The multicultural Effect Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The multicultural Effect - Essay Example (Silko 1996, 43) These words f Leslie Marmon Silko describe aptly what this ReVision issue is about: storytelling. Indigenous conversations. Recovering indigenous conversations. Remembering stories. Putting them back together. Cherishing the fragments we find. Exchanging stories. Finding ways to bring the immediacy and presence f the stories told in front f a group f people onto paper and between journal covers. Sharing stories between groups f people, Sami siidat, German Sippen--communities (some f these groupings are now called cultures, or societies, or nations, or tribes). The primary focus f the contributions is not agreement or disagreement with Eurocentered views on narrative knowing. Instead the articles, taken together, walk their own path, affirming an ancient way f being present to knowing. That is all. This issue is an invitation to remember that practice and to participate in it--today--with all that that might mean in our contemporary situation. Within the Eurocentered context, the concern would be with the defense, explication, placement, or support f narrative knowing within the edifice that Eurocentered thinking tries to maintain, even as it crumbles and disintegrates at the external and internal margins. Much f what has been written about narrative knowing presents such amendments, usually framed as advances. Progress f thinking. A contribution on the evolutionary trajectory. This is the stage set by Eurocentered thinking for the justification and defense f narrative knowing. That stage matters not in an indigenous or a remembered indigenous context. The stakes are much higher. There are many more criteria. They are in the landscape. In the ancestry. In history. In what is commonly called myth. In gossip. In the narrative plot provided by the stars. In the remembrance f the pain f what people have done to each other and are doing to each other. Individuals all. In the rejoicing about the beautiful things people have done. Because these kinds f criteria elude Eurocentered thinking to a large extent, they cannot--and should not--be justified in that context. Pressures for such justification arise from the need to the maintain the social construction f whiteness. Though it may seem extraordinary to the Eurocentered mind, in the indigenous context, one fact stands out as a simple truth that native people live by: "Whether we know the stories or not, the stories know about us" (Silko 1996, 150). We may not remember our ancestry or honor it, but the ancestors remember us. There is hope in this. Storytelling is allowing completeness in a nutshell: hologrammatically. Here we don't find philosophy apart from the cycles f the seasons--yet we find science. Here we don't find agriculture separate from the local narratives--yet we find astronomy and agroastronomy. Here we don't find navigation apart from star and weather lore--yet we find nautical science. In the narrative universe f these worlds, story is not an individualistic or existential project. It is the survival f the self woven inside, outside, and in between through precise presence. There is no possibility f standing apart or objectifying or dissociating. What an advance to remember such pr actices. The current issue started out with a different design in mind: I was in the process f inviting several authors and informing them to assume the importance and validity f narrative knowi