Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development
by Cora Voyageur, Laura Brearley & Brian Calliou
2015 [2014] · Banff Centre Press · 345 pages
Since leadership plays an important role in any community, Indigenous leadership scholarship advocates opportunities for leaders within Indigenous communities to gain the knowledge and skills required to fulfill the needs and aspirations of their peoples and to foster economic development. Yet over the years, states have imposed their laws and institutions upon Indigenous peoples, resulting in the loss of traditional leadership and governance. There has been a pattern of non-Indigenous leadership practices being forced upon Indigenous communities, exacerbated by the media portraying Indigenous communities and their leaders in a negative light, which sociologists have termed a “deficit paradigm” (Ponting and Voyageur 2001). Restorying Indigenous Leadership: Wise Practices in Community Development shares different stories, which collectively could be referred to as a “strength-based” paradigm: specific examples of wise practices and successful leadership in Indigenous communities.
Stories have been bringing us together for thousands of years; storytelling is not only a way we make sense of our worlds (Ellis 2004), but it is “a creative act of leadership through which we manifest our solidarity and strengthen our people to take their next steps in encouraging good and healthy lives” (Kenny 2012, 1). Restorying Indigenous Leadership uses a storytelling model that interweaves lived experiences with extensive research to stimulate progressive and informed action through not just sharing stories but a process of restorying.
Restorying is a dynamic form of storytelling that revisits and recuperates in order to restore–a central theme in the work of Indigenous writers Thomas King (2008) and Lewis Mehl-Madrona (2007). While Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Dale Turner argue that Indigenous leaders need to understand and use the narratives of modernity and globalization, they also emphasize the necessity of incorporating Indigenous knowledge, practices, and ideas into the global discourse in order to assert their respective community rights and interests (Simpson and Turner 2008). Thus, restorying not only helps readers become aware of “the power and beauty of our stories to educate and heal people” (Archibald 2008, 371), but enacts a kind of storytelling that encompasses the past, the present, and the future, and is a participatory and reciprocal process between writer and reader. [Text Source: Banff Centre Press]
