Interview with Rose O'Leary
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Video transcript: "Storytelling is intrinsic in many indigenous communities and often stories are multi-layered and they are meant to be told over, and over, and over.
So throughout a person's lifetime they may hear the same story many times. This is true of one of my communities - the Osage nation. We have a long history of telling our history. However, certain people carry that history and the way that they would tell that history is they would orally transmit that story over several days. So no one person could ever hear the entire story, because you would need to sleep, and eat, and you may be at different points of maturity, so you might even hear the same bits of the story over and over at different points of your life as it's told annually.
However, stories are built to be multi-layered, and people are meant to take away different things and different interpretations from them dependent on what stage of life they're in. And so they allow for a multiplicity of perspectives and they are meant to be heard and told over and over. So that the depth of meaning can come through in different ways and have different meanings to different people at different points in their lives."
Other interviews with Rose O'Leary