ABSTRACT
There is a popular assumption of a fundamental link between resilience and storytelling. Resilience is seen to benefit storytellers, by helping to create a coherent frame around challenging life events, as well as listeners, who gain strength through empathetic connection. In settler-colonial countries such as Canada, which have undertaken Truth and Reconciliation processes, the stakes of storytelling and its presumed connection to resilience are particularly fraught. In this chapter I consider the function of storytelling in two models of resilience: the dominant version, which works to manage the complexities of settler colonialism, and an alternative model, rooted in Indigenous knowledges, which supports struggles for decolonization. Both versions describe the capacity for individuals or systems to flourish in the face of change, but with significant differences in their understanding of what or who persists in what kind of world. I read Thomas King’s 2014 novel, The Back of the Turtle, in conversation with his comments about storytelling in his 2003 Massey Lectures, as a meditation on these contending versions of resilience, and on the use and limits of stories for decolonization and planetary justice.
