Sandi L. Boucher uses the telephone-game anecdote to argue that cultural lenses distort how we interpret and retell others' actions and teachings. She warns that non‑indigenous or cross‑cultural reinterpretation can misrepresent meanings and advises always identifying the original source or elder when sharing teachings or quotes.
Chapters
So I don't know if you've ever played the telephone game. The idea is you sit in a circle and the person who starts out whispers a sentence or a couple sentences into the ear of the person next to them. And then that person turns and whispers and tries to repeat the sentences, whispering it into the ear of the next person, and on and on and on until you've gone all the way around the circle and the last person shares out loud what they think the two sentences are. I have never seen this game played where the two sentences at the end are anywhere even close to the two sentences that started the game. But there's a teaching in there, and it's a really super important teaching. Especially in this time time of cultural appropriation, it is incredibly dangerous for one culture to try to interpret the actions of another, because you're not going to get it right. It's the exact same idea as the telephone game. We all can only look at the world through our cultural lens. It's the same as wearing glasses. My cultural lens is made up of all the things I've experienced, all the things I've been taught, my education, all of it comes together to help me interpret what I see. But that's my cultural lens. If a non indigenous person or a person from another culture or even another religion looks at my actions, they may misinterpret what I'm doing or saying. When we share someone else's story, someone else's teaching, we are going to slant it with the way we would phrase things, with our expression. And even when we were trying to be as accurate as possible, it's going to be changed. And that's why it is so incredibly important to say where you got a teaching or a lesson from. If you're repeating the teaching of an elder, identify that teaching. If you're sharing a quote, share the name of the person that said it so that the people listening know this is an original story that has now gone through the telephone game. That is your cultural lens.
