Sandi L. Boucher (Red Thunderbolt, Loon clan, Seine River First Nation) gives a short spoken teaching using the children’s 'telephone game' as an analogy to explain how cultural lenses alter stories. She warns that when people from outside a culture interpret or repeat another culture’s teachings, misinterpretation (and cultural appropriation) can occur, and urges listeners to identify and credit original sources (elders, speakers) when sharing teachings.
Chapters
Foreign. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine river first nation in Northern Ontario. And I'm here today with our Tuesday teaching. I'm in the middle of an insane kind of day here, so I just thought I'd bop on and share this with you because I think it's not only important, but incredibly timely. What I'm talking about today is the teachings found in the telephone game. 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. 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. And of course everybody laughs. But there is a teaching in there, and it's a really super important teaching. Especially in this 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, through no ill intent whatsoever, 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. It allows them to realize that your interpretation may be slanting it in a little ways. It's not anything major, but it's super important because as I said, when it comes to one culture interpreting another, it is just so easy to get off track. There's your teaching for today. Ownership does not transfer when a story is shared with you or when a teaching is shared. So give credit where credit is due and give your listeners the heads up that I heard this from someone else. So this is the story gone through the telephone game until next week. Hope that helped you out. Take care and talk to you soon. I love you. Bye bye.
