Making A Difference - StoryCenter's Joe Lambert Interviews Marita Jones and Tina Tso, Healthy Native Communities Partnership, Shiprock, New Mexico
In moving to New Mexico three years ago, I of course wanted to find out who was doing Digital Storytelling in what has now become my home. It did not take me long to learn about a group in the Northwest corner of the state, Healthy Native Communities Partnership, that had led workshops in and around Native America for almost 15 years.
In celebration of the upcoming Indigenous People’s Day, I invited two of their members, Marita Jones and Tina Tso, to share the story of their storytelling work.
Joe Lambert
How did you end up being connected to the digital storytelling process?
Martia Jones
In the early 2000s, we had been doing work with community wellness planning, around all the dimensions of wellness…not just physical health, but spiritual and social, intellectual.
We were running a leadership program with tribes all over the country. As part of one of our programs in 2009, we met Laura Revels*.
We were in a leadership development session with Gary Ferguson**, we met her, and she was the one that told us about her digital storytelling process.
We ended up trading trainings. She joined one of ours, and she led us through her training. In Anchorage, we participated in a digital storytelling training with her in September of 2009.
We learned the process. And it was so awesome.
What struck me from the beginning was learning to trust the process of the workshop model, and also put your trust in the people to make the jump into digital editing, working with MovieMaker or iMovie. That seemed like a big leap, but people took to it.
I also learned to trust that people could write a script and record their story. We really liked that aspect of it.
The stories come directly from the people themselves. It is different than an interview, you might edit, and in the process it filters through your brain as the editor, and something changes from what the original storyteller might have wanted to say, and how. It is so much better that people can tell their own stories in their own voice, in their own way.
I also like the short format.
When we first learned about it, we happened to be working on a project with Indian Health Service at the hospital around breastfeeding, trying to encourage breastfeeding, and so we recruited some women breastfeeding moms to come and tell their story, and so we did our first digital storytelling training session in December of 2009.
Navajo TriChapter DST training - Updating the Progress Matrix. Liana Hussein and Jeremiah Holiday, Facilitators
It was me and a colleague Shelly Frazier that did the first one. It worked. We ended up doing a bunch of trainings. We learned to trust the wisdom of the people.
Tina Tso also came in there at the beginning.
Joe
So what was your story, Tina?
Tina Tso
I first took it right after maybe the second training Marita and the team put on. That's when I was introduced to it and I actually made my own digital story.
Joe
So this is now a 15 year journey, from September of 2009 to September of 2024. Where has your work taken you?
Marita
Oh, my goodness. So many trainings. Because I worked as a field coordinator for Indian Health Service when I came back to Navajo about 20 years ago, I worked nationally with all 12 of the Indian Health Service areas, with tribes all over the country. Once we started this work, we end up doing four to eight workshops all over the country. We worked with health care people, at the hospital level, and health center level We worked with specific communities. People would hear about digital storytelling and invite us in.
Then we also worked with NIHB, National Indian Health Board, with their national youth summits. So we did digital storytelling training with the youth Every year until about 2016.
Working with youth really sticks with me. We had stories by young people about what keeps them strong or what keeps them connected to your culture and tradition , to who you are as a Native youth. They spoke a lot about resilience.
More recently, we worked with the University of New Mexico on the COVID experience. We worked with UCSF on rheumatoid arthritis stories. We worked with the epidemiology centers, and a lot of work with youth and others here on Navajo, all the different chapter communities Diabetes prevention, cancer, variety of health issues.
As we began to work with various communities, Jen Clark*** from Tucson, she has been so helpful to me as we also have worked with other cultures.
As part of UNM’s Weave program, we worked with the border communities in Las Cruces, also with the Asian community, African American communities, and the LBGTQ communities in the Albuquerque area.
And as different all those communities are, I was always amazed at the process.
As we grew to a larger team, we would survey. We would ask participants five questions, three months later, and six months later, about how they use the tools and who they shared their stories with..
And I would say most people mainly make the stories for themselves and their families. And the cool part of that is that there were issues that they brought up that they never shared with their family before. And so then they were able to share their story with their family and talk about these things.
Like one lady at Suquamish (Native community in Northwest Washington state). she was a rancher. She had a heart attack when she was out in the field. And somehow her husband noticed her out there and came and got her and took her to the hospital. But she never told her family. As the head of the family she needed them to see her as a strong person.. she didn't want to be a bother.
She said she told her story because of the “group agreements” we do in every workshop, how the group wants to be working together for three days. One of the agreements was to tell the truth.
We’ve noticed most people when they first come, they want to tell a surface level story.
She thought she was going to talk about her horses.
She told us, “I sat right in front of the group agreements and it said, tell the truth. So she decided to tell the truth about her health situation and she shared it with her family.
People expressed to us that they didn't realize what a burden they were carrying around. For us this came a big surprise. We learned that digital storytelling had power for people personally.
People said they felt healed when they told their story. With almost every group, at least half the group felt like they got healed by sharing their story. That was just mind blowing.
Being truthful and honest and being a role model to their families and hopefully that trickles to the rest of their family and their community.
Joe
No that is consistent with all I have ever experienced in our circles of story. Tina, any of us that do this work, know it changes people, but we, as facilitators, are also changed. Has there been a particular memory of an experience where you just felt you learned some new wisdom through this process?
Tina
I think one of the ones that really stood out for me was the one that we did with UNM around COVID. We did the training right in the middle of COVID 2 (the winter of 2020-2021). It was about our homeless relatives in Albuquerque and what they were going through. Their stories were so powerful.
Many of the homeless are Native, mostly Navajo, actually, that were part of this training. They were talking how during the pandemic homeless services disappeared. And on the other hand, that nobody was on the street harassing them. You know, like people saying “I’ll give you a quarter if you dance and all that stuff. Terrible stuff.
That's what really struck me to this day. When I see a relative walking through the world like that, homeless or appearing to be homeless, I always think, wow, “What stories they could tell.
Joe
That's very powerful. Marita, what story comes up for you?
Marita
As I said, I think the youth work is what I remember the most. They're just like kids. They come in and they're all joking around and laughing and bouncing off the walls. And then you get to hear their story. Usually at the NIHB conference, the kids come in and you don't realize what they're going through. A lot of it is around suicide affecting their lives. But they are also about the power of culture and identity and recognizing who you are as a Native person and tapping into the traditions of your people to help you go through these really rough times and what a difference that makes.
Our people are resilient. It is so sad to see these young people go through these struggles and not have the support that they need to make it through. They tell their story. And they just are really blunt about it.
That is also how the stories are used. If people want to have a conversation about suicide prevention or about depression, or rheumatoid arthritis, whatever at a community level, theses stories can help.
Joe
In Storycenter work, we are first trying to create circles of safety, where you don't have to tell any story you don't want to tell, until it's ready to be told. But we're also trying to create circles of courage. In which you're willing to tell it because you think you might help someone.
But safety and courage seem to us to be directly tied to people seeing the workshop leaders in the room as knowing something about what it is like to be them already, in that they share a culture, a gender, a socio-economic experience, a health experience just like them.
And how important has it been for your group as an indigenous digital storytelling organization where your fellow Native participants, or even people from other marginalized cultures, could see a bit of themselves in who you are and how you treat other people?
Tina
That’s why we do a lot of digital stories with our own native communities. I think it's really important.
I have to tell you a story. As a native American or as Navajo, we were told that horses came from the Spaniards.
But the horse was already in our songs, it's already painted on our canyon walls, for time immemorial. So we knew that was not a true story. And of course recently studies show that the horse has been here a long time
As native people, I guess that's how we carry stories on. The stories of the Long Walk, and other experiences of our people. That's how it's carried on. It's in our songs, it's in our prayers.
Much of what we do as Native digital storyteller trainers is informed by those traditions.
We open with a song, open with a prayer, if it gets too heavy, we offer a blessing to the people. We always have cedar. We always have our feather there with us. We always have the water. We tell them the water's listening. Then we give it back to the earth. I think those little things are really powerful.
Marita
Another example, not from digital storytelling, but around an economic development program that we are going to be implementing in our chapters. I'm listening in on as session, being led by a non native. Wow, it was a very well intentioned person. I love working with her.
But I don't think she has a clue. She has no clue what people have to do to survive in the context of poverty. It is just like normal life for most people on the rez.
So when we are working with other communities, Asian, African American, Latino, they are so thankful to us, but we let them know we come from a Native perspective and that informs the processes that we use. Some people might think we're too touchy feely, but for us process is so important, because people are hungry, hungry to remember who they are, they have it already in them, they just need to remember who they are, as a Native person, and to tap into that wisdom, to tap into that spirit.
And so talking to the Asian group and say, they are familiar with that feeling. The things that their community is dealing with are relatable, They liked our Native process.
And we still look for trainers from the African American communities, from Asian American communities, or other communities, because we know that helps.
Joe
Any final thoughts.
Marita
I'm just really glad that we learned about digital storytelling. That to trust the people, trust the process, and the sharing of those stories, however people want to share it, I think is important. And that some people allow us to share some of their stories, where they can make a difference.
Tina
I also really like the format that the Story Center has developed. The three to four minute story is perfect.
The model works.
Joe
Yes. Yes, it works.
And thank you for your time.
Footnotes:
* Laura Revels is a (Native Alaskan Digital Storytelling leader, for more about her my interview with her in Digital Storytelling; Story Work for Urgent Times.
** (Ferguson is currently director of of Integrative Medicine with the Tulalip Health System, but at the time part of Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) with Laura)
***Footnote- Jen Clark with Creative Narrations
(Left to Right) Marita Jones, Tina Tso, Liana Hussein, HNC DST Facilitators
