Calling Home Beloved: Writers, Poets, and Orators Narrate Place - Maamawi-Ozhigi - Together We Grow

Calling Home Beloved: Writers, Poets, and Orators Narrate Place 

Written by Will Sharp, Graduate Assistant, Beaumier U.P. Heritage Center 

‘By telling these stories, everything, everything becomes enriched’ - Shirley Brozzo, Retired Northern Michigan University Professor and Elder in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.

Stories and language help show us who we are, bridge experiences and have capacity to instill a sense of belonging. Narratives that tell of our origins, creation, and why the world is the way it is are common in almost all cultures. Why certain stories are remembered and why some are repressed begs considerations of colonization, migration and human history. 

As Arthur P. Bourgeois, editor of Ojibwa Narratives of Charles and Charlotte Kawbawgam and Jacques LePique notes, “we live immersed in stories, the narratives that we tell or hear told, stories that we imagine… Narratives can be viewed as a way of knowing and remembering, and as a means of shaping or patterning emotions and experiences into something whole and meaningful” (Bourgeois, 1994). These words hint towards story as both archive and act — a means of situating ourselves at the intersection of stories not yet completed.

This idea of storytelling takes ceremonial form in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko of Laguna Pueblo descent. Storytelling becomes medicine: an act of renewal that bridges the ancestral and the immediate, the mythical and the lived. The written word traces and tends what has been said, giving shape to memory’s echo. Oral history and retelling are not passive inheritances but dynamic practices of survival and flourishing—ways communities gather grief and praise into coherence, carrying memory forward not as record but as ritual. Through this lens, narrative becomes both remembrance and restoration: a living pedagogy that remembers the world (Silko, 1977).