Whose Story Is This?

Literary Concepts: Oral Tradition, Direct Address, Repetition, and Speaking Voice

Not every story belongs to every teller. In Indigenous communities across Canada and around the world, this is foundational that certain stories are held by certain families, certain knowledge belongs to certain people, and the right to speak is not assumed. It is earned, inherited, or granted. This is not a restriction on creativity. It is an understanding that stories carry relationships and responsibilities alongside their words.

Literary scholars use the term cultural appropriation to describe what happens when a writer takes stories, images, or cultural practices from a community they do not belong to and uses them without permission, without accountability, and often without accuracy. The harm is not just about hurt feelings. Appropriated stories tend to flatten the communities they claim to represent, stripping out complexity, replacing lived specificity with assumption, and profiting from what was never the writer's to take.

The opposite of appropriation is authenticity or writing from inside your own experience, with full knowledge of what you are carrying and what it means. Authentic storytelling does not mean a writer can only write about themselves. It means they know where they stand in relation to the story they are telling, and they are honest about that position.

Oral tradition is one of the clearest examples of a storytelling system with its own rules of ownership and transmission. Before written language, Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island developed rich and sophisticated traditions of knowledge-keeping through the spoken word. Stories were told aloud, in community, with listeners present. They were shaped by repetition, by rhythm, by the relationship between speaker and audience. Oral tradition is not a primitive stage that preceded writing. It is a fully developed literary system with its own aesthetics and ethics.

When Indigenous writers bring oral tradition into written work, they are not simply using an old technique. They are making a claim about where meaning lives and who it belongs to. Several features mark oral tradition on the page.

Repetition in oral tradition is structural, not decorative. A word or phrase that returns is returning on purpose, to build rhythm, to signal what matters, to let the listener feel the weight of something arriving again.

Direct address is the technique of speaking to a listener directly, using "you." A poem that uses direct address knows you are there. That awareness changes the relationship between text and reader. You are not an observer. You are the person being spoken to.

Speaking voice is the quality of writing that makes you feel a specific human presence behind the words. Writing with a strong speaking voice sounds like someone. You recognize who is there before you can fully explain it.

Marilyn Dumont is a Cree/Métis poet from Alberta. Her debut collection A Really Good Brown Girl (Brick Books, 1996) uses all three of these features, not as stylistic choices borrowed from a tradition, but as the natural expression of a writer who carries that tradition herself.

As you read her poems, listen for the moments when a voice becomes unmistakably present. Ask yourself: who is speaking, who are they speaking to, and what gives them the authority to say this?