Inhabiting and Telling Stories Not Our Own
Laura S. Meitzner Yoder, Director and John Stott Chair of Human Needs and Global Resources; Professor of Environmental Studies
The topics of representation, authenticity, and ethical storytelling are frequently discussed and encountered in very practical ways within the Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) program. Each year, we wrestle with quandaries that arise as students consider the varying experiences and opinions they have on this topic through their internships. In student writing, in the returned students’ Chapel, in how students wrestle with what to record, what to share, and what to only ponder in their hearts for now: whose counsel should guide these decisions? How should they communicate hard, ambiguous, or troubling things that they have seen and heard through involvement in distant communities that they have joined for a season. Students, along with faculty colleagues, regularly face the central questions of this year’s seminar:
- Who has the authority to represent others' experiences, to tell someone else’s story?
- What in our own backgrounds affects how we hear and interact with the stories of others?
- How do we hear others’ stories without becoming self-referential?
- What responsibilities do we have when relating stories outside of our own experience?
In the May 2025 CACE seminar “Performing Identity, Authority, and Community,” we explored dilemmas and practice of ethical storytelling. Performance arts can foster our curiosity and capacities in practicing empathy across difference, so we focused on how inhabiting and relating narratives not our own is done in theater.
We read together “The Thanksgiving Play,” the 2018 satire by Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse in which four white characters weave their way through the challenges of representation in developing an elementary school performance about the national holiday of Thanksgiving. As they propose various alternatives given their lack of Native involvement, they encounter the pressures applied to their task by public audiences including parents, grant funders, and their own backgrounds and identities. They name their own sensitivities and priorities related to this project, and wander through various attempts to grapple with contentious and changing aspects of racial and ethnic representation of others in the United States today.
Participants’ discussion of this situation highlighted the persistent national difficulty we face in acknowledging wrongs in our history. Even as Christians who should be under no delusion that we are perfect people, it is hard to allow ourselves to be implicated or identified as bound up in contextual wrongs in which we are embedded and that we may not even notice. From our seminar leader: “I’m not convinced that all of us believe in our own inherent flaws.” Rather than choosing to repent, to turn, and to be changed, we evade facing our failures and imperfections. “Do we acknowledge the winding road behind us, and that we are on?”
My - Our - Their Story. One exercise made us consider the ethics of telling stories that are our own individually, our own shared/collective stories, and the stories of others – of groups to which we do not feel we belong at all. We each put a word into three circles labelled My - Our - Their, symbolizing stories that we considered part of each category. We had to consider our comfort level in sharing each of these stories, and with whom, and under what circumstances. This activity brought to mind the times that HNGR students returned from their internships tasked by individuals in their host communities to share a particular perspective with “the people there” when they returned home. In my own work in remote rural areas, people have often asked me to tell others about their circumstances, needs, or wishes – as a person who knows something of their reality which may be unknown or invisible to those in power, and as a person whose mobility and access can afford opportunities to communicate outward and upward. Being asked to tell someone else’s story for specific purposes – “to remind people in power of our existence” – can be a solemn charge to receive and to enact going forward.
When we advocate, and speak alongside or on behalf of others, may we consider: For what purpose are we telling this story? For whose benefit or other effect? Beyond good intentions, may we seek divine wisdom to grow in humility as we come to recognize the limits of what we can know or say about others’ stories. How can we invest more deeply in pathways for people to relate their own stories?