Telling stories about stories.

I want to tell you a story. This is a story about stories. As in any good story, we’re going to wander down a few storied paths. One of the paths leads back to 3 award-winning stories.* Remarkable stories by remarkable physicians who take seriously the power of stories—who have written powerful stories. Another path is about the importance of stories for human health and well-being from the perspectives of some very different “storytellers”—if we can call an indigenous author and radio humorist, and an awardwinning Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons storytellers. Which, for the purposes of this story, we will. The story I’m going to begin with is about a storyteller who ends up working in a Faculty of Medicine. This story starts in a tiny community on 2 tiny islands upon which most people in Canada—perhaps, most people in the world—have never set foot. Many people will not have even heard of these islands, these islands balanced in almost-always gray and stormy waters far off the northwest coast of British Columbia—further north, perhaps, than parts of Alaska. If you type the name of these islands into a Microsoft Word document, a red squiggly line will tell you you have made a spelling mistake. Haida Gwaii is no mistake, however. Haida Gwaii, a fistful of scattered broken bits of earth balanced in mist and alive with the high-pitched whistles of black-and-white bald eagles and the golden shine of bull kelp on silver-sand beaches, is the ancestral home of the Haida people, people whose connection with the islands has been scientifically dated to reach back more than 7000 years. People who once spoke to, and were spoken back to, by ravens. As the story goes, and according to one journalist who recently wrote about it, the last of Haida Gwaii’s fluent Raven speakers passed away less than 20 years ago. It made sense, according to the journalist who wrote the story, that the Haida people once spoke fluent Raven—in deep history, there would have been more ravens than humans roving around the gray-green archipelagos. Ravens are talkative birds—tricksters whose antics were responsible for the first humans on the planet, according to the creation stories told by the Haida. Ravens flew, so ravens saw the world in ways that would have proven tremendously helpful to the Haida people, so long as the people listened to the ravens’ stories. And listen the Haida people did. They learned from ravens about streams where the salmon swam thick. They learned from ravens about the locations of people in danger at sea. They learned where angry bears might be hiding up ahead and where berries were bright and plentiful. It made sense to learn the languages of ravens, because ravens had important stories to offer up, stories that would ensure the health of the Haida people, so long as the people listened. Raven stories meant prosperity for the Haida people. I grew up on Haida Gwaii. In the mid-1980s, I hit upon what I thought to be a noble and original idea—that I would like to “help” people and “make a difference in the world.” It made sense in my 12-year-old mind to wander down to the largest non-military hospital on Haida Gwaii—the Queen Charlotte City General Hospital. As I wandered down the hill from our house, with ravens calling out lessons I did not understand, I daydreamed of the “real” medical things that I would soon be doing, like changing sheets, sitting behind a nursing desk, answering the phone, and magically ministering to the sick. I had visions of the redand-white “candy striper” uniform I would be given, of the exalted position I would quickly achieve upon being recognized as the Florence Nightingale-esque person that I surely was. Imagine my 12-year-old surprise, then, when I was greeted at the front door of the small rural hospital by a rather pleasant family physician who said he had the perfect job for young people like me who wanted to volunteer at a hospital. And there was no need to wear any pretty uniform—my mum’s hand-knit sweaters would more than suffice. I could, I was told, sit beside Charlotte. I could, I was told, read stories to Charlotte. I could also, although I would likely not be able to understand them, listen to the stories Charlotte would surely tell me, love as she did to tell her stories to young people. Charlotte, you see, was the oldest living Haida person on the globe. So far as I know, passing away as she did at about the age of 103 (although no one knew for sure when she was born) she remains one of the longest living Haida