Mostly, we don't know our ancestral stories. My own family history was "curated" to reinforce the model of adulthood into which we children were being molded, to be polite, to be reasonable, to be accommodating. We were well into our adulthood before my older brother, younger sister, and I began to learn the truth.
My maternal grandmother, at five years old, growing up in Pennsylvania, may have been kidnapped by her own father and brought up to Canada to be raised by his family. Her birth mother doesn't show up at all in any records. A great uncle we'd never heard about on my father's side left the fold to take up with a First Nations woman in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia in the 1920's, never to be spoken of again.
Rogues and mavericks. In my own family! Who knew? Perhaps if they'd been part of the official family history in the first place, we'd all have rested a little easier about not being as polite, reasonable, and accommodating as we were raised to be. We may even have embraced our own nonconforming wildness and led more interesting lives, albeit lives of which my parents in all likelihood would not have approved.
The stories we hear in childhood are terribly important to our development. They tell us who we are and how we are to live and what we are to become. And Disney just doesn't do it--the helpless princess, the heroic prince, the triumph of goodness and bravery over evil and darkness. Those stories, like the ones I heard when I was young, about my own family, turn on moral purity and social compliance. They are stories meant to create good citizens, not interesting individuals.
The real fairy tales behind those sanitized Disney versions afforded no such utility. Violent, morally ambiguous, mystifying, they haunt the hearer more than they educate them. There are, for instance, at least seven known versions of the tale Briar Rose, the story we have come to know as Sleeping Beauty, from India to Iceland. Yet each version contains a common thread: a birth, a curse, a spindle, a reckoning, and an assortment of endings, happy and otherwise (as if the ending isn't the point).
Natalie Pepin, a Metis cultural educator, recounts that while she grew up knowing her Indigenous heritage she didn't grow up knowing her culture. To learn that, she had to seek out the stories for herself and dig for the answers to her questions. Likewise, Tad Hargrave, a cultural explorer partly of Scottish descent, had to probe the details of his own heritage, like the significance of the tartan, before he could access the culture of his people.
When the two stumbled upon fairy tales as an inexhaustible, cross-cultural compendium of ancestral wisdom and lore, they were smitten by the potential of those stories to engage those of us who lack the teachings of our own specific cultures. Fairy tales do not care to make good citizens of us. Instead, they invest themselves in a full disclosure of our humanity--the noble, the savage, the light, the shadow--and in the wisdom required to navigate our way in upstanding castles and wild dark woods.
Natalie and Tad now offer programs to help people rediscover the wisdom of fairy tales, beginning with Briar Rose. But whether a four-hour online seminar, a weekend workshop, or a six-week extended course, they still haven't reached the bottom of the riches hidden there. Maybe there is no bottom. And maybe that's the point. Some stories are simply meant to lead us back to the lives Mystery expects us to work out ... for ourselves.
To listen to my conversation with Natalie Pepin and Tad Hargrave, just press the Play button below. To learn more about Natalie and Tad and their work, together and on their own, follow the More Info button to the show notes.