Reflecting on Indigenous Storytelling in the Digital Space.

The podcast Telling Our Twisted Histories, hosted by Kaniehti:io Horn, reclaims Indigenous voice and sovereignty by interrogating colonial language through personal stories and intergenerational knowledge. In the episode “Discovery,” Horn remarks, “When they say discovery, it’s like we didn’t exist. That word erases us” (Horn). This moment encapsulates how the podcast challenges dominant settler narratives by centering lived experience and collective memory key features of traditional Indigenous oral storytelling. The digital medium preserves the emotional cadence and voice of each speaker while offering a transformed platform that reaches broad, cross-cultural audiences. As Amber Dean observes, storytelling can act as a form of “resistance to colonial representations that render Indigenous people absent or passive” (Dean 49), and the podcast achieves this by shifting authority from institutions to Indigenous communities themselves.

By centering voices from diverse Indigenous Nations, Telling Our Twisted Histories enacts digital sovereignty: it is controlled, curated, and voiced by Indigenous peoples, rather than filtered through settler frameworks. Horn opens each episode with the line, “These are our words, twisted by colonization. Let’s untwist them together,” foregrounding the podcast’s mission to decolonize language. Dean writes that “strategic refusals” of victimhood or invisibility can interrupt colonial logics (Dean 52), and the podcast’s refusal to use or accept terms like “Indian” without scrutiny enacts precisely that. However, a potential limitation of the digital medium is the possibility of decontextualization where sound bites circulate without cultural framing. Nonetheless, Telling Our Twisted Histories effectively bridges oral tradition and digital technology, using sound and voice to reassert Indigenous knowledge, challenge systemic erasure, and engage in cultural resurgence.

WORKS CITED

Dean, Amber. “Reflections on Resistance: Representing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, edited by Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013, pp. 47–62.

Telling Our Twisted Histories. Hosted by Kaniehti:io Horn, CBC Podcasts, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/484-telling-our-twisted-histories.