In Louise Ercrich's novels, The Birchbark House, Love Medicine and other fictional works, she unravels the wonderfully complex story of her Ojibwa Native American community and their celebration and rigorous preservation of a culture, language, and voice against centuries of genocide. In the unraveling, our eyes are opened to a world view that would have been wasted, a language silenced, a way of life forgotten, and a wisdom lost. What worlds, voices and wisdom might we discover in our students and ourselves, given permission to tell our stories? What are the connections between permission and learning? To find out, we'll use experiential games, activities, and principles from the Story Workshop approach to the teaching of writing. We'll dare truth and beauty as literature by reading Erdrich's stories, telling our own, and writing together.
