Storytelling & Resilience

Stories aren’t just for entertainment – they’re integral to our survival and humanity. And now, more than ever, we need storytellers.

The Ancient Secret to Resilience (That Science Is Only Now Catching Up To)

Long before there were research papers and data charts, there were stories. Stories told around fires. Stories sung in ceremonies. Stories passed from elders to children, carrying wisdom, memory, and hope across generations.

For Indigenous cultures all over the world, storytelling has never been just entertainment. It’s how people remember who they are. It’s how they teach values, share knowledge, make sense of hardship, and imagine a future together. It’s how communities survive and thrive.

And now, after thousands of years of people knowing this in their bones, science is starting to prove them right.

Stories Are More Than Words — They’re the Glue That Holds Us Together

Researchers today are finding that storytelling does more than connect us — it strengthens us. When communities share stories, they build trust, deepen empathy, and develop a shared sense of identity. That shared identity becomes a powerful resource in hard times.

Communities who regularly shared stories about their history, about past disasters, and even about personal struggles, are better able to recover from crises. They are more likely to support one another, adapt to change, and rebuild stronger. This sort of narrative resilience occurs when your story aligns with the stories around you – so much so that it can help people heal from trauma.

But if you ask Indigenous elders, they’ll tell you this isn’t news. Their ancestors have always used story as a kind of survival tool, a way to remember lessons from droughts and migrations, a guide for living in balance with the land, a way to pass on hope in times of upheaval. Science is describing something that’s been true for generations but remained unseen due our deeply ingrained racism.

Sometimes racism shows up as ignoring or dismissing what other people’s lived truths. Science isn’t “proving” anything – it’s simply providing a new sort of story that aligns with the knowledge that Indigenous cultures have been steeped in for ages.

Storytelling Helps Us Heal, Too

Stories don’t just prepare us for challenges, they help us heal from them. Sharing stories of loss, injustice, or trauma allows people to process pain and move forward together. In many Indigenous communities, storytelling circles are still used today to honor grief, reclaim agency, and weave individual experiences into a collective strength.

This storytelling-as-healing is also an act of resistance, and an important one. In the face of centuries of erasure and oppression, telling and retelling stories keeps memory alive. It ensures that people’s histories and belong to them, not to those who tried to silence them. It is a way to pass on knowledge in a way that can’t be easily censored or erased the way paper or digital media can be.

The Oldest Wisdom for a Changing World

We live in a time when the future feels uncertain — climate disasters, genocides, violent social divisions, and deepening fascism all saturate the news every day. And yet, the answer to building resilience in the face of all that might not be something new at all. It’s something quite ancient.

It’s the stories we tell…and the ones we choose to listen to.

Because stories do more than entertain us. They remind us who we are. They teach us how to care for one another. They show us how we’re different and how we’re alike. They carry the lessons of the past into the challenges of the present. If we let them, they can help us move toward a better future – and help future generations not forget the lived experiences of the people who history too often silences.

Want to read more? Start here:

The Importance of Indigenous Oral Traditional Storytelling: Part 1 — https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/importance-indigenous-oral-traditional-storytelling-part-1

The Importance of Indigenous Oral Traditional Storytelling: Part 2 — https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/importance-indigenous-oral-traditional-storytelling-part-2

Our Breath of Being: Indigenous Living through Storying Traditions — https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/our-breath-being-indigenous-living-through-storying-traditions

The Healing Power of Storytelling: Finding Identity Through Narrative — https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/arbutus/article/view/19324/8643 (Opens as a pdf – the site is trustworthy)