Assessing Anishinaabe children’s narratives Sharla Peltier. [electronic resource] : an ethnographic exploration of elders' perspectives /

This paper reports on an ethnographic research project conducted to explore the narrative skills of a group of eight Anishinaabe children. An emically-derived methodology was developed to examine narrative skills and the results were compared to those obtained using a scoring system developed for narrative analyses with majority culture English speaking children. The research illustrates that narrative analyses derived from a Western based perspectives, such as the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software, is not always congruent with a narrative analysis based on the Anishinaabe perspective that reveals culturally relevant preferences for components of narratives based on the perceptions of Elders who value Aboriginal orality. The application of a Western based narrative analysis tool placed a different emphasis on what was valued as a ‘good’ narrative and these evaluations did not consistently reflect Anishinaabe orality values and perspectives. The research addresses culturally appropriate practices for eliciting and assessing the narrative performance of Anishinaabe children and provides an opportunity to understand the research participants in their own context while exploring culturally specific meanings behind the data.