A practice lab for non-Indigenous settlers who want to further explore and think critically about how our personal stories (and the public narratives we hear) work to recreate colonial attitudes, laws and policy in Canada.
What is Story Shifters?
Story Shifters is an initiative focused on resisting cultural imperialism and challenging dominant, oppressive cultural norms. It works primarily with non-Indigenous (settler) individuals to:
Unlearn systemic biases.
Disrupt colonial policies and practices.
Create space for Indigenous partners to advocate for policies and practices that reflect their ways of knowing and being.
Key activities include:
Facilitating workshops and Practice Labs to help settlers unpack and unsettle personal and cultural colonial stories.
Developing tools to enable settlers to reflect, dialogue, and act on biases in real-time.
A Toolkit
Story Shifters has started developing an interactive toolkit to support ongoing decolonizing work. The toolkit aims to:
Help settlers “unsettle” and dismantle barriers that sustain colonial relationships.
Encourage collaborative practices in a safe space for Dialogue, Reflection, and Reflexivity.
These tools include, but aren’t limited to:
The Pyramid of Hate (developed by ADL): A model to identify and address biases and oppressive structures.
Power frameworks: Exploring relational power dynamics to shift from domination (“Power Over”) to collaboration (“Power With” and “Power Within”).
Next steps include testing the tools in use and securing funding to expand the toolkit.
“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” — Thomas King
Story Shifters is a co-creation between Storytellers’ Foundation, Diana Cullen, and Anne Donaldson. Our work is based on the belief that we are the stories we keep – the stories we inherited, those we hold right now, those we are passing on.
Why Stories?
Stories shape our identities, relationships, and understanding of the world. Story Shifters emphasizes:
Recognizing and disrupting colonial stories to create new narratives that support equitable relationships.
Exploring personal connections to place and history, asking questions like “Whose land am I on?” and “What impact has colonialism had here?”
Indigenous advisor Willie Ermine's concept of Ethical Space is central. It involves settlers doing the “heavy lifting” of unearthing their colonial biases and assumptions before engaging meaningfully with Indigenous partners.
Story Shifters’ goal is to create space and tools for non-Indigenous people to begin the work of decolonization by interrupting their narratives.
This space invites non-Indigenous people to openly explore and question challenging issues around colonial practices like land exploitation and social injustice.
Through honest, vulnerable dialogue, it builds trust and relationships. By staying curious instead of settling on answers, participants confront and rethink colonial beliefs and biases, empowering them to respectfully challenge colonial narratives and politics in the world.
Story Shifting Experiences
Practice in Action
Story Shifters help to create conditions where allyship is possible. We are building a solidarity network where settlers take on the responsibility to address unearned power and privilege given to them because of colonialism, actively supporting one another to dismantle colonial policies and practices. Examples of policy/practice shifts:
Facilitated workshops with non-Indigenous government teams negotiating with Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs to uncover and address unconscious biases and discriminatory behaviors.
A regional district integrates TRC Calls to Action into governance
Hospitals involve Indigenous members in HR processes to foster inclusivity
Provincial ministries engage in year-long training to address colonial biases
From participants
“Story Shifters was incredibly helpful in enriching our team towards a better and deeper understanding of what it means to be a settler and how we are implicated in maintaining systems of oppression, where we may not have been aware of before. The Story Shifters experience provides a gentle yet blunt approach to naming colonization, racism towards, and oppression of Indigenous people and communities. It also allows teams, like ours, to work at a speed that we need to, to increase our understanding, as non-Indigenous people, of historical and current colonization, while we continuously build a “safe environment” to talk about really hard stuff”.
“For me, personally I am unsettled. My self-awareness has increased along with my knowledge of Canadian history. I have unpacked with my group what “truth and reconciliation” means beyond the public apologies, and land acknowledgements. I can see my privileges, of which there are many. There is a perpetuating system of oppression all around me, I have experienced it in the company I work for. From participating in Story Shifters, I can now ask myself “how do I contribute to this system”? This question is a gift!”
