Bearing Witness to Native Stories: An Interview with Ahousaht First Nation’s Mark Atleo and Cowichan First Nation’s Adrian Sylvester

Walter Fisher (1984) claims that humans are homo narrans, suggesting that not only is narrative the common act in which disparate groups of people engage, but that storytelling itself is a fundamental human undertaking. In this brief interview, we (Henry Wang and Hannah Huo) engage with the stories of two First Nations members, Mark Atleo and Adrian Sylvester, who are of the Ahousaht and Cowichan Tribes, respectively. An important component of storytelling is not just telling or conveying that story to another, but bearing witness to it (Wyles, O’Leary, and Tsantefski 2023). That is what we hope to do here, and what we hope that the reader will do upon encountering these stories—to bear witness to the injustices committed against the First Nations peoples.