Ideas for Letters to Ancestors

• Proceed with your oral history project, listening to audio recordings about life in past times or interviewing Elders.
• As a group, discuss what it must have been like to live in those days. You can discuss as a whole group or break into small groups or pairs and then come back together to share your ideas. Hold a free discussion or create questions to guide the discussion, such as the following:
  • What qualities must our ancestors have had to survive and live well?
  • In what ways do you think life was easier or harder in traditional times?
  • What do you admire most about your ancestors?
  • What would you say to your ancestors if you could speak to them?
• The facilitator or one of the group members can take notes on lip chart paper during the discussion.
• The project is to write a letter to an ancestor. Write to one specific ancestor in your family, to a namesake, or to ancestors in general if you don’t know someone specific from your family history.
• Using the notes on the lip chart paper as a guide for ideas, each person writes a letter to an ancestor. If you could talk to this family member right now, what would you say to her or him? What would you tell your ancestor about the world today? About their family today? What are you thinking and feeling? What would you want them to know about the changes that are happening?¹
• Think about using the Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun that the ancestor would have used. Remember traditional vocabulary you learned during the research phase.
• Later you could write a response from your ancestor. What do you think the ancestor would say back to you? What would his or her response be to the changes in the world and to your thoughts and feelings?
• This could also be a way to begin an oral history project. Hold the group discussion before you begin the project. Each group member writes a letter to an ancestor. The letter is sealed in an envelope and kept in a special place until the end of the project. The project proceeds - doing research, conducting interviews or listening to recordings, studying a specific oral history theme and creating a presentation. When the project is complete write another letter to the same ancestor. Each group member can then open the original letter and compare it to their most recent letter. How has this project changed your approach, your attitude or your understanding of the past?
• The letters can be kept for the group’s children or made into a booklet that can be used as reading material for other literacy groups and schools.

1. Adapted from Culture, A Way to Live by Yukon College