In other articles, we have seen that some stories were not written for us and some were not supposed to be written at all. They lived in voice, in movement and rhythm. They belonged to a people, a place and had a specific purpose.

Now many of these stories are in books. They have ISBN numbers. They are taught in schools, shared in social media posts. They are annotated, translated and the subject of commentary and debate by people who never met the tellers or understood the cultural contexts in which these stories were conceived and were born.

What happens when an oral tradition crosses into print? What happens when this is against the will of the people who the story belongs to? And what is our role, if any, in the life of a story that was not meant for us?

Fire Stolen

Take the Popol Vuh, the sacred narrative of the K’iche’ Maya of modern-day Guatemala. It tells the story of the Hero Twins, of creation and the underworld. It was carried orally through the generations, held in memory and ritual. Then, in the 16th century, it was written down in K’iche’ using the Latin script, preserved in quiet defiance of a colonial power that was brutally dismantling Maya identity. (Side bar note: in a perverted twist, the person who conserved this version of the story was also one of the chief oppressors. What other sacred stories must have been lost during this time?)

Centuries later it was translated into dozens of other languages. Anyone can read the story now.

It was not intended for us. It was not gifted to us. Yet, it is a story I have come to love very deeply. I don’t dare ask the question: should we be reading it? I would rather ask: how should we be reading it?

What does it mean for a sacred story, rooted in a specific landscape, language and blood, to be read by someone with no links to any of those?

After all, this is a story that was taken from a people.

Fire Gifted

Across the Indigenous nations of Canada, stories and knowledge also moved into writing, but often only after great care. I was at a quality-of-life conference a couple of years ago in Calgary and the only important conversation I had there was on this topic. It made it worth the trip.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, we read not just about Indigenous Canadian teachings, but also the ethics of transmission. The author invites us to cross a bridge to begin understanding traditional Indigenous medicine and to form a relationship with the peoples. This is about education, not appropriation.

This is ethical transmission of a people’s secret wisdom.

Fire Woven in Roots

Local medicinal knowledge held within a specific community is tied intimately to its landscape, language and worldview. It is not just a list of remedies; it is a woven memory of plants, minerals, rituals and healing practices. It is a testimony of how local people achieved the best use of the immediate environment to meet the therapeutic needs of the local people – for millennia. These are typically passed on orally, through apprenticeship, observation and shared experience.

Every plant known, every preparation remembered, carries a relationship: to the land, to ancestors, to spirits, to the circle of life and death. It is practical, but also sacred. Cumulative and deeply particular: what heals one community may be unknown to another.

When this knowledge moves outside of its original context, through recording, translation, pharmaceutical extraction and the products find their way onto the shelves of Wholefoods or Holland & Barrett, it undergoes the same transformations as sacred stories do when written or transmitted to cultures way beyond its original setting.

This knowledge becomes displaced and stripped of the relational meaning that gave it vitality. What was once a living dialogue between land, healer and patient may become a commodity or a patent. We saw lots of this all over the world during the Covid pandemic.

Archiving a traditional pharmacopeia carries the same ethical responsibility as the stories. It is not just ‘data’ but a fragment of living knowledge, not easily shared or given away.

Again, this is to carry fire.

Fire Unseen

The world still holds stories that have never been written. The Jarawa, the Onge, the North Sentinelese and other minimally contacted or entirely uncontacted peoples all live in oral memory. Their languages are largely unarchived, in some cases, not at all. Their cosmologies, histories, beliefs and stories still sacred, still private.

What happens if we one day learn their stories?  This is the dilemma at the heart of post-contact anthropology, ethnography and global storytelling: is knowing the story a gift? If it isn’t, does retelling it compound the theft? What happens if this story – as with stories relating to all peoples – shed some light onto the human condition, a little angle we never considered before? What happens if, in amongst its stories, there is a tiny glimpse of something in the local pharmacopeia that ends up reshaping global medical thinking?

If we are not the original audience, can we still become custodians? Custodians, the ones that also help carry fire of a flame we did not start.

Being a custodian means:

-            Carrying the fire with care

-            Listening before speaking

-            Asking before sharing

-            Returning it when asked

-            Leaving space for silence

-            Let the original voice lead.

Preservation is not possession. Archiving a culture is not the same as respecting it. And what happens beyond that, once shared, when the stories are packaged, decorated with dreamcatchers, hash tagged? What happens when it is appropriated, becomes a meme? Put in a Disney movie? What was meant to be a path of learning and understanding becomes something grotesquely misshapen instead.

Fire Entrusted

This relates directly – and strangely – to Patient Voice research. We are still entrusted with sacred stories, though their forms have changed. Every patient we speak to holds a sacred story. Consider that, just for a moment. Patient data, anonymised and stripped of names and faces, carries the imprint of real people, lived experience, pain, survival, hope. These are silent details that data sets and statistics can only hint at.

Each patient is an untold story of one: singular, fragile and unrepeatable. A whole life lies in that story and it is one that is not taken from them, but given to us by them, entrusted to us – strangers to them – with silent confidence, a trust that must not be squandered or forgotten. And what do we do with it? Swan around the conference circuit and publish papers? Have a tiny fragment of their words transferred verbatim into an item in a Clinical Outcome Assessment? Use their insights as an anecdote? Can we think better, beyond this, in a way that honours the people who gifted us their stories?

This is also to carry fire.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025