Book Review: Memory Serves: Oratories

Abstract

In Memory Serves, Stó:lō (Coast Salish) rememberer and storyteller Lee Maracle weaves together a selection of her speeches and lectures into a single volume of oratories. In the preface, Maracle expresses the worry that in the process of converting these spoken pieces into written form, “the words can lose much of the personality of the speaker” (xii). Her voice as a storyteller, however, coheres beautifully on the page, carrying the rhythm and consonance of her original orations. The recurrence of several themes (decoloniality, sovereignty, direction, memory) that arise throughout the text also gives us a powerful sense of her memory and personality as an Indigenous woman, elder, and rememberer who is anchored by the cultural values of her people.