Month: June 2015

I decided to answer Question #2 this week, with a focus on the Indian Act of 1876. I found this particular piece of legislation interesting because it’s had such significant effects, and because it continues to shape our government’s relationship with Indigenous communities even today. The UBC Indigenous Foundations website has a good overview of the Indian Act through history that I rely on for a lot of my information.

From the beginning, the act operated from a perspective of encouraging assimilation with the dominant culture and treated Indigenous people as children; it also limited their self-governance and gave the government many powers, like the ability to decide which people received benefits.

The government’s goal of assimilating the First Nations was often extremely explicit – in the 1920s, for example, the government official responsible for Indian Affairs said to Parliament, “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question.” A primary reason for banning potlatches in an 1884 amendment to the Indian Act seems to have been the fact that they interfered with this assimilation.

I’ve always taken for granted that assimilation is a negative thing – along with most of my friends who talk about it – so I was surprised to find that in a 2012 National Post article entitled “Is it time to scrap the Indian act?” many of the readers who wrote in explicitly supported assimilation. Didn’t they learn anything from Star Trek?! But on a more serious note, I can’t help thinking that they would quickly change their mind if they were asked to assimilate to First Nations culture, or if Canada made French the only official language and tried to assimilate English speakers into that culture.

Another aspect that stood out for me was the way the Indian act was amended in the 1920s to prevent Indigenous people from hiring lawyers to fight for their rights. From a modern perspective, there’s something particularly immoral about an organization making arbitrary rules about certain groups of people being unable to question them in court. It’s hard for me to see this as anything other than an admission of guilt, but I’m curious about how it would have been taken at the time.

In 1951, the more oppressive sections including the ban on potlatches and hired legal counsel were removed, returning it to a state closer to the original version.

One significant part of the Indian Act was the introduction of “Indian Status,” where the government was able to decide who counted as an “Indian” person (and who, therefore, was eligible for the special rights that entails). At times, the government revoked the status of any Indigenous person who reached a certain level of education.

The Indian Status system was also responsible for widespread discrimination against women, because women who married non-Indigenous men forfeited their status (as well as the status of their children), while men who married non-Indigenous women had no such problem. In effect, this forced Western forms of discrimination – which their own culture didn’t share – onto the Indigenous population. Bill C-31 in 1985 and Bill C-3 in 2010 were intended to remove their discriminatory policies but failed to do so: as the link above notes, “Grandchildren born before September 4, 1951 who trace their Aboriginal heritage through their maternal parentage are still denied status while those who trace their heritage through their paternal counterparts are not.”

I think my research generally supports Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility. It’s hard to imagine the historical moment in which these laws were formed, but it seems like a lot of it was based in fantasies of civility – even when they were destroying Indigenous people, the government always tried to frame it as doing what’s best for them. Coleman also mentions forgetting our government’s uncivil acts of colonialism and nation-building as a necessary part of the idea of white civility, which I think is demonstrated both in the existence of “well-meaning” modern proponents of assimilation, and in the fact that so many people (myself included) have never heard of the oppressive details of the Indian Act. Harold Cardinal seemed to realize the importance of remembering when in 1969 he called the Indian Act a “lever in our hands and an embarrassment to the government, as it should be.”

Works Cited

Crey, Karrmen, and Erin Hanson. “Indian Status.” Indigenous Foundations. <http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-indian-act/indian-status.html>

Hanson, Erin. “The Indian Act.” Indigenous Foundations. <http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-indian-act.html<

“Indian Act Background.” <http://www.usask.ca/education/fieldexperiences/tools-resources/diversity1/saskatoon-public/grade-4/3-Indian-Act-Background.pdf>

Joseph, Bob. “Indian Act and Women’s Status Discrimination via Bill C31 and Bill C3.” Ictinc.ca. <http://www.ictinc.ca/indian-act-and-women%27s-status-discrimination-via-bill-c-31-bill-c-3>

Russell, Paul. “Today’s letters: Is it time to scrap the Indian Act?” National Post. <http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/letters/todays-letters-is-it-time-to-scrap-the-indian-act>

Question #1: “In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.”

I enjoyed thinking about understanding Robinson’s stories in last week’s entry, so I was excited for the opportunity to think about that topic from another angle. It was quite interesting to see how the oral syntax that King describes, as well as different ways of reading, can affect our interpretation of a story.

There are some obvious changes that come from the fact that we don’t include punctuation when reading aloud. For example, early on in the story, there are a series of remarks:

Who?
What is it?
Looks like a person. (65)

Since it’s presented in the printed version without quotation marks, it seems like the storyteller is presenting these questions to the audience, but the lack of punctuation is invisible when read aloud, making it seem more like the voices of the characters.

Or take this example from the first page:

They still there.
And for many years. (64)

The second line doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense when we just read it normally; the obvious question is, “For many years what?” But when read aloud or with a storyteller’s voice, it’s a lot easier to just accept the meaning and move on, since people do talk like this all the time.

For me, the most interesting aspects of the oral syntax were the ways it affected the story on a larger scale. It felt a lot more like storytelling, with all of the connotations that word entails – for me personally, that meant that it seemed more fluid, more informal, and more personal. It also felt very distinctly outside of the European tradition of literature. I could picture sitting around a campfire in a forest somewhere and hearing it, and even when reading silently in my head, it came out in a very distinct voice.

In my previous blog post, I talked about how we need to approach these stories from an Indigenous context in order to truly understand their meaning. There can be a lot of challenges that get in the way of doing that, but perhaps the oral syntax of Robinson’s stories makes it a little easier?

Last week, I also mentioned Robinson’s emphasis on slowing down and taking a lot of time to appreaciate these stories, and one of the things that stood out the most for me about oral syntax and the use of short sentences is the way it forces you to slow down. When we tried reading it aloud, both my friend and I were tempted to read it fairly quickly, but a lot of the story sounds awkward that way.

Perhaps this is another indication of my separation from the context of the story, but it took me a while to find a way to read it aloud that seemed to flow, and I’d need a lot of practice to do it well. Reading aloud let me experience a sort of interaction with my audience, and being read to let me experience it without focusing too much on the written syntax. But as a beginner at this type of storytelling, I actually found that the easiest and most natural thing was to read it silently but slowly, with the voice suggested to me by the syntax. Still, I think even this type of silent reading succeeds at, as King puts it, “re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186).

Works Cited

Cathrae, Martin. “Campfire & Starlight.” Flickr. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/suckamc/2606021092/>

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.”

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories.

Question #2: In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so. […] In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited.

In this week’s lesson, Dr. Paterson points to two primary obstacles to finding meaning in early stories. The first is the way in which the social process of telling stories is disconnected from the story, and Wickwire provides some specific examples of this disconnection—she says that when listening to Robinson’s story, she was “hooked on what felt like a direct encounter with coyote—a living coyote linked to Harry by generations of storytellers” at that, by contrast, printed versions are short and lifeless (8). Wickwire also mentions that the identities of individual storytellers and details that are specific to local communities are often erased when composite stories are created, and stories with contemporary political content were often ignored or edited by the anthropologists who recorded them.

The second is the way storytelling among Indigenous people was prohibited, and the way children were removed from their culture and their stories when they were sent to residential schools. I was actually quite surprised to learn that potlatches were officially banned from 1880 to 1951, and I thought the link provided in the lesson gave a fascinating overview of the history. The suggestion that it was partly because potlatches were seen as a “detriment to the expansion of the nation’s economy” stood out for me, because it really emphasizes that they were being targeted because they weren’t “useful” enough to our Western capitalist culture. The fact that stories were targeted also points to the great importance and power of storytelling.

Which brings me to the third reason, expressed by Harry Robinson in Wickwire’s introduction. The third reason, I think, can be summed up as the difficulty of understanding meaning in cultural contexts and traditions that are so different from our own, and in particular with settlers’ inability or unwillingness to adopt  new frameworks and ways of thinking.

Robinson’s story about Coyote and the two twins seems to be all about these failures of communication and understanding, as the younger, white twin steals a piece of paper and refuses to share its contents with the older twin. I found it interesting that Coyote travels to the King of England to work out some codes about how Indigenous and white people would live and interact, which resulted in the creation of a “Black and White” book, and that Harry’s friend Edward Bent tries to read it. These details show that Indigenous characters attempt, out of the willingness or necessity, to work within the cultural framework of the settlers, even if the attempt is ultimately unsuccessful and wrapped up in the violence of residential schools—and this, in turn, draws attention to the fact that there’s no reciprocal attempt on the part of the settlers.

Wickwire says that the same story explains how Indigenous and white people derive their power from two completely different sources, with Indigenous people’s power in their “hearts and heads” and white people’s power “on paper,” which also emphasizes differences in culture and language. And when Robinson says that this story was the thing that was missing from the political meetings of his youth, I think he was drawing attention to the settlers’ failure to consider these issues from any perspective but their own.

Robinson also talks a lot about the importance of taking sufficient time to hear these stories, telling Wickwire that “It takes a long time. I can’t tell stories in a little while” (12). Later, he tells her to

[…] think and look
And try and look around at the stories.
Then you can see the difference between the white and the Indian.
But if I tell you, you may not understand.
I try to tell you many times
But I know you didn’t got ‘em…
So hear these stories of the old times.
And think about it.
See what you can find something from that story… (18)

And on the next page:

See if you can see something more about it.
Kind of plain,
But it’s pretty hard to tell you for you to know right now.
Takes time.
Then you will see. (19)

So we need to hear many stories rather than just a few. (Notably, Robinson’s largest concern with the book was that it hadn’t included all of his stories.)

We need to “look around” at the wide breadth of the stories and consider them collectively.

And we need to think about it thoroughly, repeatedly, and over a long period of time.

Robinson’s point, I believe, is that we can’t really make meaning from First Stories if we approach them from a Western context and way of thinking, which is what inevitably happens when most of us read a single story or even a collection of stories. It’s only through becoming immersed in an Indigenous context that we can start to see true meaning, and that only starts to become a possibility if we can take in a near-lifetime of stories and learning.

Works Cited

“Alert Bay, potlatch, 1910s.” Flickr. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/benbradley/16959540456/>

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-2/lesson-2-2/>

“The Potlatch.” The Story of the Masks. < http://www.umista.org/masks_story/en/ht/potlatch02.html>

Robinson, Harry. Living By Stories.

“Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.”

I ended up focusing Kaitie’s “Belonging to Home,” Alishae’s “Home Is A Feeling,” and Freda’s “A Home Is Not (Always) A House” for this assignment, although I ended up reading a lot of other blogs and I think my observations are applicable to many of them. In reading these blogs, I came across three major commonalities.

The first is to emphasize location as an aspect of home. Home may be more than a physical location, but in keeping with the most traditional definition of the word, the location is still an important part of it. Where all three authors diverge from tradition is in the specific locations that are described. Alishae gives specific striking details of multiple locations rather than a particular house: the “sound the leaves make when the breeze rushes through them,” the “shimmering skyscrapers,” and the “wooden floors and fireplace.” Kaitie talks about a family cottage and a lake as evoking a stronger connection than the actual home she grew up in. And Freda connects home to the inside of her family’s car, as well as to an experience on a particular mountain road.

Secondly, the three pieces all seem to emphasize positive connections with other people: Freda talks about values of togetherness and love, while Kaitie’s story emphasizes the importance through talking of her family’s connection to the place and through the story with her friend Courtney; Alishae talks of home existing in long-term friends or in her aunts’ stories. I think the presence of family is also a very typical part of the way home is viewed, although many of the blogs echo Kaitie’s and Alishae’s in emphasizing the importance of friends as well as family in creating a sense of home.

My third observation can be summed up with the title of Alishae’s blog post: “Home is a feeling.” In almost all of the blogs I read this week, home really is a feeling, one which encompasses and is driven by aspects of location and family connection but also goes beyond them. Freda mentions associating the feelings of comfort, familiarity, and safety with the idea of home. Kaitie describes a sense of belonging. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think all of these feelings about home are extremely common and all of them play an important role in defining what home is for us.

In considering what kind of assumptions we’re making about home, I started to think about how home never seems to be presented as unsafe, lonely, confining, or something to escape from. It’s always just assumed that it’s a good thing. Maybe for many of us the very definition of home is a “good thing,” and if a home stops being a good thing then it stops being a home at all – and maybe that says something about how we as a culture think about home?

 

Works Cited

Abeed, Alishae. “Home Is A Feeling.” ENGL 470A: Canadian Studies. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/alishaeabeed/2015/06/05/assignment-22-home-is-a-feeling/>

Li, Freda. “A Home Is Not (Always) A House.” ENGL 470: Whose Canada Is It? <https://blogs.ubc.ca/fredaliblog/2015/06/05/blog-4-a-home-is-not-always-a-house/>

Warren, Kaitie. “Belonging to Home.” Canadian Stories. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/canadianstories/2015/06/05/belonging-to-home/>

 

The neighbourhood where I grew up was quiet and pleasant, with small houses that I never thought of as small before I moved to Vancouver. Fences separated many of the backyards—a recent addition, according to my mother. But there was still a feeling of space, of expansiveness, to the neighborhood, as though it were full of unexplored secrets.

My grandparents were unusually involved in my childhood. I lived with my parents in the small house at the back of the lot, and my grandparents lived in the big house in the front, so it was like I always had two homes. And my best friends as a child, three sisters, lived next door; I was over there every day in the summer, so sometimes that felt like a home too.

One burning summer day in the late nineties—I must have been around eight—I was playing with my friends and their cousins. We got frozen-juice popsicles out of my refrigerator to eat in the sun amid the suburban flower beds, sprinklers, and fresh cut grass. It was a lazy day, as usual, and as usual we needed something to do.

That something turned out to be sharing information about a series of  weird, ghostly occurrences. Little, truthful things things to start with, like items that weren’t where we’d left them. But bigger and less truthful things once our imaginations got going, like voices, or mysterious figures.

“This is so weird,” we told each other. “We’d better investigate.”

So we investigated the ghosts happily for several hours, trying to work out exactly what was going on.

Our investigation at last led us to the basement of my grandparents’ house. We looked for clues for a bit, spreading through the different rooms and enjoying the creepy atmosphere provided by the dim daylight that filtered through the high windows. Then, when we were finishing up, one of the doors began to move—seemingly of its own accord. We all screamed and fled up the stairs, and each of us swore that we hadn’t been the one to push the door.

As the game dragged on, one of my friends confessed to fabricating a different piece of evidence for the sake of the game — one mystery solved. But there was still the matter of the door. Everyone swore they hadn’t moved it, and it was only the next day when a second friend admitted that this too had been a bit of fun.

***

It’s difficult to encompass my idea of home in a single story, but I’ve attempted the task in the above sketch. The assignment of telling a story that fits my idea of home made me think about all the ways in which stories in and of themselves represent home for me. Not the stories about home I tell myself now, but the stories about anything that I told myself as a child. In the scene above and on countless other occasions, our fun was so centred around stories that we all contributed to and told each other, and knowing that they were a fiction didn’t make it less enjoyable for any of us. (Perhaps the newer generations don’t do this as much: when looking for articles on childhood storytelling I found this page which encourages “make-believe play” but suggests that it’s been supplanted by gadgets in many cases. At the time, my family was unusual in not even having a TV.)

Stories came up in a lot of other ways: I was constantly asking my grandmother for stories, for example. My favourite were the ones she made up, but she told me true stories from her life too – apparently beneficial to children – and I loved all of them. I also loved holidays like Halloween and Christmas, perhaps because they’re so wrapped up in stories of their own, with characters like witches and ghosts, reindeer and elves. Maybe part of the reason I associate stories so strongly with home is because of their communal nature, because they require other people (whether family or friends) as tellers and listeners.

As an adult, I think that my idea of home is wrapped up in remembering my childhood stories rather than creating new ones. (I’d speculate that I may someday be in a place in life where I make new ones, but that isn’t now.) But the communal aspect of storytelling continues to play a big part in remembering, because stories seem more natural when there is an audience to appreciate them. And I don’t think the remembered stories necessarily need to be my own in order to feel like some version of home — childhood stories seem to have a magic that can only the individual who experienced it can truly understand, but the listener can still get a glimpse of what was unique and special about it.

 

Works Cited

Kight, Pat. “My neighborhood (looking west).” Flickr. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/kightp/479996698>

Reese, Elaine. “What Kids Learn From Hearing Family Stories.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 9 Dec. 2013. Web. 5 June 2015 <http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/what-kids-learn-from-hearing-family-stories/282075/>

“Supporting Make-Believe Play.” Tools of the Mind. Web. 5 June 2015. <http://www.toolsofthemind.org/parents/make-believe-play/>