Home is a place where an individual feels comfortable and happy; a place of belonging. One can have their most treasured items in a home, such as the growth chart of their child on the door frame, the place where they get their first kiss, or as a place of pure relaxation. A home can come in many different forms, for example a house, a country or we even call the Earth itself our home. Deciding on where one’s home is can be difficult, depending on where you are born or what events occur during your lifetime. What we consider to be our home can have fancy furniture, an expensive car and a pool in the backyard, but money cannot buy the feelings of a home. For the Native Americans living in Canada, they feel it difficult to call Canada their home due to the fact that they have been pushed out of their native land, land that once belonged to their tribes and their culture. Chamberlin describes this feeling of isolation in his home country “I don’t come from anywhere, except the Americas. And somebody else calls this place home, somebody who isn’t always happy having me around.” (Chamberlin 87). The sense of home becomes an imagined place where one does feel like they belong, but in the reality of the situation, home is a place which has already been resided in by people in our past history. For Chamberlin, home becomes a generic term for where a person lives for the moment, which may not feel like home to them if they have not chosen this home or is their home has been taken from them by a different culture.
The home is a place of language, culture and belief. Pico Iyer, the speaker in the TED talk, says “If somebody suddenly asks me, “Where’s your home?” I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.” This is a part of Iyer’s description of home, which also notes that “movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective” (TED) which indicates that home is part of movement and stillness. I really enjoyed Iyer’s talk about the home as it opened up my ideas of home and that it is fluid; wherever one is they can call that place home. When the fundamentals of language, culture and belief are taken from a person, they lose their sense of the place in the home. Chamberlin has a distinct view regarding the loss of home in the settlement of Canada. The different way of looking at this is “the history of many of the world’s conflicts is a history of dismissing a different belief” (Chamberlin 78) which becomes an “unbelief” (Chamberlin 78). The unbelief becomes a form of savagery or difference in the society, which makes the person feel that they are not part of the culture, or more importantly the home. These two views are different in the fact that the first is the displacing of the person, from where their home is, and the second is the degeneration of their beliefs, which make them feel like they are not at home. Both are valid arguments as to the understanding of the settlement in Canada by the native individuals, but there are still consequences for each of these ideas. For this first, can anybody be said to have a home if that home was originally owned by a previous person? There can be no such sensation as having or belonging to a home, as one is displaced through history not able to actually find a location for a home. With the second theory the implication lies with the fact that the home is tied to beliefs, and if said beliefs are dismissed, there can be no home. Home is more than just beliefs; it is also an emotion of happiness.
“What Makes a Home?” Winnifred Gallagher. Oprah. Web. 5 Feb. 2015. <http://www.oprah.com/home/What-Makes-a-Home>
“Where Is Home?” Pico Iyer. TED, Jun. 2003. Web. 15 Jan. 2015. <http://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home?language=en#>
Chamberlin, E. If This is Your Land, Where are your Stories? Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2003. Print.
7 Comments
Hey Alexandra!
I really enjoyed reading your post – I especially liked your critique of Chamberlin’s understanding of home as I have often thought it is a romanticized understanding. I was wondering if you had any ideas in regards to how now, as Canadians, we can approach both the Aboriginals’ idea of ‘home’ and the rest of us who live here who also see Canada as our ‘home’ – as technically we all have stories now too! For example, nowadays, just because someone arrived after you to Canada, doesn’t mean that you have more right to a home than them… so should that still be the case in our history textbooks? How can we create unity in Canada our Homeland?
Hi Susie!
I think your question is really good in understanding how Canada can be united in history through many different cultures. There are so many different aspects of how a culture depicts its history in Canada, I am not sure if there would be a single version that could unite all of these culture’s perspectives. Canada is home to both our culture and the Aboriginal culture, it is just diversified in history by the way each culture tells of its history. For example, the Native culture tells its history through stories and songs, relating to nature and the Earth. We may see our history a bit differently, such as including more politics and geography. Each of these accounts is a part of our history, they just differ in the aspect in which they are accounted for and told. Canada belongs to all of its citizens, whether one has lived here for generations or just called Canada home recently. Each of us has a right to call this country home, as home is the place where we feel where we belong.
Hello Alexandra, thank you for your answer to my question – and the most interesting hyperlink to Pico Lyer’s TEdTAlk; a most thoughtful and interesting talk. I will post it on our FB page :)I think you should add a little to this post – perhaps end with a question about Lyer’s talk – He is of course talking about the people who leave their “home behind”for whatever reason or historical circumstance – and you might come up with a good question about the differences between this kind of ‘leaving home’ – and the Indigenous experience of ‘staying at home’ – Just a thought.
I will ask you to avoid hyperlinking dictionary definitions though — unless of course you want to comment or challenge the definition is some way. The problem with dictionary definitions is they further ingrain the notion of the authority of singular definitions/ percpectives for …. everything.
Again, thank you
Thank you for the comment Professor! I will make sure to comment on Pico Lyer’s talk. I found it really interesting and a great way to explain the “home.” I will not use dictionary hyperlinks from now on; sorry for using it in this post! Your comment really helped me to understand how to focus this post, and future posts as well.
Hi Alexandra!
Great blog post! I love that you linked Pico Iyer’s TedTalk! This has always been one of my favourites. One of Iyer’s points that resonated with me was the transience of “home”; for me, home is fluid and dynamic. Indeed, the arrival of European settlers in North America forced Canada’s First Nations people to be subject to the imposition of a foreign notion of “home”. Their notion of home stood in stark contrast to that of the colonizers and, indeed, as European settlement continued in Canada, so too did the dominance of the European narrative. This narrative has long since been the “one” that drowns out the alternative voices sharing their definition of home. Limitations on the definition of home that I identify with have caused much confusion in my own life as I’ve been faced with many assertions that my concept of “home” was incorrect. When I was young, I would frequently be asked where “home” was for me. Some people would assume my answer would pertain to somewhere in India. Others would assume my answer would pertain to somewhere in Canada. Some people would say, “No, I meant… where were you born?” while others would ask “No, I meant… where do you live now?” At one point in my life, I identified as strictly Indian (even though I really knew nothing about India; the language or the people or ANYTHING, really) and would say that although I lived in and grew up in Canada, India was home. At a later time in my life, I identified as strictly Canadian. Sure, I was Indian but I’d lived all my life in Canada so, surely, Canada was my home! Today, “home” is more transient to me. I think, personally, that home stems from the imagination; it is not real. Home is fluid. Home is different for everyone. Some conflate house and home, others say home is anywhere you feel comfortable. Do you have a definition of home that resonates with you, Alexandra? Do you think there is a definition of home that can be wrong/is “home” entirely imagined?
Hi Shamina!
There are many different concepts of home and I think all of them have validity. I really like how you explain your difficulty of where or what home is with your personal experience it really helped me to see how complex the idea of home is. Home for me is where I am happy and comfortable, but I see the Earth as being my home, as well as my actual house where I reside with my family. I think home is a much bigger concept which can be broken into smaller concepts; for example we inhabit the universe, live on Earth and reside in a certain location (which can be a fluid location as well). I call our planet home, so I suppose home can be found everywhere. I have always lived in Canada so I do not have any experience with the difficulty of moving to a new place and wondering where my home actually is, but from your comment I see how home is a fluid concept. I do not think that the home is imaginary; if so then we do not have a place to live, which in turn could mean that our whole existence is imaginary.I do think that the home is a fluid object, but for it to be an object it does have to exist in some form (whether it be as a thought or an actual place).
Thank you for your comment!
🙂