This blog is a response to Question #4:
In one of the truly awesome achievements of our education system, we teach those who come to us loving words and numbers to hate poetry and mathematics. What we are in fact teaching them is to make that false choice between reality and the imagination[.] [T]he choice between being marooned on an island and drowning in the sea (Chamberlain 127).
In a society obsessed with order, the notion of two valid and contradictory truths is unsettling. An urgency to categorize all that is “right” away from “wrong,” and to isolate “reality” from the playgrounds of the imagination ensures an eternal commitment to choice. Truth or Untruth? We have been conditioned to choose only one. It is likely that these self-imposed limitations are what make figuring out “this place called home” problematic. We are uncomfortable allowing ideas to co-exist in these contradictory domains; however, as Chamberlain explains, both truths are fundamental to discovering a “new relationship between strangeness and familiarity; mystery and clarity” (Chamberlain 122). In finding an “intersection” between two contradicting stories about the history of Canadian settlement, it becomes possible to reimagine home (Lesson 1.2 Paterson).
Chamberlain’s initial-and somewhat redundant-description of the history of settlement only offers one story. In this way, it dismisses the truths of entire populations, and shapes their injustices into narratives to be understood by non-Indigenous listeners. Chamberlain quotes, “no English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland” (Chamberlain 79). Jeff Corntassle’s article “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling and Community Approaches to Reconciliation,” illustrates how Indigenous storytelling not only passes down a narrative, but an attitude. To offer only one “truth”, made up of English words that do not give justice to the feelings or attitudes of the people who are being spoken for, and call it “history” is a major injustice and consequence of the truth/untruth binary.
In putting his initial idea of settlement “differently,” Chamberlain explains, “the history of many of the world’s conflicts is a history of dismissing a different belief or different behaviour as an unbelief or misbehaviour, and of discrediting those who behave differently as infidels or savages” (Chamberlain 78). This notion, unlike the other, acknowledges the existence of other truths; of other agencies. It questions the accuracy of a truth that dismisses alternate perspectives on the mere basis that they are different. It is important to note how difference, in this context, is associated with wrongness or inferiority. A story that does not support or reinforce the authoritative “truth” is compulsorily dismissed as an “untruth.” It is by this construction that the colonial voice has been handed the authority to govern the story of settlement in Canada.
While perhaps it is convenient to place stories on a hierarchy of truth to weed out the contradictions, it must be understood that all stories, regardless of who is telling them, live through the imagination: “[They] are all, in some sense, about someplace else or someone else. They take us to imaginary places, with imaginary people. They show us the importance of elsewhere. (Chamberlain 126). Corntassel’s piece introduces the concept of “restorying.” It is encourages a re-examination of the dominant cultures’ narratives to make room for a symbiotic truth; one that intersects stories that have been historically contradictory to “unsettle assumptions about the past” (Corntassel 138). While I’m not convinced I hear the music, I think we’re approaching the intersection!
Chamberlain, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where are Your Stories: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: AA. Knopf. 2003. Print.
Corntassel, Jeff, and Chaw-win-is T’lakwadzi. “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-Telling, And Community Approaches To Reconciliation.” English Studies In Canada 35.1 (2009): 137-159.
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