This post is a response to question #2: “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.”
For Indians, power was located in their hearts and heads; for whites, it was located on paper (Robinson 16).
While words such as incapacity and inability are seldom used to self-describe in our own written histories, this lesson unveils the devastating limitations (born from the truth/untruth dichotomy) that make it difficult to extract meaningfulness or fluid understanding from first stories. The authority given to settlers’ written narratives has suffocated historical meaning and value from First Nations oral stories, such as ones retold by Harry Robinson. With this, the official historical narrative becomes a depthless, one-sided account, leaving the other side to be blindly discounted as an “untruth”. Wickwire indicates that the editorial process of transforming oral stories into written narratives suitable for publication contributes to the suppression of “real evidence and change,” thereby “transform[ing] what may have been a historical narrative into the more desirable pre-contact myth” (Wickwire 22-3). This systematized erasure of historical authenticity from oral narratives provides a third reason to explain our severe limitations in extracting meaning from the first stories.
In lesson 2.2, Erika addresses the “two significant obstacles” that “stand in the way of understanding and making meaningful the first stories” (Paterson Lesson 2.2). The first she confronts is the process in which we collect, translate, edit and publish the stories (2.2). After publishing her first collection, Wickwire reflects on why she included some of Robinson’s stories at the expense of others: “Along with several generations of scholars and others, I had been seduced by the Boasian paradigm which reified the mythological past and promoted the stereotype of the “myth-teller”- the bearer of the single, communal accounts rooted in the deep past… That Harry’s stories of white/ Aboriginal conflict had few parallels in the early collections did not mean that his predecessors had not told such stories. Early collectors simply did not have any interest in them” (Wickwire 28-29). Wickwire’s realization not only reflects the authority assumed by collectors and editors to tailor the stories to fit the paradigm of “pre-contact myth,” but also emphasizes the inauthenticity that is born from these changes.
The second “significant obstacle” that contributes to our limitations in assigning meaning to the first stories was the installation of the Indian Act. The outlawing of the “dissemination and celebration of cultural knowledge and territorial rights amongst First Nations,” in addition to the introduction of residential schools, had a devastating impact on the storytelling tradition (Paterson Lesson 2.2). The political process of categorizing Indigenous stories as “untruths” in opposition to supposedly “true” settler accounts was a tool of assimilation that rested on a constructed dichotomy. For these important stories to survive, “[t]he storyteller must be able to pass the story on, and the listener must be present to witness the telling of the story” (Paterson 2.2) The Indian Act posed great limitation to these practices.
“To base ones entire analysis of consciousness…on one or a few traditional rituals and narratives, and then to conclude that that culture as a whole is in the mythic phase, lacking a concept of history, may reflect a lack in the investigative procedure more than a lack in the culture (Terrance Turner as quoted in Wickwire 22). This statement is applicable to each obstacle I have attempted to address here. All three “significant obstacles” rest on the construction that classifies First Nations oral stories as inherently “mythical” in opposition to “historical” settler narratives. Once we discover the limitations that are born from these violent assumptions, we may come closer to rediscovering meaning within first stories and encounters.
Armstrong, Jeannette C . History Lesson. Google Docs: 1998. Web.
Paterson, Erika. Lesson 2.2: First Stories. English 470A UBC Blogs. Web.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books 2005. Print.
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