Lesson 3:3 – Connections & Interconnections

Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water blends Western literary fiction with the oral stories of Indigenous people. For this week’s assignment, each student was given a specific set of pages from the novel with the intent of discovering as many of King’s subtle (and not-so-subtle) allusions and cultural crossovers as possible. I have been given pages 12-24, which has a plethora of names and references. As I break down the significance of these various names, I will be relying heavily on Jane Flick’s “Reading Notes” for King’s novel.

Ishmael, Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, and Robinson Crusoe (p. 12-15)

Each of these four names holds a rather significant place in Western literature and entertainment. Unlike their Western namesakes though, in Green Grass, these are the names of four Aboriginal men – a clear fusion on King’s part of Western and Indigenous fictional characters.  “Ishmael is a character from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, who begins the story with one of the most famous opening lines in American fiction: ‘Call me Ishmael'” (Flick 143). “Ishmael” is also a Biblical character: he is Abraham’s first son. 

Lone Ranger is a famous Texas Ranger character from American historical folklore. At the time, he represented the American fantasy of what the American frontier was like. In taking the name of this famous American character, King is telling the story of Lone Ranger from an Indigenous perspective. In doing so, he addresses some of the issues that are inherent in the original literature, which Chadwick Allen outlines in “Hero with Two Faces: The Lone Ranger as Treaty Discourse”:

In the popular White American imagination, treaty discourse inscribes a brief moment of balance in the citizenry’s and the government’s history of Indian-White relations (only vaguely known or understood by most White Americans), a pause between what is seen as the ignoble past of conquest and the present disaster of Indian policy…Essentially mythic, treaty discourse sanctions White American fantasies of an idealized treaty moment. Central to these fantasies is an available and thus knowable Indianness: an Indianness defined as racially “pure” but organized in non-Indian terms. In the classic Lone Ranger-Tonto pairing, the idealized Indian Tonto operates as an “island of tribalism” in a frontier imagined as overwhelmingly White, supervised and supported by the “governmental” authority of the idealized White Ranger. (Allen 612)

Hawkeye, or Natty Bumppo, also a famous Caucasian character from the American frontier, is another instance of King trying to rectify the issues in past American stories. In his paper on the significance of able-bodied Natty Bumppo as symbolic of American notions of ability and superiority, Thomas Jordan writes:

…[there is] a binary opposition between the disabled and the able-bodied in order to mark a point of separation between Natty Bumppo and his Native American friend and counterpart, Chingachgook. Here, Chingachgook occupies a disabled identity in order to facilitate his ultimate removal from the novel. Chingachgook’s physical frailty is a narrative device that foreshadows his eventual suicide and symbolically positions the end of the Native American race as the result of a process of natural selection rather than violent British and US imperialism.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is an important character in English literature, with his story marking the rising popularity of realistic fiction. Once again, however, Western superiority takes precedent over Indigenous people in Defoe’s narrative as Flick writes: “[Crusoe] is aided by his Man Friday, the “savage” he rescues from cannibals, and then Christianizes.” Crusoe enacts what colonizers assumed was the best course of action for people they viewed as “savage”. Again, there is an issue to be redressed here and King does so through his Indigenous Robinson Crusoe.

Dr. Joseph Hovaugh (p. 16-17)

One of the few references I actually caught on my own without Flick’s help, Dr. Joseph Hovaugh’s name is actually a homophone for “Jehovah“. On these two pages, the doctor spends his first appearance in the novel contemplating his garden, a garden that most likely refers to the Garden of Eden. (Flick writes on page 143: ” Note also that Joe Hovaugh’s garden is in the east, in Florida: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden” (Gen.2:8).”) The escape of the four “Indians” from Dr. Hovaugh’s institution can be interpreted as the escape of Indigenous people from the imposed Western dominance, which the doctor represents.

Alberta Frank, Henry Dawes, John Collier, Mary Rowlandson (p. 18-21)

In her “Reading Notes,” Flick succinctly describes the significance of Alberta’s name along with the importance of her students’ names, all of whom hold a place in history, and whose behaviour in the novel reflect their real-life counterparts. Flick writes that not only is Alberta’s name a reference to the Canadian province where King has lived and taught for a decade, but Alberta’s last name is also indicative of her honest and direct character. Flick posits on page 144 that “King may also have drawn her name from Frank, Alberta, on the Turtle River. This town was a major disaster site, buried by the famous Frank Slide of 1993.”

Henry Dawes created the Dawes Act of 1887, “which privatized communally held Indian land and led to the dispersal of Indian lands in the U.S., estimated at more than a million acres…much trickery and deeding away of lands followed this enactment” (Flick 144). In these pages, Henry Dawes is depicted as the worst student of the group, having fallen asleep in Alberta’s lecture and being the one she picks on to answer a question about the lecture.

John Collier became the Commissioner of Indian Affairs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He introduced the idea of a “New Indian Deal” in 1934, but despite his “sympathetic [view of] Indians, he still depicted them in a stereotypical manner“. In King’s text, Collier seems to be the only student engaging with Alberta’s lecture, though even still, his engagement is far from scholarly, with one of his two responses being a simplistic “Oh, bummer” (King 19).

Mary Rowlandson was a colonial American woman who was captured in 1676  by Native Americans an held for several weeks before being ransomed. A few years later, a narrative of her capture and release was published. Considered an important point of reference by colonialists at the time, the work held heavy tones of revulsion for Indigenous people and described them using words such as “ravenous beasts”, “wretches”, and “heathens”. King recreates this historical character as a student who is unconcerned with details in Alberta’s class.

Babo Jones, Sergeant Cereno (p. 23-24)

Flick notes that Babo is a reference to the character of the same name in Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno,” and that Sergeant Cereno is a reference to the story’s eponymous protagonist. In Melville’s tale, Babo is an African-American barber who becomes a slave revolt leader on the story’s ship. In the interaction between the Sergeant and Babo regarding the details surrounding the Indians’ disappearance, there are references to water and ship a few pages later, as Babo observes the Pinto outside the window flooding. “Pinto”, Flick observes on page 146, is a play on the name Pinta, which was the name of Columbus’ ship. The reference to flooding is not only a nod to Melville’s story, but it is also one of the many Biblical inclusions in King’s attempt to blend Western narrative with Indigenous story-telling.

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Lesson 3:2 (Q#2) – The Trickster

Question 2: Coyote Pedagogy is a term sometimes used to describe King’s writing strategies (Margery Fee and Jane Flick). Discuss your understanding of the role of Coyote in the novel. Throughout Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, Coyote appears alongside the narrator, who tells and retells the story of where all the water at the beginning of the story came from. The presence of Coyote, a trickster in Indigenous fiction, “helps to communicate a particular lesson about life to listeners” (Coyote Facts). Despite his antics and seemingly clueless nature, his line of questioning not only provides comic relief, but his interjections also illuminate various issues otherwise hidden within the narrative:

“Wait, wait,” says Coyote. “When’s my turn?” “Coyotes don’t get a turn,” says Coyote. “Nonsense,” I says. “In a democracy, only people who can afford it get a turn.” “How about half a turn?” says Coyote. “Sit down,” I says. “We got to tell this story again.” “How about a quarter turn?” says Coyote. (327)

In this particular example, the narrator’s remark regarding democracy is an unfortunate aspect of our system – those who make the decisions at the top of our democratic hierarchy are often the wealthy elite who can afford the expensive campaigns often needed to win elections. To further this point, in 2008 “successfully-elected candidates in the Vancouver municipal election spent on average $36,246. In Vancouver, the average spending of elector organizations supporting candidates that were elected was $1,100,233, and the average spending of campaign organizers was $47,826” (Campaign Financing, 4). As such, though Coyote’s ignored appeals for his turn to speak feels lighthearted in this context, it highlights the important issues of silenced voices that those who are powerless or part of the minority face in our society. Apart from expanding our awareness, Coyote also serves to embody the oral culture of the Indigenous people. I found that as I was reading the novel, I had to read certain parts aloud (particularly some of the names on page 182 – well played, King). Most notably, the parts with Coyote speaking seemed to work better when I read them out loud, which was rather reminiscent of Harry Robinson’s short story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”. Having experienced Robinson’s story, feeling compelled to read aloud wasn’t what stood out for me; rather, it was the smooth blending of both this vocal and silent story-telling that really made the whole experience unique. This blend is not only a combination of the Western literary style with Indigenous oral story-telling, but it is also the amalgamation of Christianity and Coyote. On page 146 of the novel, when Noah states that bestiality is “against the rules,” Coyote responds with “but he doesn’t mean Coyotes.” Here, Margery Fee and Jane Flick comment on King’s blending of two cultures in one narrative:

Rules are made for coyotes to break! Apart from ignoring borders between animal and human (or divine and human, if you prefer), this subversive move makes the central story of the Christian religion into a Coyote story, and repeats the novel’s overall strategy which subsumes European culture and history into an Aboriginal framework, and counters a patriarchal religion with a matriarchal one. (136)

At the beginning of the novel, it took me a while to grasp what was happening – the significance of each character and their connections with one another were revealed bit by bit; the whole process felt like putting together a puzzle, really. Even then, the narrative would slip away from me sometimes, and I found myself flipping back a few pages to check if what I inferred was correct or to reorient myself within the context again. It may just be me, but this novel seem to have the characteristics of Coyote: tricky at times, and despite the humour, there are important lessons to be learned. Sidenote: As I was reading up on the character of Coyote, I stumbled across this term that I thought would be interesting for people to know: Heyoka, which means “trickster spirit”. There is also a discussion forum with helpful postings about what this term encapsulates.

Source: http://www.indiancanyonlife.org/ksr/

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Lesson 3:1 (Q #1) – A “Problematic” Mentality

Topic for this week: “outline why colonial authorities couldn’t conceive of accepting the Métis as a third founding nation” (Paterson)

As globalization and migration became more prolific, European explorers discovered and settled in their new-found territories, exploiting the resources and the people already residing there; colonizers in what is now known as Canada were no different. Though several nations laid claim to Canada’s lands, the British soon asserted their dominance in the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham over the French. Even though British superiority reigned over Canada, the victors were willing to accommodate the French in this new nation: “…success in national politics has often required the accommodation of the aspirations of the French speakers in Canada, since they have always formed the largest group of non-English speakers in the country. Other cultural and linguistic groups, including Indigenous peoples, were expected to assimilate to the notion of Canada as British” (Nationalism, 1500-1700). To the south, the outcome of the American Civil War in 1783 resulted in the migration of over 30 000 defeated Loyalists to British-ruled Canada where they “called upon colonial administrators for new lands [in return for fighting for Britain]” (A History of Treaty-Making). More and more land was being taken from the Indigenous people and being given to the foreign settlers.

After the War of 1812, relations between the British and their former colonies improved. Despite being their allies during the War, Indigenous people found themselves on the receiving end of British assimilation efforts. Indigenous people were reduced to “wards of the new Canadian state” (Nationalism, 1800s) – a result of colonial mentality and need for ownership of the land. The mentality is what Daniel Coleman calls “loyalism,” which he identifies as a “problematic and still pervasive collective concept of Canada as a white, Christian, primarily Anglophone, civil society” (Nationalism, 1800s). The AANDC (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada) describes the result of this mentality: “Based upon the belief that it was Britain’s duty to bring Christianity and agriculture to the First Nations people… [the government encouraged] First Nations people to abandon their traditional ways of life and to adopt a more agricultural and sedentary, more British, life style.” Refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of people such as the Métis, the British established themselves as guardians of the state and therefore caretakers of the land, effectively taking what they justified was theirs. 

Looking specifically at the Métis Nation of Manitoba who “created a provisional government [in 1869] and attempted to negotiate directly with the new government of the confederation to establish their territories as a province under their leadership” (Paterson), this “problematic” and “pervasive” mentality of Indigenous people as lesser beings resulted in the rejection and suppression of the Métis Nation’s attempt at independence. Unlike their acceptance of the French, the British did not consider any Indigenous groups as their equal. Thus the provisional government was seen as a rebellion from those who should only be content with being governed; to allow the Métis government was to acknowledge them as equals to their European counterpart, which was unacceptable in the British mindset at the time. The Canadian forces outnumbered those fighting for the Métis cause and the provisional government’s leader, Louis Riel, was captured and subsequently executed.

Louis Riel

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Lesson 2:3 (Q #1) – “What is happening?”

That’s what my brother said when I told him to read Harry Robinson’s short story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England,” to himself silently.

“What is happening?” he asked. He was barely into the second page.

I must admit, I had the same response as well when I read Robinson’s stories silently. We both found that his colloquialisms, nuances, and the grammatical liberties he had taken made focusing on the story itself difficult. As I read the story, I found myself progressing from reading mentally to mouthing the words silently and finally I gave in and read the rest of the story aloud. My brother also found that he couldn’t help but do the same; only then did the story make sense to us. When it was time to read to each other (we had read the stories aloud to ourselves separately), I found that I was more animated when reading aloud to my brother than when it was just for myself. I also realized that I adjusted Robinson’s words as I tried to emulate the colloquial tone he was setting. Mostly, I would modify the -ing suffix: “Lots of soldiers watchin’. And Coyote went through there. Nobody seen ’em” (Robinson 68, emphasis added). I would do this only when I noticed another modified word (in this case, “’em”) either immediately preceding or following the verb. I think I needed to add my own touch to help the story flow a little for me as I was reading it. My brother, on the other hand, read the story verbatim.

In “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” Thomas King states: “[Robinson] develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats readers’ efforts to read the stories silently to them­selves, a syntax that encourages readers to read the stories out loud” (King 186). My brother and I wholeheartedly agreed that the story was much easier to understand when we heard it aloud, without the text in front of us. That being said, I disagree in part with King’s next comment:

“The common complaint that we make of oral literature that has been trans­lated into English is that we lose the voice of the storyteller, the gestures, the music, and the interaction between storyteller and audience. But by forcing the reader to read aloud, Robinson’s prose, to a large extent, avoids this loss, re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance.” (King 186)

While Robinson’s story did have a distinct style that allowed his voice to shine through, no matter who read it, the story’s grammatical particularities made reading it aloud a clumsy (for lack of a better word) attempt at recreating a story that Robinson no doubt knew off the top off his head. While parts of Robinson’s oral telling may be preserved in the translation to text, I would argue that it does not re-create “at once the storyteller and the performance”. While Robinson may pause where appropriate, when telling this story, my brother and I would stop abruptly mid-sentence to figure out how to tell the next bit aloud, mangling the story’s narrative at certain points. That being said, understanding the story was a bit of a magical moment for the both of us and by the end of this exercise, instead of asking “what is happening?” we both said, “I get it now.”

The magic of hearing someone else’s voice in your mind.

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Lesson 2:2 – First Stories

Question: “First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?”

In a Classical Studies course that I took in second year on Greek mythology, my professor said something along the lines of: “…then Christianity came to Greece. It soon became the dominating religion in Greece because in the face of a new and perfect God, who could believe in the ancient deities with all their many humanistic flaws?” Creation stories, or origin stories, seem to impart the message that there was one beginning, and perhaps that is why we feel the need to choose only one as sacred, dismissing all others as stories. It is in the nature of all stories to set the stage, but by setting a stage, you eliminate (for the most part) the possibility of other settings. Genesis begins: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering  over the waters.” King points out that the Bible’s narrative possesses a more authoritative voice than “The Earth Diver,” but both have firm, distinct beginnings. Note that Genesis has “In the beginning” – there is no ambiguity about whether or not there are several other beginnings out there. What follows, God’s creations, is a very specific stage set-up. Likewise, “The Earth Diver” also starts with a description of the setting: “Back at the beginning of imagination, the world we know as earth was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was a larger, more ancient world” (King 10). Again, we have the specific “at the beginning”; both stories claim to talk about a singular beginning, but both beginnings are seemingly distinct. The perception of needing to choose between stories in order to establish an origin of existence stems may stem from these differing settings. Why the need to choose? Why not have several settings? Perhaps it is our desire to have certainty in our lives, free from the ambiguities that follow when attempting to reconcile differing origin stories.

Yet are they that different? Both stories are about creations: the world was empty, but then someone came and put things where they are. What we view as a series of choices (what King refers to as dichotomies) are actually different perspectives of the same stage. Perhaps one storyteller had a balcony seat, front-and-center, and the other had a floor seat off to the side. Stories are perspectives – if we choose one side of the dichotomy, we ignore the other half that is also part of our world.

 

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Lesson 2:1 – And I’m Home

Closing my eyes for a moment, I took a deep breath, then strode through the front door and entered the familiar foyer. Everything was where I left them, the usual knick-knacks in their various places. As I made my way further into the house, I passed by the small library room, filled with books (not all of them good, mind you). Next to the library was the small theatre room where I usually relax and enjoy my favourite shows and movies. Further into the house is, to my chagrin, a rather dusty exercise room. Walking through the hallways, my hand traces the familiar scars in the walls, each with a story of its own. At the next turn would be a picture with a faded image of that day, years ago, at the beach with my family. You can’t really make out what we’re doing, but the big smiles on our faces says it all: we’re having fun. Making my way further into the house, I dread the next turn, the next room I would find. It looks like the other rooms of the house, but this is the only one with a locked door. I know where the key to this door is; I even enter this locked room every once in a while, but not today. I heard barking a little ways down the hall and I smiled – there she is! Flubby is a looking a little mangy, but she bounds up to me, standing on her hind legs, little paws just barely reach up past my knees. We continue walking through the halls together, her chewing up the occasional slipper and I enjoying the various photos of myself and my friends and family up on the walls. I noticed Flubby making a beeline for a picture book on the ground. Recognizing the picture book, I raced over and rescued the book before it became a chew toy. It was a book my mother used to read to me. Well, it doesn’t actually have words in it so I suppose I shouldn’t say “read”. The story goes a little like this:

There was a mother duck with her three ducklings. One day, on the way to school, one of the ducklings sees a pond in a fenced up house. Noticing that the gate is slightly ajar, the little duckling sneaks in to play in the pond while its siblings continue their walk to school, unaware that their adventurous sibling had gone off to play. Later, the little duckling, having had enough fun, decides to leave the pond and join its siblings at school, but finds the gate locked shut. Meanwhile, the other two ducklings return home to tell their mother that they lost the third duckling. The mother makes her way down the same path that her children travel everyday and hears her little duckling crying, stuck behind the locked gate. Tying rope to a bucket, she throws the bucket over the gate, her little duckling crawls in, and she hauls him out.

My mother managed to add something extra to the story every time she told it to make the story new and interesting. Looking up from the story, I realized that Flubby had left and the room around me seemed hazy somehow, shimmering like a mirage. I found what I was looking for though, and I made my way back to the front of the house and shut the door behind me. I’ll be back soon.

 

Author’s Note:

I didn’t really know what to write for this week’s assignment, which was this: “write a short story that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home” (Paterson, “Lesson 2:1”). If this were an assignment to simply describe what home meant to me, then I would have had a more straightforward answer. To make a story, though, about what home was to me was, for some reason, difficult for me to wrap my mind around. What inspired the story above is BBC’s Sherlock  and the idea of the mind/memory palace. I have a really bad memory – I tend to remember things in broad strokes or not at all. When I do remember details, they tend to be odd, useless details. I do have a decent short term memory, which is why the foyer of my story is so cluttered, but beyond that, it’s hallway after hallway, with rooms that are generalized by what they seem to contain. Even the most terrible memory holds onto some of the precious moments of the past though, and for me, two of those memories is my dog and my mom reading me bedtime stories. For me, home is a place where the memories that were made still have a hold, shaping my identity and the foundations of my perception.

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Lesson 1:3 – Stories & Shadows

Humans were once silent and shadowless. Those who walked in the light and produced darkness with their body were shunned for they had broken the sacred silence that kept the dark at bay; once a shadow is released, it can never be rescinded. There was one who had spoken, brave or stupid enough to want to see what would happen if he did so; he was driven mad by his dark passenger on the ground, following his every step and eventually, following him off a cliff. However, silence did not guarantee people a shadowless existence – there were those who said too much with their body, and though they noticed their mistake, there are traces of darkness that follow them everywhere.

Into this world, a child was birthed and abandoned, for her parents were poor and could not afford to feed her. Left in a forest, the child screamed and screamed until a passing bear found her. Though humans were silent, this was a time when animals could speak, for they did not fear the shadows and knew what the dark passenger represented. The bear raised the child as her own, and the child, growing up amongst the animals of the forest, learned to speak. As she grew older, she began to explore beyond the forest and one day came upon a village. Despite the animals’ warnings, she grew curious and decided to enter the village. The villagers, upon seeing her full-bodied shadow, captured what they thought was a madwoman and locked her up.

For three days she was held with little food or water; the girl tried to get the villagers to listen to her, to hear her explain that the dark follower was not fearsome at all. None stayed to listen so instead, she decided to tell her story. She spoke to no one in particular at first, but she was not deterred. She started with the story of her birth and abandonment, then she spoke of her Mother Bear and her Father Deer. She recounted the hilarious ventures of her Cousin Squirrel and his quest for a nut, and her Brother Rabbit, who constantly, but lovingly, complained about the sixteen mouths he had to feed. As she told these stories, more and more of the villagers gathered around her. They were wary of her shadow, but soon realized that it did them no harm, and they were far too fascinated by her stories to leave.

Suddenly a child stood up and though he did not speak – silence had muted spoken language for too long in the village – he mimed. He shared the story of his first time swimming that day, the anxiety he felt as he stared into the water’s bottomless depths, the fear as he jumped squeezing his eyes shut, and the relief as he broke through the surface of the water for air. Despite seeing the child’s shadow grow, the villagers all listened intently. Soon a pair of newly-weds stepped forward and together they danced, each step a show of their joy in their new life together – a story of love. More and more villagers stepped forward to tell their stories, and more and more shadows appeared. Some, seeing the many shadows, fell back into their usual misgivings and tried to take it all back, but the shadows could not be retracted. Others realized that their dark silhouettes were not evil nor were they to be feared. Shadows are the embodiment of stories – everyone has a story.  Some tales are taller than others, and some tales, like the shadow of the wind, can never be told. Sometimes they blend with the stories around them, just as shadows blend with the surrounding darkness, but they are always there. We are all followed by the stories we tell, “for once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in world.”

Source: http://www.tlc-systems.com/dsc01698_lzn.jpg

Author’s note:

I had written another story before this, a story about a tyrant who kept his slaves isolated from the world so that they would not know freedom existed elsewhere, but then a wandering traveler sneaks into the tyrant’s land and shares the stories of other places where people are free. These stories of liberty spread amongst the slaves who then revolt against their oppressive ruler and gain their freedom. That was the story I was going to post. A friend of mine changed my mind when he spoke of shadows and how, like stories, everyone has one. What immediately came to mind was Plato’s Cave, another story of realizing that one cannot go back after experiencing something (the allegory has little to do with my story though). I knew I wanted to include anthropomorphism in this new story (one of my favourite literary devices), but beyond that I didn’t really have a plan when I began writing. I was a little apprehensive as I wrote this – I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out, or if it would make sense at all.

Telling this story was a different matter – I’m a horrible storyteller. My terrible memory makes it difficult for me to keep the sequence of events in order. I found myself constantly trying to give clarification for previous points or backtracking to fill in a plot hole. I told the story twice – once without the story in front of me and once with. Some people enjoyed the story and others thought the moral didn’t fit.

I don’t think this is my best story, but it was one I felt compelled to tell.

 

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Lesson 1:2 – Story and Literature

For this week’s blog post, the class was asked to read Edward Chamberlin’s If This Land Was Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? We must then answer one of Dr. Paterson’s prepared questions in response to what we have read.

Question #6: Write a summary of three significant points that you find most interesting in the final chapter of If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?

In the final chapter of this book, titled “Ceremonies,” the theme that Chamberlin clearly wants to establish is the “common ground” that can be found between groups with differing cultures and beliefs. From the points that Chamberlin uses to expound his theme, I have selected three that stood out to me, the first being the importance of believing: “We need to understand that it is in the act of believing in these stories and ceremonies rather than in the particular belief itself that we come together, and that this act of believing can provide the common ground across cultures that we long for” (Chamberlin 224). Though we may not completely understand the beliefs of other cultures, the recognition that the need to believe in something happens in all cultures is the beginning of breaking down the wall between Them and Us.

Source: http://dharmacomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/breaking-down-borders_web.png

The second point regarding common ground is the importance of ceremonies and the role they play in helping us recognize the border that divides “sense and nonsense…where strangeness disappears then reappears again in a new guise” (Chamberlin 223). Using the example of a play, Chamberlin depicts someone who crosses the border into the realm of sense as one who would shout out an actor’s real name rather than acknowledge the character they are portraying. On the other hand, those who remain on the imaginary side of the border shout out warnings to the character on stage, fully immersed in the story’s plot and forgetting that this is all an act. Not everyone recognizes the border, but ceremonies help us understand that it is there. In the example of the theatre, the director’s introduction of the play is a type of ceremony that inducts us into the play’s world while grounding us in the understanding that this is a work of fiction. The Holy Communion, which emulates Christ’s Last Supper, has a similar border, where disbelief is suspended because ceremony bridges the gap between what seems like “very strange table manners” (Chamberlin 225) and the faith the wine and bread are truly the body and blood of Christ. The importance of ceremonies for society, Chamberlin argues on page 226, is not so much that we carry out our own, but that we make an effort to understand the ceremonies of others: “Often, like table manners, these [ceremonies] seem silly to those of us who are not bound by them in belief. But like other nonsense…we need to recognize their claim on people’s hearts and minds.” In misunderstanding these ceremonies and the values that they exemplify, we deepen the rift between Us and Them and as such, issues like those that arise in treaties between Indigenous people and settler societies will continue to exist.

The final point is the power of storytelling and the common ground that this act creates across cultures. Everyone tells stories – the narrative and its form may be different, but we are essentially explaining our understanding of the world, and through our explanation, we also demonstrate our perception of stories. Though we may not recognize them immediately, we are always telling stories: “We call the old [stories] teaching, and the new ones research” (Chamberlin 234). On page 239, Chamberlin tells us that although the division of Them and Us is “inevitable”; the paradoxical power of stories is that although different cultures may not be able to understand the different narratives, thus creating a border,  the act connects us all in our attempt to balance reality with imagination. In other words, it is not the content of our stories or the nature of our beliefs that connects us all, but rather our shared understanding of “what is is to believe [and tell stories]” that creates common ground and mutual understanding.

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Lesson 1:1 – Shall we begin?

Here you are – here we are – at the start of a new journey through Canadian literature. My name is Bonny Bung and I’m in my fourth year finishing up a double major in Political Science and English Literature.

I look like I’m napping. I probably am.

I’m not particularly good at introducing myself and have decided that a sporadic spray of a few tidbits about me is the path to take. Apart from my borderline unhealthy obsession with television shows, I jog on occasion, volunteer at two non-profit organizations,  and tutor wee ones piano. Speaking of children, when I was 6-years-old I thought a brilliant way to catch birds was to build a nest in the middle of my lawn and wait for the birds to make it their new home (I thought nests in trees were just a coincidence). Total birds caught? Zero. Total time wasted waiting for gullible birds? None. I had built the nest, then promptly took off with my brother to pan for gold in a nearby puddle.

In this Canadian Literature course with Dr. Erika Paterson, we will “focus on the intersections and departures between European and Indigenous traditions of literature and orature.” This is a course that will delve into a range of literature and stories with the aim of uncovering historical cultural connections between Europeans, Indigenous people, and Canada. Being a distance education class, students are expected to not only engage with the professor and each other via multimedia, but also  consider technology’s role in “the future of [Canadian] literature” as the dominating medium of expression.

Last summer, I had the privilege of working at Union Gospel Mission; there I met several gentlemen, such as Alex, who shared with me their experiences in residential schools. It was then that I realized how woefully ignorant I was regarding Indigenous issues. My most recent encounter with Native fiction is Daniel Heath Justice’s Kynship: The Way of Thorn and Thunder, which was a required text from my English seminar course last term, and Grace Dillon’s introduction to her anthology of Indigenous science fiction. I am thankful for the opportunity to critically explore other works in this field and hope to develop a greater understanding of the impact that colonization and nation-building had on the true natives of Canada.

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