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.
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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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