I have chosen to answer question 5 for lesson 2.2, concerning my initial reactions to Robinson’s story about Coyote’s twin brother stealing a “paper” (Robinson, 9).
When I first read the story, I was immediately struck by how much it reminded me, in part, of the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall from Eden. The “whites” ancestor twin steals knowledge they shouldn’t possess, banishing all their descendents to a displaced life away from their original homeland, much like the Christian tradition. However, in this story, Coyote’s descendents become the chosen people, and the Europeans assume the role of the kin of Cain, in a manner of speaking.
Another thing that struck me was how explicitly the story draws a line between “Black and White”(Robinson, 10). It mirrors European narratives of superiority over Indigenous peoples, by asserting the Indigenous peoples’ role as descendents to the obedient and wise older brother, the one who did not “fall.” It is a narrative which illuminates the artifice of the “facts” of the traditional contact dialogue between First Nation’s and Europeans, flipping the paradigm on its head, with the Europeans becoming the younger, inexperienced, disruptive individuals, while the First Nations become the favoured, wiser, chosen people. Robinson’s story seems to take a traditionally European or Christian narrative, and invert it to convey the opposite message, legitimizing First Nations rights to “their” land through a narrative with roots in First Nations mythology, which utilizes more “modern” tales and reasoning to legitimize the story’s message.
What the “paper” is precisely eluded me, but it seemed to me to recall the differences between oral and written cultures, between Indigenous and European cultures in the “first contact zone.”(Lutz, 4) The story establishes the “Indians'” claim to the land, establishing them as being there “before the whites.”(Robinson, 9) The story highlights the dichotomy identified by Lutz between Indigenous methods of storytelling and European methods of storytelling, because :”storytellers in the modern European tradition wrote their stories down.”(Lutz, 8) The “paper” contains some knowledge which the First Nations lack-European scientific knowledge or rationalism, say-not because they are intellectually inferior, but because they do not need it. The story could be read as completely, subtly undermining the whole basis of European traditional superiority-their scientific knowledge and reasoning. The story is a myth, sculpted to fit a certain narrative, one which promotes the legitimacy and worth of the “Indian” over the “white”, inverting the traditional narrative of the reverse being true.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the story was the way it showcased Wickwire’s whole argument for challenging a Boasian anthropological point of view, showing that Boas selected stories to study and become scholarly “canon” based on his own criteria of a “static” Indigenous literary canon, one which was purely ahistorical (Robinson, 23). Far from being ahistorical, Robinson’s account takes elements of European narrative traditions, such as the presence of a Christian style “god”, and incorporates them into a story about Coyote, with the purpose of conveying a certain message about the presence and nature of Europeans on Indigenous land (Wickwire, 455).
Robinson’s story is eye opening to say the least, particularly where it reveals the problems with many traditional forms of anthropology, and a problem with scholarship in general, as scholars and others tend to assume that those who came before them in the scholarly or narrative tradition were unbiased, collecting data without a personal agenda. Wickwire’s revelation about Boas perfectly illuminates the problems with this methodology, and perhaps taps into one of the problems this course is seeking to evaluate-when you write something down, modern methodologies assume it to be genuine fact, and oral lessons to be more open to corruption and manipulation. However, as Robinson’s story indicates, perhaps the reverse is true, as once an obfuscation is written down, or evidence which does not fit the desired theory is discarded, the written product becomes sacrosanct, and it can be very hard to unpick the truth from the lies once again.
Works Cited:
Jacknis, Ira. “The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905.” American Anthropologist. 104.2(2002): 520-532. Web. June 20, 2014.
Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indignenous- European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. 1-15. Print.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2005. (1-30)
Wickwire, Wendy. “Stories from the Margins: Toward a more inclusive British Colombia Historiography.” The Journal of American Folklore. 118.470(2005): 453-474. Web. June 20, 2014.
Thank you, thank you for an excellent, insightful and great expression of your reading of Robinson – hope to see some dialogue grow here.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your insight into the Coyote narrative. You alluded to Franz Boas’ anthropological writing and the flaws discovered and then that of Robinson’s story. Our society, and, my opinion only, our academic institutions, research facilities, law, etc, take written (usually European) accounts almost like “gospel” (excuse the pun) and though we’ve made strides towards recognizing oral tradition and the importance of them, we still have a long way to go. My question is what is your opinion on the difference of a written account and an oral account?
Hi Kristin, glad you liked it. I think modern society-Western media saturated society anyway-tends to hold with the belief stemming back to Plato’s time that Logos(speech, in this case the written word) is truthful, while Mythos(in this case oral stories) are easily manipulated and fanciful. Readings such as Robinson, Wickwire, and King all seem to hold with this idea-Native stories are discounted because they are oral, and are silenced because they are spoken, lost because they aren’t written down. Unfortunately for the European colonizers, words spoken aloud are much harder to repress than those written down, those which can be burned. Still, what better way to suppress the irrepressible than to discredit it as false? Do you think the European reaction to Native stories might have been different, that the “contact zone” might have been easier to bridge, if the Indigenous peoples had had a written culture, rather than an oral one?
Hi Breanna,
I found the same parallels between the story of the twins and the Genesis story too! It’s interesting that we both recognized that; I wondered if I’d be alone in drawing those similarities (I answered the same question in my blog). But what do you make of these similarities? Do you think there’s Christian influence in the story, or simply coincidence that results in these striking similarities? Each case would have different implications, but I had a hard time trying to determine exactly what they would be and what that would mean for how to read the story. What are your thoughts on this?
Hi Lian, it’s really interesting that only the two of us seem to have highlighted these parallels-they jumped out at me right away. I think it’s entirely possible that Coyote stories were adapted to incorporate elements of Christian religion, particularly considering how long missionaries had been in contact with Indigenous peoples, even before official “contact”. But, if it is just a coincidence, it would certainly say something interesting about the differences between “them and us”, if “our” stories grow the same themes independently of each other. What do you think?