Monthly Archives: February 2016

“If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact” 43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.

Although it’s never stated as such by Robinson, I would assume that this story is one that popped up after European contact to explain their existence. What I find interesting about the story is that it both demonizes Europeans and, I think unintentionally, expresses the insecurity of the Indigenous people who created it.

I can’t speak to the intentionality of either Robinson or the original storytellers, but this story struck me as similar to the propaganda used in World War I and other wars, that was intended to both endorse the propagandist’s home army and vilify the enemy. What Robinson’s story establishes is that a) the Indigenous people of North America are descendants of the good twin, Coyote (an endorsement), and b) that Europeans are descendants of the bad twin who was banished (a vilification). While Coyote is usually portrayed as a “trickster/seducer/pest” in other stories, this particular story shows him as “the obedient twin who dutifully followed the orders of his superiors” and “he represented goodness” (Wickshire 11). Here, Coyote’s character has been adapted to create a dichotomy between him as the good twin and his younger brother as the bad twin. While the younger twin is not directly referred to as bad, he is a liar and a thief, both qualities that the story implies are negative. With this story, the storyteller is able to give a historical reason as to why Indigenous people deserve to live in North America, and white people – the banished – do not deserve to live there.

What I found to be the most interesting detail of the story is that the younger twin was banished because he stole a piece of paper he was not supposed to touch. First, this is reminiscent of Eve eating the apple in the Bible’s Genesis story, which may indicate the influence that Europeans had on Indigenous storytellers. Second, this suggests to me that Indigenous tellers of this story felt they needed to justify the fact that Europeans had developed a complex written system before they did. For all the talk of oral and written cultures being on the same playing field – that is, one not more advanced than the other – this story suggests to me a feeling of inadequacy from Indigenous people in this regard. I’m not trying to suggest that they had any disdain for their oral culture, but simply that the Europeans believing themselves to be more advanced because of their written culture may have gotten into the heads of Indigenous people, leaving them feeling defensive. So a historical reason for this difference was created, one that painted the ancestor of Europeans as a thief and then a liar – clearly a less desirable person despite his paper – and Indigenous people as the rightful inhabitants of North America.

I believe that the stories we listen to affect our worldview, particularly ones we grow up with as children. However, what Wendy Wickshire’s introduction and Robinson’s story of the twins has shown me is that it is just as true that our worldview affects the stories we tell.

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Works Cited

“Canadian Wartime Propaganda: First World War.” WarMuseum.ca. Canadian War Museum, n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.

Wickshire, Wendy. Introduction. Living By Stories. By Harry Robinson. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. 1-30. Print.

“Wordlviews and Science: the effects of presuppositions.” Truthnet.org. Truth Net, n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.

Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.

Cherie Au’s “My Sense of Home“

Similarities

• a sense that people are an important part of what makes a home
• traditions (for me this would be better worded as routine, but it’s a similar sentiment)
• a sense that home can shift from one place to another

Differences

• a sense of displacement and yearning for home
• a dissatisfaction with the actions of people at her home

Nicole Galloway’s “The Seasons of Home“

Similarities

• we both grew up in Lynn Valley
• dependent on childhood memories and adventures in the place we call home

Differences

• more focused on the place than the people (although the people are what shape her connection in the first place)
• more attached to history of home

Danielle Dube’s “At Home Behind the Mask“

Similarities

• a sense that people are an important part of what makes a home
• home as a place of comfort

Differences

• considers the place where she can perform an activity (hockey) to be part of her home

The most common thread running through all the blogs I read is that people are at the core of what makes a home for us. Even some of the other common threads like comfort, stability, culture, and traditions are all things that are a function of the people surrounding us. Some people were particularly attached to a specific geographic location, but even those places were connected to memories with people.

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Works Cited

Au, Cherie. “My Sense of Home.” CANADIAN LITERATURE. UBC Blogs, 8 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

Dube, Danielle. “2:2 At Home Behind the Mask.” OH CANADA! The Stories We Tell. UBC Blogs, 8 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

Galloway, Nicole. “The Seasons of Home.” Oh Canada. UBC Blogs, 6 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the valuesand stories that you use to connect yourself to your home and respond to all comments on your blog.

When I was a kid, my family shared our house with another family. They lived on the top floor, and we had the bottom. The little girl who lived upstairs was the same age as me, and we played together all the time. We used to sneak into our neighbours garden through his hedges because we thought it was a fairyland. I can’t remember whether we really believed it at the time, but I do remember it looking magical.

One morning, Gabrielle and I had a conversation about the house.

She said, “I never want to live anywhere else. We’re going to own this house forever.”

I was just as attached as she was to the place, so this made me inherently sad because I knew our families had already started to not get along. A few years later, my parents bought out her parents, and the house was all mine. I never talked to her about it, but I felt guilty knowing how much she loved the place.

When I was 16, and my parents separated, my mom bought a condo a few minutes away from the house. They bought it before they told my brother and I they were separating. My dad said he had the option of either keeping the house or buying a condo as well with bedrooms for my brother and I. He wanted our opinions, and I was adamant that we keep the house. I couldn’t imagine losing my home when there were already so many emotions to work through about my parents’ separation.

The funny thing was that as soon as I moved into the condo with my mom, it started to feel like home and the house I grew up in no longer did. I realized that my mom was the person who made home feel like home for me. It was the knick-knacks that brought back memories, the routines we had to make sure chores got done, the nights spent watching TV together on the couch, and the way we took care of each other. That was home for me. That was where I felt comfortable.

When I visited my dad on the weekends, I always felt slightly uncomfortable. This made me feel guilty because of course I loved my dad as much as I loved my mom. He was intelligent and interesting and we could talk for hours. But I’d constantly come home to dishes I needed to clean up, and an almost empty fridge. We didn’t have routines and it left me feeling like a visitor in my own house. My dad had the best intentions, but he didn’t know my habits the way my mom did. I never imagined he might surprise me with my favourite ice cream flavour the way my mom did from time to time. My dad liked to take me out for dinner or breakfast so we could have bonding time, but that always came with a sense of guilt that we were overspending on food consumption. I think the best way to describe our relationship at that time is awkward. I was a teenage girl, and naturally there were personal things in my life that I felt I couldn’t share with him.

Last summer, my dad sold my childhood home, and he moved into my mom’s condo after she moved to Sechelt. It’s still a funny feeling to drive by that house, and simultaneously feel so connected and disconnected to it. It’s weird to imagine other people living there and calling it home. But I wasn’t all that sad when I handed my key to the realtor. It was just a place, really. Home is where the people I love are. I still feel like I have two homes. My relationship with my dad has grown a lot since I was a teenage. We decorated the condo together when he moved in, and it feels like our place. And my mom’s place in Sechelt feels like home too. She has a guest bedroom, but she always refers to it as my bedroom.

For me, home is where I feel comfortable and loved.

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Works Cited

Looi, Claudia. “Top 10 Must-Do Things To Do on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia.” Travel Writing Pro. Travel Writing Pro, 8 Sep. 2011. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

SBG – Crewstock. “Land of Faerie.” Digital Art. Deviant Art. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

Your task is to take the story that Kings tells about how evil comes into the world at the witches conference [In “The Truth About Stories” ] — and change the story any way you want — as long as the end remains the same: once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to. 

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I told my daughter a story that some might argue she was too young to hear. It was a story about evil, and how it comes to be in the world. I didn’t do this to scare her. I did it to make sure she knows her responsibility to act against evil in others and in herself.

I told her about a time when I was a young woman. I had just turned 19, and I went out to a club to celebrate my birthday. I was naive then in a way that I no longer am. I believed in my heart that every person on this earth had the best intentions, although they varied in the strength of their conviction to be good. Evil was weakness, and I pitied those who practiced it. On this night of celebration, I felt carefree and joyous, a couple close girlfriends at my side. I looked to new faces around the bar as friends or lovers waiting to be found. The man who found me was not a friend though. He was an evil that I had not known existed. Some part of him, perhaps born, perhaps bred, wanted to be violent. It was his nature to be evil, and he was not apologetic or regretful about it. When he approached me on the dance floor, I did not know yet of his nature. I flirted with the sting of alcohol on my breath. I told my friends that I was leaving with him, and they gave me a knowing wink. It wasn’t until we stood outside waiting for a taxi that I saw his true nature come alive. He whispered in my ear things he wanted to do with me that I was not interested in doing. I understood that some people have different preferences, and that’s okay, so I communicated to him where my preferences differed from his, and I thought that would be the end of it. But he did not care about my preferences. He did not care that I was a human being.

I tried to walk away from him, back to my friends, but he restrained me in a chokehold. I screamed and he pressed his arm harder into my throat until I could barely breathe. The bouncer standing outside the bar saw this. People walked down the street laughing and talking as if I wasn’t in danger. He stopped my breathing just long enough for me to pass out, and for some reason the taxi driver took in this man and a helpless, unconscious girl without a second thought. I don’t know what these people did think when they saw me; that this was all a joke and I was actually okay? All I know is that evil came into my world that night for the first time, and I saw it in two forms: evil in a person’s nature, and evil in those who failed to protect me.

Some people say my daughter was too young to hear this story. But, of course, it is too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

This story was inspired by a conversation with my father about evil. I asked him where he thought evil came from and he replied, “Evil is when good men do nothing.” This is his paraphrase of a quote from Edmund Burke, not that my dad remembered the source!

I found this to be a really interesting idea particularly because I learned about the bystander effect in an intro psychology course I took in first year. The murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 sparked research into this area. Genovese was stabbed outside her apartment building and then raped over a period of about 30 minutes with 38 people later admitting to having heard her screams without acting on the situation. Does that mean those 38 people were evil? Well, the bystander effect theory helps explain how good people can be passive bystanders. First, the more bystanders there are in an emergency, the less likely any of them are to act as there is a diffusion of responsibility, making each bystander feel less responsible for helping. They may believe that in such a crowd there must be someone more qualified to help than them. Second, bystanders are affected by the attitudes of those around them. If they see others remaining calm, they believe that what they are seeing is not actually dangerous, and that their initial interpretation was a mistake. Interestingly, one of the most effective ways to combat the bystander effect is to teach people about it, so they are aware of the pressures acting on them when confronted with a situation that requires action.

I find the bystander effect to be particularly enlightening in terms of rape culture, and how it is able to persist in a society that deems itself forward-thinking.

Have you ever been a bystander, either active or passive?

Thanks for reading,

Caitlin

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Works Cited

Dwivedi, Supriya. “Rape culture persists in our legal system.” Toronto Sun. Postmedia, 4 Feb. 2016. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Keltner, Dacher, and Jason Marsh. “We Are All Bystanders.” Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. University of California Berkeley, 1 Sept. 2006. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.