Category Archives: Uncategorized

In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation. Why do you think this is so?

King’s novel begins with a feeling of disjointedness between the sections with the four Indians and the sections with other characters. That disjointedness comes from the distinction between the ancient stories the four Indians are telling, and the recognizably modern lives lived by characters like Alberta, Lionel, and Eli. At first, it was not even clear to me that the four Indians were in the same time period as the others. As the novel goes on, the two worlds start to merge as the reader realizes that Coyote, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Lone Ranger are the same four Indians who went missing from Hovaugh’s hospital in the beginning. Then the four Indians meet Lionel on the road, bringing their presence directly into the other characters’ lives. I can’t speak to whether this was King’s intention, but for me it brought the mysticism of ancient Indigenous stories together with the modern perspective.

King begins the novel with “So. In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water” (1). I believe that King’s emphasis throughout the novel on creation stories, of both Indigenous and Christian descent, is a way of showing their importance to human beings on an essential human level. In a personal sense, King has a connection with both these cultures as his mother is of Greek descent and his father Cherokee. Perhaps his emphasis on blending and in doing so critiquing creation myths comes from their importance in his own life and personal history. Regardless, I think that King shows he importance of these stories to his characters through their attempts to leave the reserve and eventual return to it.

This is most prominent in the story of Eli Stands Alone. He has lived apart from the reserve for most of his adult life, yet he returns when his girlfriend, Karen, dies in a car accident. Upon his return, he discovers that his mother’s cabin is going to be torn down to make way for a dam. He protests this, and lives in the cabin until his death. What this story says to me is that even though Eli wanted to start a new life away from the Blackfoot and their traditions, he ultimately had a love of it deep enough to defend his family’s right to their land. To me, this was the first inkling of what I believe King is trying to get across: that no matter whether we believe in them in a literal sense, our myths and traditions are a part of who we are as individuals.

In the case of Alberta, she has also lived away from the reserve for most of her adult life. Alberta teaches in Calgary, and only comes to visit when she is seeing one of her lovers, Lionel. Lionel’s birthday is what brings her back home in the novel. Although Alberta seems to engage with her culture again almost accidentally (she runs into Latisha who prods her into going to the Sun Dance that day), she ends the novel as an active participant in that culture. When we last see Alberta, she is pregnant thanks to one of Coyote’s tricks, and she is helping Norma and Latisha rebuild Eli’s mother’s cabin after the dam washed it away. Here again, an Indigenous character returns home only to find what she had been looking for everywhere else.

Lionel is an exceptional character in that he does not live off the reserve, but he does work off the reserve. Lionel works at Bill Bursum’s selling televisions. Bill Bursum is clearly racist against Indigenous people. Although he has no problem hiring them as he does for Lionel and Charlie, Bill’s dialogue and thoughts show that he believes himself to be inherently better than them. This is emphasized at his extreme anger over the Western he watches on the Map having the ending changed so that John Wayne is killed by the Indians instead of vice versa. By engaging with Bill’s world, Lionel shows a distancing from his own culture and an implicit shame of his people. Furthermore, Lionel hopes to go to university and start a new life outside of the reserve like Eli. While Lionel does not actually desert the reserve, the reason why seems to be more about his inability to get things done, than about a desire to remain true to his heritage. Reluctantly, we see Lionel also join Latisha, Norma, and Alberta in helping to rebuild the cabin at the end. He says he even might live in it for a while, although Norma is quick to tell him, no luck, she has first dibs. For a character like Lionel – who I think is best described as a person who lets things happen to him – creation myths are perhaps of the most importance in that they actively affect him and his lifestyle. No matter Lionel’s intentions, he can’t seem to get away from his heritage.

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Works Cited

“Blackfoot Confederacy.” Canadian Encyclopedia. Historic Canada, n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.

Cherokee Nation. Cherokee Nation, 2016. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.

Schaffer, Jennifer. “21 Feelings All Mixed-Race People Know.” BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, 13 Oct. 2014. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.

In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility.

The original intention of the Indian Act of 1876 was to separate Indigenous people from Canadian citizens until they could be assimilated into Western society. One example of this is the process of enfranchisement. When an Indigenous person chose to enfranchise themselves, they lost their Indian status and became part of Western society. Until 1960, only those Indigenous people who were enfranchised could vote in Canadian federal elections. This process divided Indians and non-Indians, and suggested that there was no middle ground to be part of both communities. This most clearly supports Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility, along with the decades-long requirement for Indigenous children to attend residential schools where they were taught to read and write English.

Furthermore, the Indian Act displayed clear sexism. The rules for qualifying for Indian status have changed over the years through bills passed by the federal government of Canada. At one time, women who married men without Indian status lost their own status. However, men who married non-status women did not lose their status. In 1985, this was amended and women who had lost status because of marrying a non-status man were allowed to reapply. However, their children still could not qualify for status. The irony of this gender discrimination is not only its offence to feminist movements of the time, but that many Aboriginal communities follow a matrilineal line of descent, and the rules of the Indian act were in opposition to this, reflecting Western patrilineal lines of descent. While many bands are now in charge of defining their own membership rules, this does not necessarily mean all band members qualify for Indian status, and the government only provides funding to bands for their members with status.

I believe strongly that we need to move away from a race-based qualification for Indian status, and move towards a culture-based qualification. If a person is welcomed by a band to be part of their community, and chooses themselves to be part of that community, they should qualify for Indian status along with their band membership regardless of race. With the amount of race-mixing in our current time, it is not reasonable to define Indian status through this trait. Giving the benefit to mixed race children means that there may be an abuse of Indian status rights. For example, mixed race children with essentially no connection to Indigenous culture may apply for Indian status in order to evade taxes. While not paying taxes on goods and services is only applicable on reserves, this may still be a huge benefit in communities like West Vancouver where the upscale Park Royal mall is located on a reserve. On the flip side, denying mixed race children the benefits of Indian status can often mean leaving out individuals who are very much active participants of Indigenous culture.

The Indian Act has not been abolished despite attempts in 1969 by the Trudeau government and in 2012 by the Harper government. While I personally believe that these were both well-intentioned attempts intended to reverse the institutional racism against Indigenous people that Canada has been practicing since its creation, they displayed a degree of implicit racism on the part of the government. By trying to make the choice for Indigenous people whether the Indian Act existed, they were again showing that they, the federal government, are the supreme body that makes decisions for Indigenous nations. This blog written by a non-Indigenous person working and living on a reserve has an extremely interesting discourse on the abolishment of the Indian Act. The author makes the point that, “We can’t talk ourselves out of this situation without making structural changes, and we can’t make structural changes without talking to each other.” While the Indian Act certainly needs change if not abolishment, what it needs more so is conversation and agreement between both parties standing on equal footing.

The essential problem with the Indian Act, today and when it was created, is that it is a document filtered through the lens of the Western perspective.

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Works Cited

Adler, Howard. “Indian Status: 5 things you need to know.” CBC News. CBC, 23 Aug. 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.

Haifischgeweint. “4 Things Non-Aboriginal Canadians Need to Know About the Indian Act.” Haifischqeweint. N.p., 16 Sep. 2013. Web. 26 Apr. 2016

Why is it, according to Carlson or/and Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).

According to Carlson, these allegedly post-contact stories are not of scholarly interest because they are viewed as inauthentic. The dictionary definition of authentic is “not false or copied; genuine; real.” Assuming we believe prophecies are not real, post-contact myths are inauthentic because they claim to be pre-contact when they must in fact be post-contact, being informed by the events of the Europeans’ arrival. The Salish prophecy about white men bringing literacy is a perfect example of this type of inauthenticity. What’s interesting is that the typical pre-contact Aboriginal myths should also be considered inauthentic by this definition. They are fictional stories pretending to be non-fiction, so they would be considered false. It’s easy to prove that myths are at least part fiction because we see so many variations of the same stories. Logically, they cannot all be 100% accurate. So what is the difference between these two scenarios?

I believe that it comes down to the idea of cultural authenticity, rather than story authenticity. Culture is a set of traditions, behaviours, and beliefs shared by a group of people. To mix one’s culture with another often comes with a sense of impurity; that it has been contaminated by another culture. So these post-contact myths are not seen as authentic because they are “less Native” than pre-contact myths. This is essentially a racist way of thinking and promotes the divide between “us” and “them”. Furthermore, it exacerbates the situation of mixed-race children who often don’t feel accepted by members of either race, rather than being accepted by both. The reality is that Europeans have spent enough time on the same continent as Aboriginals to become a part (although certainly not the whole) of their identity. Often Aboriginals define themselves in opposition to Europeans, as in the myth of Coyote and his paper-stealing twin, yet that still marks Europeans as a reference point. It is not realistic to think that two cultures could have so much contact, and not be influenced by each other. We certainly have been influenced by their culture. Moreover, outsiders do not get to determine what parts of Aboriginal culture are “more Native” or “less Native”. If they accept post-contact myths as an authentic part of their identity, then that is their right. That is their truth.

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Works Cited

“Authenticity.” Dictionary.com. 2 Mar. 2016. Web.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. 43-72. Print.

Connolly, Colleen. “Examining the Aboriginal influence on Western Canada.” The Cord. WLU Student Publications, 30 May 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.

Heath, Joseph. “How to beat racism.” National Post. Postmedia, 19 Apr. 2014. Web. 7 Mar. 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.

At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.  I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?

I agree with Courtney Macneil‘s point that it is unfair to privilege written cultures over oral cultures, particularly when the technology we have today blurs the lines between written and oral so thoroughly. While the written word used to be the more stagnant form, and oral stories the more malleable form, the two are becoming closer than ever in this regard. Oral stories can now be recorded in a permanent form. Smart phone users can send texts via snapchat never to be read again after the first time. The reader and the listener have more power than ever to choose what they absorb, and what they pass on to others.

Just like the printing press revolutionized the publishing industry in the 1400s by making the written word accessible to all classes of people, self-publishing companies like Kindle are cutting out the gatekeepers of literature, allowing readers access to a multitude of works they might never have seen otherwise. The downside to this is that a lot of poor writing is now available (although we know publishers didn’t always get it right anyways). The reader now becomes the one who has to sort the good from the bad rather than the publishing house. With such varying tastes in literature, maybe it makes more sense to have the reader as the gatekeeper. Although author, Amanda Hocking, who has become a millionaire selling Kindle books, admits that there is a randomness to what does well in the self-publishing industry. She compares herself to author J.L. Bryan who she believes is a better writer than her and publishes in the same genre, yet sells less books than her. Self-publishing is at the whim of the popular readers’ taste, something that’s not always easy to discern. It is important to note that the majority of the publishing industry is still controlled by print media, although ebooks are becoming more popular than ever.

What I find most interesting about the prevalence of self-publishing today (not so much in terms of e-books, but in terms of blogs and tweets and other forms of social media) is that it has made it very difficult for any body of power to enact wide scale censorship. The Arab Spring in 2011 used social media to collectively protest against their governments. At the time it seemed like an unstoppable movement, but it turns out the countries who participated in the protest haven’t seen much change on the ground floor. Having now caught on, governments are able to use social media as a powerful tool for propaganda in the same way that protestors did. With news coming to us often in the moment it happens or immediately after, false information is as easily spread as shocking truths. We are less likely to see stories from journalists who have taken the time to verify all the information, and can come to us with a fully formed viewpoint on the situation. Once again, the reader has become the gatekeeper in deciding what sources they believe and which ones they don’t believe.

Hyperlinks are an interesting addition to written culture in that they allow the reader to access further information about a subject easily, and to see the works that an author has built their own opinion on. When the written word was just print on a page, we had to take the author at his word or otherwise go to the library for some in-depth research. Now with the click of a mouse, we can see exactly what they are talking about and form our own opinion on it, that may be in line or in opposition to the original article we read. We can also have the written word augmented by videos or photos that may speak to us in a different way. Or we can just read the article and not click on anything. That is what technology has brought us: choice. Sometimes an overwhelming amount of choice!

Works Cited

Blakeley, Kiri. “Who Wants To Be A (Kindle) Millionaire?” Forbes Magazine. Forbes, 6 Mar. 2011. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Hempel, Jessi. “Social Media Made the Arab Spring, But Couldn’t Save It.” Wired Business. Wired Magazine, 26 Jan. 2016. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013

Follow the instructions in this lesson to set up your blog and write a short introduction (300 – 400 words) that includes at least two hyperlinks and a visual. This introduction should welcome your readers and include a brief description of the course and some commentary on your expectations for this course.

Hi everyone!

My name is Caitlin Bennett, and I am a fourth year English Lit major, Creative Writing minor set to graduate this spring. I was born and raised in North Vancouver.

Outside of my university career, I work part time as an assistant manager for Landmark Cinemas. I’ve worked in the movie theatre industry for almost 6 years now, and have come to be extremely proficient in buttering popcorns. I’m also a cheerleader on Adrenaline’s Audacity team. I have been involved in the BC cheerleading community for 10 years now, first as an athlete, then coach, then manager, and athlete again. It’s my second biggest passion next to writing. Although it’s not always possible, I try to take at least two weeks off every year to go somewhere fun! Last spring I took a trip to New York, Montreal, and Ottawa where my aunt lives.

Here is me feeling very Canadian, sitting with the Famous Five on Parliament Hill:

As a literature student, I have found myself focused mainly on British literature from various time periods, so I am excited to engage with material that hits closer to home in this class. As a Canadian, I’ve often found myself struggling as to how to identify with my nation. Aside from being stereotypically polite and loving hockey, I don’t know what makes a Canadian a Canadian other than their passport. I don’t even love hockey, so I hope there’s more to it than that! We’re a state whose political structure originated in British law and a people who absorb massive amounts of media and entertainment from the US. Where does that leave our culture as a nation? Who do we want to be? How do First Nations fit into that? These are questions I’m interested in exploring in this course!

Cheers,

Caitlin

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Works Cited

Evans, Pete. “Immigrants more likely to consider Canadian symbols important to national identity.” CBC News. CBC, 6 Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.

“The Famous Five.” The Nellie McClung Foundation. n.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.