2] 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.

(I think that this is a really powerful photo!)

The Indian Act (1876), according to UBC’s Indigenous Foundations website, is a “federal law that governs in matters pertaining to Indian status, bands, and Indian reserves” (Indigenous Foundations n.p.). Although the Indian Act was developed in 1876, there were other legislations that pertained to the governing of First Nations people prior to its conception. The Indian Act is a direct result of the combining of two previous legislations, The Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and Gradual Enfranchisement Act (1869) (Indigenous Foundations, n.p.) Both legislations were created with the intent of enfranchising First Nations people into Canadian settler society (a society, as we read in the Can Lit Guide, that was colonized and promoted as an extension of British society).

The Indian Act sought to legally identify those FIrst Nations under “Indian status.” This was done through an exclusionary gendered practice. As the Indigenous Foundations website notes, “the Indian Act defined ‘Indian’ as:

First. A male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a certain band;

Secondly. Any child of such person;

Thirdly. Any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person” (Indigenous Foundations qtd Indian Act n.p.).

This is an extremely important note, not only because its sexist in its nature, but because it points to the fact that the government knew it could control the legalities around the who was a status Indian, therefore limiting their number in the Canadian population, slowly assimilating them into Canadian society.

Status was being carried down through the men’s line, which deprived and dispossessed many women of their rights as Indians and their rights to live on their reserve lands. These rights were also lost for their children as well. Moreover, if we think about how people were socialized during this time, many white women did not want to marry Indian men. As Frye mentions, there was the creation of second class citizens (Frye xxvi). This is supported by the Can Lit Guide as well, “early radicalized settlers and later immigrants were seen as less worthy, and therefore less Canadian” (Can Lit Guide, n.p.). White, in Canada, was preferred, and many First Nations people lost their legal rights because of the intermarriage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Not only did the Indian Act assimilate peoples through their commitment to their partners, but it had also put in place the Indian Residential School system. This was an initiative to forcefully assimilate First Nations people into Canadian society, making the use of their languages, traditions, and practicing of cultures forbidden.

As for Coleman’s concept of the project of white civility, I do believe that the Indian Act was put in place to diminish the population of First Nations in Canada. It was an act that was in place for a legal assimilation through force and through family.

Frye mentions the idea of unity and identity (Frye xxii). He writes, “Assimilating identity to unity produces the empty gestures of cultural nationalism; assimilating unity to identity produces the kind of provincial isolation which is now called separatism” (frye xxiii). This can be related to the Indian Act. It was a piece of legislation that sought to define what an “Indian” is and assimilating those who did not fit the legal category. He continues, “Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is a man’s destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity” (Frye xxvi).

Bibliography

“Enfranchisement.” Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Concord, Ont.: House of Anansi, 1995. Print.

“Guides | CanLit Guides.” Guides | CanLit Guides. Can Lit Guides, 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.

Hanson, Erin. “The Indian Act.” The Indian Act. Indigenous Foundations, 2009. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.

“Indian Act.” Photograph. rabble.ca. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.

1] In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call anoral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.

I read a third of Robinson’s story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England”, in my head. For the rest of the story, I read it out loud in front of my partner. There were a couple of differences I came across while doing this reading exercise.

First, I found that when silently reading, inside my head, I could read the story faster. Because Harry uses – and Wendy Wickwire writes – a language that is not often used in published works, I found it was almost easier to read inside my head. When reading aloud, I found that I needed to slow down my reading pace a little bit and get used to the flow of the language.

Once I slowed my reading down, I was able to really embrace the flow of the language and the stories message. As I continued to read out loud, I found that I was able to interact more with the story as well, become more animated and really emphasize the points that I thought were notable.

In last weeks question, I answered what I thought King was emphasizing by telling the Creation Story and the Genesis Story by using different language forms. Similarly to last week’s answer, I think that with Wickwire deciding to use Robinson’s actual syntax, the point of the story is not to emphasize the believability but instead, its content. It is also a way to emphasize the importance of the storytelling, in general, in First Nations cultures. Stories, in many First Nations cultures, are told with an intention of guidance but always leave the listener to decide what it means to themselves. Again, an emphasis that is placed on the readers understanding of the story – rather than have a story that is “black and white” (Robinson 79).

Bibliography:

“Kings and Queens of England, Scotland, Wales, and the United Kingdom.” Royal Family History. Britroyals. 12 February 2015. http://www.britroyals.com/rulers.htm

“Wendy Wickwire.” School of Environmental Studies. University of Victoria. 12 February 2015. http://web.uvic.ca/~enweb/people/faculty/wickwire.php

Wickwire, Wendy. Harry Robinson: Living By Stories. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009.

“Wile E. Coyote.” Wikipedia. n.p. 12 February 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wile_E._Coyote_and_The_Road_Runner

1. 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?

The two creation stories, offered by King in the book, The Truth about Stories, is told in a dichotomy to lead the readers to think more about the delivery of stories rather focusing on the content.

Like King, Lutz points out the examining of Western and Indigenous stories as a dichotomy. He writes, “we are asked to evaluate written versus oral traditions and then even more challenging, to decide between explanations based on different notions of what is real and what is imaginary” (Lutz 2). Although King does set up a similar dichotomy of stories, he is not as concerned about belief. Instead, King is more interested in readers responsiveness of different storytelling strategies that are found in the Indigenous and Western cultures.

King writes that in the Native story, he tries to “recreate an oral storytelling voice and craft in the story in terms of a performance for a general audience” (22), whereas in the Christian story, he tries “to maintain a sense of rhetorical distance and decorum while organizing the story for a knowledgeable gathering” (22). Using these storytelling strategies King is able to emphasize the importance in how a story is told, rather than emphasize what the story is about.

King notes, “In the Native story, the conversational voice tends to highlight the exuberance of the story but diminishes its authority, while the sober voice in the Christian story makes for a formal recitation but creates a sense of veracity” (King 23). This is an important piece of information when thinking about how Western Missionaries asserting religion and its stories over the First Nations peoples during the early stages in colonization in Canada (and in other countries that have colonized Indigenous peoples).

He playfully extends his point by suggesting to his readers, “of course, none you would make the mistake of confusing storytelling strategies with the value or sophistication of a story. And we know enough about the complexities of cultures to avoid the error of imagining animism and polytheism to be no more than primitive versions of monotheism. Don’t we?” (King 23). His sarcasm has an underlying essence of realness. This was a main argument used by the Missionaries to undermine First Nations cultures, oppressing and dispossessing the peoples of their cultures, languages, stories and traditions.

King’s renditions of both stories is not to emphasize the importance and belief of one story over the other in its content? Instead, King is stressing the importance of the storytelling strategies and how they might influence the interpretation and absorption by the people its told to.

What other storytelling strategies might influence readers?

Can you think of any other ways storytelling strategies were used to control, dispossess, or sway peoples do so something or believe in something that they would not normally do?

Bibliography:

“Book of Genesis.” Wikipedia. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis

“Creation Stories: Canadian First Nations.” Native Creation Myths. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://www.sd91.bc.ca/frenchj/Students/Creation%20Stories%20First%20Nations.html

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003.

“Thomas King Quotes.” Meetville.com. n.p. 5 February 2015. http://meetville.com/quotes/author/thomas-king/page1

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.

From reading other students blogs I have found these similarities in our perceptions of how we think of “home”:

• hardship and overcoming it
• love
• family
• support
• laughter
• confrontation / reconceptualization of the idea of ‘home’
• history / heritage
• memories
• comfortability
• friendship

It seems that many other people in the class view home as a place where they can be comfortable, where they can feel some sort of support (either from friends or from family), and where they can re-conceptualize home for themselves. Many people spoke of seeing home not only in one distinct spot, somewhere in Canada or across the world, but instead, home is adaptable. The real common denominator is yourself (and all of the things in the list). If you are somewhere, you can find home as long as you can attain friendship, support, comfort, and love. Where you can create memories for yourself, not just happy memories but also memories that include hardship and overcoming that hardship.

I was surprised, actually, after reading other student’s blogs because I didn’t think that we would have very many stories in common. However, I realize, after reading the blogs, that it is not the story that needs to be similar (not everyone has to write about death to relate to my story), it is the values and the morals within those stories that are similar to mine and help create an idea of what home is. Many people in this class are influenced by their family and wrote about them when speaking of home, just like mine.

This is a really interesting and exciting blog topic for me because I just found out that my dad is sending me home for reading week (I haven’t been back to Ottawa in over a year). And although they have completely renovated the house and will be sleeping in a completely different room, I still feel like I belong there, that it is an alternate ‘home’ for me.

What was most striking about the similarities for you when you were reading other students blogs?

Bibliography:

“Emerson – Mommy’s Nose is Scary!” Youtube. MandKyeo. 2 February 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oxmRT2YWw

“Ottawa Skyscrapers.” 4ever.eu. n.p. 2 February 2015.

“Ottawa.” Pinterest. n.p. 2 February 2015.