Canadian Literature: Parkinson Perspective

In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so: 1) the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness, and 2) the extended time of criminal prohibitions against Indigenous peoples telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities. In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited. To be complete, your answer should begin with a brief discussion on the two reasons I present and then proceed to introduce and explain your third reason from Wickwire’s introduction.

Wendy Wickwire illustrates the importance of the storytelling method for creating shared meaning in Indigenous histories by citing her visits with Robinson. She makes a comparison to Robinson’s recount of a story of ‘coyote’ and its relationship with the people of Similkameen, and how similar stories of coyote in literature lose meaning through translation or the written method. Another point with the storytelling method is that not enough detail is given to the origin of the storyteller – therefore the reader is lost, not knowing what potential biases exist on the author’s part, including gender or geographic origin. This form of storytelling is unfamiliar to myself to a large extent, growing up in a highly westernized school system and being of anglo-saxon origin. It was further isolated from society with the laws that prevented its sharing, such as making the pot latch illegal.

Perhaps most interesting to me is Wickwire’s analysis of Robinson in relation to Claude Lévi-Strausse, who would have labelled Robinson’s point of view as ‘ahistorical’ due to the fact that there is no linear chronology for depictions. In some ways this reminds me of magical realism, where the events still have meaning and truth, though the way they are being portrayed has an abstract element to it. Connecting the past with more present events (Robinson’s story of the two twins) and subsequently the one twin’s return to North America has a lot of power to it, portraying the colonizers in a less heroic and more infiltrative light.

Lévi-Strausse describes such storytelling as cold, not relating to any point in history and therefore lacks relevance. The impact of describing First Nations recounts of history in such a way places their perspectives in an ahistorical category. When an entire community’s perspective on events (past and present) are considered ahistorical, this means the community will be taken as less than human, as well as stuck in a cultural timebox.