Thinking back on the banishment of the younger twin from Robinson’s story, the “written document” feels almost like the apple (i.e. forbidden knowledge) from the Garden of Eden story from the Bible. Before I continue, I must preface these thoughts with the fact that I am not a religious person; I have never read anything associated with the Bible, all my knowledge comes from pop culture, and mostly satire at that.
To refresh your memory, in Robinson’s story, “the young twin stole a written document . . . he had been warned not to touch” (14) leading to his sudden and abrupt banishment that left “[t]he elder twin . . . in his place of origin” (14). Reading this segment, I cannot help but think that this banishment caused for the younger twin to lose his connection to the land that the elder twin, the representation of Indigenous peoples, maintains. While studying Indigenous history and their stories, the theme of spirituality and a connection to the land is often brought up; this connection is somewhat lost on those of European descent.
Coyote the Trickster by coyoteflutesong on DeviantArt
If we look at the written document that Robinson describes the younger twin to have stolen and read as being a forbidden knowledge, much like the apple that Eve and Adam ate of, perhaps it can be thought of as somehow disconnecting people from the land. Descendants of the younger twin in Robinson’s story continue to “[conceal] the contents of the ‘paper’” (14) when eventually they land back on North American soil. Therefore, it seems that by reading the document, those that descended from Coyote (the elder twin) would lose the relationship of “stewardship . . . for the land (and sea) and all of the creatures that inhabit the land with them” (“First Nation Relationship to the Land”).
I would be interested to know when Robison’s story was first told. We are told in the Introduction to “Living by Stories” that when the “whites had landed on the moon, [Robinson] immediately incorporated this detail into his story” (57) of another one about Coyote. I cannot help but wonder about other incorporations as Lutz speaks about how Indigenous peoples of the past weren’t “interested in replacing their own spiritual beliefs and powers with Christian ones. [Rather t]hey sought to add the spirit powers of the whites to their own” (“Frist Contact” 44). This suggests to me that Robinson’s story is influenced by the Bible (whether from his own creation, or from past storytellers that he learned from).
I wonder about how incorporating Christianity into Indigenous culture may have gone if left to the people to decide rather than have it forced upon them by European colonists. I found an interesting, yet short read, about the rise in Christian Indigenous peoples in Canada according to the 2011 National Household Survey. Looking at the graphic representing the Indigenous populations religious beliefs, I cannot help but feel disheartened. While I recognize a lot of these conversions more than likely didn’t happen on the friendliest of terms, to hear that they are rising brings up concerns that I feel were expressed by Robinson about the disappearance of proper story tellers (i.e. those learned in the ways of Indigenous culture).
Work Cited
coyoteflutesong. Coyote the Trickster. DeviantArt, Jan 6, 2011. https://www.deviantart.com/coyoteflutesong/art/Coyote-the-Trickster-192406629. Accessed Feb 22, 2021.
“First Nation Relationship to the Land.” Indigenous Corporate Training Inc., May 7, 2015. https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/first-nation-relationship-to-the-land. Accessed Feb 22, 2021.
Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30 – 45. Print.
Robinson, Harry. “Introduction.” Living by Stories edited by Wendy Wickwire. Talonbooks, 2005. 8 – 62. eBook.
Todd, Douglas. “Indigenous Christianity on the rise in Vancouver and beyond.” Vancouver Sun, Dec 11, 2017. https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/indigenous-christianity-on-the-rise-in-vancouver-and-beyond. Accessed Fed 22, 2021.
I salute your effort to interpret Coyote’s adventures from the perspective of its intended audience, Cayla, but I wonder if it’s possible. How would we know if we hit on the correct viewpoint and did even Robinson himself know what was originally intended? The story could conceivably date from, say, 1530, so that would make it almost 400 years old when Harry Robinson first heard it—there were kings and papers in Europe in 1530 and the oral story originated somewhere. Cultural anthropologists saw “Little Red Riding Hood”
(circa 10th Century) in terms of solar myths and other naturally occurring cycles, apparently, thinking her red hood could represent the bright sun which is ultimately swallowed by the terrible night (the wolf), and the variations in which she is cut out of the wolf’s belly represent the dawn. Your ideas are a lot better than that, I’d say, but if ultimate knowing is theoretically impossible then it all seems to become an untethered thought exercise; fun, and maybe good for literature, but no longer connected to the Salish of yesterday or today. Sorry for my constant skepticism, but maybe Harry Robinson was a bit of a trickster himself….
Hi Joe,
Ultimately knowing when Robinson’s story was first told is not what I was aiming to try to pin down. The theoretical implications of when the story could have POSSIBLY originated from (i.e. when the Indigenous first learned of the Bible and the stories it contains, and therefore incorporating it into their own) is more what I’m interested in looking at. As a historian, I understand that some questions can never be fully answered, however, I do enjoy the thought exercise of thinking of how the story could have formed and how additional knowledge from other sources helps to either prove or disprove the working theory.
Hi Cayla, great insight regarding the connections between Indigenous and Christian forms of storytelling and archetypes of morality and myth. In my post for this week’s assignment I wrote about the dichotomy King sets up in his presentations of Genesis and the Indigenous tale of Charm, two wildly differing forms of first story, in his introduction to “The Truth About Stories,” and I believe some connections can be made between our analyses. I ended my post with a hyperlink to a CBC Arts piece on Metis artist Kenneth Lavallee and his piece “Creation Story,” an examination of the interconnections between the Flood mythologies of Indigenous, Greek, and Biblical storytelling traditions. When you wonder how the incorporation of Christian narrative into Indigenous storytelling would have gone had it not been for the genocidal impact of the Canadian settler colonialist state, perhaps we can point to artists like Lavallee, who as Metis straddles a liminality between Indigeneity and settler-colonialism, to examine how modern Indigenous storytellers are now attempting to reclaim Indigenous storytelling into the communities that formed these narratives whilst simultaneously (re)incorporating the storytelling forms of those who to this day continue to oppress them.
When you suggest that Robinson’s story is perhaps influenced by the Bible, you note that this influence could perhaps be “from his own creation.” Are you perhaps hinting towards an examination of archetypes of story? The trope of the forbidden item or location, and the protagonist’s subsequent ill fate in their disobedience in accessing that which they are not meant to access – is far from isolated to Biblical imagery: there is in Japanese folklore the tale of Urashima Taro, who transforms into an old man upon opening a forbidden jeweled box that he was earlier gifted, and there is, of course, the myth of Pandora. So the question remains, then, as to what came first: Pandora? The tale from Japan? Genesis? Do they form a wider, interconnected web of international, interhistorical storytelling that reveals, ultimately, that King’s dichotomous presentations of Genesis and Charm are ultimately unstable?
Kenneth Lavallee’s CBC article: https://www.cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists/what-do-indigenous-mythologies-and-biblical-creation-stories-have-in-common-1.4560570
Hi Leo,
One of my favourite aspects of studying multiple cultures from their beginning to the Medieval era was learning of their creation mythology (of how their kingdom/country came to be). You point out how “Pandora’s Box” story is seen in other cultures, presumably with no contact between them, and yet two very similar stories, with similar morals, exist. It could be perhaps that the idea of “forbidden knowledge” as seen in Robinson’s story and the Bible could just be a coincidence that the viewing of the two stories next to each other produces the feeling that one story was birthed from the other. It is a fascinating concept to think about that interconnectivity of people and our working minds — were all the same species, so it makes sense that our teachings/morals would share aspects. These stories are a way of teaching the young (or even not so young) about the world we live in and how to traverse it. When you boil it down, were also an animal species, so whose to say that these stories don’t function in a similar way as to a lioness teaching her young cubs to hunt?