I have a great story to tell you.

Long ago, no-one had a word for the bad things that happen to people. There was a word for sun and a word for moon, a word for tears and a word for smiles. Water, leaf, and cranberry got a word each. But the only words anyone had were for talking about things.

Real things. Things you could taste, see, and touch. If someone needed a cranberry, they could go and ask for it. But if they needed something more complicated, like an epistemology or a dialectic, they were on their own. Without the word, they couldn’t even tell themselves about it.

Everyone got by, even without epistemologies. They ate their berries and drank their water out of leaves without any confusion. And even when things got very bad, they didn’t talk about it. They made tears together and moped around for a while, but when the sun came out again they went back to their former ways – if not without a thought, then certainly without a word.

One day, someone who did not have much to do stared at the sky and noticed the fluffy white things that floated around up there. The sloth gave them a name. It was their word for cloud. The others liked it. They got so excited that they decided to throw a great festival to honour the birth of the new word.

Things went wrong at that festival. A storm came up. The rain came down. A wind came through, scattering the coals of the campfire. It picked up the sloth and hurled that sloth over the horizon.

The others couldn’t go looking until the rain stopped. But it carried on for days. The others huddled together, soaked to the bone, and sang mournful songs about clouds, cranberries, and water.

One day the sun came out. And one day, the sloth came back. But that sloth was not so slothful anymore. The not-sloth had big, wild eyes and hair like lightning. Everyone gathered round to hear that not-sloth’s story.

The story was big. It was about someone who lived in a cave at the top of the mountain. Someone furry with big teeth and long horns. Someone who made the pleasant sun take their water away. Someone who turned nice clouds bad. And with that story came a brand new word. It was their word for evil.

The not-sloth didn’t live much longer. But whenever things went bad after that, everyone knew whom to blame. From time to time they would look for that someone on top of the mountain. They would find strangers there and scare them away, knowing that there weren’t just evil clouds. There were evil people, too.

Some people didn’t like that not-sloth’s story. Down the ages they tried to fight it. Some had long beards. Some had enormous moustaches. Most had epistemologies. But even with epistemologies, no-one could seem to dislodge it. Evil had its ups and downs, but “evil” kept getting bigger. Because it was a good word, wrapped in a good story.

And once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose on the world.

Not much room left for discoveries. I liked the parallel of Leslie Silko’s version with Pandora’s Box. Silko’s is less didactic, more playful. My version is influenced by linguistic relativism and other such ideas. I had a lot of fun writing it. Keep the lasagna flying!

“The Myth of Pandora’s Box.” Greek Myths – Greek Mythology. Greek Myths and Greek Mythology. n.d. Web. May 28, 2015.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2003. Print.

Swoyer, Chris. “The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information. 2003. Web. May 28, 2015.

In “If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?,” J. Edward Chamberlin offers an enticing proposal when he touches on the metaphor of land ownership. Title, as Chamberlin describes it, is a legal fiction concerning a person’s right to do certain things in a certain area. In the comparative approach he emphasizes, this is one story among many, sacred to a certain “Us” as other stories are to other peoples. In Canada, there is a deeper player in the story of title: that of “underlying title,” belonging to the Crown.

The “Crown,” of course, is a poetic device, a kind of metonymy. It is a symbol for the reigning monarch, who in turn symbolizes the authority of Britain. Canada’s sovereignty, in ceremony at least, derives from it. A person’s ownership of a piece of Canadian land is a right granted by the federal government, but this right is devolved to it by the Queen of England.

Chamberlin suggests rewriting our national fiction. It is built, he says, on a contradiction between private ownership and “deeper” ownership. “Why not an aboriginal ‘trick’? ” he asks. “Why not change underlying title back to aboriginal title?”

This act could reframe the identity of the country, even if it had no effect on the day-to-day application of property law (Chamberlin himself imagines it wouldn’t). In contemporary battles on Aboriginal land claims, doctrine and precedent have maintained that the burden of proof is on the particular First Nation to justify their right to a valued place – i.e., to show how it belongs to them. To many such Nations, this is in itself an imposition. Writes Hanson (linked above), in pre-colonial times “humans, along with all other living beings, belonged to the land.”

Land covered by modern treaties (source: Land Claims Agreements Coalition). Notice the lack of ratified agreements south of sixty.

This accords with Chamberlin’s further claim: that one factor in the failures of legal discourse in settling Aboriginal land claims has been the need to wrangle traditional stories into the ponderous language of legal storytelling. The language of Canadian law is founded on the thinkers of Europe. To the Europeans, to belong to the land symbolized serfdom, subjugation, wretchedness; to progress was to gain mastery of it. To some First Nations, the subjection of humans before nature (and, consequently, land) was a truth both elementary and sacred. These two conceptions of human beings’ relationship with the ground beneath their feet are not easily reconciled.

Perhaps Chamberlin’s proposal could supersede that conflict. Rather than making Aboriginal lands a scattered forbearance of the Crown’s omnipresent title over Canadian ground, Canadian roads and cities could become a scattered forbearance of a deeper right, held by the First Nations, to belong to the land that shaped, and shapes, their way of life. This could be achieved through a change in our country’s definition of underlying title that would also give it relevance in a world where the monarchy is increasingly thought of as an archaism.

What form would this take? Would there be a plurality of underlying titles, corresponding to each First Nation with their own particular claims, or a single one ratified by each? Or would the title belong to “the land itself,” on the understanding that this was an affirmation of the unique relationship the First Nations peoples have to it? This, I think, would be for them to propose.

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?  Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

Hanson, Erin. “Aboriginal Title.” indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca. University of British Columbia. n.d. Web. May 21, 2015.

“Commonwealth Members.” The Official Website of the British Monarchy. The Royal Household. n.d. Web. May 20, 2015.

“Implementation Issues.” Land Claims Agreements Coalition. Land Claims Agreements Coalition. n.d. Web. May 21, 2015.

Hello, reader!

I’m Mattias Martens, a student of English 470A, Canadian Literary Genres. I was born to a first-generation German mother and a Mennonite father whose ancestors had fled to Canada for fear of the Bolshevik Revolution, and I now study topics of interest at UBC with a nominal major in Computer Science. In this course, I intend to learn about significant works of Canadian literature and how the stories they present are intertwined with the colonial history of this country.

Though I was born in Swift Current on the Saskatchewan prairie, in many ways I feel myself to be a newcomer. When I was younger, on a trip to my mother’s hometown, it struck me how much one could feel a sense of history there. The castles, town, and cobblestone roads had been there for centuries, some even for millennia. They stood as if one with the earth. Canada, by contrast, was a land of tin shanties and log cabins – it had scant history. Slowly I have come to understand that this sense of infancy hangs on the erasure of a vast pre-existing legacy, an erasure demanded by colonialism, and that it is this alone that makes our country appear an orphan of history.

I hope to learn more about this legacy and its tragedies under the colonial hegemony, as well as the new voices emerging from a Canadian consciousness that is more deeply and equitably aware of its past. In particular, I look forward to reading more Thomas King – I loved Green Grass, Running Water when I read it a few years ago. Where I grew up in Yukon Territory, there was a museum dedicated to a story I found particularly inspiring: George Johnston, the Tlingit man who had a car shipped into his village before there were roads, and who bought a camera to capture the life and traditions of his community.

George Johnston.

I feel that George’s life demonstrates beautifully that for the indigenous peoples of Canada, the sometimes-constructed dichotomy between heritage and change is a false one. It also shows the power that technology and culture have to complement each other.

Cheers, and I look forward to learning with you all!

Works Cited

Anderson, Alan. “Mennonite Settlements.” The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina. n.d. Web. May 14, 2015. <http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/mennonite_settlements.html>.

“George Johnston.” George Johnston Museum. George Johnston Museum. n.d. Web. May 14, 2015. <http://www.gjmuseum.yk.net/gjohnston.html>.

Picturing a People: George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer. Dir. Carol Geddes. Nutaaq Media, 1997. DVD.