Thomas King’s novel Green Grass Running Water contains a peculiar intersection in the character of Doctor Joe Hovaugh. The novel is full of references (of varying degrees of subtlety) to historical and literary figures, from General Custer (Latisha’s ex-husband George and his jacket) to Louis Riel (Louie, Ray, and Al) (Flick, 2013). Joe Hovaugh appears to evoke the Christian Jehovah: their names are nearly homophonous, and he is introduced in the novel contemplating his garden and facing to the East, the direction of new beginnings in Cherokee symbolism. At the same time, he is unmistakeably linked to the work of Canadian scholar and critic Northrop Frye: late in the book (p. 389), he is depicted “turning [his] chart… literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogic” – the same categories that Frye employs in his theoretical work Anatomy of Criticism. Rarely is a critic hailed as a creator, still less a creator of the universe. But when considered in the context of King’s motif of clashing mythologies, this incongruity begins to make sense.

In The Bush Garden (2011), Northrop Frye describes Canadian identity as that of a nation that has failed to assimilate the vastness of its wilderness, creating a “garrison mentality” against the indifference and peril of nature. He offers a three-stage process (p. 221): “English Canada was first a part of the wilderness, then a part of North America and the British Empire, then a part of the world;” but it went through these too quickly to find its identity at each step. In other words, this new Canada is a country not in ownership of its own backyard; and in a similar way, Frye’s caricature in the novel is fixated on nature but does not engage with it. Hovaugh is always looking out of windows, whether from the desk of his clinic or the driver’s seat of his Karmann-Ghia – or the Cafe in Blossom: “It was raining outside and it looked as though it was going to be gloomy for a while. And disorganized.” (p. 314, emphasis mine.)

But Frye’s summation of Canada does not account for any First Nations perspective; it simply does not enter the question for him. As with the observations of Asch (2011) and King (2004) that Canadian scholarship places the beginning of Canada’s history at the moment of European arrival, thereby minimizing the vast preceding timespan, Hovaugh’s arrival in Canada in the novel is really two arrivals: the European-style academic, and the Christian Creation myth. But as King’s telling makes clear, the Christian mythology that European colonization brought to Canada was a fragile foreign bud compared to the spiritual figures that lived there already. That is why Jesus, God, and various figures of English literature squabble presumptuously with Indigenous spiritual figures such as First Woman (Cherokee), Changing Woman (Navajo), Thought Woman (Pueblo), and Old Woman (Blackfoot) in the spiritual retellings that shadow the main narrative.

Thus, Hovaugh represents a Canadian consciousness that appeared late in the cultural history of the land and yet presumes to insert itself at the beginning. Frye also has little compunction in drawing an unqualified distinction between the “sophisticated” colonial culture and the “primitive” Indigenous one. Likewise, Hovaugh says that “In ancient times… Primitive people believed in omens,” but “What they thought were omens were actually miracles.” (p. 238) A seemingly frivolous distinction, unless considered in the context of European colonization and the mythological canon it carries.

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Political Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

Austgin, Suzanne. “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and the Effects of White Contact on Pueblo Myth and Ritual.” Hanover College History Department. Hanover College. Spring 1993. Web. June 24, 2015.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. June 24, 2015.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

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

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

“Changing Woman – A Navajo Legend.” Native American Legends. FirstPeople.us . n.d. Web. June 24, 2015.

“The Legend of the First Woman – A Cherokee Legend.” Native American Legends. FirstPeople.us . n.d. Web. June 24, 2015.

“Old Man and Old Woman – A Blackfoot Legend.” Native American Legends. FirstPeople.us . n.d. Web. June 24, 2015.

I read Robinson’s story, Coyote Meets the King of England, aloud to my little brother, and I had him read it to me. I found that the process of reading aloud changed the nature of my attention to it. In particular, reading aloud fosters one’s attention to small details.

Robinson’s storytelling is full of descriptions that add vividness to the narrative, but are easy to miss on a first reading. When the angel dispatches Coyote on his mission to England, he includes this in his instructions: “you can drag your boat out on the dry ground so they wouldn’t float.” And upon his arrival, Coyote does this. When I read it silently, I did not consider it a consequential detail; but more significantly, I did not realize I considered it inconsequential. I did not consider it at all.

Storytellers, of course, add all sorts of such details simply as part of the process of filling in the mental landscape on which their stories unfold. (On Dickens, Orwell writes about his talent for invention: a detail that is only “a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created.”) To a more outdoorsy person, the inclusion of this special precaution might evoke tactile connections to the act of securing a boat on a riverbank, and through that the feeling of aloneness with nature. In me, in spite of a few childhood boat trips, the connection is not very strong.

When my little brother took his turn, something that struck me was the necessity of reading Robinson in a conversational way. I did not find much in King’s claim that the stories “force” you to read them aloud, but the voice Robinson creates, literal or no, is palpable.

I struggled to recreate the cadence I imagined for him using my own voice. At first I felt ridiculous, then I settled into it with a more solemn, steady intonation. But my little brother seemed to pick it up immediately – his reading was casual, conversational, and serious. Neither he nor Robinson imitated the style of “drama,” which hinges on hiding things from the listener until the moment when their effect will be maximized.

There is more candour to Robinson’s style; it is not the voice of a weaver of fiction but of someone charged with relating simple truths. When it occurs to him to fill in a detail, like Coyote’s necessitated journey through the Panama Canal, or the date that the book of Black and White arrived in Canada, he does so. It is harder to analyze the details critically when one reads aloud: one must invest one’s own breath, and in so doing invest oneself in the story. It becomes a more personal interaction. Of course, there is another step again to reciting the work aloud without the benefit of text, as storytelling cultures like that of the Okanagan have done.

Orwell, George. (1940). “Charles Dickens.” C. Choat (Ed.) Fifty Orwell Essays. Project Gutenberg Australia. August 2003. Web. June 18, 2015.

Robinson, Harry. (2005). Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. W. Wickwire (Ed.) Vancouver: Talonbooks.

In “Living By Stories” (2005), Wendy Wickwire partially relates a story told to her by the Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson. At the creation of the world, two twins are sent to carry out some of the tasks: Coyote, the forefather of the Indians, and the first white man. In the course of his work, the white man steals a piece of paper he was not to touch. For this he is banished, but it is foretold that his descendants will return after many years to “reveal the contents of the written document” (Wickwire). But when they finally do return to the ancient birthplace, they start killing the descendants of Coyote and stealing their lands, all without keeping their promise to show the fated document.

I had a painful reaction to my first reading of the account – perhaps, because I saw it through the lens of the legacy in which I share. Colonization carries a motif of cultural genocide, coloured by shades of duplicity and insincerity. Robinson’s story is infused with this characterization of whites as treacherous and wanton. But the pain runs deeper than that, because Robinson also makes us kin.

John Lutz mentions that, in the late 1700s, “European intellectuals were engaged in a battle over whether man had been created in a single or a multiple genesis” (2007). Under either conclusion it was clear that, under European taxonomy, the Indigenous people of the Americas were to receive at most only reluctant admission into the human race. Today, of course, the scientific consensus has all H. sapiens descending from a common ancestor; but the first geographical split, it seems, could have happened 200,000 years ago or more – far beyond the edge of human collective memory. It has currency in our schools but not in our myths.

A favourite infographic of mine, representing a current theory of human migration – link

Creation stories cannot help but touch the core of one’s identity, be they of the body, the race, the world, or the universe itself. Hence, the pathos of Robinson’s “twinning.” By embedding the white man so deeply in his story of creation, he not only indicts them for their treachery but also brings them to the core of his spiritual world. From this many questions arise, of the kind that can only be answered through the play inherent in interpretation.

Does the kinship of twins in the story tell of a collision of cultures that extends into the spiritual world, of peoples that have become so enmeshed that their goals can no longer be pursued separately? What is the secret document? Is the paper symbolic of the power of the written word, coupled with the accusation that white culture has stolen and perverted it? Does the storyteller imply the possibility of reconciliation, or is he in favour only of resistance?

I’m reminded also of Franz Kafka, for instance his parable, Before the Law. An apparent theme, as also in The Trial and The Castle, is of the struggle to reach a faraway goal in some unknown direction, barred from sight by a dizzying labyrinth of bureaucratic redirection and shady passageways, but also accessible only through that labyrinth. This goal is sometimes symbolized by the Law, as in The Trial where the protagonist is trying to determine the nature of the charges laid against him. There seems to be an analogy with Robinson’s paper, and the Book of Black and White in the story where Coyote meets the king of England. This goal, this paper, would resolve everything, but it seems doomed to continually evade capture.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Aboriginal — Non-Aboriginal 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.

Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law.” (I. Johnston, trans.) Franz Kafka Online. kafka-online.info. n.d. web. June 11, 2015.

Robinson, Harry. (2005). Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. W. Wickwire (Ed.) Vancouver: Talonbooks.

I’ll be writing about some of my peers’ blog posts and the similarities in their ideas of home. There was great variety in the responses, both in the substance of the homes they spoke of and in the approach they took to elucidating the idea. One thing strikes me above all: these are evocative, emotional stories. Home is powerful.

“The places I feel at home are the places I’ve grown into, the people I’ve grown with. Or, more accurately, home is where I’ve let myself grow.” ~Melissa Kuipers

Not surprisingly, the look and feel of places features prominently in the posts: Melissa Kuipers writes about her childhood house with its different-coloured carpets, Hailey Froehler about the two neighbourhoods where she spent her early years, Charmaine Li about beaches, climbing trees, and ostrich pens around UBC campus. A second theme comes through as well, that of childhood memories. Most of the posts emphasized early life, and gave only secondary importance to the places where the writers and their families lived now (all had moved at least once).

“I don’t remember why, but I was so very happy in this house, even though it was much smaller than the only other one I remember.” ~Charmaine Li

Home can be a paradoxical concept – neither place nor identity, but a compromise between the two, a conversation between inside and out. It stays with us if we should leave it behind, but always shifts in the journey. As it turned out, this was an only slightly less pervasive theme: the sense of homelessness, of displacement, of struggle to reconcile one’s immediate physical surroundings with the bonds one feels with far-off times, places, and people.

“I feel like, because the term “home” is so ambiguous, it doesn’t necessarily have to relate to any physical space specifically.” ~Hailey Froehler

Hannah Vaartnou takes us through three meanings of home in her account of a childhood shaken by a tragic accident. First, at a very young age, the physical – “our little bungalow on a half acre lot.” Then, after the strain on the household following the accident, she describes the home found in “the pages of a good fantasy book.” “My imaginary world was a home of sorts,” she relates. “I cannot say I have ever had a sense of that in reality.”

Finally, Hannah adds a third sense of home, one I instantly felt I could relate to: not attached to a place, but to a commonality between many. “As long it was a beach,” she writes, “then I was home.”

I found this to be a poignant illustration of the relationships that emerge between place and belonging. The feelings and memories, the connections Hannah made to the beach and the ocean endured the move to new parts of the coastline: a conversation between an inner feeling and many outer places, some long familiar, some yet to be discovered.

Overall, I was touched by the openness everyone showed in sharing their personal memories. Often I felt a sense of closeness with them in spite of the wide differences between my life’s trajectory and theirs, and between theirs and each other’s. There is power in the way one’s tellings of the past can shape and reshape the present.

Froehler, Hailey. “The Ambiguity of ‘Home’. ” English 470A. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Kuipers, Melissa. “Where We Grow.” True North. UBC Blogs. 04 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Li, Charmaine. “A Home with Many Adventures.” Canadian Yarns and Storytelling Threads. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Vaartnou, Hannah. “Home is in Your Own Heart.” Hannah and Canada. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

I have a tangle of memories from my childhood in Saskatchewan. Riding a tricycle around our steeply sloped block in Swift Current. Pouring caterpillars through a sieve and watching them fan out, star-shaped, over the concrete step. Drawings of spiky dinosaurs, volcanoes, and sinking steamships. My father, announcing our impending journey to the Yukon.

We went in the fall without any lodging arranged. Eventually we found our way to a village of four hundred called Teslin, where I lived between the ages of six and seventeen. The community didn’t welcome us. With little to do, I retreated into computer games. My memories of that period of my life are scant. There was little mental stimulation, no real friendship. My clearest memories are of the games. RuneScape, Mechwarrior, and Pokemon.

I also remember me and my two brothers play-fighting with my dad in the living room. We would jump on him and try to pull him down like a trio of Davids locked in battle with Goliath. Time passed, and at the age of thirteen I left the community to attend the nearest high school a two hours’ drive away in Whitehorse.

Up until that point, I was home-schooled, due to my dad’s fear that we might be indoctrinated with “un-Christian” values such as Darwinian evolution and sexual tolerance. I struggled with his fundamentalism for most of my life. In high school I felt cut off by social awkwardness and a lack of shared background and interest. The feeling that came to the fore of my identity at that time was one of placelessness.

I didn’t fully realize that I was no longer a Christian until my second year of university. It was a slow transition. For a long time I’d struggled to believe, particularly in the aggressive fundamentalist strain I was raised with, and for a while in high school I classified myself as an “absurdist-theist” – an epithet I invented for myself, meaning someone who thinks that life is absurd, but that God is waiting at the end of it with a sensible explanation. What came to me early in second year was that the spiritual comfort I thought I had found in the Trinity was really just the comfort of having Christian friends. Without them, it vanished. And when I stopped finding comfort in the Trinity, it wasn’t a long step to disbelieving in it altogether.

A genealogy of religion. To me, placing Christianity in its context was a major step away from faith.

I felt alone. I made a few friends at university through alcoholism, that time-honoured ritual. But in my sober moments I was awkward and uncomfortable around them. I had neither a sense of belonging nor of purpose. I hid from these problems as best I could, always hoping against hope that I would find the answer in romance.

After a torturous false start, I did manage to find love. It was the latter half of third year by then. I met a fellow unbeliever, a never-believer in fact, and an intellectual; someone who was filled with empathy for non-human animals and hatred of humanity for harming them (an attitude I was barely familiar with). She was of three-eighths Inuit ancestry; she relates in her short story that she was once excluded from a dance for not being the full half. I felt I knew what it was to be a borderlander, and I wanted to join her in her world-between-worlds. I wanted our unity to be a world we could both call our own.

She was a survivor of trauma. I wasn’t able to cope with her pain or the needs that came from it. Our relationship was intense and brief. I hoped we could continue it after it became long-distance, but it crumbled in a few weeks. I’ve tried to contact her many times, but to this day I’m still cut off from her.

I spent the next year in a very personal hell. I dropped out of school to pursue writing (still in Vancouver), but I hated my writing because it had failed to save our love. No-one around me could share my pain. Slowly, I gathered a few close friends through clubs in town for atheists and skeptics. I soon made the decision to go back to school, a choice I’ve never regretted. It put me back in touch with the current of ideas. It taught me to be humble, to share my mental space with other thinkers and not to lust after originality.

The concept of home has always tormented me. I feel I’ve lost many homes that I might have had along my life’s journey. I’ve found passing comfort and moments of fellowship, but I’ve always been forced by conscience and circumstance to move on. Still, it would be deceitful to conclude on a gloomy note.

I’ve found that home is a habit that builds up around you. It’s rarely intended. There is a world inside me that I hope to live in one day, but as I labour to think of ways that I might realize my imagination, I can still rest in the comfort of the home that I know, however small and scattered it may be. There is love in my life again. I have a handful of close friendships. I’ve reconciled with my family – in the end, I wasn’t the only one of my siblings to make the pilgrimage out of religion. I find home wherever I happen to be, in welcoming country, earnest minds, and the smiles of strangers and strange familiars.

Christie, Eliza. “Incomplete.” Aboriginal Arts and Stories. Historica Canada. 2012. Web. June 4, 2015.