I will be investigating extra-textual connections in the assigned section pp. 222-229 in Green Grass Running Water. It corresponds to pp. 265-274 in the 2007 edition that I have, beginning with television store owner Bill Bursum thinking to himself and being teased by Coyote. It continues through an encounter between Thought Woman and “A. A. Gabriel” and ends with an exchange between the four elders and Coyote where Coyote starts a rainstorm with a dance.

Bill Bursum’s thoughts do not include any significant direct references, although it does mention Eli Stands Alone’s cabin being in “the wrong place” (p. 267) and Bursum’s plan to pick out “the best piece of property on the lake” (p. 266) even before said lake existed. The lake was to be created by the dam, which is a symbol of technological progress. Bursum’s attitude toward the lake and the cabin are symbolic of the colonial attitude toward progress as a good and inevitable force, sure to sweep away everyone such as the Natives who fail to conform to it.

Thought Woman’s segment is much thicker with allusion. Thought Woman washes up on shore and meets A. A. Gabriel – the Arch(A)ngel Gabriel. Running through this segment is the conflation of Christian religion with state authority. Gabriel introduces himself with a card that says “Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.” The other side says “Heavenly Host.”

The card proceeds to sing “Hosanna da,” which could be interpreted as a slight garbling of “Hosa-anna” as it is usually sung. Coyote comments on this and the narrator corrects him with the card’s real song: “Hosanna da, our home on Natives’ land.” (p. 270) Again, a song of religious (Christian) importance is intentionally blurred with a song of national (Canadian) importance.

Despite the many allusions to his divinity, Gabriel has the appearance and tone of a government official, possibly a bureaucrat or customs or immigration officer. He records Thought Woman’s name as Mary; as Flick’s reading notes remind us, “Church and government officials re-named First Nations individuals with familiar, especially Christian names.” Hence the name has a dual role as an allusion to colonial history and in the next passage where Gabriel appears to try to induct her into the actual role of the Virgin Mary.

Gabriel attempts to photograph her stepping on the head of a snake, in reference to many representations and statues where she is depicted doing exactly this. The snake is supposed to represent the Devil, and hence this act is symbolic of her freedom from sin because of Immaculate Conception. (Historically, it may also be connected to a translation error.)

One very interesting detail of this passage is that, of the four observing the scene, only Gabriel sees the snake. The others all see Old Coyote instead. This may suggest the existence of two distinct perceptive worlds. In Gabriel’s, the snake represents sin and nature simultaneously, and hence the sin of nature; meanwhile in the Native worldview presented by King, Old Coyote represents the inscrutability and indifference of nature. Gabriel arrives on the narrative scene with a highly unusual and seemingly absurd perspective which he then tries to impose on others.

Finally, Gabriel tries to impregnate her, presumably so she can give birth to Jesus. The scene is suggestive of sexual coercion. When Thought Woman refuses to be involved and says no, Gabriel says: “You really mean yes, right?” (p. 271). I think this alludes to the sexual commodification of Native women which continues to afflict Canadian society. Gabriel attempts to rob Thought Woman – first of her name, then of her nationality (she is treated like an outsider, interrogated on her connection to the American Indian Movement, and implicated in smuggling), then of her spiritual role, and finally of her sexual agency. Thought Woman reacts to all of these affronts with indifference.

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

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

Tan, Julian. “Statue of Mary Stepping on a Snake.” Questions and Answers. CatholicJules.Net. September 2, 2010. Web. July 9, 2015.

Green Grass Running Water is full of events that directly or indirectly deconstruct the mythos of the colonizers in Canada and the United States. While the main narrative current mostly suggests a combination of mystery and aimlessness – Alberta’s (almost) fruitless search for someone to conceive with, Lionel’s attempts to find a mission for his life, Eli’s meditative last stand – the spiritual narrative that threads through it combines figures of Native American mythology with ironic and parodic representations of the colonizer’s mythos, religious, fictional, and quasi-historical. These parodies are not exactly vicious; but in playing with the most sacred figures of that mythos, King carries out the aim of making them harder to take seriously.

On pp. 68-69:

Who are you? says First Woman.

I’m GOD, says GOD. And I am almost as good as Coyote.

Funny, says First Woman. You remind me of a dog.

And just so we keep things straight, says that GOD, this is my world and this is my garden.

Your garden, says First Woman. You must be dreaming. And that one takes a big bite of one of those nice red apples.

Don’t eat my nice red apples, says that GOD.

I’ll just have a little of this chicken, if I may, says Old Coyote.

Your apples! says First Woman, and she gives a nice red apple to Ahdamn.

Yes, says that GOD, and that one waves his hands around. All this stuff is mine. I made it.

News to me, saws First Woman.

In this confrontation, GOD is portrayed as angry, but ineffectual. He claims to have created the world, but the indifference of Coyote and First Woman undermines this claim. “You can’t leave,” he shouts. “You can’t leave because I’m kicking you out.” The suggestion created in the vacuum left by this deflated figure, this toppled icon of omnipotence, is a world that was not created at all, or perhaps only by accident, through play.

Jesus gets a slightly kinder treatment, rather in line with his portrayal in Christianity as gentle and forgiving; but he is trimmed down as well through one of his well-known miracles.

Jesus calming the storm, as per canon.

So that Boat stops rocking, and those Waves stop rising higher and higher, and everything calms down.

Hooray, says those men. We are saved.

Hooray, says Young Man Walking on Water. I have saved you.

Actually, says those men, that other person saved us.

Nonsense, says Young Man Walking On Water. That other person is a woman. That other person sings songs to waves.

…

By golly, says those men. Young Man Walking on Water must have saved us after all. We better follow him around.

Suit yourself, says Old Woman. And that one floats away.

Earlier Young Man had shouted at the waves to cease, but they did not respond to him. Now when they halt on their own, with Old Woman’s encouragement, he attempts to take credit for it. A similar joke is played at the Son’s expense as was played on the Father: both shout uselessly when they want their way; and both attempt to take credit for what are really the miracles of nature. To King, Christianity presents a mythos of force and dictatorship which is really meaningless before the turning of nature’s wheel.

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

“Aboriginal Worldviews.” Dragonfly. Dragonfly Consulting Services, Canada. n.d. Web. July 2, 2015.

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.

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.