Month: February 2019

2. In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility.

For this assignment, I decided to investigate the 1989 Canadian Multiculturalism Act. I was intrigued by this policy in particular because the BNA Act, Indian Act, and Immigration Act were all produced in a comparatively distant time period, which, although it does not lessen the horror of their implications and approaches, can seem cognitively distant enough that individuals attempt to tell themselves the governments that enacted those policies do not resemble ours and were more malicious than ours, which to me becomes dangerously close to the attitude of “that couldn’t happen here” or “that couldn’t happen now” that leads to individuals becoming complacent within their own democracies. In contrast, the Multiculturalism Act is relatively recent (occurring within the past 50 years), and at least on the surface level, seems far more positive in its approach to crafting a national identity than the BNA Act or the Indian Act, who explicitly attempt to control non-white groups and embrace colonial settlers as the dominant group.

The Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1989 emerged in response to shifting social policies and opinions that worked to recognize the rights of various minority groups; in the 1960’s and 1970’s, this social movement included social forces like the Civil Rights movements in Canada and the US, the first and second wave feminist movements, and within Canada, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. By 1989, an increasingly diverse Canadian population that grew with the help of immigration reform prioritizing skilled labour over country of origin began to fight for recognition by the Canadian government. Although general attitudes were becoming more inclusive, there was still little to no legal framework entrenching multiculturalism as a national value or as a legal framework through which to guide lawmakers and businesses.

However, while entrenching multiculturalism may initially seem like a positive action, recently questions have been raised about whether this action instead just identifies a sense of culturalism that relegates individual’s to their country or culture of origin, their observable heritage, or their families ethnic and cultural roots. This not only has the potential to emphasize cultural differences instead of similarities and empathy but also fails to identify the intersections or complexities of an individual’s upbringing. For example, how do you classify the culture of someone who had one parent grow up in France, the other in Kenya, both of whom then attended post-secondary in, say, England, before moving to Canada and raising a child together? (For an excellent discussion on this topic, and an alternative to asking ‘where are you from?’, see this video). There are many ways cultures intersect and diverge from the country of origin, and many cultures whose worldview does not center around borders, like the Indigenous people of Canada, whose presence in this land precedes even the concept of the nation-state.

Within the context of Coleman’s argument about creating a narrative of white civility, the fact that existing documentation was founded on a view of Canadian identity that was primarily limited to English and French in its recognition demonstrates the ways in which systematic frameworks were designed with whiteness as the priority. Similarly, the modifications to encourage diversity and inclusion through the Multiculturalism Act shows the disparities existing in the way minority and majority groups were treated; an explicit program to encourage diversity is necessary only in the backdrop of discrimination, and the ways in which this act identified minority groups further solidified this divide.

Library and Archives Canada. Statutes of Canada. An Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada, 1988, SC 36-37 Elizabeth II, Volume I, Chapter 31. Retrieved from “Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988”.

Works Cited

“Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988.” Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, 2019, pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/canadian-multiculturalism-act-1988. Accesed 26 Feb 2019.

Dirks, Gerald. “Immigration Policy in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 29 Jun 2017, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/immigration-policy. Accessed 27 Feb 2019.

“Nationalism, 1960s onwards: Multiculturalism.” CanLit Guides, Canadian Literature Quarterly, 4 Oct 2016, canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/nationalism-1960s-onwards-multiculturalism/. Accessed 26 Feb 2019.

“The Quiet Revolution.” Canada History, 2013, canadahistory.com/sections/eras/cold%20war/Quiet%20Revolution.html. Accessed Feb 26 2019.

Selasi, Taiye. “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.” TEDGlobal, 2014, ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local/details?referrer=playlist-what_is_home&language=en. 26 Feb 2019.

 

3] In order to address this question you will need to refer to Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” You can easily find this article online. Read the section titled: “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (468 – 470). Write a blog that explains Sparke’s analysis of what Judge McEachern might have meant by this statement: “We’ll call this the map that roared.”

In his article “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation” Matthew Sparke outlines the ways in which different physical representations of Canadian geographical history, the map and the Atlas, have communicated information about ownership and sovereignty over the Canadian landscape. Matthew Sparke highlights two case studies in examining this work: The 1997 Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en case against the government of British Columbia, and the first volume of The Historical Atlas of Canada. Matthew Sparke suggests that both these cases were landmarks in attempting to define a national, unified narrative of land ownership and entitlement to said land, and in placing this definition within a national and historically colonial context.

In the section “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (Sparke 468-470) Sparke outlines the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en use of maps and cartography as a form of resistance and protest against a primarily Eurocentric and preferentially colonialist approach. Sparke suggests that both the results of the legal case of Delgamuukw v the Queen and The Historical Atlas of Canada  engage in an attempt to create a Canadian “nation-state” identity that encompasses “demographic, economic, cultural, governmental, and social” (468) relationships collectively’ this necessitates a shared vision of land, history, and Canadian future which often does not listen to, or even tolerate, differential and minority viewpoints as legitimate. Sparke highlights the inherent ethnocentrism present in both the case’s proceedings and Judge Mceachern’s decision on it, which was condemned by the United Nations because of Judge McEachern’s discrimination. Sparke looks particularly at the role of cartography, which historically embedded Europeans as the owners and “discoverers” of North America, and in doing so suggests that the ways in which the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations utilize this same power in challenging this Eurocentric view through a language or modality that is shared between them (the map).

John Mitchell’s rendition of North America prior to the Seven Years War, designed to denote the British as having more territory and therefore a stronger likelihood of success than they had in actuality (Mitchell; Dugre).

 In calling the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en use of a map that rejects and refuses confinement by existing systems of utilities and systems embedded in colonial establishment a “map that roared,” Judge McEachern recognizes the resistance in this act. This map does not just function as a visual representation of the Indigenous perspective on their land; it is a direct, targeted response to colonial claims of their land in the same language that was used to assert this claim. It is a response in the language of the colonizer that rejects the systems used to confine it and encompass it. In saying it “roared,” the Judge, who would eventually decide against recognizing Indigenous land claims, revealed a recognition of the Indigenous argument as powerful, meaningful, and challenging. It roars in defense of its people, its perspective, and its point: you cannot use a map to lay claim to a land and its history. By recognizing this roar and then dismissing the case, Judge Mceachern could also be seen as inherently recognizing the inability of other cartographies to act as evidence, which relates to its later role in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia appeal case, which was taken to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In calling this section “Contrapuntal” Sparke also brings forth images of duality, as contrapuntal is traditionally a word used to refer to musical scores comprising  two melodic lines. Melodic lines are also usually the most prominent, narrative part of a musical composition in that they are the most identifiable and emotion-laden part of the musical piece. In this context, referring to the ongoing negotiations in perspectives on who “owns” Canada, and which narratives are “correct”, the imagery of two interrelated voices that rely on each other in their engagement seems to mirror the ways in which the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en peoples engaged with both the Canadian legal system and its relation to colonial history, and their relationship to the maps and cartographies they used in this case. Challenging the Canadian narrative as it exists cannot occur in a void; the colonial Canadian perspective relies on negating the Indigenous one, just as the Indigenous perspective for this case relies on challenging the existing narrative. Both narratives are independent versions of the events of history, but they rely on each other for context and authority, just as melodies stand alone or operate contrapuntally. Similarly, a map or cartography is embedded with a narrative in that it necessarily operates as a simplified representation of the truth, and in this case, the Gitxsan engage with the cartographic form as a means through which to challenge one narrative (or melody) through another: the form is related, but the story it communicates is different, just as a contrapuntal melody uses a similar form to tell related, but independent, musical stories. In this sense, “The Map that Roared” is related again through sound and story to its functioning as a challenge to existing narratives.

Works Cited

“The Delgamuuk Court Action.” Gitxsan, Gitxsan, 2013, www.gitxsan.com/community/news/the-delgamuukw-court-action. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.

Dugre, Neal. “Maps and the Beginnings of Colonial North America.” Digital Collections for the Classroom, The Newberry, 05 Sep 2017,  dcc.newberry.org/collections/maps-and-the-beginnings-of-colonial-north-america. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.

Kurjata, Andrew. “20 years ago, this court case changed the way Canadians understood Indigenous rights.”  CBC News British Columbia, CBC News, 11 Dec 2017, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/delgamuukw-vs-british-columbia-20-years-rights-titles-1.4440703. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.

Mitchell, John. “Map of the British and French Dominions.” Map. Scale not given. “Maps and the Beginnings of Colonial North America.” Digital Collections for the Classroom, The Newberry, 05 Sep 2017,  dcc.newberry.org/collections/maps-and-the-beginnings-of-colonial-north-america. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.

Sparke, Matthew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 3, 2010, pp. 463-495

“What is Counterpoint?” Music of Yesterday, 2019, musicofyesterday.com/historical-music-theory/what-is-counterpoint/. Accessed 19 Feb 2019.

1. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

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In telling the “Earth Diver” and “Genesis” creation stories, King uses dichotomy in a multitude of ways to highlight the methods through which the stories we believe and embrace are essentially our own choice. In presenting the stories as a dichotomy, King reminds us that “you have to be careful with the stories you tell and you have to watch out for the stories that you are told”; by presenting the stories as incompatible and contrasting, King actually challenges the reader or listener to consider if this dichotomy is necessary, and if so, how we have been conditioned to accept one story as sacred and the other as secular. King acknowledges that he spends more time focusing on the Earth Diver story, largely because the majority of the audience is not working from a place of existing knowledge of this creation story. However, in approaching it this way, King also draws the audience’s attention to the fact that they do know the story of Genesis. Regardless of their own religious beliefs, King makes the audience question how the Genesis story became so pervasively known within our culture. Without directly asking the audience this question, King demonstrates an alternative by choosing to examine the Earth Diver story more thoroughly. King chooses which story to privilege, modeling his argument regarding how the dichotomous representation of the stories necessitates declaring one as sacred and one as secular. As King writes, “we are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” Dichotomies are easy. Choosing is easy. Challenging the dichotomy is hard, and changing your mind is even harder.

By using an authoritative voice when describing the Genesis story, King highlights how prominent this narrative is in Western culture. He can shorten the story because most of his audience already knows it. He can explain the story from an assumption of the audience’s knowledge. Comparatively, when King tells the Earth Diver story, he crafts it cooperatively and collaboratively. King can assume the audience is coming from a shared place of not-knowing. Just as King challenges the way the Christian Genesis narrative creates a sense of hierarchy by crafting God, then the world, then animals, then man, and finally woman, he challenges the hierarchy with which Christianity asserts its authority by presenting the collaborative Earth Diver creation story from a place of assumed equality. Telling the Genesis story by assuming others know it already creates a hierarchy between “knowers” and “non-knowers,” Christians and non-christians, members and non-members, in-group and outgroup. Telling the Earth Diver story in completeness, with humour and questions to the audience, makes the storytelling process collaborative and functions by assuming the audience is coming from a place of sameness: of not knowing, but being curious, much like the tenacious curiosity of Charm in the story. He creates togetherness. King also makes this storytelling process a bonding experience; unlike the often punitive doctrine of Christianity, Native storytelling is meant to involve laughter, joking, and flaws. Listening to the story and laughing together is part of the experience.

Much like King, I don’t wish to imply that a punitive and isolating experience of Christianity is the only way of engaging with that religion and its stories. There are many Christians who embrace messages of openness, acceptance, tolerance, generosity, and kindness, and whose experiences with religion have involved community, curiosity, and the creation of a social network. Many Indigenous people in Canada also identify as Christian and see benefit, importance, and significance in doing so. However, I think it is arguable that in the larger picture of colonialism, and particularly in how Christianity was brought to Canada, fear and autocracy has been a prominent feature in Christianity’s spread, particularly within the First Nations communities of which King speaks. He is using dichotomy to show us the ways a dominant narrative eradicates or diminishes the value of alternatives. He is challenging us to consider our own agency in the stories we interact with, put faith in, tell to others, and have told to us. I believe this strategy is an attempt to get the audience to consider when and how they came to know the Genesis story instead of the Earth Diver, and how complicit, complacent, or agent they are in assigning one more importance than the other. When King says, “Take Charm’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story,” he is giving the audience the option to change their relationship to the world and to take agency in their decisions. It is not good enough to say you would have done differently if you had only known of the alternatives: he has presented the alternatives, and the choice is now left in the hands of the audience.

Thomas, J.B. The Birth Story of Creation. 2001, oil painting on canvas. Accessed from www.takentheseries.com/the-great-beginning-of-turtle-island/

 

Works Cited

Belshaw, John Douglas. “4.7: Canada and Catholicism.” Canadian History: Pre-Confederation,  opentextbc.ca/preconfederation/chapter/4-7-canada-and-catholicism/. Accessed 7 Feb 2019.

Marley, Karin. “Majority of indigenous Canadians remain Christians despite residential schools.” The Current, CBC, 1 April 2016, www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-1-2016-1.3516122/majority-of-indigenous-canadians-remain-christians-despite-residential-schools-1.3516132. Accessed 7 Feb 2019.

“The Role of the Churches.” Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools, Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-3/role-churches. Accessed 7 Feb 2019.

Ziervogel, Katarina. “The Birth Story of Creation by JB Thomas.“ 2001, oil painting on canvas.  The Beginning of Turtle Island, TAKEN The Series, 6 July 2018, www.takentheseries.com/the-great-beginning-of-turtle-island/.

The view from the plane when I travel between my original home and my current home.

In reading my classmates’ blogs, I was struck by the amount of uniqueness in an individual’s definition of home. While many people referenced a sense of belonging and comfort, what produced that feeling often escaped definition; indeed, it seemed difficult to assign a name to the feeling of home that encapsulated what fully produced this sense of belonging. It’s easy to say that home is family or your house or being with your friends, but this definition doesn’t hold up for everyone. For many people, family is complicated. Many of my classmates referenced the complex dynamics of growing up with divorced parents, or of struggling through conflict with their parents and siblings. Even with the definition of home as family, who we consider to be family extends and contracts as we meet new friends, start new relationships, and (in the case of some of my classmates, although not myself), have children.

For others, ancestry and lineage played a much stronger role in their sense of home than it did for myself. Many people spoke of the ties to their family’s ancestral history, and even if they themselves had not lived in whichever nations and cultures held significance for them, were tied to that ancestry trough language, food, and practice. Many individuals wrote of beautiful sensory experiences that held strong memories for them, like cooking family recipes with their parents, or the feeling of being hugged by someone they love, or laughing with friends.

Others found their sense of home to be more internal, relying more on a sense of comfort within themselves; this was a feeling I loved reading about from others, because I’ve often found myself aspiring to a stronger sense of self. In the times where I’ve spent extended periods away from Canada, or at times where my life has undergone great transitions, I always find myself feeling a little ungrounded or uncertain, and I love knowing that for others, it is full and expansive simply to exist as oneself, no matter the location. That being said, many others identified a sense of dividedness with considering home that resonated strongly with me, whether that be due to geographical relocation, a family that is far away, or a deeper sense of misidentification with the location they reside in. Alternatively, others expressed a divided self in the sense of feeling at home in many places and with many different people, which, as someone who has done their undergrad degree away from their hometown and who has extended friends and family spread across the country, is a feeling that resonated with me.

Something I’ve noticed particularly with Canadians, which was echoed in the posts my classmates made, was a sense of connection to the geography and landscape of Canada; whether this was the Vancouver ocean, the rocky mountains, or the great lakes, many people identified natural spaces as contributing to their sense of home. Considering being in nature can elicit positive feelings, this seems to be somewhat biologically engrained in us; however, it wasn’t just identification with the memories of these places that produced a sense of home, but the spaces themselves (for example, while some people may love the beach because they spent a lot of time there with their family, others love the ocean who never grew up near the ocean and encounter it for the first time without a strong emotional background). Given the nature of our course, many people pointed out the complicated questions of entitlement and ownership that arise alongside this sense of identification with the land, given it is arguably not ours in the first place. It has left me with much to consider as we continue to disentangle these complicated questions.

I want to offer special thanks to Suzanne, Andrea, Ryan, Tamara, Kevin, and Anna, whose blog posts provided the thought-provoking contrasts and considerations here, and to everyone else who shared a little vulnerability in this assignment.

 

Works Cited

Harris, R. Cole. “Regionalism.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 28 Oct 2015, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/regionalism. Accessed 1 Feb 2019.

Williams, Florence. “How Just 15 Minutes of Nature Can Make You Happier.” TIME, 7 Feb 2017, time.com/4662650/nature-happiness-stress/. Accessed 1 Feb 2019.