Monthly Archives: March 2016

Your blog assignment is to hyper-link your research on the characters and symbols in GGRW  — according to the pages assigned to you on our Student Blog page.

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PAGES 70 – 80, 1993 Edition, PAGES 85-97, 2007 Edition (referencing will be based on 2007 Edition)

The section that I cover in Green Grass, Running Water, illustrates several of the central themes of the novel:  characters on journeys of self-discovery will not find direction in the traditional Christian settler institutions , Native narratives are fluid (with water as the dominant metaphor) and circular and the settler’s insistence on a vacant landscape to be mapped and navigated with linear roads is a fallacy, Native matriarchal creation stories defy the male dominated Christian story, and only through revisiting our stories and circling back to the beginning are Native peoples likely to find that direction.  King demonstrates these themes while satirizing settler narratives, myths and institutions and highlighting the missed themes of Native oral narratives.

Alberta Frank Driving

As Jane Flick points out, Alberta’s name is a potential reference to the province in Canada, where King once resided.  Additionally, Frank, Alberta was buried in 1903 when the mountain became unstable because of underground coal mining and parallels the risk that Eli fears from the dam.  Frank is on the Turtle River, an allusion to the next chapter, where the turtle is part of the Creation story.  Additionally, Alberta the land is personified as the shy female that has been colonized by non-Native settlers.   Alberta the woman is subjected to figurative colonization by her white husband.

The chapter elucidates the theme of Native people not finding life’s direction following Christian settler institutions and includes many images of roads, trains, cars and maps.  As Marlene Goldman points out “the novel intimates that their journeys will never assume a meaningful direction, so long as they stick to the … non-native discursive maps” (Mapping 27).  For example, Alberta now rejects the institution of marriage after her own failed first marriage to a stereotypical white male who wanted her to acquire cars and possessions so that she would not “spend the rest of [her] life in a teepee”  (GGRW 86) and her drunk father.  Not only does Alberta reject marriage, but she seems to reject the settler social conventions of gender and legally binding union of a man and a woman and pursues the tribal affiliations and relations.  Alberta’s job as a settler university lecturer does not provide a satisfactory life journey.  Her role as lecturer on the Plains Indians ties her to the four Fort Marion Natives who will try to show the lost characters the Native path.

As Alberta reflects on Amos and Ada’s failed marriage one of the novel’s continuing metaphors of water and images of cars being submerged in water surfaces.  Amos, who is an abusive drunkard, departs and is not missed while his truck slowly rusts in the water (a lake originally created from the outhouse).  Arnold Davidson explains that “the repeated depiction of cars being submerged in water reminds readers that Native tales of origin begin, not with a void to be mapped and driven across, but with water” (Border 121).  Furthermore, he suggests that King uses water as part of his narrative strategy to demonstrate the fluidity of Native oral storytelling compared to non-Native linear narratives.

Babo Starts the Story Again

In the next chapter, the police officers are questioning Babo Jones, the janitor from Dr. Hovaugh’s Florida asylum from which the four Indians have escaped.  Jane Flick points out that Babo is likely a reference to the black slave in Melville’s Story “Benito Cereno”.  The interrogating officers, Jimmy Delano and Sargeant Ben Cereno are also characters from this story.  In the Melville story, Babo is thought to lead a mutiny to take the ship to freedom in Africa.  King’s Babo in fact mentions that his great-great-grandfather was a barber on a ship (with a cutting blade for shaving).  Perhaps King is relating freedom of the slaves to freedom of the Indians in Florida.  Jimmy Delano could also be a reference to Columbus Delano who was in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and defended imprisonment of Plains Natives.  Marta Dvorak suggests that Melville’s characters are used by King to highlight non-Native white patriarchal imperialism narratives.

Babo is “the native bamboozling the naïve anthropologist” in a “mistold myth” (Abo-Modernist 196) in a story to the officers using oral storytelling as a Native trickster.  Babo lightheartedly mistells a Native earth diver creation story, beginning, of course, with water.  The talking animals are contrasted with Christian creation stories where only humans are made in God’s likeness.  The story of animals swimming in water is in contrast to the biblical story of Noah and the Ark and the story is in another place, not heaven.  In a Native narrative style, Babo restarts the story when the ducks get tired of swimming and a woman falls from the sky and sits on a giant turtle and creates dry land.  Laura Donaldson suggests that King attempts to displace the Christian foundational narrative of the biblical story of Noah with a new flood myth, perhaps as humorous retaliation for the settler myth that Native Americans were descendants of Noah’s disgraced son, Ham.  Furthermore, having the creation story with First Woman is in contrast with Noah’s Christian view that women caused the Fall.  Donaldson sees Babo’s stories as Native resistance to settler Christian narratives.

Toward the end of the chapter Babo looks out the window for the Pinto, one of the cars that disappears in the water.  Jane Flick mentions that while the Pinto represents one of the many settler vehicles that leads to nowhere for Native characters, it is also potentially a reference to Columbus’ ships or a Plains horse (as drawn by Fort Marion prisoners).

Dr. Hovaugh is interrogated by the officers

The next chapter has Dr. Hovaugh responding to the officers’ questions about the escaped Indians and exposes several non-Native myths.  The officers assume that the Natives fit stereotypes including drunken and drugged.  Dr. Hovaugh, according to Jane Flick, is a play on the Christian name Jehovah.  Dr. Hovaugh represents the white Christian settler-invader imprisoning the Plains Indians with his non-Native myths.   Blanca Chester provides analysis of Dr. Hovaugh as Northrop Frye, in “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel”.  Dr. Hovaugh is then representative of the rigid classification of literature which precluded oral storytelling or contextual reference to contemporary events.  Frye was the promoter of the static Native myth, which aids in the settler narrative of a vacant land and disallows any modern day allusion to challenges to land transfer.  Dr. Hovaugh tells of his great-grandfather’s vision, a colonial story of an empty land.  His grandfather was “an old world Evangelist” (a Christian – unlike modern day evangelists like Jim Baker) who made his money in real estate (selling land stolen from the now extinct local tribes – a reference to the massacre).

In this chapter King makes reference to 1876.  During this year Treaty Six was signed in Alberta with disparity between Native and non-Native interpretation.  According to the testimony of Alberta Treaty Six elders, the treaty provided for land sharing, not outright land surrender.  Dr. Hovaugh says that “our Indians” arrived (in Florida, also Fort Marion, in 1891, which is just after Wounded Knee, the South Dakota site of the last battle with Plains Indians.

Norma as Matriach and Native stability

As the chapter opens Norma, who takes the unpaved path toward the Sun Dance and is humming a round-dance song, represents Native matriarchal stability.  She is taking her nephew Lionel, one of the directionless Natives, back to the traditional Sun Dance and his community.  Lionel wonders if Dr. Loomis is still alive and Cecil made it to Wounded Knee.  Potentially Dr. Loomis is Reverend Loomis, a Presbyterian minister who contributed to the Centenary Fund in 1889 to pay for Wounded Knee.  Lionel recalls looking at his reflection in a window in the past.  This could potentially be an allusion to The Picture of Dorian Grey where the character stays the same, while the picture ages and reflects the horror of its environment.  Oscar Wilde wrote Picture to put forward the view that art should be pure and not reflect contemporary events, just as Frye felt that Native myth should be timeless and static.

Norma picks up the four Indians at the side of the road, who, like Lionel look lost.  Lionel is of course standing in a pool of water, a metaphor for starting at the beginning.  References to direction and roads once again signify the challenges of modern life throughout the novel.  These Indians are the Fort Marion Indians, Native shape-shifters who can exist in different places and time.  John Coleman indicates that the continual reference to the four Indians is a rejection of the colonial Native archetype “as a radicalized Other symbol” (Writing 5) of violence and savagery.  The chapter and section closes with reference to the Indian wearing a black mask, to rewrite a stereotype with British literary characters and American Western drama type-cast roles.

GGRW and this section are complex circular narratives that challenge non-Native stereotypes, myths, and historical interpretations with oral storytelling, Native tricksters, creation stories, and narrative structures.  These challenges reveal the flaws in the colonial narratives of Canada.

.Works Cited:

Andrews, Jennifer. “Border Trickery and Dog Bones: A Conversation with Thomas King”. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, [S.l.], june 1999. ISSN 1718-7850. Available at: <https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/14248>. Date accessed: 27 mar. 2016.

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999).Web. April 04/2013.

Coleman, John. “Writing Over The Maple Leaf: Reworking the Colonial Native Archetype in Contemporary Canadian-Native Literature.”  Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections.  Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 3.  Wilfred Laurier University.  2013.  http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=bridges_contemporary_connections

Davidson, Arnold E., et al. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Buffalo;Toronto;: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Web.

Donaldson, Laura E. “Noah Meets Old Coyote, or Singing in the Rain: Intertextuality in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water”. Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.2 (1995): 27–43. Web 25 March 2016. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/20736846?pq-origsite=summon&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Dvorak, Marta. “Thomas King’s Abo-Modernist Novels” Thomas King: Works and Impact. Ed. Gruber, Eva. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 11-34. Web.

Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. March 18^h 2016. 

Goldman, Marlene. Canadian Literature: Mapping and Dreaming: Native Resistance in Green Grass, Running Water. University of British Columbia Press, 1999. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.  https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/canlit161-162-MappingGoldman.pdf

Shackleton, Mark. “Have I Got Stories – “ and “Coyote was There” :  Thomas King’s Use of Trickster Figures and the Transformation of Traditional Materials”.  Thomas King: Works and Impact. Ed. Gruber, Eva. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 184-198.  Web.

Taylor, John Leonard. “Treaty Research Report – Treaty Six (1876)” Treaties and Historical Research Centre, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1985. https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/tre6_1100100028707_eng.pdf

Wilde, Oscar, and Andrew Elfenbein. Oscar Wilde’s the Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print.

Native Dance.  Native Dance Partners, Contributors, and Production Team.  Carleton University, Editors:  Dr. Elaine Keillor, Cle-alls (Dr. John Medicine Horse Kelly), Dr. Franziska von Rosenhttp://www.native-dance.ca/index.php/Renewal/Round_Dances?tp=z

Frank, Alberta Slide:  http://history.alberta.ca/frankslide/slidefacts/docs/fsic_facts.pdf

Sun Dance Camp at Blackfoot Crossing, Alberta, 1927

8. Everyone is on the move in this novel, road trips abound and in order to hit the road what do we need? — a road map. At the same time, Lionel, Charlie and Alberta are each seeking direction in life. As Goldman says, “mapping is a central metaphor” (24) of this novel. Maps chart territory and provide directions, they also create borders and boundaries and they help us to find our way. There is more than one way to map, and just as this novel plays with conflicting story traditions, I think King is also playing with conflicting ways to chart territory. What do you think lies at the centre of King’s mapping metaphor? Marlene Goldman, “Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

Many of the Native characters in King’s Green Grass Running Water are on the roads, paved (settler-invader) and unpaved (toward the Sun Dance) as they seek direction in their lives.  The characters seeking that direction, primarily Lionel, Charlie, and Alberta have spent their lives in cross-cultural intersections, seeking meaning from life within settler cities such as Toronto, or settler institutions such as universities.  As Marlene Goldman says in Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water “their journeys will never assume a meaningful direction, so long as they stick to the man-made road and continue to rely on non-Native discursive maps”  (Mapping 27). The linear non-Native maps lead to an apocalyptic end.  The unpaved roads lead to the Sun Dance, the centre of King’s mapping metaphor.  The Sun Dance and the circle, the basis of the traditional way of life according to Native spiritual leaders (referenced by Goldman (Mapping 29) from Lutz) whose “goal lies in furnishing participants with a map of the universe in which their location is clearly demarcated” (Mapping 34) are offered as an alternative to non-Native discursive maps.

Goldman represents that many of the young Native people in GGRW lack direction in their lives. Conventional maps and the settler-invader linear way of life have not taken them in a satisfactory direction, nor have elders since they were playing stereotyped characters expected to be successful in non-Native society. King emphasizes this point with inclusion of Portland Looking Bear, an elder whose desperation to act in non-Native society’s depiction of the settler-invader narrative results in the loss of his ability to provide direction to Charlie.  GGRW “brings together both the cartographic and performative connotations associated with the word ‘direction'” (Mapping 28) as Lionel, Charlie, Eli and the elders escaped from the Florida[1] (meant to be the Fort Marion) “asylum” come together in Bursum’s store to see his “map” of televisions displaying John Wayne Hollywood Western movies. These Western movies of Native extinction are only “fixed” by the four elders when the linear narrative is fixed by a “circle of performance epitomized by the Sun Dance” (Mapping 29).  Characters following non-Native discursive maps and way of life are lost until elders appropriate “the technology of non-Native society” (Mapping 29) to elucidate the “organic path of the circle and performance” (Mapping 33).

Whereas Eli is initially unsure what wisdom he can impart to Lionel on his birthday, after witnessing the elders at Bursum’s store he is able to teach his nephew as part of the circle of life and family. As Lionel contemplates leaving Blossom to complete university, Eli explains that he should never have left the circle of the community, the Sun Dance, for Toronto.  We understand the importance of the Sun Dance to the community and Native life as Eli reminisces about the past.  Goldman explains that Native spiritual leaders describe the Sun Dance as a “tangible model of the universe” (Mapping 35).  “During the Sun Dance, the body itself becomes a map” (Mapping 35).  Eli had abandoned his mother and family for many years in pursuit of a settler-invader career.  With the wisdom of age he returns to his ancestral home to fight the dam that would destroy the home and the Blackfoot community.  He takes Lionel to the Sun Dance circle, leaving the paved road for the “vital path that virtually fuses with the natural world” (Mapping 33).  Eli stops the truck and he and Lionel look down on the Sun Dance, a circle of teepees that appear to be floating on the prairie.  This circle is provided as contrast to the linear way of life that Lionel feels he must follow, and Eli now rejects.  Eli offers Lionel the Sun Dance as a map for him to find his way in the universe.

The Sun Dance lies at the centre of King’s mapping metaphor for its importance in charting life direction, as well as  potentially for the symbolic importance of the Blackfoot Sun Dance Camp in the 1877 Treaty Seven political devastation.  In reviewing King’s interviews and other scholarly references I was unable to find King’s assertion that this is in fact true.  Treaty Seven resulted in the transfer (see linked article to see the settler-invader view and the Blackfoot view) of 50,000 square miles of Southern Alberta land from Native control in exchange for reserves, livestock and farming implements.  On the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty signing government officials selected the Blackfoot Sun Dance Camp, as a National Historic Site because of the significance of the treaty signing.  When officials photographed the site in 1927 for unveiling of the Historic Site plaque they captured the settler-invader “narrative of success in fulfilling treaty promises” (Sundance 5) and undisturbed  Native life by depicting a “circle of teepees surrounded by vacant wilderness landscape” (Sundance 7).  However, the reality was that the Sun Dance was banned in 1913 as Duncan Scott felt that it stood in the way of the civilizing process and was a nuisance as it occurred when the Blackfoot should be working crops. The fact that the Sun Dance still existed in 1927 was an act of Blackfoot defiance in retaining a ceremony central to their culture. In GGRW King repeatedly rejects photography (a form of non-Native mapping) of the Sun Dance.   King’s selection of the Blackfoot Sun Dance is potentially a reminder of the devastating impact of how the settler-invader interpretation of “land as property to be consumed and used by Europeans was written into the language of maps” (Goldman quote of Chandra Mukerji – Mapping 19) and King’s rejection of the settler-invader narrative.

In GGRW King positions the Sun Dance at the centre of his mapping metaphor as the map of the universe that will help the Native characters find their life’s direction. It is offered as an alternative to linear mapping found in non-Native institutions and cities.  As Goldman says, GGRW is “like a participant in the dance itself” (Mapping 36).  Potentially underscoring the importance of Native tradition and mapping, King uses the location of  the Treaty Seven signing, the Blackfoot Sun Dance, as a reminder of the consequences of how settler-invader maps are used to take the Native way of life and land.  Is anyone able to find any reference to King purposefully choosing the Blackfoot Sun Dance to highlight Treaty Seven?

[1] Florida is meant to represent the Garden of Eden and the settler-invader linear narrative of creation. However, all of the trees are dead.

Works Cited:

Hugh A. Dempsey, “Treaty Research Report – Treaty Seven (1877)” Treaties and Historical Research Centre, Comprehensive Claims Branch, Self-Government, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1987 http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/tre7_1100100028790_eng.pdf

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

Goldman, Marlene. Canadian Literature: Mapping and Dreaming: Native Resistance in Green Grass, Running Water. University of British Columbia Press, 1999. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.  https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/canlit161-162-MappingGoldman.pdf

Jauca, Halena. “Sundance Camp at Blackfoot Crossing: Perpetuation of a Pioneer Narrative.” Canadian Studies Undergraduate Journal 14 (2013): 2-8. http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/theseed/article/download/184880/184402

Lutz, Hartmut. “The Circle as Philosophical and Structural Concept in Native American Fiction Today.” Native American Literatures. Ed. Laura Coltelli. Pisa: SEU (Servizio Editoriale Universitario), 1989. 85-97.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia, 2013. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.

Images used:

Sundance Camp, Blackfoot Crossing, Alberta, 1927. Photographer: WJ. Oliver.  Glenbow Archives, NA-3331-1.

4)  In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester focuses on an analysis of Northrop Frye as Dr. Joe Hovaugh. She writes;

In Hovaugh’s carefully constructed world, meaning lies in circular and closed systems. Thus he draws a “deliberate circle around Parliament Lake.” He then draws another, and another (324). King’s narrator then describes Indian “gifts” and white “gifts” for us (327), defining each in a play on paradigmatic opposites (327). Real Indians don’t exist in this system. But in the novel Hovaugh’s organization of the world ultimately reveals itself as petrified and static. His is a world where circles are no longer cycles—where circles construct borders around knowledge. His world, unlike the world of the old Indians, exhibits a garrison mentality. 52

For this blog assignment, I would like you to find and describe other examples of Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s character that reflect aspects of Frye’s literary theories and ideas about the Canadian imagination – or, any element of Frye’s thought that you hear echoed in the pages of Green Grass Running Water.

In Blanca Chester’s article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” she provides analysis of Northrop Frye as Dr. Joe Hovaugh.   She asserts that Dr. Hovaugh, and thus, Frye, perceives that “the wild physical environment (or nature, of which “Indians” are seen as a part and settlers are not) is ominous seen from a (civilized) perspective” (Theorizing 49).  In the character of Dr. Hovaugh in Green Grass Running Water Thomas King challenges Frye’s assertion that Canada’s literary imagination is reflective of the vast emptiness of the physical environment.  He challenges this by juxtaposing Dr. Hovaugh’s fear of an untamed natural environment and his controlled Florida garden with the fluidity of the movement and context of the “Indians”.  In providing this contrast, King is demonstrating that the literary void that Frye claims in Canada is the fault of Frye in not considering First Nations stories in his narrow categorization of literature.  This paper explores examples of Dr. Hovaugh’s  fear and horror of the vastness of the Canadian landscape and the how King’s “Indians” represent the chaos of the natural environment that he must contain.

The first example that we see of Dr. Hovaugh’s discomfort with uncontrolled nature comes immediately in his introduction in King’s story. As he is introduced, there is a description of Dr. Hovaugh in his Florida (in the more civilized United States) asylum (see reference in link to Dr. Hovaugh and the significance of Florida) office with his desk “a rare example of colonial woodcraft” that “reminded him of a tree cut down to the stump” (GGRW 16) looking out the window and admiring the manicured garden.    The garden is purposefully landscaped with daffodils in lines, arbors and swans.  Dr. Hovaugh is from his reverie by news that the “Indians” are gone from the hospital (and the police engaged to capture them).  His fear is palpable as he “seemed to shrink behind the desk as though it were growing, slowly and imperceptibly enveloping the man” (GGRW 17).  The impact of news of the “Indians”’ freedom on his consciousness is to cause the tree like desk, although polished and stripped to grow and swallow him.  His reaction is to suggest that he get a pair of peacocks, introducing further artificial order into the landscape to calm himself.  Dr. Horaugh is only comfortable with the “Indians” and nature when they are carefully controlled.

Dr. Hovaugh brings Babo to Canada in pursuit of the “Indians”.  While Babo takes the supernatural for granted, even Dr. Horvaugh seems to uncomfortably realize that they are “led” by a light in the ominous Canadian sky, “some omen or miracle” (GGRW 238) toward the “Indians”. Before their arrival at Blossom Lodge, King demonstrates the First Nations literary imagination with Coyote telling the creation story of Thought Woman.  The story defies the mythic Frye definition as Coyote interacts and jokes about the Christian creation story with Thought Woman and the border guard. Just before they arrive at Blossom Lodge the “Indians” invoke the threatening Canadian nature and create a storm with “the world rolled up dark and alive with lightning” (GGRW 173).  Dr. Hovaugh needs Babo to help capture the “Indians” as he does not understand how they think.  Dr. Hovaugh is completely disoriented in this untamed land as “the wind blew Dr. Hovaugh’s coast up his back and rolled his hair over his face” and the “coat rattled around his stomach” (GGRW 275).  King has the “Indians” create chaos to emphasize the futility of Frye’s attempts to order and control the “Indians” and ignore their stories.

In Green Grass, Running Water King takes on Frye’s sense of the emptiness of the Canadian landscape and literary imagination.  Interwoven creation First Nation stories in the narrative of Dr. Hovaugh’s attempts to capture and contain the “Indians” in the chaotic Canadian landscape demonstrate King’s view that the absence of literary imagination in this harsh environment is in fact Frye’s limitation. Perhaps Frye realizes his own waning relevance in Canadian literary theory as Dr. Hovaugh’s “mystical and reclusive retreat to his mythical garden also suggests his own escape into timelessness, into a world of his own mythic making” (Chester 50).

Works Cited:

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999).Web. April 04/2013.

Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. April 4^th 2013. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/files/2013/11/GGRW-reading-notes.pdf

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism : Four Essays. University of Toronto Press, 2006. Web. 10 Mar. 2016.

Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2003. Web. 10 Mar. 2016.

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.

Images:

Marmon Silko, Leslie – TiyospayeNow. “Thinking of Thought Woman” Web 10 Mar. 2016.  http://www.scoop.it/t/indigenous-sovereignty

6.  Carlson writes:

“Harry Robinson’s account of literacy being stolen from Coyote by his white twin conform to all the standard criteria associated with a genre of Salish narratives commonly referred to by outsiders as legend or mythology with one exception – they appear to contain post-contact content” (Carlson 56).

Why is it, according to Carlson or/and Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).

Why is it that Aboriginal stories influenced by post-contact European proceedings and disputes are not addressed by scholars? Wendy Wickwire asserts that the impact of this absence is a lack of Indigenous participation in documenting their own history because “the ethnographic archive …is… devoid of cultural context” (Stories 456).  Keith Carlson, in Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History, says that some Salish stories tell of Indigenous literacy lost or taken away and notes that those stories that are ”informed or influenced by post-contact European events and issues” are ignored by scholars (56).   In Wendy Wickwire’s introduction to Harry Robinson’s Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory she contemplates the distinction between Robinson’s stories and Aboriginal mythologies she researched in preparation for her meetings with Robinson and her own original unconscious bias to exclude stories that don’t conform to the traditional mythologies. This blog will demonstrate how both Carlson and Wickwire attribute the lack of scholarly interest to a model of “historical purity” (Orality 56) that is applied to Aboriginal stories.

Carlson’s exploration of Indigenous stories of the Salish people to understand Indigenous literacy history in comparison to Western chronologies leads to his explanation as to why Indigenous literacy is ignored by scholars. He explains that Indigenous stories such as the Bertha Peters’ story of the three chiefs that would otherwise be considered “legends” or “mythology” worthy of study are dismissed because they contain post-contact content, rendering them inauthentic.  Prophecy stories, such as those of Mrs. Peters, are also dismissed because they are interpreted by Westerners to include post-contact knowledge in supposed prophecies and thus are inauthentic as well.  As Carlson says, “[w]e have grown so accustomed to associating authentic Aboriginal culture with pre-contact temporal dimensions that we have dismissed or ignored Native stories that do not meet our criteria for historical purity” (Orality 56).  Carlson identifies that the Salish, too, want authenticity.  However, they do not measure authenticity in terms of “historical purity” and verifiable evidence, but rather in terms of whether it matches the collective memory and ongoing stories of the community.

Wickwire, who worked with Harry Robinson to help him fulfill his mission to make sure that his stories did not die with him, confronts the challenges of being a good listener and a good publisher. When Wickwire notices herself distinguishing the story of Coyote and the king and his free travel between prehistoric and historic times, she recognizes that it is because there are so few documented Aboriginal myths and legends with post-contact content.  Wickwire references Franz Boas’ and James Teit’s collections of stories from Salishan-speakers as documented myths and legends.  While she finds many similarities to some of Robinson’s stories, most of both Boas’ and Teit’s work (except a post-humous Teit work published by Boas) had a “fixation on the deep past” (Living 22) creation stories.  The post-humous Teit publication contained many post-contact references to white people, biblical stories, and the story of Coyote meeting the king, confirming Wickwire’s suspicion that the “collectors” passed over any stories that they deemed too Westernized in their search for “authentic” mythology.

Wickwire’s search for explanation for this fixation on the deep past leads her to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind as theoretical literature on myths and legends.  In this book Lévi-Strauss theorizes that there are “hot” and “cold” zones of peoples. According to this theory the Salish would be “cold”, so their stories should be “mainly timeless and ahistorical” (Living 11).  Wickwire identifies Michael Harkin saying that Boas worked within this Levi-Straus theory and limited his publications to a single genre, the myth, as his he sought to capture “some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people” (Gateways 93-105).

Wickwire goes on to reference another ethnographer who, like Boas, was “entrenched in the salvage paradigm” (Living 23), Charles Hill-tout.  Hill-tout claimed that the pre-contact Indigenous myth was the only “reliable record” and the only way to get “genuine glimpses of the forgotten past” (The Salish 137).  Like Boas, Hill-tout questions the authenticity of post-contact stories.  Wickwire appropriately challenges this assumption of reliability given that the myth storytellers talking to Hill-tout have only ever lived in post-contact times.

Carlson and Wickwire both identify that the early ethnographers and “collectors” of Indigenous stories systematically ignored stories with post-contact content, or combined or edited the stories to eliminate such references in their quest to capture the timeless myth of the Indigenous. Wickwire says that this early framing of “authentic” indigenous stories has limited our ability to be reliable storytellers and listeners of indigenous stories which are fluid in time and space. The “Boasian paradigm reified the mythological past and promoted the stereotype of the “mythteller” –the bearer of the single, communal accounts roots in the deep past” (Living 29).  Teit, who lived in the community, says that it was not his intent to ignore the current stories containing issues and challenges in living with white people. However, he said that the American and Canadian governments who paid for his work were not at all interested in the current stories, so he de-emphasized them.  Was the lack of government interest a purposeful disinterest to hide the protests of the theft of land and rights?

Works cited:

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish   History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines. Eds. Carlson, Kristina Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 43-72.

Harkin, Michael. “(Dis)pleasures of the Text:  Boasian Ethnology on the Central Northwest Coast, in Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. Eds. I. Krupnik and W. Fitzhugh.  Washington:  Smithsonian Institution, 2001.  93-105.

Hill-Tout, Charles, and Maud, Ralph. The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1978. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

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