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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.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories : A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Talonbooks, 2005. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.

Wickwire, W. (2005). Stories from the margins: Toward a more inclusive british columbia historiography. Journal of American Folklore, 118, 453-474. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1714581?accountid=14656

Question:

2. In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so: 1) the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness, and 2) the extended time of criminal prohibitions against Indigenous peoples telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities. In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited. To be complete, your answer should begin with a brief discussion on the two reasons I present and then proceed to introduce and explain your third reason from Wickwire’s introduction.

There are many reasons why those listening to first stories in 2016 have limited capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from them. The two reasons that Professor Paterson discusses in English 470A notes include the fact that the social process of the telling of the story is disconnected from the story  and the 75 year gap in families and community storytelling as children from 5-15 were removed to non-native residential schools.  Professor Wendy Wickwire, in the introduction to Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory, further explores our limitations to hear the stories, and suggests that they are related to our narrow perspectives shaped by the colonial and imperial “official”1 written narrative histories of power and dominance. This blog will discuss the support cited for the three reasons identified above.

Separation of the social process of telling the story from the story creates a problem in attributing relevance and meaning. The stories were often told at a potlatch in a ceremony where laws are prescribed through the telling of the story.  As important to the telling of the story in this ceremony, is the presence of a listener who is able to witness the telling of the story, and inscribe the laws by repeating them.  Hearing the story in absence of the song and ceremony and multi-sensory aspects of the potlatch can render the story confusing and meaningless.  If the story is written down and read without the words and songs of the storyteller they can be misinterpreted.  If the reader or listener is unfamiliar with the context of the telling and his responsibility of the listening, it will not be understood or repeated properly.

When Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities, the listeners were removed, and thus the next generations’ storytellers. While in the residential schools the Indigenous children were told different stories bythe non-native administrators and communities.  They were punished for use of their own languages, so even if they did tell ancestors stories that they remembered later, the language was often lost and interpretation distorted by non-native narrative.  Many children and their stories died because of abuse, negligence, or exposure to disease in larger communities.  The later listeners of the surviving stories had often lost the language and the ability to hear the story and understand the potlatch ceremony.

Wickwire explains that the listeners of Indigenous stories today cannot hear their message because they have embraced the history as written in the text books and captured by early anthropologists. This history includes Cook’s official1 account of the “discovery” of the west coast of Canada.  Cook was sent to make claim on the land for a European imperial power during the Age of Enlightenment.  He scientifically remapped and renamed all of the places and told his story (which was edited further by officials in England who did not even observe things first hand).  The listener of an Indigenous story today carries many preconceived concepts and histories and finds too many disparate views to his own understanding to listen openly and hear them as the storyteller intended.

Wickwire discusses the impact of one of the 20^th Century’s prominent anthropologists, Franz Boas, in limiting our ability to hear the stories of the Indigenous.  Boas “collected” some Indigenous stories.  They were short and “lifeless” according to Wickwire. Boas and other collectors had edited stories for broad consumption, eliminated community and individual names, and even combined stories.  Words like “gun” were removed to transition stories to pre-contact myths.  Wickwire claims that because Boas focused on gathering ancient anthropological “myths” of the Indigenous and did not hear or document their stories of land, generations of readers and writers dismissed these stories as unimportant.  The desire was to “collect” a static myth set in prehistoric times.  Therefore, many of the stories that were captured to maintain some of the oral histories despite the devastation of the Indigenous because of the removal of the children from their communities, the stories of change and current life were lost or muddled.  Boas’ own inability to understand Indigenous  storytelling tradition across time and space led him to dismiss many of the stories as “nonsense”. The anthropological collectors dismissing, rewriting and reframing Indigenous stories limited generations of readers’ and listeners’ (and even subsequent documenters of storytellers such as Wickwire) ability to hear what is really being said.

Wickwire and Paterson provide compelling arguments as to why we cannot understand the first stories. The necessary continuity of oral ceremonial communication from storyteller to responsible listener was severely interrupted by removing generations of children from communities and families and outlawing their ceremonies.  Anthropologists such as Boas and explorers such as Cook told imperial stories and edited Indigenous stories that have been embedded in our consciousness for generations post contact, limiting our ability to hear the real stories.

[1] J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Vol. I: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771 (Cambridge: at the University Press, published for the Hakluyt Society), cxxxvi.

Works Cited:

Cook, James. The Journals of Captain Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Vol. I: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771,  ed.  J. C. Beaglehole.  Cambridge: University Press, published for the Hakluyt Society, 1955. Print.

Clayton, Daniel. W. Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. University of British Columbia Press, 1999. Web.  15 February. 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2.2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia, 2013. Web. 16 Feb. 2016.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories : A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Talonbooks, 2005. Web. 19 Feb. 2016.

Wickwire, Wendy. “The Grizzly Gave Them the Song: James Teit and Franz Boas Interpret Twin Ritual in Aboriginal British Columbia, 1897-1920”. American Indian Quarterly 25.3 (2001): 431–452. Web  2 Feb. 2016.

While there are certainly some common elements of “home” for our class, I found that there were some unique concepts as well. Although we have a lot in common in our lives in that we are UBC students connected with Vancouver, it is obvious to me that our concepts of home, like many aspects of our thinking, depend upon our histories and where we have been.  While several people commented on their connection to land and feeling at home with nature, others spoke much more of emotional spaces and connections as “home”, with no mention of a connection to a place.  Sometimes the connection with nature and stimulus from remembered interactions with nature evoked emotional memories of family and home.  The change and evolution of nature was tied with the changing concept of home (and decay to some extent).  While family was often associated with home and a strong emotional space, most spoke of immediate, living family.  A few people spoke of ancestors (in fact Beatrice mentioned 32 generations!) and heritage, but this was less common.

Most people saw home as possible to be multiple places, and change over time. Some saw it as anchored to where family or a physical home was, while others described it solely in the abstract – almost a state of mind.  For one person, it was a place of strength and advantage, but also a safe, protected place, behind a mask.

Chamberlin’s idea that the homeless of the world continue to displace others was reflected in the observations of several of the group. There was a sense of dismay that we had an oblivious perception of Canada as the immigrants’ for the taking.  The immigrant story of coming to Canada and leaving home and being displaced because of wars and poverty was told several times.  The sense of being the “other” in an adopted home because of skin colour, language, or names was repeated.  Despite our differences, we meet in these common spaces.

Works Cited:

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: AA. Knopf, 2003. Print.

The cover from the community book for Lac Brule, Quebec, which documents the history of my husband’s family and those who settled (in their vacation homes) around the lake.

“Home may be in another time and place, and yet it holds us in its power here and now.  Home is like our language, compelling us to think and feel in certain ways and giving us the freedom to imagine other ways and other places.  It is who we are and where we belong.  Home both binds us and liberates us” (Chamberlin 76).

My story of home begins with my parents’ homes.  My father was born in Port Alice and grew up in Port Hardy where First Nations are 35% of the population in a home in the Kwakiutl traditional territory on the water.  His parents fished for salmon alongside First Nations after coming from a farm in Idaho.  My aunt married a mixed race First Nations man in the 1960’s when interracial marriage was not common.  My father left school and went into the woods at age sixteen to work and then joined the Canadian Air Force to escape a difficult home. As a young girl visiting my grandparents I would see First Nations in hand carved canoes on the beach beside us. I loved the beach, with the strong tides, amazing sea life, the smell of the ocean, and the whales in the harbor.  My mother considered Port Hardy remote and backward and our visits were fewer over time.

My mother grew up in Port Alberni next to the traditional territories of the Tseshaht and Hupacasath.  Her parents had a more traditional European immigrant story.  My grandfather was an impoverished Swede arriving on the boat from Finland in Canada to take free farm land to settle Canada.  When Winnipeg proved too harsh he moved west and anglicized his name to avoid discrimination.   My Swedish grandmother, an orphan at three, began work in a fancy house in Shaughnessy as a downstairs maid, having little English.  She and her twin sister saved everything they made to eventually buy a rooming house and a bakery.   When my grandfather and grandmother married, he left for the woods to log while she managed the farm and family restaurant.  Canada provided middle class prosperity and safety from the second world war in Europe that killed most of their siblings.  My grandmother remarried just before I was born when the hard labour of the woods killed my grandfather at age fifty and she moved to Nanaimo, traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw.  I loved the farm in Nanaimo on the river, where I learned to swim, and loved the fields, the woods, and the clear fresh water.  We had idyllic visits harvesting the fruit and vegetables and consuming my grandmother’s fresh baking under the warm sunny skies.

My family lived all over Canada, so my grandmother’s farm was my real home.  While we moved to dreary houses in different provinces, I could still return there to the thread of my life.    My parents had set out from Vancouver Island to explore Canada when still in their teens and were looking for the perfect small town together.  The Canadian Air Force took our family to Biloxi, Mississippi in 1964 where we witnessed first-hand the “beach wade-ins” to protest school racial segregation.  After my father left the Canadian Air Force he worked for the “telephone companies” building the infrastructure for modern communication for Canada.  My home was Prince George, Cape Breton, small town Ontario, and finally Richmond….  The houses and the towns were transitory, but home was going back to the farm in Nanaimo and the beach in Port Hardy.  The story of my grandparents’ home kept us “sane and steady” (Chamberlin, 78) from our unhappier story – one of parents who had married far too young in order to escape their small towns and never found that perfect small town together.

My mother was very proud of our working class roots.  We were descendants of workers who had created new lives with sweat and determination.  My desire to go to university (the first to earn a degree in my family) and study language, literature, and liberal ideas was to reject the values of my home.  Now I have lived in West Vancouver for twenty years with my husband and children and really don’t feel a sense of home in Richmond.  When my mother passed away, we sold the Richmond family home of thirty-five years and it was knocked down for redevelopment within weeks.  Like my ancestors, I am continuing the re-creation of home for what suits my family and my life style.   I can look out my kitchen window at U.B.C. and be up Cypress Mountain to cross country ski within fifteen minutes.  I love where we live, but now we have too big of a house for my husband and I, so we will likely move when my youngest daughter goes to university in 2017. My daughters, like most of their friends, feel a need to go away, and find their own home and experience.                    Cypress Mountain cross country skiing 2016.

By contrast, my husband has a great sense of history in his family.  They were originally from Scotland and have been in Quebec for many generations.  Their story is more typical of British immigrants.  They were successful professional people with education and summer homes.  In the 19^th century they had architects build wonderful summer homes and ski chalets with tennis courts on Lac Brule in the Laurentian mountains.  “Many well-off city men buy themselves farms at a certain stage of their careers… its understood they can now afford to indulge: a hankering to make contact with the land” (Gordimer 22).  There are stories of a leisure class taking horse drawn carriages from the train station to reconnect with the earth with wonderful gardens, tennis, and canoeing.  This land that my husband’s family made contact with has now replaced my grandmother’s farm as my home base.  We go every summer for the community regatta and every winter for the cross country ski loppet around the lake.  My daughters love our little cottage and speak of bringing their children there – it is understood that this is where our family history will continue.   They love the sense that their ancestors were there, that everyone returns from all over Canada and the U.S. for these bi-annual events, that there are books written about the community.  There is a sense of land, with raspberry patches and wild blueberries.  There are wide open fields for children to run free and a clear, clean lake for swimming, canoeing, and skating.

Did we take this home from someone else?  There is no sign of indigenous history there although research tells me there obviously is some.  The Quebec heritage web site talks of a land largely uninhabited when settlers arrived.  This is the narrative of the colonizer – of an empty Canada, ready for settling, mapping and (re)naming.  The indigenous peoples, the Weskarinis-Algonkians, wintered in our area for centuries before their defeat at the hands of the Iroquois in 1651. Then the francophone settlers came to farm the land to be replaced by the Montreal leisure class because of its beauty and proximity to the city.  Today the lake is still almost exclusively owned by Anglophones.  There is still an awkward sense of segregation as shop people and snow plow drivers are Francophones and part-time resident landowners are Anglophones.   My husband grew up in Anglophone Westmount during great political tension and left this idyllic home for the west coast as he graduated when Anglophones were limited professionally in Quebec.

So, I have this home in Vancouver that I love, but will leave, and my adopted home in Quebec that I hope to see my grandchildren inherit one day…. And, I travel a lot. I explore the world to learn about people and places. My family had an amazing trip to an indigenous community in a remote part of the Amazon after a long canoe ride past the foreign owned, smoking oil wells. We saw the homeless indigenous on the streets of Quito. I was in the theatre district in London during the Thatcher poll tax riots and in Paris during May Day protests with police in riot gear. For work, I have seen the optimism in Bangalore and the pessimism in St. Petersburg, Russia where my Russian hosts told me that Stalin was the greatest Russian leader of modern times. I left Manhattan early on September 12, 2001 after seeing the city attacked just blocks away from my investment banking meetings. I worked for B.C. Transmission Co. as they attempted to negotiate to develop transmission lines through First Nations traditional territory and participated in supporting the 2010 Olympics, where four First Nations welcomed the world to their traditional territory for the games. When I arrive at the airport home to Vancouver I am a little uncomfortable about the brand new highly varnished totem poles on display commissioned to attract tourists with the cultural richness of the spectacular land that we have colonized and settled. When I leave the airport and walk outside I breath in the cool, damp, clean air and it smells like home.

That is the story of my home. Although it is the story of an immigrant, of continually recreating the home story, it is a good home.

I do not have songs that remind me of home, or a home that is rich in music. Is music an important part of home for you?

Works cited:

“1990: Violence flares in poll tax demonstration.” BBC News – 1950 to 2005. 31 March 1990. Web 8 February 2016.

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto:  AA. Knopf, 2003. Print.

“FLQ Crisis.”  The Canadian Soldier in the 20^th Century.  Web.  8 February 2016.

Gordimer, Nadine.  The Conservationist.  Markham:  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 1975.  Print.

Matas, Robert.  “Olympics were sweet and sour dish for first nations.”  The Globe and Mail.  11 February 2011.  Web. 8 February 2016.

Pollock, Diane and Moffat, Margaret.  A Sense of Community.  Ste. Agathe North: DiMar Publishing, 2001.

Stock, Sandra. “The Laurentians: A Very Concise History, Part 1.” Laurentian Heritage Web Magazine. Sherbrooke: Quebec Heritage Web, 2014. Web. 8 February 2016.

There is a story I know.  It is a story about how evil came into the world.

One winter Bear’s mother sent him on a great chunk of ice to find a new place for fish.  She looked at the moon to tell him a good place to go, but the moon forgot and Bear drifted for three moons through the sea.  After the third moon the sun was telling the bear to stop being silly and waiting for the moon to tell him anything because the moon is always falling asleep.  The sun decided to try to get Bear to stop his wandering by giving his chunk of ice back to the sea.  Bear was very hungry and trying to put his four paws on the little ice and still waiting to know where he should go for fish.  As the sea gobbled his ice he saw the fish swimming all around him laughing at seeing a big bear on a little piece of ice.  Finally, Bear bumped into a tree along the shore of the great lake, and the tree shook Squirrel from a branch on to Bear’s head to tell him to stop here.

Bear and Squirrel were soon running around together and were brothers, and everyone knew that they were the ones who played the tricks on humans and animals alike.  When the humans were putting their fish to dry in the sun, Bear would lay very still in the water pretending that he was one his tree friends who were laying in the water to cool off and helping him hide.  When the humans went to sing their songs to the moon, Bear would invite his friends to come and laugh at the fish and have a feast.  When it was time to store nuts for the winter, Squirrel would throw a big party and ask everyone to bring him a nut.  He wasn’t lazy, he just wanted to see all of his friends before the big winds and snow came.

One time Squirrel told all of his friends to join him for the party and make sure and bring their nuts.  The snakes and the old men came, and so did the horses and the children.  Squirrel was busy running up and down the tree putting the nuts in all of the best places in high branches as everyone arrived and gave him their nut gifts.  Meanwhile Bear was eating all the berries and fish that he could find and was busy night and day and forgot about Squirrel’s party.  The fish danced away from him in the water and laughed at Bear for forgetting about the party.  Bear knew that he was very late and did not have time to find nuts in the moonlight, so the fish told him to bring some smooth round rocks from the river so that Squirrel would think they were nuts in the dark.  Squirrel grabbed the rocks from Bear when he arrived and chattered away to him about coming to the party so late.  As he ran up the tree the rocks felt very heavy and they fell from his paws and landed very hard right on the head of the Bear.  The Bear was in such pain and so angry at his friend that he shook the tree very hard.  The Squirrel landed right on the bump on his sore head.  Bear was so angry that he took the squirrel in his hand and threw him and his nuts into the sky … where they remain today as a constellation and many bright stars in the sky, frozen and far away from Bear, who misses his mischievous friend Squirrel and wishes he would come back to the tree by the sea.

“But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So, be careful of the stories you tell, and the stories you listen to” (King, 10).

ΩΩΩ ΩΩΩ

When I told this story to my daughter, she said that is not the way that she would tell the story.  Although I obviously made up the story I felt a sense of disappointment that she was rejecting “my” story, for my story had become a part of me.  She said that the story is silly.  I found myself remembering what King said that the “sober voice in a Christian story …creates a sense of veracity” (King, 23).  If a story is told with humour deemed silly by the listener does it also undermine the veracity for European readers?

Works Cited:

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

Miller,W., Schuster,S.C., Welch,A.J., Ratan,A., Bedoya-Reina,O.C., Zhao,F., Kim,H.L., Burhans,R.C., Drautz,D.I., Wittekindt,N.E. et al. (2012) Polar and brown bear genomes reveal ancient admixture and demographic footprints of past climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science U.S.A., 109, E2382–2390.

Van der Merwe, M. Brown, J. & Kotler, B. (2014) Quantifying the future value of cacheable food using fox squirrels (sciurus niger), Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution, 60:1, 1-10, DOI: 10.1080/15659801.2014.907974

1.  Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality.

The view that cultures can be separated into “oral culture” and “written culture” is a flawed conception of how culture works according to J. Edward Chamberlin in If this is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? and Courtney MacNeil’s Orality. Chamberlin defines “oral cultures” as those “whose major forms of imaginative expression are in speech and performance” (Stories 18) and “written cultures” are generally considered those that use alphabetic writing. MacNeil identifies that orality can be defined as the means through which we exchange information and as a media in competition with other forms. It is important to examine the rational arguments Western readers require to see the flaws in the concept so that they can begin to transition thinking away from use of the distinction to divide “them and us”, the “civilians and barbarians”. This blog will show how Chamberlin and MacNeil demonstrate the errors in the concept of separated cultures through illustration that many oral cultures are abundant in non-syllabic writing and many written cultures have oral traditions.

Chamberlin rejects the distinction between oral cultures and written cultures as a “misconception” (Stories 19) that entrenches the divide between peoples and dismisses as primitive those from cultures considered to be oral. To dispel the myth that there are exclusively oral cultures, he identifies the non-syllabic writing that take the same prominence in the society as written texts do for cultures using alphabetic writing. Such non-syllabic writing includes various weavings, carvings, masks, hats, and strings. Princeton Professor of linguistics Joshua Katz said that the majority of modern English texts use only twenty words, whereas Father Cobo in History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indians’ Customs and Their Origin, Together with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institution explains that indigenous Andeans from the Inca empire used quipos (made of rope) with an infinite number of knots and many colors to tell such complex and subtle histories that specialists, “quipo camayos” were required to maintain them and “read” them. The Incan Andeans were considered illiterate (and thus inferior) by the Spanish because they did not have an alphabetic language. As Chamberlin claims, “written” language can take many forms.

Chamberlin then identifies how European cultures, considered written cultures for several centuries, have well established, ritualized oral traditions for some of their most important institutions such as churches, parliaments, schools, and courts. In addition to these highly formalized oral traditions, he identifies the role of oral stories, songs, rhymes, anthems and myths in many cultures’ creation stories and ceremonies of belief. Furthermore, he identifies that “finding consolation requires ceremony” (Stories 102) as he talks about how many non-alphabetic and alphabetic cultures, including 20^th century Americans, use dirges, poems, and songs for emotional support. Oral traditions form a fundamental part of many cultures, including those who use alphabetic written language.

MacNeil quotes Chamberlin as she agrees with him that “speech and writing are so entangled with each other in our various forms” (Orality) and advances his arguments through discussion of how the many technological advances, namely cyberspace, have demonstrated how natural this entanglement is for humankind. She also rejects the view that orality is primitive and that written language is key to the evolutionary process as espoused by those such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. (In this short video Ong argues that oral cultures are inferior because they cannot create scientific treatises: Walter Ong – Oral Cultures and Early Writing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo.) She says that their claims that orality is ephemeral is wrong as clearly demonstrated with audio files and the explosion of such applications as YouTube. Conversely, applications where written communications will disappear after reading such as Snapchat belie the permanence of the written word! This explosion of integration of the oral and written shows the natural way that cultures work.

MacNeil, like Chamberlin, expands upon the use of orality as a broad human way of “accessing collective memory or innate human truth” (Orality) in such forms as laments, dirges, or slam poetry. She defines these forms as part of meschonnic orality, the fundamental way that humans access an interior drive toward interaction and connection. In many cultures, even those with extensive written language, orality is still the overriding art form and an essential part of the arts. MacNeil concludes that despite evolution and modernization, most of us use orality as the main means of communication.

Chamberlin and MacNeil illustrate how cultures are both oral and written and how digital and non-digital cultures weave both together. Understanding this allows us to step back and question our interpretation of the written word as “the truth” and the spoken, sung, or chanted word as inferior. McLuhan predicted in 1965 that “world connectivity” would bring us to “wholeness” (The World is Show Business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY).  As Tom Pettit says “print literacy is an exception in a much longer trajectory of human thought, which may be in the process of restoring earlier modes of communication based on speech and instantaneity rather than space and time-delay” (After Ongism 207).

Works Cited

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto:  AA. Knopf, 2003. Print.

Cobo, B. History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indians’ Customs and Their Origin, Together with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institutions. University of Texas Press, 2010.  Web 11 Nov 2015.

Courtney MacNeil, “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/

Hartley, John. “After Ongism, the Evolution of Networked Intelligence” Orality and Literacy, London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. Ebook Library. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.

McLuhan, Marshall. The World is Show Business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY

Ong, Walter.  Oral Cultures and Early Writing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo