“Tell me the truth,” everyone demands. Not many will demand the written truth.

Keith Thor Carlson, in Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History, argues that the oral stories of the Salish are just as authentic as the written stories of the Europeans. It is simply another way of knowing.

This type of knowing is just as concerned with authenticity and truth as the European or Western ways of knowing. Carlson explains that in both societies, “it is understood that poorly conveyed or inaccurate historical narratives pose dangers, not only to the reputation of the speaker but to the listening (or reading) audience” (58).

So why is it that orality is often situated outside of authenticity in Western culture? The Salish people are well aware of the dangers of misrepresenting a story. Salish stories bring into the world the spirits of historical actors spoken of and “if a story was imperfectly recalled it was wrong for [Salish historians] to ‘guess’ meaning, to pad, improvise, paraphrase or omit. It was better not to tell” (qtd. in Carlson 59).

This feeling of inauthenticity comes back to what J. Edward Chamberlin describes as a “kind of thinking” (19) – not a kind of a fact or a kind of truth.

It is important to realize that every day, we tell the truth. When confronted, we must tell before we write and even when we write, I believe it is a type of post-orality. When writing, we make drafts and we make changes. We move words around and add in sentences. We come back to it days later and realize something was wrong and we change it.

It is not concrete or as the saying goes, “written in stone” when something is written. Changes can be made before “publishing” and even then, after things are published, interpretations continue beyond that. The reader comes away from it and can add on to this written content with the experiences they have gathered and lived through.

One of the assumptions I take from levelling literacy over orality is the idea that literacy lasts. But as Carlson retells the stories of Mrs Peter and Henry Robinson, paper can be burned and lost. Writing on stone can be broken or misplaced. It can erode and become illegible.

I believe orality, like Carlson says, is yet another way of knowing. As I sit in lectures, I don’t often question my professor’s spoken information. I’ve learned from them and oral Salish stories operate in a similar fashion. The act of speaking is the very same act of writing something down. Once spoken, Salish stories become truths and go out into the world in this way through time and space.

It is interesting to apply this notion of writing the truth to technologies today. Texting is an integral part of our society today, especially among peers, friends, and family. It straddles the border between oral and written language. Although it is written, it is written as if spoken at times. And most of the time, fingers go so fast, nobody takes a second look to what is being typed and interesting things happen.

So yet again, texting is just another way of knowing. Just like writing down stories or telling out loud stories. They are just as authentic. And can equally be untruthful. Not everything written is truth, nor is everything said. But I believe, one should not be considered more advanced or more authentic than the other.

References

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.”Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. 43-72. Print.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterbough, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190. Web. 04 april 2013.

My favourite movie is Avatar. It can be summarized as what John Lutz writes, “enter[ing] a world that is distant in time and alien in culture, attempting to perceive indigenous performance through their eyes as well as those of the [Earth]” (32).

And if you have watched the movie, it is quite literally as Lutz described; a white man, Jake Sully, seeing through the eyes of a genetically engineered body called the Avatar that is fused with the DNA of the Earth host and the DNA of the “natives”. Confusing? I know.

Although Jake sees through the eyes of his Avatar, his mind is still far and distant and attached to his body that travelled from Earth. He attempts to see and live like the Na’vi and is eventually accepted as an Omaticaya. But he is always attached to that human body. The Avatar is but a vessel for his human-made mind.

This is how I view Lutz’s assumptions. He is speaking from his own European-made experiences. From his experiences, those who would normally read his writings would be from a European background – not an Indigenous one. To him, the world has advanced towards European beliefs, values, technologies, and culture. To Lutz, Indigenous culture is “distant in time and alien in culture”.

He then calls for readers to engage in this challenge and “step outside and see one’s own culture as alien” and that both European and Indigenous stories must be put under “the same ethnohistorical lens” (Lutz 32).

Lutz’s assumptions are clear. The world looks through the lens of the European. The European must then look at themselves through the lens of another culture’s in order to understand. It is clear in his writing that it was influenced by the Europeanized English-speaking and writing world.

And exactly what is European? Often times, European becomes lumped with American and then extrapolated as white. Normally, when someone in North America says “white”, I assume they mean all people who had an ancestry from Europe – particularly British or French. Similarly, in his writings, Michael Ignatieff imagines Canada through myth. He compares the American myth, or the American Dream to that of Canada’s, which is not a single myth, he says, but “three competing ones, English Canadian, French Canadian and Aboriginal” (13). This is interesting in that Ignatieff, white himself in race, is able to differentiate between two different European cultural groups – but not Aboriginal.

It seems the world has been dichotomized as either European/white or not. Hari Kondabolu talks about a “white minority” in 2042. He says race is is just a way to divide, to generalize, and to socially construct the world we live in. It seems white people are homogenized into one, as well as all minority groups.

This goes back to J. Edward Chamerlin’s notion of “Us and Them”. At least in North America and parts of Europe, “Us” is often equated with white. So in that when Lutz writes for “us” to challenge ourselves to think outside of European constructs, he is talking to the white version of “Us”. (Note that version is not pluralized.)

So the way I view Lutz’s assumptions is with understanding – the understanding that he writes from a background that is dominated by European/North American/white mentality. It’s the understanding that unless the character in a fictional novel is described otherwise, the character is most likely white. And even if the character is described with features that may indicate non-whiteness, the character can be still mistaken to be white unless explicitly informed.

In the same way, the first contact stories told by Indigenous people (described by Lutz) is oralized within the background of a variety of Indigenous cultures. Some scholars may decide to analyze stories and texts only linguistically – not taking into the account the contexts of which when the story was formed, where it came into being, or even by who imagined it into existence. However, I believe contextual background is important along with linguistic analysis. Without this acknowledgement, erasure of differences tends to happen. And so then groups becomes homogenized and with it, individuals become lost.

References

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

Ignatieff, Michael. “True Patriot Love.” True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. 1-30. Print.

Kondabolu, Hari. “Hari Kondabolu- 2042 & the White Minority.” YouTube, 05 Feb. 2014. Web. 06 Feb. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85fr6nbiMT4>.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Aboriginal — Non-Aboriginal Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45.