Settler Relations

I like this question and what it’s asking. This question, like a hyperlink, is a careful invitation to stray off the path of what is easy–to read linearly, it is a call to re-imagine these stories as more than opposing dualisms. So let’s click away, explore what these stories could mean in relation to one another. Vladmir Nabokov, a favourite writer of mine once wrote in one of his lectures that “all great novels are great fairy tales“. What he means by this (I think) is the sense of affect and possibility in-text, in story telling. King, I think, in his very purposeful reading of the two stories, is playing into the hands of these dichotomies–that the Genesis doctrine is an instructive way of being in the world, while the Earth Diver story is collaborative. King, always the trouble-maker and truth-teller, is pointing these dichotomies out to us, highlighting them. From here, the reader (or listener) has a choice, to take things at face value, to make the easy choice of reading these two things as on opposite ends of a spectrum, or interrogating these peculiarities, asking why King has made such a point to separate the two.

Indeed, the histories that Christianity has on Indigenous peoples across this land is severe and grave. I think to Dr. Daniel Heath-Justice, a two-spirited and Cherokee contemporary theorist here at UBC, who traces and delineates the ways in which a Christian doctrine is implicitly linked to the subjugation, moralization, and ongoing colonization of aboriginal peoples, and specifically, two-spirited peoples. The complexities of two-spiritedness are not to be dismissed ,or written off. Too often in academia, two-spiritedness is conflated with queerness–and how easy to draw parallels between  a “queer two-spirited” sensibility and a Christian moralizing while looking at say, the fights against same-sex marriage in the contemporary American landscape. These two things are not the same, however. Many nations had differing roles and understandings of two-spiritedness, and indeed, there has been a resurgence and reclamation of the term by contemporaries like Heath-Justice, but I do not wish to flatten the lived-experience of many peoples whose identities transgressed, and were entirely separate from a Western queer experience- many of whom were situating inside and outside of the gender spectrum, for example. But I digress, my point here, is that like King is showing us, the parallels we can draw using a “good vs bad” or “us vs them” mentality leads us on a dangerous path.

What I think is a more fruitful venture in reading or re-reading King’s two stories, is keeping them in conversation with a contemporary Native American landscape, wherein assimilation, colonization ‘mixedness’, and erasures are the lived realities of many. Indeed, King himself exists at a juncture which Canadian writer Fred Wah might call “living in the hyphen”; he is both Cherokee and Greek. The point I’m making here, is that there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ story telling here. King hyperbolizes the tones of the two stories to show one reading of them–that the Genesis story is harsh and authoritative while the diving woman story is much more laid-back, relaxed. An important point he makes while telling the falling woman story in his Massey Lecture reading of it, is his joke that naming the woman (he fluctuates between Blanche and Charm) might be decided by “someone you trust”; someone who “might lower your taxes” (King 2013). In this moment, King is pointing at the complexities of group-story. He’s nodding his head at the issues at hand of telling, re-telling, and listening to stories. My mind raced when he made this seemingly flippant joke, thinking to all the ways in which stories aren’t all created equal. Anyone can tell a story, indeed, but not everyone listens. Entire stories have been told and devoured by politicians like John A MacDonald, our first prime-minister who passed the Indian Act .

It would be easy to read the two stories as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but this is a blunder. Holding the two not as opposing ends, but rather, as complicated and intertwining systems that can both  be believed at once holds a key to a more nuanced understanding of story and story-telling. If we can move past the idea that if we take one story to be a truth, than the other is just a story, and embrace the multiplicities of being in the world, of having complicated ways of understanding our own being in the world, which draws upon both stories, or neither story, or yet one hundred more, we start to see a certain gradient set upon us. Things need not be black and white. I am struck then, with the ways in which indigenous land claims across Canada have cited their own stories in their fight to reclaim land or treaties (pdf). This offers yet another parallel to the multiplicities that unfold when we merge and meld stories-weaving tales and legends into legal documents, much like a Genesis melding and yielding to a falling woman.

Works Cited

“Cherokee Nation.” Cherokee Nation. Cherokee Nation, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan. The Limits to Union: Same-sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002. Print.

Heath-Justice, Daniel. Daniel Heath Justice: Imagine Otherwise. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Feb. 2014.

Indian
Act,
R.S.C.
1985,
c.
I‐5.

Justice, Daniel Heath, and James H. Cox. “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 20.1 (2008): n. pag. Print.

Pitzer, Andrea. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Pegasus, 2013. Print.

Roger William V. British Columbia and Canada. BC Supreme Court. 2004. Woodward and Company. David M. Robbins, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Wah, Fred. Lecture. Standing in the Doorway – the Hyphen in Chinese-Canadian Poetry. Richmond Public Library, Richmond. Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. University of British Columbia. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.