Home used to be a small farm nestled beside a river out in the countryside. During the winter home was the smell of wood on the fire in the house, and during the summer home was the smell of horses and hay outside. Home was the beautiful view of the river and the mountains from our backyard. Home was the feeling of a warm horse beneath me when I was riding bareback. Home was the numb tingly feeling that you get in your fingers when carrying out water pails to the horses in the middle of December. Home was the sound of frogs in the backyard on a summer night. And it was also the sound of hungry horses neighing because they want to be fed in the morning. Home was the taste of burned marshmallows in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter. For my childhood this was home, but due to unforeseen circumstances I was forced to grow up and leave this place that I called home. 

My next home was in a small town, this home was very different from my first home and it took a while to get used to. Back on the farm there were beautiful green mountains with tall trees that were the homes of squirrels. In this new home the mountains are all brown decorated with cactus and sagebrush which were the homes of rattlesnakes. Back on the farm it was just the four of us my Mom, Dad, little sister, and myself. But now this new home is really busy and loud filled with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and friends all coming over to say goodbye. This home is the place where I also had to say goodbye to my Dad as in this home he passed away from cancer. Our family of four soon became a family of three the house went quiet. This home although filled with painful memories is still a home that I love as it is also filled with happy memories too. One memory I have is sitting outside with my father in the backyard watching big fluffy bumble bees pollinate the pink flowers in the tree. This was also the home where I became closer to my mom and sister. It is the home where we three girls united together and planned vacations to Hawaii, bought a hot tub, held parties, and watched TV in bed together. My relationship I have with my mother and little sister grew a lot in this home. But soon I grew out of this home. I got bored of going to the same restaurants, and shopping at the one mall that we had in this little town. And I just did not picture myself going to one university we had in town. I knew that if I went to this university I would be going to school with all the people I went to highschool with I was no longer a teenager I was becoming an adult and therefore I moved out on my own.

The home that I live in now is in Vancouver. For me Vancouver is a place of independence, freedom, opportunity, and new experiences. Of course when I first moved here I often got homesick and yearned to be back in my little town but soon that changed. Vancouver is now my home as it is a place where am able to follow my dreams and passions. Here at my home I can study what I am passionate about as I am able to attend UBC which has “one of the leading Asian studies programs in Canada” (The department of Asian studies). I also am able to pursue my dream of  becoming an English teacher and be able to choose from an abundance of different teaching jobs. I am also able to develop new hobbies as Vancouver gave me the opportunity to become an avid cold water scuba diver. The multiculturalism in Vancouver is another reason why I call it home as I am able to meet new people, try new food, and practice speaking new languages. And now when I go back to my small hometown, I feel homesick and cannot wait to get back to Vancouver. 

Overall when I am told to write a short story that describes my home I cannot help but write about a bunch of different places. For me I had a different place that I called home for each stage of my life. These places all hold a special place in my heart and I could not say that I loved one more than another.

Commentary

Before writing this story I did a little bit of research to look into how to write captivating descriptive passages.  I learned that it is good to use all of the human senses (Anders) and this is what I tried to do for most of my story.

Citations

Anders, Charlie Jane. “How to Write Descriptive Passages Without Boring the Reader or Yourself.” io9, io9, 16 Dec. 2015, io9.gizmodo.com/how-to-write-descriptive-passages-without-boring-the-re-1479764153.

Andresen, Brendan. “Scuba Diving Club Vancouver Courses Lessons Training.” UBC Aqua Society, diveubc.com/.

“The Department of Asian Studies: University of British Columbia.” Department of Asian Studies, asia.ubc.ca/.

I have a great story to tell you. This story starts off with the children the most innocent and naive members of the village. The children that lived in the village all grew up being taught and told stories about the greatness of their leader. The village referred to their leader as Father as he was the protector and provider of the village. Every child learned in school the great story of how Father fought off the bad people who threatened the security of their village. The children loved hearing these stories and even created a game that they would play after school. The children would pretend to be Father and his army and would run and catch the other children who pretended to be the bad people. They ran through the woods with sharpened sticks yelling I am going to catch you and I am going to kill you, the game only ended when all the bad people were caught and ‘killed’. 

The children had to attend school everyday, and everyday during class one child was picked to tell a story to the class. Most children told stories where they confessed their love for Father or of the greatness of Father. But today the story told was very different. Today a little girl named Lily was chosen to tell a story. Lily was an abnormally small orphan child who was adopted into their village, everyone loved Lily as she was very kind to everyone she knew. Lily started off her story by describing a beautiful scenery of a village that was nestle by a mountain next to a waterfall all the students were captivated as they never heard of a village this beautiful. A student cried out “I want to travel to this village it sounds like the setting of a fairytale!”. When Lily heard this her eyes got shallow and dark, “You can’t travel to this place anymore this village was burned to the ground and everyone is now dead,” she said in a hollow tone. The whole class waited for her to continue they were all on the edge of their seats. Lily then described the gory details of the burning and slaughtering of the people in this village, she ended her story by stating “the man that all of you refer to as father is the one who did this to my village”. Everyone gasped in horror, a few children started to cry, and the teacher’s face turned sickly pale. This was the first time the children learned about the evil that was present in their world. The teacher hurried to rush Lily out of the room, she then returned to the class telling them to forget the story and that it was not true. “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” (King, 10). 

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories (CBC Massey Lectures) (p. 10). House of Anansi Press Inc. Kindle Edition. 

Commentary what I discovered

I found this assignment more difficult then I expected. I actually had to do some extra reading when it comes to writing a story, I learned that it is always helpful to write stories that are similar to own events in your own life this helps you add real and authentic emotion into your story (Jenkins). Furthermore, I read about the importance of sharing your story and I felt having a fictional story that I could connect to myself is a way to get my story out in a way that does not feel like a violation or a threat to my privacy.

When reading my story out loud I felt it was great to get some feedback from my peers and I ended up changing my story a lot after reading it to them. I feel like when you share your story out loud you are forced to really hear what you are writing and this causes you to want to change things or to come up with new ideas to make it better.

Jenkins, Jerry B. “How to Write a Short Story: 9 Steps from a Best Selling Author.” Jerry Jenkins | Proven Writing Tips, Jerry Jenkins, 12 Nov. 2019, jerryjenkins.com/how-to-write-short-stories/.

“The Importance of Sharing Your Story.” Communication Skills | ReachOut Australia, au.reachout.com/articles/the-importance-of-sharing-your-story.

In my blog post I will be summarizing three significant points that I found interesting in the last chapter of Chamberlin’s book If this is Your Land, Where are your Stories. The last chapter of Chamberlin’s book is called Ceremonies and I was curious when the chapter explained that in order to tell the indigenous stories the proper ceremony is required (Chamberlin, ch.11).  In J. Edward Chamberlin’s book interview he explained that an “elder  … wouldn’t [tell the story]  if the conditions did not exist [and] he was quite willing to die and not transfer the stories because the conditions were not right the ceremony could not be produced properly so the story would not be told” (Knopf). However, westerners also have ceremonies too as they need certain conditions to be met in order to accept the story. In the interview Chamberlin gives an example of this in his book as people needed to go through the “process of proving the geological record that yes a landslide took place 7000 years ago that corroborates some native myth” (Knopf).  Overall my take away from this was that people have different conditions that need to be met in order to accept/transfer the story. 

The next point I found interesting about in this last chapter was the Western dominance that was present when deciding what story confirms the truth. It was explained that “the court was inclined to see the scientific story as confirming the legendary one. However, the elders of the Gitksan were at pains to persuade the judge that each story was validated by the other; that neither had a monopoly on understanding what happened” (Chamberlin, ch.11). This goes to show that Indigenous knowledge is still being viewed as being fictional and this most likely is due to the racism that is still present in society. It has been proven that “there are many cases where science and history are catching up with what Indigenous people have long known” (Nicholas), however society seems not to accepted this as many people still look at Indigenous stories as being fully fictions.  

Lastly, what I found interesting in the last chapter was how it touched on the question of what makes a story fictional and what makes it real and then it shows how the lines are often blurred. In the chapter Chamberlin explains how “the problem with poems and paintings and performances from other cultures is not their strangeness, which some part of us always welcomes, but the way in which they give a signal that we are at the border” (Chamberlin, ch. 11). This border is a “visible boundary from everyday life to the theatre” (Knopf) or how I like to think about it is the line between reality and fiction. In society we see some things as being black and white like it is either fiction or reality and nothing in between however Chamberlin explains that this is wrong to see things this way. Chamberlin further says how science is often looked at as “hard practical reality” (Knopf) but this is wrong as it does have some element of fiction in it as scientists have never seen an atom yet they draw pictures of atoms and we believe that these pictures are truthful (Knopf).  Society gets to decide what is truthful and not. People sometime have issues in believing that Indigenous stories are truthful and are based in reality and this is most likely because of the the gap that society has created between Indigenous education and Western education. “In pre-colonial times, the process of learning for Aboriginal  young people was very different from educational systems found in Western societies“(Simpson) and just because something is different it does not mean it is wrong or untruthful. Overall the Indigenous stories should not be thought of something that needs to be backed up with science, chapter 11 shows that their is value looking at scientific data and Indigenous stories equally backing up and confirming each other (Chamberlin, ch.11).

citations

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? . Knopf Canada. Kindle Edition.

Knopf, Alfred.“If this is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?” The Writer’s Cafe, 2003, http://writerscafe.ca/book_blogs/writers/j-edward-chamberlin_if-this-is-your-land-where-are-your-stories.html. Accessed 16 Jan. 2020.

Nicholas, George. “How Western Science Is Finally Catching up to Indigenous Knowledge.” Macleans.ca, 11 July 2018, www.macleans.ca/society/how-western-science-is-finally-catching-up-to-indigenous-knowledge/.

Simpson, Leanne. “Stories, Dreams, and Ceremonies: Anishinaabe Ways of Learning.” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, 7 Mar. 2012, tribalcollegejournal.org/stories-dreams-ceremonies-anishinaabe-ways-learning/.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello, my name is Sidney! I am so exciting to be blogging with all of you! I am a fourth year Arts student majoring in Asian studies and minoring in the Education of language learning and teaching. I am graduating this May and after I graduate I hope to teach English as an additional language in Vancouver.

Why did I choose this course? & My expectations for this course.

The reason why I chose this course is because I believe that this course is able to support me as a aspiring English teacher. As an English teacher who wants to teach English in Vancouver I believe it is my job to not only teach my students English but also to teach my students about Canadian culture, traditions, and history. I feel that the best way to teach the English language and Canadian culture is by getting my students to read different types Canadian literature. I hope that ENGL 372 will introduce me to different types of Canadian literature and teach me how to properly understand and analyze it as this would allow me to be able to make informed decisions when picking Canadian literature to teach to my future students. I also hope that this course introduces Indigenous narratives as I would like to become more familiar with this topic and become acquainted with materials that I can use to teach this topic. When immigrants and international students first come to Canada they may not know that Canada was colonized and that the land of the indigenous people was stolen by settlers and I think it is partially my job to teach them about this part of Canada’s history and good way to teach this is through Canadian literature.

The Danger of Teaching English 

Another reason why I wanted to take this course is because this course involves reading the narratives of Indigenous people and through these narratives I want to become more aware of the dangers of teaching English. I first learned about the dangers of teaching English in LLED 489A. LLED 489A is not a class that you would expect to learn this kind of lesson as LLED 489A is an English grammar class. However, during one of the classes our professor decided to take the class to the UBC long house to watch a film based on an indigenous story. At first I was confused why the professor wanted to ‘waste’ a day of class to go watch this film, I thought to myself “what does this film have to do with me becoming an English teacher?”. But after watching the film I learned a really important lesson about teaching English. This lesson was that teaching English can be dangerous as English is a predator language and can kill other languages. The film that I watched Edge of Knife (Siff) taught me this as I learned that the film was made “for the purpose of revitalizing the Indigenous Haida Gwaii language, as their language had become endangered due to the fact that most people in the Indigenous community grew up only learning English” (Scharf, 2019). In Canadian society English is more accepted and economically valued and this is what causes the death of Indigenous languages (Scharf, 2019). But the film Edge of the Knife is fighting to keep the Haida Gwaii language alive as the film is “performed entirely in the Haida language” (TIFF Trailers) and most of the young actors who were of Haida Gwaii background were taught the Haida language for the film. Before the film there were “less than 20 fluent speakers” (TIFF Trailers) and now after the film there is much more. I recommend everyone to watch the film Edge of Knife as I can promise you that you have never watched a film like this before. The movie is based on an indigenous oral story and it paints a beautiful yet haunting and dark story about a man who turns into a beast “and spirals into insanity after accidentally killing his best friend’s son” (Siff).This movie is not only filmed beautifully but also the making of the film itself represents something special as it represents the push back against the predator language English and the revival of the Haida Gwaii language (CBC Docs).

Brief description of ENGL 372

My understanding is that in this course we are going to be reading and analyzing different types of European and Indigenous literature. By reading this literature we can further learn about social dynamics and the lives of different people throughout Canadian history. And by closely analyzing the literature we can learn how to think critically about the events that have happened in the past and how these events may now even have a huge impact on our present and future.

Works cited

CBC Docs. Youtube, “Making the world’s first Haida-language feature film”. 4 Sep. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WwICs7S-AQ

Haig-Brown, Helen and Gwaai Edenshaw, directors. Edge of the Knife. Haida Gwaii, Niijang Xyaalas Productions, 1 Sept. 2018.

Scharf, Sidney. “Metaphor of Language: Language as a predator” 2019.

“Sgaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife).” SIFF, https://www.siff.net/festival/sgaawaay-kuuna-(edge-of-the-knife).

TIFF Trailers. “SGAAWAAY K’UUNA (EDGE OF THE KNIFE) TRAILER”. YouTube, 5 Dec. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnbOw5Nuq2U.