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/.