1. Why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? . . . What is he trying to show us?

I’m dying to remind myself that the basis of Christian doctrine is rectitude and reward, crime and punishment, even though my partner has warned me that this is probably not a good idea. Tell a story, she told me. Don’t preach. Don’t try to sound profound. It’s unbecoming, and you do it poorly. Don’t show them your mind. Show them your imagination.

So am I such an ass as to disregard this good advice and suggest that the stories contained within the matrix of Christianity and the complex of nationalism are responsible for the social, political, and economic problems we face? Am I really arguing that the martial and hierarchical nature of Western religion and Western privilege has fostered stories that encourage egotism and self-interest? Am I suggesting that, if we hope to create a truly civil society, we must first burn all the flags and kill all the gods, because in such a world we could no longer tolerate such weapons of mass destruction?

No, I wouldn’t do that. (King 26-7)

And yet, Thomas King has already made these suggestions, in a somewhat disingenuous way (a rhetorician might call this apophasis), by invoking and discarding them. Nor does he discard them very definitively; he says that he “wouldn’t do that” as though he could well or would very much like to. Indeed, his casual rewriting of Genesis seems to support rather than detract from these disavowed claims.

I quote King at length here to exhibit my moments of greatest struggle with his text, and to acknowledge my instincts of dissent and defensiveness. I know that full-fledged Christian apologetics are not what is called for here. This is why I appreciate Dr. Paterson’s invitation to read beyond the dichotomies King seems to be setting up and consider why he might be doing so.

Although we haven’t reached the novel yet in our course of work for the term, I can’t help relating my thinking and feeling about this question to what King does in Green Grass, Running Water. When I read the book three years ago, I found it quite brilliant, provocative, clever, and on the whole enjoyable (and I mean this in a non-trivial way: the novel manages to be extremely fun, stimulating, affecting, and at times surprisingly inspiring). This reading—perhaps the intervening years of study have made me more prone and confident to question!—I find myself more troubled and challenged by what seems like an insistent belittling of Christian myth. In fact, the novel affects to collapse a Christian narrative into its Coyote-story (or Coyote-stories), more or less as a silly or aberrant offshoot (a rogue dream).

This strategy of collapse is no less surprising than the simplistic dichotomising he seems to carry out in The Truth About Stories; both suggest a basic dualism that seems quite far from the intellectual and ethical projects of J. Edward Chamberlin and even John Lutz. They are concerned with finding common ground between systems of story and the understandings they support, not with establishing moral hierarchies between them or writing them off as pernicious.

True, even their projects must involve some reduction and simplification. Upon reflection, I don’t think the complex of stories underpinning a single individual, much less a “society,” could really be entirely articulated and examined.

In that sense, it’s really rather peculiar that King should characterize the spiritual, mythical, narrative discourse(s) of Christianity as “monolog[ical]” (21). As though there were ever a supposed cultural monolith as drastically heterogeneous, fragmentary and debated! This reminds me of the German philosopher Odo Marquard in his thinking about “polymyths” and “monomyths” (88). For Marquard, the polymyth (analogous with polytheism) is harmless and therefore desirable; the multiple stories, gods, and powers keep each other in check so that no one of them has absolute sway. It’s the monomyth you have to look out for (93).

Yet Lutz and Wendy Wickwire help us to see that, practically speaking, we’re not dealing with a simple static dichotomy of monomyth vs polymyth but with fluid, changing, constantly renegotiated contact zones, meetings of horizons in which different (but perhaps not wholly incommensurable) stories meet. Values and outcomes are always somewhat complex and unclosed to begin with: as with the adoption of pre-Christian stories and practices into instantiations of the Christian mythos, or the mixture of Christian and courtly values in medieval romance, or indeed the European elements in post-contact stories of North-West coast Indigenous peoples. These cases are not to be dismissed (as post-contact stories were by anthropologists) for not fitting the type, but rather valued as ambiguous places of intersection displaying the extraordinary complexity of belief.

Ambiguous or, to use King’s word, enigmatic. These are areas of imperfect understanding and (as Chamberlin would point out) constant contradiction (115). Perhaps they carry the good news that we don’t have to be—can’t be—entirely consistent. Can only one story really be sacred and true?

There’s a story about a little girl who asks her mother where they came from. The mother replies, “God made us on the seventh day of creation.” The girl, still unsure, asks her father the same question. His answer—“We evolved from apes.” Now she’s more confused than ever. She goes back to her mother and says, “You told me that God made us and Dad said we evolved from apes. I don’t understand—which one’s true?” “They’re both true, honey,” her mother responds, “your father’s just talking about his side of the family.”

A resolution and no resolution at all. Chamberlin would have us see that we can and do believe in both, and that this isn’t just a result of muddled thinking. In fact, sometimes it can be the result of humour and irony. Lutz notes that Indigenous storytellers often use humour and irony to “challenge and reorder hierarchies of power” (13). Maybe what King is doing is using humour to point out the radical contingency of the stories we live by, the telling of them, and even the analytical models we use to discuss them. They didn’t need to be this way. And changing the telling or the valuation can have genuine transformative power. Laughter, which may be as close to a cultural universal as it gets, may be a potent means of finding common ground. At least, being able to laugh at ourselves may have a certain value.

Works Cited

Beard, Mary. “A history of laughter – from Cicero to The Simpsons.” The Guardian, 28 June 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/28/history-laughter-roman-jokes-mary-beard. Accessed 22 February 2021.

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

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Harper Collins, 1993.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi Press, 2003.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as Spiritual Performance.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, edited by John Lutz, University of British Columbia Press, 2007, pp. 30-45.

—. Introduction. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous- European Contact, edited by John Lutz, University of British Columbia Press, 2007, pp. 1-15.

Marquard, Odo. “In Praise of Polytheism.” Farewell to Matters of Principle : Philosophical Studies, Oxford University Press, 1989. ProQuest, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=271453. Accessed 15 June 2020.

Marty, Martin E. “Fractured Christian World(s).” The University of Chicago Divinity School, 18 January 2016, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/fractured-christian-worlds. Accessed 22 February 2021.

Wickwire, Wendy. Introduction. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory, compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire, Talon Books, 2005, pp. 1-30.

It was a true pleasure reading my peers’ beautiful and eloquent reflections on home. Some dwelt on aspects of place: the sights, sounds, and scents, for example, that may often go unnoticed but end up making an important part of who we are. I suspect this is an especially familiar thread in Canadian stories of home (although not exclusive to them); we need only think of BC’s self-promotion as “Super, Natural British Columbia” to remember the extent to which a certain experience of land characterizes the image of a Canadian identity.

Other stories focused on home as a cognitive and/or social structure, a web of memories, activities, and relationships. A space of interaction between people.

Our accounts of home often hinged on narratives of travel. It is not surprising, maybe, that departures from and movements of the people we know and love, returns to the places we recognize, shape our experience of home. This is a factor of some individuality, as no two person’s histories of motion and travel are exactly the same. (I can say with the splendid Scottish writer Nan Shepherd that I’ve slept in the same bedroom for practically my entire life!) That being said, the same (or similar) conditions of mobility characteristic of contemporary society have surely had no small impact on how we live and think of home.

I think of John Clare (who lived some two hundred years ago) and his haunting words on relocation and desolation in “The Flitting”:

I’ve left my own old home of homes,

Green fields and every pleasant place;

The summer like a stranger comes,

I pause and hardly know her face.

I miss the hazel’s happy green,

The blue bell’s quiet hanging blooms,

Where envy’s sneer was never seen,

Where staring malice never comes. (1-8)

And this was for a move between the villages Helpston and Northborough in Cambridgeshire, which were all of (as I reckon) four or five kilometers apart. (Clare faced more traumatic dislocations in his life, and died in an asylum.) How has home changed its meaning? How does that meaning still change between cultures, between individuals?

One common (you could say “formal”) feature struck me especially: lyrical rhythms of repetition with recurring phrases like “Home is . . . ” or “I am home.” I think that this testifies on one level to the unclosedness of home as a concept, its in-built tendency to change over time and acquire new meanings. But that changeability involves a recurrence, something like the refrain of songs like “Galway Bay.” (That is a song my grandmother loves. My family is mainly Irish and Scottish in origin; both the Irish and the Scots have large diasporic communities and strong traditions of nostalgia.) Or Robert Burns’s “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and “Auld Lang Syne.” There is a sense of finding a home through these rehearsals and repetitions of loss and yearning—as John Keats locates a feeling of belonging in the embodied rhythms of a sleeping lover’s breath.

I think also that there’s a parallel with the atmospheric rhythms that punctuate our experience—like the seasons. To give one example: there has been ice in the Fraser near where I live these past few cold days. This is the first time we’ve seen so much freezing in years. Walking out onto the river a little ways, I remembered doing the same with my brother several years ago, when the ice was even thicker—an unforgettable experience. More than that, looking over the frozen expanse towards far wooded shores brought to consciousness an early childhood image of the Canadian North: tundra, frozen rivers, mountains, pine forests, a land of wolves and ravens. I don’t even know where this picture really came from. A movie? But this fantasy world, which doesn’t even truly exist, has been part of what “home” means to me. This fact came to me in a visionary instant.

Works Cited

“Ascent to greatness: the charmed afterlife of Nan Shepherd.” The Scotsman, 9 January 2017, https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/ascent-greatness-charmed-afterlife-nan-shepherd-1458734. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Clare, John. “The Flitting.” Poemhunter, 13 April 2010, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-flitting/.

“John McDermott – Galway Bay.” Youtube, uploaded by LadyGreyCarolyn, 31 January 2014, https://youtu.be/EHkM51ywUZo.

Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Owen, Siobhàn. “Siobhàn Owen ~ Auld Lang Syne.” Youtube, uploaded by Siobhàn Owen, 27 December 2015, https://youtu.be/TRpdzmMH4f4.

Polwart, Karine. “Karine Polwart – My Heart’s in the Highlands (Robert Burns).” Youtube, uploaded by Петар Жутић, 23 February 2012, https://youtu.be/9HuHTkDw9Sw.

“Super, Natural BC – British Columbia Travel Information.” HelloBC, https://www.hellobc.com/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Image Credit

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni). The Journey of the Magi. Ca. 1433-35. The Met Fifth Avenue, New York. The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437611. Accessed 15 February 2021.

  A sharp wind blew from the coastal mountains, whose peaks, textured with early snow, caught the salmon light of an autumn sun now hidden from view. The brisk air swept south across the broad brown expanse of the Fraser and whistled through the log palisade of Fort Langley National Historic Site. The four figures crouching in the damp earth in the fort’s south-east corner were not sheltered from the chill. They wore reflective vests and sifted through the soil with spades and trowels, spaced out at even intervals within a rectangular excavation area. No one spoke as they made use of the last of the light.

  Audible only to the one wielding it, a spade struck wood. Slowly and furtively, the digger cleared away the surrounding soil. When the others had moved off into the darkness, their work for the day complete, he lifted out of the earth a small oaken chest. He brushed it off with a feeling of awe. Then he brought it into the Big House, where they were collecting all their findings. Flicking on the lights, he carried the chest to table in the corner and set it down carefully. He checked it for fastenings and opened it.

  Inside was a large piece of vellum, folded many times over. After unfolding it, he adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses and brushed back his dark hair. Set on the vellum in dark ink were the unmistakable lines of British Columbia’s Pacific coast. On the left of the map islands were sketched in fine detail. On the right triangular shapes seemed to represent the Rocky Mountains.

  His eyes widened. Criss-crossing the map—especially its southern portion—was a network of faint lines, thin as hairs. But that wasn’t all. In certain places, underneath the gridwork, stranger forms asserted themselves, half erased: the slope of a valley, the hint of dwelling-place, and words—unfamiliar symbols whose sounds he did not know. They reminded him of names he had given to well-known trees in Tolkien’s Elvish—long, graceful, unique names. He took a picture of the map with his phone, replaced it in the chest (which he tucked into the corner), and moved to go.

  A tall, bald man intercepted him in the hall.

  “Hi, Dr. Perks.”

  “Any big finds today, Alex?”

  “No, nothing much today.”

  “Well, see you on Monday.”

  “Good night.”

  The dim parking lot was full of mouldering brown needles and brittle leaves. Alex got into his car and started on his way home.

  Fort Langley was hopping on a Friday night, the patios full, the main street roaring with passing cars and trucks. Anonymous faces and blank windshields. Young families who’d moved into the suburban new builds by the river.

  Soon Alex was driving through the fields. After ten minutes he turned onto a leafy side street and then pulled into a driveway in the gap of a tall hedge. A familiar skyline—silhouettes of poplar and maple. But unfamiliar shapes possessed his mind: half-hidden names and enigmatic lines of ink on vellum.

———-

  The next night around midnight Alex was driving back towards Fort Langley. He had strapped a light wooden ladder to the top of his car. Both hands on the wheel, he breathed slowly and deliberately.

  That day he had scrutinized the photo on his phone. He’d puzzled over the lines, and cross-referencing the image with Google Maps had left no doubt. It was bizarre—impossible, really. The map looked centuries old, but it showed today’s motorways: all the main roads and highways.

  No one else had seen it. Alex felt an ardent curiosity bordering on possessiveness. He didn’t think it right that this thing should fall into institutional hands.

  Alex drew his car up close to the east wall of the fort. He carried the ladder hurriedly to the palisade and steadied it. Forts. What would it be like to have one of your own up in the mountains, to live quietly among the endless forests? For now, the illicit pleasure of breaking into this relic would have to do. Alex balanced on the top of the wall and muscled the ladder silently to the other side, proud of his agility. Within five minutes, he had unlocked the Big House with his key, snatched the chest and its contents, returned, scaled the wall again. Then he was on the road home, in the car’s privacy.

———-

  He had told his family cheerily that he needed time and space to work this Sunday. He had passed a day of questions and wonder. Now the map was laid out on his desk, and he stood over it with a scalpel.

  The hidden forms, he knew, had not been erased but covered. If he could only uncover them . . .

  He approached the surface of the map tentatively with the edge of the blade. He began scraping with almost imperceptible pressure. There was a sound to getting it right, there in the quiet of the room before the picture window—a faint craking like the singing of a cricket. The map began to show itself.

  The dense gridwork gave way to long undulating lines. Railways? Alex kept at it doggedly. He couldn’t understand everything he was seeing: streams, dikes, ditches dug to drain the floodplains of the Fraser, footpaths, hills, rivers. Strangely, the map didn’t seem flatten as he scraped off minute layers; rather, in seemed to gain in depth. Was this a trick of the light?

  Suddenly, the area under his knife burst into colour: earthy pigments, the colours of fern, moss, clay, and dried grass. Alex almost gasped. He had forgotten the names and words for the moment, although these were more numerous than ever; he could not make sense of them now. He seemed to see to the hidden sources of rivers. He smiled. Through the window, the sun shone through leaves, and the wind carried voices of the family as they readied the canoe for a Sunday expedition.

Works Cited

“Fort Langley National Historic Site.” Parks Canada, https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/bc/langley. Accessed 10 February 2021.

“Urban Palimpsest.” The University of Kansas – The Commons, https://thecommons.ku.edu/urban-palimpsest. Accessed 10 February 2021.

Image Credit

Hardesty, H.H. “Map of British Columbia.” The Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia, New York, H.H. Hardesty and Company, 1883. Alabama Maps, http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/canada/bc.html. Accessed 10 February 2021.

I was walking with my mom down the street near my home in rural Port Kells, BC. Looking to our left, we saw the quarter-acre or so of a neighbour’s garden that he’d recently ploughed–a stretch of dark, moist, furrowed earth. Not for the first time, we wondered what he would be growing there. “That reminds me,” I said, “that I have a great story to tell you.”

It’s a story about how evil entered the world. It had to do with Growing People.

(A puzzled look. “Growing People? Like in The Matrix?”)

Growing People: farmers, gardeners, gatherers, groundskeepers. You know–people who grow.

In those days–

(“In those days,” she repeats with exaggerated solemnity, and we laugh at my overblown narration.)

In those days, they held a great fair, and people came from around the world bringing their finest produce. They all gathered under an enormous white pavilion, where all the specimens were laid out. Giant gourds. Prize apples. Genetically enhanced grain. That kind of thing.

(“Where did you read this?”)

There was music, and it was good fun. Everyone walked around, chatted, and marveled at the things on display. Judges made their rounds, jotting down notes about the most promising candidates. All the while everyone kept their eyes open for the one thing that would take the general prize: the hardiest, most delectable fruit or the most prolific and resilient seed . . .

The judges were about to give a decision, but just then a person stepped up onto the bandstand. This was the one person who’d entered the tent empty-handed. This individual wore a long coat and a large hat that completely covered the face. No one knew where this person came from or if this person was male or female.

This one had nothing to show but a story, and told it: a story of violence, slaughter, envy, and acquisition. By the end, everyone knew that this story–the most delicious fruit and the most prolific seed–had won the prize. “But,” they said, “this isn’t so wholesome; this isn’t so good. Take that story back. We want you to take that story back.”

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 you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.

(“So this is a philosophical story?” “Yes, you could say that.”)

One of the wonderful things about Leslie Silko’s story on the coming of evil into the world–included in Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories (9-10)–is its ambiguity. In a way, it explains by explaining nothing. Who is this strange outsider among the witches? How did evil enter this person’s mind as a story? This story of origins works precisely by deferring any absolute origin, refusing to pinpoint anything too exactly (I’m even tempted to read “witch people” as “which people?”). So I think Silko’s story is quite critically conscious of the ways in which stories of origin can ideologically underpin exclusion and violence, even as it celebrates the tremendous power of storytelling. (We could keep these two strands in mind while reading this short and fascinating interview about creation stories. Such stories often boggle our minds and our logics because we still have to ask where the first “stuff” came from . . . )

My retelling is mainly a slavish, impoverished imitation, showing some doubt and hesitation as to the extent of our “retelling” prerogative. But it did make me think about some of the ways in which acts of storytelling are situated, rooted, in the world. You could say that an experience of place gave me a prompt (or an alibi) for weaving this story into the fabric of everyday experience. And the telling, whose dialogic quality I tried to hint at in my transcript above, was inextricably joined with our motion as we continued to walk–the corner we turned, the dips and rises of the road.

This sense of time and place seems strong in oral telling, though it may at times imbue our experiences of reading too. William Wordsworth has a phrase in the eleventh book of the The Prelude for such experiences of spatialized memory that articulate our own stories as well as the stories we might be telling: “spots of time” (258). By chance I just came across this oral reading of Wordsworth’s long, long autobiographical poem (linked on “spots of time”). I wonder what it, along with our own retellings, might tell us about the changes and the life of spoken and written stories . . .

Works Cited

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

Leeming, David, and Liane Hansen. “Exploring the World’s Creation Myths.” NPR, 13 November 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5010951. Accessed 3 February 2021.

Wilmer, Clive. “(11) Book Eleventh – Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” University of Cambridge, 7 September 2011, https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1171068. Accessed 3 February 2021.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, Penguin, 1995.