I decided to dive deeply into pp. 389-97 of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Here we go!

P. 389: A concentrated allusion to the critical practices of Northrop Frye, and thence to Biblical hermeneutics (and beyond?). Dr. Hovaugh (whom we’ve identified both as Frye and Jehovah) sits “in his hotel room in a sea of maps and brochures and travel guides.” This is an enclosed “verbal universe” in which the interpreter occupies himself in the comparison of the immanent qualities of texts: “he consulted the book and then a map, the book and then a brochure, the book and then a travel guide.” It seems significant that Hovaugh’s textual world is dominated by tourist kitsch—tourism being a product of consumer capitalism and its colonial exploits.

The “star,” one of the signs Hovaugh plots onto his graph—Frye had a highly diagrammatic mind—recalls the story of Jesus’s nativity: the three magi, or “wise men,” followed a star westward to pay homage to the newborn Jesus, a story often taken to signify the allegiance of all nations and peoples. King offers a somewhat inverted story: Hovaugh himself is a white Christian “wise man” following the star of a rather different “virgin birth” (or, at least, conception)–Alberta’s pregnancy, which seems to be somehow caused by Coyote.

Hovaugh’s levels of meaning or interpretation (“literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogic”) refer to the different modes of meaning ascribed to the Bible by St. Thomas Aquinas and retooled in Frye’s rather ingenious “Theory of Symbols.” These categories attempt to account for the polysemy (or the presence of many possible meanings) in a word, image, or literary work, positing various planes of literal/historical and spiritual meaning. Hovaugh’s process of interpretation is a notably “self-assure[d]” and insular activity, contrasting with the “old Indians”’s collaborative action and narration.

“Tomorrow. . . . Tomorrow and tomorrow. . . . And tomorrow” cannot help but evoke Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play (Frye was a legendary lecturer on Shakespeare and Eli Stands Alone wrote a book about him):

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time. (19-21.V.5)

Perhaps this suggests a degree of fatalism in Hovaugh’s projections—a desperate and futile attempt at security in a world whose outcomes cannot be singlehandedly controlled.

Finally, “Parliament Lake” links the point of crisis with the Canadian government and its often inequitable relationship with Indigenous people, of which the Grand Baleen Dam is an reminder. (Perhaps Hovaugh’s three circles have a Trinitarian resonance and the “purple marker” a hint of imperial pomp? Allusive overload!) The lake also reminds us of the novel’s uniting motif of water, which is underscored by the “sea of maps and brochures and travel guides.” The image of moving water subverts even Hovaugh’s verbal universe.

P. 390: Jane Flick notes that the West Edmonton Mall indicates Charlie’s materialistic concerns (151). The Mall is “the size of a small city” and is part amusement park, part retailer—all an enveloping consumerist market of experiences and commodities. The Mall may be an opposite pole in the novel’s Alberta, and it embodies a super-capitalist lifestyle. As a “three-bedroom condo” would suggest, this is potentially a family lifestyle.

Pp. 391-6: King’s dictum that “There are no truths . . . Only stories” is characteristic, but it also bears a hint of Nietzschean “perspectivism.” This may not be a deliberate move on King’s part.

As Flick points out, Glimmerglass is a beautiful lake in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. As with Thought Woman and Moby-Jane, Old Woman is better able to enter into conversation with the lake itself—a conventionally voiceless entity—than with the overdetermined and narrow-minded Western heroes.

Nathaniel Bumppo finishes the series of canonical heroes with native companions. He is ironically presented as “Post-Colonial Wilderness Guide and Outfitter,” maintaining the commercial overtones of the text-centred (post-)colonial enterprise that Hovaugh also represents (392). Bumppo continually dashes behind trees, probably referring to the clichés of frontier fiction to do with preternatural hunting and outdoorsmanship skills; echoing Sergeant Cereno’s handgun (and Hovaugh’s grandfather’s rifle), Bumppo carries a “really big rifle,” which has faint (but clearly violent) phallic quality when he aims to obliterate Old Woman with it (392).

Chingachgook, a Mohican chief, is Bumppo’s loyal friend. Unlike the other “native companions” in the previous three stories, Chingachgook actually appears in this telling. His name and presence, unlike Old Woman’s, are sanctioned by the authority of the “book” when the two are challenged by soldiers. Old Woman, like her predecessors, must assume a new identity, and, again like them, she faces incarceration (396).

Bumppo’s enumeration of parallel (but unequal) “gifts” resembles Robinson Crusoe’s listing of good and bad points (King 294-5). It also taps into a deep history of European thought aligning the “Indian” with the natural and corporeal and the “White” with the civilized, intellectual and spiritual.

(I am unsure about the recurring figure of “Old Coyote” and how he relates to the Coyote who converses with the narrator. Like Coyote, he travels between stories with ease. Well, I won’t try to pin him down; I’m willing to let him run around for the time being—and perhaps someone can help me come to terms with him!)

“Whites are particularly good killers,” says Bumppo to Old Woman, making particularly plain the violence inherent in the racial hierarchizing that his story supports (393). This rendition of his character is senselessly and casually homicidal, shooting creatures “just to get it out of my system” (394). For Bumppo’s death, King exploits a common cinematic trick in which a gun is discharged but not the expected one—the hero held at gunpoint is not killed but rescued. He neglects, however, the revelation of the other shooter. Coyote’s response—”Wait, wait! . . . Who shot Nasty Bumppo?”—stands in for the reader’s reaction. “Who cares?”, replies the narrator, subverting the narrative convention (395). Coyote generally acts especially like a surrogate reader in this passage, trying to puzzle out a “deep” meaning from the events that unfold before him. His later suggestions (“Maybe there was more than one gunman. . . . Maybe it was a conspiracy”) are downright funny, if vaguely unsettling; trying to find concrete answers in the text amounts to conspiracy theorizing like that surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy (395).

 

King also evokes the domain of politics and legislation in the list of “killer names.” Daniel Boone, Harry Truman and Arthur Watkins are, as Flick remarks, political figures known for destructive policies and decisions, either in war or in the treatment of Indigenous peoples (163). (Needless to say, they’re also all men, which Old Woman is not. This is a recurring misrecognition.) “Hawkeye” (the “Indian” name bestowed upon Bumppo) is presented as a killer name akin to these, the implication being that violence can be inherent to certain names and acts of naming (395). (On the other hand, the adoption of a name or persona can be empowering in some ways.) As the narrator makes clear, this is not a “good Indian name” but a “name for a white person who wants to be an Indian,” rather like the real-life “Grey Owl” (395). Stories like Bumppo’s can work to both create and appropriate a mythical “Indian-ness.” King is taking some stories back by way of names and characters, and recontextualizing them in ways that reveal their hidden affinities.

Works Cited

“About.” West Edmonton Mall. https://www.wem.ca/info/about. Accessed 28 March, 2021.

Ajuha, Neel. “Colonialism.” Gender: Matter, edited by Stacey Malaimo, Macmillan, 2017, pp. 237-51. Ajuha, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/f/396/files/2014/11/Ahuja-Colonialism.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Baime, A.J. “Harry Truman and Hiroshima: Inside his Tense A-Bomb Vigil.” History.com, 11 October 11 2017, https://www.history.com/news/the-inside-story-of-harry-truman-and-hiroshima. Accessed 29 March 2021.

“Chingachgook.” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chingachgook. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer. Project Gutenberg, 26 January 2009, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3285/3285-h/3285-h.htm. Accessed 29 March.

“Daniel Boone.” Historic Missourians, https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/daniel-boone. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Denham, Robert. “Theory of Genres.” Northrop Frye and Critical Method, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. The Educated Imagination, https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/critical-method/theory-of-genres.html. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, 140-70. CanLit, 20 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/reading-notes-for-thomas-kings-green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Frye, Northrop. “SECOND ESSAY: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols.” The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press, 1957. Blogspot, http://northropfrye-theanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/second-essay-ethical-criticism-theory.html. Accessed 28 March 2021.

Grattan-Aiello, Carolyn. “Senator Arthur V. Watkins and the Termination of Utah’s Southern Paiute Indians.” Utah Historical Quarterly vol. 63, no. 3, 1995. ISSUU, https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume63_1995_number3/s/161824. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Halleman, Caroline. “The Five Biggest JFK Conspiracy Theories.” Town&Country, 26 October 2017, https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a13093037/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-theories/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

“How Northrop Frye’s ‘literary cosmos’ can help us reimagine life in 2021.” CBC, 8 March 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-northrop-frye-s-literary-cosmos-can-help-us-reimagine-life-in-2021-1.5586648. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Isbouts, Jean-Pierre. “Who Were the Three Kings in the Christmas Story?” National Geographic, 24 December 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/three-kings-magi-epiphany. Accessed 29 March 2021.

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

Lander, Devin, and Lauren Roberts. “Who Is the Real Natty Bumppo?” WAMCPodcasts, 30 July 2020, https://wamcpodcasts.org/podcast/who-is-the-real-natty-bumppo-a-new-york-minute-in-history/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Marie, André. “The Four Senses of Scripture.” Catholicism.org, 11 December 2007, https://catholicism.org/the-four-senses-of-scripture.html. Accessed 28 March 2021.

“Nietzsche and the Impossibility of Truth.” New Learning Online, https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/nietzsche-on-the-impossibility-of-truth. Accessed 28 March 2021.

Onyanga-Omara, Jane. “Grey Owl: Canada’s great conservationist and imposter.” BBC News, 19 December 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-24127514. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Palmater, Pam. “‘At every turn, Canada chooses the path of injustice toward Indigenous peoples.’” Macleans, 29 January 2021,  https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/at-every-turn-canada-chooses-the-path-of-injustice-toward-indigenous-peoples/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. MyShakespeare, https://myshakespeare.com/macbeth/act-5-scene-5. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Tupy, Marian. “How Capitalism Brought Tourism to the Masses.” Fee, 15 January 2019, https://fee.org/articles/how-capitalism-brought-tourism-to-the-masses/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

White, Ellen. “Defining Biblical Hermeneutics.” Biblical Archaeology Society, 2 August 2020, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/defining-biblical-hermeneutics/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Hand in hand with the ferocious humour of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water is, I would suggest, a deep concern for the sacred. What stories and words, the novel asks, are holy and binding? Which give proper coordinates allowing us to plot the courses of our lives?

King’s title begins this conversation by evoking a formula common to treaties between governments and First Nations (Flick 158); Portland’s character in The Mysterious Warrior also testifies to his love with the phrase “As long as the grass is green and the waters run” (208). This introduces the idea of mapping (as a performative, narrative act) on several different levels. First of all, treaties have to do with establishing terms and right and, often, agreeing on geographical borders. They involve a shared trust in the sacred fiction of the words used and the lines drawn. As the CanLit “Introduction to Nationalism” says, “The borders on contemporary maps resulted from long histories of negotiations and wars among nations and nation-states to control particular territories.” To give a King-esque paraphrase, every line of the map has a story—though not necessarily an equally good one, with the same depth of historical relation to the land. Physical maps institute and fix these stories in an abstract form–maps like Bill Bursum’s bluntly named “The Map,” an agglomeration of television screens showing North America. For Bursum, The Map satisfies a (none too subtle) fantasy of panoptical control: “It was like having the universe there on the wall, being able to see everything” (128). And Bursum associates this fantasy with experience of the sacred: “It’s like being in church. Or at the movies” (129). No wonder: his holy text is Niccolò Machievelli’s The Prince, from which he’s derived the gospel of advertising (128). This example (e.g. “A Western for the Map,” Bursum decides) most explicitly shows the correlation between mapping and narrating—especially in damaging ways (265).

The other way in which the title suggests a kind of mapping is by invoking the land itself. Environmental processes (the growth of grass, the flowing of water) represent not only steady, dependable rhythms of the world but also the guarantors of sincerity in human behaviour. In a sense, we are mapped by the land, and perhaps even in ways that might alleviate the kind of postmodern spatial alienation described by Frederic Jameson.

The four “old Indians” periodically wander the world fixing things like the Transformer characters of Salish mythology. The four story-women find their respective ways from the beginning of the world to Fort Marion. Characters like Alberta, Lionel, and (earlier) Eli gravitate toward their original home on the reserve, while Charlie and Portland follow a vector of motion between Blossom and Hollywood. Coyote and the narrative “I” occupy an uncertain, liminal space. And then there are the complexly interwoven temporal dimensions of the novel, with its frequent retrospects and its creation stories. All in all, it might be tempting to follow Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s lead and try to make diagrammatic sense of all this movement, to tie the novel’s fluid motions to a solid “pattern” (48).

This would seem, however, to miss the point, or to miss an opportunity. In a way, even Jane Flick’s useful reading notes can act to neutralize the overflowing and unmanageable allusiveness of Green Grass, Running Water—to compromise the experience of not knowing that Professor Paterson has pointed out as a crucial part of the novel. (As a collaborative product of discussion, however, these reading notes probably end up being something congenial to the ethos of Green Grass, Running Water.)

With this in mind, I will make one tentative suggestion about the orientation of King’s mappings in the novel. As Blanca Chester notices, the Sun Dance—which is surely somewhere near the social, emotional, and spatial heart of Green Grass, Running Water—is referred to but never directly represented (49). While the content of this sacred ceremony is absent (it must not be photographed or reproduced artificially, although Latisha feels that it is not an ineffable mystery like the Trinity), its form is present as a cyclical recurrence: “in the morning, when the sun came out of the east, it would begin again” (388). Similarly, Eli never tells Lionel the reason he came home; this is left as something it’s “best to figure . . . out for yourself” (422). This is to say that the novel centres not around something (e.g. a location or knowledge) fixed, stable or given but around open, fluid practices and understandings that unfold and are negotiated in time and in community. If, as Chester argues, King brings a multitude of stories into a dialogue in which they contextualize themselves and each other in perpetually shifting ways, then there may be no proper centre—just the water.

Works Cited

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, pp. 44-61. CanLit, 29 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 18 March 2021.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, 140-70. CanLit, 20 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/reading-notes-for-thomas-kings-green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

“Introduction to Nationalism.” CanLit Guides, 15 August 2013, http://canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/introduction-to-nationalism/. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 1988, pp. 347-60. Shifter Magazine, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/jameson-cognitive-mapping.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj8hLy0qL3vAhXRJzQIHUwGCVQQFjAKegQIHhAC&usg=AOvVaw3baGi6M46nndtfFAtcg1tQ. Accessed 19 March 2021.

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

McMullan, Thomas. “What does the panopticon mean in an age of digital surveillance?” The Guardian, 23 July 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham. Accessed 19 March 2021.

“Treaties and agreements.” Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, 30 July 2020, https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028574/1529354437231. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Verhoeff, Anna. “Performative Cartography.” Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 133-66. Jstor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mtwb.10?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Image Credit

@JeffreyLuscombe. “When Torontonians draw a map.” Twitter, 23 January 2020, 7:01 a.m., twitter.com/JeffreyLuscombe/status/1220361018427265027?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1220361018427265027%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogto.com%2Fcity%2F2020%2F01%2Fsomeone-just-drew-map-what-toronto-looks-centre-universe%2F.

Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature” is stridently polemical, prescriptive, and programmatic; her tone is calculated to rouse and challenge. The complex of terms—literature, oratory, story, myth, criticism—she addresses with respect to nation is of the utmost interest to our project in ENGL 372.

Maracle’s dissatisfaction with Thomas King’s phrase “We are about story and nothing else” gestures toward the role she imagines for stories in recuperating and consolidating an Indigenous, national knowledge base (qtd. in Maracle 82). The power of King’s statement, of course, is its simplicity. Maracle’s concern, however, is that this pithy saying (like many such aphorisms, in which, it’s fair to say, King excels) runs the risk of being reductive and even diminishing: it may suggest a child-like exchange of anecdotes rather than a robust system of cultural knowledge. This knowledge, Maracle would insist, is vitally sustained and mediated by story but also exceeds it (89). (To be fair to King, he would probably agree with J. Edward Chamberlin on defining “story” more expansively than Maracle.) A national (Sto:lo) literature would be involved in the reclamation and redeployment of a primarily oral Indigenous knowledge whose transmission has been critically interrupted by colonialism but whose scope encompasses medicine, natural science, law—in short, every domain of knowledge represented (not to mention monopolized) by a Western episteme.

What does literature have to do with such a social, political, epistemological resurgence? This is the question posed by that difficult and complicated word “criticism.” Here we can, as Dr. Paterson has suggested, bring Maracle into conversation with Northrop Frye. It’s uncertain exactly what Maracle (or indeed anyone) is referring to when she uses the word “criticism,”—whether she is thinking of literary journalism, scholarship, review writing, or all of the above. Her description of its normative activities displays her oppositional stance toward “Euro-society”: “In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon” (88). So, criticism as something evaluative and exclusive.

I believe that the idea and the history of literary criticism can actually help to make some common ground between Maracle and Frye, perhaps in ways that would change what both of them think criticism to be.

I’m in the midst of a seminar in the history of academic English criticism and can’t resist taking a short historical excursion. From its early days with the likes of Cambridge critic I.A. Richards (1893-1979), “modern” English literary criticism was centrally concerned with its social function and that of the literature it dealt with. (Maracle’s comment about the history of criticism back to Aristotle is surely an extraordinary and forceful one, but I think there is still value in not painting the European “critical tradition” (if there is such a thing) in such a broad single brushstroke (84).) In fact, Richards downplays the evaluative commitments Maracle seems to so distrust: “It is less important to like ‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad’, than to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds” (334). For all his faults, Richards is faithful to the instrumental moral and social efficacy of literary (and critical) experience; this seems not altogether different from Maracle’s desire for new stories “alter our direction or behaviour, clear old obstacles, and point us all in the direction of the good life” (a rather Aristotelian turn of phrase; 84). My main point here is a shared commitment to the social function of some kind of collective practice called “literary criticism.” Frye himself, in 1950, writes an article entitled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

What social function does Maracle imagine for an Indigenous literary criticism? It seems to be a collaborative process of construction, of “adding rafters to the house” and “learn[ing] as an ensemble” (95). Perhaps most importantly, this process is predicated on an awareness of traditional ways of knowing, of studying the “old story,” understanding one’s (or a community’s) place in it, and assessing its potential for (social, national, subjective) transformation (85). As I understand it, criticism would be a matter of getting inside the old stories, becoming at home in their workings, and so allowing the creation of new myths from them for today.

As Dr. Paterson proposes, we can see a certain kinship between this imperative to write from within the culture and the critic who writes that “as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images” (234-5). Maracle, to my mind, actually supports the systematization or theorization of such “principles” for the purpose of Indigenous self-authorship. Both thinkers support the liberating energy of the mythic imagination: while Frye may imagine the liberation from ideological “social” “mythology” Maracle envisions liberation from colonial structures of power and knowledge (237).

Frye’s particular blindnesses and prejudices are not, in some cases, to be wondered at. His argument that “The forms of literature are autonomous” goes hand in hand with the ascendant (New Critical) aesthetic idealism of the moment (234). We are left with a question: is his position inextricably bound up with colonial power and privilege or does he still have something to offer us? Could dialogues between him and someone like Lee Maracle not still be productive? Perhaps there is no real place for Frye (or me, for that matter) in Maracle’s particular project—that would be something to be accepted and respected—but there may be such a place elsewhere.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Anansi, 2017.

Hanson, Erin. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

—. “The Residential Schools System.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: ‘A Body of Writing’.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, edited by Paul Warren DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma LaRocque, Broadview, 2010.

“New Criticism.” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/art/New-Criticism. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Edited by John Constable, Routledge, 2001.

Westacott, Emrys. “What Does It Mean to Live the Good Life?” ThoughtCo, 26 February 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226. Accessed 12 March 2021.

The time for midterm evaluations is approaching, and I have included links below to what I believe are three of my most worthwhile blog posts of the term so far. I feel that, in these posts, I was able to draw on my own experience (and the stories I’ve contacted) in engaging personally with our readings and discussions. Articulating these thoughts in this form was both a pleasure and a challenge of rigorously spinning out my responses. I hope you enjoy reading through these selections.

Worlds of Words (Assignment 1:3)

More Stories: Home and Abroad (Assignment 2:3)

Enigmas and Laughter (Assignment 2:4)

7) Considering transformation as writing.

According to Keith Thor Carlson, the acts of transformation performed by central figures of Salish cosmogonies function as acts of writing, and thus of literacy. As I understand, these Transformer figures roamed the world in the distant past, “setting things straight” by changing features of the primordial earth into their permanent, proper forms. Carlson carries out a fascinating etymological discussion, drawing on the collective understandings embodied in language and its relationships; as he describes, the Transformer characters are referred to as Xe:xá:ls (apologies for my lack of certain diacritics and my ignorance of the relevant writing conventions) and their work of transformation as xá:ytem (46, 61). Both words share a common proto-Salish root, xá:l, which denotes not only transformation but also marking or inscription (61).

Such observations have the potential to change our common understandings not only about histories of literacy in contact zones but also about writing itself. Carlson finds it thought-provoking that Salish peoples use such a spiritually resonant native (not borrowed) word for a practice or knowledge usually associated with the arrival of European settlers. Like Harry Robinson’s story about the stolen paper and the accounts of literate indigenous prophets, this suggests a prior history of literacy (a first fourteen chapters, if you will) among Salish peoples. It’s not that literacy (and thus history) was absent before colonization but that native traditions of literacy were different from those of the newcomers—and so unrecognizable to them. This conclusion is well borne out by Courtney MacNeil’s comments, which we read earlier this term, on how oral and literate practices are inevitably intermixed in a culture.

I find especially poignant Carlson’s suggestion, quoted by Dr. Paterson, that “literacy is part of a broader genre of transformation stories” for the Salish peoples (61). This is not merely to say that transformation might fit into the category of literacy (significant though that is) but to propose that writing participates in a more expansive activity of transforming the world. The Salish Transformers, as I imagine, etched new and lasting meanings and forms on the face of reality—Transformers stories thus imply a powerful literacy in the enduring relationships between Salish peoples and their homelands (transformations being both written and readable). Our (and other) acts of writing, meanwhile, can represent comparable (if much more minor) transformative inscriptions.

It’s tempting to have some more recourse to etymology and consider the Old English wrītan, ancestor of our write, which means “to engrave, carve, inscribe”—a form of knowledge preservation that literally transforms its medium, penetrates it deeply (Anglo-Saxons too were initially “illiterate” by Roman standards, though they wrote with carved runes).

Perhaps it would be an appropriate revision to suggest that settler populations have historically displayed a certain illiteracy, one encapsulated in the mythology of the terra nullius, the empty land or blank page. The failure to recognize the presence of anything readable may be the most extreme act of illiteracy. Part of our task may become an awareness of alternative literacies, an awareness not geared toward decoding or explanation as toward mutual respect and acknowledgement.

Works Cited

“Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes.” Duke University Press, May 1994, https://www.dukeupress.edu/writing-without-words. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Keith Thor Carlson, Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory,  Uchicagoedublogs, 19 Feb. 2013, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/. Accessed 19 January 2021.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory, edited by Wendy Wickwire, Talonbooks, 2005, pp. 64-85.

“Sxwōxwiyám Places.” SQ’ÉWLETS, 2016, http://digitalsqewlets.ca/sxwoxwiyam/sxwoxwiyam_names-noms-eng.php. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Thom, Bryan. “Coast Salish Transformer Stories: Kinship, Place, and Aboriginal Rights and Title in Canada.” web.uvic.ca, 1998, http://www.web.uvic.ca/~bthom1/Media/pdfs/ethnography/transform.htm. Accessed 5 March 2021.