Lesson 2:2

First Stories:

Topics

  • A discussion of terms: Indian, Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Nations, and Wuikinuxv
  • First Stories
  • Contact Performances and Zones
  • Introduction to Harry Robinson

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson students will be able to:

  • Identify and discuss problems and issues involved in recuperation, interpretation and publication of first stories in general.
  • Recognize and discuss the links between first stories and land and resource ownership
  • Discuss how people(s), use stories: mythologies, cosmologies and histories, to understand new and novel phenomenon
  • Discuss the impact of concepts about time, myth, and history in context with first stories, contact stories, and Robinson’s stories

Lesson Description

With this lesson we examine some ideas about the first stories we know about this land and how they work within Indigenous traditions. We will also look at stories about first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. This is a general discussion about a complex subject which I have simplified and focused down in an effort to emphasize the connections between land and stories and to raise a number of questions for reflection about the power of the “stories we tell ourselves.”

According to our readings this week, both the Indigenous peoples and the Europeans had expectations of each other previous to the arrival of the European traders and colonizers. As John Lutz puts it, “even if Columbus had no knowledge of his predecessors, his encounter was the product of expectations, conditioned by imaginary worlds conjured up long before his arrival.” And, “like the Europeans, Indigenous peoples drew their new encounters from, and into, their old mythologies” (Lutz, “Contact” 2). Indigenous cosmologies connect the spirit and the natural world and include stories about visitors from the spirit world, and even prophecies that foretold of the arrival of the White man, for the most interesting reasons. We will conclude with Harry Robinson’s story about whites being a banished people who originated in this land, but were sent to Europe (Robinson 9). This is going to be an interesting and particularly challenging lesson.

Assignments

Assignment 2:4 / Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

At the end of this lesson, you will find a list of questions. Read each of the questions and select one that you would like to answer for your blog assignment.  

Required Readings

A Discussion on terms

There are six terms that I use to identify Indigenous peoples in North America: Indian, Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Nations, and Wuikinuxv. When I use the word “Indian” I am talking about the “Imaginary Indian” or I am quoting someone. “The Imaginary Indian” is also the title of Daniel Francis’ well-known book published in 1992. Francis argues that “there is no such thing as a real Indian” (21). Instead, he poists that beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century and through to the present, ” the Indian is the invention of the European” (21). Francis traces the stereotypes projected onto “‘Indians'” and concludes that “the Imaginary Indian has much more to say about White aims, assumptions, and anxieties, than it has about actual Indigenous peoples” (Chelsea Horton, n.pag.)

When I use the word Native, I am referring to all the peoples who lived in this land before the non-Native peoples arrived. Aboriginal and Indigenous have the etymology denoting originating from the land, but Aboriginal was most often used to refer to Australian Indigenous peoples before it appeared in the Constitution Act, 1982, section 35, where it was used as an umbrella term for “the Indian, Inuit, and Metis peoples of Canada”. First Nations is my favortie term because this is a name that the First Nations gave themselves to replace the government’s reference to them as “Bands” — back in the 1970s. However, since it is used by the Assembly of First Nations, which comprises the elected chiefs of these nations, it doesn’t work as an umbrella term. And using Aboriginal is using a name imposed by government legislation. Because the Inuit and Metis peoples are distinguished as different political groups, they are not included in the designation of First Nations. I have much less knowledge about the Inuit and Metis in general, so when I use the term First Nations I am talking about the First Nations – and not the Metis and Inuit. Finally, the Wuikinuxv Nation is one of 630 nations in Canada and I name them here in order to make reference to the numbers of First Nations for whom Canada is home.

First Stories

We begin by taking a look at the first stories about this land we call Canada, that is, the stories told by the Native peoples before the non-natives began to arrive. This requires a little undisciplined thinking because much of what we know about the First stories lies predominantly in the ethnographic writings and collections of translated stories by anthropologists. Of course, our ways of knowing about these early stories and how they connect peoples with land are seriously limited for obvious reasons. For this discussion, I am going to depend largely on Brian Thom’s article, “The Anthropology of Northwest Coast Oral Tradition.” Thom provides some excellent insights into the problems of recuperation and interpretation as well as illuminating the important connections between land and story.

A long, long time ago, long before the Europeans arrived, the Indigenous peoples were telling stories elaborate with details concerning land and resource claims. Thom offers a number of good examples of these stories (which are classified as adaawk which are oral histories that were recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1995 as having equal evidentiary weight as written history) as well as an interesting insight on Franz Boas’ work that he uses to demonstrate an essential link between first stories and land. Boas was collecting and translating stories about origins within a single tradition, the Nuxalk , when he realized that “each village has its own tradition concerning the origin of the world” (Thom 7). In order to make sense of this “great variation in narratives” and “the seemingly conflicting traditions of the Bella Coola,” Boas made a connection between these first stories, or “myths of origins” and land ownership (Thom 7). Boas realized that the stories of origin among these peoples are “a reflection of the conception of property in Bella Coola communities; each community owns a distinct myth of origin and accompanying it are unique rights and privileges over resource areas” (7; emphasis added). Thom concludes, thus what seemed to Boas, “on the surface […] to be conflicting cosmologies, are in fact an integrated set of traditions around property, each held privately by the property-owning social unit” (7).

From the above example, I want you to take away the most general of understandings: the first stories were property — they belonged to the peoples who told them. These stories of origins name places and name people and in this naming the people are connected to that land: the first stories created the “link of ownership between people and the places.”

“Thus, when chiefs tell myths, or rather have a hired speaker tell them at a potlatch feast, storytelling becomes an explicitly political act, authenticating claims to land” (Thom 9).

When people on the west coast were telling the first stories, they told them at the potlatch, which was central to forms of governance and exchange among and between First Nations all along the northwest coast. The potlatch is a special place, at a special time, with special ceremonies that depend on that time and place. While you need some description of the Potlatch, in keeping this excursion beyond disciplinary boundaries as brief as possible, it is sufficient for this discussion if you think of the potlatch as fulfilling the activities of the court house, the theatre, the church and the university; a special place and time set aside where laws, cultural and spiritual beliefs, and treasured knowledge are displayed, performed, challenged, decided and disseminated. While I can find many parallels between the functioning of these institutions and the potlatch, there is also a major distinction between the court house, theatre, church and university and the potlatch — and that is the difference between the act of writing laws, scripts, scriptures, building libraries — and the act of repeating stories that prescribe laws in the telling — and in the repetition of the telling, inscribe those laws. At the heart of this difference, for our purposes, are the storyteller and the listeners. The storyteller must be able to pass the story on, and the listener must be present to witness the telling of the story. The telling of the story includes the possibility of re-establishing credibility via the listeners as witness and the possibility “of challenges from people with other stories” (Thom 9).

It is worth quoting at length here in order to quickly establish the credibility of this connection between telling and retelling the story and claiming land and resources through ownership of the story– or, challenging those claims:

This indigenous law […] emerges from retelling the oral traditions that document land ownership (adaawk), marking household ownership of land on totem poles, and validating the land tenure at potlatch feasts. […] Mentioning place names is critical in telling adaawk to connect mythological elements of stories to specific, owned areas on the ground, which can be recognized today. Potlatch feasts are held to formalize the recognition of these ownership rights and to allow them to be contested. Thus, telling the adaawk and holding potlatches form an unambiguous system for asserting ownership of traditional lands (Thom 9).

Note: Other Indigenous nations have other ways of asserting land tenure. Adaawk is a classification that refers to stories that are collectively owned histories, but it is much more complicated than this. If you are curious and would like to read the telling of an Adaawk, I recommend you read an interesting Master’s thesis by Margaret Gildewt Grenier, In the Space of Song and Story: Exploring the Adaawk of Hagbegwatku Simgeeget Sigydmhana nah Deth when sim Simgeeget, I have provided a link in our supplementary reading list. I quote from the introduction to pique your interest:

In holding the chiefly title Hagbegwatku he also holds ultimate authority over our Adaawk. Am’na gwatku is the term which states the authority to use ones father’s song and it is under this authority that I have the right to recount it as his daughter, Gildedowet of the House of Lelt. These are our titles, the names we hold that are derived from these stories and therefore connect us directly to our history. We received them from our Elders and we will pass them on to our children’s children.(Grenier 3)

So, in the first stories about this land we find narratives that name places, artifacts and people, these stories were the property of the people who told them, and they were told at special times in special places were ownership could change with the telling of the story; stories and names could be passed on to others, or ownership could be challenged. Remember how Chamberlin begins his book by quoting the Gitksan Elder asking, “If this is your land, where are your stories?” This question should resonate with more meaningfulness now that you understand this connection between stories and land.

As I mentioned above, there are a number of reasons why attempts to interpret first stories are far beyond our capabilities. Most outstandingly, there are two significant obstacles that stand in the way of understanding and making meaningful the first stories; one is that in the acts of collecting, translating and publishing these stories, the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness – and there are always questions about who is collecting the stories and why, and these questions complicate the larger issues of translating or interpreting Indigenous stories using European symbolism and mythology. A second major obstacle is that there exists a serious time gap of almost 75 years, between 1880 and 1951, when the telling and retelling of stories at the potlatch, and other similar First Nations institutions across the country, were outlawed by the Indian Act and accordingly, the possibilities for storytelling were greatly diminished — as was the subsequent ability to voice or dispute the ownership rights inherent with the telling of the stories (Hanson n. pag.). Compounding the laws outlawing the dissemination and celebration of cultural knowledge and territorial rights amongst First Nations was the residential school system and the authority of the Department of Indian Affairs to take school-age children (7 – yes, as young as seven years old up to 15) away from their villages and their families. The first residential school opened in1834 and the system was officially implemented in 1876 and in 1920 attendance became mandatory — it was not until 1996 that the last Residential school was closed (Hanson n.pag.). Effectively, seven generations were cut off from their community and family stories. They were also cut off from knowledge of their clan histories, territorial rights and their languages. Thousands of children died before reaching 15, the age they were allowed to return home, thousands more survived unspeakable treatment, and certainly thousands more lived a childhood devoid of parental love and full of injustices. All this seriously disrupted the continuity and credibility of ascribing land ownership through stories – and of course, so much more.

Here we need to stop and ask, why? What precipitated such acts of violence against the First Nations? Outlawing the potlatch on the west coast and other similar First Nations institutions across the country was much like burning all the books, the theatres, the churches, and the courthouses. Taking children from their families is a horribly cruel punishment. Indeed, the UN Convention on the Definition and the Prevention of Genocide includes “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as an act of genocide.

What necessitated the criminalization of Indigenous cultural and political practices? What was the rational behind taking children from families? What did the First Nations do to deserve such a harsh and relentless attack upon their political and cultural institutions, their communities and even their children? Did they ruthlessly attack and slaughter the first Europeans? Were they brutal and, according to the norms of the centuries past, deserved brutal punishments?

Before proceeding, stop and ask yourself, how would you answer these questions — using the stories you already know?

Contact Stories

Contact stories are all about belief, and Lutz argues that the “rational European stories” that pass for realist accounts, are in fact as rooted in a European mythology as others are in an indigenous “myth world”(Lutz, “Contact Over and Over Again” 6).

Land has always been the defining element of Aboriginal culture. Land contains the languages, the stories, and the histories of a people (King, Inconvenient Indian 218).

Contact stories come in all forms and shapes; they are the telling and the reenactments of those moments of first contact between European and Indigenous. As Lutz says, the very idea of those moments sparks the imagination; just imagine, European and Indigenous peoples coming face to face for the first time — what happened?

How do we know what happened? Whether we are thinking science fiction or historic encounters, such as Columbus and the “Indians,” James Cook and the Hawaiians, or Martin Frobisher and the Baffin Island Inuit, the questions are the same, the curiosity intense. The moment of contact between two peoples, two alien societies, marks the opening of an epoch and the joining of histories. What if it had happened differently? (Lutz, “Contact Over and Over Again” 1)

In “First Contact as Spiritual Performance,”Lutz presents an interesting discussion on first contact stories in which he argues for an understanding of the performativity of first contact experiences, and in particular the performance of mythologies and spiritualities. Like Chamberlin, Lutz begins by presenting his reader with a challenge. He says the challenge is to “step outside and see one’s own culture as alien and to discern the mythic in the performances of ones own histories” (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). This is all in an effort to see the early contact stories as a dialogue speaking across cultural divides: “a contact situation that encompasses both Native and Stranger” (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). The difficulty that Lutz is presenting is to recognize that there is much that is mythic and supernatural in the European stories that claim to be based on reason and science: “a closer look at the Europeans shows that their rational behavior was determined in part, by their non-rational spiritual beliefs”(Lutz, “First Contact” 32). There are of course numerous other difficulties involved in attempting interpretation of first encounters. Keeping the focus on first encounters as spiritual performances provides a pinhole through which to examine the dynamics of how powerfully people depend on their stories: cosmologies, mythologies, and histories, to make sense of the new and the strange.

Lutz makes a note on his use of the word spiritual, which is worth repeating. He writes, “[a]dmittedly, the word ‘spiritual’ fits imperfectly, since the distinction between the spiritual and non-spiritual world probably did not exist in indigenous thinking, nor would it have for many Europeans at the time; it is an approximation, referring to the more ‘immaterial’ features of their world views” (“First Contact” notes 180).

The recounting of contact stories on the north-west coast normally describe peaceful, performative encounters with the European and Indigenous peoples enjoying common goals: a desire for peace and a “cultural imperative to acquire wealth through exchange” (Lutz, “First Contact” 30). Accordingly, we do not normally find tales of contact with descriptions of violence. In a large measure, Lutz says, “it was the spiritual” that determined the ‘peaceable’ outcomes of the early encounters” (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). And indeed, I was surprised to read that although “it is seldom explicit in the contact stories, between the lines it is apparent that in North America, at least well into the sixteenth century, indigenous people had the power to determine success or failure of new European settlements” (25; emphasis added).

What we do find with the first contact stories, is evidence of how people, and here I mean all peoples, use stories: mythologies, cosmologies and histories, to understand new and novel phenomena. First contact stories are not only rich with performance they are also woven together with stories already told long before the encounter. This is because first encounters involved performances of exchanging stories – with no common language, both parties sang their songs, played their instruments, displayed their cultural symbols and artifacts, wore regalia that spoke of their status, and — both parties depended on their own already long told stories to interpret the other’s performance:

Although, using European records, we can date many encounters to a chronological moment, the meaning of that moment, depended on the long sweep of the centuries-old stories that the participants brought with them (Lutz, “Contact Over and Over Again” 4; emphasis added).

Interestingly, both the Europeans and the Indigenous brought to their first encounters stories that anticipated their meeting.

While I have not found retellings of first contact stories that might help to answer the question I raised at the end of Lesson 2:1: What happened to precipitate and justify the oppression of the Indigenous peoples? Nonetheless, a closer look at these stories as performative exchanges helps to reveal three things: 1) a better understanding of the misunderstanding embedded in those first encounters, 2) the progression from peaceful and mutually beneficial encounters to progressively one-sided and abusive acts of power over the rights and properties of the Indigenous peoples, and 3) most significant for our interests, the role that ancient stories, in the shape of mythologies and cosmologies play in enabling that progression. This discussion is meant to lay a foundation for approaching the stories of settlement and nation building. While the points I make below are simplified and necessarily generalized, your assigned readings are complex and provide details that you should use to expand on this discussion with your blog assignment this week.

A better understanding of the misunderstanding:

Because contact stories are so richly informed with “centuries-old stories that the participants brought with them,” it is helpful to consider those stories first (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). We have observed that the first stories connected people to the land and to special artifacts. Lutz’s discussion gives us further insight into how those stories worked as reflections of “spiritual” beliefs within European and Indigenous cosmologies. While Indigenous first stories and creation myths are diverse, reflecting the diversity of the Indigenous cultures in North America, there are common elements. One is the openness between the spiritual, the natural, and the human worlds; spirits, ancestors, humans, animal, plants, rocks, the sea and the landscape are alive and interconnected over time and space (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). According to Lutz, this is common across Indigenous cosmologies and mythologies in North America. Every living creature and land form may have transformative and supernatural powers for various reasons with differing results. There are also “transformer characters” as discussed in Unit 1, with similar transformative and supernatural powers and who are disruptive and chaotic, often causing a lot of trouble for people in a humorous and non-violent way. As Lutz explains, for many Indigenous peoples, first contact exchanges involved synthesizing the appearance of white men with their long-held knowledge of visitors from the animal and spiritual worlds. In the more than 200 first contact stories belonging to the Indigenous peoples of the north west coast, in Lutz’s study, they all associate the arrival of Europeans with the spirit world (“First Contact” 36). This is not to say that in these stories the European represent as gods, not at all; “Indigenous people had no gods” in that sense, “instead they were aware of a wide variety of spirits that could take human form” (“First Contact” 36). Lutz suggests that while the appearance of Europeans was strange and certainly novel, it “was not a threat” because they were able to “fit into” their knowledge of the spiritual world (36).

Unlike the diversity of Indigenous cosmologies, the Europeans arrived with a unified cosmology that held firm and distinctive hierarchies and divisions: God, man, animals, plants. As Lutz points out, the Europeans did not see the “new world with fresh eyes; they saw them through the lenses of their ancient stories” (“Contact Over and Over Again” 3). The Europeans arrived at these encounters also prepared to “fit” the Indigenous peoples into their cosmology, mythologies, and histories. Beginning with the classical accounts (which passed for factual knowledge in their time) of the monsters and cannibals that lay at the foundation for Columbus’ description of “the West Indies” and continuing through to the Christian stories of God’s divine plan for this “soulless” and “empty land” – the European contact stories are infused with pre-contact references and invocations of spirituality. Once armed with stories of the supremacy of science, the European would use “his” reason to ascertain what that divine plan might be. In the European cosmology the “Native” had originated outside of the Garden of Eden – somewhere between the realms of man and animals.

Both European and Indigenous exchanged their stories, both represented themselves through song and music, dance and costume, and both sides “drew each other into their imaginative worlds” (Lutz, “Contact Over and Over Again” 4) As I said above, Lutz argues, “it is apparent that in North America, at least well into the sixteenth century, indigenous people had the power to determine success or failure of new European settlements” (Lutz, “First Contact” 25). So, what happened? If initially encounters were peaceful and mutually beneficial – despite the fertile territory for misunderstandings, what was the impetus that changed this situation? If it wasn’t through wars and bloodshed, how did the Europeans manage to silence so much of the Indigenous story and in turn claim their land and colonize this land?

I assume most of you know the stories of the “vanishing buffalo” and the ones about the millions of Indigenous peoples all over the Americas who died as a result of first contact with European diseases (I suggest you watch the documentary, Guns, Germs and Steel, or a Hollywood rendition, At Play in the Fields of the Lord). As Lutz explains, the diseases that the Europeans brought with them were reason enough for the Indigenous peoples to imagine and believe that these strange white men had supernatural powers. And, it appears that the Europeans also imagined that they did indeed possess spiritual powers greater than the Native. They imagined and believed that their god gave them the power and the duty to posses both the Natives and their land: “In the name of God, the Trinity, the Maker and Creator” they planted their giant cross and read their “Acts of Possession”, that they then buried in a bottle at the foot of the cross, and pronounced their reasons for taking possession: “to bring the word of the Holy Gospel to the Barbarous Nations”(Lutz, First Contact 39) . This example is from the first meeting of Haidagwa and the Spaniards in 1774.

With the renewed interest in science and the “Age of Reason”, came a heightened sense of superiority and a “God-given purpose” that was now even more credible in the minds of the European; with science and reason the European was equipped to divine God’s will – or so the story goes.

This over-simplified and generalized account of the prevailing peacefulness of first encounters on the north west coast is meant to lay the groundwork for conceptualizing how first contact stories began as an exchange of performances, each animated with spiritual symbolism and infused with ancient mythologies — that were foreign to the other. Fertile territory for misunderstandings, certainly – but also significantly, evidence of the “common ground” that Chamberlin asks us to seek. Much of what we first see by looking at contact stories is the meeting of different truths. But, keep in mind what Chamberlin asks us to do – “instead of two truths” we might see “the convergence of reality and imagination” meeting each other, and the world.

But, what happened to Coyote?

Whenever I need to be reminded that language is magic and that stories can change the world, I go to Robinson.
– Thomas King, Book Jacket Review, Living By Stories. Talon Books.com Web. April 4 2013.

It takes time. I can’t tell stories in a little while,
Sometimes I might tell one stories and I might go too far to the one side like.
Then I have to come back and go on the one side from the same way, but on the one side, like.
-Harry Robinson, Living By Stories.

And now for something totally different — let me introduce you to Wendy Wickwire and Harry Robinson. For those of you who have not already encountered the story of how Wickwire, then a student working on her PhD thesis on Native song, and Harry Robinson, who was born on a potato farm in the Okanagan Valley in 1900, spent 10 years visiting — it is a good story that you’ll find in Wickwire’s introduction to Living By Stories. After listening and recording, reflecting and researching Robinson’s stories for over a decade (1977 – 1989), Wickwire comes to a fascinating conclusion that fits right in at this somewhat transitional point of our discussion between contact stories and stories to colonize the land. And, it is an excellent route to introduce you to Harry Robinson. At the end of her introduction Wickwire writes:

The way Harry put it, everything hinged on the book produced by Coyote and the king. Although he never read its contents, he knew the story about it and that was what mattered. He would pass the story on through his own book. And its message would be clear to all: that whites were a banished people who colonized this country through fraudulence associated with an assigned form of power and knowledge which had been literally alienated from its original inhabitants (Robinson 30; emphasis added).

Now that’s a good story — the Europeans were originally a banished people from this land. According to Robinson’s story, there was no first contact – rather, the Europeans originated in this territory , were banished, and then returned to this land as the colonizers. It all begins with a pair of twins assigned duties related to the creation of the earth; one twin was white and the other was black. The white twin stole a piece of paper and was banished across the seas with instructions to return in the future and “reveal the contents of that written document” (Robinson 10). The black twin was Coyote – “the Indians forefather.” And, the white twin is the forefather of the Europeans.

We’ll come back to this story in more detail in lesson 2:3 when we discuss the stories Europeans brought with them that they used to leave home and the stories they used to claim this land as their home — with the stories the Indigenous peoples use to make sense of this new reality. For now, I would like you to read Wickwire’s introduction to gain an understanding of the issues and questions she raises about the “missing stories” in the early ethnographic collections: “the historical narratives” and “Harry’s stories of White/Aboriginal conflict” — the stories that “early collectors simply did not have any interest in ” (Living with Stories, 28). Pay particular attention to what Wickwire has to say about time and myth and history. As well, read this introduction in context with your reading of Lutz and see if you can find interesting points of connection, or disconnection between these two very different investigations into stories about when the Europeans and Indigenous peoples first met each other – or not.

 Assignment 2:4:

  1. First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?
  2. In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so: 1) the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness, and 2) the extended time of criminal prohibitions against Indigenous peoples telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities. In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited. To be complete, your answer should begin with a brief discussion on the two reasons I present and then proceed to introduce and explain your third reason from Wickwire’s introduction.
  3. We began this unit by discussing assumptions and differences that we carry into our class. In “First Contact as Spiritual Performance,” Lutz makes an assumption about his readers (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). He asks us to begin with the assumption that comprehending the performances of the Indigenous participants is “one of the most obvious difficulties.” He explains that this is so because “one must of necessity enter a world that is distant in time and alien in culture, attempting to perceive indigenous performance through their eyes as well as those of the Europeans.” Here, Lutz is assuming either that his readers belong to the European tradition, or he is assuming that it is more difficult for a European to understand Indigenous performances – than the other way around. What do you make of this reading? Am I being fair when I point to this assumption? If so, is Lutz being fair when he makes this assumption?
  4. Lutz writes: “Christianity is to Europe what the Transformer stories are to the Indigenous west coast of North America. Indigenous rationality rested on the transformer myths as European rationality and assumed superiority rested on Christian mythology” (First Contact 41). Connect this quotation to Wickwire’s surprise when she realizes that Coyote is able to “travel freely between pre-historical and historical time zones” (11) –thinking of Coyote as a master transformer. Now, consider that in Lutz’s survey of 200 contact performances, he mentions Coyote only once and this is in context with his accounts of first encounters having common “spiritual components.” And, in this story the story-tellers identify Simon Fraser as a manifestation of Coyote. According to Lutz, “[s]everal nlaka’pamux accounts of their meetings with Simon Fraser identify him as the ‘sun’; others suggest he was a manifestation of the transformer-trickster Coyote …” (“First Contact” 38). Or, another way to put this, is that Coyote the transformer appears as Simon Fraser. My question is why do you think it is that Coyote is so central in the stories that Robinson tells, both the ancient and the historical stories, yet is a small example in Lutz’s survey of over 200 stories? I am NOT asking you to critique Lutz’s discussion. Rather, look for your answer in Wickwire.  In particular, pay attention to her comments about time, myth and history.
  5. “If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact” 43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.