Lesson 2.3

Topics

  • A story of colonialism and contact zones revisited
  • Questions about postcolonial theory and definitions of “the settler” in colonial discourse.
  • Susanna Moodie and colonial stories and myths
  • Harry Robinson and nineteenth-century prophets

Lesson Objectives

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

  • Identify some of the central theoretical issues that complicate colonial discourse and post-colonial theorizing.
  • Discuss with more complexity western concepts of time, history and myth that impact interpretations of Indigenous knowledge and history.
  • Identify colonial stories and myths and recognize how the literary re-appearance(s) of Susanna Moodie work to “resurrect” the stories and myths that she carried across the ocean with her.
  • Discuss Harry Robinson’s stories in a larger context concerned with nineteenth-century prophets who were contemporaries of Moodie’s and address questions about authenticity and different definitions of history.

Lesson Description

What happened when the imaginative power of the Indigenous stories that associated the white man with the spirit world encountered the reality of thousands upon thousands of white people claiming their territories? What stories did they tell to make sense of this new reality? Or, one could ask, metaphorically of course — what did Coyote do? In turn, what stories gave the emigrants from Europe the motivation to brave the crossing of an ocean and the emotional fortitude to leave their homes – forever? What happened when the imaginative power of their stories encountered the realities of life as a settler? With this lesson we enter into “dangerous territory” that requires a bit of mapping before we begin to focus on these questions. So, we begin with a small story about growing up in Canada that is inspired by an infamous quote from the Prime Minister of the day and meant to provide a bit of a foundation for understanding why the territory is dangerous. And then, we enter into the discourse of colonialism, briefly. All this is in preparation for our reading of Susanna Moodie and Harry Robinson. We will read Moodie three ways: as a significant colonial author and foundational to the Canadian canon, as an iconic character in Canadian literature, and as the bearer of stories in Green Grass, Running Water. For your reading of Robinson we will focus on the story about the twins and that piece of paper and supplement our reading with an excellent article by Keith Thor Carlson: “Orality about Literacy: ‘The Black and White’ of Salish History.”

Assignments

Assignment 2:5 / Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog.

Assignment  2:6 / 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

Instructor’s blog

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 2011. 43-72.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 9 Apr 2013.

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

Supplementary Reading:

Ballstadt, Carl. “Biography, Susanna Moodie 1803 – 1885.” Poetry Foundation. Web April 2013.

Introduction to Lesson 2:3

So, as that story went in lesson 2:2, the first stories we know about this land we call Canada connect people to the land, those stories name places and people and both the stories and the land are the property of the people who tell the stories. Or, rather, the land was their property. Then came the traders, they came from all over, from the east and from the south, they spoke French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish and they came to find resources. When they encountered the Indigenous peoples they relied on their knowledge of the territory and they normally established peaceful trading relations with them. Then came the big ships with the explorers and the missionaries. Lutz describes two impacts that Enlightenment Christianity (1650 – 1800) had on contact experiences; European science and reason became a way to both divine and enact “God’s will,” and to demonstrate and inscribe the inferior position of all native peoples. And this is the story that lays the foundations for colonization, this is the story that justified the arrival of the missionaries, who with the help of the traders “cleared a little bush” for the arrival of the “settlers” with the help of the “mother land” cleared more bush and created colonies. Of course, there are those other stories too – the ones about how the white twin was originally banished for stealing the paper. This story we will save for the end of this unit because I think it is a story that works hard to make sense of the story of colonialism below, even though the story of the twins begins before colonialism.

A Story of Colonialism

We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.

—Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking at G20 news conference in Pittsburgh, September 2009. David Ljunggren. “Every GP Nation wants to be Canada, insists PM”. Reuters News Online 25 Sept 2009.

So, according to the Prime Minister of the day, “we” have no history of colonialism – as Thomas King might say, “that’s one good story.” I think this story, that we have no history of colonialism in Canada, is a powerful testament to the contradictions we find when imagination and reality work together to shape the historical past to accommodate the present. Imagine, no colonization – what does that mean? I think that Prime Minister Harper was implying that “Canadians” were never colonized – and by Canadians, I imagine he means the immigrants who came from all over Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (who were the colonizers; see below). This would be in keeping with the story we (Prime Minister Harper and I) learned as children– the story of a peaceful and benevolent history of settlement representing Europeans of all types working hard to clear the bush and turn empty land into civil communities, so very civil that there was no need for revolutions or wars of independence. Rather, independence from British rule was earned respectfully and benevolently granted, the way children earn privileges as they mature – and, the story ends with this goal being fully achieved after demonstrating an appropriate level of maturity and manly strength by sending troops to fight in European wars. It is not difficult for me to see how Prime Minister Harper’s notion of colonialism could be so very exclusive. This is one way to understand colonialism that concurs with the story of a peaceful and benevolent settlement of a new country. I believe I am just a few years older than Prime Minister Harper, and even though we were educated in different parts of the country, I imagine we both learned this same story in school. And, no doubt, he also participated in the singing of “God Save the Queen” and the reciting of the “Lord’s Prayer” each morning before classes began – “a ceremony of belief” that took place in public schools across the country until the late 1960s – every school day morning.

So, where are the first storytellers in this story? Well, I grew up thinking that the “Indians” had been like noble savages who first traded with the French, they had slaves and small wars among themselves, and latter fought along with the British, who treated “them” with great benevolence, trading protection and security for their land, and then they disappear into the background as the pioneers worked hard to cultivate the land, build a railroad and eventually form the Dominion of Canada. Honestly, this was the story I learned as a young Canadian in the 1960s, and I learned it in all sorts of ways, not just in the classroom. For example, I learned to skip rope singing a song called Ten Little Injuns in which “Indians” die one after the other until there is only one Little Indian left: “One little Injun livin’ all alone, he got married and then there were none.”

Canada does of course have a history of colonialism. And indeed, many will argue that colonial relationships of unequal power and privilege continue to govern our lives. And this is in keeping with Lutz’s suggestion that we remain in a contact zone, over and over again. And by we and our, I mean all of the peoples who call this land home

What kind of intersections can we find where the stories meet; the stories Europeans brought with them that they depended upon to leave home and the stories they used to claim this land as their home — with the stories the Native peoples used to make sense of this new reality? Is there such an intersection? Michael Asch, in an article that addresses the Elder’s question – “if this is your land where are your stories, “suggest that the arrival of “the settlers” constitutes Chapter 15 of the First Nations’ stories. But, for the “settlers” and their descendants, Chapter 1 begins with their arrival (31). Asch goes on to explain to the Elder, that “our” story places “their” story, the first 15 chapters, outside of history: “It is, if you will, a time that is timeless, an a-historic kind of time in which knowledge is not accumulated through experience and transmitted from one generation to another. In that sense, it is a form of time that stands outside of history” (8). In his article “First Contact, Over and Over Again” – an adept title for his argument that “we are still in that contact zone,” Lutz suggests that, “not only are settler populations and indigenous people still meeting in zones of mutual incomprehension […], they are also still creating and telling new contact stories and challenging the old ones” (4). I like the concept of new contact zones challenging the olds ones, especially in context with Lutz’s discussion on how contact stories are an exchange of performances, because this concept suggests the possibility for finding common ground, in Chamberlin’s terms. And, I like Asch’s idea of the disjunction of time between the stories of the First Peoples and the Europeans because this idea opens up a space to investigate that looks a little like an intersection.

Before we enter into an investigation of this intersection, we need to pause briefly to consider colonial discourse in general. Ironically, the contemporary body of theory that deals with colonial discourse is called post-colonial studies (see King’s “Godzilla vs Post-Colonial“ for further explanation of this irony). King’s theoretical expertise is limited, as is mine, but as I understand the discussions, one of the ideas is that we academics who are the inheritors of the European stories are now sufficiently outside of the influence of colonizing and nation building stories, and this enables the intellectual development of a new set of interpretive critical tools, called post-colonial theory. In his introduction to the Post-colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft outlines the central issues and debates featured in post-colonial theory which revolve around questions of “the literary text as a site of cultural control and an instrument for “fixing” the “Native” as the “other” and all that entails in terms of misrepresentations and colonial self-identification (8-9). Gaytari Spivak’s questions if it is even theoretically possible, or legitimate, to “recover” the voices of colonized peoples, or to construct a “speaking position” for Indigenous voices who have been so thoroughly written out of history and misrepresented in literature (8). In response some have suggested that Spivak’s analysis is itself “too deeply implicated in European intellectual traditions” (Ashcroft, 10). The debate, Ashcroft says, is “between those who insist on the possibility of an effective alignment of position with the subaltern and those who insist that this, paradoxically, may serve only to construct a refinement of the system it seeks to dismantle” (10). Ashcroft concludes that “[a]ll are agreed, in some sense, that the main problem is how to effect agency for the post-colonial subject. But the contentious issue of how this is to be attained remains unresolved” (9). Clearly, we enter difficult and perhaps dangerous terrain in approaching colonial discourse.

In King’s analysis, post-colonial theory “purports to be” a method by which, “we can begin to look at those literatures which are formed out of the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer, the term itself assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America” (“Godzilla” 183). One of King’s issues here is that this discourse “effectively cuts us off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization …” (185). With King’s insights and cautions at hand, we are going to look at stories to settle the land with the awareness that, just as we found with contact stories, these stories are also rich with tales told long before the settlers left home, and that these stories, in reality, constitute Chapter 15 in the larger story of this land.

So, the first intersection we are going to investigate is where Chapter 15 of the Indigenous stories meets Chapter One of the European story. In an interesting way, Susanna Moodie’s text, Roughing it in the Bush, provides both insights into Chapter One of the European stories and opens a pivotal space for connecting stories over the disjunction of time. We may not be able to listen to the Indigenous stories of the past, but we can learn to listen today, and if Lutz’s analysis is right-minded, I think we can find intersections between contact zones over time. But, this is not the only reason to examine Moodie’s text. I also want to begin to introduce many of the characters you are going to find in Green Grass, Running Water in context with this discussion on stories to settle/unsettle the land and build a nation.

One more detour before we proceed to examine some of the stories that enticed and transformed one particularly iconic “settler,” Susanna Moodie. One of the complexities we are confronted with when entering into a colonial discourse is the “dual” nature of colonial identity in Canada. I believe it is this complexity that confuses Prime Minister Harper and leads him to believe that the “settlers” were actually the colonized instead of the colonizers. So, we need some understanding of the duality of colonial identity, which most simply put recognizes that the settlers were also invaders. More complexly, this duality is layered; the settler-invaders were indeed the active colonizers: surveying land, building fences, displacing and isolating the Indigenous populations, and creating colonies. They were also settler-colonists and as such they were subject to the authority of the colonial centers. The settler-colonist than, is seen as occupying a space between the colonial powers and the Indigenous peoples, a space that is paradoxical in as much as settler colonies “simultaneously resisted and accommodated the authority of imperialist Europe” (Daniel Coleman 15). This dual activity of both resistance and accommodation also involves a third element of complicity; the settler-invader acts as the mediator between imperial power and the Indigenous peoples, enacting colonial authority to dispossess peoples of their lands and rights while claiming a benevolent innocence based on this role as agents of a greater power than themselves. The dual identity that I want you to think about then is the settler-invader who dispossess the Indigenous peoples under the authority of colonial powers, and the settler-colonist who resists the authority of colonial powers in their dreams and efforts to build a nation that they could call home.

Roughing it in the Bush with Susanna Moodie

Roughing it in the Bushis a rewarding read. It is not a saccharine memoir, and it is not an overblown adventure yarn. It is a frank and fascinating, and sometimes frightful tale and, while it feels singular, it reminds readers that Moodie’s was a story lived by thousands of men and women who were crazy enough to leave the relative comforts of Europe for the uncertain and terrible life of roughing it in the bush. It is our first immigrant story, and it’s certainly deserving of its place in the canon (Decook n.pag.)

Susanna Moodie did not write Roughing It in the Bush. In fact, Roughing It in the Bush was never written. Susanna Moodie and Roughing It in the Bush are interchangeable titles given to a collaborative act of textual production whose origin cannot be limited to one person or one point in time (Thurston 44).

Susana Moodie is an iconic colonial author and character in Canadian literature. Both Moodie and her text, Roughing it in the Bush, have appeared in every collection of the Canadian national bibliography and survey of English Canadian literature since, Henry Morgan, a founding member of the Canada First Movement in 1868, “began the canonization of Susanna Moodie” and her writing (Thurston 4). If you are not familiar with Susanna Moodie’s biography and publications, you should follow the link in the supplementary reading list and gain more insights before proceeding with this lesson.

In a 1981 article, Eve-Marie Kršller lists three “canonized resurrections” of Moodie by twentieth-century authors: Robertson Davies’ play, At My Hearts Core (1950), Margaret Atwood’s book of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and Carol Shield’s novel, Small Ceremonies (1976) (qtd. in Faye Hammill 167). Hammill goes on to list an additional six manifestations of Susanna Moodie, ending with Moodie’s appearance in Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water at the Dead Dog CafŽ. These successive resurrections and re-writings of Moodie can be read in many ways. One is as examples of a shared cultural and literary heritage — however, while to invoke Susanna Moodie can reinforce a sense of literary ancestry that begins with the settler-colonist (Chapter 1), this also invites ironic and subversive mis-readings that can work to critique instead of validate this notion of literary ancestry. These re-occurring literary manifestations of Moodie as character can also be read as reflections of shifting values in both criticism and the canon (Hammill 169). This is evident with a reading of Margaret Atwood’ s successive resurrections of Moodie as a character beginning with her 1970 poem series, The Journals of Susanna Moodie and ending with her novel Alias Grace (1996). One of the questions we are going to ask is what does the literary re-appearance of Susanna Moodie bring along with her? What are the stories and myths that are “resurrected” by her presence?

Susanna Moodie is a bundle of stories — just as much as she is a British colonial author. Thurston provides an interesting historical survey of critical and biographical responses to Moodie and her text, Roughing it in the Bush, that trace rewritings and recreations of Moodie the author. He writes that the early portrayals of Moodie as “loyal loving daughter of her adopted land […] with a strong sense of nationality” are based on critical imagination more than the reality of Moodie’s position or sentiments (Thurston’s conclusions are based on a reading of her letters, diaries and published texts) (5). According to Thurston’s analysis, the many biographical transformations of Susanna Moodie were, for a long time, motivated by literary desires to re-make Moodie into “the pioneer of Canadian Literature” (5). In Thurston’s survey of biographical essays and biographies of Moodie, he emphasizes how they “stress” Moodie’s “happy ending as a true Canadian heroine,” inscribing her with shaping the “destiny of a nation” and “helping us to form a correct notion of our national identity,” he concludes:

Anthologists excerpting from her work created a Moodie they felt was most representative. Critics and teachers of Canadian literature constituted both “the Canadian identity” and a Moodie congruent with it through a grid of acculturated proclivities founded on national optimism and the romance of history […] (5).

Susanna Moodie, British emigrant and colonial author, is also Susanna Moodie the pioneer of Canadian literature, is also Susanna Moodie romantic heroine in the quest for Canadianness, is also Susanna Moodie(s) iconic character(s) in Canadian literature, sometimes echoed and sometimes appearing in different guises in different times and places And there is more: a survey of critical concerns more directly focused on the text demonstrates it too has morphed and transformed. Initially read as a “romantic telling of colonial experience, ” (6) with shifting critical concerns at the turn of the century, the text became interesting for its literary form; in essence the text shifted from representative of colonial history, to representative of colonial literature, it became a novel – ” a work of creative fiction” (see Klinck 1959; 6). With this metamorphosis, Moodie is again likewise transformed — metaphorically; Carl Ballstadt “claimed that she “articulate[s] the central issue and problems of the creative writer” in Canada, to move upstream into the heart of the cedar swamp and to develop a language and form adequate to that experience (qtd. in Thurston 7). As a novel, Roughing it in the Bush is liberated from historical circumstance, and instead of reading a colonial memoir, critics study interesting elements of its literary form. A central conversation revolves around the “generic instability” of the novel and many critics work to explain the “double-vision” of the novel in psychological terms. Roughing it becomes a novel of “the divided psyche” exposing the “psychological dangers” of “confronting the overwhelming emptiness of the Canadian wilds”(R. E. MacDonald qtd. in Thurston (7). What was a memoir becomes a fiction and history becomes myth. Thurston concludes:

This text was remade as a novel about a heroine’s confrontation with the archetypal wilderness. It became a major exhibit in the attempt to construct a canon based on the putative uniqueness of the Canadian relationship with the land (8)

Here we return to the question of land – stories and land, where we began. Note Thurston’s use of the term ‘putative’; the assumed and commonly accepted unique relationship between Canadians and the land, and the notion that the construction of the Canadian literary canon begins with this relationship between peoples and land as centrally thematic.

Moodie’s presence in King’s novel, requires at least a nod of acknowledgement to all the above Moodies and the roles they have played in the stories about the “putative uniqueness of the Canadian relationship with land”, or how this land became Canada complete with the prerequisite literary ancestor on which to anchor Chapter 1 of Canadian literature. But we are more focused on the stories and myths that the Moodie brought with her, that she used to leave home — and the stories she used to claim this land as her home.

Stories to settle the land: “God gave her to us”

“Canadians, rejoice in your beautiful city! Rejoice and be worthy of her “She is ours!–God gave her to us.” Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush Ch 2.

These are the words Moodie writes in her description of seeing Quebec City for the first time. This certainly concurs with the earlier European contact stories enacted out with the placing of the cross and the burying of the written words: “In the name of God” we claim this land. Moodie extends this metaphor a few times with references to the Garden of Eden; “the island and its sister group looked like a second Eden just emerged from the waters of chaos” (Ch. 2.). Again, in a conversation about the absence of ghosts in “the unpeopled wastes of Canada,” Moodie stops to reflect on how the “new settler” must feel like “our first parents after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden” (Ch. 12) The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden is part of the creation story in the Christian European tradition, and by seeing “a second Eden” as she sails up the Saint Lawrence, Moodie is clearly carrying with her an imaginary land that belongs to this ancient story from a different place. Imagine — a second Eden, a second expulsion, an empty land with no ghosts, a second chance given by God — that is a powerful story. And it is one of the stories that Susanna Moodie carries with her when she crosses the Atlantic Ocean in 1832, and when she appears in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Thomas King’s novel.

This passage with its “unpeopled wastes” speaks to another story that voyaged the same ocean centuries before Moodie’s arrival, the story of Terra Nullius: land belonging to no one. The characters of this story change over time; for the agents of imperial powers in the 16th and 17th centuries this land was “empty” because it contained no Christian souls; a soulless land was an empty land belonging to no one. For Moodie, “the unpeopled wastes of Canada” is as much “an empty continent” as it is a “wasted land” full of potential; a land waiting to be cultivated and civilized. In her story, emigration from England is, she says, “a duty”; a duty to her husband and her family to achieve a higher social status through land ownership, a duty to Britain and apparently to God, as she says to herself on the eve of her departure, if she should change her mind and not fulfill these duties, it would be a sin.. These stories: Terra Nullius, the empty continent, and the wasteland waiting to be civilized are connected in numerous ways. Of course they each rely on Christian stories of belief as a main cause, and they each work nicely to motivate and justify actions — first the claiming of the land in the name of God and then colonizing the land in the name of civilization – British civilization that is. These stories too, are stories Moodie brought with her from England, and again, stories she brings with her to the Dead Dog Cafè.

These stories are also connected to a third and final story that I want to point to, and indeed in strange way the above two stories depend on this third story to reach a happy ending. This is the story of the “The Noble and Vanishing Indian.” There are different renditions of this story and they change over time as well, but they all fit into Daniel Francis’ category of “The Imaginary Indian.” For Moodie, the Indian was not quite so noble as she had been led to believe, but he was indeed vanishing. She describes them as “a people whose beauty, talents, and good qualities have been somewhat overrated, and invested with a poetical interest which they scarcely deserve” (Ch 15). Moodie describes her Imaginary Vanishing Indian by balancing off the many aesthetic and character faults she finds along side a list of “Indian gifts”: “Their sense of hearing is so acute that they can distinguish sounds at an incredible distance, which cannot be detected by a European at all; ” they are “cunning,” but out of necessity, not malice, they have an “Indian coolness and courage” and “iron nerves,” they “are great imitators” and “Nature’s gentleman–never familiar, coarse, or vulgar.” She doesn’t mention if her Imaginary Vanishing Indian can run fast – or not? (see King, Green Grass Running Water327). But, despite these Indian gifts, Moodie must lament that she has often grieved their sad fate:

[T]hat people with such generous impulses should be degraded and corrupted by civilized men; that a mysterious destiny involves and hangs over them, pressing them back into the wilderness, and slowly and surely sweeping them from the earth” (Ch. 15).

In this story the Vanishing Indians are beset be “a mysterious destiny””surely sweeping them from the earth” – and all that there is for the civilized settler to do, is grieve for their fate and marvel at the power of destiny: a power that is mysterious, unknowable and natural. The story of the “Vanishing Indian” was quite convenient for the settlers, and Moodie’s rendition has a nice romantic innocence to it; other than those nameless “corrupt civilized men,” no one is guilty; not the Indian, not the settler, and nothing is to be done in the face of destiny. As Francis observes, “the Vanishing Indian was a very expedient notion” (59) for the settlers who did not wish to see themselves as invaders, and clearly Moodie does not imagine herself an invader. She describes her Indian friends, the peoples whose land was granted to the Moodies by the government (400 acres):

The tribes that occupy the shores of all these inland waters, back of the great lakes, belong to the Chippewa or Mississauga Indians, perhaps the least attractive of all these wild people, both with regard to their physical and mental endowments. (n. pag.; emphasis added).

She writes about her own property:

A dry cedar-swamp, not far from the house, by the lakeshore, had been their usual place of encampment for many years. The whole block of land was almost entirely covered with maple trees, and had originally been an Indian sugar-bush. Although the favorite spot had now passed into the hands of strangers, they still frequented the place, to make canoes and baskets, to fish and shoot, and occasionally to follow their old occupation (n.pag.; emphasis added).

Notice how in Moodie’s imagination, the land never did belong to “the tribes,” rather they occupied the land, and their homes do no constitute “settlements” rather they are “camps” and much like the “Vanishing Indian” himself, their lands seem to have “slipped” away from them, innocently “passed into the hands of strangers.” The scene she describes of people making canoes and baskets sounds as if the government-granted land included a living museum exhibition. Just as Moodie sees a second Eden upon sailing up the Saint Lawrence, when it comes to possessing the lands of “her Indian friends,” once settled on her land, she imagines herself and her husband as “the first people:

The pure beauty of the Canadian water, the somber but august grandeur of the vast forest that hemmed us in on every side and shut us out from the rest of the world, soon cast a magic spell upon our spirits, and we began to feel charmed with the freedom and solitude around us. Every object was new to us. We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles, and raised imaginary houses and bridges on every picturesque spot which we floated past during our aquatic excursions. (Ch. 2.)

At the beginning of this lesson I suggested that Susanna Moodie and her text, Roughing it in the Bush, provide both insights into Chapter One of the stories European’s brought with them and open a pivotal space for connecting stories over the disjunction of time that Asch and Lutz both describe. Asch, with his analysis of Chapter 15 of the Indigenous story meeting Chapter 1 of the European story, and Lutz with his concept of continuing contact zones. The pivotal space I see could be conceptualized as a contact zone in Lutz’s terms. When Moodie’s visitors, a small group of Indians, study the large map of Canada hanging on her wall, Moodie says, they traced their traveling routes and pointed to their villages with their fingers as “they rapidly repeated the Indian names for every lake and river on this wonderful piece of paper” (Ch 2; emphasis added). In that moment, there are two maps; two ways of naming and knowing the landscape – it is here that I see a contact zone that stretches between the past and the present. When the Mississaugas looked at that “wonderful piece of paper,” that Mr Moodie “consulted daily” in order to know where he was, they demonstrated that they knew exactly where they were – even on the colonizer’s map. A little over a hundred years later, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Chief Justice Allan McEachern was presented with a map from the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en titled Exhibit 102: Traditional Boundaries of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Territories, as evidence of their claim to the land. Unlike the Mississaugas in Moodie’s living room, Justice McEachern, of course, could not find himself on this map, and accordingly could not accept it as evidence. More to the point, he was not able to see that this map charts territorial boundaries and land uses that existed previous to European re-mapping of those lands: he could not see what he did not believe existed. His response upon unfolding the map: “We’ll call this the map that roared” (qtd. in Spark 468). This weeks Blog assignment includes a question that interrogates this response, so for now, I will leave this here for reflection.

One reason for putting these two scenes of reading maps side by side, even though they are separated by a century of time, is to suggest that when it comes to reading maps that chart territory, we are in a contact zone that stretches across the disjunction of time and history that Lutz, Asch and Wickwire each describe. Reading a map is an act of literacy, in the first story in Moodie’s living room, the Mississaugas read over the colonial map with no difficulty. In the courtroom, the Judge could not read the map presented by the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en. You see, the map that the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en produced for the courtroom, a map that was created solely for this purpose, was a map that charted the connections between songs and stories and landscapes, a genre of cartography in which Judge McEachern, on his own admission, was illiterate (Sparke). Just to tie together those two scenes a little more tightly, I will end with a quote from Judge McEachern that I think works nicely to reinforce this connection over time between Moodie and McEachern:

I visited many parts of the territory, which is the principal subject of this case during a three-day helicopter and highway ‘view’ in June 1988. These explorations were for the purpose of familiarizing myself, as best I could, with this beautiful, vast and almost empty part of the province. (qtd. in Sparks 477; emphasis added).

Coyote and 19th century Prophetic Literacy

This is a good place to introduce our final reading for this unit, Carlson’s article on orality about literacy. Carlson examines the role and place of literacy in Salish stories, but as he puts it, he turns his gaze in a unique direction:

Presented here is a discussion of several Salish oral traditions that strives to situate literacy within an indigenous cosmology. To accomplish this, I attempt to invert the now standard scholarly exercise of trying to determine the ‘effect of literacy on orality’, as well as the more recent efforts to assess the degree of ‘orality in literature’, or the extent of ‘literature in orality’. Instead I turn my gaze to the indigenous orality about literacy (44).

The stories and historical narratives that Carlson examines help to answer some of our questions and they also challenge understandings of Native-newcomer relations in the most interesting way – and they provide insights on nineteenth-century Indigenous stories to balance our reading of Moodie and colonial stories. Recounting how Robinson’s story is about Coyote losing literacy (or his twin stealing it?) and relating the historical narrative of a contact-era Salish prophet, St’a’salk, who was influential in Salish and British relations, Carlson presents a fascinating, if ironic conclusion:

Contrary to scholarly orthodoxy, the Native people did not lose their land in large part because they were non-literates who could be easily duped and manipulated by nefarious literate settlers and mendacious colonial government officials, but, ironically, precisely because they were literate! (54).

Carlson also presents some of the same ethnographic evidence that Wickwire examines, the stories that James Tiet collected that speak of a “divinely inspired manuscript” that was eventually burned by Bishop Durieu:

According to ethnographer James Teit, as late as 1880 a Salish prophet was traveling among Coast and Interior Salish villages preaching from a divinely inspired manuscript that only he could read. This text, an accountant’s ledger book containing a series of pencil drawings and repetitive symbols, is now a part of the ethnographic collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and has been catalogued under the title “Dream Book of a Stalo Prophet (Carlson emphasis added 63) .

And there are two final elements of Carlson’s discussion I want to direct your attention to because they help us to read Robinson’s stories; they also shed light on typical questions of authenticity in post-contact stories in context with Indigenous Truths. First is his explanation of the necessity for “getting the story right” that is so essential within the whole large and complex traditions of storytelling and listening to stories. As Carlson explains there are “serious consequences” of sharing inaccurate or wrong history and this is not only “to the reputation of the speaker but to the listening (or reading) audience.” Indeed, “to retell a story is to convene the spirits of the historical actors described” (58). Second is Carlson’s understanding of literacy as part of the broader genre of transformation stories” and that acts of transformation are acts of literacy (61).

Blog Question: Assignment 2:6

1] In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to both King;s article and Robinson’s s  story.

 

2] Read Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of Roughing it in the Bush, 1854. I use the Project Gutenburg website which has a ‘command F’ function that allows you to search the entire document by words or phrases. Moodie’s introduction is often read as a warning to would be emigrants as well as an explanation of why her family emigrated from Britain. See if you can find echoes of the stories discussed above: a gift from god, a second Garden of Eden, an empty/wasted land, the noble but vanishing Indian, and the magical map. By echoes I mean reading between the lines or explicitly within Moodie’s introduction. Discussing what you discover, use your examples as evidence to write a blog that explores what you think might have been Moodie’s level of awareness of the stories she carried with her. And accordingly, the stories that she “resurrects’ by her appearance in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Green Grass Running Water.

 

3] In order to address this question you will need to refer to Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” You can easily find this article online. Read the section titled: “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (468 – 470). Write a blog that explains Sparke’s analysis of what Judge McEachern might have meant by this statement: “We’ll call this the map that roared.”
4] In the last lesson I ask some of you, “what is your first response to Robinson’s story about the white and black twins in context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet.” I asked, what do you make of this “stolen piece of paper”? Now that we have contextualized that story with some historical narratives and explored ideas about questions of authenticity and the necessity to “get the story right” – how have your insights into that story changed?
5] “To raise the question of ‘authenticity’ is to challenge not only the narrative but also the ‘truth’ behind Salish ways of knowing “(Carlson 59). Explain why this is so according to Carlson, and explain why it is important to recognize this point.

6]  Carlson writes:

“Harry Robinson’s account of literacy being stolen from Coyote by his white twin conform to all the standard criteria associated with a genre of Salish narratives commonly referred to by outsiders as legend or mythology with one exception – they appear to contain post-contact content” (Carlson 56).

Why is it, according to Carlson or/and Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).
7] Following Carlson’s discussions on literacy as “part of a broader genre of transformation” (61), try to explain what he means when he says that transformation is an “act of literacy.” This can be confusing at first, but if you follow his discussion beginning with “how Salish people understand the process or act of transformation in relation to literacy itself” and pay attention to how he uses etymology to shape his insights, you should be able to extract an explanation for conceptualizing transformations as writing and as readable.

Works Cited

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. 43-72. Print.

Chamberlin, Edward. “Boasting, Toasting and Truthtelling.” Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History. Ed. Keith Thor Carlson, Kristina Fagan, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print.

Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print.

Decook, Travis. “The History of the Book, Literary History and Identity Politics in Canada.” Studies in Canadian Literature/ Etudes en Litterature Canadienne 27.2 (2002): n.pag. Web. 04 April 2013

First Nations Studies Program, University of British Columbia. Instructor Interviews. Web. 04 April 2013.

http://www.intheclass.arts.ubc.ca/interview-archive/session-information/instructor-interviews.html.

Francis, Daniel. Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Aresenal Pulp, 1992. Print.

Grenier, Gildewet Margaret. “In Space of Song and Story: Exploring the Addawk of Hagbegwatku Simgeeget Sigdmhana nah Deth when sim Simgeegt.” MA thesis. McGill University, 1997. Web. 04 April 2013.

Hammill, Faye. Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 760-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.Print.

Hanson, Erin. The Residental School System. University of British Columbia.Web. 04 april 2013. http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school-system.html.

Horton, Chelsea. “The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (2nd Edition) by Daniel Francis.” Book Review.

BC Studies. Web. 04 June 2013.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterbough, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190. Web. 04 april 2013.

— The Inconvinent Indian; A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Canada: Doubleday 2012. Print.

Ljunggren, David. “Every GP Nation wants to be Canada, insists PM”. Reuters News Online 25 Sept 2009. 04 April 2013. Web. http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/26/columns-us-g20-canada-advantages-idUSTRE58P05Z20090926

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indignenous- European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1-15. Print.

— “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Aboriginal — Non-Aboriginal Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.

Sparke, Mathew. “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.3 (1998): 463- 495. Web. 04 April 2013.

Thurston, John. Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s P, 1996. Print.