Assignment 1.3: Chamberlin’s “Ceremonies”

Question: Write a summary of three significant points that you find most interesting in the final chapter of If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?

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In the same way J. Edward Chamberlin constructs the earlier chapters of If This Is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? by tactfully stringing together personal anecdotes, lyrics to songs, passages of poetry, historical events, and a plethora of other significant “stories,” his final chapter sorts through this varied material to reach a resounding conclusion.

The first point that I felt really registered with me in my reading of this chapter is the very first “point” Chamberlin makes. He retells the Gitksan “story of the grizzly and the sacred mountain called Stekyooden and the village of Temlaxam” and connects that traditional narrative to its modern-day implications (Chamberlin 220), namely how it was used in the 1997 Delgamuukw case between the Gitksan community and government officials as a way to assert that scientific ceremonies or stories do not make legendary ones obsolete. Effectively, Chamberlin explores this “notion of contradictory truths” with an analogy of two painters who paint the same subject but in different ways, one in an realistic style and the other in the mode of impressionist painting. As he asks: “which is the true portrait?” (Chamberlin 222). What Chamberlin does in these few pages is raise an extremely valuable question that seems to bother him throughout the text as a whole; does one truth necessitate there can be no other truth? For him, “truth” can be substituted in this line of questioning by stories, or paintings, or sciences, or even religion. But regardless of the medium by which we arrive at a “truth,” Chamberlin stresses that nothing can be fully understood “in isolation.” As he notes, these “truths” are “ceremonies of belief” that must interact with one another (Chamberlin 222).

Going back to his question of the portraits before moving on, I wanted to present an example of how engaging that line of thinking might be. Here is a photograph of an iceberg, here is a nineteenth-century painting of an iceberg by an American artist, and here is a contemporary painting of an iceberg by a Canadian artist. The photograph is very real, it captures the details and changing colours of the iceberg in as authentic a way as possible. The nineteenth-century painting strives for that realism albeit in highly romantic ways that capture tremendous detail and magnificent scale but in ways only an oil painting can. And the final one, the contemporary painting skips the finer details altogether, and places an emphasis on the angular beauty offered by icebergs. So “which is the true portrait?” Somebody might like one and not think much of the others, or like all of them, or detest all of them but when held side by side, you cannot deny that your appreciation of icebergs as colourful or epic or even odd is heightened and closer to a complete appreciation than if you just looked at one piece.

In the same way these works of art can be considered “ceremonies of belief” that enable the viewer to broaden or display or hone their understanding of the iceberg, Chamberlin leaps to say that “our contracts with each other” — be they War or Peace treaties, political constitutions, Biblical covenants — are of utmost importance “to the imagining of individual and collective identity” (Chamberlin 226). From the course schedule and reading list, I can assume we will study the complicated and long-lasting effects of land treaties between aboriginal peoples and settler societies so I think this is another point that has tremendous value. Regardless if we are “bound by [these contracts] in belief” or not, “we need to recognize their claim on people’s hearts and minds (Chamberlin 226). Understanding how our stories of “why we came to be here” and “how we came to be here” will constantly contradict those that others might possess is essential for us to not only understand struggles we might not have, but to also appreciate and respect the people on the “other” side of that “border”—a word which, like many others in the book, Chamberlin highlights as arbitrary and artificial.

Lastly, as a student pursuing a degree in English Lit, I really liked Chamberlin’s summation of scholarly pursuits as part of a human desire to participate in the constant act of storytelling and in doing so, aim “to understand—or overstand—the world” (Chamberlin 234).

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003. Print.

Church, Frederic Edwin. Final Study For the Icebergs. 1860. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas. Sotheby’s. Web. 21 January 2016.

Coupland, Douglas. Arctic Landscape Fuelled by Memory. 2011. Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. The Toronto Star. Web. 21 January 2016.

“Hanamus Fanny Johnson of Gitsegyukla.” Photograph. Tsimshian Villages. Canadian Museum of History. Web. 21 January 2016.

Mercer, Anthony. “Iceberg.” Photograph. National Geographic. National Geographic Society. Web. 21 January 2016.