Pages 171-182

On page 171, we have a scene with the four Indians. Their names hold extreme symbolic importance as names in and of themselves, examinations of identity and identification:

Ishmael is a name most known as being that of the protagonist of Herman Melville’s excruciatingly complex Moby-Dick. As notes that Te-Ed lesson, Ishmael begins by “telling his own story,” but later, upon boarding the Pequod, becomes instead “an omniscient guide for the reader” (Morrell 2020). Ishmael’s complicated role is a well-storied debate in the literature, and as Susan VanZanten Gallagherr notes in the abstract of her paper examining this issue, “as the narrator of Moby-Dick, Ishmael has long provoked critical problems,” with long disappearances from the action, descriptions of scenes or dialogues he was not witness to, and an erratic style (1). We may thus consider Ishmael to be an example of an unreliable narrator, withholding or manipulating information, pressing doubt and subversion upon the narrative, twisting the storytelling structure to serve their own needs. That famous first line of Moby-Dick – “call me Ishamel” – is a testament to the novel’s deep examinations of narrative and telling, of perspective and protagonist. The character himself has no last name, no family, hardly a backstory to speak of save for his desire to explore the open waters – it is Ahab instead who takes the role of protagonist later in the novel, as Ishmael fades into the background, absent for long chunks of the narrative while remaining, somehow, omniscient of the events of the Pequod. Thus Moby-Dick confronts the fundamentals of storytelling – just as is Green Grass, Running Water, with its narratives-within-narratives, with its first-person narrator in the Coyote portions and third-person narration in the “realistic” stories, its weaving-together of a multitude of plot threads to form a cohesive whole. Who – ask both King and Melville – tell our stories? And how, with what motivations in mind? Who adopts whose voice?

Ishmael is also a Biblical name. He is son of Abraham, ancestor of the Ishmaelites and the Arabs. The name itself derives from the Hebrew Yishma’el, meaning “God will hear” or “God will listen.” It is a theophoric name, meaning it carries in itself the name of a god, most commonly in Greek religion (Parker 53). So in Ishmael, or Yishma’el, King is providing us with another name for (a) god/God, alongside Dog-God and Dr. Joe Hovaugh.

As notes Jane Flicks in her reading notes for Green Grass, Running Water, Hawkeye is a moniker for Natty Bumppo, protagonist of the Leatherstocking Saga by James Fenimore Cooper (141-142). Scholar Thomas Jordan for Disability Studies Quarterly examines the Bumppo figure as indicating a “unique portrait of American national identity,” a symbol “of the nation’s white, Anglo-Saxon destiny” (1). Jordan further examines Bumppo’s abled-bodiedness in contrast to the disability of his Native American companion Chingachgook, suggesting a “corporeal hierarchy” by which to present the demise of the mythic American Indian as resulting through natural selection or otherwise physical incapabilities rather than the violence of US colonialism (1). In Bumppo there is a twisting of the truth of colonialization to serve to reinforce Western sovereignty and erase Indigenous history.

Next is the Lone Ranger, that most iconic of masked Old West heroes, whose image as the quintessential cowboy alongside his Native sidekick Tonto remains embedded in the American cultural imagination. He was also the star of a 2013 film of the same name, which was highly controversial at the time due to the fact that the Native sidekick Tonto was portrayed by Johnny Depp, a white man. Examining the name Tonto yields very interesting results: the name means “stupid” or “crazy” in Spanish. Tonto’s tribal affiliation has been always either been left ambiguous or been completely wrong for the location the show was set in. Tonto was also known to use the catchphrase “kemosabe,” a term that means, in the context of the show, “friend.”

The Supreme Court of Canada once ruled on whether or not the term is offensive to Canadian Indigenous people after a Mi’kmaq woman was called “kemosabe” by her boss. It’s been noted that “kemosabe” actually means “idiot” in Apache (Harris 2013), but scholars and fans alike have hardly been able to pinpoint the exact origins of the term as used in the show by the mysterious Indian Tonto.

The last Indian is Robinson Crusoe, protagonist of the novel of the same name by Daniel Defoe, sometimes considered, as note scholars Elisabeth Bekers and others, to be the first novel in English, as well as one of the greatest, described by the author himself and by the protagonist Crusoe as a “history” (McCrum 2013). It literally helped to birth the novel format, that transformation of storytelling from the voice to the page. It is a symbol of literacy. The name is also complex etymologically: in the novel’s first page, the protagonist himself explains, from the first-person, that he was originally named “Robinson Kreutzaner,” but “by the usual corruption of words in England” came to be called Crusoe (Defoe 1). So Robinson Crusoe the name marks a corruption of language and of naming, of how external influence alters a person’s linguistic identification.

Crusoe also has a Native companion, Friday. Crusoe names him so; it is not a name the man gives himself. “I let him know his name should be Friday” narrates Crusoe, later noting that he “likewise taught him to say Master; and then let him know that was to be my name” (Defoe n.p.). This is rather problematic, in that the identity of this Indigenous man is not only erased entirely but never provided at all, and it is only the name given to him that marks his personhood, and his position subservient to the white Crusoe.

All four of the characters from whom the Old Indians get their names are fictional white figures who had “Indian” protagonists: Ishmael had Queequeg, Hawkeye had Chingachgook, the Lone Ranger had Tonto, Crusoe had Friday.

On page 172, Lionel references his boss, Bursum, an allusion to Holm O. Bursum, who was senator from New Mexico from 1921 to 1925. In the early 1920s, Bursum wrote a bill, the Bursum Bill, to give ownership of Pueblo lands in New Mexico to non-Native people (New Mexico Museum of Art). That the character’s full name is Buffalo Bill Bursum further solidifies the allusion to the Bursum Bill.

Lionel means “young lion,” derived from Latin. It is not Indigenous – although his last name, Red Dog, is. There is an interesting albeit small point to make here about lions – the Biblical Revelation tells of the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Rev. 5:5), who is Jesus Christ – C.S. Lewis in fact took inspiration from this Lion of Judah to create his Aslan character in The Chronicles of Narnia, who famously represents Christ. Another Biblical allusion, however far-fetched, or even unintentional on the author’s part, it may be.

Lionel is also the name of a knight of the Round Table in Arthurian legend, Sir Lionel, who in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is named as Lancelot’s nephew. There is also Camelot, Lionel’s mother, an obvious allusion to that most famous of castles, Arthur’s court and the seat of the knights of the round table. Though Malory was not the first to record the adventures of the knights of Camelot, his literary Le Morte d’Arthur is often considered another candidate, alongside Robinson Crusoe, as the first novel ever written in the English language. Again we have an allusion to the power of literacy and the recording of historical and not-so-historical events through paper and word – Robinson Crusoe is written as a real travelogue, and many medieval histories record Arthur as a real figure. Where do we draw the boundary between what is real and what is not? Does our Western culture place greater authoritative power on the written word over orality? In these allusions – as well as in the novel’s general examinations of Biblical narrative – King is asking the reader to confront notions of literacy and text. He is creating a dichotomy, or lack thereof, between oral and textual forms of storytelling and recording. In the Western world, it seems, literacy prevails – with such groundbreaking works as Malory’s chronicling of Camelot, Daniel Defoe’s adventure story, and the Bible itself.

On page 175, Alberta reminisces on a childhood memory of seeing “cows artificially inseminated,” noting how it felt “mechanical” (King 175). Later, she parses through the words: “Cows. Cows. Horses. Cows. Horses. Cows. Cows” (King 175). Interestingly, neither cows nor horses are indigenous to North America. Instead, they were brought to the New World by European conquerors (McTavish et. al 2013). To take the allusory and symbolic connections of Green Grass, Running Water to their absolute limit, cows and horses were “artificially inseminated” into the New World. They were products of colonialism.

On page 179, Alberta learns she is a “blue priority” patient (179) at the clinic. Blue is a recurring symbolic colour: Sergent Cereno calls one of the escaped Old Indians “Mr. Blue (King 52), and as Flick explains in her reading notes, the fourth of the novel’s headings in the Cherokee syllabary translates as “North/blue” (Flick 143). Flick further notes that in the Medicine Lodge, north is old age (143). Thus blue, perhaps, comes to represent aging. It is clear that Alberta’s “blue” patient status indicates that she is getting older – the woman from the clinic notes that “younger women get higher priority,” and Alberta waits months for any progress towards getting an opening.

Later, on page 180, Charlie is described as flipping “through the channels, never watching any program for very long,” “except for the Westerns” (King 181). Earlier, on page 177, Albert scrolls through channel after channel, finding “nothing” to watch until “before she knew it, she was back to the Western” (King 177). The cultural image of the Western is vital to understanding King’s novel. Many refer to it as the genre through which the “central myth of the United States” is written (White 1). It is a film and literary genre through which the cultural legacy of the United States has been shaped and re-shaped through a colonialist lens of manifest destiny and the figure of the cowboy or outlaw. Indeed, the Lone Ranger and Hawkeye are both examples of Western figures, powerful white men through whom the West is conquered, Indigenous lands brought under the subjugation of America. And it seems King’s characters can never escape the Western – no matter how many channels, how many stories, they go through, they will always return to the myth of America.

The (manipulative) storytelling tradition of the Western grows in importance on page 182, when readers are told of the movies, of “Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, Polly Hantos, Sammy Hearne, Johnny Cabot, Henry Cortez, C.B. Cologne, Barry Zannos” (King 182). Each name is allusory. Sally Jo Weyha as I have previously analyzed in another blog post refers to Sacagawea, the young Shoshone woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition through America, whose name is commonly mispronounced, as notes historian Peter Kastor, as Sa-ka-jew-WAY-uh, because the name was spelled Sacajawea in William Clark’s manuscript journals. A better pronunciation, as explained by professor Gary Moulton, is sah-kah-gah-wee-ah, with a hard “G.” The culturally ubiquitous mispronunciation of Sacajawea is a succinct example of the colonial appropriation and manipulation of Indigeneity – the identity of this Native Shoshone woman shaped and re-shaped through decades of American cultural myth. Other illusions here include Frankie Drake to English explorer Sir Francis Drake, Polly Hantos to the famous Native American woman, and Henry Cortez to conquistador Hernan Cortes. Pocahontas is another interesting figure to examine – her life, too, has been mythicized, and she is such a dominant (Western, misrepresented) symbol of Native Americanness that the name itself, as we saw when Trump famously used it to refer to Senator Elizabeth Warren, has become derogatorily associated with a mockery of Indigeneity. Just as with what I earlier mentioned as the problematic use of the term “kemosabe” to refer to Indigenous people, the term Pocahontas has become a derogatory nickname. The self-identities of Indigenous individuals are erased, replaced by references to a select, few, colonially-curated images of the “Indian.”

It is interesting that the names that allude to Native figures – Sally Jo Weyha and Polly Hantos – are strange misspellings of the original names, forcing the reader to engage in acts of mispronunciation, and in doing so identify these figures through their colonialist framings. However, the allusions to colonial figures – Frankie Drake, Henry Cortez – are not misspellings, only slight alterations or diminutives of the original names. These figures of the legacy of Western settler-colonialism are not mispronounced and/or misidentified – for they were able to formulate their own stories. As fellow classmate Victoria Ranea pointed out in a comment on my previous blog post, the allusory “Louie, Ray, Al” (King 334) is a distortion of oft-maligned Metis figure Louis Riel, while a name like “Sue Moodie” (King 156) is a simple reference to Susannah Moodie without signification alteration. That Native names are altered while colonial names are not is a rather hidden means by which King explores the delineation of Native identity and Idengenity through colonialist Western hegemony. Victoria analyzed this phenomenon through an examination of the photographic works of Edward S. Curtis, whose rather voyeuristic depictions of Native Americans and his role in the perpetuation of the myth of the “vanishing Indian” speaks to the overwhelming dominance of settler-colonialism in shaping and re-shaping Indigenous identity, history, and culture.

All the characters – Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, and others – are described as “fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (King 182), speaking to the problematic portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood and on television. Scholar Martin Berny for Angles examines the “misrepresentation of Native Americans in cinema” as furthering “an irreconcilable enemy image upon which the American self is constructed,” with Hollywood continuously recycling “the dual stereotype of the noble Indian and the bloodthirsty savage” (1). Here, as with the names of the four Indians, we see King’s confrontation with (mis)representations of Indigeneity and the figure of the “Indian.” Just like the lives of figures like Sacagawea and Pocahontas have been appropriated and manipulated to serve the narrative and legacy of Western colonialism, so too did novels like Ishmael’s Moby-Dick and Robinson Crusoe, as well as shows like The Lone Ranger and literary series like Natty Bumppo’s Leatherstocking Tales, portray wildly curated images of Native Americans as the noble savage or a mythic, submissive figure of pre-civilization.

Works Cited

Bekers, Elisabeth, et. al. “The Legacy of Robinson Crusoe: The First Novel in English as Catalyst for 300 Years of LIterary Transformation.” Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. a1-a18, https://clic.research.vub.be/sites/default/files/atoms/files/INTRO_FIN_0.pdf.

Berny, Martin. “The Hollywood Indian Stereotype: The Cinematic Othering and Assimilation of Native Americans at the Turn of the 20^th Century.” Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, vol. 10, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/angles/331.

The Bible. New International Version, BibleGateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/.

“Bursum, Holm Olaf.” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/Home/MemberDetails?memIndex=b001144.

“C.S. Lewis Letter Testifies Narnia’s Lion as Christ.” Christian Today, 7 Dec. 2005, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/c.s.lewis.letter.testifies.narnia.lion.as.christ/4724.htm.

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. London, William Taylor, 1719. Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/521/521-h/521-h.htm#chap01.

Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, et. al. “Sir Francis Drake.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Drake.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, pp. 140-172, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/files/2013/11/GGRW-reading-notes1.pdf.

Gallagherr, Susan VanZanten. “The Prophetic Narrator of Moby-Dick.” Christianity & Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 1987, pp. 11-25, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014833318703600303?journalCode=cala.

Harris, Aisha. “What Do You Mean ‘Kemosabe,’ Kemosabe?” Slate, 26 Jun. 2013, https://slate.com/culture/2013/06/kemosabe-meaning-origin-and-history-of-tontos-word-in-lone-ranger.html.

“Highest court asked to rule on old Lone Ranger term.” CBC News, 22 Dec. 2004, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/highest-court-asked-to-rule-on-old-lone-ranger-term-1.491423.

“History: Statehood.” New Mexico Museum of Art, http://online.nmartmuseum.org/nmhistory/people-places-and-politics/statehood/history-statehood.html.

“Ishmael.” Behind the Name, https://www.behindthename.com/name/ishmael.

Kansas City Star. “A Miss Pronounced: Flip a Dollar and Just Say Sacagawea.” The Orlando Sentinel, 14 Jun. 2000, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2000-06-14-0006130350-story.html#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20phonetic%20spelling,gah%2Dwee%2Dah.%22.

Kastor, Peter. “Listen to Why You’re Probably Pronouncing Sacagawea Wrong.” St. Louis Public Radio, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2014-04-28/listen-to-why-youre-probably-pronouncing-sacagawea-wrong.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. HarperPerennial, 2007.

“Lionel.” Nameberry, https://nameberry.com/babyname/Lionel/boy.

Malory, Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. William Caxton, 1485. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm#chap102.

Mansky, Jackie. “The True Story of Pocahontas.” Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Mar. 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pocahontas-180962649/.

McCrum, Robert. “The 100 best novels: No 2 – Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719).” The Guardian, 23 Sept. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/30/100-best-books-robinson-crusoe.

McTavish, Emily Jane, et. al. “New World cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events.” PNAS, 2013, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1303367110.

Morrell, Sascha. “Why should you read ‘Moby Dick’? – Sascha Morrell.” YouTube, uploaded by TED-Ed, 26 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmoFxVqZ9z4.

Parker, Robert. “Theophoric Names and the History of Greek Religion.” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 104, 2000, pp. 53-79, http://publications.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/104p053.pdf.

Phelps, Jordyn. “What’s behind Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ taunt of Warren.” ABC News, 16 Oct. 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-pocahontas-taunt-warren/story?id=58530657.

Ranea, Victoria. “2:6 – On ‘The Vanishing Race.'” Victoria’s ENGL 372 Blog, 4 Mar. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/vranea372/2021/03/04/26-on-the-vanishing-race/.

“Sacagawea.” History.com, 5 April 2010, https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea.

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Through the Years.” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Mar. 2012, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/lone-ranger-tonto-johnny-depp-armie-hammer-clayton-moore-history-297732/1-johnny-depp-armie-hammer.

“The Problem with The Lone Ranger’s Tonto.” CBC News, 2 Jul. 2013, https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/the-problem-with-the-lone-ranger-s-tonto-1.1390402.

Thomas, Jordan. “The Myth of American Ability: Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the Frontier Tradition, and the Making of the American Canon.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, 2012, https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1739/3178.

“What Is an Unreliable Narrator? 4 Ways to Create an Unreliable Narrator in Writing.” MasterClass, 25 Mar. 2021, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-an-unreliable-narrator-4-ways-to-create-an-unreliable-narrator-in-writing#:~:text=An%20unreliable%20narrator%20is%20an,their%20credibility%20as%20a%20storyteller.

White, John. Westerns. Routledge, 2010. Taylor & Francis Group, https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/books/mono/10.4324/9780203835319/westerns-john-white.

Zeidan, Adam. “Ishmael.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Dec. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ishmael-son-of-Abraham/additional-info#history.

Question 6

As I have considered throughout my last few blog posts, the authors we are beginning to examine in depth – Harry Robinson and Thomas King chief amongst them – expertly and critically blend oral and literary forms of narrative. A synthesis – or perhaps a contrast – of voice and text leads us towards a new form of narrative that is neither wholly one or the other, but rather an intertextuality of storytelling by which to confront colonialist subjugation, Indigenous cultures and histories, and postcolonial understandings of nation, race, and identity.

Green Grass, Running Water is a novel obsessed with names. Let’s analyze three examples of names in King’s novel which demand being vocalized so as to understand their full allusory complexities.

The first name is Ahdamn, who lives with First Woman in the garden (King 40). He is, of course, an obvious allusion to the Biblical Adam, on this Biblical webpage called the “father of the human race.” In scripture, the name itself seems to be given little great significance: in the King James Bible, the name appears suddenly and unceremoniously; this is because Adam is quite literally the Hebrew word for “man,” and so Adam represents, at that point in biblical history, all humanity. The Hebrew itself is rife with plays-on-words – scholars have come to various understandings of the name “Adam” as representing all humans, or as representing the earth, or perhaps both. R.J. Berry for Science and Christian Belief examines these complexities, noting the Hebrew word adamah as meaning “from the earth” (23). Consider, for example, the Ha’adamah Blessing, made before the eating of cultivated produce, to understand the significance of adam/adamah as referring to earth as well as humanity’s relationship to the ground itself. Through the name Ahdamn, King is illuminating a Biblical orality – a rarity within the overwhelming significance and dominance placed on literacy in the presentation of Christian narrative and morality. Drawing from a Hebrew Biblical pronunciation guide, one can voice adamah as ah-daw-maw, with some emphasis on the central “daw” – a stark contrast to the common American/Canadian pronunciation of Adam as ædəm, or “AH-dum.” Perhaps it is only through speaking Ahdamn out loud as “ah-DAMN” or “ah-damn,” with emphasis on either the second consonant or neither, that readers can understand the allusion to the Hebrew. Ahdamn also transforms the name into not just a name but also a phrase, and a particularly expressive one at that, demanding aggressive voicing over silence – “ah, damn!” It is also alluding to the damnation faced by Adam and Eve in their fall into sin – a particularly profane allusion, and one that is steeped in orality: “ah, damn” is a spoken phrase, conversational rather than literary, harkening to the oratory of Indigenous storytelling.

The second name is Dr. Joe Hovaugh. Only in voicing the name out loud can readers discern the play-on-words and allusion to the BIblical Jehovah, one of a few potential vocalizings of the Tetragrammaton, that sacred name of the Hebrew God that, as notes liturgical scholar Lynne Courter Boughton, many propose should be left unpronounced. Some say Yahweh. By forcing readers to vocalize “Joe Hovaugh” to understand the allusion to Christian considerations of godhead, King is critiquing Christian doctrine’s reverence of pure literacy and avoidance of orality. King decolonizes Christian myth through a direct rebuke of the sacredness of the unpronounceable name of God.

The third example is the group of names for the individuals who were “all waiting in the shadows of the major studios, working as extras, fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (King 182). Two of the names are “Sally Jo Weyha” and “Polly Hantos,” allusions to Sacajawea and Pocahontas, respectively. Colloquial pronunciations for Sacajawea, or Sacagawea, vary: this Ted-Ed video (which, interestingly, purports to be telling her “true story”) uses the most common North American English pronunciation of “Sac-uh-jew-WAY-uh.” History professor Peter Kastor, however, pronounces it as “suh-kaw-guh-WAY-uh,” with the first three syllables spoken in quick succession and a hard “g” rather than a soft “d̠ʒ.” In that interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Kastor explains that William Clark had spelled the name n multiple ways in his original manuscripts, and the editor had chosen the version Sacajawea, thus giving rise to the now-common mispronunciation (2014). By spelling his allusion to the famous American figure as “Sally Jo Weyha,” King is forcing his reader to actually mispronounce the name – and seems to be taking a jab at the appropriation of Native identity and storytelling through colonialist interpretations of Indigeneity. Sacajawea is “sac-uh-jew-WAY-uh” only because of the white authors and editors through whom her life was mythologized. And as King notes, Sally Jo Weyha, amongst others, was stuck “playing Indians again and again and again” (182), always bound to the forever-static role of the colonialist construction of the “American Indian.”

Works Cited

“Adam.” Behind the Name, https://www.behindthename.com/name/adam.

Berry, R. J. “Adam or Adamah?” Science and Christian Belief, vol. 23, 2011, pp. 23-48, https://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/serve_pdf_free.php?filename=SCB+23-1+Berry.pdf.

The Bible. King James Version, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202&version=KJV.

Broughton, Lynne Courter. “The Name of God in the Scriptures and in Liturgy.” Questions Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy, vol. 90, no. 1, 2009, pp. 23-43, DOI: 10.2143/QL.90.1.2040728.

Fairchild, Mary. “Meet Adam: The First Man and Father of the Human Race.” Learn Religions, 25 June 2019, https://www.learnreligions.com/adam-the-first-man-701197.

“Listen to Why You’re Probably Pronouncing Sacagawea Wrong.” St. Louis Public Radio, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2014-04-28/listen-to-why-youre-probably-pronouncing-sacagawea-wrong

Mensing, Karen. “The true story of Sacajawea – Karen Mensing.” YouTube, uploaded by TED-Ed, 8 August 2013,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnT0k9wdDZo.

Parsons, John J. “Ha’adamah Blessing.” Hebrew for Christians, https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Blessings/Daily_Blessings/Food_Blessings/Ha_adamah/ha_adamah.html.

“Strong’s H127 – ‘ăḏāmâ.” Blue Better Bible, https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?t=kjv&strongs=h127.

Answering question 5:

Green Grass, Running Water is King’s reckoning with orality and textuality. The novel is polemical, in its thematic examinations of colonialism, of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural identity, of Canadian literary theory in the Joe Hovaugh character as a figurative stand-in for Northrop Frye and a clashing of Indigeneity and the Western literary canon in the runaway elders. But I would also contend it is, in many ways, rather interfusional; and unlike Harry Robinson and his “Coyote Makes a Deal With King of England,” whose syntactic and narrative structure privileges performance over interiorized reading, King’s text is, in many ways, definitively textual. And yet it is also oral, particularly in its borrowing from, and thematic and structural dialogue with, the stories of Harry Robinson. 

Green Grass, Running Water‘s opening section is highly oral and echoic of Robinson: there is the sparse use of quotation marks for dialogue; there is the present tense perspective, a technique which, as noted in this Guardian article by noted literary journalist Richard Lea, has skyrocketed in popularity in recent prose fiction as a means of adding “intimacy” or “immediacy” to one’s storytelling; and there are Coyote and God, in dialogue and in opposition. Both narratives begin with water and the solitary Coyote, as well as with a past tense perspective which quickly gives way to a present immediacy: “In the beginning, there was nothing,” goes the opening words of Green Grass, Running Water, “just the water,” with the unnamed narrator noting that “Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep” (King 1; emphasis added). To compare, Robinson writes that “for a long time, Coyote was there / on the water” (Robinson 64; emphasis added). Robinson and King employ the oratorial immediacy of the present tense to dissolve temporality and thus remove the Indigenous narrative from the sequential confines, the “sense of progress,” implied by what King notes as the common label of “post-colonial” literature as being bound to hegemonic structures of nationalism and settler-colonialist pedagogy (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 185). Robinson and King are decolonizing the myth of the Vanishing Indian, examined by scholar and author Mari Murdock as having been perpetuated by Edward Curtis in his production of a recipe of “myth-making” to forge “the reality in which the people…have disappeared” (138). 

Coyote’s position as a figurehead for oratory comes into greater prominence when his narrative converges with that of the four elder Indians and Lionel. Coyote’s voice and actions, even some of the world in the immediacy of his mention, remain in the present-tense, while those of the Indians, and the general narrative, remain in the past:

“You bet,” said Ishmael.

“I love parties,” says Coyote, and he dances even faster.

“Yes,” said the Lone Ranger. “We remember the last party.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” says Coyote just as the rain begins to fall. (King 274)

This examination of tense and King’s highly unusual melting-together of past and present temporalities in quick succession leads us to an understanding of Green Grass, Running Water as a liminal novel located between orality and literacy, voice and text. One particularly striking example of the book’s textuality, in comparison to such a work as “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” that demands the spoken word, is the opening chapter’s visual presentation of God as GOD, in small capitals. Only after “that Dog Dream” demands immense Godhead does he become “that GOD” (King 2), alluding to the conventional small-capitals spelling of LORD in Biblical texts, a transliteration of the Hebrew “yhwh,” the Tetragrammaton considered too sacred for speech that was later altered to become Yahweh. When “that GOD” asks “what happened to my void?” and “where’s my darkness?,” we can begin to understand this character as the deity of the Old Testament, the Western creator, whose original name, as revered by the Hebrews, was quite literally unspoken: an anti-orality, the “ineffable name.” Robinson’s God is a far more elusive character through His distance and orality, in the constant reference to “God’s thought” (Robinson 66, 71) rather than his word, that famous notion of the authority of the Word of God. Through highlighting voice and belief over the colonialist authority of text, Robinson confronts Judeo-Christian values of print and scripture.

King is comedic in his examination of Christian mythmaking: “that’s the wrong story,” explains Ishmael, when Lone Ranger begins to speak the first words of Genesis. What is quoted here is the King James Bible, which many still regard, as seen in this Oxford Biblical Studies retrospective on its 400th anniversary, as a titan of literature, faithful to the original authors and sublime in its translation, and a major influence on the spread of the English language. King examines literacy further in the names of the elders, particularly Hawkeye, Ishmael, and Robinson Crusoe, titans of fiction in a centuries-long Western literary canon that has come under much scrutiny in recent years for its perceived problematics, but is nevertheless still considered “essential reading” – why? As Katy Waldman for Slate writes, these books “actually reflect the tainted history we have” (2016; emphasis added) – but what does it mean for literature to reflect?

There is more literacy to King’s book. As notes theorist Blanca Chester for Canadian Literature, King’s is a “highly contextualized and literary novel,” reworking orality into “high” literature (45). To understand this, look no further than the volume headings written in the Cherokee syllabary, that rendering of the Cherokee language into print by the illiterate Sequoyah, a linguistic event that National Geographic notes as a moment of “remarkable inventiveness” which allowed the Cherokee, through mass literacy and printing, to “preserve their language and cultural traditions and remain united with each other amid the encroachments of Euro-American society” (2019).

Fig 1. A chart of the Cherokee syllabary. Source: “Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ / Tsalagi).” Omniglot, https://omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm.

So King is calling attention to that specific loss of orality in the formation of written sounds, and perhaps problematizing the notion of literacy being the “saviour” by which Indigeneity can be preserved. What would King make of this National Geographic article, and its praising of the textual literalizing of Indigenous language?

Works Cited

“Bible Verses about the Word of God.” Daily Verses, https://dailyverses.net/the-word. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, pp. 44-61, https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/canlit161-162-GreenChester.pdf. Accessed 12 March 2021.

“Focus on King James.” Oxford Biblical Studies Online, https://global.oup.com/obso/focus/focus_on_king_james/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

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

–. Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Broadview press, 2004, pp. 183-190.

Lea, Richard. “Make it now: the rise of the present tense in fiction.” The Guardian, 21 Nov. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/21/rise-of-the-present-tense-in-fiction-hilary-mantel. Accessed 11 March 2021.

Murdock, Mari. “Stepping Out of Photographs: Stopping the Myth of the Vanishing Native through Reclaiming Personhood in The Edward Curtis Project.” Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 135-142, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1293&context=criterion. Accessed 12 March 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, Talon Books, 2005, pp. 46-63.

“Sequoyah and the Creation of the Cherokee Syllabary.” National Geographic, 13 Nov. 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/sequoyah-and-creation-cherokee-syllabary/. Accessed 10 March 2021.

Waldman, Katy.” The Canon is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, and Totally Gross. Yes, You Have to Read It Anyway.” Slate, 24 May 2016, https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/yale-students-want-to-remake-the-english-major-requirements-but-there-s-no-escaping-white-male-poets-in-the-canon.html. Accessed 11 March 2021.

Hi, below are links to my three favourite blogs: assignment 2:2, my short story on the meaning(s) of “home,” assignment 1:5, my short story on how evil came into this world, and assignment 1:3, on the power of language and words.

I chose my post on language because I felt that I went more in-depth with that topic than any other, and issues of language, cultural genocide, Indigenous erasure, and communication are dear to my heart. I am continuously fascinated with questions of literacy vs orality, the mysteries and riddles of words, and the construction of truth(s) and histories.

I chose my evil story because I was rather happy with how it turned out, and I found I had a lot to say in my commentary on it – I discovered much about the nature of orality and literacy, for example.

I chose my story on “home” because the subject is another I am very fascinated by – ideas of cultural identity, language, belonging, and performative ethnicity.

Assignment 1:3 – the Power of Language | English 372 – Canadian Literature (ubc.ca)

Assignment 1:5 – How Evil Came Into This World | English 372 – Canadian Literature (ubc.ca)

2:2: Home | English 372 – Canadian Literature (ubc.ca)

Answering question 1: 

Reading “Godzilla vs. Post-Post-Colonial” brought to mind the Odyssey and issues of translating English from the Homeric Greek: much has been written and debated of the historic and linguistic incongruities of the poem, a strange amalgamation which calls into question the identification of Homer as a single individual. In the early twentieth century, scholar Milman Parry examined in detail the poem’s extensive use of fanciful epithets for gods and humans alike, markers which are linguistic rather than thematic or narrative in purpose, “created to meet the demands of the meter of Greek hoeric poetry” (Knox 15). The discovery of this epithetical system led to the groundbreaking understanding of the Homeric works as orally improvisational rather than textually fixed. And according to Homerist David Bouvier in his examination of this issue, Greek civilization was predominated by speech, and the transmission of culture and history occurred orally (59). This is “the common complaint…of oral literature that has been translated in English” that Thomas King is writing of, that “we lose the voice of the storyteller…and the interactions between storyteller and audience” (186). What is lost in adapting Homer not just to text, but to English?

Harry Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” is, as a textual work made for speech, seeking to suture the link between storyteller and listener. In its strange syntax, as with the (prescriptively) grammatical nonsensicality of “and he eat right there” and the extensive use of sentence fragments, it forces the reader to present the narrative orally. I found it difficult to read it silently to myself; its fragmentary nature made me double-back and re-read, to make sure I was scanning the text properly. Like the Beat poets and modern slam poetry’s emphasis on the synthesis between poet and audience, in the collective disillusionments of the poetic environment and employment of audience reactions for emphasis and emotional catharsis —- as with the great “Say No” by Olivia Gatwood and Megan Falley, an example as well of a bond between storytellers — Harry Robinson is “re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (King 186).

Only when I read Robinson’s piece aloud to a friend, and had them read it back to me, did I grasp a full understanding of it. There is no textuality to Robinson’s work beyond orality. The rhythms, often harsh, with jarring sentence fragments as with “They want to have a queen. Got to be a woman” (Robinson 2005), the voices of Coyote and King brought to life through speech – this is all only understandable through telling the poem, and that requires a voice and an audience.

It is an aural/oral piece, and through its being written in English but demanding of its reader the oral finesse of Indigenous storytelling and community, it acts as a direct rebuke of the linearity evoked by the label of “post-colonial literature,” what King describes as the term’s implication of a “sense of progress in which primitivism gives way to sophistication” (185). KIng’s preferred term here is interfusional: Indigenous orality in the language of the colonizer. Keith Thor Carlson in “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History” writes of “literacy…as a colonial weapon capable of inflicting damage by relocating the sacred from local control and into the public domain” (43), and it is through this understanding of the colonialism of literacy that we must understand what Robinson is doing through this fusion of text and voice, Indigenous history and colonial, assimilative language.

Reading Robinson also brought me to thinking again of Indigenous author Alicia Elliott and her “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground,” which I analyzed in one of my earlier blog posts: “culture lives and breathes inside our languages,” she writes, writing of how colonialist Canadia “fought so hard to make us forget them” (51). The term “post-colonial,” writes King, “is hostage to nationalism” (185), and perhaps this is what Elliott is (indirectly) pointing towards: an understanding of modern Indigenous literature as “post” colonialist erases Indigeneity through a lens of literacy. The problematics of hierarchically positioning literacy over orality are still evident to this day, as with the denigration of Africa as the “oral continent” and thus more “primitive”; in his Orality and Literacy, philosopher Walter Ong presupposes that literacy follows from orality, calling it a “shift” and emphasizing the importance of “comparing successive periods with one another” (2). This is what King warns against in his critique of the term “post-colonial,” and this dichotomous, sequential thinking is what a work like “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” challenges.

The “written word” has long been considered to carry a greater sense of authenticity than speech; but with Robinson, I found the authenticity in the speech, in my connection to the listener or the storyteller. Coyote and others found life in our voices (though this in itself is a problematic idea – I am not Indigenous). That is why Robinson is so unique. When I read the story aloud, and listened to it being read to me, this was not pure literacy – this was interaction, a destruction of the boundary between literacy and orality.

Works Cited

“An Introduction to the Beat Poets.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147552/an-introduction-to-the-beat-poets.

Bouvier, David. “The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?” Oral Tradition, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59-61. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51578/pdf.

Buthelezi, Mbongiseni. “Debunking the myth that orality trumps literacy in Africa.” The Conversation, 8 Oct. 2015, https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-myth-that-orality-trumps-literacy-in-africa-47422.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality About Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/files/2020/02/Orality-and-Literature-.pdf.

Elliott, Alicia. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” The Malahat Review, 2016, pp. 47-54, http://www.malahatreview.ca/excerpts/197files/elliott.pdf.

Gatwood, Olivia, and Megan Falley. “National Poetry Slam Finals 2014 – ‘Say No’ Olivia Gatwood, Megan Falley.” YouTube, uploaded by Poetry Slam Inc, 31 October 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GxVJTqCNs.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. Routledge, 2002, https://oportuguesdobrasil.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/ong_walter_j_-_orality_and_literacy_2nd_ed.pdf.

Answering Question 1

With his introductory “‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened'” to The Truth About Stories Thomas King is asking his readers to examine storytelling from a (post)colonialist perspective, to confront issues of narrative appropriation, cultural genocide, and the subsuming of counter-narratives by hegemonic, colonial master-narratives. He does this through his overtly contrasting presentations of two first stories, the authoritative Genesis against the captivating tale of how Charm fell from the sky, and his subsequent discussion of belief and binaries: West versus Indigenous, Christian versus Native, hierarchy versus cooperation – colonizer versus colonized. It is that latter dichotomy which, although perhaps not explicitly arrived at by King in his introduction, is what concerns us most here: to take the perspective of Western hegemony, Genesis is the Christian truth of the world and Indigenous creation myth is just that, “myth” and nothing more, an entertaining story to tell one’s friends or family to be in awe of the wondrous storytelling capacities of the mystical Indian.

Following his poetic, captivating telling of how Charm fell from the sky, King writes of the story as perhaps being “a little exotic,” like “the colourful T-shirts that we buy on vacation” (20). Eventually, he writes, these shirts, these stories, are “left to gather dust on shelves” (21). In North America, Native stories are exoticized and rendered fables. The Canadian Museum of History has a dedicated page to the cataloging of what they call “traditional stories and creation stories,” narratives that they must emphasize are “more than legends,” “embodying a view of how the world fits together” (“Traditional Stories and Creation Stories”). Are Christian creation narratives similarly systematically curated as entertaining artifacts, contextless pieces of an exotic culture meant for museum preservation?

No. The Bible, for many, is the truth – it is the North American truth. It is the master narrative. Look no further than the phrase the gospel truth to mean an absolute truth — and its cultural usage, as in the song of the same name from Disney’s Hercules, where it is used to describe the “honesty” of the Muses’ rendition of Hercules’ tale in opposition to the supposed fantasticality of the grandiose “Greek tragedy” version that the Muses so object to — to understand the significance of Biblical narrative in the formation of Western sociocultural hegemony. King confronts and wrestles with this dichotomy in his introduction because our society imposes a dichotomy. He recounts the story of Charm as just that – a story, well-written and fantastical, with clever dialogue and settings imaginatively described. In contrast, his recounting of Genesis is short and matter-of-factly straightforward, as though expecting us (rightfully so, for most of us Western readers) to be familiar with the whole framework already – “a less misogynist reading would blame them both,” he writes, revealing Genesis as a tale so well-understood, so ubiquitous, in North America that there exist myriad readings of it.

In many ways, the process of decolonization begins with removing Indigenous storytelling from voyeuristic museum halls and returning the traditions and tales to the communities who told them first. Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, in an issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, write of Indigenous storytelling as “an act of living resistance”, examining its political and decolonizing power as a form of community resurgence. As Lenard Monkman for CBC notes, the 1885-1951 potlatch ban instituted against the First Nations by the settler Canadian government has had long-lasting effects on Canada’s First Nations and Indigenous peoples: this settler-colonial imposition against the storytelling and truth-telling traditions of Canada’s Native communities – the stories, as J. Edward Chamberlin notes, which “tell people where they came from, and why they are here” (2) – has led to the loss of many ceremonial and leadership traditions for Indigenous women. The erasure of Indigenous truth-telling leads to the loss of Indigenous culture and community. King’s dichotomous presentation of the two first stories in his introduction is how he confronts the appropriation of Indigenous storytelling by our settler colonialist state and the use of Western, Christian, settler colonialist first stories to assert a hegemonic dominance on stolen land. We can learn perhaps, through his work, that it is time this appropriation be stopped, the erasure of Indigenous storytelling be counteracted. This is what Metis artist Kenneth Lavallee is doing through his examination of the intersection between Indigenous and Biblical creation stories, his confrontation of this “dichotomy” between these two worlds. Is it truly a dichotomy?

Works Cited

Ice River Films. “What do Indigenous mythologies and Biblical creation stories have in common?” CBC Arts, 5 Mar. 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists/what-do-indigenous-mythologies-and-biblical-creation-stories-have-in-common-1.4560570. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

“Traditional Stories and Creation Myths.” Canadian Museum of History, https://www.historymuseum.ca/history-hall/traditional-and-creation-stories/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

Menken, Alan. “The Gospel Truth.” YouTube, uploaded by xFliiy, 18 Sept. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRq7lLawQB4. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

Sium, Aman, and Eric Ritskes. “Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. I-X, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19626/16256. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

Monkman, Lenard. “Historical ban on potlatch ceremony has lingering effects for Indigenous women, author says.” CBC News, 25 Mar. 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/historical-ban-spirituality-felt-indigenous-women-today-1.4036528. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

How we share home: common values, assumptions, and stories:

–Home as unstable, as a concept that is “always changing” as “the world around us always changes” (Zac Collins 2021). This idea of home is unanswerable; it is impossible to trace exactly its origins and its paths. As Aidan put it, home is “ambidextrous” (Aidan McConnell 2021). It is often impossible to say what “home” exactly is because the answer would vary so drastically depending upon one’s current state – where they are, what language they are speaking, what people they are surrounded by. My story is about this as well: my idea of home is highly unstable: I am from multiple places, but simultaneously not of any place.

-Home as defined by loved ones, friendships, and family.

-Home as a sense of one’s inner identity.

-Home as defined less by place(s) and more by sense and feel: Magdalena’s post was entirely concerned with the idea of being “at home” in various places – home with people rather than at places, each micro-story paragraph ending with the repetition of “and I was home,” with each home a hyperlink to a different definition of the word. Both Aidan and Zac’s concepts of home are also based on people as well as places. Mia’s post defines home as “the ability to stand in the same room with the people I valued the most, and simply breath” (Mia Nikoo 2021). Both she and Kyle Olsen titled their posts with the phrase “where the heart is.”

-Home as environmental, defined by the natural world and remembrances of landscapes: Grace Marshall writes of having grown up on an island, with the “ocean” having “always been an important part” of her image of home (Marshall 2021). She writes of the sounds of the waves, the comfort of the ocean. Aidan writes of the Coast Mountains as the greatest symbol of his idea of “home” in Vancouver (McConnell 2021), and Laura Metcalfe writes of how the mountains “know about me,” of how she knows “about the land” and the “old growth forest” (Metcalfe 2021). Samantha Stewart’s post is dedicated in part to the ocean – its breezes, its weather. This connection to the storytelling of the natural world is part of what place-based education is concerned with, an immersion into “local heritage, cultures, landscapes” (Promise of Place).

-Many of our stories spoke of childhood and of growing up: my own post was partly concerned with how I was born in Japan, but raised in Canada, thus splitting my identity between two places as a true “native” of Japan but culturally far more immersed in Canadian society. Zac writes of how “the home of my childhood really does feel like childhood,” writing of a “strange clashing of worlds” upon his return to his hometown (Collins 2021). Laura, Magdalena, Holly Rance with a photographic artifact of her childhood, Grace M., and Lenaya Sampson with her retelling of childhood stories and youthful memories, all seem to create a shared narrative of home as where one was a child; home as childhood memory.

There were, however, some differences between stories, some shared differences even. I noticed that not all stories shared the same sense of cultural (or political, even) uncertainty: I noticed that I was (perhaps) unique in my idea of home being about my being of two vastly different societies, two vastly different cultures. This speaks to the sociocultural/sociopolotical specificity of home as a product of nation-state building, citizenship, race, and colonialist (dominant/counter) narratives – as with British-Indian writer Nico Iyer’s talk examining the idea of “home” from a cultural and political perspective as a child of British parents, born in Britain, raised in California and England, and having lived in Japan for 25 years. So where is he from? What is home for him? Perhaps this is to say that my blog post focussed more on home as a sociopolitical entity whist many of my classmates considered home through a more emotional, spiritual, familial lens – though perhaps the two forms of consideration are more similar than different. For those who would wish to further examine the intricacies of borders as a means of dilineating home and identity I would recommend political anthropologist and Mohawk Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, an examination of the struggles of the Mohawks to maintain “political sovereignity through centuries of settler colonialism” (Simpson 2014).

I also noticed a competing pull between home as unstable and always-changing (like my idea of it) and home as secure, what Cayla writes of as “a sense of security; of peace of mind; of relaxation” (Banman 2021). So there is home as relaxing, peaceful, and secure, vs. home as unstable, like sand through one’s fingers, or uncatcheable smoke. These answers are all correct; but to different people raised and living in vastly differing circumstances.

Works Cited

Collins, Zac. “Blog 2:2 :: Where the Heart Is.” UBC Blogs, 9 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/englitwithzac/2021/02/09/blog-22-where-the-heart-is/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

How, Magdalena. “Assignment 2:2 | When.. I was home.” Magdalena How’s Student Blog Engl 372 99C, 9 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372magdalenahow/2021/02/09/assignment-21-when-i-was-home/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Iyer, Pico. “Where is home?” TED, 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript?referrer=playlist-what_is_home#t-4311. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Marshall, Grace. “Homestead Stories (A2:2).” Reading Corner, 11 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/gracemarshall/2021/02/11/homestead-stories-a22/#. Accessed 15 February 2021.

McConnell, Aidan. “Assignment 2:2 – There’s No Place Like Home.” Canadian Literature Blog, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372aidan/2021/02/10/assignment-22-theres-no-place-like-home/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Nikoo, Mia. “Where the Heart Is.” Literary Traveller, 11 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mianikoo/2021/02/11/where-the-heart-is/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Olsen, Kyle. “2:2 Home is where the Heart is.” Kyle’s Blog, 10 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/kylesblog/2021/02/10/22-home-is-where-the-heart-is/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Rance, Holly. “Coming Home.” Rediscovering a Nation: A Study of the Power of Stories, 11 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/hollyrance/2021/02/11/coming-home/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Sampson, Lenaya. “2.2 Home Sweet Home.” Lenaya’s Blog: English 372 Oh Canada, 10 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/lenayasampsonengl372/2021/02/10/2-2-home-sweet-home/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Simpson, Audra. “Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States.” Duke University Press, May 2014, https://www.dukeupress.edu/mohawk-interruptus. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Stewart, Samantha. “Jumping Waves.” Rocks, Trees, Water, 10 Feb. 2021, https://blogs.ubc.ca/rockstreeswater/2021/02/10/jumping-waves/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

“What is Place-Based Education?” Promise of Place, https://promiseofplace.org/#:~:text=Place%2Dbased% 20education%20(PBE),other%20subjects%20across%20the%20curriculum. Accessed 15 February 2021.

What is home? Many speakers and artists, like Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi with her musings on what it means to be a “local” of a certain place, have grappled with what it means to have a “home.”

Like Selasi, I am multiethnic. My mother is Japanese, my dad Canadian. I was born in the city of Hamamatsu, where we lived for five years before moving to Vancouver, where I’ve lived ever since. In having spent most of my life in Canada, I’ve lost much of my native Japanese fluency, and have, in a sense, become more culturally “Canadian” than “Japanese.” But perhaps I’m neither, straddling a cultural and ethnic liminality between these two places, these two “homes.”

In the 2016 Canadian census, there were reported to be 92,920 visible minority Japanese Canadians, 121,485 Canadians of Japanese origin, and 232,375 Canadians belonging to multiple visible minorities. Where would I fit? Perhaps the first category – although I’m not fully Japanese, and many people have been genuinely shocked when I’ve told them of my Japanese heritage when they’d  believed me to be entirely “white.” Certainly not the second, as I’m only half ethnically Japanese, and certainly not the third either, as half of my identity is not a visible minority. Thus, it seems there is no place for individuals like myself on the census. Do government statistics determine if one has a “home” in Canada?

In 2019, I took a trip to Japan, returning to my “home” country for the first time in years. I saw my family, revisited my hometown, explored locations I had never been to before. In seeing family and old friends, I produced a unique version of my Japanese-Canadian ethnic identity – I was simultaneously a foreign bastardization of cultures unwanted by Japan’s harsh ethnic purity and discrimination, as well as an insider being welcomed back to my “motherland.” Is there a place for “mixed-race” people like myself in the Japanese nationalistic desire for homogeneity?

My identity was not an inward one shaped by my own conscious desires and actions but rather an outward performance informed and (in)validated by my audience. This is what sociologist Rusi Jaspal and psychologist Marco Cinnirella are describing in an article of theirs’ when they write of how “‘voluntary ethnicity…is unlikely to be possible since the identity must be ‘validated’ by significant others” (6).

So my “identity” was constructed through exterior perception- was I Japanese? Canadian? Japanese-Canadian? None of the above? Was I “home” when I had dinner with some old family friends I hadn’t seen in years? During that particular conversation, the people around me were quite shocked that I was able to speak Japanese so well – and so was I.

Japan is still highly monolingual (Hayashi 2005), and as somebody who straddles the line between Nisei (the “second-generation,” children born in the new country to Japanese-born parents), and Issei (the “first-generation,” those who were the first to immigrate to the new country), my linguistic identity in many ways informs ethnic identity. Miwa Nishimura, a bilingual scholar at Georgetown University, examines the complex code-switching of Japanese/English bilingual Nisei speakers, noting that they generally employ a mix of English with Japanese phrases and sentences to “express their shared ethnic identity” while using full Japanese when addressing native Japanese folks (Nishimura 1995). When I revisited my “home,” I was shocked at my own Japanese abilities; though I had not practiced much of the language in preparation for my trip, nor spoken much Japanese at all in my Canadian life, I found myself being able to hold a conversation with my native Japanese friends and family. It was almost as though I were subconsciously relearning my “Japaneseness.” And yet my friends and family, too, were shocked at my Japanese, thereby excluding me from possessing full Japanese nativeness – my ability to speak the language was an unnatural surprise. In many ways, home is shaped by language: our abilities, or lack thereof, to communicate with one another, to produce emotion, connection, love and shared experience.

So was I home in Japan? Or am I home in Canada? Perhaps I’m like Selasi, and I’m a local of multiple origins. Selasi’s ted talk returns time and again to that ever-so-loaded question: “where are you from?” These questions take center stage as our country grows complex in identity, culture, and “mixedness” – we can look at, for example, UBC journalism and Jasmine Mani and Carol Eugene Park’s intimate examination of growing up mixed-race in Canada, of having two identities never “integrating into one.” Or we can read HuffPost’s musings on the question of where one is really from, as though those of us of mixed-race origin must dichotomously choose one side over another.

I have been asked that question – where are you from? – in both Japan and Canada. My answer always differs. When in Japan, I’m “from” Canada – and when in Canada, I’m “from” Japan. Japanese people think I look more white than Asian, white folks the opposite. And yet my face doesn’t change, does it?

A photo I took of Kinkaku-ji, the “Golden Pavilion,” when I visited Kyoto.

So in Japan, I felt at home – and not at home. I was immersed in the story of Japan, and of its people – I went to Kyoto, where I walked silent through ancient temples and decrepit ruins. I went to Nara, the country’s first capital, the birthplace of the empire. I learned the stories of Japan’s cultural trauma in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and witnessed the history of the atomic bomb when I saw the famous Genbaku Dome. I bathed in the stories of Japan not just in words, pictures, or voices , but in experience, in visiting my family for the first time in years, in being shocked at my sudden ability to hold a conversation in Japanese, in retracing my steps down the street of my childhood home. But even in those stories, I felt both wanted and unwanted. My identity was shaped by the world around me and the performance I gave to it, however subconsciously. Home is contradictory; it is elusive and unstable. My stories are of the in-between, and I take what I can from the “sides” I (don’t) belong to. People will always ask me where I’m really from – but I think I will be asking myself this, too.

A photo I took of the Genbaku Dome, a symbol of the destruction of the atomic bomb detonated on Hiroshima.

Works Cited

D’Souza, Joy. “Identity is Complex for Mixed Canadians.” HuffPost, 16 Oct. 2016,https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/26/mixed-race-canadians_n_12157752.html.

“Hamamatsu Guide.” Japan Visitor, https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-city-guides/hamamatsu-guide.

Hayashi, Asako. “Japanese English Bilingual Children in Three Different Educational Environments.” Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, edited by Cohen James, et al., 2005, pp. 1010-1033. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=22305D30C8B73AB2F06FC4BBF92A679E?doi=10.1.1.655.1501&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

“Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome).” Unesco, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/.

Jaspal, Rusi, and Marco Cinnirella. “The Construction of Ethnic Identity: Insights from Identity Process Theory.” Ethnicities, vol. 12, no. 5, 2012, pp. 503-530. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39666/1/1315870_Jaspal.pdf.

Nishimura, Miwa. “A functional analysis of Japanese/English code-switching.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 23, no. 2, Feb. 1995, pp. 157-181. Semantic Scholar, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-functional-analysis-of-Japanese%2FEnglish-Nishimura/3e7e0906fa9ce551fc784222768f18fedcf25162.

Statistics Canada. “Census Profile, 2016 Census.” Statistics Canada, 29 Nov. 2017, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=PR&Code1=01&Geo2=&Code2=&SearchText=Canada&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All&TABID=1&type=0.

Selasi, Taiye. “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where _i_m_a_local/transcript?referrer=playlist-what_is_home#t-6522.

UBC Journalism. “What is it like being mixed race?” Vimeo, 13 Feb. 2019, https://vimeo.com/317143217.

I have a great story to tell you.

In a far corner of the land there stands a village in supernova. The stories the townsfolk tell burst with celebration and unworry: the storytellers weave words of good content, and these words rise across the sky to shape the trees and the wide fields and the little homes and farmsteads across the deep soil. The words form the world. Letters flow downstream like ripples in their making, carried down on a wind of song. Truths and symbols to fertilize the earth.

And yet a gospel daily planted with not a change to its words yields few fresh flowers on its hundredth budding, and the townsfolk grow restless. They feel a monotony lingering in the leaves and the tall grass, nothing more than the autumnal aftertaste of those recurring tales. An aftertaste of ennui. Summer sputters towards its lethargic death.

It is at this precipice the bard arrives. He has no face – no word has been said of it so it remains in darkness. His job requires only a mouth, and the tapestries it weaves are shadow incarnate. Its palette is a history still yet to be spoken and its paints are songs and stories.

He arrives at a place when that place seeks new truths. He is raw and exciting, bearing syllables and scribbles still yet to be planted. The villagers are curious, and so they gather and ask him:

Give us something new.

And so the bard stands amongst them like some monument freshly-excavated, and he begins to whisper. They listen close and claw at every word for they are starved for story. At first, he whispers, and his words are small. They scatter through the empty air and the villagers watch with awe. What secrets are these?

The darkness grows insidiously. The villagers are so hungry they only begin to taste that darkness post-digestion. By then the words have fed the world and altered it irrevocably. These stories are at once familiar and unfamiliar. the bard takes old words and makes them new, melting and reshaping until the words are unrecognizable. Through hushed song and crooked script these new tales trace a path of evil and violence. The wind cuts through the villagers until their bodies are shivering under the weight of these new tales. They watch as the bard paints the village grey and black like he has done to village after village, letting his voice puncture the land and drain it of all colour. The soils remain fertile, yes, but the villagers watch as plants already dead in their birth rise from the ground and spill horror to the sky.

The villagers beg the bard to untell his tell. They wish for the world as it was before, with all its familiar colours. Oh, to return to mundanity! But it is too late, for a story told cannot be recalled. Once departed from a teller’s lips it is the world’s story – the world’s history. The bard’s job is irreversible. He leaves the village tarnished through his stories of evil. In the end, you always have to be careful of the stories you tell, and perhaps more importantly – the stories you listen to.

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I wanted to write a story where words left physical changes in the world, symbolizing the effects of storytelling on perception and truth, literalizing the common saying of how stories “shape” the world. This is J. Edward Chamberlin’s musings on the “bear and the word ‘bear,'” of tracking and the significance of words (132). Through the bard “reshaping” old words, I wished to touch on issues of adaptation and narrative recontextualization; one need only examine the plethora of adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood, ranging from the childish to the most adult in Charles Perrault as adapted by Andrew Lang, to understand how we adapt and readapt the same stories time and again. In fact, LRRH has been so widely adapted in fact that its dark origins are news-worthy and treated as “unknown.”

I also found it difficult to transpose my story to speech. I’m used to writing narrative prose fiction, with meandering sentences and attempts at creative syntax, but orality is a whole different beast. Through my characterization of the storyteller as a “bard” and the faintly “medieval” setting, I wished to touch upon medieval bardic traditions, recall such ancient tales of wonderous musings and authorial anonymity as The Wanderer, and nod towards (though perhaps only in my mind) the truthtelling wisdom of Shakespeare’s nameless fools, particular Lear’s, who “speaks bitter truth to his master the King” (Rasmussen and DeJong 2016). The differences between orality and literacy bring to mind Thomas King and his “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” where he writes of the common complaint of the loss of “the voice of the storyteller…and the interaction between storyteller and audience” in the transposition of an oral narrative to text. It was difficult to present my story through voice, as it was written first for the page rather than for the voice – in contrast to, say, the orality of Homer, and, as according to Homerist David Bouvier in his examination of Greek storytelling, the predominance of speech and oral transmission of culture and history in Ancient Greece (59). We can examine the works of Harry Robinson, whom professor Renate Eigenbrod examines in detail in her examination of the melting-together of orality and literacy, to find “the oral” as signifying a “creative process, a stylistic feature as well as a culturally based way of thinking” (94). Robinson’s works are highly interfusional – to use Thomas King’s term – blending orality and literacy. My story? Not so much. I struggled with the oral half, even though I had written it alongside voicing it aloud, simply because I am not accustomed to orality. 

It was a fascinating exercise to “take the story out of the text” and recontextualize a narrative and moral framework. Stories often “share” endings, and thus share morals; there are only so many that are as universal as the idea of evil and humanity’s reckoning of why it exists. King’s story explains evil as a product of competition; mine, as a product of boredom, curiosity, and adaptation.

Works Cited

“35 Little Red Riding Hood Stories, Retellings and Fractured Fairy Tales.” Bookroo, https://bookroo.com/books/topics/little-red-riding-hood-stories.

Bouvier, David. “The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?” Oral Tradition, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59-61. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51578/pdf.

Chamberlin, Edward J. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Davies, Sioned. “Storytelling in Medieval Wales.” Oral Tradition, vol. 7, no. 2, 1992, pp. 231-257, https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/7ii/4_davies.pdf.

Eigenbrod, Renate. “The Oral in the Written: A Literature Between Two Cultures.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 15, No. 1, 1995, pp. 89-102, http://www3.brandonu.ca/cjns/15.1/Eigenbrod.pdf.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 183-190.

Puchner, Martin. “How stories have shaped the world.” BBC Culture, 23 Apr. 2018, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180423-how-stories-have-shaped-the-world.

Perrault, Charles. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Blue Fairy Book. Translated by Andrew Lang, London, 1889, https://archive.org/details/bluefairybook00langiala/page/n11/mode/2up.

Rasmussen, Eric, and Ian DeJong. “Shakespeare’s Fools.” British Library, 15 Mar 2016, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/shakespeares-fools#.

“The Wanderer.” Old English Poetry Project, https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-wanderer/.

Answering question 3 

In considering Edward Chamberlin’s ruminations on language in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, I thought of Tuscarora author Alicia Elliott and her essay collection A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, an examination of transgenerational trauma and colonialism through which Elliot hopes people “think more critically about how they got to where they are” (Elliott 2019). The original essay‘s central concern is the extraordinary power of words and the ways in which the destruction of Indigenous languages contributes to intergenerational Indigenous trauma. Elliott notes that in Indigenous communities where over half of residents speak their native language, rates of suicide are lower (Elliott 252), concluding that “culture lives and breathes inside our languages” (253). She receives her data from the Centre for Suicide Prevention, which labels suicide as the leading cause of death for Indigenous youths and adults up to age forty-four (“Suicide Prevention Resource Toolkit”). We can look further to a primary source referenced by this Toolkit to examine how “any threat to the persistence of personal or cultural identity poses a counterpart threat to individual or community wellbeing” (Hallet et al. 392), with “the demise of the most endangered of Canada’s indigenous languages” (Hallet et al. 392) itself a threat to this persistence of identity. It is thus clear that language and words, through their allowing us to form diverse modes of communication and impart stories, assist in the shaping of identity and community.

Both Chamberlin and, to a lesser extent, Elliott, concern themselves with the differences, or lack thereof, between signifier and signified – between words and their meanings, between “learning to recognize the difference between a bear and the word ‘bear’,” (Chamberlin 132). Indeed, Chamberlin writes of “rhythms and melodies and meanings” as helping people “understand both the earth they live on and their place in the greater scheme of things” (125). Languages and their stories shape culture and community and reveal where people “came from, and why they are here” (Chamberlin 2). A language is the bedrock of a community, and it is through these communal expressions of words and meanings that these diverse truths develop.

Less than one percent of Canada’s population, around 260,550 individuals, speak an Indigenous language (Coles 2018). With this threat comes the continued loss of Indigenous culture, community, and history. In his examination of the destruction of Tibet’s minority languages, anthropologist Gerald Roche writes of the destructiveness of “language oppression,” how “certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible” (487). The original 1947 draft of the United Nations Genocide Convention laid out five distinct markers of a cultural form of genocide, the third of which was the “prohibition of the use of the national language even in private intercourse” (MacDonald and Hudson 443). Political scientists David B. MacDonald and Graham Hudson later conclude that “there seems to be clear evidence of intention to commit cultural genocide” towards Canada’s Indigenous peoples, partly through “forcible assimilation, including denigration of traditional languages” (445). Through the forced invisibilization of native language comes the inability for Canada’s First Nations to express their cultures and their stories and thus maintain community.

The erasure of Indigenous languages brings with it the erasure of Indigenous communities and their stories: consider esteemed professor Hilde Lindemann and her work on counterstory, which in a 2014 lecture at St. Thomas University she defined as “a story that is told for the purpose of resisting a socially shared narrative that purports to justify the oppression of a social group” (Lindemann 2014). These “socially shared narratives,” or master narratives, “enter the tissue of stories that constitute the group’s identity, damaging that identity” (Lindemann 2014), and so commit an institutionalized form of propagandistic oppression upon said group identity. In If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, Chamberlin is examining the push and pull of counter-narratives against the master narratives that, through their language and truthtelling, they seek to oppose.

Is Elliott’s essay a counter-narrative? Perhaps so, with its spotlighting of the struggles of a marginalized community – and yet how could Elliott ever hope to oppose oppression when “both depression and colonialism have stolen (her) language” (53)? If, as Chamberlin so eloquently tells us, language is the foundation of truthtelling and culture, how can Elliott properly counter the dominant master narratives oppressing her people if she cannot narrate in her people’s language? She works in the language of her colonizers – the words, rhymes, and rhythms of the master narrative. What truth, what identity, is stripped from her narrative in that loss of language? The world of words is complex and often contradictory – the riddles of language shape meaning. “The word’s the thing and…it is not the thing,” writes Chamberlin (132): language is vital to identity and community, truth and history, yet simultaneously we must understand there to be a disconnect between words and the world. In “Orality about Literacy,” an examination of oral vs. literary forms of communication and narrative with a particular focus on the stories of the Salish peoples, Professor Keith Thor Carlson writes of literacy both as “a colonial ‘weapon capable of inflicting damage'” and a “Western tool sometimes employed by Aboriginal people to preserve their cultural and traditions against colonial assimilation” (43); thus, the written word is malleable, subject to recontextualization to suit the needs of various causes, from colonialist dominance to the formation of counter-identity. The same words that have oppressed her people now allow Elliott to reclaim, and make public, her story and her Indegeinity – however limiting that reclamation may be. Words are never set, never final, and so the cat, as writes Chamberlin, “is both there and not there” (132).

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Vintage Canada, 2004.

Coles, Terri. “Indigenous Languages Are In Danger Of Becoming Extinct – Here’s How You Can Help Save Them.” HuffPost, 21 June 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/06/21/indigenous-languages_a_23465069/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA4s6oNfKWa3YvYAXC8CVJF1UnsTpAChazfckipHo8lMvGjADri7Hk7LnkMjMURsyU9N0OQUAmz37Js4PN0ZrJ4VtUZTEw7xlpETLfqe2uhPiL0P5wJIT0G9oqhI8fIczwKvNrEH9X6idcQPdHGLX-TfcYvlOzNE_-C6UPdQecfR. Accessed 22 January 2021.

Elliott, Alicia. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” CBC Books, 25 January 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/books/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-1.4930281. Accessed 22 January 2021.

—. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” The Malahat Review, 2016, pp. 47-54, http://www.malahatreview.ca/excerpts/197files/elliott.pdf. Accessed 22 January 2021.

Hallet, Darcy, et al. “Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide.” Cognitive Development, vol. 22, pp. 392-399. Science Direct, http://web.uvic.ca/~lalonde/manuscripts/2007CogDevt.pdf.

“Indigenous Suicide Prevention.” Centre for Suicide Prevention, https://www.suicideinfo.ca/resource/indigenous-suicide-prevention/. Accessed 25 January 2021.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality About Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/files/2020/02/Orality-and-Literature-.pdf.

Lindemann, Hilde. “How to Counter a Counterstory (and Keep Those People in Their Place).” YouTube, uploaded by etcjournals, 6 July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzNqq1_DDck. Accessed 22 January 2021.

MacDonald, David B., and Graham Hudson. “The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne De Science Politique, vol. 45, no. 2, 2012, pp. 427–449. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23320978. Accessed 22 Jan. 2021.

Roche, Gerald. “Articulating language oppression: colonialism, coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 487-514. Taylor and Francis Online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1662074?needAccess=true.