For the assignment this week I picked pages 130-143. During these pages the primary focus is on Latisha, as she deals with four American tourists named Jeannette, Nelson, Rosemarie, and Bruce. The section also dips into the past, explaining how Latisha met her husband, George Morningstar, and ends with a quick meeting between Eli Stands Alone and Sifton, the dam planner.

To begin elucidating the references King (probably) made in the writing of these scenes, I will start with George Morningstar.

In the appendix of Green Grass, Running Water Jane Flick links George Morningstar with General Custer, a Civil War general (20). Now, I am unfamiliar with General Custer, but the name sounds familiar — like Uncle Sam, or Captain America. In GGRW George is described as having “soft light brown hair that just touched his shoulders” (132); pictures of General Custer corroborate King’s description, as does Custer’s youth, seeming uselessness, and yet all-over charisma. Consider this description from biography.com:

“But Custer had greater ambitions than being a grammar school teacher and soon set his sights on the military academy at West Point. While he lacked the qualifications that many of the other candidates had, his confidence eventually won over a local congressman, and with his recommendation, in 1857 Custer was enrolled at the school” (n.p).

And compare it to Latisha reminiscence of her first few months with George:

“At the end of the day, he [George] was still there, watching, listening, looking for all the world like the most intelligent man in the universe… ” (132).

Yet General Custer was not a spectacular general, and though he himself escaped many scrapes, his men “suffer[ed] disproportionately high casualties during the [Civil] war” (biography.com, n.p.). Compare this again to Latisha, who realized early in her marriage to George that he “wondered so much about the world was because he didn’t have a clue about life” (132, 134).

General Custer was eventually killed, along with 210 of his men, at the Battle of Little Bighorn, due much in part to Custer’s inability to await orders.

Jane Flick connects the diner goers (Jeannette, Nelson, Bruce, and Rosemarie) to “figures [who] have been active in the stereotyping of Canadian Indians and Canadian life in the North or West” (25). Flick links Jeannette and Nelson, in particular, to actors “Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy [who] starred in Rose Marie (1936), a Hollywood musical romance about life in Canada’s north” (25). At one point in the diner scene Rosemarie tells Latisha that she was once an opera singer, and Nelson sings “When I’m calling you, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo!” (133). Flick notes that this song appears in Rose Marie as the “Indian Love Call” (26). Of course, because the internet is fantastic, I found the song on YouTube, and place it hear for your viewing (listening?) pleasure (the video patches together all instances of the song in the movie):

Nelson (the diner-goer) says quite mournfully that his childhood dog was named Tecumseh (bear in mind that he’s eating at the Dead Dog Café, where Latisha insists straight-faced that the meat they serve is dog) (132). Nelson says that his dog was named about Tecumseh the Indian chief, and Flick notes that there was a “Shawnee Chief… noted for his courage and sagacity” (26) named Tecumseh. But when I was on biography.com researching General Custer, a prompter at the bottom showed me General William Tecumseh Sherman.

General Sherman was the hard-hitter in the American Civil War — his army’s battles against the Confederate south were known as “Sherman’s March, in which he and his troops laid waste to the South” (biography.com, n.p.). On the biography.com site the editors speculate that Sherman’s middle name came from his father, who “admired the Shawnee chief” (n.p.) Flick mentioned.

There is perhaps a correlation here between naming a man who “believ[ed] the Native Americans were an impediment to progress… [and] ordered total destruction of the warring tribes” (biography.com, n.p.) after a famous Native American chief, and naming a dog after a famous Native American chief. Both usages of the name disparage the original person — Sherman by his actions, the dog by way of insult. King may be hinting at the appropriation of names, used to shock or to portray oneself as exotic. In GGRW, Charlie’s Dad Portland makes a mockery of this process by taking a more “Indian” name for his stage name, despite being Native American and already having, not only an “Indian” name, but a name of his own: 

“After the fourth year of playing minor roles, C.B. Cologne, a red-headed Italian who played some of the Indian leads… told Portland he should think about changing his name to something more dramatic. Portland and Lillian sat around one night with C.B. and his wife, Isabella, and drank wine and tried to think of the most absurd name they could imagine. ‘Iron Eyes Screeching Eagle'” (151).

This taking of names also links to General Custer, who was given the name “Son of the Morning Star… by the Arikaras in Dakota territory” and who liked to be known as such (Flick, 20). King could be alluding to the practice of taking only what one liked from the Native American way of life, and discarding or obliterating the rest — names, ways of dress (Custer was famous for wearing a fringed leather jacket (Flick, 39)), the stereotypes that go over so well in films, particularly Westerns, were all adopted by the European settlers (and continue to be so — headdresses at Coachella, anyone?). But anything that didn’t fit in — polytheistic myths, language, cultural ceremonies, land usage — was cast aside.

Finally, the conversation between Sifton and Eli Stands Alone. Flick notes that the dam project in Quebec to which Sifton alludes as his lost career opportunity is a stand-in for the “James Bay project, the monumental hydroelectric-power development on the east coast of James Bay… it was contested by the Cree, who had not been consulted… The Cree settled for $225 m. and retained hunting and fishing rights” (26). I found an article online detailing the process of creating the James Bay dam (a dam included in the wider Great Whale development), and the evidence given in court by Alan Penn about the social and cultural effect of the dam foreshadows what King no doubt is hinting would happen to Blossom, Alberta, if Eli Stands Alone moved aside:

“The distribution of hunting territories, an essential cultural feature of Cree society, has been challenged by the 11,000 square kms of flooding, and by the emerging network of roads….  La Grande river, especially above the first rapids, is heavily contaminated [with mercury]… Many families…decide simply to avoid fish altogether. This is particularly obvious in the case of women of child-bearing age. This group is generally only exposed to very low levels of methyl mercury. But this is because women have stopped eating fish. Given what we know about the role of fish in nutrition during pregnancy in the north, we must wonder what the larger public health implications of these dietary shifts really are” (Grand Council of the Crees, n.p.).

Which brings me to Eli, and Sifton. Eli, Flick notes, is most likely based on “Elijah Harper… [who] voted against a debate that did not allow full consultation with the First Nations” (24). The correlation between Eli and Elijah Harper could be that they stood completely alone in the face of opposition — Eli, against the dam, and Elijah Harper, as the only person to vote no in the “Meech Lake Constitutional Accord in 1990” (Flick, 24).

Sifton Flick connects to a Sir Clifford Sifton, an “[a]ggressive promoter of settlement in the West… and a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population” (Flick, 24). In the article about the James Bay Project Alan Penn noted that to create the dam “required the relocation of one of the largest subsistence-oriented native communities in northern Canada” (Grand Council of the Crees, n.p.). Sifton, as the head developer of the dam in Blossom, represents large corporations which require the relocation of Native settlements for their projects to commence, as well as the late 19th century British man who forced Native Americans out of their lands to make way for Western settlement.

I am sure there are many more references, but I will gratefully bow out now.

Works Cited

Biography.com Editors. “George Custer Biography.” The Biography.com Website, A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. Accessed July 27, 2016.

— Picture of George Custer.

— “William Tecumseh Sherman.” Web. Accessed July 27, 2016.

MacGregor, Roy. “The feather, Elijah Harper, and Meech Lake.” Aboriginal Multi-Media Society 8.8 (1990): 7. N.P. Web. Accessed July 27, 2016.

“Social Impact on the Crees of James Bay Project.” The Grand Council of the Crees. N.D. Web. Accessed July 27, 2016.

“Indian Love Call.” Uploaded by Mac&EddyMagic, February 8, 2010. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8KesxHBVOU. Accessed July 27, 2016.

1. In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation. Why do you think this is so?

It wasn’t until I read this question and tried to puzzle out exactly what Professor Paterson was getting at that I saw the connection between King’s fixation on the beginnings of creation and the stories of Lionel, Alberta, and Eli. I’m not sure why I didn’t see it before — but their stories meld Christian myth and Native American myth perfectly.

The fact that King’s four parts of the book start and are interwoven with four different variations of a Native American creation story, stories in which traditional Native American figures meet Biblical, fictional, or historical Christian/European figures, is a sign that one of King’s aims for the novel might have been to show that Christian and Native American myths can co-exist. Why not expand that concept further, by including two of the most important Christian myths into contemporary times, but enacted by Native Americans and their deities/spirits?

I’ll start with the easy one. Eli Stands Alone literally stands alone in the face of a massive dam project which, if successful, would submerge his family home and the surrounding land in water, probably forever. In this we can see the allegory of Native Americans being overrun, or submerged, by European immigrants. We can see contemporary issues where Native American tribal lands and treaties are overlooked in the place of progress (or golf courses), with Eli representing Native Americans as a whole and the dam project Canada’s predominantly white governmental and commercial authorities.

But, and this is what clicked when I read the question, we can also see the story of Noah and the Flood. Symbolism is huge in King’s novel — can’t see the forest for the trees, in some cases. I think the fact “[i]t was a little over a month before the waters went down” (King, 420), and that the four Indians’ efforts to “fix the world” (King, 123) calls for a flood makes the Biblical references hardly coincidental. King isn’t coy about the allusion either — after the dam’s flood, the four Indians turn to Coyote and remind him of how “[t]he last time [he] fooled around… the world got very wet” (King, 416), implying that Noah’s flood was actually the work of Coyote, not God.

Or, as King tries to show us by mixing and matching Christian and Native American myth, by Coyote and God. King uses the same technique in the story of Alberta.

When I first read this question, I got the impression that Dr. Paterson was meaning that Alberta was a lesbian (“or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!”) But when coupled with the Biblical connotations of Eli’s story, Alberta became to me another Virgin Mary — or, rather, a woman experiencing immaculate conception. The novel does not clearly state who the father is, and Alberta herself is adamant that she cannot be pregnant. But why make Alberta pregnant? Why follow or shadow the myth of Jesus Christ’s conception? Well, Coyote again seems to play a part in that story as well — “‘But I was helpful, too,’ says Coyote. ‘That woman who wanted a baby'” (King, 416). And again the old Indians say “You remember the last time you did that?” (ibid), implying that Coyote was responsible for Jesus’ conception.

Lionel, however, doesn’t exactly fit the bill. I’m not overly familiar with Biblical stories (except for the big ones), so perhaps there is a Gospel of Bob or Parable of a Fig that matches Lionel’s story of regret and redemption. But in Lionel I see something else, something far less concrete and recognizable — a feeling versus a story or an event. Lionel represents, to me, the true Christian path, or what Christianity claims to offer its followers — a chance at salvation. Lionel has made mistakes in the past (and though the mistake were in fact made by his colonial government, I want to look at his life in point form), he has lost his way, he has lost his belief (in whatever that may be) — and yet he finds a way to redeem himself, to get out of his “funk,” to become a good man. Colonialism aside, Sun Dance aside, Lionel stands as homo humanius, the formula all men (and women) should follow to find peace.

My read of Lionel is backed up by his strangely non-committal presence in the novel. The only true choice Lionel makes is to get his life together — at all other times he speaks without being heard, listens without hearing what people say, and accepts events (and jackets) without question. He lacks agency, and motive, as yet is arguably the main character in the novel. The Four Indians leave Florida to save Lionel, a thought just as ridiculous as thinking that God will go out of His way to watch over you, or your loved ones.

The fact that King recreated Biblical stories of the flood and immaculate conception, as well as the Christian message, in the lives of Native Americans is perhaps a suggestion that we aren’t so different after all. Or maybe that we are different, but not incompatible. There is room enough in the world for both narratives, Christian and Native American. (Any Hamilton fans out there will appreciate how hard it is for me NOT to include a link to The World Was Wide Enough. Carry on.)

This diffusion of myths through different mouths, bodies, and cultures reminds me of the strangely eerie fact that almost all major religions have a Flood with a capital F story. The Judeo-Christian religions like to claim the story of the Flood, and Noah’s heroic actions with a hammer, as solely their own. And yet in the Epic of Gilgamesh*, the same story is enacted almost to a T, despite the tablets having been created in the 7th century B.C. (and perhaps recited before that). Now, we can of course just attribute this to Christianity borrowing another aspect of different religions and calling them its own. Or, as King seems to suggest in his novel, we can start to recognize that stories do not belong to any one religion, or any one people. Stories are shared equally and belong equally to all humans — big, small, white, black, Native American, etc. The one universal right that humankind has is to imagine, and be comforted, by story. The fact that two Biblical stories can fit so well into the lives of Native American people in the 1990s with differing circumstances without the world ending is evidence of that.

*I want to apologize for the Creationist tone of this website. I found that their comparison of Genesis and Gilgamesh was interesting, as well as their blatant anti-anything-not-Christian and “liberal” scholars.

Works cited

Izzard, Eddie. “The Origin of Christianity, Circle (2000).” YouTube, uploaded by Chris Z, December 18, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCIvmdABBnU.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperPerennial, 2007. Print.

Lorey, Frank. “The Flood of Noah and the Flood of Gilgamesh.” Institution for Creation Research. Acts and Facts 26 (3), 1997. Web. Accessed July 20, 2016.

“Standoff at Oka.” CBC Learning, 2001. Web. Accessed July 20, 2016.

(Asked for an extension till July 11th, which Dr. Paterson graciously granted.)

Instructions

“For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).”

 Northrop Frye

I found this question really hard to understand, and I can’t really explain why I decided to try and answer it anyway. I think I was drawn in by the juxtaposition Frye noted between the “starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and … the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan” (Frye, 221), elements in celebrated Canadian poet Duncan Campbell Scott’s work. Aside from the macabre image of someone using their skin to fish, in a completely objective and somewhat Romantic (with a capital R) point of view the juxtaposition of something so desperate with something so beautiful, like classical music, is fascinating.

But what the heck does it have to do with the assignment? I’ve decided to work out my thought process in this blog, answering the question in the process of deciphering it.

So. The question is: Why was Scott’s role in the destruction of indigenous cultures not relevant in Frye’s observation of the tension between civilized and primitive cultures? In other words, Frye highlights the dis-junction between Canadian literature that dealt with classical themes and mundane horrors, but he does not look further to the actual writers/poets who in their work romanticized or sympathized with the Natives’ plight but who in public advocated for their removal.

Does that sound right? I’m going to keep going.

I think what Dr. Paterson is looking for as an answer here, and what Frye pretty much explicitly states (in a roundabout way) is that Literature (with a capital L) has formulae.  There are literary conventions, plot tropes, stock characters — etc. We learn this in English class, and that seems pretty obvious. Frye writes: “The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read” (234). Frye goes on to say that the “great technical experiments of Joyce and Proust“* were only possible because they saw the “formal possibilities inherent in the literature they… studied. A writer who is or who feels removed from his literary tradition tends rather to take over forms already in existence” (234). In layman’s terms, Frye believes that Canadian literature has never taken off because, being separated from the great literary world as a sort of satellite consumer and producer of literature, Canadians can only adhere to what has gone before, and as such their original ideas and new experiences fall flat in stale formula.

But what does this have to do with the Indian woman baiting fish with her own flesh?

Ah. Perhaps that example is what Frye would call a new experience — something of which highly literate, educated, and esteemed men in England would never have even thought. But a dissertation on the musical theory of Debussy — ah, that they would understand. They would have lived and breathed dusty, methodical critical essays on Henry Vaughan, and chortled over biting satirical pamphlets on this-or-that radical, this-or-that out of favour politician. Scott, too, would be familiar with those types of literature, and would have striven, as a Canadian cut off from his sophisticated ancient homeland of Britain and the striving, thriving neighbour that was America, to emulate them. (At least, that is Frye’s argument, pages  220-21). And so Scott tries, sequestered in Canada, to draw inspiration for his great musical thesis or avant garde poetic criticism — and sees an Indian woman baiting a hook with her own flesh.

Perhaps he’s disgusted. Perhaps he’s sympathetic, or horrified, or offers to buy her food. Who knows. But an experience like that does not leave a person, and definitely changes a person — yet the great world trundles on, Britain trundles on, filled with sophisticated literary men who demand policies and expansion and Indian removal acts and without whom Canada would (the fear seems) be swallowed by the wilderness (as Frye eloquently puts its “to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent” (219)).

Here, perhaps, is where I can see some reason, however indefensible, for Scott’s duality. He can express sympathy for the Vanishing Indian in his poetry, or empathy for a starving Indian woman and still advocate for policies that would destroy Indigenous culture because he is working in something bigger than himself, something that has always worked this way, something that to him seems out of his control, and to which he must adhere or be cast aside. Similar to literary conventions — there is a reason, as Frye points out, that Joyce and Proust succeeded while others failed. It was because they were so entrenched in the “literature they… studied” (Frye, 234) that they were able to manipulate from the inside out. Like that old age adage says — you have to know the rules before you break them. Joyce and Proust were in the driving seat of Literature — Scott was on the outside, offering halfheartedly to clean the window-shield.** The old white British men were formulating policies, or influencing governmental acts, or advising on how to gentrify the West — and Scott was handing out refreshments.

I think a familiarity with Scott’s work would help in understanding this assignment, or the ramification of Frye’s observations, a bit more. However, I did enjoy figuring out how exactly I was going to answer this, and I will definitely read a bit more into Frye (of whom I had never heard before) to really try and decipher his frame of mind.

*This article has nothing to do with this assignment, but is an example of the complexity and ingenuity of writers like Joyce (as well as the absolute lunacy, depending on which side you’re on), which he was only able to pull of because of his entrenchment in the literary world.

**This video clip is from Eddie Izzard’s tour Dressed to Kill, sometime in 1998. This link, again, has nothing to do with the assignment (though there are correlations between power and language that can’t go unremarked), but the metaphor I used of driving seat versus window washing comes directly from him, and I must give credit where credit is due.

WORKS CITED 

Cook, Eleanor. “Frye, Herman Northrop.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. University Toronto/Université Laval, 2009. Web. Accessed July 11, 2016.

Flood, Alison. “Scientists find evidence of mathematical structures in classic books.” The Guardian. The Guardian, January 27, 2016. Web. Accessed July 11, 2016.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Ontario: House of Anansi Press Limited, 1995. Print.

jennyblues. “Eddie on EU.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, June 28, 2007. Web. Accessed July 11, 2016.

Maggs, Arnaud. Northrop Frye. 1983. Portrait Gallery of Canada, Canada. Library and Archives Canada. Web. Accessed July 11, 2016.

Susanna Moodie’s introduction to Roughing it in the Bush lacks the rough-and-ready “civilize the West” bravado common to immigration manifestos, and states the truth of most immigrant stories. It begins with a somber sentence: “In most instances, emigration is a matter of necessity, not of choice” (Moodie, n.p.). Moodie goes on to state that few people who live comfortably and well in their native lands chose to leave that comfort and stability for the wild unknown. It is those who wish to better their “condition, and… escape from the vulgar sarcasms too often hurled at the less-wealthy by the purse-proud” (Moodie, n.p.) who immigrate — people who have experienced “want of wealth” (Moodie, n.p.), through, the sense is, no fault of their own. Moodie clarifies this point by claiming that the rich and the poor are from “the same parent stock” (Moodie, n.p.), or descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore equal in body and soul despite the material disparities they face on Earth.

As I don’t know much about Susanna Moodie, I will draw a little on what I do know about the majority of immigrants to the colonies. Most were, as we’ve been taught in lesson 2:2 and 2:3, tradesmen and farmers, but all (generally) were religious. The first immigrants who set up New England were Puritan dissenters, who believed that America was given to them as a re-do of civilization, a chance to become a “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop wrote, to which all other cities steeped in sin and corruption could look for guidance. Moodie brings with her the same sense of renewal, even if her introduction is somber — Canada is a place where people can strip away the injustices which society has placed upon them and reinvent themselves as they “hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization” (Moodie n.p.). This, then, is an instance where Moodie’s introduction demonstrates the stories which European settlers brought to the “new” continent which Professor Paterson elaborated in lesson 2:3 — the stories which name the Americas as a gift from God, sent to the right people as a second Garden of Eden; in essence, Canada as a continental second chance.

Yet Moodie does not completely buy into the idea.  As is evident from the succeeding paragraphs of her introduction, Moodie blames the  “speculators in the folly and credulity of… men” and their “hired orators” (Moodie, n.p.) for spreading the notion of Canada as an empty/wasted land ripe for cultivation. The immigration enthusiasts’ words masked the hard work and struggle the settlers faced in the colonies. Moodie’s critique shows that she, at least, was aware that calling Canada a gift wasn’t right. It was more something that had been stumbled upon and which was ripe with possibility; thinking of it any other way hurt the settlers and by extension, though Moodie does not explicitly say it, the Native Americans. For if something is given as a gift, it makes sense that the receiver believes that he/she can do anything they want with it. If something is found, and multiple people profess interest or claim ownership, cooperation must exist for there to be success (especially if the finders refuse to leave, as was the case in the “discovery” of the Americas). Moodie does seem to have carried the idea of Canada as a second Eden with her from Europe, but it was a moderated Eden, conditional on hard work, strife, struggle, and coexistence with the “wild land” (Moodie, n.p.) — and, presumably, its people.

But Moodie is not completely innocent of Lockean concepts of property. The concluding paragraph in her introduction demonstrates that she believed that land, once earned, was owned: “The Great Father of the souls and bodies of men knows the arm which wholesome labour from infancy has made strong, the nerves which have become iron by patient endurance, by exposure to weather, coarse fare, and rude shelter; and He chooses such, to send forth into the forest to hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization. These men become wealthy and prosperous, and form the bones and sinews of a great and rising country” (Moodie, n.p.). In those last few words it is clear that Moodie believed that sweat and hard work were what validated ownership, and that Canada only became a country (in the sense of laws and roads, schools and farms, instead of just a land mass) through the tireless struggle of the settlers.

Moodie’s attitude in those last few words is echoed by her character’s appearance in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Moodie is at a diner in Alberta with a few of her friends, and proudly proclaims to Latisha, the diner’s Native American owner, that “[w]ith the exception of Archie… we’re all Canadians. Most of us are from Toronto. Archie is from England, but he’s been here for so long, he thinks he’s Canadian too” (King, 158). The irony here is that Moodie’s aside about Archie can be applied to herself and everyone in that diner that isn’t Native American, as long as “for so long” encompasses the few hundred or so years of European immigration to Canada. Moodie’s character in Green Grass, Running Water seems to believe in a time limit to immigrant status — she is completely Canadian because she is from Toronto (though before that, where did she come from? Where were her grandparents born?), while Archie is a foreigner. Yet to Latisha, and every other Native American in King’s book, every person not of Native American descent can be grouped under the umbrella of “been here so long, [they] think [they’re] Canadian too.”

I think there was a level of self-awareness in Moodie that is evident in her introduction to Roughing it in the Bush. Or perhaps not a self-awareness, but a cultural-awareness — she knew that claiming Canada as a glorious, empty, ripe-for-the-plucking second Eden was a malicious lie. She seems more concerned about the effect that lie had on the immigrants who believed it — who, putting aside the land-stealing and cultural genocide they as a group committed, did live hard and dangerous lives in Canada as they eked out a living, and shouldn’t be forgotten — than she does for the Native Americans being displaced. Yet I think that there are hints in Moodie’s writing which suggest why she believed calling Canada a second Eden was a misnomer — Eden had been empty, Canada was not. Moodie’s conflicting views on colonization, Native Americans, and immigration is perhaps best summed up by this quotation early in her book:

“…the Indian is one of Nature’s gentlemen—he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians who form the surplus of over-populous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy” (Moodie, n.p.)

While here we might accuse Moodie of classism or xenophobia (after all, it’s the European countries she sees the barbarians arriving from, not the British Empire), we also see her fight against one of the common stereotypes that Native Americans were dirty, uncivilized people. Of course, by doing so she taps into another stereotype — the Noble Savage à la Rousseau — but I believe Moodie made an effort to see what was going on in Canada, and not just report the idealized stories and anecdotes which were popular at the time. (We see modern examples of this in Green Grass, Running Water, with the Western films having the same plot of a kidnapped damsel, a love between a proud Indian chief and said damsel, and the final scene where the cowboys kill the Indians (King, 182-214). Many battles were fought where the Native Americans came out the victors, but those are rarely shown, and so each Western perpetuates the myth of Native American inferiority. So, too, could Moodie have based her description on Native Americans who were rude, and she would have had no one question her because it fit with what people already “knew” .)

In conclusion, I think that to subtract Moodie from the stories with which she had been inculcated since a child would be difficult — not only did the stories form a part of her country’s identity (Britain superior), but they were reinforced by her religion which still had a weighty influence. But I do think that Moodie’s personal experience in Canada made her think for herself — and the immigration enthusiasts, the priests, and her racist or xenophobic peers could not completely pull the wool over her eyes.

WORKS CITED

King, Thomas. “Green Grass, Running Water.” Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.

Mathews, R.D. “Susanna Moodie.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, April 10, 2008. Web. Accessed June 28, 2016.

—- “Roughing it in the Bush” title page

Moodie, Susanna. “Roughing it in the Bush.” Project Gutenberg, August 2003. N.P. Web. Accessed June 28, 2016.

Tuckness, Alex. “Locke’s Political Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  November 9, 2005. Web. Accessed June 28, 2016.

Winthrop, John. “City Upon a Hill.” Digital History, n.d. Web. Access June 28, 2016.

Reading as a way of understanding stories, new information, or difficult concepts is never a 100% guarantee. We’ve all experienced this in class —  for example, when we lean over to a friend after the perusal of a textbook or a new sheaf of notes and go, “Huh?”

“It’s like this,” says our friend, and suddenly, through their oral retelling of the written words in front of us we understand. But it’s not just the oral retelling — it’s the hand gestures our friends use to describe a scientific process or the significance of water in a certain passage from a book, it’s the expression on their face as they mangle the new terms or try out a simpler style of phrasing from what the textbook does its best to make complex, it’s the look in their eyes as we watch them performing, and the connection we form between a speaker and a listener.

Or, a storyteller and an audience.

Comprehension is undoubtedly aided by oral retelling, and I think this was the point Professor Paterson was making in her introduction to lesson 2:2. It’s hard for us — white settlers, or even Indigenous people disconnected from their history, to understand Native American stories.This is because we, more often than not, read Native American stories, in print or online — but to experience and understand the full purpose of the story, it must be told, or performed, as the story was at its conception. This aids not only in our comprehension, but allows us to see the stories as both stories and bigger than stories — as histories, as truths, as myths, as things which reveal the secrets of the present while detailing the past. Of things which are magical but also real, a contradiction which Chamberlin pays so much attention to in chapter two of If this is your land, where are your stories? (pages 32 and 34 in particular).

The second difficulty that Professor Paterson pointed out was the forced enrollment of Indigenous children at residential schools and the disastrous effect this break from their culture, language, and history had on their comprehension of their stories. This point, I feel, does not need to be explained further — only an unfeeling person could wonder how a break from family and tradition at a young age, being subjected to an alien culture, physical and/or sexual abuse, and being taught that one’s culture is wrong could have any effect on a generation’s ability to know, understand, and even want to learn their stories.

The third difficulty which I picked up in reading Wendy Wickwire’s introduction to Harry Robinson’s Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory is that Western scholarship has mismanaged Native American stories since its first attempt of collecting them. Even the concept of collecting stories and binding them into a book — essentially binding the words, and creating that disconnect between reader and words that I mentioned above — is an example of the bungling nature of the West’s approach to Native American story. This binding of words is not unique to Native American story — I had a professor who taught Old English Literature, and he described that great epic Beowulf as “a fish swimming through time.” The paper copy we had in our hands was just one x-ray, one two-dimensional slide of that fish that was Beowulf, captured at that moment in time by pen and ink but in no way representing the hundreds of tellings before and after that moment of penmanship. Trying to capture a story once, and hold it as the definitive, does not work for Old English literature as much as Native American story. Wickwire experienced this herself when she researched creation myths, and found four myths which were all published in the early 20th century as Creation with a capital C myths, yet which had no “common storyline” (26). And why should they? Lack of cohesiveness is sometimes taken as evidence of the falsity or fantastical nature of Native American stories, but as Wickwire argues in her introduction, lack of cohesiveness should not and does not prove unreliability; rather, it proves that stories grow and evolve with the times and with their people. An example of this is Harry Robinson’s story of Coyote’s son going to the moon, to which he added the presence of white men after he learned of the Apollo 11 moon landing (Wickwire, 29). This addition didn’t, in Robinson’s mind, make the story untrue, and in its inclusion of ancient story with modern events we again find myth and reality living in harmony.

Wickwire attributes the confusion of Native American story — and its truth, or relevance, or falsity — to the practice of dividing Indigenous cultures into “hot” or “cold,” based on the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss — “‘cold’ zones were associated with Indigenous peoples with a mythic consciousness that tended to resist change; ‘hot’ zones, on the other hand, were associated with Western peoples with a historical consciousness that thrived on constant, irreversible change” (Wickwire, 11). This discourse essentially broke up native cultures into two groups — one group who lived only on prehistorical myth, and the second who moved with the times. In what seems obvious now, this breakdown did not leave room for cultures that lived outside of the breakdown, cultures that, like Robinson’s story, incorporated myth and reality, the past and the present — this was the point with which scholars took issue, and sought to counteract.

AND YET. Wickwire points out that the acknowledgement of the futility of dividing cultures into “hot” or “cold” merely ushered in an era of over-correction: that of  attempting to create what Michael Harkin called “an overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people” (qtd. in Wickwire, 22). Instead of separating cultures scholars aimed to unite them into one conglomeration of myth-loving peoples; Wickwire found evidence of this in Franz Boas’s work, when he removed the word gun from a traditional Native American tale in what Wickwire called an effort to edit “a historical account to make it fit his vision of a prehistorical myth” (23).

All three of these issues — unsuitable mediums, cultural genocide, and Western mismanagement — contribute to the difficulty of understanding Indigenous stories. However, though printed, I do believe that Wendy Wickwire’s collection of Harry Robinson’s stories was a good step. I think that the difference in her case was the use of a tape recorder, and her decision to print the stories in an almost verse/poetic form — catching the idiosyncrasies, as well as the lyricism, of Robinson’s stories.

WORKS CITED

Chamberlin, Edward J. If this is your land, where are your stories? : Finding common ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

“Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Philosophers.co.uk. 2012. Web. Accessed June 16, 2016.

NASA Administrator. “July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind.” NASA. July 14, 2014. Web. Accessed June 12, 2016.

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

X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 2012. Web. Accessed June 16, 2016.

Of the three blogs I read I found that all three writers believed that home is not necessarily a place, but a state of mind, a place to feel comfortable, or based more on people than places.

This was interesting, because I picked these blogs at random by scrolling down the class Facebook page, and yet all three echoed my own sentiments. We four all somewhat scorn — or disregard — the concept of “home” that we’re force-fed through books or TV/movies. That notion of “home” doesn’t survive divorce, tension between nationalities, warring identities, or the unconventional home/drifting childhood. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and neither, I think, did the three writers of the blogs — because what we get in return for the disillusion of “home” is something that actually works, filled with some unhappiness, some introspection, but also growth, happiness, and just an effusion of MORE — more family, more history, more ranges of religion, or cultural practices, more experiences, more opportunities, which in turn make US into more than we would be originally. Adaptable, stronger, smarter, independent people — as well as knowing the true value of a family that you choose.

Interestingly enough, this concept of home not being a place, but being wherever you’re comfortable, or a home that you make for yourself, reminds me of Chamberlin’s point that the concept of European “settlers” and Indigenous “nomads” is backwards (29-30). Following the tradition of immigrants in Canada, one would assume that I (I hesitate to include the three ladies in this, as I am not 100% sure of their nationalities and don’t wish to offend) would feel at home in Canada, because it is, to over-ring that bell, my “home and native land.” But it’s not, not really, and I don’t feel at home in it just because I grew up here — I feel at home, as I mentioned in my blog, wherever my dogs feel comfortable (and by extension, my family).

This concept of aimlessness — or disconnect from the land, and focus on the people — is I think a really important concept to explore. Why do we feel disconnected? Is it because we’re immigrants, no matter how far back? Do Indigenous peoples feel a connection to this land deeper and better than I do? I really do wonder.

WORKS CITED

Chamberlin, Edward J. If this is your land, where are your stories? : Finding common ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

Mr. Finnegan, b. April 1st, 2016

What Home Means

Me and my family have always had dogs. When I was a newborn my parents were living in a van in Whistler, parking in the ski lots at night, working at restaurants full-time, and looking after me and their two German shepherds — Bandit, and her daughter, Ziggy. When I was about four we moved from the farmhouse they had moved into and shared with a few friends in Pemberton to Braylorne, a small mining town past Lillouet. There we lived in a trailer, and me and my sister — she was two to my four — shared the shower for a bedroom. Hard to picture, I know — I think my Dad stuck a few two-by-fours in the middle of the shower; my bed was on the top, hers on the bottom. I faintly remember using the drawer handles on either side of the shower to clamber into bed. We still had one of the dogs then, Ziggy — Bandit had passed away after a terrible accident with a bear-trap.

We lived in the trailer for a while, then moved into the house my Dad and his friends had been building in the mean time. Ziggy had puppies, and we sold all but Bo — a half German shepherd, half husky black puppy with thick fur and big feet. I don’t remember much of him as a puppy, except that once he *ahem* eliminated on a wasp nest, and my Dad had to beat his hindquarters with a fly swatter to get the wasps to stop stinging.

We moved to Salt Spring Island when I was about five, and only took Bo with us — Ziggy had been run over a few months before, and we buried her outside our house in Braylorne. Bo took to Salt Spring Island like a fish to water — and got in trouble a couple times with running away to chase the sheep in neighbouring farm fields. I remember him then — lanky, big and furry. He had a penchant for grapes and apple cores, and once hopped in the back of a stranger’s car because he wanted to go for a ride. I’m sure he caused my parents a few headaches, especially in the hot summer months when his thick black fur would cause him to pant like the blazes — but he hated to swim, so he could never truly cool down.

When I was eight we moved to Whistler. I remember my Dad went ahead of us, and my Mom drove us in the Jeep. Bo sat in the front seat, stinking up the car with his breath. We moved to a house in Alpine Meadows that had strange cut-out shapes in the balcony. Once Bo got his head stuck in them; other times he’d sleep on his back on the porch with all four paws in the air. He was good at scaring away bears — his sheep-chasing finally came in handy there! But he came back when called; bears, after all, are a bit feistier than sheep.

When I was thirteen we moved to Emerald Estates, a different residential area in Whistler. Bo followed me to the bus one day, and I told him repeatedly to go home — which he would, until I had my back turned, then he would follow me again, keeping a sneaky distance away. He liked to sleep at the foot of the stairs, and would shed each spring and autumn huge, fluffy clumps of hair that would float on the breeze and collect under the car tires.

When Bo was about fourteen we got a new puppy, Eddie. Eddie was a rescue from Whistler Animal Galore, or W.A.G., with huge feet, floppy ears, and a tendency to fall over when he tried to run. Bo hated him — I would tear myself out of bed at the break of dawn (or as my parents called it, 10 AM) and yell at someone, anyone, to stop the dogs from barking at one another.

But eventually they got along, grudgingly. Bo became slower as Eddie got faster, and soon enough Bo just lay and watched Eddie lunge and bark at him, too tired (or wise) to retaliate.

We had to put Bo down in March, 2013, after a long, wonderful life of being our big dog who slept on his back with his feet in the air. Eddie missed him, and still sleeps at the foot of the stairs where Bo used to sleep.

I’m now living in Vancouver, having moved out to go to school and figure out what to do with my life. I’ve recently gotten a dog of my own — Finn, a fluffy Shih Tzu/King Charles spaniel cross, who at eight weeks old is 0 to 60 in half a second, and the same backwards — a  nippy little crocodile who likes to chew toes and sleep with his nose tight up against my neck.

He hasn’t met Eddie yet, but he will.

Home, for me, has never really been one house, or one town. We moved a lot when I was younger, and sometimes into places that wouldn’t necessarily adhere to the common definition of a “home.” But what has always been a constant is our dogs. Though some passed before I was capable of noticing them, and others have gone with tears and an aching heart, in some sense every dog we’ve had is still with me, with us, in the dog we have. I sort of see each special dog — with their own stories, and their own characters — as morphing into this analogous dog shape that’s followed me from childhood to now.

So what I mean to say is that home isn’t a house — it’s where my dogs feel most comfortable, where they can sleep with all four paws in the air, or curled at the foot of the stairs, or upside down on their towel with a toy still half-chewed in their mouths.

WORKS CITED 

Picture of Finn — my own

On the Isle only the men told stories. They would crowd around the fire, its flames roaring around the dry bark of a felled tree, and tell stories until the first blush of dawn in the horizon, each story more extravagant than the last. They looked like demons, Nala sometimes thought, with the fire reflecting in their wide eyes and their gestures magnified by the shadows till they reared over the crowd, their arms elongated to wings, their hands to claws.

Nala watched from the wooden seats placed around the fire pit in a protective ring, where all the women old enough to no longer be children sat. They were the moderators of the stories — a single smile from Inga, the village elder, would puff out the story-teller’s chest until he walked like a rooster, newly mated. A shake of the head, and the man’s voice would falter, until he was little more than a mouse amidst the stamping feet and soaring voices — and then he would disappear. Not forever; only until he could be sure that the next time he came to the fire, he would have a story that would please Inga, and the rest of the women.

Sometimes, they stayed away for a long time.

One night, a comet appeared on the horizon, and over the next few days it grew larger and larger until night was as light as day.

“We know what the comet is,” said the men.

“Tell us tonight,” said Inga. That night, a competition was held before the flames about who could tell the best story about the comet. Nala watched from the side, itching to speak, wishing the fear within her bones could be replaced with the excitement so evident in everyone else.

“The comet is made of a star dipped in silver,” one man boasted. “As the silver cools it falls through the sky, gaining speed and shine until it’s as luminous as the moon. When it passes by silver dust falls from its form, turning the air to jewellery that all the women will nag their husbands to acquire.”

Inga, and her council of women, blinked and nodded, and the man stepped aside, elated to not have displeased, but yearning for a smile.

“The comet is a large white bird, feathered with dying star and breathing fire in it’s belly,” began another.

Nala couldn’t listen any longer.

“It’s a giant rock!” she cried.

Only the crackle of the fire, and the strange, fizzing sound which was the comet could be heard. The comet was so bright it fought with the flames to light the faces turned in Nala’s direction — some were silver-glazed, others red. All were enraged.

“Only men can tell stories,” said one man, larger than the rest, with great tufts of hair on his chest.

Everyone drew in a breath as Inga stood.

“Nala, you must leave,” she said.

“But it’s true!” Nala said. “My grandfather told me that he saw a comet when he was a little boy. It fell into the ocean and made a wave so large it swamped the whole eastern part of the Isle!”

“She’s telling stories!” snapped another man. “Women can’t tell stories — they always lie!”

“As if the tales of your prowess are always steeped in truth,” cried his wife. She stood, as did a few other women, while others remained held in place by Inga’s glare.

“Women do not tell stories!” Inga cried.

“Why not?” Nala demanded. “Why can only the men tell stories?”

“Because we’re better at it,” one man said.

“Because we know how!” said another.

“I believe her,” said a third.

All eyes turned to a tall man with sad eyes. He met their gazes shyly, and then looked away. “My grandfather told me the same tale.”

“So did mine,” said a voice in the back of the crowd.

Nala edged away from the fire as the men began to argue among themselves, and the women began to shout, both sides jumping up and pushing accusing fingers at the other. They argued for so long, and so loudly, that they didn’t hear Nala screaming, begging them to notice that the comet had gotten closer.

At last, the fight between the men and the women turning violent, Nala turned and ran. She grabbed one of the rafts tied up on the shore and struck out for open water — paddling fast, and faster still, as the night lightened to almost painful brightness. The fizzing sound had turned to a roar, and though the water lapping Nala’s toes was cold sweat poured from her body from the heat of the sky.

WHOOMPH.

Nala’s raft tipped, and she fell headlong into the water. She fought the waves, which seemed intent on dragging her down, until finally her head popped out into the night which was now black and smelt of fire.

Nala took three huge breaths, and began to swim.

When she got back to the Isle, the burning smell on the wind intensified. It wasn’t hard to see why — the fire pit had been struck by the comet, flinging burning coals and branches into the trees. There they smouldered, holding an eerie vigil for the clicking, cooling, rugged comet that smoked gently amid the dying flames and mounds of black dirt in its crater.

Around the comet were bodies — most would never tell or listen to a story again. In a cottage a baby began to wail, shaken out of its sleep by the impact.

“I know what the comet is,” Nala said softly to herself. “It’s evil.”

COMMENTS

I told this story to my sister as we walked along the sea wall to Kits Beach. As I didn’t have a copy on hand, I had to recite it from memory. What was interesting is that, though I knew the story and stayed largely along the same storyline, I found myself adding little tidbits — who Nala was, why Inga was the village elder, etc. I also tried out a few tricky turns of phrase, one of which ran:

“… and the night that had been as light as day was now as dark as night…”

and which my sister quickly informed me was overwriting at its ripest. She also had questions, one being — why did Inga speak against Nala with the men? Wasn’t Inga a women and so, ergo, naturally on Nala’s side to have an equal speaking voice?

I then had to get into internalized sexism and the naturalization of patriarchal systems in (some) women who manage to rise to what little power women can in those kinds of societies. So that was fun. (Here is a good blog post by an Australian/American author Justine Larbalestier in which she addresses including historical/modern day sexism/racism in your novels/stories to prove a point and the problems associated with that if the writer isn’t careful.)

All in all, a cool assignment!

(P.S. I got the partial idea for this story from Nation by Terry Pratchett — though in the story, Mau’s island community is wiped out by a tsunami, bringing with it a British ship with a feisty parrot and a young girl).

WORKS CITED

Hynes, James. “The Ghost Girl and the Naked Savage.” The New York Times. The New York Times, December 5, 2008. Web. Accessed June 1, 2016.

Larbalestier, Justine. “Racism in the Books We Write.” justinelarbalestier.com. WordPress, September 5, 2012. Web. Accessed June 1, 2016.

NASA. Halley’s Comet. 1986. Space.com. Web. Accessed June 1, 2016.

In just a few short sentences J. Edward Chamberlin completely opened my mind to the fact that separating cultures into “oral” or “written” is misleading at best and disparaging at worst. The few sentences are:

…the central institutions of our supposedly “written” cultures — our courts and churches and parliaments and schools — are in fact arenas of strictly defined and highly formalized oral traditions, in which certain things must be said and done in the right order by the right people on the right occasions with the right people present. (If this is your land, where are your stories? 20)

This quotation complements a main point in Chamberlin’s book If this is your land, where are your stories? that language is a form of ceremony (2). Be it in the retelling of a Creation myth, a nursery rhyme, a weekly call to your parents two provinces away, or the passing of judgement in a court of law, language is often accompanied by ceremonial actions, sacred or ordinary. This is why separating cultures into “oral” or “written” is redundant — the “separate” cultures utilize language, and its ceremonies, in similar ways: to tell stories, initiate ceremonies, pass laws, even to swear in citizenship.

The distinction which Chamberlin tries to eradicate between oral and written cultures is similar to the one between men and women’s clothes which Virginia Woolf addresses in a footnote in Three Guineas:

… the late Mr. Justice MacCardie, in summing up the case of Mrs. Frankau, remarked: “Women cannot be expected to renounce an essential feature of femininity or to abandon one of nature’s solaces for a constant and insuperable physical handicap… Dress, after all, is one of the chief methods of women’s self-expression… In matters of dress women often remain children in the end. The psychology of the matter must not be overlooked….” The Judge who thus dictated was wearing a scarlet robe, an ermine cape, and a vast wig of artificial curls… the fact that the singularity of his own appearance… was completely invisible to him so that he was able to lecture the lady without any consciousness of sharing her weakness, raises two questions: how often must an act be performed before it becomes traditional, and therefore venerable; and what degree of social prestige causes blindness to the remarkable nature of one’s own clothes? (150, emphasis mine).

The fact that the judge in this case chastised women for their love of clothes while wearing an ostentatious costume is remarkably similar to a Christian who has just finished attending a compline service looking down on a traditional Native American sun dance. While I wouldn’t call a shared use of language in written or oral forms as a shared “weakness,” the essence of Woolf’s sentence is the same — the similar use, the similar recognized importance, of words written and spoken in Western and Native/other “oral” cultures is blatantly obvious. Courtney MacNeil, citing Henri Meschonnic in her article “Orality” underscores the cohesion of oral and written language:

… orality is not the opposition of writing, but rather a catalyst of communication more generally, which is part of both writing and speech” (“Orality”).

In high school and some university classes the distinction between written and oral cultures is still made. I believe that the distinction is beneficial, for it allows for the more traditionally orally-dominated cultures to have their stories and histories taught, instead of shoved to the sidelines for not complying with what we define as literature. However, the distinction should not be accompanied by hierarchical ordering of importance. As MacNeil says in her article, orality is “part of both writing and speech,” inextricably linked as anyone who speaks aloud a to-do list or signs a marriage certificate while also proclaiming “I do” at the altar will realize. In the end, let us not be judges in scarlet robes and ermine capes, looking over our pulpit at respectably dressed women and shaking our heads of cascading artificial curls over their materialism.

Works cited 

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If this is your land, where are your stories? : Finding common ground. Toronto: Random House, 2004. Print.

“Compline at Keble.” Keble College. N.P. N.D. Web. Accessed May 22, 2016.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. The University of Chicago, 2007. Web. Accessed May 22, 2016.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harbinger Book, 1966. Print.

“Sun Dance”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. Accessed May 22, 2016.

Pinterest. “British Judge in Court.” Accessed May 22, 2016.

Hello everyone! My name is Mia Calder and I will be going into my fourth year at UBC starting in September 2016. I like to read and collect old books — I just came back from a two-week trip in England, and my suitcase was noticeably more book-shaped than it was when I left. I also like to write, and hope one day to be published.

On this blog I will be documenting my progress through English 470A, a course dedicated to disentangling traditional and imposed narratives of Canadian history. This course also focuses on the many stories and voices of the Indigenous populations which have been distorted or silenced through Canadian history to present day. I know that I will be learning a lot, as well as reading many authors of whom I have never heard. I also know that this process will be an uncomfortable one at times, as any thing is when it causes reflection and introspection.

My only experience so far with stories focused on Indigenous peoples is Initiation by Virginia Frances Schwartz. Interestingly enough, Virginia Frances Schwartz is not Indigenous herself, so I can honestly say that to my knowledge I have not read anything written by an Indigenous Canadian. I prefer — or I guess prefer is too strong a word, but rather tend to — read authors from the mid-to-late Victorian period, as well as modern day fantasy and science fiction authors such as Tamora Pierce and Sir Terry Pratchett (R.I.P).

As I’m reading over what I’ve written so far, I’m having trouble deciding which words to use, or which are appropriate — Indigenous? Native? Is one offensive? Is it offensive that I’m unsure? I hope that this course will help to clear up my confusion.

I am also hopeless with online technological wizardry. It took me longer than I care to admit to even figure out how to start writing this post. That, too, is something I hope will clear up in the coming weeks.

(I saw a first edition Jane Eyre on my trip in the National Gallery, so it was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking of an image to post).

Cheers!

WORKS CITED

“A Biography of Sir Terry Pratchett”. www.terrypratchettbooks.com. Transworld Publishers, n.d. Web. Accessed May 13, 2016.

Google Books. “Initiation.” www.books.google.ca. Web. Accessed May 13, 2016.

viaLibri. “Jane Eyre first edition.” www.viaLibri.net. Web. Accessed May 13, 2016.