Team Coyote teamed up with Team Stories of Survival
SUMMARY
Introduction:
- Our goal for our research during this conference was to help shed light on how regionalism and location have long lasting effects on the types of narratives that are shared internally and externally between cultural groups. If we ignore the importance of location in regards to storytelling and think of our world in a globalized sense, there is meaningful material that can be lost. Initially, we researched the significant differences between Indigenous and European traditions and the importance of storytelling within those cultures. Identifying where people live, raise their families, and root their traditions, gives us a more intimate look at why and how narratives form and spread. Further, we as a team explored how colonialism, as well as sharing space in multicultural settings, can result in colliding worldviews. This collision can create new sets of narrative form and perspectives, but can also be disruptive to preserving longstanding traditions- especially within Indigenous groups who have historically had their cultural progression threatened.
- As a call to action, we suggest promoting education that focuses on Indigenous storytelling models and showing how important Indigenous traditions- such as oral storytelling and generational teaching- are to creating a fully developed understanding of the land we call Canada. We must all embrace the legitimacy and power of Indigenous narratives from centuries before, as well as new forms of narratives such as survivor memoirs and literature that challenges Eurocentric Canadian ideals.
Central Points and Issues:
1. Comparing the differences between Indigenous and European cultural ideologies and more specifically, their narrative styles. Exploring how having these cultural identities in the same location can cause disruption and confusion.
2. King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water demonstrates ways in which cultural stories and myths can coincide and uses this narrative form as a source of decolonization.
3. Place, location, and the idea of home are mentally developed and inherited. In order for people to culturally share this information, impactful narratives must be formed and shared.
4. We must refrain from allowing colonialism to affect our views on others’ narratives and the way in which they share them.
5. The correlation between home and the physical land and our inability to feel belonging in a certain place.
6. The use of cultural appropriation in order to try and tell the “others’” story in a way that is inaccurate and offensive.
Questions:
- Does promoting a multicultural Canada actually allow Indigenous people to participate fully in their own culture, or does it still suggest integration and loss of identity?
- Do values and traditions change with location, or does history have a more impactful influence? Can growing up in a space that encourages cultural stereotypes affect these values as well?
- Residential schools promoted displacement of families and a shift in location for Indigenous children. Does this idea of a modernized world (which ignores the importance of regionalism) create a gap in the illusion of “home” for these children and future generations to follow?
- How can Canada provide success for Indigenous storytellers, when our Western framework revolves around consumer culture that primarily supports non-Indigenous writers? In order to evolve as a writer, how must one be able to support themselves?
- Are there any positive shifts happening from global interconnectedness of the world? Can cultures survive if we use the model of the world becoming everyone’s home?
Quotations:
“Different ways of interpreting the world are manifested through different cultures” (Bear, 77).
This quote addresses the importance of understanding the need for acceptance of diversity in order to build a relationship primarily between the Indigenous people and Canada, but also between all cultures. As Franco pointed out in our research, “we often view the culture of First Nations people already under a Eurocentric lens, which prevents us from truly engaging and understanding who they are as a society without a more westernized standpoint”. By thinking about this point, our research has discovered that place has a huge role in forming identity; our identity is expressed through narratives: our thoughts, beliefs and values are conveyed through words, whether written or spoken. Different cultures thus have a unique and influential way of forming our narratives, as each culture grows from different land and location. For Indigenous people, their culture relies heavily on the interconnected relationship between themselves and the land, the beauty, and nature; this is different for the Europeans/Colonizers whose relationship with land is a more dominate. Both forms of relationship to land, is reflected in their narratives.
We discovered that through Bear, “an individual absorbs the collective thought processes of a people” (78) through language which differs from location to location. Location thus influences narratives, as it is the initial creation of a person; it molds the beliefs and values of a person that remains with them when they enter other cultures and countries. Our research emphasized the significance of location holding power over narratives through the sense of home being allocated to location. Home creates a physical and mental sense of belonging and this idea of belonging is what defines our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us and how we then interpret and pass these ideas on.
“Both the colonizer and the colonized, have shared or collective views of the world embedded in their language, stories or narratives” (Bear, 85).
This quote reflects the answer for our question: “People who are physically in the same space can still experience these places in very different ways. Why should we place emphasis on location if it is not a fixed variable?”. Bear teaches us that though cultures view the world differently, they in fact are integrated in the sense that for the Indigenous and Eurocentric worldviews, their stories and narratives work to inform others of their own beliefs, values, and traditions. Although many of these beliefs for the Eurocentric culture are oppressive and harsh towards the Indigenous culture, it cannot be argued that their narratives are not striving for the same goal as the Indigenous – to pass on their stories. This works in the understanding that both cultures have one goal, but the ways in which they reach this goal vary in how they look at the instruments they can use around them. So for our research, to look at the Indigenous people and the Westernized people within Canada, it can be viewed that, yes the land is the same, but the ways in which the land is perceived vary.
However this difference is shared and collective as both cultures use the land to benefit their people, but for one culture this means creating harmony with the land too. This comes from the idea that place and locations are “carriers of cultural narratives” (Benesch 96); we bring with us what we learn from where we come from. The colonial mindset comes from a land where man prioritizes itself over nature, in a land filled with the Indigenous ideology that nature and man must coincide to live in harmony. Jamie brought up the idea that this sense of authority by ‘the one’ may be in connection to the fact that Europe was the first to Industrialize, meaning that it is easier for one to find the instruments they need to survive before providing for more. This perception showed our research group that the land controls the way of living for people, whilst simultaneously forcing people to cater themselves to the land in order to survive. The core knowledge here is that narrative form is influenced by tradition and ethics, and it is hard to put aside these factors of an individual. We also discovered that though location may not change, the location of an individual’s perception and understanding of the land surrounding those changes; ultimately altering how we pass on these experiences.
“Perhaps if we remember our similarity, and avoid viewing identity as something based on categories of difference, then Canadian literature and other media can help destroy stereotypes and generalizations of Indigenous cultures.” -Chloë Parkin.
This quote refers to Somers’s article, which discusses identity formation in relation to narrative, and how identity should be redefined in better terms to include concepts from social theory and politics, coined as narrative identity.
Narrative identity “builds from the premise that narrativity and relationality are conditions of social being, social consciousness, social action, institutions, structures, even society itself; the self and the purposes of self are constructed and reconstructed in the context of internal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantly in flux” (Somers, 621). Hannah Westerman brings up an interesting tangent, suggesting that “perhaps storytelling and narratives alongside regionalism, form culture…much like the way the First Nations culture is based on inter-connectivity”.
Moreover, the quote addresses how we must change the angles of our perspectives to further close the gaps of cultural misunderstandings. Yet establishing the common ground of being a globalized citizen can be more meandering than useful in terms of authenticity, as Franco mentions via Tsosie that globalization and technology has made goals of authenticity to be more difficult. It is through the representation of media forms where these stereotypes are able to be created and brought down, but how we may convey these frameworks of representation itself respectably may require much collaboration. As Hannah Wagner suggests, decolonizing the epistemology of literary study through moving away from Western contextualized literature can add value to a diversity of information.
Conclusion:
In the future we must acknowledge that Canada is a multicultural nation with a history that extends far beyond the era of colonization. Moreover the land has many stories that it can tell, all of which derive from many people of different cultures and worldviews, just as long as we are willing to listen. Keeping this in mind we need to ensure that the voices of First Nations people are not silenced or disregarded as a result of the current popularity of Eurocentric literature. This goal is highly important as the focus on Eurocentric literature only allows the story of Canada to be told in an extremely biased and largely westernized worldview, making key parts of its history left untold. Thus, it is only one side of history that gets the privilege to tell their narrative, while the other side is completely left out of the conversation.
In order to prevent this outcome our group suggests that we try to shift the focus of education from the widespread Eurocentric writings towards more Indigenous forms of storytelling such as orality or generational teaching. We believe that this change will allow all citizens of Canada to have a better understand the history of the land not just through the lens of Eurocentrism, but also through Indigenous perspectives as well, regardless of their ethnicity. All in all, this call to action ensures that First Nations voices are heard, and more importantly, culturally, socially, and politically respected by all Canadians.
Future Research:
One particular area that we could explore in the future involves the exploitation of land by colonizers as well as their descendants. Our team believes that this could be highly relevant to our current research because if we want to understand how location affects narrative, then we should also investigate how the actual physicality of said location (in terms of plant life, bodies of water, mountain ranges, and other landforms) can affect it just as well. This is because nature seems to be a critical part of Native American culture so it would be important to consider if the alteration and destruction of the environment for residential or commercial purposes, has in any way changed, inspired, or created entirely new stories altogether. In addition, it may also be interesting to know whether or not there exists certain aspects of their storytelling that is dependent on certain environmental features the may surround them?
Moreover, this research could also delve into the environmental damage that has been caused today by oil, lumber, and carbon-intensive industries over the years. The installation of pipelines, the deforestation of forests, or the increasing temperature of the earth are just a few examples in which colonization has significantly altered the physical geography of Canada, mostly for the worse. In any case, this area of research could aid us in understanding how stories reflected the way First Nations people use, protect, and respect their land, while also revealing how such respect continues to inform their society today.
Works Cited
“Common Portrayals of Aboriginal People.” Media Smarts (italicize), http://mediasmarts.ca/diversity-media/aboriginal-people/common-portrayals-aboriginal-people.
“The Future of Indigenous Storytelling” YouTube, uploaded by Tedx Talks, 10 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-Ln0457YA.
Bear, Leroy Little. “Jagged worldviews colliding.” Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision (2000): 77-85.
Benesch, Klaus. “Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 64, no.1, 2016., pp. 93-108.
Keahey, Deborah. Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. N.p.: U of Manitoba, 1998.
Korff, Jens. “Meaning of Land to Aboriginal People.” Creative Spirits, Mar. 2016, Accessed Dec 8, 2016, www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/meaning-of-land-to-aboriginal-people.
Somers, Margaret R. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23.5 (1994): 605-49. University of Michigan.
Tsang, Phyllis. “Breaking Aboriginal stereotypes through Art.” Toronto Media Co-op (italicize), 15 September 2009, http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/fr/story/1903.
Tsosie, Rebecca A. “Reclaiming Native Stories: An Essay on Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Rights.” Arizona State Law Journal 34 (2002): 299. SSRN.