Month: February 2021

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Blog Assignments

Blog 2:4 :: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

Thomas King represents these two stories in two very different, almost oppositional ways, representing the different world views, and spiritualities that these stories are told from. The biblical tale talks about the hierarchy of creation, with God at the top, and humans having dominion over the land. It expresses the ideology of our creation being an act of an authority figure that we must be devoted to in order to survive the ultimate turmoil of existence. Meanwhile, the story of Charm talks about the world as an imperfect place, where mistakes are made, characters are flawed, and yet still have value with how they live. No authority instructed Charm on how to make the world. But with the support of her newfound community of animals, she was able to help them make the land for them, on and near which they can live in harmony in pursuit of their survival. (23)

King is doing a few things by setting these two stories at ends with each other. First, he is showcasing how these two ideologies have shaped history. He is, of course, representing beliefs that are in some way contrary with each other, because when we view how these two worldviews interacted with each other in our past, the result was one worldview assuming dominance over the other, and attempting to control them “for their own good.” The dominance of one group over another is not an idea that is formed in Charm’s story of creation, but is rather built on over and over again throughout the many stories in the Bible. Here, King is comparing the worlds of these two culture’s spiritualities and the world that makes up our history.

Second, King is breaking from the colonial norm of assuming one truth and embracing the complex nature of the world that lives outside of our minds. It is a colonial mindset that finds co-existence of opposing views discomforting. After all, where in the Biblical story all truth and all power points towards god, in the story of charm, life is permeated with cooperation and harmony.

Dichotomies are a colonial construct. Believing that there is an inherent, mutually exclusive opposition between states of being (rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, etc.) is a way that colonial mindset boils down complex ideas into easy to understand bites that let us to make what feels like meaningful statements about the world. As King puts it “we trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” (25)

We have ideas about how the world is black and white that we have been taught to embrace as soon as we start learning the English language. As young children we learn all about male and female, boy and girl, and yet there is no standard in grade-level education where students are expected to develop a broader understanding of the differences between gender identity, gender expression, sexuality, and sex, and how the many variations along the spectrum between boy and girl, male and female, are expected to fit in to what we know.

It feels controversial to say, but few, if any, of the binary ways of thinking that we accept in everyday life actually line up with reality and our lived experience. That is not to say that the colonial framework is fundamentally flawed (though this may be contested), but more that the language that we have learned in this culture simply does not recognize a gap between what our words boil down we understand and the complexity of what we experience.

The idea that things are black and white are an essential part of what King describes from the colonial creation story: all creative power lies with God, and it is through his actions that anything exists. (24) With ultimate power, knowledge, and good will in the hands of one being, there exists the faith that there is one single truth, and only one perspective that matters.

With this objectivity, the world that we take in can be easily divided up into categories that we can share and compare with others. We categorize ideas into ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and ‘success’ and ‘failure,’ because our words demand that we put things into these categories, rather than accept them as something broader.

King puts these two stories at ends to showcase how the colonial framework of competition and hierarchy has a tendency to dominate our ways of thinking. He is showcasing how colonial thinking alters our expectations. By posing these two stories in conflict, King is demonstrating how these two worldviews have clashed in the past, continue to clash in the present, and how these two stories express the ideologies that each culture holds dear.

I had misread the final paragraph in this chapter when I read it the first time. King had previously set the scene, talking about how the conceit of the biblical narrative seems to fuel our thirst for goods such as electricity and private property, and allows us to control the expression of race and gender which we make them discriminatory. Through this, I read the final lines as “but don’t say you would have lived your life the same way had you only heard this story.” I quickly realized my mistake, though I thought the implication here was clear, and I have not been able to stop thinking of it this way: The stories that we grow up with shape the way that the move through the world.

Green, Hank. “Human Sexuality is Complicated….” YouTube, uploaded by vlogbrothers, 12 Oct. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXAoG8vAyzI

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: a Native Narrative. Anansi, 2007.

Quinn, Emily. “The way we think about biological sex is wrong.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 6 Mar. 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_quinn_the_way_we_think_about_biological_sex_is_wrong

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico.

Bonus Link:

Piapot, Ntawnis. “9-year-old Sask. girl embraces identity through makeup, ribbon skirts.” CBC Indigenous, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/9-year-old-indigenous-girl-makeup-identity-1.5921066. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021, 

Categories
Blog Assignments

Blog 2:3 :: Home — Some commentary

When I was writing my own thoughts about home, I came up with a few ideas that stuck with me through my entry.

I started by thinking of ‘place’ as an environment and the expected things that fill that environment. So for myself growing up in a suburb, that place was an environment filled with winding streets, residences, corner stores, and friends.

I thought of space, as the specific things that I remembered in that environment, and how those specific things changed in time. In my own suburb, where the place was filled with residences that you would expect to see in a neighbourhood, the space had memories of friends’ houses, and how after all these years those houses are not my friends’ anymore.

I thought about home as being a place that was safe to explore, secure enough to be myself, and grounded enough that I could rest at the end of the day.

Peers’ thoughts

The following are a list of themes discussed in my peers blog posts on the same topic:

  • Unique Space
  • Land
  • Independence
  • Freedom
  • Joy and Happiness and Love and Pride
  • Memories
  • Hope, Future
  • Security, Care
  • Family
  • Community
  • Belonging
  • Making Connections
  • Shared Experience and History
  • Knowledge
  • Learning

This list far exceeds the ideas that I discussed in my own post. When reading my peers’ blogs, I was astounded to find how people managed to articulate my exact thoughts about home, while approaching it in an entirely different way. I had considered ideas of space, freedom, security and adventure in my own description, and yet all of these other ideas of family, community, and belong; of shared experience and memories — none of them seem at all different to how I would want my feelings of home articulated, and yet were left out in my own post.

I have broken down my thoughts into general themes below, with a conclusion that wraps up these ideas at the bottom. There simply was a lot to unpack in my peers’ work, and I wanted to make sure their writings were done justice.

Unique Space and Land

I had considered the idea of place and space as being essential to our ideas of home, but I hadn’t considered how the uniqueness of that space would be essential. Holly, Victoria, Laura, Grace, and Magda all spoke about home involving a unique space that we can get to know personally. Laura, Magda, and Grace all spoke about the importance of land and nature in the places that we call home, and how they influence our feelings towards them. Grace specifically having the experience of growing up on an island, finds the idea of land not connected to the ocean as being unsettling and I have to say that, having grown up on the coast and always being near a beach or a river, I have to agree.

Holly and Victoria Specifically came across the ideas of seeing your home as space that is created by our living there. In Victoria’s story, she describes how a feeling of home starts to take shape from just the few days spent in an empty apartment. These “hints of home” coming in the forms of abandoned coffee and yet to be washed dishes, and framed pictures already starting to be hung on the walls. In Holly’s, the deep understanding of your space as how the layout reflects your experience.

Powerful Emotions

In general, we often have positive feelings of home. I was specific in my own entry to not declare that everyone’s experience of home is positive, but in our posts, it seems that many have those positive feelings of home. Presumably, when we do not feel these positive associations, we try to find other places to call home as we grow.

Magda, Holly, and Cayla had all uncovered powerful emotions that represent home in their blog entries. Magda had discussed the ideas of hope and future prospects as being something that fills the space and feeling of home. Both Magda and Cayla had added on with positive associations we have with home; feelings of Joy and Happiness and Love. Cayla talked about finding ways to stay entertained, engaged, and connected to the world. I suppose this is why I had brought in my memories of long bikerides as a kid. For me, it was a great way to pass time and feel connected to the space that surrounded me.

And Holly and Cayla both discussed how home is a place where we don’t just make memories, we take the time to make memories. When we feel at home, we create experiences that we can look back on when thinking of our past.

Security, Community, and Belonging

Ultimately I refer to home most often in terms of my ‘home base’. I think of home in my day-to-day as the place where I can relax and turn off for a bit. Magda, Cayla, Victoria, and Laura also saw ‘home’ as a place where we can feel this sense of security. A place to relax, find peace of mind, and to wind down. Victoria, Laura, and Magda all talk about how attached the feelings of family and community are to the feeling of home, with Magda describing community in terms of a group that provides freedom, play, and support. Finally Laura, added the feeling of belonging to this idea of community, security and family. And I have thought of this belonging throughout my life — from experiences in school and in university; in my professional life; and in my personal life. We feel at home when we think of our space as being a place that we belong. From the activities we do and the entertainment we seek we are in search of a sense of belonging connected to our feeling of home.

Connections and Experience

When I was describing my feeling of home, I was very focussed on the idea of home as a noun.  ‘Home’ is a place that we experience, and I wanted to describe that experience as best as I could. I had not, however, considered thinking of home a verb, or as a thing that we are in an active roll of doing and creating. Magda discusses how we don’t just find ourselves in a community, we build ourselves into that community. From the early ages of preschool and before, we are making connections to those around us in order to form that community. These connections give us that same sense of belonging, and help us navigate the spaces that we include in our ideas of home.

But we don’t just make these connections in the young ages of 3 and 4. We are making these connections throughout our lives, identifying with those who can share in our experiences of the world, and who come from a shared history. Holly and Laura both describe this idea of shared experience in our ideas of home, that communities that we make our homes alongside share in the mutual feeling of belonging through their shared experiences and cultural contexts. 

Knowledge and Learning

Throughout these entries is the feeling that home isn’t just about memories, or about our feelings of community and belonging. They come back to that idea of our space being unique, and our knowledge of how it unique. Our knowledge comes in many forms. As Cayla describes, it may be a space where learning happens, or may be a place where we know the resources around us. To Laura, it may be the knowledge of the space, its history, its meaning, and its context. To Grace, telling the story of the settlers who colonized her island as their home this knowledge may be in the form of stories told about the land that we live on.

Conclusion — TL;DR

I was amazed at how widely we think about home, and how so many people consider such similar ideas, and such drastically different ideas. For instance, it seems that we all agreed that security and rest are an important part of what we find in a home. We all considered how home is contained in a physical space, but also an emotional space, and that we have complex ways of navigating these feelings. We all seemed to consider that home changes over time in various ways. Home, as a child is different to home as an adult.

But many had some really unique ideas that don’t seem to contradict our ideas of home. Home having a specific connect to story was an interesting thing to read from Grace, who had a unique understanding of the place that she grew up.

Home being a place where we learn and understand responsibility in different stages of life was an idea of Cayla’s that was profound and eye-opening, but still somehow felt fundamentally true.

Victoria and Holly both came to the conclusion of home involving a specific understanding of how a space is unique to us, and I have not been able to get this idea out of my head since.

And Laura thought about how home exists in your sense belonging to a group, to a space, to an experience. And this, too, seems essential to how I think about home, but had not considered before now.

I’ve learned a lot in this assignment about how our ideas about home all cover very similar ground, while taking many different paths across it. Some experience home in how they connect to others, how they think about the land, or how they remember their past. But each of these seem to just be a perspective with which we can regard a generally understandable space.

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Blog Assignments Story

Blog 2:2 :: Where The Heart Is

I grew up in a suburb of Delta. The streets were small, and often winding, but it was easy to get from A to B using whatever method that you liked. I really liked bike riding around, and I eventually developed my skills at biking in this area by riding into neighbouring towns to pass the time. I had done this so often that to this day, even as the town has changed quite drastically from buildings being torn down to intersections being rebuilt, my mental map of Ladner is pristine.

Since leaving high school and beginning work in various fields I have moved to Vancouver, and the feeling of home has become different. I have a place that I live with my partner whom I love, and we’ve got lovely cats and a community of friends around us. But it doesn’t feel like ‘home’ the way that ‘home’ feels.

Really, I have two different sets of home: one that feels like adventure, and curiosity, and the slow-pace of a suburb; and another that feels like security, and rest, and perhaps a little cramped. They both feel like love. They both feel like safety.

Since I’ve been working I’ve been taking transit, bike riding, and walking most of the time to get from one place to another. This means that since working in a more professional field, and getting older, I’ve had to start reacquainting myself with driving. Vancouver is not a very safe place to do this, as the rush of the city makes people a lot less patient than would be helpful to a driver trying to gain confidence, so my partner and I have been taking trips down to Ladner on the weekends to do just this. Before this, the last time I was driving in Ladner I was still in high school, and since getting back onto the road, I’ve been going over the same routes and practicing the same intersections, turns, and lane-changes that 16 year old me was practicing.

Returning to my home town to do this creates a strange clashing of worlds inside my head. The home of my childhood really does feel like childhood. It feels like exploration, and like wandering without pressure. And this is exactly what I am able to do when I explore my home town on these weekend trips. My partner and I wander aimlessly in the car through streets that I know so well. Not having not grown up in the area, my partner had always assumed that I was directionally challenged, as I don’t have a good sense of how to get around by car in Vancouver — I can bike and I can train but providing driving directions, not so much. But driving around in Ladner is a totally different story. I’m planning my routes several streets ahead, I’m able to visualize and explain what each of these turns is going to look like before we get there, and I’m completely at ease with the idea of where we are going to go.

Over the past year, ‘home’ has become a much stranger word to many people. During the lockdown in March and April all the schools in BC closed while the government started to plan its next steps to combat Coronavirus. That time, was the period that so many of us are now familiar with: Work-From-Home! Since becoming an adult and living with my partner, my concept of home centred around my living space. ‘Home’ was one place, ‘work’ was someplace else. But under work-from-home, the two places melded into one. Where I once had the security of knowing I could simply close my eyes to the world outside, strangely, the world outside was seeping in. I had to manage the space in my home so that work happened in a certain area, and home happened everywhere else. One of the hardest psychological affects of coronavirus during this period (other than the lack of certainty, the unclear yet overwhelming presence of danger, the changing expectations of what a functioning society was going to look like, and the knowledge that things were going to get worse before they got better) was the compartmentalization of everyday life.

After schools started opening again, and the simply terrifying aspect of returning to work became a reality, my home started to become home again. I had a safe space returned to me. I knew there was a place that I could come to and relax, even when the school — which in the back of my mind was a death trap — felt overbearing. The areas of my apartment that were designated to work, were no longer simply ‘work’ spaces. They were home spaces that I could do work in. More of my home was returning to me.

To me, home is a complicated idea, and I think it probably is for many people. I have ideas of home that have to do with where I grew up; an idea that has more to do with how the place feels in my mind and in my gut. There is the physical space that is so familiar to me, it is as if it is tattooed on my brain. But there is also the ‘home’ that is a physical space that has changed several times in the past year alone. There is a place called ‘home’ in my mind that feels like it is back in time to when I was a kid, just figuring out who I was and what I could do; and another that is grounded in the present and sometimes painfully anticipating the future. And I have ideas of home that have to do with where I most want to be at the end of the day, where I know I feel safe and secure, and where I know I can take a breath and close my mind to the world. And I know so far this one has stayed with me, as when that went away, for a while it felt like home was disappearing, too.

I know not everyone has these same feelings of ‘home’ that we attribute to the places that we live. I know that some people have simpler ideas of home, and other people have much more complicated ideas. Not everyone had a safe childhood like me, or moved to a new city like me. And not everyone was impacted by this past year the same way that I was. But to me, home is a mixture of a lot of ideas and emotions and events that are difficult to attach to one location, because, strangely, they go wherever I go. Home is always changing because where we are always changes, who we are always changes, the world around us always changes, and how we feel never stops changing.

Beck, Julie. “The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Matters So Much.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-psychology-of-home-why-where-you-live-means-so-much/249800/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.

Aziz, Saba. “‘Loneliness Pandemic’: Work from home during COVID-19 takes mental toll on Canadians.” Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/7589114/coronavirus-mental-health-work-from-home-covid-19/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021

Categories
Blog Assignments

Blog 1:5 :: Storytime

Thomas King relates a story in his Massey Lectures The Truth About Stories that he in turn received from Leslie Silko in her book Ceremony. I have taken this story and I have changed it. I’ve made it my own. And this feels like a crime. Stories are important. They are powerful and engaging, and they hold something about a culture that cannot be reached by any other words. I want to acknowledge that regardless of the changes I have made to this story, this story is not and will not be entirely my own. And the changes I have made also makes it something significantly different from the original. Passing on these stories is important, because stories have power, but how you use that power is consequential. For a prolific indigenous writer to pass on a story from another prolific indigenous writer, the story and the power that it creates may hold its integrity. But for this retelling to come from someone else, I acknowledge that this can only be done with the respect and understanding that these stories deserve, and I hope that despite these changes I have still done them justice.

So.

I have a great story to tell you. I heard this story once, about how evil came into the world. You’ll never believe what happened. There was no gift from the gods, no magic box or magic tree that someone was told not to touch. It was just the spirits of the world, coming together to tell their stories to each other. You see, way back then, that was how the world was made. The spirits tell their stories to each other, and when they listen to each others’ stories, what they tell become a part of the world. The spirits saw that there was no water, and so they told each other the stories of great lakes, and rushing rivers, and trickling streams, and vast oceans, and just like that the world was not just land anymore. The spirits saw that there were no trees, so they told the story of great oaks and pines, drooping willows, and blossoming cherry trees, and just like that, the land was covered in forests.
Now, to these spirits, they knew that the only audience that they had were each other, and for a while that was great! After all, having your stories listened to by other great storytellers feels good. But after a while, they got bored of telling their stories to other storytellers, they wanted others to see their stories for the beauty that they held. So, one day they decided to tell the stories of People so that they had an audience that could witness the stories that they had made in awe.
And at first the People loved the trees and the water and the many other things that the spirits had told into existence, but before long they were bored of the same stories of the land.
And so the spirits decided that they needed to get together and think about how they could give this gift of stories to the people of the land so that they, too, could appreciate the world that was created with them. One spirit told the story of powerful emotions such as romance and relief and humour. Another spirit told a story of adventure and strength and duty. Yet another spirit told the story of discovery and invention and creativity. All the spirits shared in their stories, and as they did this, the people were given a deeper understanding of the world and each other.
But one spirit did not share. This one spirit listened to all the stories and thought about what they all meant. When the other spirits asked them to share, at first they did not, not knowing what good their story would do. But eventually they did, and they told the story of suffering. Of emotions such as greed and anger and jealousy. Of pain and of hardship. And of Death.
When this spirit finished their story of all of these horrible things, the other spirits sat in silence. They basked in the horror of what had just happened. One spirit said, ‘no,’ as if in answering a question ‘no, thats not what we are doing here. This story won’t help the people understand our work.’ The others agreed and they watched as the people began to experience pain and anger and distrust.
‘Your story was powerful,’ the other spirits said, ‘but you have to take it back. Call your story back.’
But, of course, it was too late. Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, and the stories you listen to.

My story is quite a bit different from the story that Thomas King tells. I also feel that it is more different from his version (or Leslie Silko’s) than the various versions of Turtle story that Thomas King tells are from each other. There is a reason for this. I honestly had no intended to go so far off the beaten track as I started writing, but I was still conscious of it as it was happening. I wanted to tell the story in my own voice, and because of that I needed to change the characters of agency. I know some folks who practice witchcraft, and while I don’t think that Thomas King’s story paints witches in a particularly bad light, it was just not likely that I would be telling a story involving witches in the way that they were portrayed. So, witches needed to change, but the problem was that regardless of the human characters I selected I couldn’t come up with a feasible reason why they would be telling these stories to each other. So I decided to use a blank slate, “Spirits” and let people fill their own understanding of what that meant into the role that they play. As the purpose of this story is to express that these stories have power, I decided to make that power tangible in the form of a short cosmology.

I really enjoyed writing this story. I love writing, and this was a wonderful way to write a story that had already had a specific meaning, and pour a little bit of my own meaning into it as well. The narrative of stories having power has been one that has stuck with me for quite a while so being able to amplify this narrative in what I wrote felt like a great opportunity to let loose a little bit.

After I had written what I wrote, and fought the urge to make further changes, I enjoyed several hours of practicing my story, and it brought me back to a feeling of engagement in story that I hadn’t felt since high school Drama classes. Being able to review the story that I was going to tell to the point that I could recite it by memory made me feel even more connected to the story that I wrote, and made it even easier to uncover layers of meaning almost intuitively. That feeling of connection made the story feel even more like it was mine, and something that I had brought into the world.

And I really enjoyed telling it to people. It felt powerful to have something that I had a hand in creating and watch how that affected other people.Telling the stories to others was nerve wracking. I am usually a bit of an improviser when I go up in front of crowds, so it took some effort to remember to stick to the script without literally reading what I had come up with. It clearly takes great skill and an abundance of practice to be able to recount an important story from memory.

But the also story felt final and centred in the moment in a way that written word does not: there was no going back, and no editing. As I presented my story to family over Zoom, it created an artificial separation between the storyteller and the audience. Zoom has the feeling of speaking through a tunnel, and it made it a little bit difficult to gauge peoples’ reactions to what I was saying. But even with this barrier, telling the story felt like a form of meditation.

Despite how proud I was for the work that I put into this story, and the affects it seemed to have on others, I also felt guilty about telling it. Perhaps I took the importance of my own voice too seriously as I wrote it. There maybe wasn’t a need to rewrite to the extent that I had, and I could have found another way to portray the storytellers within it. But I made the decision that I made when I started writing, and as a result I took a story that wasn’t mine and made it into something that feels entirely different. And despite this, because of the work that I put into it, it felt equally disingenuous to scrap what I had done and write something closer to a story that Thomas King would tell, as if that was the only way to share a story.

The power that stories hold had absolutely affected the way I felt about this particular story. The guilt I felt in changing the story is recognition of power, and recognition of how I might be carefully walking a line of privilege. While I don’t think that retelling or even changing a story is inherently bad, deliberately changing the way that it was told and the context within it still felt wrong, and I can only express this feeling of ill-ease as being a way that this power manifests. Like being handed a loaded weapon, while meaning no harm.

Stories feel sacred to begin with, and something that you should not mess with if you can help it. But reciting the story had an immediate quality that kept me locked into the zone in a way that written word just doesn’t compare. And the feeling of putting the words out there had a feeling of ownership and finality that made me more connected to the story than when I had simply written the words down.

The power that storytelling holds is abundantly clear to me after this experiment, and despite my conflict I feel empowered to engage with it again.

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