7] Following Carlson’s discussions on literacy as “part of a broader genre of transformation” (61), try to explain what he means when he says that transformation is an “act of literacy.” This can be confusing at first, but if you follow his discussion beginning with “how Salish people understand the process or act of transformation in relation to literacy itself” and pay attention to how he uses etymology to shape his insights, you should be able to extract an explanation for conceptualizing transformations as writing and as readable.

I think that Carlson is trying to teach the readers that the many people in the world have a distinct idea of how indigenous culture and live is and many of those assumptions are wrong.  I think that Carlson wants to use indigenous literature to teach people who are ignorant of the real life problems and customs of these people.  So many people have ideas of indigenous cultures that are completely wrong.  I think this “transformation” is that people are able to have their personal ideas about indigenous people changed.  I think it is important for people to have their ideas about the world challenged every single day, this is what makes humanity a better place as a whole. I also think the easiest way to get the point across to many people is in writing.  Many people will not believe what is right in front of them unless there is scientific evidence.

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?

I think King creates these dichotomies to show us how two stories that have the same end result can be so different in the way that they are told and created.  It is true there has to be one story that a person believes is fact and the others are just pure creative stories. I think that the way a story is portrayed to its viewers makes a huge difference in the believability of a story. Most people would be more likely to believe a story from for example the history channel, compared to a story that is told by word of mouth.  Which is really quite funny, because most television and movies are glamourized so that people will watch and people fall for it and think it has to be right.

I think the pairing up the oppositions of dichotomies is to show how different the two stories but also shows the commonalities between the two stories. I think it is important and very easy to follow in the way that he pairs the similarities and differences together.

http://www.sd91.bc.ca/frenchj/Students/Creation%20Stories%20First%20Nations.html

This is another example of creation stories, and I think this would be difficult for many people to believe.  I think for the sole reason is that the website it not looking professional!

http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/fp/fpz2f22e.shtml

And I think that this would be more believable just for the sole reason it looks more appealing.

My personal photo

I read quite a few of my peers projects, and I must say I was surprised how personal a lot of people got.  Myself included.  The three I chose to talk about are Danica Ferguson, Deepak Nijjer, and Charlotte Tilstra.

In Danica’s Post I felt the same way she seems too.  Not in the town they grew up in, but feels a strong attachment to the place.  Although my story differs because I do not want to move back, I will visit.  HAHAH it is way to cold in Alberta for me now.  It is amazing how quickly you can adjust to warm weather.

Deepak’s I really enjoyed this post because, it is so interesting to me to have someone live in the exact same house for 23 years! I know a lot of people probably do that, but I could never imagine.  We always moved every 5 years.  I do think though it is important to have those ties to the house the actual structure.  That is really interesting to me.

Charlotte Tilstra’s post I engaged with because of the fact she talks about these tourist farm towns, and this is what I connect with.  The town where I consider my home, is a little farm town with a giant Ukrainian Easter Egg, and that is all the town in known for.

Home has a mixed connotation for me.  I love where I live in Kelowna, and I do consider that my home because now I would never move away from it. This is not where I consider my roots.  My roots are still stuck in Alberta on my grandparents farm.  As children we spent every weekend there driving quads, hanging out on the combines and watching the family working on the crops.  It was the best feeling to go out to the farm.  There was and still is no cell reception, and it is in the middle of no where.  This is where I feel most at home.  I feel like nothing can go wrong here,  I also enjoy myself there.  I am 100% happy there.  There is no other feeling like the farm.  It has been in my family’s possession for almost 100 years.  There was a gas station, a store, two homes, and a lot of family that grew up there.  And just across the road there is a Cemetery.  It is called New Kiew Ukrainian Church.  It is a small little church with so much character, I wish I had pictures of it. It is eerie to go to the church…No one is ever there to visit the grave sites so it is a little run down.  But there is a little cross in the back, that has the words Dyk (Duk in english)  carved into it. This is my uncle that died when he was a couple months old, he drowned in a little puddle of water… All the graves there are in Ukrainian. For me it is surreal to walk by them and read them, because many people could not read them, but I can.  Off the corner of the cemetery there is a little beaten path with three wooden crosses, nothing carved into them. No names, no dates, nothing is there.  This bothered me a lot so I did some research as to why they were so far away from the rest of the graves…it was the babies that died before they could be baptized, either abortions or miscarriages.  This made me so sad, because these poor children did not even have a chance to be baptized and they were shunned into the corner of the cemetery.  I just found this so unbelievable sad.  I cannot believe that innocent children were not allowed to even be buried on the property because the religion believed that anyone who was not baptized could taint the others who are buried there.  How unfair is that.

I feel so blessed that I had this opportunity to grown up in such an amazing area and have experiences that other people my age didn’t have.  For me having a massive amount of land to play on was unthinkable for my friends that lived in the city.  They had their little plot of grass and thats it.  I had more than my eyes could see.  Of course this got us into a lot of trouble at the same time.  Lots of broken bones and great memories that i would not trade for the world.  And for those reasons, the farm is my home, is it were I feel at peace with the world.