470: a summer delve into Canadian literature

Like a road map, Green Grass Running Water is full of allusion and word play connects the novel not only linearly, but also inter-connectively–it forces you to make connections at various points throughout the novel. Here is my “hyper-text” reading for pages 194 to 206. Page 194 opens with Coyote and a story about Changing Woman. Coyote is known as “the trickster” in Native American mythology, and is considered one of the First People (Flick 142). Changing Woman is a Navajo deity who was born “in the fifth world” of the subterranean…read more

In the opening of Marlene Goldman’s article “Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water”, she explains how Hugh Brody’s experience “testifies to the fact that Native American peoples have repeatedly asserted the legitimacy of their own maps and contested European maps and strategies of mapping, which have played such a central role in conceptualizing, codifying and regulating the vision of the settler-invader society” (17, emphasis mine). This can be seen in the very maps we use today, where Africa and South America are much smaller in terms…read more

According to a StatCan study conducted in 2006, by 2031, 47% of “second generation Canadians would belong to a visible minority group, nearly double the proportion of the 24% in 2006”. Specifically in Vancouver, B.C., “Chinese would be the largest visible minority group, with a population of around 809,000…account[ing] for about 23% of the Vancouver’s population, up from 18% in 2006” (StatCan, 2006). Despite these exponential predictions, the population diversity, specifically the population of Chinese in Canada was at one point actively discouraged. The CanLit guide on Nationalism states that “as a result of…read more