Prompt:

Question #2: In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility.

– Lesson 3.1, ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres May 2015

If you were to go up to a random individual on the street, say somewhere around the bustling communities of West 4th, Commercial Drive, or Main Street, and ask how they would describe Canada in one sentence, not many would use the words “exclusion [or] racial discrimination”.  However, the overview of nationalism in Canada as covered in the CanLit guide reveals that there are “many examples of state legislation and policies” that aimed to do exactly this.  This week, I will take a brief look back into the darker side of our nation’s history and research one of these such acts, The Immigration Act of 1910, and explore the ways in which it supports David Coleman’s argument for the “project of white civility”.

An extension of the original Immigration Act of 1906, the Immigration Act of 1910 sought to expand the original initiation to regulate all forms of immigration in Canada.  The Immigration Act of 1910 emphasized the expanding of the prohibited category of immigrants to include those that the government believed would “advocate the use of force or violence” and granted the government power to place an immigrant at risk of “deportation if judged undesirable”.  Some may argue that so far, the act seems unnecessary but not guilty of outright RACIAL exclusion yet…but wait for the kicker.  The act granted the government the ability to “restrict immigrants belonging to any RACE deemed UNSUITABLE to the climate or requirements of Canada”.  This detail of the 1910 act reveals the very type of discriminatory “literary personifications [and idealistic goals] of the Canadian nation” that reveal the type of “white civility” and “Britishness” status that Canada sought to maintain.  Furthermore, the emphasis on the power to deport those that were deemed capable of “force…violence”, and incivility is in line with the construction of “white and civil” as normative and in line with the “true” Canadian identity.

Today, one would like to believe these shameful acts of discrimination and racial exclusion are a part of Canada’s (albeit important) past, but even this is not true.  New pieces of legislation, like Bill C-24, prove that there is much work to be done in our country’s dealings with race.  Are we moving forward at all, or does the existence of things like Bill C-24 prove history is bound to repeat itself? What are some other examples of race exclusion and discrimination in Canadian legislature?

Works Cited

CTV Staff. “Bill C-24: What Dual Citizens Need To Know About Bill C-24, The New Citizenship Law.” CTV News, 17 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 June 2015. <http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/what-dual-citizens-need-to-know-about-bill-c-24-the-new-citizenship-law-1.2426968>.

“Immigration Act Canada (1910). North American Immigration. Web. 24 June 2015. <http://northamericanimmigration.org/141-immigration-act-canada-1910.html>.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.1″. English 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. UBC Blogs. Web. 25 June, 2015. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-3/lesson-3-1/>.

Prompt: 5.) “To raise the question of ‘authenticity’ is to challenge not only the narrative but also the ‘truth’ behind Salish ways of knowing” (Carlson 59). Explain why this is so according to Carlson, and explain why it is important to recognize this point.

In his article “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History”, Carlson discusses the problems and complications in non-Natives using “Authenticity” to understand Salish narratives.  Carlson suggests that the Western scholarly association of aboriginal authenticity with “pre [European]-contact temporal dimensions” has lead to the detrimental questioning and even outright rejection of stories that “do not meet our criteria for historical purity”.  The problem is that the Western world has a very inflexible understanding of the history regarding Aboriginal and European settler contact.  This stubborn and oversensitive stance towards the “authenticity” of the Salish people’s stories  is born out of a fear.  To grant “authenticity” to these stories would pose a threat to Western ideologies and history that we have believed and passed on for centuries.

It is important to note that Carlson is not in any way suggesting that Salish tradition does not value the importance of “truth” and legitimacy when it comes to the stories and history of its people and land.  He goes on to show that for the Salish people, “historical accuracy is a matter of great concern” in the same way as it is in the Western world.  The only difference is the ways in which it is measured.  While Western scholars rely “verifiable evidence”, the Salish people judge historical accuracy “in relation to people’s memories…in relation to the teller’s status and reputation as an authority”.  Therefore, for Western scholars to question the “authenticity” of Salish people is to misunderstand the culture and heritage of the Salish people and is in line with hating what one does not understand, a stance that “insult[s] the people who share their stories and…reduce the likelihood of their generosity [in sharing these stories in] continuing”.  To raise this question of “authenticity” is to undermine the “authenticity” of the Salish people altogether, and contributes to the relentless dismissive attitude that has proved so toxic to our relations. To question authenticity is to continue to attempt to write aboriginal history and culture out of the picturesque and rose-coloured history of our “wonderful” nation.  It is only once we understand and accept that Salish history, that all aboriginal history, IS our history and change our “ethnocentric and historically deterministic” attitudes that we can begin to move forward in our healing.

Works Cited

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 2011. 43-72.

“Native Languages of the Americas: Salish Indian Legends, Myths, and Stories” Native Languages of the Americas. N.p., 2015. Web. 19 June 2015. <http://www.native-languages.org/salish-legends.htm>.

1.) 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…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?

                                                               –  Lesson 2.2, Blog Prompt #1

This weeks blog prompt does one extremely important and powerful thing: it forces us to stop and reflect on the ideologies and belief systems that structure our lives.  At first, King’s use of dichotomies in his retelling of the two creation stories, the “The Earth Diver” story on one hand and the “Genesis” story on the other, appear problematic and incorrect.  They support the very detrimental type of binary thinking that exists in so many other aspects of our society, including the hierarchical dichotomy created between oral and written cultures by the by the scholars at the Toronto School of Communication that suggest “communication is a competition between eye and ear”.  Yet this is the exact type of flawed thinking that so many, including Chamberlain, MacNeil, and King himself, criticize and caution against.  So, as readers, and critical thinkers, we are faced with a dilemma.  Why does King demonstrate and almost even encourage the very thing he opposes?

In my reading, I believe King’s true thoughts and purpose can be found just below the surface of a very “tongue-in-cheek” performance.  It is true many times that one cannot see the flaws in one’s actions or thoughts until we are removed from the situation and forced to come face to face with them and the inevitable repercussions that come with them.  By structuring his retelling of the two creation stories in a way that supports the dichotomized way of thinking that is the “elemental structure of Western society”, King shows us the fault in our habits by allowing us to come to the conclusion ourselves.  It is our knee-jerk reaction to want to structure things in dichotomies, to see one thing, in this case a creation story, as “the one” or “true”.  It’s comfortable and safe and fits the other dichotomies that we have grown up abiding by “rich/poor, black/white, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature, male/female” and so on, even if they don’t make sense or are toxic.  When King says “and theres the problem…if we believe one story as sacred, we must see the other as secular”, he is not making a statement, but rather probing us to question this belief that we hold, not him.  Is it true that only one story must rule as truth above the rest?  Its true, they are vastly different.  One has cooperating talking animals, a main character named Charm, while the other “celebrates law, order, and good government” created out of competition and authority.  But as we learned with last week’s blog assignment on homes, difference doesn’t mean inauthenticity.  Many of us had quite varied ideas of what home was, in from road trips in dingy cars to dorm rooms to nature landscapes all over the world.  But that doesn’t make any one of ours stories or beliefs of home any less true or real.  There is no one true story or definition of home.  They all feel real to the people they belong to, the people that choose to believe in them.  The same exists about creation stories.  Therefore, the “tidy dichotomies” that King exemplifies in his retelling of the Native “The Earth-Diver” creation story and Christian “Genesis” story exist for us to do one thing: tear them down.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003.

Li, Charmaine. “2.1 A Home With Many Adventures” Canadian Yarns and Storytelling Threads. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 11 June 2015.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. N.p., 2007. Web. 11 June  2015. <https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/>.

Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.

For this week’s blog assignment, I read lots of my fellow students’ blogs on their ideas of what home meant to them.  Although I originally expected many blogs to be similar and repetitive, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how unique they all were.  It was eye opening to see how many different representations home can take on, and all the different paths each of us have taken that have brought us to where we are today.  Despite the differences, all the blogs I read moved me with their honesty, emotion, and candidness as people opened up about their childhoods and families.  However, 3 blogs in particular really stuck out to me because of the similarities I found in them in regards to my own blog on home.  For my blog this week, I decided to focus on the blogs Where We Grow by Melissa Kuipers, Let Me Come Home by Whitney Millar, and The Ambiguity of “Home” by Hailey Froehler.

These 3 blogs left the biggest impression on me as I was reading them because they shared my own values and assumptions towards what a home is. Here are some of the common themes and similarities I found:

Family 

Quote: “The places I feel at home are…the people I’ve grown with” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers

Quote: “I still feel like eating Pancit and Ginataang Bilo-Bilo with my Nanay has always been home to me” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers 

It seems like for many of us, family plays a huge role in the definition of what “home” is.  In all of our blogs, there was a common thread where we placed family and loved ones as unnegotiable aspects of what a home is, even when that home was not one particular house or apartment but a constantly changing environment for those that moved around a lot.  In my own blog, I mentioned that the memories I shared with my mom, dad, and brother are the ones that pop up when I reminisce on what home means to me.  Even if these memories were technically spent on the road, away from our home in Calgary where I was born, the bond and love I felt gave me the truest sense of home.  No matter how different all of our concepts of home are, the idea of family seems to hold a significant role in all of them.

Comfort 

Quote: “It’s a comfortable environment full of loved ones that bursts with memories. Those are the three basic ingredients to a home for me.” – Let Me Come Home, Whitney Millar 

Quote: “The home that provided me with all of my familiar comfort when I returned from university was no longer ours. Despite the fact that we were moving for good reasons, I couldn’t help but feel like I was losing the only constant space that I defined as home.” – The Ambiguity of “Home”, Hailey Froehler

Comfort is a theme that I stressed particularly in my own blog as the number one thing I feel home represents.  Its a sense of familiarity, safety, and belonging that only comes with being at home.  Reading Whitney Millar and Hailey Froehler’s blogs, this idea of comfort and familiarity seemed to be something we all mentioned and associated with our own separate ideas of home.  For Hailey, her loss of comfort when she moved was emotional for her and she mourned it as a loss of her own idea of home.  In my own blog, it was the sense of comfort I felt, surrounded by my loved ones, even in stressful, scary situations, that provided me a sense of what I see as home.  Comfort seems to stay especially so close to each of our definitions of home because it tells us that we belong.

Home as not necessarily always a PHYSICAL concept 

Quote: “After that, home was constantly changing for me: a dorm room, a suite with roommates, a subleased studio apartment.” – Where We Grow, Melissa Kuipers 

Quote: “However, I feel like the concept of “home” is so ambiguous. Growing up I lived in two different homes.” – The Ambiguity of “Home”, Hailey Froehler 

Quote: “I know that “home” doesn’t necessarily mean a physical space…” – Let Me Come Home, Whitney Millar

Last but not least, there was a constant mention of the idea of home as an idea, an emotion, a set of values, rather than just a physical place.  In my own blog, I mentioned the struggle with feeling like I had missed out on the generic idea of “home” in my own life because I didn’t have the stereotypical grand house that I spent all my childhood making memories in.  Rather, I moved around a lot and have jumbled up flashbacks in condos, apartments where I spent a few years here and there.  Reading my fellow students’ blogs, I was comforted by this shared value that home isn’t always necessarily just a physical environment.  Like Hailey Froehler stated so beautifully, the concept of home is truly “ambiguous”.  I think this opens up the door for home to represent so much more and so many different things for each and every one of us.  After all, it only makes sense that there is no one such thing called home.  We’ve all come from such different walks of life, different families, cultures, and lifestyles, there is no way one stagnant concept of what a home is can hold true for all of us. It is through acknowledging this that I feel like we truly have the freedom in celebrating each of our own unique concepts of home.

Works Cited

Froehler, Hailey. “The Ambiguity of “Home”” ENGL 470A. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 06 June 2015.

Kuipers, Melissa. “Where We Grow”. True North. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 06 June 2015.

Millar, Whitney. “Let Me Come Home” ENGL 470A Experience. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 05 June 2015.

Prompt: Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home and respond to all comments on your blog.

Hi all,

What or where is home? I spent the better half of the past few days mulling over this prompt, trying to attach it to a specific house or apartment from my childhood.  I think the natural reaction when someone asks us to talk about our “sense of home” is to think of a physical place, the city we grew up in, the neighbourhood we reminisce about when we think of our childhood, and usually most importantly, “the iconic house”.  The house with the white picket fence with the tire swing hanging form the big oak tree on the front lawn, the patio where we had our first kiss and countless summer barbecues, the living room where we had movie nights and christmas mornings.  Unfortunately, this idea of “home” doesn’t always fit for everyone, and the pressure to be able to pull up a memory and place like this had me struggling to find “a house” to talk about.  It wasn’t until I allowed myself to let go of this stagnant idea of what home has to be, as a physical house, that I was able to discover what home really means to me.

For me, home is not a physical house or a neighbourhood block.  To me, home is comfort, familiarity, safety, love, and most importantly, family.  Home isn’t just one place, but rather an idea, a feeling that I have experienced in various different places throughout my life.  One of my most vivid memories from my childhood of feeling at home has been on the road.  I was born in Calgary after my parents first immigrated from China in order to pursue graduate school in Canada.  My parents were young, scared, but filled with hope for the promises for a better and brighter future for themselves and my brother and I in Canada.  For them, home was an even tougher question.  They had left everything they knew back home in China, their friends, their family, their sense of culture and identity to try to make it in North America.  But they couldn’t dwell on the idea of leaving this idea of home behind, they were forced to look forward and create a new home, for themselves and us kids.  For them, home was their new, small family, and the adventures we were about to take on together.  Like most students…my parents were broke.  My childhood never had the iconic house.  Instead, my family made our memories through countless road trips.  From as far back as I can remember, my parents would take us on road trips all across North America in our $900 Ford Mercury Cougar Station Wagon.  It was the times spent riding around in this beat up little station wagon, and values of togetherness, love, safety and comfort that I find my truest memories of home.

It looked a little like this.  Real old school.

One of my most vivid memories is from the summer of 1999.  My family had decided to do a camping trip up to Yellowstone National Park for a couple of days.  We packed snacks and pop and a handful of crinkly worn out paper maps (in the days before GPS…) and hopped into our car.  Our trip went off without a hitch, and other than a few bad mosquito bites, I was happy.  However, on our drive home from Yellowstone to Calgary, my parents got lost and took a wrong turn.  We ended up on a rocky gravel path that lead us onto Highway 29, unbeknownst to us at the time as the infamous “Going-To-The-Sun Road” (little did we know, it was a highway that was infamous for its impossible driving conditions and high rate of accidents).

^The infamous highway in all its scary, dangerous glory.

As we crept slowly further and further onto this dangerous path that winded along the mountain and into the clouds, it became apparent that we had made a mistake.  My dad, usually so confident and comfortable at the wheel of the car, was hesitant and uncharacteristically quiet.  I could tell that he did not like the looks of this road, with our car hugging the side of the mountain and an ungated, free falling cliff only inches away.  However, there was no way we could turn back.  All we could do was move forward and get through until we got to the other side of the mountain.  As I glanced at my dad’s furrowed brow in the rear view mirror, and my moms white knuckles clutching the side of her seat, I felt scared.  I remember the next few hours in a fuzzy blur, as we crept along in silence, focusing on just making it through this mountain pass, and holding my moms hand.  Luckily, we made it out alive, and the trip went down in history as one of the most memorable experiences we’ve ever had.  I remember two days after we got back to Calgary, there was a story in the news about a mini van that had been travelling on that very infamous road, “Going-To-The-Sun-Road” that got into a horrible accident when it veered off and slid off the cliff.  It’s odd because, looking back on this moment, the tension and terror that filled the air, and knowing now in retrospect how many dangerous accidents have occurred on that narrow, winding road, it shouldn’t be a memory that comes up when I think of home.  However, if was those little moments, holding my moms hand, being terrified, that I found more safety and comfort and love than in any other of my fondly cherished memories.  No matter how scared I was in that moment, I felt a sense of calm and security that one can only find from the presence of one’s parents, of one’s family, when it feels like all you’ve got is each other.

So, maybe I never had that iconic grand house with the white picket fence and the tire swing out back.  Maybe there is no single house to “house” all of the memories of home that I have, and it’s just a jumble of condos and rented apartments that don’t fit the image I have when I think of “home”.  But maybe a home is not always just a house.  Maybe it’s memories like this one from our adventure on “Going-To-The-Sun-Road”, that resemble the true concept of home and belonging to me.  And I think I like that just fine.

Works Cited

Peterson, Christopher. “Teen Killed in Sun Road Wreck.” Hagadone Corporation. Flat Head News Group, 8 Sept. 2004. Web. 05 June 2015. <http://www.flatheadnewsgroup.com/hungryhorsenews/news/teen-killed-in-sun-road-wreck/article_a75f833c-5507-567e-903b-52e179e0e86f.html>.

United States. National Park Service. “Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 18 May 2015. Web. 05 June 2015. <http://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm>.