Prompt: Each student will be assigned a section of the novel Green Grass Running Water (pages will be divided by the number of students). The task at hand is to first discover as many allusions as you can to historical references (people and events), literary references (characters and authors), mythical references (symbols and metaphors).

For this week’s assignment, I have been assigned pages 192-201 from GGRW, which in my text is actually pages 230-238.  I will be referencing my own novel so hold on if things get a little confusing, I will try to use quotes where I can to help!  To be honest, this particular collection of pages was difficult for me to tackle because it included snippets from each of the multiple storylines that weave throughout the novel.  We find ourselves in the middle of the four old Indians discussing whose turn it is to tell the creation story to explain why there is so much water, with Robinson Crusoe beginning his version with the Thought Woman and the story of the River.  Then we find ourselves in the middle of the storyline of the escaped elders on their way to Blossom to “change the world”, who have now found their way to the parking lot of the Blossom Lodge.  Dr. Hovaugh and his assistant Babo have just arrived at the Canadian border in their quest to track down the escaped elders and bring them back to the mental institution.  At first I wasn’t sure even where to start, but I realize the fact that I have the various intersections of plotlines allows me a lot of room in what to explore.  With the help of Jane Flick and a little digging around of my own,  I present to you some of the allusions I found:

Robinson Crusoe

The use of “Robinson Crusoe” as one of the names of the Old Indians is interesting for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost, it alludes most obviously to the hero and main character from Daniel Defoe’s novel, “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”, arguably one of the most popular and well-known travel narratives from the 18th century.  Despite the novel’s success as a piece of literature that set a new standard for English novels of Defoe’s time, King makes criticisms on some of the more problematic themes like the novel’s legitimization of colonialism and its degrading and distorted depictions of the savage “Other” in the novel.  In fact, the focus on the palm trees on Robinson Crusoe’s shirt early on in the novel on page 9 is an allusion to Daniel Defoe’s literary hero that “signals the desert island connection” and Crusoe’s subsequent christianizing and colonizing mission and interactions with his uneducated and uncivilized cannibal slave “Friday”.

Light

There is an emphasis on the turning on of lights in this segment of the novel, where Coyote the mischief trickster is constantly asking for attention as he “turn[s] on the light[s]” on page 230.  This is a clear allusion to role of Coyote as the creator and the biblical reference Gen 1:3 when “God said, Let there be light.”  Furthermore, light is a consistent symbol of heaven, enlightenment, hope, and religious guidance in Biblical literary stories and is constantly depicted in opposition to darkness.  This light is also a reference to the “beginning”, and the creation of the world, a constant point of conflict between the Genesis story vs First Nation mythology in the search for the “true” creation story of how the world began.

“In the distance, at the edge of the horizon, Babo could see a point of light, a star in the morning sky…” 

On page 235, Babo spots a star in the sky as her and Dr. Hovaugh make their way closer and closer to the Canadian border on their trip to find the escaped elders.  This emphasis on following this star to their destination has clear allusions to the Biblical Star of Bethlehem that lead the 3 Wise Men to Jesus in the Nativity story.  Similar to the biblical reference, Babo and Dr. Hovaugh are being guided by a star to find the four Elders that have escaped to Blossom, Alberta.

What did you think about these allusions? Did you see anything else that I failed to catch in my own analysis? Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Works Cited

Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. 4 Apr. 2013.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Perennial Canada, 1993. Print.Saeed, Nourin. “Colonial Representation in Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India.” Thesis. BRAC University, 2013.

Swendenborg, E. “Spiritual Meaning of Light.” Bible Meanings. Web. 9 July 2015. <http://www.biblemeanings.info/Words/Natural/Light.htm>.

Wilson, Ralph F. “The Wise Men (Magi) and the Christmas Star of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1-12) — Christmas Incarnation.” Web. 9 July 2015. <//www.jesuswalk.com/christmas-incarnation/magi-star.htm>.

Assignment 3.5 Lesson 3.2

Prompt #2: Coyote Pedagogy is a term sometimes used to describe King’s writing strategies (Margery Fee and Jane Flick). Discuss your understanding of the role of Coyote in the novel.

Pedagogy is defined quite succinctly on www.dictionary.com as “the function or work of a teacher; teaching”.  However, when I first started reading Green Grass Running Water, I have to be completely honest…I didnt feel like Coyote was teaching me anything.  As a cultural hero in First Nations mythology, Coyote is known as a trickster, a Creator, mischievous and foolish, a troublemaker, humorous and clever, and always full of energy. But to me…Coyote was a pain in the ass.  I was very frustrated with him.  “How is it possible that King is going to use him as a teacher throughout this novel?”, I scoffed t0 myself.  He was annoying and frustrating and most of all, confusing.  His constant interruptions and questions that kept interrupting the flow of the story denied me of a certain predictability and “flow” that I’m used to finding in mainstream “North-American” literature where everything follows a trajectory plot line that all us english literature majors know like the back of our hands.  Why was he always interrupting, why was he always making jokes and saying weird things and why was he in two separate storylines throughout the novel?  However, as the novel progressed, I found myself opening up and understanding more and more who Coyote was, and what he represented, and embarrassed that it had been so clear and right in front of me the entire time.

In his constant meddling with the creation story, Coyote is a figure of power that King uses to question the truths we hold onto so tightly.  Our ideas of how a story is supposed to be told, in what order and by who are core to our identities and understanding of Western society.  The reality is that the constant and relentless mischief, confusion and chaos that Coyote causes does one very important thing.  It forces us to acknowledge the reality: we are not holding onto anything real.  He forces us to question why we have these rules about how stories are supposed to be told, how plotlines are supposed to proceed and how characters cannot hop in and out of multiple woven plots.  But our beliefs around storytelling and creation myths are rooted in false preconceptions that provide a sense of comfort and security, and that is all they are.  They are not invincible and they are not a universal truth.  And it takes a trickster little Coyote frustrating us and forcing us to come to terms with these expectations that teaches us a very valuable lesson in believing “our” story is the “right” one.  In fact, it is the very fact that I didn’t expect Coyote to teach me anything valuable that he was able to catch me off guard with a very hard-hitting and important lesson about my own bad habits and the nature and power of storytelling.  What did Coyote teach you this week?

Works Cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperPerennial Canada, 1999. Print.

“Native American Coyote Mythology”. Native Languages. Web. 1 July, 2015. <http://www.cotef.org/about-us/coyote-teaching>

“Native American Mythology”. God Checker. Web. 2 July, 2015. <http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/native-american-mythology.php?deity=COYOTE>

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>.

Hi all,

Prompt: “At the end of this lesson you will find detailed instructions for this assignment. Your task is to take the story that Kings tells about how evil comes into the world — and change the story any way you want as long as the end remains the same: 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.” – Unit 1, Lesson 1.3

This week, we were responsible for taking Thomas King’s retelling of Leslie Silko’s story of how evil first came into the world.  Silko’s story revolves around Witches, and I was inspired by this mythical aspect of her tale and decided to invent my own type of people, called the Dreamweavers.  I chose to base my story on the ideas of dreams and nightmares because I think they are closely related to stories and are an area that reveal the ways stories can resonate with us on a level past our day to day consciousness.

Here it is:

This tale begins a long, long time ago, when the first humans and animals first came to be and there was no bad or evil in the world.  Among all those roaming the land, there existed in particular, one small magical kind of people who inhabited an unknown island.  These people were known as the Dreamweavers.  Dreamweavers were those that were born with the gift to weave and create the dreams of every living being on earth. Each Dreamweaver family had their own unique and separate ability to weave different types of happy dreams, responsible for weaving the dreams that graced every child, teen, and adult in the world. One family was responsible for weaving dreams of hopes and wishes, one for weaving dreams of laughter, and many others for love, friendship, nurturing, and the list goes on and on.  Now the children of these Dreamweavers were meant to grow up and take over the specific dream skills of their parents, like families of blacksmiths or farmers or merchants that passed on their skill and line of job to their children. Children of each dream weaving family would follow on to fulfill the types of dreams their parents and grandparents wove for many generations before them.

However, there was one mischievous and restless little girl from the land of the Dreamweavers that we must learn about. Her name was Jay, and her parents weaved dreams of candy and lollipops. Now Jay was only at fault in that she was too eager. She was tired of being young and unimportant and waiting her turn because she wanted to start dream weaving now. But Jay’s parents told her there were no other types of dreams left to weave, and she must wait until her parents passed on their type of dreams to her one day.  Jay was fed up with being told she wasn’t ready yet, so she she called a meeting with some of friends and suggested they think up of their own dreams to weave. New and different dreams that hadn’t been thought of yet. They decided to tell some stories to inspire themselves of what kind of new dreams they could create. As the sun set, and the shadows of animals and plants and trees danced in the dimming sunlight, they were inspired by the darkness around them and thought of some of the most evil and dark stories that ever graced the earth.  They thought up stories filled with blood and tainted with violence, greed and disease, lies, and fear.

As the last light of day disappeared over the horizon, Jay began to feel a really bad feeling, a feeling she had never felt before, as if she had been poisoned by the words she had spoken and heard. She nervously said, “Ok, I changed my mind, I feel bad, I don’t want to be the Dreamweavers of these new dreams we thought of. Let’s take back these stories, and go home. But it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be pulled back. These stories released these horrible dreams loose into the world, and they became what we today know as the nightmares that terrorize each and every one of us from time to time.  So you have to be careful with the stories you tell.

The End.

After writing this story, I decided to attempt to tell it to both my parents and my boyfriend by heart.  Although I hadn’t spent any time attempting to memorize what I had written, I was surprised by how easily I could remember the setting, details, character names, and various other details.  It was a story I had made up, within a short period of time, and yet it had found its way so snugly into my mind and being.  When my boyfriend asked me to clarify a detail about the main character, I answered quickly and confidently. In many ways, the story had become part of my identity, and I was attached to it.

I think this is indicative of the power of stories, and how they resonate with us and influence us in ways we may not even notice.  It’s easy for us to assume we have the power in choosing the stories we tell and listen to, and thats true to a certain extent.  But I think its worth mentioning that these stories have an equal, often overlooked power over us, and for this reason, they are an indispensable aspect of our lives.

Works Cited

Cherry, Kendra. “Dream Interpretation: What Do Dreams Mean?” About Education. N.p., 2015. Web. 24 May 2015. <http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/dream-interpret.htm>

Wilkerson, Richard. “Common Questions About Nightmares.” International Association for the Study of Dreams. N.p. 2013. Web. 25 May 2015. <http://www.asdreams.org/nightma.htm>

Welcome back ENGL 470!

Prompt: Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either “oral culture” or “written culture” (19) is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works, according to Chamberlin and your reading of Courtney MacNeil’s article “Orality.

The idea that orality is a primitive precursor to written text is a concept that is deeply ingrained in Western thought and society.  Through our education systems, we are taught from a young age to value the beneficial advancements brought upon by innovations surrounding written text.  From the invention of the first printing press in the early 15th century Europe to the making of the first forms of writing paper during China’s Han dynasty, we are told that the development from orality into written text was vital in the birth and growth of many great nations.

Even in today’s society where our concepts of communication are constantly evolving due to the influence of the World Wide Web, these flawed beliefs still exist.  Cultures around the world who still rely on mainly oral forms of communication are often instantaneously labeled as undeveloped, uneducated, subordinate, and impoverished.  This is also fuelled by the way certain forms of communication are treated within North America, today, where oral communication is seen as lesser than the ability to read and write, and illiteracy is treated as a problem that plagues the poor and useless.  Orality is often framed within this ideology that those without a written text central to their society are not as well off, in need of help, and are part of a statistic that teaches us about realities of poverty in the US and Canada.  Furthermore, many respected scholars within the realm of communication support and advocate these same ideas.  In Courtney MacNeil’s article on “Orality”, the Toronto School of Communication places alphabetical writing as “absolutely necessary for the development of not only science, but also of history, philosophy… [and] literature…and of any art”.

However, there are undoubtedly many problematic aspects of this way of thinking that frames communication on a hierarchy.   As J. Edward Chamberlain points out in his text “If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?”, this way of judging cultures, where orality is always subordinated by the more desirable and respected form of written text, encourages a “blend of condescension and contempt” for those that fail to fit Western and European standards.  Furthermore, even when other cultures do have their own forms of “written culture”, they fail to be recognized as legitimate because they do not fit the confines of the syllabic and alphabetical understanding of writing that governs Western society.  This binary structure of orality vs. writing thus fosters an incredibly hostile and toxic environment where other cultures and minorities are appropriated to Western and European ideologies of what is significant, what is respected, what is REAL.

In reality, not only do oral and written forms of communication coexist in their importance, but the defining features of what constitutes as a “written text” are far from limited to Western and European ideals of letters, syllables and alphabets.  On page 20 of Chamberlain’s text, he notes that for some so-called “oral cultures”, a written text exists for them but in the form of “woven and beaded belts and blankets…canes and sticks, masks [and] hats and chests”.  Moreover, for countries like China that have a very rich and flourishing culture, written text comes in the forms of characters that do not fit the Western standards of a standard alphabet.  In fact, many of the original versions of these characters, that have changed from dynasty to dynasty, found their way to be from pictures and stories.  Thus, by seeing communication as a hierarchy with rigid rules about what constitutes culture, we are hindering ourselves from the potential benefits of communication that can only happen by seeing spoken word and written text as “mutually interdependent”.

The reality is that “our stories” and our cultures can not flourish successfully from only relying on written text and seeing orality as a thing of the past.  Instead, we must realize that all of us are “much more involved in both oral and written traditions than we might think”, and that the hierarchal understanding of the two must be abandoned for us to move forward.

Works Cited

Butler, Chris. “The Invention of the Printing Press and Its Effects.” Flow of History. N.p., 2007. Web. 21 May 2015. </http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/west/11/FC7>.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003. Print.

“Invention of Paper in China.” History of China. N.p., 2007. Web 19 May 2015. <http://www.history-of-china.com/han-dynasty/invention-of-paper.html>.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. N.p., 2007. Web. 21 May 2015. <https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/>.

Olmstead, Gracy. “The Death of Writing & Return of Oral Culture.” The American Conservative. N.p., 2013. Web 20 May 2015. <http://www.theamericanconservative.com/death-writing-oral-culture/>.

Hi all!

My name is Freda Li.  I’m currently in my fifth year at UBC as an English Literature major, and will be graduating in December 2015.  ENGL 470 is actually the second online course I’ve ever taken so for all you newbies out there, don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it soon enough 🙂

To be honest, when I first started at UBC, I wasn’t too intrigued by the idea of studying “Canadian” literature.  It’s interesting because I am a Canadian born Chinese, born in Calgary and raised most of my life in Vancouver.  My Chinese is passable at best, I can speak and understand but I never went to school so my writing and reading skills are quite lacking.  I have and feel like I always will identify first and foremost as a proud Canadian, yet I have never felt drawn to the history of our nation.  So when I first started my degree at UBC, I immediately dismissed “Canadian Literature” as a “requirement” I would deal with later on in my undergrad.  However, as I’m sure most of my other peers who are in their final years will agree, I found that as each year passed, I grew and changed in many ways.  In fact, not only as an individual but also as a student.  Different classes that seemingly had nothing to do with Canadian history or literature had profound effects on the way I viewed the society around me.  Through a variety of classes in sociology, gender studies, and german studies, I found my true inner critical voice that made me more intuitive to the problematic aspects of not only Canadian society’s treatment of indigenous peoples but also my own attitudes as a subsequent product of them.

The reality is that many Canadians do not feel like indigenous issues are relevant to them.  Last semester, I took a CSIS450, a critical studies in sexuality class with Dr. Janice Stewart, in which we discussed the types of narratives that exist in our society, how they define the way we see history, and most importantly who profits and benefits from these narratives.  Although it was a gender and sexuality studies class, we touched on the portrayal of First Nations groups and the ways in which they are erased from our country’s history in various ways that are overlooked by many people.  One example is in the world renowned Canadian landscape art of the Group of Seven.  It wasn’t until I took this gender studies class that I realized there was criticism surrounding their art’s reinforcement of Terra Nullius, the depiction of various Canadian regions and land as untouched and undiscovered by humans when in reality, these areas had been inhabited by indigenous groups for many years.  This in and of itself reveals the problematic ways in which First Nations people have been written out of our nation’s history.

Recently, I also took ENGL 358, an english class in 18th century British Colonization literature, and found myself more fired up and interested in looking first hand into colonizing narratives and representations.  It was through this exposure to all these different studies that I experienced a shift in my attitudes towards Canadian Indigenous history and literature.  I came to realize the importance of understanding the significance of First nations stories, and the current lack of them in current Western literature.  What are their stories and why are we not hearing them?  Who decides the stories we read and hear?  Why don’t more events or movements in the news that attempt to bring more attention to First Nations narratives like #ShutdownCanada receive more attention?  I am interested in taking on all of these questions in ENGL 470 during this summer semester with all of you, and I hope we can help change the apathy that so many Canadians feel when it comes to First Nations issues.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment!

^Growing up in Vancouver, BC.

Works Cited

Gough, David. “#ShutDownCanada: First Nations People Plan Nationwide Protests Friday.” Toronto Sun. N.p., 11 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 May 2015.

Varley, Christopher. “Group of Seven.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. N.p., 11 July 2013. Web. 15 May 2015.