If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact” 43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.

Harry Robison’s story of the twins, as shared by Wendy Wickwire, opens the door to new insights and a greater understanding of contact stories.

Upon reading the story, I grappled with many different thoughts.

Immediately I was struck with the numerous levels of oral and written story-telling at play here, and by the number of voices involved in the story-telling process. At its core, this story is an oral tale told by Harry Robinson, but belonging to his larger group and culture, and to their collective heritage. At the next level, this oral story has been changed and told through the literary tone of Wickwire in order to be preserved in written language. Further, the story becomes more complex upon recognizing the oral and written forms intersecting within it, through the written document, or “paper,” featured in the tale. This highlights Edward Chamberlin’s argument that “speech and writing are so entangled with each other in our various forms and performance of language that we are like Penelope, weaving them together during the day and unweaving them at night” (151).

I then turned my attention to the “paper” in the story. I had never encountered a First Nations story like this one, which so explicitly references documents or papers as potentially dangerous artifacts that, according to an ancient agreement, ought to be revealed to the Indigenous people of this land. This called attention to the long legal history of settler-colonialists deceiving and cheating Indigenous people out of their home and land. The “paper,” which can be read as encoded laws and treaties, gave white settlers authority, under the eyes of their own governments, to strip power from Indigenous people. I found the association of the “paper” with the destruction of Indigenous people extremely moving—especially when the stories of settler-colonial powers utilizing or navigating written law to undermine and displace Natives have never gone away, and remain shamefully present to this day.

Foremost, I was captivated by how the story united mythology and reality, disrupting the divide between truth and fiction. As John Lutz comments, “first contact and the imaginary are, as it turns out, closely linked” (2). Indigenous stories are so strange to our Euro-centuries literary understanding because they blend truth and fiction so that they become wholly combined. And, as is especially seen in this tale, “they flow over time and across space” (Lutz 7). This space of discomfort for non-Indigenous readers or listeners, somewhere between now and when the world was young and somewhere between legend and history, is a space we must navigate. As settler bodies in so-called British Columbia, the contact story is a chance to look beyond our own cultures and close-mindedness. In Lutz’s words: “The contact zone is a place of hope” (15).

Works Cited

Benz, Michael. “high-angle photo of sea with waves.” Unsplash, 14 Jan. 2017, https://unsplash.com/@michaelbenz.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.” Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Timothy J. Reiss, Africa World Press, 2001, pp. 145-164.

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous- European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1-15. Print.

“Native American Coyote Mythology.” Native American Indian Coyote Legends, Meaning and Symbolism from the Myths of Many Tribes, www.native-languages.org/legends-coyote.htm.

Wet’suwet’en, Office of the. Office of the Wet’suwet’en, www.wetsuweten.com/territory/pipelines.