Author: hanniacuri

Alright, then. Now to hyper-text Green Grass, Running Water. I’ve been assigned pages 64-76, and cannot wait to be done with this. So let’s go!

We begin with Alberta considering her options for conceiving a child without need for marriage. She makes what looks like a failed attempt to find a one-night only liaison. This section isn’t exactly rich in terms of references, but I did feel for Alberta’s plight. It sucks to psyche yourself up for something and not be able to go through with it, what with the feeling of uselessness for not being capable of carrying out a simple plan. I felt for her; this was a good moment to just empathize with the character, to build an emotional connection.

After this, we check in with First Woman, enjoying a lovely feast in her Garden of Eden expy with Ahdamn. Suddenly, “GOD” (in all capitals) appears to break up the party. He tells First Woman that she is essentially trespassing on his property and eating his food; “this is my my world and this is my garden” (68). He takes special care to mention how his big, red apples are being eaten, reminiscent to the story I learned growing up in a Catholic household, the one about Genesis and Adam and Eve being kicked out of the garden for eating a single bite of an apple. That old thing. GOD’s insistence on there being Christian rules and the way he imposes them on First Woman forms part of a pattern in the novel where Christian rules are invoked to restrict Indians in some way. First Woman also tells GOD that he acts as though he has no relations (69); I mention this to help track the instances of minding one’s relations being emphasized in the text. Rather than fully slip into the role of Eve, First Woman is seen to just pack up and leave the garden of her own will, fed up with GOD and his stinginess. GOD says he’s kicking her out, but it’s something of an “I dumped you first” situation.

Together with Ahdamn, First Woman then stumbles into a reference to The Lone Ranger, marking the first instance where she uses the iconic character as a disguise. She introduces Ahdamn as the Ranger’s sidekick, Tonto. Notably, the rangers comment on how it is a “stupid” name; tonto translates to stupid in Spanish (71). They also toss out the names of other faithful Indian sidekicks/outlaws in popular culture: Little Beaver, Chingachgook, and Blue Duck. Having evaded trouble with rangers with her clever disguise, First Woman meets some soldiers who arrest her for “being Indian” (72), a scene that repeats itself in further stories.

After this, there is a conversation between Dr. Joe Hovaugh and Sgt. Cereno. The scene begins with Dr. Hovaugh reminiscing about the elm trees that died in his garden due to a blight, and how their being replaced with weak new trees left him “inexplicable remorse and guilt” (73). I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into a simple bit of text, but the mention that the dead trees had been there almost as long as the garden, and that they died of illness reminded me of the demise of many Native Americans through exposure from European diseases, which was sometimes strategically engineered by the European colonists themselves. His guilt over it makes me think of Dr. Hovaugh as something of a remorseful, white liberal who can feel it in his heart to feel bad for the sordid affairs his people have engineered in the past, but not exactly do much in terms of bringing about reconciliation.

Also, I giggled at his secretary being named Mary. It’s a common name, but with a man whose name sounds like “Jehovah” if you sound it out…

Pop culture references are rather dry in the conversation between Dr. Hovaugh and Sgt. Cereno, but it is full of small references to the treatment of Native Americans in modern times. Though not exactly related to Native Americans per see, it also brought to my mind the prevalence of guns among modern American people, with Sgt. Cereno pointing out his regulatory arms and Dr. Hovaugh casually mentioning that his father also owned a firearm. It might also be significant considering who is involved in the conversation that we often credit Europeans for bringing firearms to the North American continent, which they would trade with the Native population. The scene concludes with the Sergeant asking why the Four Old Indians were locked up in the hospital in the first place; Dr. Hovaugh says it was the government’s idea, suggesting that there is no real cause as far as the Indians’ behaviour is concerned. The government corralling Native American people for no particular reason… gosh, does this remind anyone else of anything?

Works Cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Wow, all that catching up went so well! So timely and efficient! I was truly on a roll, it was such a sight to behold. My grandchildren will hear about how productive I was.

Lies. So many lies.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Four Old Indians. Everything about Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water is still fresh in my mind, which may not be how we were meant to examine it, but when you fail at doing work as much as I do there’s not much time for rereads and sober reflection. To start, though, my initial reaction to the characters was… uhm… well, I feel like I just decided to roll with what the novel decided to reveal about them. I was thinking, upon first encountering the Four Old Indians, like someone well versed in the structure of a novel and character (or trying to) and asking questions like, why are these men (and I did make the assumption that they were male right off the bat) trapped in a hospital? What is their story? Though I did like how pleasant they seemed, how they seemed to be rolling through life enjoying it as much as possible. “We’re going to fix the world,” they say, cheerily and matter-of-factly. Whatever the symbolism in giving Lionel, who wanted to be John Wayne as a child, a cowboy-esque jacket for his birthday, they did it so good-naturedly it was almost cute.

Now that I’ve finished the book, I have the feeling that these particular characters spent the better part of the narrative actively telling their story, as strange as the stories coming from them might seem if you don’t just accept that they might not follow the laws of human logic as characters. It’s fiction, they’re allowed to be a little strange. In any case, the first thing these characters are shown to do is calmly struggle to find a way to begin the novel, allowing for four attempts if necessary. I may be wrong, but I interpreted the “I” in the narration interacting with Coyote to change depending on the section of the novel; each of the Four Indians have a chance to tell stories, and I assumed the “I” changed depending on who was telling the story in a given section. I may have lost track of a major player here, but that was my understanding. And it helps me in seeing the characters as, above all, connected to stories. From the storytelling circle they form with Coyote, to their infiltrating of Western films and rearranging their narratives, the Four Old Indians create and belong to stories. Dr. Hovaugh speculates on the Indians’ involvement in history, the way their disappearances coincide with major historical disasters; this coupled with the way they proudly boast that they’re out to fix the world marks them as agents not only in the context of the stories they tell, but in history as it exists in the novel itself.

As for their identities, I feel it is all but outright stated in bright, bold letters that the Four Indians are, if not goddesses as Chester says, some sort of supernatural, higher beings taking corporal form. I would actually put my money on them being First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman and Old Woman; each of their stories have an autobiographical tinge, and each of the woman take on the names used by the Four Old Indians which suggests a link. Their age is often put into question, with Dr. Hovaugh stating that they were already old when they arrived (King 96). There is also the question of their gender; their files suggest that they are men, and somehow, as I mentioned before, I immediately assumed they were men, yet Babo says they were women (53). In other parts of the novel, their sex is not defined, so it’s not impossible to believe her. If, however, I go with the theory that they are the goddesses in their respective stories, women who took on white, male names their occupying this kind of ambiguous gender space is fitting. They are tough to pin down, as much as people like Dr. Hovaugh agonize over trying. They are imprisoned, but apparently come and go as they choose. They’re not so much people as a force of nature, being associated with large earthquakes, and likely having a hand in the destruction of the dam and the flood associated with it at the end of the novel.

In short, my understanding of the Four Old Indians’ place in the novel is… they more or less direct the course, as well as provide a mystery in regards to their identity.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC. At 21… I can’t quite finish this reference properly, but let’s just say she made a lot of judgement errors that led to a very, very unwieldy sleep schedule. So where has Hannia been for three weeks while the course went on without her? Doing battle with her circadian rhythm, basically. Darlings, at one point I was sleeping during the day, and I’m not even a party animal. When you can’t stay awake long enough to do the required reading every time you make an attempt, you gotta prioritize making a change, especially when you also have a 9 a.m Biology class to contend with. Add a bit of mental constipation and… well… I’ll let Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes vocalize it for me. Still haven’t fixed it, but I actually find myself feeling awake and alive for once, so I’m going to press on and write.

Anyway, let’s face off against Northrop Frye. I say it this way because I, personally, feel like I’ve been doing battle with this post for a week and am trying to place the blame somewhere that isn’t on me and my terrible decisions. Babble aside, let’s talk about Duncan Campbell Scott and Frye’s writing. Without swords.

In searching for the answers to why Scott’s involvement in the destruction of Indigenous culture is not relevant to Frye’s insight on the duality of his work, I found a rather interesting remark: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions” (Frye 235). In order to concern oneself with the well-being of a group of people, an important step is to see them as human beings. If I am interpreting this correctly, Indigenous people were more akin to a genre convention or trope than breathing human beings to Scott and his contemporaries in literature. The duality in his writing, then, may have little to do with the people involved, as the people are not considered as such. The “starving squaw” is not based upon a flesh and blood woman, but rather an archetype in literature, much like I might use the trickster fairy in my personal writings.

Frye only needed to reflect on the contrasting images in the literature itself, as that was all that was presented to him. As rich as the analysis would be taking into account how there is a duality in Scott’s opinions on the Indigenous people’s place according to the Dominion, Scott was not writing about them, but rather the idea of the Indigenous people. I find Frye’s comment on how the Canadian writer tends to form his expression “from what he has read, not from what he has experience” (234) quite pertinent to this idea of how Scott actually treats the Indigenous people in his writing. He may have an idea of how to write about them that originates not so much from the work he does with them, but from the way the mythological Indian appear in other literary works.

It may seem, then, that rather than build off of the existing mythology of the Indigenous people, Canadian literature as described by Frye swallowed them up into itself. Although there was much to work with, colonial writers deigned to use them more as the “sun-gods and the like” that populate mythology. In essence, rather than contributing to Canadian literary mythology, the Indigenous people simply became a part of it. I wish I could find where to look for the precise place where I found these remarks, and I suspect they’re peppered all over Tumblr, but I have read in places where young Native Americans discuss their people’s treatment in the modern world, commenting on how their image is that of a dead people, of a group that exists only in the past and maybe Disney’s Pocahontas. It can be all too easy to forget that for all that Indigenous culture was deeply harmed, for all that Indigenous people, including entire groups, were eliminated in many cases, they are not a dead people that only populate the land of fiction.

Works Cited

Charles, RuPaul. “Supermodel (Of the World).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Apr.  27, 2012. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

Higgins, Jenny. “Disappearance of the Beothuk.” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage. Memorial University of Newfoundland, n.d. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

Medley, Bill and Jennifer Warnes. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Feb.  24, 2014. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

I set out to answer the question regarding Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England and its syntax. I attempted to read the story on my own, and while doing so, I heard it the way I thought it would sound if I were to read it aloud. That’s normal enough, everyone has thoughts. I did find the syntax to be a little strange, but I felt it would flow smoothly.

Then I read it aloud to a friend. Not having someone on hand to read to at all times, I did it over Skype conference. This experience was… interesting. The way I read it was probably way too fast, but I felt the way it was written on the page compelled me to keep a quick pace. Thus, I kept tripping over my words, misreading things, having to stop and repeat bits and pieces I’d flubbed. And then there was the running commentary. We had some trouble getting through the story, as its more conversational style made it, in the case of myself and my friend this time, a bit easy to get lost in the narrative. So I often stopped to summarize so we were clear on what was happening and various other remarks. I am a terrible joker, so there were times when I may or may not have been a little mean to the text. For example, Robinson often repeats details, like when God is giving Coyote instructions about how he’ll arrive on the English beach on a boat, and he mentions the fact that he’ll arrive on the boat about three times. I quoted The Emperor’s New Groove. (“The poison. the poison meant specifically to kill Kuzco. Kuzco’s poison.”) We’d often repeat the words “Kuzco’s poison” when we got to a part where the narrator fixated on a detail, this proving once and for all that I am a terrible person. Looking back, I should have taken it more seriously, but I felt I was hanging out with my friend. There was also the “which queen of England is he referring to exactly, and that is not how the inheritance works in the English monarchy” incident. Essentially, in reading it aloud I imbued the text with my own irrelevant thoughts, and allowed that to colour the performance.

I really wish I could hear Robinson himself tell the story. The syntax makes me wonder if there’s a specific cadence and speed that one needs to hit in telling this story for it to get across correctly. Wendy says, in a bit of conversation shortly after the story, that no one tells stories quite like Harry does. I doubt I managed to tell it that way, in fact I think I got it catastrophically wrong, so I’m not entirely sure if the syntax really does preserve the original teller’s essence.

The night grows ever lighter. I blink at the light of my screen, struggling to stay awake. How did it come to this? I was doing so well! I think to myself, holding back the tears that so, so, easily fall from my eyes at the slightest disturbance. Once I cried because I spilled some noodles on the sidewalk. Anyhow, here I am, bravely forging through while releasing yawns every once in a while. You gotta just let ’em out sometimes.

My very first reaction to Robinson’s story about the Black and White law was that it was likely conceived after contact. Keeping in mind the history between the Indigenous people and Europeans, all the hurt and anger that must have been present after years of horrible treatment, the characterization of the twins makes sense. Coyote’s character, as Wickwire notes, was far from the bad boy Harry often painted him to be (Robinson 11); he was quite responsible and mature, making me wonder what exactly had happened to create the wild man previously described. This departure from character points towards a story that was more a product of the result of the contact rather than a prediction… which I guess it presented itself as, really, though its creation story elements do give off the vibe that this is something whipped up after a long time knowing the White twin’s children. The stories with Coyote as a footloose and fancy-free individual might be older than this one, but I can’t say I know. It’s simply an assumption I can make from reading this story.

Also, such accurate, painful description of the harm Europeans caused in this story is really paints it as a kind of narrative formed to come to terms with the shoddy treatment received by them, to find some kind of logical origin to it. Dr. Paterson asks what the Indigenous people did to deserve the ills that came upon them in this week’s lesson, and I feel this story is a way to bring about an explanation. Notably, it highlights that there was nothing the Indigenous people did to warrant the pain brought upon them, but rather a side-effect of each group’s forefather’s difference in temperament. The European people are descendants of a liar and a thief, thus explaining their behaviour. Coyote was good and raised his children well, but his brother’s mistake in rearing his doomed them.

As for the stolen piece of paper, it hearkens back to our discussion on oral and written cultures. The Europeans count as a “written” culture… type of people. Their ancestor stole a secret piece of paper, which I figure he used to write on and taught his children to do the same. Thus, a difference in record keeping was born. The fact that Coyote then traveled to England to procure a piece of paper with a law written on it implies the fact that the Europeans essentially forced the Indigenous people to adapt to their ways, even in seeking retribution. Overall, the story highlights the difference between the groups in a matter that is understanding considering the teller and the history at hand.

Works Cited

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genre. UBC, n.d. Web. 21 June 2014.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2005.

(WARNING: The following piece of writing is sandwiched between the complete overhaul of my sleep cycle and a term paper deadline. Misspellings are due to the author having to write through a veritable waterfall of tears.)

First of all, I found that I may not be entirely alone when it comes to being confused about where home is meant to be. It seems to be a pretty common thing, especially among those who have had to relocate several times. It is pretty difficult to get a sense of home when you keep having to pack it up for a new one. Though yes, there are people who can say they’ve lived in the same place all their lives, ours is a fairly nomadic group and we’re familiar with feeling ill at ease in a location we’re meant to live in, even though our feelings may later change. There’s a sense that to many of us, home is a place we’re trying to find, realize we’ve found just as we’re meant to leave it, or never even realized we’d found until much later.

Overall, though, there’s a sense that home is tied to a feeling, be it of comfort, belonging, or so on. You could technically live in a place and still yearn for home elsewhere. If it’s tied to people, that covers the feeling of belonging. If it’s memories, maybe comfort. Sometimes it’s even tied to things like food. In any case, home is less about, say, a house than our feelings toward that house.

Human disaster Hannia did not just sleep through a deadline. It happened but it never happened.

Now, to approach the question at hand: why is dividing cultures into the categories of “oral” and “written” inaccurate as far as how cultures work?

To begin, I’d like to draw on the first point Chamberlin makes in his first chapter: we tend to divide ourselves into groups based on a concept of Us vs. Them. The rituals and practices of our group are completely natural and, as far as we know, the correct way to do things; other groups and their customs are alien to us because in their difference, we may not see them as correct. Or, as Chamberlin puts it, “there are those who speak properly,…, like Us, and those who babble, more or less meaninglessly, as They do.” (Chamberlin 8) After years of collectively building an understanding of the world, and how to interact with it and each other, the beliefs and rituals we create become so entrenched in our lives that anything else will inevitably seem strange, and this was likely as true for the Indigenous groups confronted by European settlers who felt their otherness made them lesser.

The concept of oral cultures and written cultures as entirely different groups drips with the idea of Us vs. Them; oral cultures are relegated to the role of “babbling barbarians” and written cultures hold the prestige of being “civilized” (18). This, as Chamberlin points out, can take a condescending tone in which we see groups that we classify under the umbrella of oral cultures as innocent children. We celebrate how at one with nature these cultures supposedly are, how primitive, while safe in the thought that with the written backbone of our culture, we posses the capacity for sophisticated, “modern” thought (19). Thus, the distinction between oral cultures and written cultures is not so much a useful way to classify groups as a way to distinguish between the supposedly enlightened and the unenlightened. Us and Them. I think in this way it does fit in with the way groups of people would inevitably function, as it reflects the tendency for one group to value their own customs over another’s. However, apart from reflecting this unfortunate human habit, it falls apart rather quickly as humans are not so wildly different.

If we look as supposed “oral” cultures as primitive children with no way of preserving their history, drifting through time and reveling in the present, we have to assume that written records are the only way to preserve the past. This ignores the fact that, just by thinking about it for a few minutes, one can come to the conclusion that if the same story is passed down from generation to generation, communicated from one mind to another by orature and performance, does that not constitute a record? Chamberlin points out that oral cultures do have their own form of “writing”: items such as  “woven and beaded belts and blankets, knotted and coloured strings, carved and painted trays, poles, doors,” etc. serve as a form of record keeping much in the way that texts do for “writing” cultures (20).

Written cultures are also not bereft of oral tradition. In Courtney MacNeil’s article on orality, brings up Walter Ong’s distinction of primary and secondary orality. Primary orality refers to the sort of oral tradition that thrives among people who do not practice writing, secondary orality refers to “a new orality…sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print” that is common in “modern” cultures. Here we see that old need to draw a line between Us and Them; while both groups do have an oral tradition, ours is still more modern and sophisticated. That line of thought may not have been the exact intent, but it is reflected in the fact that this distinction was made.

I don’t have much space to babble about how in our modern society, we enjoy many mediums of entertainment and storytelling that are based on oral performance, so I will just throw the example I find most compelling out there. I am a great fan of internet reviewer Kyle Kallgren’s work, and in this video he explores the ways in which the rhythmic structure of classic poetry can be reflected in pop music. Poetry, which was once the most respectable form of writing, can be connected to the likes of pop music, which is often enjoyed as a performance. Yes, lyrics can be written down and preserved as a text, but what I’m getting at is that when crafting a poem, the form demands that the poem sit down and organize the words in a way that will flow pleasingly when read aloud. It is a meeting of oral and written forms, and I think this is important. The oral and the written are not mutually exclusive in culture.

Works Cited

• Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. AA. Knopf. Toronto. 2003. Print.
• Courtney MacNeil, “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/
• Kallgren, Kyle. “Between the Lines: The Beatles”. Blip. That Guy With the Glasses, 12 Nov 2013. Web. 23 May 2014. http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/teamt/oancitizen/between-the-lines/41299-between-the-lines-the-beatles