My assigned section (pages 78-90 in my edition) was relatively sparsely sprinkled with allusions to popular culture or myth, and so most of what I’ve done here is simply look deeper into lines or words that interested me, or that I lacked knowledge of.

“School’s expensive. You got money saved up?”

“The band will probably help me out.” (King 80)

This refers to the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP). I’ve spoken with many who seem to think, Like Bill Bursum, that this is “free money,” as though a Native student can Waltz onto campus with no financial obligation to the institution. These are grants that must be applied for that may not cover all costs, as a certain amount of money is allocated to each band per year. As Lionel finds out, not all applicants are guaranteed this funding.

“whites don’t want to hire Indians unless the government makes them” (King 81)

I couldn’t find much on government subsidized benefits to employers who hired Native employees. It seems that the government only has a wage subsidy for an employer in the housing industry hiring Native youth.  Apparently, The Northwest Territories implemented an affirmative action policy around a decade ago, but have faced criticisms (and legal action) regarding the prioritization of “Indigenous Aboriginal Persons” (those who are from N.W.T.) over “Indigenous Non-Aboriginal Persons” (Status Natives who come from elsewhere in Canada). Of course, this policy only applied to applicants for government jobs and was relatively limited.  Certainly, the government is not making anybody hire anyone else, but it seems like they could be doing more in the way of encouragement.

“Smart move, John Wayne.” (King 83)

John Wayne runs through this novel as the emblem of white, male antagonism towards Natives. Film is never really discussed in a positive light here, and John Wayne (and later, Richard Widmark) is the poster boy for the subjugation of Natives on film. Flick mentions that Lionel’s desire to be John Wayne as a child “signals his denial of ‘Indianness'” (147). Depictions of Native peoples on film may have improved in the decades since Wayne stopped acting, but even after the pleas of some of cinema’s titans for more equitable treatment, Hollywood’s struggle for a more sensitive treatment of these issues continues. (Side Note: a movie that does a remarkable job in the portrayal of Native peoples is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), which inverts the negative tropes perpetuated by old Hollywood, which King criticizes in GGRW).

Bill Bursum (85)- referred to here with the prefix “Buffalo.” Just as his namesake is”an exploiter of Indians for entertainments in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show” (Flick 148), Bursum is only interested in hiring Lionel for the prospective business he could bring in from the reserve. He even forgets Charlie’s last name (Bursum says “Looking Back” (King 80)) who had been his employee for a number of years.

Duplessis International Associates- Flick says “Duplessis invokes both duplicity and the political corruption of the Duplessis régime in Québec (1936-39; 1944-59)” (151). Beyond this, anything with a French name suggests a sort of nobility or high class distinction, and if anyone has class aspirations here, it’s Charlie. The irony here is Charlie warning Lionel about Bill’s exploitative behaviour. Bill is almost a caricature of a slimeball salesman, so the reader should expect this type of behaviour from him but when Charlie is fired by Duplessis after Eli’s court case is finished as they no longer need a token “Indian” on their side, the reader sees that this is a systemic issue, and it goes all the way to the top.

“Amos slid his pickup down the reserve roads” (King 87)

This is something the reader could pass by relatively easily and not give a second thought; King sure doesn’t spend much time talking about road conditions on the reserves but it is important to know that beyond Amos’ drunken motor skills, infrastructure (including things like road conditions) is generally seen to be substandard on Canadian reserves. This does not apply to every reservation, but it is a nationwide problem. You’ll notice that Amos knocks over the outhouse and this implies that they do not have indoor plumbing.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 140-175. Web. 26 Jun. 2015.

“Housing Internship Initiative for First Nations and Inuit Youth.” Canada Business Network . Government of Canada. 24 Jun 2015. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. 1993. P. S. Toronto: HarperPerennial-HaperCollins, 2007. Print.

“N.W.T. sued over affirmative action policy.” CBC News North. CBC. 23 Jun. 2011. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Native American actors quit Adam Sandler movie over Adam Sandler jokes.” The AV Club. Onion Inc. 23 Apr. 2-15. Web. 10 Jul 2015.

Oscars. “Marlon Brando’s Oscar Win for ‘The Godfather’.” Youtube. Youtube. 2 Oct 2008. Web. 10 Jul. 2015.

“Policy 14.03: Affirmative Action.” Northwest Territories. Northwest Territories. 28 Sept. 2006. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Post Secondary Student Support Program.” Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. Government of Canada. 28 May 2013. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Shacks and slop pails: infrastructure crisis on native reserves.” CBC News Canada. CBC. 26 Nov. 2011. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

1. In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.

Why do you think this is so?

The challenging part of answering this question is narrowing it down. King himself says, by starting with Creation stories, he can “drag” oral Creation myth “through Christianity, through Western literature and Western history” (70). He wants to create a sort of breeding ground for the cultural intersections that are of particular interest to this class. My view is perhaps more facile. Near the novel’s outset, Norma shows a profoundly uninterested Lionel some carpet samples: she says, “You make a mistake with carpet, and you got to live with it for a long time” (King 7), a sentiment that echoes King’s Massey lecture (“once a story is told it can never be taken back”). Stories furnish us with the luxury of going back to crucial moments in time, the points where history diverges into things that happened and a mass of unrealized potential (ex. Lionel’s three mistakes, Dr. Hovaugh’s dates). The Transformer stories that are influential to Green Grass, Running Water’s technique and content can theorize potential alternative histories. Of course, if a catastrophe were resultant from an incalculable mix of agents and reagents, who is to say that one or two subtle reversals of outcome would not produce the same final result. The only way to be sure the course would change, would be to start from the beginning and do it right.

The novel’s temporality is fluid, not beholden to any strict chronology. Frequently, King presents the reader with sections of interwoven prose, juxtaposing a character’s present temporality and one of several years prior. The effect is to give the reader a greater understanding of motivations; we come to understand Alberta, Lionel, Latisha, Charlie, and Eli as (beyond complex characters) projections of their past mistakes, for better or for worse. Clearly, the past is not something King wants us to disregard. Often times it feels as though moments described in the narrative present are mere digressions, and the recollected scenes comprise the main narrative; the present is subordinate to the past.

Lionel’s similarities to Eli give him a window into his own potential future; he has the opportunity to see what he likes and dislikes about Eli and consciously emulate or deviate from his way of life. “Hope you took notes” says Norma to Lionel shortly after Eli’s death in the earthquake (King 421), but this is a message to all of us. Though we may not have Coyote’s ability to move through time like salmon through a river, we can learn from the lives of others.

Beyond this, thanks to help from Jane Flick’s compendium of allusions made in the novel, we see that King borrows names from all eras of human history- both fictional and not. These names bring baggage with them and once again allow the reader to see the resonance of an individual’s actions down through the generations. Clifford Sifton, for example, “a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population” and Laurier’s Superintendent of Indian affairs (1896) interacts with the namesake of Elijah Harper, who helped block the 1990 Meech Lake Accord (Flick 150). Outcomes of events are the result of present agents bumping up against historical barriers, and by starting from the very outset of the world King is free to embody these historical barriers in characters who exist in the narrative present, like Sifton.

The novel ends with the potential of regeneration and new beginnings; Alberta is pregnant, the cabin is to be rebuilt. “Norma stuck her stick in the earth. ‘We’ll start here,’ she said. ‘So we can see the sun in the morning.’” (King 424). This stick in the dirt is the physical manifestation of one of those points in time that King is so obsessed with. This is a new beginning, and it seems as though all of the characters will do their best to ensure that this is a point the Four Indians will NOT have to revisit.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 140-175. Web. 26 Jun. 2015.

Gzowski, Peter. “Peter Gzowski Interviews Thomas King on Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 65-76. Web. 3 Jul. 2015.

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

I would like to begin this blog assignment by saying that I have found some of Northrop Frye’s ideas to be relatively challenging. After multiple re-readings I’m still not entirely sure if I’m grasping his theories completely. This being said, please comment if you feel my response to be out of line with Frye’s ideas. I think he has some very interesting things to say and would love your feedback.

3 ] Frye writes:

A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:

The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

This is a response to a question concerning a topic that I have debated endlessly. It is a question regarding personal ethics in the consumption of art. In my own tastes, a few examples of Duncan Campbell Scott-like cases, artists who have done despicable, inexcusable things but have also made considerable works of art, include the likes of film director Roman Polanski and black metal musician Burzum. Similarly, John Ford, easily one of the most influential directors in film history, depicts Native Americans in such a backwards way that it threatens to compromise the integrity of the work as a whole. Can we ignore the implications of these artists’ personal lives on their works? Should we?

We need to look at what Northrop Frye sees as important to understand why he can divorce Scott’s political persona from his literary one. It seems that, for Frye, a great work of literature ”pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself” (216). Frye uses the word “autonomous” a couple of times in this chapter (216, 234) regarding the “world of literature.” Frye would seemingly have literature pull us completely into the realm of imagination. Frye looks at “cultural history” and the “social imagination” (221) so he is less focused on retelling of events than of how Canadian writers transmute history into art. This creates a nice little safe space in which the reader or critic is not forced to deal with heinous wrongdoings directly.

“The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (Frye 234). Content is secondary for Frye, what concerns him is the potential development of distinctly Canadian “forms” of expression. Frye has little interest in those writers who would “pour the new wine of content into the old bottles of form” (234). So Frye celebrates Scott’s juxtaposition of the “sophisticated” and the “primitive” (221) because he saw it as a form long out of use (since Anglo-Saxon times, apparently); we should hope that Frye would have been just as delighted with a different example of this juxtaposition (even though Chamberlin has taught us that this is a false dichotomy anyhow). Also, the two sides of this binary are fictional, coming from “within literature itself;” “Indians… were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions” (235) as opposed to human subjects with a basis in reality. Scott’s Native subject is a fictional one, an archetype whose overuse precludes a more critical look at its use. To acknowledge the much more disturbing juxtaposition, that Scott romanticized the “vanishing Indian” while actively promoting their disappearance would mean judging the literature based on something outside of itself, which Frye has little interest in. Too often, Canadian writers had something to say, but no new way of saying it; good, innovative literature, Frye argues (citing James Joyce and Marcel Proust as examples) is spawned from “profound literary scholarship” (234). A writer must be acquainted with the tradition they are working within in order to decide how to tastefully depart from or adhere to it. Again, we see Frye privileging form over content; Frye wants to know how a national literature prolongs itself and mutates and less how it interacts with the concerns of the day.

Having read some of Scott’s poems to further acquaint myself with his style, I find that their lack of artistic merit does not really justify any sort of defence based on aesthetic quality. I don’t like them. Frye would say that this doesn’t matter. The task of the critic is not strictly an “evaluative” one, but rather to “broaden the inductive basis on which… writers on Canadian literature [make] generalizations” (215). The critic’s duty is not to judge, but to define. This means that all of a nation’s works of art are engaged in a sort of conversation, and just because we like or dislike the work or find its contents or author reprehensible, does not make that voice louder or softer.

(Again, I can’t say that I’m totally with Frye on this. I would opt for a more case by case evaluation over Frye’s broad guidelines for the separation of art from artist)

Campbell, Duncan Scott. “The Half-Breed Girl.” Department of English, University of Toronto. Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries, 2003. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

D’Angelo, Mike. “Tarantino was onto something when he took that shot at John Ford.” AV Club. Onion Inc., 26 Jun, 2015. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

Day, Matthew. “Roman Polanski US extradition case adjourned by Polish court.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited 22 May 2015. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print. 215-253.

Michaels, Sean. “Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes guilty of inciting racial hatred, French court rules.” The Guardian. The Guardian 9 July, 2014. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

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.

Beware the term “authenticity.” It is slippery and maybe unattainable. An education in the liberal arts teaches us that “objective truth” is an illusion, and authenticity is a close cousin of truth. It carries an immense amount of cultural clout; no one wants a copy, they want “something real.” No one wants to hear a story third-hand if they can hear it from someone who was there (“I was there!”). Keith Thor Carlson’s article Orality About Literacy, examines authenticity in different cultural contexts. Regardless of how shaky a concept it is, authenticity in the relation of events is of paragon importance everywhere you go, but why?

Carlson asserts that by challenging the authenticity of Salish narrative, you challenge the truth of their ways of knowing because in Salish culture, knowledge is something that is conferred. Salish people do not write long treatises alone to be sent out into the world and examined by readers in solitude, they tell stories to groups of people who are perspicacious listeners and observers. A good story for the Salish people is one that is sanctioned by many listeners; the genealogy of the story becomes a part of the story itself. Wendy Wickwire notes that “oral footnotes” are an integral component of a worthy Salish story (qtd. in Calrosn 57). So a challenge to a well-known story told by a Salish individual is a challenge to the group. Writing history in the Western tradition is much more autocratic than it is in the Salish tradition, as the telling is subject to the style and interpretation of the writer. In Salish culture, the tales seem to be more obstinate, less flexible to the whim of the teller; Carlson quotes Sally Snyder, who notes, “it was wrong for [Salish historians] to ‘guess’ meaning, to pad, improvise, paraphrase or omit” (59). Accuracy in storytelling for the Salish people is a matter of grave seriousness just as it is in western culture and so, considering the spiritual wellbeing of the orator and listeners is on the line, we must regard Salish stories with credence. The idea that retelling a story “[convenes] the spirits of the historical actors concerned” (Carlson 58) is a terrifying one, but it is certainly a good journalistic practice. Stripped of its spiritual element, this idea involves the teller considering the narrative from every possible angle and understanding that stories have irrevocable consequences, as King reinforced for us earlier. Carlson notes the negative impact of poor or inauthentic storytelling and its effect of fomenting nationalist hatred leading up to World War II (58). This week we can even see how weaving a fraudulent personal narrative, falsifying the story of your life, can have effects on a global scale. Maybe if Rachel Dolezal had considered the Black women’s perspectives she was invoking with her appearance, she might have avoided wrongheaded appropriation and paid tribute to Black history in a more respectful and constructive way.

It is important to take “indigenous historical understanding seriously… because it destabilizes mainstream understanding of and assumptions about history and therefore creates a new starting point for cross-cultural dialogue” (Carlson 45). In other words, by doing this we rid ourselves of the “evolutionary developmental paradigm” that comes with thinking of orality as primitive in comparison to literacy. Carlson notes that literacy has long been held as the fulcrum of Western intellectual superiority, but only recently scholars have begun to see that this is “a reflection of Western assumptions and arrogance” (52). Westerners tend to only see authenticity in pre-contact Native stories, which Carlson calls “historically deterministic… [and in thinking this way] we potentially insult the people who share the stories and thereby reduce the likelihood of their generosity continuing” (56). Last week’s readings addressed the willingness of anthropologist Franz Boas to bend Native narratives into an arc of his choosing; many thought of Native myth as “timeless and ahistorical” and Boas altered retellings to fit that particular notion (Wickwire 11). The propensity to treat Native storytelling as somehow subordinate in authenticity to non-Native historical documents (or pre-contact storytelling) could cut off our link to a different and enriching perspective on a shared history. And, as Carlson pointed out earlier, there are few things more dangerous than one-sided history that purports to be total.

Blow, Charles M.. “The Delusions of Rachel Dolezal.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 17 Jun., 2015. Web. 19 Jun., 2015.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. 43-72. Print.

EMI Music. “LCD Soundsystem- Losing My Edge.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 25 Feb., 2009. Web. 19 Jun., 2015.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.

4. Lutz writes: “Christianity is to Europe what the Transformer stories are to the Indigenous west coast of North America. Indigenous rationality rested on the transformer myths as European rationality and assumed superiority rested on Christian mythology” (First Contact 41). Connect this quotation to Wickwire’s surprise when she realizes that Coyote is able to “travel freely between pre-historical and historical time zones” (11) –thinking of Coyote as a master transformer. Now, consider that in Lutz’s survey of 200 contact performances, he mentions Coyote only once and this is in context with his accounts of first encounters having common “spiritual components.” And, in this story the story-tellers identify Simon Fraser as a manifestation of Coyote. According to Lutz, “[s]everal nlaka’pamux accounts of their meetings with Simon Fraser identify him as the ‘sun’; others suggest he was a manifestation of the transformer-trickster Coyote …” (“First Contact” 38). Or, another way to put this, is that Coyote the transformer appears as Simon Fraser. My question is why do you think it is that Coyote is so central in the stories that Robinson tells, both the ancient and the historical stories, yet is a small example in Lutz’s survey of over 200 stories? I am NOT asking you to critique Lutz’s discussion. Rather, look for your answer in Wickwire.  In particular, pay attention to her comments about time, myth and history.

Lutz’s discussions focus on a singular moment, Coyote is a character that is (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut) “unstuck in time.” The approaches of Robinson and Lutz are completely different; Lutz and the anthropologists he cites are looking to, at first, situate these encounters in a temporal context, their approach falls within an academic realm, which means that information is privileged over creativity, whereas they are on more even ground in the stories of Robinson. What separates Robinson’s storytelling approach from the aforementioned scholars is that he seems to be more focused on elucidating patterns in history; less concerned with the moment, more so with the arc of time. Wendy Wickwire acknowledges Claude-Levi Strauss’s hot/cold framework of myth or legend near the introduction’s outset. While commonly Native storytelling is associated with the “cold” side of the binary (meaning the narratives take place in a “timeless and ahistorical” zone) Robinson’s storytelling blends the hot and cold approaches (Wickwire 11).

Lutz is concerned with the uniting factor of the “spiritual component” of these first stories, but other than this, he looks for disparities. As he notes, we should not “be surprised by conflicting versions of the same event” (Lutz 37). Robinson’s voice is a singular one and his stories, while separate, seem to take place all in the same semi-fictive realm. “The appearance of the Europeans was a novel manifestation, but it was not a threat to the indigenous spiritual ordering of the world… Rather than immediately destabilize traditional beliefs, the arrival of the Europeans was merely proof of the ongoing proof of these beliefs” (Lutz 38). Robinson does not see the arrival of Europeans as some breaking point between two mythical epochs, he rather fits their arrival into pre-existing contexts. Myths are ancient and well-worn with repeated telling, so one would think this should speak to their continuing relevance to modern day issues. As Wickwire says, “just as there were monsters roaming round in Coyote’s time, so too were monsters roaming through the landscape in more recent times” (14). Lutz’s analysis is experiential- how did each party in these early encounters react to and interpret the actions of the other? But Robinson is looking at the skeleton of history and fleshing it out in the image of his spiritual beliefs. Coyote reappears constantly throughout history because his persona is embodied by myriad historical figures.

The irony here is that, based on what I said above, one might be inclined to grant more credence to the scholarly analysis and retelling of first stories. It almost sounds like Robinson bends the historical material to fit the spiritual material but the opposite is true; the spiritual is what is mutable here, as it does not create narrative, it complements it. Franz Boas, however, bent his retellings to make Native myth seem “colder.” Wickwire quotes Michael Harkin’s assertion that the “collectors’ goal was to document ‘some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people’” (22). She also notes how Boas himself omitted the appearance of a gun in a story James Teit had written to him (Wickwire 23). The short answer to the question is that Robinson’s approach is a mixture of the hot and cold; he finds a fork in the road, and takes it. “Sometimes I might tell stories and I might go too far in the one side like./ Than I have to come back and go on the one side from the same way” (Robinson, qtd. in Wickwire 13). Robinson seems aware of the necessity of mixing the historical and mythic elements in his stories which accounts for the frequency of Coyote’s appearances.

Works Cited

Lutz, John Sutton. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance.” Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. Print. 30-45.

Robinson, Harry, and Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.

I thought I’d comment first on Stewart Woolner’s blog. It seemed appropriate because we have some shared experience in the area we wrote about for this week; he was my roommate in first year. We had never met before, and moving into a room where you can essentially take one step and poke the person from any given point will definitely shake your sense of “home.” His story is beautiful and simple, and the most evident assumption we share is that home is in a sense of community rather than actual place. Of course its kind of rote to say that a house does not necessarily a home make, but this seeming cliche is one that is true and impossible not to utilize in this sort of assignment and Stew manages to make use of it in a way that feels new. We also make the same assumption that home works on a sort of continuum. Your sense of home is not inert, but dependent on many volatile elements. What makes and alters home for the story’s little protagonist is the influx of people into his life, and we get to see his sense of home finding itself. For me, I assumed that home was  sort of stable place in my memory, but with each new visitation, it was altered by my changing perceptions.

Next I find that I share much with Sarah Steer’s values and ideas about home. She speaks of how her sense of home had a distinctly territorial aspect, tied to the house she grew up in. Home quickly became a place fixed in her mind which she could visit, until she let her old sense of home, that unchanging pink house, become coloured by and commingled with new experiences. In both of our stories the perceptions of home shift as time progresses; a home only really makes itself out to be a home in hindsight, it takes on its most comforting aspects with the help of memory’s embellishment (“‘there’ is what creates ‘here'” she notes- the past is an object that casts a different shadow depending on the angle from which it is viewed).

“It is with this in mind that I, subconsciously or otherwise, have constructed a sense of home out of those less tangible things.” -Hava Rosenberg, “Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there”

What I identify with most in Hava’s post is the idea that we construct home. This is not so much an assumption as it is a reaction to one. As was mentioned above, home is not unchanging, nor does it emerge organically from some void. We are participants in the construction of “home,” which is why an exercise like this is important- it makes us look at our conceptions of home and check ourselves and our assumptions. Hava says “you can always come back” to home, but given her vision of home as a sort of concatenation or patchwork of memories, you get the impression that the home that exists in memory is going to change each time she revisits it. Also, Talking Heads rule.

Redwood Meadows is one of those subdivisions that probably looks something like a circuit-board from above- tiny squares in rows intersected by crystalline systems of lines (roads) and strangely erratic ones (rivers). I lived there for a very short time, but I lived nearby for most of my adolescence and always had friends living there. Home is usually thought of in a possessive sense (as in “my home”) but ownership of land is incredibly complicated (maybe impossible) and the dubiousness of having a home is perfectly embodied in this community.

Every Canada Day, we’d watch the fireworks in Redwood. I’d skate at the community rink in the winters. I would take my beloved dog, the mysterious and stately Glenn Danzig, to play fetch in the park

.

The neighbourhood had its own myths: house number 6969 allegedly played host to the swingers’ club, and so on. It was a neighbourhood where you’d go to hang out with one friend and wind up with a crew of 15 skateboarding down the middle of the street, holding up the traffic. Where I lived was insular and lonely, so visits to Redwood were a treat. This sense of community, or propinquity to all your friends and enemies, to the houses of girls you liked, and those of your teachers, made Redwood feel kind of like my home even though it wasn’t. Through the years, an increasing number of friends’ moved closer to the city. Redwood became a place coloured by the tincture of memories. Though a select few of the Old Guard remained, I began to think of it less as a real place and more as a some suburban ideal.

One evening, in my final year of high school, a party was held in Redwood. A wallflower is on the Cook family crest, so while I usually stayed in, I decided to indulge my more romantic side by visiting this part of my childhood I felt alienated from. Drinks were had and drama ensued as is typical of high school parties, and I ended up back in the aforementioned park consoling a dear friend who had just had a nasty fight with his girlfriend. He was visibly and audibly upset, and I sat on the other side of the picnic table chain-smoking and trying my best to alleviate his distress with silent nods and understanding grunts. A large figure emerged from the nearby woods. He asked for a cigarette. I gave him one to appease and send him on his way. To my chagrin, he stood and smoked it by the table, seemingly deaf to my friend’s tears and to the silence with which I responded to his anecdote about doing mushrooms in this park. After a long pause in conversation, during which only stilted sobs could be heard, the man returned to the woods. We laughed about his brazen lack of tact and the stupid story he had told. It was a moment of absurdity that added some levity to the dismal situation. Later I remembered him as the victim of some rather severe childhood bullying (I recall a bus-full of children chanting “FAT-YEW,” a rather uninspired pun on the name Matthew, repeatedly while our bus was stuck in the snow one afternoon), As I drove my friend home to get some much-needed sleep, I thought of that man’s complete lack of social awareness, his desire to have a conversation with or without willing participants. In light of my recollection, his awkwardness made sense. I felt guilt for wanting this guy to take the hint and shove off, after all, even though I hadn’t been party to the bullying, I hadn’t spoken out against it either.

Needless to say, the evening was not a romantic trip down memory lane. I was confronted by my own willful ignorance of past reality. Now when I think of Redwood, I do not think of it as “home,” I think of that night’s unsettling revelations.

Dr. Paterson quotes Thomas King, who asserts that assumptions are “especially dangerous when we do not even see that the premise from which we start a discussion is not the hard fact that we thought it was” (“Godzilla vs Post-Colonial” (183)). Indeed, Redwood rests on land owned by the Tsuu T’ina band. No one “owns” their home (and a home is something one usually assumes ownership of), technically the houses are all on a lease, which is up in 2049. People are becoming more reluctant to buy there because out and out ownership is not in the cards. These non-Indigenous people don’t want to make their home, or the memories or whatever it is that constitutes home, on one big rug waiting to be ripped out from under them. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? The idea of having to share their home with those whose inhabitance preceded theirs has provoked some (though certainly not all) residents to outrage.

As it turns out, the government restrictions on what Aboriginals are allowed to develop on reservations is incredibly limited and tightly controlled, to the point where it may as well not be theirs at all; the government doesn’t give them autonomy, doesn’t treat them “like grown-ups” (Libin).

The story of Redwood Meadows is confusing, mired in bureaucratic nonsense that precludes easy answers. If home is something we carry with us, that we can go back to (if only in our thoughts) when we feel lost or uncertain, than stories like this are alarming. The bottom of that mental box in which we store all of our memories is ready to fall out if only we look at our assumptions closely.For whom is Redwood a “home:” the people who live there, the Tsuu T’ina, the government who restricts development, or me, with my stupid memories? The answer (as I’m sure J. Edward Chamberlin would agree) is both all and none of the above.

Libin, Kevin. “Shackled by red tape.” The National Post 15 Feb 2008. Web. 4 June 2015.

“Tsuu T’ina flag vandalism angers Redwood Meadows residents.” CBC News Calgary 3 Jan 2013. Web. 4 June 2015

“I’ve got a great story to tell you. So there are a bunch of witches hanging out. A few warlocks are there, also some Goblins, a chupacabra, assorted ghouls, vampires, werewolves, etc. A real “who’s-who” of the world’s phantom scary-beings. It’s their Annual General Meeting at the airport Ramada in Laughlin, Nevada. They’ve all come down from their rooms, bleary-eyed and hungover from last night’s debauchery. The Creature from the Black Lagoon chokes down a dry bran muffin from the continental breakfast tray as the meeting begins. The administrative side of things takes up most of the day, followed by awards (“Most Scares,” “Most Improved,” and the announcement of the winner of the coveted top prize at the previous day’s chili cook-off). They decide to end the event with a competition. Some of the attendees were lacking inspiration and method in their recents attempts to petrify onlookers with terrifying displays, and so it was decided that all attendees would attempt to produce the greatest possible fright they could, by any means necessary, with a winner being determined by vote at the end of the exhibitions. Haunting organ riffs were played, macabre cakes were baked, and very frightening balloon animals were crafted. Last in the line of performers came a pretty ordinary looking human, who did no more than tell a story. No one seemed to recall sending an ordinary human the e-vite. The story was brief but potent. In its aftermath, faces frozen in grotesque expressions filled the room. The person left. The monsters did not even convene to vote for the winner. Their stunned silence ordained the victor. Only further choking from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who was stealthily attempting to consume muffins left over from the morning’s meal, broke the eerie silence that succeeded that story of pure evil.”

For a story about how evil came into being it might seem like my version has too much comedic ambition (“ambition” being the key word there, as it drew few to no laughs) and this is something that developed directly as a result of my repeated tellings of it. I started by simply retelling Thomas King’s version of Leslie Silko’s story. My first response came from a friend who replied: “so it’s fiction. Fiction brings evil into the world?” Her response was probably the best one I received. After this I learned that my friends and family have very little patience for dour material. Either this or maybe my desire to provoke a reaction made me heighten the comedy. I was worried that the added humour might be taken as disrespect for the story’s origins, but it was really just a way of drawing it out and amusing myself in the process. But there is comedy in King’s telling of Silko’s story. I pictured the gathering of witches as something like this: by turns comical, terrifying and sort of campy. Think of how bored these witches must have been to make up such a contest.

I decided to make the one who brings evil into the world a human (though I left the gender ambiguous, as Silko does) because the idea of a mere human raining on the parade of all of these famous monsters is hilarious to me. Though I know we were supposed to maintain the ending and Silko’s story does not end with a marine monster choking on a dry baked good, I made that little addendum as a last opportunity for the audience to laugh (though they did not), and take a breather after the story’s gravest moment.

Beyond coming face to face with my lack of comedic talent, I don’t know that I came away with any trenchant insights about storytelling. Though obviously I found that it is much easier to tell a story in a vacuum without the immediacy of an audience response than it is to engage in a more performative storytelling activity.

Hyperlink:

Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages. Dir. Benjamin Christensen. 1922. Film.

1. “What the Rastafarians have done is to make up a story – and I say this in high tribute – that will bring them back homewhile they wait for reality to catch up to their imaginations” (italics mine).  (77).  Chamberlin often points to Rastafari myth and song as exemplary of the power of stories to connect and reconnect peoples, as places to begin to find the common ground. Indeed, he thinks, “Rastafarianism may be the only genuine myth to have emerged from the settlement and slavery in the New World” (187).  Why does Chamberlin think this? Please be sure to include some discussion about language, in particular “Dread Talk.”

Rastarianism seems almost custom built for Chamberlin’s approach as it is the real life manifestation of “finding common ground” through story. It is a faith spawned from a grand metaphor, though the suffering experienced by those who practice it is certainly not metaphorical.  The entirety of Chamberlin’s text concerns the use of story as a means of “overstanding the stories and songs of others with whom we may be in conflict” (188), and by grafting the Old Testament narrative of wandering exiles onto their own cultural situation, they have heartily accepted “the challenge to believe in strangeness” (188). Rastafarians identify with the story of the Israelites with – literally- religious fervor.

Of course it is not without adaptation that the story is transposed onto their own heritage, but it is stamped with their own subjectivity and this is done through language, which “reflects their own imaginings and recovers their own realities” (Chamberlin 187). Native languages and names were taken from these people by their oppressors, and so in turn they modify this unnatural tongue of the colonizer as a way of acculturating it. This renaming is a way of exercising power in a subtle, yet resonant way. More than this, Chamberlin notes that “dread talk” is crafted to “represent a return to wonder, and perhaps to the surprise of the original metaphor” (188). So “dread talk” is language that prioritizes the experiential representation (using words like “overstand” and downpression”), it attempts to close the gap between the thing signified and its signifier in order to transport the reader’s consciousness more effectively.  Perhaps it is this aspect of their culture that allows for the acceptance of “strangeness” of the Old Testament and facilitates the inhabitance of metaphor.

Though not written down, reggae music provides an oral document, as permanent as anything in the bible, that exists beyond the death of its author, telling and retelling the stories of the Rastafarian faith. It is important to know that a primary conduit for propagation of this belief system is the musical recording: as Courtney MacNeil notes, the audio recording provides a challenge to Walter Ong’s assertion that oral expression is inherently “evanescent.” Although Chamberlin does point out that Ras Kumi set down the history of Rastafari in the 1980s, it is written exactly as it is spoken, without florid metaphorical obfuscation, and the oral precedes the textual. Oral expression is “a means through which an interior drive towards communication is accessed” (MacNeil) so the “dread talk” is a privileged point of entry into the individual and collective Rastafarian consciousness.

By buying into this narrative of Jewish exile the Rastafarians have “forged a connection among these… stories of horror” (Chamberlin 76), united themselves with disenfranchised populations the world over, yet done so in a way that maintains their distinctive cultural features.

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

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. 2007, Web. May 16, 2015.

Trojan Records. “Desmond Dekker and the Aces- ‘Israelites’ (Official Audio).” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 9 May, 2014. Web. 21 May, 2015.