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