I’m looking forward to discussing this project
with all of you. It adds to the diversity of examples of collaborative history we have had over these past few weeks. And look who else is reading it!
I’m looking forward to discussing this project with all of you. It adds to the diversity of examples of collaborative history we have had over these past few weeks. And look who else is reading it!
The act of listening is obviously critical in this work. Thinking about my own research which involves a static archive (although my stuff is in an odd middle ground) and others’ work which may contain more constrained voices, how does this change the act of listening? In other words, can we have a relationship with a traditional western archive in the same way?
Hi all, a couple questions. Apologies in advance for any lack of depth here, not too far along in the reading yet… looking forward to reading and discussing more!
The teachings in Written As I Remember It are described not as Chi-Chia’s alone, but collective ones: “our teachings” (3). This reminded me of our discussion last week on Standing Up regarding Ga’axsta’las’s experiences as not solely her own, but belonging to a collective—her community. Robertson describes this dynamic—of Jane Cook’s individual activism as belonging to a collective—as a “double-edged sword” that leaves scars on communities. I was curious if we might consider a relationship between the two texts in this regard—what are the stakes of histories of collective activism and/or teachings? Are there stakes? How might these two texts differ in this sense?
In the introduction, Raibmon discusses how Chi-Chia recognizes how little academic work is able to cross disciplinary boundaries—to be accessible. How do we envision ways forward for history that attends to this issue of accessibility, especially as “emerging scholars”? Is there room for this type of work in our early careers? What responsibility do we have as well, to ensure that historians in their own right, like Chi-Chia, are not asked the same questions over and over again (a result of such inaccessibility)? How can we collaborate—cross disciplinary boundaries—to work towards a shared knowledge that accounts for what can be the extractive nature of community-engaged oral history work/relations?
I really like the notion of “transformational listening” that is explored in the introduction. The discussion of an open, humble, emotional, and self-conscious reading strikes me as extremely important if reading is to bring about internal change. But I wonder how this fits into academic practice, especially in the classroom. It seems to me that, to a degree, a syllabus assigning x amount of time to read x amount of books often precludes, or at least highly discourages, this type of invested and transformational reading (especially in undergrad and high school classrooms).
This made me wonder what we stand to lose from focusing on quantity, rather than quality, of reading. Valuing quantity suggests that knowledge is to be accumulated and mastered, with a direct relationship between number of books and amount of expertise. It also suggest a fixed amount of knowledge contained within a given book. Written as I Remember It explicitly asks to be considered differently. Further, this book’s format depends on the reader to read it differently. In academic history, does focusing on quantity rather than quality of reading limit how effective a text like this can be? Should our focus change? What would change look like?
I’m still making my way through (the early part of) the book, but the concepts of representation and authority seem very salient and I think are perhaps worthy of further interrogation and discussion. All the books we’ve read thus far have been written collaboratively (albeit in different ways), but all have featured a researcher writing, and compiling, the majority of the text. In the introduction, Paige discusses how Chi-chia declined to write the introduction to the book and instead preferred to review what other people had written (knowing all of her comments would be incorporated). The different forms of collaboration we’ve encountered seem to have positively worked for each party involved, and I don’t want to simplify or trivialize the topic by questioning whether they are good or bad. I guess what I’m trying to get at is the question of whether this form of collaboration is the end goal of decolonizing work or whether it may just be a stepping stone. Can we even tell at this point? How might this change our reading of these texts?
I’m also interested in this idea about the value of listening that Paige discusses in the introduction. Paige addresses that a highly valuable quality of oral history is that it involves the experience of listening, yet I found it interesting that she has to impart the importance of listening through the written word. Linguistic anthropologists are often faced with the similar difficulty of having to highlight the importance of hearing and listening in the transmission of auditory knowledge through the medium of written, instead of auditory, works. What are the implications of this? In what ways is it effective or ineffective? How might the privileging of the transmission of knowledge through writing affect our understanding of these concepts in ways we haven’t reflected on before? What are its implications for history as a discipline? There’s another piece to this question that I can’t put my finger on that’s nagging at me…
See you Tuesday! I’ll bring snacks.
Hi all,
I’m sorry for posting this morning rather than last night! I think my comments are going to mirror Nicole and Vicki’s a fair bit –
It seems to have actually worked out very well that we ended up reading Written As I Remember It the week after we read Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las as these books are both collaborative histories with/about Indigenous women, written by women, from the UBC Press (perhaps Paddling To Where I Stand by Agnes Alfred and Martine Reid and Daisy Sewid Smith could also be added to this small collection). I think this shows that there is not one Indigenous methodology, but many ways to search for one and attempt to integrate new concepts and methods into historical/anthropological boundaries. I wonder how this relates to the frameworks Smith sets out in Decolonising Methodologies from week 1. I think these two book stood out to me as they both take very effective, but very different, approaches to partnership – Leslie’s voice overlapped with the voices of the Kwakwaka’wakw and the Kwagu’ł Gixsam Clan throughout her book, whereas Paige’s voice is mostly limited to the introduction. I think here I am echo-ing Vicki’s questions about collaboration and decolonisation. But I would like to take the concept a bit further. This brings me back to a quote from Burman, in 2012, which has always resonated with me: “There is no way we are going to intellectually reason our way out of coloniality, in any conventional academic sense. There is no way we are going to publish our way out of modernity. There is no way we are going to read our way out of epistemological hegemony.” I think maybe Paige, (and Leslie) have managed break out of this ‘conventional academic’ sense by approaching research through relationship, and the ways in which embodied relationships, the physical sense and experiences relate to Indigenous worldviews and history. I guess my question here is if these two books show us that there is not one ‘correct’ Indigenous methodology, how would we go about searching for one? Especially if our research isn’t collaborative/family/community focused (for example, looking at political policy
Okay I somehow pressed post mid-comment – but my final sentence was trying to get across if the ‘topic’ of our research (not the axiology, goals etc.) are not family/community focused, eg. looking at political policy rather than working with a community.
My second point goes back to the questions from last week about who we write for and whether one book can speak to more than one audience: Paige (and again, Leslie as well I think) both approach the stories they are telling with non-standard academic prose, particularly in Written As I Remember It. But I think these books are still both recognisable as academic histories to the academic historian – if anything I found the non-standard prose made this book very readable. So my question here, which I think mirrors some points above, is whether it is possible to successfully navigate both worlds?
While reading Written as I Remember It, as well as Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las last week, my thoughts keep coming back to the books’ emphasis on capturing voice, as well as the relationship between voice and authorship. In her book, Robertson’s voice and the voices of various Kwagu’l Gixsam clan members were seamlessly interwoven, while in Elsie Paul’s book, much care was taken to preserve the oral dimensions of her stories as closely as possible–including all of the irregularities and false starts that come with speech. Why is it so important to transcend the “grammatically-correct” authorial voice and preserve the texture of this speech? On one level, it might be framed as an attempt to preserve the means by which Paul’s knowledge is expressed, but how else might it impact the communicating of a historical narrative?
I’d also like to ask something about the relationship between the more “narrative” chapters, the Legends, the Sliammon Narratives, and Paul’s assertion that they are all connected as “teachings,” but I haven’t gone through enough of the book to have a well-thought-out question. Maybe I’ll just leave that for people to ponder over?
Apologies for the late post!
My question this week circulates around the question of how to read this text. The authors offer this work as “a secondary source in its own right.” Although it might still be tempting to read Paul’s words here as a primary source memoir, the book seems also to resist such a reading. It sidesteps and actively resists the pervasive need in the academy to “reauthorize professional historians as the only ones capable of upholding the necessary distance for critical thought, knowledge acquisition, and an understanding of difference” (7). I think Raibmon, Paul, and Johnson’s ambitions in this work recall Robertson’s typographical choice to weave Kwagu’ł Gixsam Clan testimony into the main text rather than use block quotations (presenting testimony as critical interpretation, rather than supporting evidence).
So how can we take this call seriously? How can we take up texts like this as a work of critical, interpretative, and theoretical weight, rather than a memoir to be tested against colonial knowledge and either affirmed or denied by “real scholars” as “another side of the story”?
I want to tentatively try and articulate some more thoughts I’ve been having as I read this book, and I don’t want my implications or meaning here to be misconstrued or misinterpreted – these are very tentative thoughts and I’m not trying to pass individual judgements on the characters or life stories of the women who’s stories we are reading: I want to question how we write about controversial, antagonistic or abrasive figures as opposed to (perhaps?) the ‘easier’ task of writing about/with people that seem more inherently ‘likeable’ – in another comparison between Standing Up and Written As I Remember It (I deliberately put these words in ” as I recognise that these are very simplistic categories I am applying here). I think I am trying to explore the affective dynamics of reading and writing history – because of course, we do respond emotionally and affectively to our subjects, co-authors, collaborators, and to the material and books we read, and this does affect the ways in which we interpret or our receptiveness to these people/voices/materials. I think maybe there’s something related to the first-person narration of Elsie’s teachings that makes us feel more directly connected to her as we read as well – so I think methodology and structure comes in to these affective categories as well.
This maybe goes both ways as well – after my paper at Qualicum this weekend I was questioned on how receptive people would be to my critique of a man seen by many as a ‘hero’ – on the other hand, our reading last week was about restoring the relationships/reputation of a woman with a very controversial place in Kwakwaka’wakwa history. There are obviously multiple affective/emotional categories and dynamics at play in each of these situations. I think the talk Laura gave at Qualicum (providing a very different interpretation of a man who was seen as a working-class hero, notably that the land he was supposedly trying to protect from the CPR was stolen Indigenous land and showing all the ways in which his white-male privilege shaped his encounters with the law) got me thinking on this subject.
I apologise for bringing last week’s reading so much into my question here, but as I was reading this book I couldn’t help questioning why I found it much more readable that last week, and wonder if it is perhaps because Elsie seems to be a very likeable woman. I am really not trying to cast judgement on the characters or lives of either Jane Cook or Elsie Paul but perhaps open a discussion on how we can be aware of our own biases, emotions and responses as we read, write and listen (- hopefully getting closer to transformational listening as Paige discusses), how we can address the full complexity of people’s lives and lived experiences, avoiding simplification and stereotyping (not that I am suggesting either of these books do this, rather that they succeed in the opposite, of capturing some of the complexity of what/whom they write about/with, and hence the complexity of my affective responses to each). And also, perhaps, how emotion and affective engagement can be used as transformative and decolonial strategies. Sorry for the essay. See you all in the morning.
Apologies for the late post after what has been a very long day for me… I finished up just before the “mother section”. partly because I am exhausted, but partly because I do not currently hold enough emotional stability to engage with the kind of grief stories I believe she is going to go into…
I see you all beat me to bringing up my interest in transformational listening, so as not to repeat I will take a different tack.
My question revolves around what the purpose of these teachings are. They have so much power for healing and transformation, for I believe all that read them, but are they intended for us to tell to others? Are we, as (generally settler) people from outside the Sliammon culture permitted to share these teachings, even though we would not have the skill in oration, the knowledge, or the language capability? A rather simple example of this would be the story of t’Әl (the wild man of the woods) and the birth of the no-see-ums. This would be an amazing, lighthearted story to tell around the camp fire, when being destroyed by mosquitoes, but I would hesitate to do so, not just for fear of appropriation, but also because my lack of skill would not do this justice. There are far more meaningful, important and potentially healing stories in this text, but again- are they for us to tell?
Are we supposed to share these stories? Can we do them justice? This question also should bring us to consider the meaning of Ɂəms tɑɁɑw (OUR teachings) when we approach the issue, as in their title it seems to me these lessons are stamped with belonging.