There are things we know and things we don’t know.  The unknown would appear to be the difficult part, but we are easily fooled – it is what we think we know that is most difficult, and most dangerous.  Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water is not concerned with knowing, but rather with how we come to know.  Yet in addressing how we come to know something, King’s story is very much concerned with what we do know – or rather, what we think we know as truth, and ultimately, what we can never truly know.

There is old fable about the fox and the hedgehog, summed-up by the Greek poet Archilochus who says “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  This perhaps false (and certainly over-ascribed) dichotomy has been used by many to divide up the worlds thinkers and writers into two camps – those whose approach to life is driven by a singular and unwavering vision, who relate everything to that vision; and those whose approach to life is more pluralistic, who pursue many ideas and modes of thought that are often unrelated and even contradictory.  Most famous was Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Fox and the Hedgehog, in which he attempted to ‘discover’ Leo Tolstoy using this approach.  I mention this here not because I want to try to place King or his story into one of these camps (that would surely be folly!), but because it (and Berlin’s essay) is a good point of departure – asking ourselves what we know, and how what we know guides our lives and how we interact with it and those in it, is a good place to start.

Green Grass, Running Water unsettles what we assume we know, and provides a method for knowing what we don’t.  Fee and Flick call this crossing borders (131).  We begin in a place of knowledge, but here we know only what is within our borders.  We therefore also begin in a place of not-knowing.  In order to arrive at a place of knowing what is beyond our borders, we must of course cross a border, and hopefully many borders.  This can be difficult, and we need to be taught how.  This is (partly) the job of Coyote.

The main way we come to know something that is unknown, is to know that it is unknown; then we can turn our attention to learning that unknown, which we accomplish by listening to those who know.  This isn’t to suggest that the known/unknown are truths, or that we gain more knowledge when we know the unknown.  “There are no truths” (King, 326), just infinite things we don’t know yet – infinite because language, as collected into stories, has the ability to create multiple (read: infinite) realities (Chester, 58).

Coyote continually makes us aware of what we don’t know by unsettling what we do know.  He infuses himself (and by extension, indigenous stories and traditions) into the stories we tell ourselves we know so well – creation, the garden of eden, ‘cowboys and Indians’, Moby Dick, etc.  We are forced to confront the fact that we don’t know this story anymore.  We become aware of the border we have come up against.

In order to then understand the story, we must cross over that border between what we know and what others know.  Coyote is crossing borders through the entire story – entering and exiting different stories, sometimes interacting directly – on the Pequod, for example (King, 197) – and sometimes indirectly (in the Blossom narrative – dancing earthquakes and children into the story).  All of this is to say, he changes things, transforms them.  He creates a new reality, which is to say he creates (or is the impetus for) a new story (one with a Moby-Jane, for example; note that it’s not until Coyote alerts the crew that they see Moby-Jane).  Coyote shows us that to cross a border requires us to do something, to create something new.  We enter into a realm of someone else’s knowledge, and we cannot know exactly what they know, but we can create something new with what we bring and what they tell us.

Returning to the fox and the hedgehog, maybe we can say that King is a hedgehog who knows only how to know many things.

—

A thought on the “I that says.”

Chester tells us that in Green Grass, Running Water “the storyteller is engaging in a conversation with Coyote and with the reader” (58).  But Fee and Flick tell us that “there is no reader” of King’s story, except maybe for King himself (131).  In trying to reconcile these ideas, I wonder if the answer is in the invitation to read the story aloud.  Reading aloud, we can hear many of the allusions/references speaking back to us (e.g. Louis, Ray, Al / Louis Riel), but it does take some forcefulness on our part.  While reading the story, I would say “I says” with the same forcefulness, and I felt like I was telling the story.  So perhaps there’s no reader because the reader is the storyteller here.  King is inviting (tricking) the reader to tell the story.  This has a few implications.  One, it is always more effective to learn something when you teach it to someone else, and so to some extent we are actually healing ourselves.  Two, we are then invited to cross borders along with Coyote; and three, we are engaging in a conversation with Coyote directly.  Which means by reading the book, we have created something new.

Berlin, Isaiah.  The Fox and the Hedgehog.  New York: Simon and Shuster, 1970.

Chester, Blanca.  “Green Grass, Running Water: theorizing the world of the novel.”  Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999), 44-60.

Fee, Margery and Jane Flick.  “Coyote Pedagogy: knowing where the borders are in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.”  Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999), 131-140.

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

Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Northrop Frye, among other literary critics, was beginning to move away from a definition of “Canada” and “Canadian” on the terms of the past and of (culturally- or geo-politically-) colonial powers.  [This echoes, in substance more than impetus, Thomas King’s rejection of defining indigeneity in relation to pre-colonial, colonial and/or post-colonial – that is, in terms of (or on the terms of) contact, Europeans, colonialism, oppression etc. (King 2004)].  Frye and others sought to identify that which makes Canadians, as evidenced in literature and other cultural manifestations, distinct (CanLit Guides, 2013).  Using Frye’s own language, we may more accurately say that Frye himself was at the time a “maturing” Canadian writer in the 1950s and 1960s, engaged in the construction of a Canadian identity as opposed to the assertion of that identity, requiring consideration of self-conflict as opposed to external conflict (Frye, 233).

Mature literature, the kind that can serve to identify, define and reinforce culture, is for Frye an autonomous medium, closed to particular historical or social experience but guided by mythical structures within which those particularities may be given expression, or form (Frye, 233-234).  The literary critic seeks to mark off those areas of autonomy, free from time and place, to separate literature from the daily life (216), and hold them up, or implant them, as true forms of a culture, and by extension, of a people.  [The connections between Frye’s endeavour and the work of Salish Xá:ls should not go unnoticed].

It is for this reason that in discussing one of the defining tensions in Canadian literature – between the primitive and the civilized, as evidenced in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott – Frye is unmoved by and unconcerned with both the inherent contradictions between Scott’s romantic poetics and imperial policies, and the obvious destructiveness of those policies on Indigenous peoples in Canada.  For Frye, Scott could only situate his experiences, give them expression and form, in terms of his own prevailing literary traditions – in this case, in the absence of a mature mythical literary tradition, one based on history.  It is this tradition, as yet immature but nevertheless giving voice to a fledgling Canadian cultural identity, which is important to Frye – not the historical or social setting from which it came (and from which come those contradictions, conflicts and destructiveness).  Cutting literature off from its place and time, drawing impenetrable circles around culture and Canadian, is the epitome of Western approaches to knowledge and understanding, marking out a space that defines x almost exclusively in contradistinction to y.  He is looking inward to the self-conflict (we might conceive of the self as that which is inside the arbitrary circle), and ignores the external conflicts (between peoples) that are so destructive.

Frye’s endeavour is to define, by constructing.  This is an effort to control, and to control for, in the very scientific meaning of controlling for variables, those elements that can unsettle.  This is also destructive, as any border/boundary (say, that of a circle) necessarily breaks down the whole into smaller pieces, and cuts off that which is outside the circle from the inside.  But more so, the act of classifying, categorizing and naming – which the drawing of a circle around a particular space, and not around another space, accomplishes – is an important power dynamic [accessible through UBC library account].  To draw circles around Canadian, and to exclude external conflict, is to wield incredible power to erase important historical and social realities and considerations.

CanLit Guides.  “Nationalism, 1950s-1970s: cultural nationalism, the Massey Commission and thematic criticism.” Canadian Literature.  13 August 2013.  Web.  07 March 2014.

Clayton, Daniel.  “On the Colonial Genealogy of George Vancouver’s Chart of the North-West Coast of North America.”  Cultural Geographies. 2000, 7(4):371.

Frye, Northrup.  The Bush Garden: essays on the Canadian imagination.  Toronto: Anansi: 2011.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” in Unhomely States: theorizing English-Canadian Post-colonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183-186.

McAllister, Jamie.  “The Mark of Xá:ls.”  What’s the Story: Literature and Canada.  n.p., 21 February 2014.  Web.  07 March 2014.

Edward Chamberlain points out that “all so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing…[such as] woven and beaded belts and blankets, knotted and coloured strings, carved and painted trays…” (19-20). Keith Thor Carlson (2011) goes beyond this to demonstrate that the very stories told in some oral cultures (in this case, the Salish people of coastal and plateau British Columbia) contain elements of literacy; that the exploits of characters in these stories create permanent marks upon the world that result both in something that gives stability and something to interact with (interpret), engage with (retell), and eventually change (rewrite).

Carlson first demonstrates that the Salish word for literacy is not taken from those languages introduced to the Salish people post-contact (with non-indigenous people). Words denoting objects for which the Salish people had no prior knowledge or understanding (such as cow, pig and mule) were taken from other sources – kweshú (from the French cochon, or pig), miyúl (from the English mule), or even the onomatopoetic músmes (from the sound a cow makes). But the Salish word for writing/to write (xélá:ls) is not derived from any post-contact languages, understandings or impositions. The fact that an indigenous word was used for a concept (writing, or literacy) that was supposedly only introduced by contact with Europeans – a concept that is supposedly colonial – suggests that there were pre-existing understandings of that concept.

[This lends credence to Thomas King’s rejection of the terms pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial on the grounds that they define indigeneity in terms of (on the terms of) contact, Europeans, colonialism, oppression, etc. (King 2004). That understandings of literacy predate all of these things suggests this part of indegeneity (taking only the topic at hand) must be seen on the terms of the Salish people irrespective of contact, interactions with Europeans, etc.]

Carlson then addresses what those pre-existing understandings were. The Salish word for writing (xélá:ls) is derived from the root xá:l, which means to mark. This root word also forms the words Xá:ls (the name of the central transformer figure for the Coast Salish people) and xá:ytem (the actual work of the transformer – though it is not made clear whether it is ‘that which is transformed’ or ‘the act of transforming’; for our purposes, I don’t think it matters).

Transformers (Xá:ls) place their permanent marks [xá:l] upon the world – the permanent forms of people and things [xá:ytem] – thereby creating stability and both preserving and revealing the world we know (Carlson 46, 61, 62, 63). Transformations necessarily create symbols – artifices that attest to the action and the result. And that’s all language is – symbols representing things, ideas, actions, etc. Literature (or literacy) is just a more permanent (that is, not necessarily longer-lasting but less flexible) way of marking down those symbols. This is what Xá:ls do – creating more permanent symbols of what had previously been both impermanent and ‘not right’ (46).

The xá:ytem are in turn “understood and known through the stories describing the act” (61). The act of permanently marking the world, then, also creates something we can interpret, retell as stories, and eventually rewrite (to varying degrees) as our world changes. I had been thinking about why John Lutz would write that, to some degree, “indigenous people had the power to determine the success or failure of new European settlements” (Lutz 12). I think the transformation stories of Robinson, Bertha Peters and Mrs. Bertha Peters, along with Carlson’s work on what orality says about literacy provide one interpretation. That indigenous understandings of their world, their histories, mythologies, etc. – that is to say, their stories – were better suited to adapting to the changes they faced. To the extent that there was literacy in indigenous communities prior to contact with Europeans, the fact that their stories retained a significant element of orality, and contained Xá:ls who could recast the world, their understanding of the world was flexible enough to incorporate these unsettling changes.

Language affects the way we think, what we think, and what we think about; how we develop the signifiers for what is to be signified. Maybe we can think of the transformer stories as a kind of language – xá:ytem as a signifier for what has been marked (written) upon the world. As has been said many times in this class (by us and in our readings – see especially King on how creation stories (2003, 28-30)), the language we use (and the way we use it – see especially King on Harry Robinson (2004, 186)) will fundamentally alter our understandings of the world, or in this case, the way we think about literacy (creating the world) and what we think about literacy (indigeneity).

– – – – – – – – –

Two asides:

This blog post is fairly late. One of the many things taking up my time the last two weeks has been a hunter education course I’m taking at night. In the first class, the instructor talked about wildlife management, and how First Nations’ traditional knowledge is incorporated into Yukon government’s management processes. He didn’t get in to specifics of what that meant or how it worked, though I suspect it’s as difficult to describe as the term/idea/promise of/commitment to “consultation”.

At one point he asked the participants how long First Nations have been in the Yukon. There were many guesses in the thousands of years, millions of years, etc. A friend of mine, an archeologist said 13,000 years. I like to annoy her, so I said since time immemorial. The instructor was good enough to avoid the debate, saying that in any case they have been here longer than us, and have a wealth of knowledge for helping to manage wildlife.

In the first break, my friend made it clear that she knew what I was doing, but that Science (capital S) proves the timelines (certainly much less than ‘forever’!). It got me thinking not about which timeline is correct, or how to interpret the different timelines put forward, but about the way we approach different timelines. For example, among many people I know, there are constant jokes about how people (in the southern United States, to take a common stereotype) believe that the Earth is only thousands of years old, that dinosaurs never existed, etc. With vitriol ‘we’ admonish them for their stupidity, backwardness, and belief in their Biblical stories, lamenting their state of education. Yet among these same friends, the approach to timelines (history) claimed by indiginous stories is either the opposite (not questioning) or certainly without the same vitriol

Why is this? Is it just the pendulum swinging? Is it a way of atoning for past wrongs? Are some of my friends just anti-Christian? Is acceptance of tribal understandings a zero-sum game (meaning do we need to reject one view that is in opposition to accepted Science in order to accept another similar view)?

– – –

I’ve also been listening to this song a lot lately. Every time I hear it, I think of the speaker as a third party talking to indigenous people and Europeans, about their relationship. A quick search finds that most people think it’s about kids from a previous marriage talking to their step-parent.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful song.

Boroditsky, Lera. “How Does Language Affect the Way We Think?” Edge. n.p. 27 Aug 2013. Web. 18 Feb 2014.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: the ‘Black and White’ of Salish History,” in Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Keith Thor et. al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 43-72.

Chamberlain, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004.

Imogen Heap. “Hide and Seek.” YouTube. n.p. 21 Jun 2008. Web. 20 Feb 2014.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” in Unhomely States: theorizing Longish-Canadian Post-colonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183-186.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: a native narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc., 2003.

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again,” in Myth and Memory: rethinking stories of indigenous-European contact. Ed. Lutz, John. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007. 1-15.

Sweetgrass, Shari Narine. “First Nations Reject Province’s Consultation Policy.” Alberta’s Aboriginal News Publication. n.p. 2013, 6:20. Web. 20 Feb 2014.    

Harry Robinson tells both a first story (creation story) and a contact story (how settlers and indigenous people in North America first met) (Robinson, 9-10).  I will give a very brief retelling of this story, but I will change some of the words in order to hopefully capture the intended message but also further illuminate that message.  I will use “We” to denote settlers, and “They” to denote the indigenous people of North America (or Indians as Robinson says).

We and They were twins charged with performing certain tasks related to creating the earth and its first inhabitants.  They performed their tasks.  We may or may not have performed our tasks, but we did steal a text that We were told not to touch.  When asked about this, We denied having taken the text.  For this We were banished to a distant land, and They remained in Their place of origin.  [This, Robinson says, is how They were here first before Us].  We were told that Our descendants would travel to the home of Their descendants to share the story from the text.  When Our descendants came to the home of Their descendants, We not only killed Them and stole Their land, but We refused to share the story.

There are a few points that struck me in this story.  First, We and They shared a common home (the place of origin).  Robinson says that this story tells of how “the Indians were here before the white” (Robinson, 9, emphasis added).  If We and They were in different places at the time of banishment, the banishment story would not need to be told to demonstrate how They were here first.

Second, We were not banished because we took the text, we were banished because we would not admit to taking the literature.  We wanted to keep this text to Ourselves.

Third, if They were here first, and if the twins were both here originally, then we must not have been We (“white”) and they must not have been They (“Indian”) until the moment of banishment.

Putting these three points together, my first response to Robinson’s story is that the twins became ‘white’ and ‘Indian’, became Us and Them when we separated; and the twins separated because We wanted to keep Our newfound text – comprised of story(ies) – to Ourselves.

It wasn’t that We had the text, or the stories contained within it, it was that We wouldn’t share them.  Jeanette Armstrong wrote that “when my words form I am merely retelling the same stories [of my people] in different patterns” (King, 2).  We can only contextualize ourselves in that which has already been said.  Having taken the written story for itself, neither the younger nor older twin could situate themselves in the same story, and so the twins became something different – Us and Them.  Upon returning, We would still not share Our story, perhaps could not share Our story – much like the government officials in Chamberlain’s story (1).

But while the paper (text) was taken, the story of the paper could not be taken.  You can steal a written document; I don’t think you can steal a story, at least not in the same way.  You can retell it (and attempt to make it your own, attempt to appropriate it), but each and every story belongs to the moment of telling.  Outside of that moment, it is a different story, and so has not been ‘stolen’ but rather recreated.  [That being said, one can refuse to share a story, by refusing to tell it – which can also be a way to exert power].  But a story written down can be stolen by virtue of possessing the written document.

The story of the paper, however, is separate from the contents of the paper.  It can stand irrespective of the text (paper).  This is perhaps why Robinson’s story has such power, because even when written down, it retains important elements of orality – impermanence and flexibility.  The storyteller or listener/reader can decide for themselves what the paper or the book Black and White contain (or leave it unsaid).  [This echoes our previous assignments, in which we told the story of how evil came into the world, but didn’t necessarily tell of that evil].

This point relates to how we see Robinson himself – whether he is a mythteller or a storyteller.  Wendy Wickwire suggests he would be insulted if called the former (Robinson, 29).  I think the distinction is almost immaterial – he is a storyteller, and in the course of telling stories he may tell of myths and of historical events.  What is important is that we recognise the stories he tells, and in particular the story of the twins, are not bound temporally.  Robinson is telling us what happened, but he is also telling us what is happening, and what will or may happen.

He is situated within a much more expansive ‘contact zone’ than described by Lutz (Lutz, 4).  In this sense, ‘first contact’ occurred almost at the moment of creation, which is given credence by the notion that any contact, at any point, is contextualized by a retelling of spiritual, cultural, moral stories of the people making contact, of all that has come before that point.  And the contact zone is ongoing, and I wonder if it must continue until that story (Our story) is finally shared.  At that point [and this is just a wild tangent at the end of a long blog post], perhaps We and They will again become something different, sharing common ground that enables We/They to contextualize the self and the other not in a single story (there can be no single truth), but in a fair and equal sharing of stories.

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

King, Thomas.  The Truth About Stories: a native narrative.  Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc., 2003.

Lutz, John.  “Contact Over and Over Again,” in Myth and Memory: rethinking stories of indigenous-european contact.  Ed. John Lutz.  Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.

McAllister, Jamie.  “It’s Your Story Now: how evil came into the world.”  What’s the Story: Literature and Canada.  n.p., 28 Jan 2014.  Web.  09 Feb 2014.

Robinson, Harry.  Living by Stories: a journey of landscape and memory.  Ed. Wendy Wickwire.  Vancouver: Talon Books, 2005.

Rollo, Tobold.  “Sage Against the Machine: being truth to power.”  Nations Rising.  n.p., 10 Dec 2013.  Web.  09 Feb 2014.

I think I’ve read everyone’s story of home (of those posted by this afternoon).  But here I’ll concentrate on four blogs (I’ll name them because I’ll refer to specific details) – @Cat’s, @Deanna’s, @Edward’s and @Greta’s.  There might be some selection bias here (relative to my own post; but these were the ones with elements that really stood out for me.

There are (not surprisingly, and similar to many of the other stories), common elements of proximity (in terms of space or mind) to loved ones, and of impermanence (difficult to define, not static).

Most interesting, Cat’s, Deanna’s and Edward’s all revolved to some extent around loss, either as a beginning or an end to the story or plot (the mother, the siblings, the parents and buildings).  There is a sense of something being destroyed or shattered (a previous life, a family, an entire town).

There are also elements of leaving and returning (to a hometown/place of painful memories, daily returns of a family, to a changed place).

The themes of loss and leaving/returning struck me, but I don’t think Greta’s had these same elements (at least not as centrally, because there is an element of each student having left some other place to come to Singapore).  Thinking of why Greta’s story struck me in much the same way the others’ did, I think it’s because all four have an element of recognition in them, either of recognizing something (the heat, familiar breakfast plates) or being recognized (by family/friends, for who you are – that is, not just for ‘being cute’).  In Greta’s story this recognizing something and being recognized were one and the same – a mutual recognition of a shared situation, that of being seemingly without a home (in the teacher’s restrictive definition).

As an aside, I think Greta’s story also contains an element of the process of creating ‘home’, in the dialogue among the students in trying to create a conception of home, variously (and never incorrectly) defining home as the school, a space around which their family is, a familiar place/place of recognition, nowhere and everywhere.

Peter’s first concrete memory of home was of it breaking apart. He was four years old and standing in a cold train station with his parents. Terminal stations are always cold – long, deep caverns with a high ceilings and platforms stretching almost out of sight.

His parents had explained to him what was happening – he was to accompany his father to their once and former home in the country to say goodbye to friends and family, and his mother would pick him up a week later for their permanent move to the city. His father would remain in the country. Later in life, Peter would have no recollection of what was said between any of them that day; all that remained in his mind was a subtle knowledge that something was changing, an unrealized recognition of ending

Peter grew up with two homes, or rather two places of residence. He came to know them well, his father’s apartment and his mother’s townhouse, later his stepfather’s house. There was a great sense of familiarity with all of them, throughout his life. Returning to these places as an adult from time to time, he knew exactly how many leaps and bounds it took to mount or descend the stairs; he would let his hand linger on the worn, smooth gypsum when rounding the corner from the kitchen to the living room; he recalled how large the ceilings and green belt behind the house had seemed as a child. Trees bore scars from abandoned tree forts, his mother’s eyes showed sleepless nights and broken curfews. There was comfort in these remembrances, a sense that he knew these places and they knew him.

And yet from the moment he left high school he felt compelled to move on, always. First to university, then for work, then for travel. He would often return to one of these homes for a time, linger, then move on again. Moving away. Though never sure what he was moving away from.

Eventually Peter stopped moving, and started building. He built himself a small one bedroom house in a town between the country and the city. He met his wife and built an extension – a second, larger bedroom and another bathroom. When his wife became pregnant, Peter tore down the guest bedroom and built a nursery; when his wife lost the baby, he boarded it up. When their first child was born, Peter rebuilt the nursery; when their second child was born, he added another level. When the children left home many years later, he turned their rooms into hobby rooms (with wall beds for when they returned). And when his wife passed away, Peter remained in the house, closing off the upstairs and making small changes as his aging body permitted. When Peter passed away, the house was left to the elements, eventually crumbling.

* * *

I had been trying all week to think of specific aspects of home, connections to them, etc. And I realized I don’t really have those memories, I can’t locate a sense of home anywhere, even though I’ve had loving homes. I’ve been thinking about home as a place, home as a feeling, home as comfort. I think there’s a strong connection between home and comfort, and that this comfort comes from both knowing that home and being known by it. But because both ourselves and the places we call home are constantly changing, this ‘knowing’ and ‘being known’ must necessarily be a process. Home is then a process of destruction and construction as we build something out of brick and wood and memories and plans that will give us the comfort of knowing and being known in an impermanent world.

Gavin Maxwell wrote in Ring of Bright Water that “happiness can neither be achieved nor held through endeavour” (1). In thinking about my sense of home, I see a similarity in this quote. If home is something we build to make sense of the world (something we know) and to give ourselves a sense of being in the world (something that knows us), and if this is a process that involves our past, present and future, then maybe home isn’t something we can have or keep, but something we live.

Having said this, I’m now concerned that this idea of home could be dangerous. If home is not something you can ‘have’, and if land is integral to X knowing and being known (that is, land constitutes or is an integral part of their home), then someone could argue X cannot ‘have’ their home. Does this make it too easy to divest people of their land? A potential response could be that with this approach, if no one (not X or Y) can ‘have’ that home (the land), then everyone can ‘have’ that home. And maybe unsettling the idea of home (that it cannot be ‘had’ or ‘kept’ or owned) can not only destabilize settler approaches to home (and the land), but open up a dialogue about the relationship between home and land?

But is this approach itself too close to settler colonialism, and does it oppose efforts at land claims? Or is this whole conception nonsense? I’d appreciate any thoughts.

Maxwell, Gavin. The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy. London: Penguin, 2001. Web. 01 Feb 2014.

A young girl crawled into a warm bed one cold night, and called to her father that it was story time

The father sat down beside his daughter’s bed and began “a long time ago, even before you were born, there was a young boy who lived with his mother.  When the boy was first born, he was placed on his mother’s chest and she told him a story before they fell asleep together.  Each night after that, the mother told her son a story before he fell asleep, each night a new story.  One night she told her son a story about his father, another night about his sister.  One night she told him a story about rabbits and how they hop, another night about chickens and the eggs they lay.  One night she told him a story about bravery, another night about cowardice.

“Sometimes the mother and son traveled great distances to tell the story, and sometimes they went to a neighbour’s house.  Sometimes they stayed in the son’s room, his mother telling a story from his bedside.  For the story about rabbits and how they hop, the mother and son went to the woods behind their house.  For the story about his father, they traveled to a far away place.

“One night, the young boy asked his mother to tell him a different story, one that was unlike anything she had ever told him, unlike anything he had ever heard.  The mother smiled at her son’s request, almost sadly, like a wince or a grimace.  She asked if he was sure, that he wanted to hear something very different.  Her son nodded his head, and the mother smiled wider, knowingly.

“The mother inched closer to her son’s bed, and whispered in his ear.  She whispered a story of evil people, in evil times, doing evil things to evil people.  When the mother had finished her story, she leaned back in her chair and looked at her son.  He was thinking about the story, running it through his mind.  Finally he said ‘mother, I don’t really like that story.  Can you take it back and tell me another one?’

“His mother kissed his forehead, and walked across the bedroom.  ‘I’m sorry my dear,’ his mother said, pausing at the door, ‘I can’t take the story back.  It’s your’s now.  To forget or remember, to retell or to change.  To find your place within it’”

The father asked his daughter if she liked the story.  His daughter said she didn’t.  He smiled and said he would tell her another story the next night.

—

I told this story to my partner, after having sketched the story in my head and the writing it down quickly, so I could at least have something to refer to if I forgot a whole part.  I found it went really quickly quicker than I thought it would.  I also kept wanting to stop and change things, to be able to pour over it and rework sentences.

I’ve gotten used to ‘showing, not telling’.  But that was really difficult here.  I had planned to go into detail about the chair the mother sits in beside the bed, but I found I couldn’t do that as easily and remember everything.  I got to thinking that this might be easier with a kind of crowd-sourcing of the details, over time.  If this story, or any story was told and retold over and over, people could add-in details, and some would stick and some wouldn’t.  And as a teller got more comfortable telling it, they could add in a detail, that someone else would get comfortable with, and then add on to it.

I think a story that has a shell but relies on others to populate it lends itself to an oral tradition.  You’ve got your structure, but then each person can add in details that make it meaningful to their lives.  The earlier stories could be changed from rabbits and chickens to moose and wolves, and they could be expanded, if the teller wants to actually tell that story (another story within the story).  I’m thinking of something like the famous joke that comedians tell among themselves (The Aristocrats – I won’t link to it, because it’s definitely ‘not safe for work/school’…and Bob Sagat’s version might not even be ‘safe for life’).  But I think leaving out the details of the ‘evil story’ is a great idea, not least because it reminds me of this gem (particularly around 3:01).

Roland Barthes wrote that “the the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author” (Barthes, last sentence). If I understand this correctly (and I can’t claim to be an expert on post-structuralism!), this was a response to the prevailing authoritarianism of the author in interpreting text. While literature represents permanence in that the text does not change, once something is written it belongs at any given moment to that reader, given meaning and interpretation by that reader.

But with story, we might say that the birth of a listener is a resurrection of the storyteller. And digital media has played no small role in this resurrection.

Digital media, in particular social media and other methods of publishing – or publicizing – has lead to a democratization of of storytelling, both in terms of product and process. Traditional publishing options in print require significant expense (printing, marketing, etc.). Digital publishing is significantly less cost-prohibitive, enabling anyone with access to a computer and internet connection to place their story in the public realm for others to consume. This change in the economics of publishing also dismantles many (though not all) of the power structures of traditional printing. Someone with a story to tell no longer has to convince others to produce their product. Of course, they may have to convince other to consume their product, something further aided by digital media, where consumers become publishers – linking to a digital story, writing reviews, and publicizing the story within their social media networks.

This democratization enables the liberation of both storyteller and consumer. The storyteller is given agency, again both in terms of product and process. Having (a more) equal opportunity to tell their story (a product of their efforts) makes the teller an agent of their truth, but only having a product – for example, telling someone else’s story for them – “does not address the process of that person’s own liberation” (Lambert 117). “Individuals need to be supported in telling their own story; in their own way, to the audiences they choose” (117). Digital media, with the freedom to produce, and produce in any way, is one of these ‘supports’. This in turn can (under the right circumstances) hasten the liberation of the listener from their ‘one truth’, upsetting Us, forcing Us to confront the reality of another fact or truth – and, importantly for social media with its immediate and simultaneous networks, many other facts and truths, or more accurately, many other stories (Chamberlain 222).

But it is important to note that the very media that enables this liberation can also frustrate it. In traditional publishing, the author cannot control who views their product. Social media privacy settings, for example, allow storytellers to much more narrowly select their audience. On the other side of this interaction, restricting our own social media networks, and the more pervasive filter bubbles, can limit that confrontation of other truths that stories force upon us.

Outside of the democratizing and liberating effects of new modes of publishing, digital media enables story, even when it is written down, to retain the impermanence of orality by mimicking the interaction of storytelling. This is achieved through overt and subtle interaction. We see interaction in digital stories that invite comments and that include discussion boards, permitting dialogue between teller and listener, and between listeners – ultimately blurring the line between who is telling and who is listening at any given moment. In this sense, the text is not really final, it is continually reimagined and rewritten as long as that interaction is is enabled. We also see this overt interaction in multimedia stories, such as the stories of Pine Point that combines text, visuals, audio and a listener-directed experience (where the listener is free to digest the story in a non-linear way if they choose).

This interaction that gives digital stories characteristics of oral storytelling can also be very subtle, as in the case of hypertext (text that lies outside the current text, but which is accessible through that current text; though we may more accurately call these hyper-representations, since this can include visuals and audio). Hypertext, accessed through hyperlinks, enable the listener to affect the story by choosing not only when or how to view that text (or other media), but whether to view it.

Of course, this interaction has occurred ion other media – for example, in 18^th and 19^th century pamphleteering and salons, with multimedia (visuals, text), protracted discussions between authors and between authors and audiences, and source citations. But perhaps we can point to a few important differences, in addition to the democratizing and in turn liberating elements of digital storytelling. Storytelling in the digital age is more immediate, is more simultaneous, and reaches far more people, resulting in incredible economies of scale when it comes to ‘fact finding’, for example (which is to say, when it comes to storytelling).

I think this a question that will come out during the course and in our final project – how significant is the difference between digital storytelling and the older modes of storytelling that also included similar elements of interaction – is it in the numbers, the immediacy, etc.?

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen (1967): n. pag. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Lambert, Joe. Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. New York: Routledge, 2013. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Chamberlain, Edward J. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

“Eli Pariser: Beware online ‘filter bubbles’.” May 2011. Ted. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

Shoebridge, Paul. and Michael Simons. “Welcome to Pine Point.” National Film Board of Canada. n.d. Web. 18 Jan 2014.

“Tom Standage: Writing on the Wall.” 05 Jan 2014. CBC. Web. 18 Jan 2014.