2] In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so: 1) the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness, and 2) the extended time of criminal prohibitions against Indigenous peoples telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities. In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited. To be complete, your answer should begin with a brief discussion on the two reasons I present and then proceed to introduce and explain your third reason from Wickwire’s introduction.
In the lesson, Dr. Paterson discusses two factors which limit our ability to find meaning in first stories. Noting these factors is very important for two reasons: Firstly, disconnections are often created when a party unaffiliated with a culture makes attempts at retelling/interpreting a story; that is, a European could not retell a story while conveying the same meanings and significances associated as an Aboriginal could. Secondly, it highlights the attempts made at eradicating Canadian Indigenous cultures and histories through the process of assimilation via Residential Schools. Both factors remove significant elements to stories and cultures, which is a third problem which Wickwire discusses in her introduction to Robinson’s book. By removing significance to a story, we lose the original purpose and historical relevance of it.
When describing her journey of collecting Coyote stories,Wickwire highlights another hindrance to our ability to derive meaning from first stories and encounters. She recounts how many of the Coyote stories she found were short and lacked the details that Robinson included in the Coyote stories he shared: “Names of individual storytellers and their community affiliations were also missing, thus making it difficult to assess the roles of gender, geographical location, or individual artistry in shaping the stories” (Robinson, 8). We also know, from Keith Thor Carlson, how integral a storyteller’s community affiliations are to their credibility, especially in Salish tradition. With this in mind, it would be very difficult for Wickwire (and us, for that matter) to know which stories were credible and which were worth ignoring. Wickwire expresses her confusion over the many contradictions concerning Coyote in the varying stories. While these contradictions could exist because different Coyote stories were written by different Indigenous cultures (which would then give Coyote different personalities and motives), it’s possible that the contradictions are found in the credibility – or lack thereof – of the authors/storytellers. Regardless of the reasons for the contradictions, the accounts of Coyote seems to leave Wickwire wondering what the real truth is.
Wickwire also writes about the loss of meaning through translations of the tales:
“Many [stories] were missing some vital segments. Coyote’s sexual exploits along the Similkameen River had been excised from the main text of an 1898 collection, translated into Latin and then transferred to endnotes. Such editing seriously disrupted the integrity of the original narrative. … In many cases, collectors had created composite stories from multiple versions, which erased all sense of variation in the local storytelling traditions.”
The translations, amalgamations, and transpositions of the stories have removed the significance once embedded within them; lacking genuineness, they are interpreted as meaningless myths to readers who are not part of the cultures from which they originate. In her lesson, Dr. Paterson warns us about the “larger issues of translating or interpreting Indigenous stories using European symbolism and mythology”. To me, it is clear that a large reason why these stories have lost their meaning is because they have been interpreted through a European perspective. Taking a tale, translating it to Latin, and putting it in the endnotes of a book takes away a tale’s original orality and removes the important details – details which do not hold the same significance to a European audience.
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Works Cited
Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflectins Across Disciplines. Ed. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, & Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: Uof Toronto P, 2011. 43-72.
Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books2005. (1-30)
