For this week’s blog post, my task is to explore the allusions, names, and subtext of pages 60 – 69 in Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. I’ll begin with a quick summary of the plot during this segment of the novel to orient my discussion of the text’s details below.

From pages 60 – 64, we hear about the aftermath of Lionel’s arrest in Green River, Wyoming, for being associated with members of the American Indian Movement, including a first jail stint for disturbing the peace, his return to the hotel in Salt Lake City, a second jail stint for leaving the hotel without paying the bill, and his inglorious return to Blossom, unemployed and with a criminal record. Next, from pages 65 – 67, we hear about Alberta’s failed attempt to execute option three on her list of ways to get pregnant, namely pick up a handsome stranger at a bar. Lastly, on pages 68 and 69, we return to the story of First Woman as it is told to Coyote, just as First Woman decides to leave the garden after GOD jumps in and starts making a brouhaha.

The notes below are organized in order of their appearance in the text.

Duncan Scott

This is Lionel’s boss at the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs (D.I.A.). We now call this the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. But Duncan Scott was a real head of the D.I.A. from 1913 – 1932, where he was an adamant supporter of educating First Nations children (he made elementary education compulsory for these children) and strongly supported the religious residential school model. First Nations children were often left in the lurch by this system after elementary school, unable to continue to higher education due to limited availability but also dislocated from their family and ancestral traditions. The residential school system was fraught with problems as well as outright abuse. Scott is also known as a Confederation Poet, a distinction given to four male poets of that era. His appearance as Lionel’s boss and subsequent abandonment of Lionel after he gets into trouble down south highlight the historical lack of genuine care for and understanding of First Nations people by the Department of Indian Affairs.

Tom and Gerry, Salt Lake City hotel employees

Tom and Jerry is a popular Warner Brothers children’s cartoon involving Tom the cat chasing Jerry the mouse. It was first established in the 1940s and has generated controversy over its depiction of African-American people, including portraying characters in blackface and as “black mammy” stereotypes. The multiple references to blond white men in the hotel staff suggest racist overtones, lending support to this connection.

Chip and Dale, Salt Lake City police officers

The combined names of this pair could be a subtle reference to the Las Vegas Chippendales, a popular male erotic dance company founded in 1979. The company performs across North America and worldwide. King just finished describing the hotel employees as young, blond, and attractive men, so this is a somewhat plausible connection. Chippendale is also a brand of furniture, but that connection didn’t seem to fit here.

George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

Lionel looks closely at a painting depicting this battle in the hotel lobby, where Custer, a somewhat incompetent American military officer, and all his men were outnumbered and killed by Native American warriors in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Their deaths were used in government propaganda to rally white Americans against the warriors and led to an increase in armed conflict with Native Americans (the Indian Wars), as well as increased assimilation efforts by the American government (BBC Bitesize).

The Shagganappi

This is the name of the Calgary lounge Alberta scopes out for attracting a potential anonymous father for her child. She doesn’t end up going inside, though. The Shagganappi is also a book of short stories by E. Pauline Johnson, a woman of English-Mohawk ancestry who performed her poetry in front of white North American and European audiences during the late 1800s. She actually had two costumes, a First Nations mishmash for the first half of her performances and an English one for the second half (Landau). At one point in her career, she recited her poetry at the same event as Duncan Scott. She died in her 50s from breast cancer and is buried in Stanley Park (Mobbs).

Works Cited:

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 1999: 140 – 172. Web. 22 February 2014.

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

Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development homepage. Government of Canada, 6 March 2014. 16 March 2014.

belkiss2. “Tom and Jerry Mammy Two Shoes …” Youtube. 16 March 2014.

Chippendales homepage. Chippendales 2012. Web. 16 March 2014.

“The Battle of the Little Bighorn 1876 and the end of Native American way of life.” BBC Bitesize, BBC, 2014. 16 March 2014.

Landau, Emily. “Double Vision.” Walrus July/August 2012. Web. 16 March 2014.

Johnson, E. Pauline. The Shagganappi. Project Gutenberg, 2004. Web. 16 March 2014.

Mobbs, Leslie. “E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), 1861 – 1913.” AuthentiCity, 7 March 2013. Web. 16 March 2014.

Margery Fee and Jane Flick consider something they call “Coyote Pedagogy” in their essay on the subversively educational experience of reading Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. What they mean by this phrase is the astonishing density of popular, historical, literary and First Nations-specific allusions that King packs into the text, as well as their unusual reliance on being spoken aloud to be revealed. King makes it a requirement for any reader with even a moderate interest in understanding what is really happening in the text to search outside of it for necessary background knowledge. But here I will explore how Coyote himself (I say “him” because of a lack of gender-neutral alternative) is the one learning in Green Grass Running Water.

King’s Coyote makes a pretty good student, engaged and always full of questions. In fact, Coyote doesn’t leave many narrative stones unturned as he listens to the teacher(s) who are explaining the stories of creation to him. He dives happily in to these stories and asks for repetition when required, although he is chided for “sitting on [his] ears” at times (King 100). At times, Coyote is a bundle of impulses with a keen eye for opportunity, be it of the fried chicken variety (“sometimes [my tongue] looks like a chicken”) (69) or vacations to Florida (100). He isn’t the quickest study with these stories, however, as following each of them, he makes some silly mistake in interpretation. He misinterprets the beginning of the story as the end, a happy ending with a clearly sub-optimal one, the location of the story, and finally the existence of multiple Coyotes beyond himself (you’d think he could at least pick up on the last point, considering that he had already heard of another Coyote, Old Coyote, in one of the stories). So maybe he doesn’t quite qualify as a top student with respect to learning stories.

We can compare the scholastic aptitude of Coyote with his fellow student, GOD. Coyote has highly active dreams; one of those “sad noise”-making Coyote Dreams jumps out of its proper place in Coyote’s mind, turning out to be a (self-styled) GOD (1). Although GOD joins Coyote in learning the creation stories, GOD doesn’t make a great student; he is a tad self-righteous about his way of understanding things, from the abominations suggested by talking trees (41) to his insistence on sticking with all those rules about who can eat or touch or say what in that garden (40). The alternative stories proposed by the four old Indians get to be too much for GOD, who jumps into the story he and Coyote are learning in order to set it to rights, never to spring out again. So much for GOD’s studentship!

So Coyote may not be the best student in terms of keeping creation facts straight in his head, but he does a pretty fine job of putting some of the principles of storytelling he learns into drastic action. From earthquakes and thunderstorms to surprise pregnancies, he more or less has the creation of dramatic narratives down pat, unlike other Coyotes out there. More subtly, he encourages a radically different viewpoint of the role of First Nations people in comparison with mainstream culture in his glee at the John Wayne role reversal scene in Bursum’s Entertainment Barn, and in his prankster attitude towards those who remain entrenched in a colonial viewpoint (Bursum and Sifton). Maybe this is Coyote’s lesson: we can all be distracted animals, but if we focus effort on our actions, we might end up with something meaningful in our hands. Telling the stories afterwards is a task that we can reserve for more experienced folks, who are better able to contextualize a particular story within a global framework.

I recently found this poem excerpt, Calgary, by P. K. Page, and include it here because it offers another perspective on education in Coyote’s prairies, and because I enjoyed it!

Calgary. The twenties. Cold, and the sweet melt of chinooks. A musical weather. World rippling and running. World watery with flutes. And woodwinds. The wonder of water in that icy world. The magic of melt. And the grief of it. Tears— heart’s hurt? heart’s help? This was the wilderness: western Canada. Tomahawk country—teepees, coyotes, cayuses and lariats. The land that Ontario looked down its nose at. Nevertheless we thought it civilized. Civilized? Semi. Remittance men, ranchers—friends of my family— public school failures, penniless outcasts, bigoted bachelors with British accents. But in my classroom, Canadian voices— hard r’s and flat a’s, a prairie language —were teaching me tolerance, telling me something. This vocal chasm divided my childhood. Talking across it, a tightrope talker corrected at home, corrected in classrooms: wawteh, wadder—the wryness of words!

Works Cited:

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

Marsh, James. “James Bay Project.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 31 January 2011. Web. 12 March 2014.

Munroe, Randall. “Engineering Hubris.” xkcd. 12 March 2014.

Page, P. K. “Calgary.” The Walrus. The Walrus Foundation, March 2014. Web. 12 March 2014.

Canada is often described as a multicultural nation, by which we mean that the unique colours of many cultures are preserved in a carefully stitched quilt of peaceful communities.

But to put it another way, in the words of Northrop Frye, we are a nation with a “garrison mentality” (Frye 227). At times, we have bracketed ourselves in exclusive, strictly ordered societies in order to protect ourselves from mysterious and terrifying external forces. These forces may once have been connected to the extremes of Canada’s natural environment, but historically as well as presently, we also fear the economic, moral, or creative powers of others who are somehow different from us. In the present day, we might consider the garrison mentality working at the level of the individual more than the community: where do we each draw lines between the acceptable and familiar and the chaotic and upsetting in our own minds? Do we garrison ourselves from certain experiences, thoughts, or emotions?

The story of Manitoba’s Louis Riel is one example of a battle between garrisons, both literal and figurative. Both the inability of certain groups to see past the fears and assumptions made about others and the huge economic disparity between the interested parties in the conflict fueled the process of rebellion.

In the 1850s, the area forming present-day Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba contained a mixture of societies, each distinct in culture, language, religion, and economic power. Ontario generally had a Protestant, English-speaking society with relatively expansive economic privilege, Quebec’s residents spoke French, practiced Catholicism and had moderate economic privilege, while Manitoba exhibited a more diverse culture with an accompanying range of economic privileges (Brown, Stanley np). Manitoba at this time was not a province but simply a parcel of land owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which was then interested in exploiting the land’s resources (furs and timber) (Dunn Rupert np). The profits from these activities fell primarily into the hands of English Protestant executives, who, while ensuring that rules were obeyed by stationing plenty of company representatives and law enforcement personnel in the forts and settlements of the regions, did not live in Manitoba or recognize its unique, diverse culture. This special culture was born from the intersection of First Nations and French-Canadian societies in fur-trapping communities along Manitoba’s waterways (Dunn Metis np). These people, the Metis, spoke French and maybe a First Nations language or two, besides being Catholics with strong ties to Quebec (Dunn Metis np). They also farmed HBC lands and trapped furs, which were intended to be sold exclusively to the HBC under a legally enforced monopoly (Dunn Rupert np). There are stories of some flexibility in this legislation, however, as described in a family story told by Louis Riel’s great-grand niece. As the century progressed, more and more English settlers moved to Manitoba to farm on the riverfront, at times displacing Metis farmers who had to resettle on less desirable land (Flanagan 30 – 31). Simultaneously, the HBC gradually withdrew from the fur-trading side of business and moved on to dealing with the division and sale of its lands (Flanagan 30). A trans-continental railway was also in the works to connect the region to the more eastern Canada (Marsh np). Change was afoot in the Red River settlements, and many people wished to speak their mind about what was happening to their homes and livelihoods (Flanagan 30 – 31).

Enter the Metis leader Louis Riel. Born in Manitoba, educated in Montreal, visitor and eventual citizen of the US, poet, and devout Catholic, he offered several solutions to the government of Canada that addressed the concerns of his people, who felt their needs were unrepresented by the far-away federal government (Flanagan 34). Some successful solutions included the incorporation of Manitoba as an official province along with getting Manitoban representation in Canada’s Parliament (if only two seats), as well as the creation of a carefully structured, hybrid provisional government for the region (Flanagan 39, 34). The hybrid nature of the government mandated equal numbers of English- and French-speaking Manitobans. Less successful in the long term were Riel’s detention of certain riotous English settlers, culminating in the trial and execution of one particularly obnoxious individual, Thomas Scott, after he was involved in the assault of a Metis man (Flanagan 33). This forced Riel to leave Canada and give up his elected Parliament position due to Canadian charges he faced (Flanagan 35). But overall, Riel’s approach to governance for Manitoba was positively received by the Metis and even by many of the English settlers.

Sir John A. Macdonald had other ideas for Manitoba, however. Anxious to avoid “another Quebec,” a society garrisoned by language, religion and culture from English Canada and therefore difficult to persuade during election season, Macdonald wanted to empower the English half of Manitoban society at the expense of the Metis (Brown 136). In response to English Canadian protests in Ontario over the death of Thomas Scott, he even denied the Metis various requests for resurveying of lands and money, actions he knew would incite armed rebellion in the region (Brown 136). And since Manitoba was by then officially a part of Canada, he was not worried that the Metis would go to the Americans for military assistance (Brown 136). Finally, he wanted to exercise Canada’s new railway muscles. Without the need to send soldiers west immediately, investors, taxpayers, and Parliament were not willing to spend the huge sum required to complete the transcontinental line (Marsh np). For Macdonald, the Northwest Rebellion was perfectly timed to drive completion of his pet railway project as well as pacify Ontarian voters. The message of Riel and his provisional government on the subject of self-determination as Metis people, ability to control their lands from a shorter distance than Ottawa, and willingness to participate in the democratic process were ignored as their small-scale armed rebellion was quickly crushed by Canadian soldiers (Beal np).

Given this historical background, we can now discuss the role of the Metis as a founding partner in Canadian culture. Their status as people of mixed indigenous and French-Canadian background was quite unique in Canada at the time and perhaps contributed to Riel’s ability to unite the English and Metis people of the Red River valley into one government. However, English Canadians living east of Manitoba were not interested in such cultural quilting projects. Their privilege extended deep into Canadian government and economic power, as they were given priority access to land resources as well as controlling the majority of Parliament (Stanley np). They were not interested in a dilution of their power. The First Nations people in Ontario and to a lesser extent Manitoba had already been stripped of their lands and much of their negotiating power, and the English Canadian population, under the leadership of Macdonald as well as Alexander Mackenzie, saw the economic vulnerability of the Metis population at the time of the rebellion as a chance to reduce their power closer to the level of First Nations people. In this they were successful, quashing the rebellion and imposing the will of Parliament on the Metis while stripping them of their leader, Riel (Beal np). But not only was a stranglehold on economic power important to English Canadians. Culturally and morally, they firmly believed themselves to be in the superior position, and this was further impetus to assert their domination over the “half-breeds” of Manitoba (Brown 135). Coleman also describes this as a domination of the supposedly superior “White spirit,” that highlighted economic gains and entrepreneurial success as the ultimate goals of civilized society (Coleman 12). Perhaps even Riel’s personal cultural quilt, one including patches of strong, mystic Catholic faith, gifts for leadership and reconciliation, poetry, and the ability to traverse multiple languages, threatened English Canadian expectations of “a British model of civility,” characterized by much less diversity and much more conformity to established cultural templates (Coleman 5). We see this quilt personified by the appearance of Louie, Ray, and Al as separate individuals in Green Grass, Running Water (King 334).

The episode of Louis Riel shows an incredible contrast between a genuine effort to reconcile and empower multiple stakeholders in the Red River valley, through Riel’s creation of a bi-representational government (note that we still do not see the First Nations people involved) and the monopolizing English Canadian effort to destroy it. Riel’s side of the situation has only been publicly recognized and made a part of official history since Canada’s centennial celebrations, when various efforts including the creation of a Louis Riel opera offered his perspective on Manitoba’s history. The stitching of Riel’s story into Canadian history offers a contrasting Canadian ideology beyond the factual implications of his life and accomplishments.

Aside: One highly entertaining story of Riel’s life is presented in Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. It’s a great intro to some of the history surrounding Riel’s life as well as the major political factors at play in Canada during his time.

Works Cited

Beal, Bob, and Rod Macleod. “North-West Rebellion.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 02 February 2006. Web. 14 April 2014.

Brown, Chester. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2003. Print.

Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print.

Dunn, William, and Linda West. “The Metis.” Canada: A Country by Consent. Ottawa: Artistic Productions Limited, 2011. Web. 14 April 2014.

Dunn, William, and Linda West. “Rupert’s Land.” Canada: A Country by Consent. Ottawa: Artistic Productions Limited, 2011. Web. 14 April 2014.

Flanagan, Thomas. Louis ‘David’ Riel: ‘Prophet of the New World’, Revised Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Web. UBC Library. 14 April 2014.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 2011. Print.

kavpro. “Quilt of Belonging.” Youtube. Youtube, August 2009. 1 March 2014.

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

Marsh, James. “Railway History.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 25 March 2009. Web. 14 April 2014.

Stanley, George F.G. “Louis Riel.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 04 April 2013. Web. 14 April 2014.

Teillet, Jean. “Bragging Rights.” The Walrus. The Walrus Foundation, November 2010. Web. 1 March 2014.

Turgeon, Bernard. “Bernard Turgeon – Louis Riel.” Youtube. Youtube, January 2013. 1 March 2014.

The book Roughing It In The Bush details firsthand the English-born author Susanna Moodie’s experience as an emigrant to Canada in the 1830s. During this time, newcomers to Canada faced incredible hardships, from starvation and sickness on the Atlantic crossing to extreme winter conditions and lack of basic necessities once established on land. Perhaps most striking to Moodie, though, was the difference between the established social structure of England, from where she emigrated, and the looser, less defined, and considerably more individualistic organization present in the Canadian backwoods. Moodie perceives Canada and her role there partly through the lens of her English societal background, but also through the lens of Christianity. In fact, the complexity of her impressions of Canada and new Canadians comes from the contradictions between her religious certainty of purpose and values in settling a “wild land” (Moodie np) and her many observations of those who stray from it. Consider her Introduction to Roughing It for a moment: she contrasts the promises made by the earthly messengers of Canada’s many virtues, “its salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country, and last, not least, its almost total exemption from taxation” (Moodie np) with the harsh reality of settler life that only the “souls and bodies of men… [for whom] wholesome labour from infancy has made strong, the nerves which have become iron by patient endurance, by exposure to weather, coarse fare, and rude shelter” (Moodie np) can really handle. She also emphasizes the need for honesty, care, and genuine piety for successful society-building in the new country. These are the individuals whom, to Moodie, measure up to her moral and physical standards for successful Canadian settlers.

Given that Moodie brings up two main qualifications of a good Canadian almost immediately in the introductory passage of her Canadian story, one might wonder how she feels the original First Nations inhabitants measure up to these standards of strength and piety. Well, the suspense is kept up until much later in the book on this front. Not until Chapter 15 are we introduced to the First Nations friends and trading partners of Moodie and her family. Speaking of the local Mississauga First Nation, Moodie writes

“A dry cedar-swamp, not far from the house, by the lake shore, had been their usual place of encampment for many years. The whole block of land was almost entirely covered with maple trees, and had originally been an Indian sugar-bush. Although the favourite spot had now passed into the hands of strangers, they still frequented the place, to make canoes and baskets, to fish and shoot, and occasionally to follow their old occupation.”

The way Moodie discusses her First Nations neighbours here as well as later in the chapter suggests that she considered them part of the majestic Canadian landscape, rather than an active force in the political and civil discourse of the time. To her, First Nations as a collective are not considered agents in the shaping of Canada, although they do serve as role models for truthful and upright conduct, as when she extolls their respectful use of language, observance of local manners, avoidance of trickery, and care for their elders in various summary paragraphs describing the characteristics of the “genuine” Indian (Moodie np). From an outside perspective, some of her interactions with First Nations people seem to show that they themselves are not completely content to remain part of a landscape viewed by an ever-increasing flow of new emigrants. Their interest in Mr. Moodie’s map of the area borders on feverish, for example, as they utter “strange, uncouth exclamations of surprise” (Moodie np) and recognize its immense power in the hands of the emigrants. The fact it is so valuable to the Moodies themselves that they cannot relinquish it for any price must have only added to its power. Moodie’s First Nations friend John also has an interest in gaining literacy in his native language, although frustrated by “the difficulty he found in understanding the books written in Indian for [First Nations people’s own] use” (Moodie np). The tension between Moodie’s varied, multifaceted lived experiences with First Nations people and her rather conventional and flat summary statements of their attitudes and behaviour is fascinating and underscores the way our internal stories shape our worldview.

Works Cited

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 14 February 2014.

“Smoke Signal: Mississauga First Nation News”. Mississauga First Nation. Web. 14 February 2014.

Describing first contact between European visitors and the indigenous peoples of North America, John Sutton Lutz goes into much detail on the topics of translation and means of communication of such events. For him, these events are rich, and “elaborately staged” (Lutz 7), reverberating with aftershocks from the “collision of fundamentally different systems of thought” (Lutz 2). There are special people, known as translators, who perform delicate work at the edges of such a cataclysm. They are “Coyote- [and] … Raven-work[ers]” (Lutz 10), transforming and muddling the facts of the collision into their own unique narratives. But after the translators are done their job, we are left with their epics to keep and pass down the generations essentially without revision.

Wendy Wickwire offers us another perspective on translation. Her good friend and storyteller Harry Robinson is a translator; his stories come from the Okanagan language, nsyilxcən, and he adapted them into English to accommodate his “growing number of listeners” (Wickwire 29). But my understanding of Wickwire’s explanation gives me the impression that any storyteller is a translator, if not through language, then through time and place. This is the Coyote work: making sense of the stories we hear, and then making them accessible or meaningful or hilarious to those we share them with. Just as the only thing we can expect from Coyote is that he will never behave according to our expectations, so too do storytellers turn us on edge when they reveal information and perspective that we never saw coming. Take Robinson’s ethnographically unmanageable story of Coyote and the king of England, for example. Coyote is the tricked party in this story, as the agreement so earnestly negotiated between the two during their meeting is never brought to action in Canada. Robinson negotiates themes of dishonesty and selfishness with an eye both to European historical narratives and the omnipresent Coyote.

Wickwire asserts that Robinson is no “myth-teller— the bearer of the single, communal accounts rooted in the deep past” (29). By this she means his stories transcend the expectations scholars, historians, and ethnographers place on them, namely that they be faithful, timeless reproductions of narratives from the earliest possible translators. But this is not what Coyote does. He is “right there” and alive (Wickwire 1) anytime we open a door to his world. And in with Coyote come refreshed perspectives and new, personalized approaches to old narratives.

Robinson’s story of the two twins, Coyote and the younger white one, challenge the perception of first contact as a uniquely cataclysmic encounter when he describes the preordained nature of the invasion of North America by the younger twin’s relatives, the Europeans. We can see the potential for disaster in the return of the Europeans in this story, but its translation from a typical myth of first contact puts that event in its place along with other significant events, for instance the creation story of the two siblings and the role of each in the present. We also see the inseparability of each side in the encounter— we are twins, after all!

Coyote urges us to reconsider everything, especially the stories we tell, because this is how we as individuals identify and claim a place in the world. He reminds us that completely static, pre-translated stories can deny us part of our basic human need to involve ourselves in our own stories, whether we create them ourselves or shape them from the ones we picked up from our translators.

Works Cited

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1 – 15. Print.

“About Our Language.” FirstVoices nsyilxcən Welcome Page, 2013. Web. 07 February 2014.

“Wendy Wickwire.” University of Victoria, n.d. Web. 07 February 2014.

Wickwire, Wendy. “Introduction.” Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory, by Harry Robinson. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 1 – 30. Print.

Our stories of home all have multiple dimensions and unique flavours. Below are a few of the common threads I gathered from reading posts from the rest of the class:

Family: that which we create around us as well as that which we come from

Travel: how it allows us to reflect on home, given a good distance to view it from, or even challenges our notions of home when we discover it in a faraway land

Comfort: a feeling that comes on “wings of warmth” (Donnelly)

Language: native languages, a grandparent’s language, a combination of languages

Stories: family histories, loon stories, lived experiences

Arrivals and departures

Natural and constructed surroundings

Love

Works Cited:

Donnelly, Lauren. “Home was a Feeling”. Cypress & Rain, 31 January 2014. Web. 2 February 2014.

MacGillivray, Duncan. “2.1 Home is a crackling hearth.” fabulas, 28 January 2014. Web. 2 February 2014.

I am an ocean creature. Two summers ago, you could find me every week tossing up and down in the choppy waters of Kits Beach, clad in a wetsuit and pink cap like some sort of bald, neoprene seal, although I’m convinced a seal feels less panic every time a wave hits her in the face. As a human, I spluttered and struggled through the waves with an ever-decreasing fear but ever-growing numbness in my extremities, until I completed my long lap (2 minutes faster than last week!). Transitioning from sea to land is an awkward process at best, involving uncooperative legs and feet and certain choice curse words when a sopping, sticky wetsuit refuses to part ways with your ankles.

Let me paddle backwards a ways: my love of the ocean began with my mother. We are cold-water addicts, the sort of people who feel that the New Year hasn’t really begun until we are salty and frozen from ocean water. Really frozen sometimes, like the year we swam in the ocean at Victoria’s Gonzales Bay, then went skating on a farmer’s icy field some hours later. And trust us to never pass by our favourite lake in the summer months (months loosely defined as April – September, occasionally reaching into October depending on the weather) without stopping for a dip. We even keep a set of bathing suits and towels in the car for such occasions. We do live in Canada, by the way— Victoria has a temperate climate year-round, but its waters are hardly tropical even in the blistering 25°C breezes of midsummer.

This hypothermic habit is not shared by very many of my friends here in Vancouver. A few of us have enjoyed the occasional midnight dip at Wreck Beach, however. When we hit the beach on sunnier occasions, I think my friends see my compulsion to swim long distances from shore in frigid ocean water as unnecessarily hazardous. They are right; it is not a particularly safe activity, especially alone. But this is something that makes me joyous. Time is suspended and I focus completely on playing with the surf, or in the absence of waves maybe investigating the water’s biological contents. I rely on my friends to recognize the warning signs of impending hypothermia and to lure me out of the waves, usually with some sort of food reward. My latest ocean adventure was on a cycle tour in California over winter break. My friends and I would stop for lunch at a city beach as a break in our ride each day. Predictably, my first move would be into my bathing suit and out onto the water, and once I was in there, hard luck getting me out. There’s nothing like big surf to make me ignore the numbness of toes and fingers while competing with neoprene-clad surfers for some wave action. Fortunately, lunch always involved both avocados and chocolate, so my friends were able to roust me from my marine trance without much effort. In fact, we all enjoyed the waves, as they offered a chilling therapy for sitting in the saddle all day.

My ecstatic relationship with the ocean draws from a strange mixture of comfort, abandon, and unpredictability. Effortlessly, I float over the tops of massive waves and watch their surge and crash at the shoreline. Maybe I choke and blindly struggle to maintain forward momentum when swimming a long distance against the surface wind. Or I spend too long in a front crawl daydream, only to look up too late and pinpoint my destination, now located to my rear. Or perhaps I get sucked under a wave I am trying to surf down, performing a series of possibly graceful underwater cartwheels as I gradually lose speed to the sandy or rocky or weedy bottom. My suspicion is that in a past life, I was a sea turtle. Not an exceptionally fast swimmer to be sure, but well equipped to navigate oceans all over the planet.

I think my seafaring family did a wonderful job of instilling a sense of home within me. It is the ocean I carry with me when I am stressed or overwhelmed, my place of detachment from care and worry. And it is a home that I am lucky enough to visit every day.

Works Cited

“About us.” Vancouver Open Water Swimming Association, 2009. Web. 31 January 2014.

“Durrance Lake.” Secret Lakes of Southern Vancouver Island, 2013. Web. 31 January 2014.

When I first shared Leslie Silko’s story about the power of stories and the beginnings of evil in the world (King 9), my listener asked me a simple question: what is evil? We sometimes characterize evil as some sort of active, polarizing force in the world, but my listener disagreed. She claimed that evil does not exist in this way, just as Chamberlin reminds us how we always try to classify things into black and white, the two neat categories of “Them and Us” (49), when such dichotomies only serve to limit our understanding. Similarly, this story suggests we can clearly separate evil from not evil. It also hands the responsibility for knowledge and access to the force of evil to one person. As I began to modify the story, I realized I wanted a cooperative effort to bring evil into the story, just as the various shades of evil and not evil in today’s world are mostly defined by how others perceive them, rather than by measurement against some external rubric. And the idea of evil itself in my story here is very different than that of Silko’s witches and may not even qualify as evil at all to you.

In the process of telling this story, I went through many iterations of adding and subtracting certain details but finally had to pin some of them down for the final telling below. I have already told it again differently than shown below, though, so this recording is hardly a final version of the story I hold inside of me. I now feel much more empathy for storytellers like King who have pinned down their stories to a recorded form! It is certainly a frustrating experience to transition from a highly customizable, personal, private, even mood-dependent way of expressing oneself to a much more impersonal, finalized, and uncontrollable recorded form (uncontrollable once released, anyhow).

Here is my story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ9AwxpEWhA&feature=youtu.be

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: Anansi, 2003. Print.

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

When I think back to my Grade 11 Social Studies course (the final installment of required history and civic studies courses in BC high schools), the aspects of the curriculum I remember most highlighted Canada’s achievements on the world stage and at home over the past century. From this we learned how Canada developed into a bona fide nation during that time. Certainly, we also covered some embarrassments and mistakes— the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII, the crushing of labour movements in the Prairies during the Great Depression, and the Oka crisis, to name a few. But overwhelmingly, the taste left behind by that course was refreshing: despite making mistakes, Canadians apologize and do better next time. And we bring our expertise in listening to every side of the story to world affairs, where for many years we excelled as peacekeepers and diplomats. But this is not exactly how our story is told to those outside Canada. Take this article from the Canadian magazine The Walrus for example. The author, Larry Krotz, visits a former Indian Residential School, now a museum, to gather material for a documentary, only to discover that the Al Jazeera media network has been there first, filming documentary footage for their series Inside Stories Americas. The administrator of the museum speaks to how even her and her brother, a former leader of the local Long Plain First Nation, felt conflicted about sharing their stories too extensively with Al Jazeera, claiming “[they] just want to criticize the Canadian government. And [my brother] doesn’t want to get in any trouble” (Krotz). Just what kind of trouble should he be afraid of today? This question is itself problematic within my Grade 11 story of modern Canada.

In J. Edward Chamberlin’s book If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories, he suggests that the story of Canada’s First Nations after the arrival of Europeans is “something [Canada has] to offer the world” (228), more so than the picture of Canadians currently imagined by Canadians such as myself. To remediate some of the damage Canada has incurred upon its First Nations, Chamberlin offers a legal restoration project of sorts. He suggests that Canada change its land ownership system to restore underlying (Crown) title to aboriginal title. This means that the power underwriting the so-called “fee simple” land ownership individual Canadians hold would switch from the federal government to the aboriginal peoples of Canada. But, as Chamberlin states outright, such an act “would be a fiction,” and “[t]he facts of life would remain the same” (231) for Canadians after such a change. Its implementation would have very little impact on how we interact with land on a day-to-day basis, the idea of underlying title being a highly conceptual legal construct. So how, exactly, would this help change the narrative of colonization in Canada?

Chamberlin offers several reasons for implementing this change. Firstly, he acknowledges that First Nations, not surprisingly, believe “a story of underlying aboriginal title” (229), since Canada was their ancestral home before colonization. He also emphasizes the uniqueness of this story for each aboriginal group: just as different groups might have many unique creation stories, so too is their relationship with the land unique to within their group. According to Chamberlin, this multiplicity of land and creation stories is a rich resource for Canadians, who can benefit from the “contradict[ion of] the idea of exclusive ownership” (228) presented by a mosaic of underlying title patterned with the traditional homelands of First Nations. And finally, the recognition of First Nations stories as part of the pervasive, invisible underlay of our government and society will, in Chamberlin’s words, serve as “an example to other communities” (232) where violence has already erupted over issues of indigenous land rights. This is the type of gesture compatible with my Grade 11 version of Canada, and hopefully those outside of Canada would see it similarly.

On a practical level, the concept of switching to aboriginal underlying title in Canada is currently under discussion, at least for reserve lands. Federally, a proposal is underway to offer First Nations the option of switching these lands over to aboriginal underlying title, to the purported economic benefit of those who use this land. This proposal is warmly by many in the First Nations and academic communities, as it will allow individuals living on reserve to hold property as their own rather than simply living on it as Crown land, greatly increasing their economic power. Unquestionably, this would also develop the richness and diversity of Canada’s land stories.

Overall, Chamberlin offers a compelling suggestion for enriching Canada’s story of government and power. As it turns out, the concept of underlying aboriginal title might indeed benefit First Nations in a day-to-day fashion as well, demonstrating the strength of one type of legal fiction or story in Canada today.

Works Cited:

“Japanese Internment.” CBC Learning. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2001. Web. 16 January 2014.

Struthers, James. “Great Depression.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 07 November 2013. Web. 16 January 2014.

“Standoff at Oka.” CBC Learning. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2001. Web. 16 January 2014.

Krotz, Larry. “A Proper Schooling.” The Walrus May 2008. Web. 16 January 2014.

“Revisiting a dark chapter in Canada’s history.” Inside Stories Americas. Al Jazeera, February 2013. Web. 16 January 2014

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

“First Nations Property Ownership.” First Nations Property Ownership Initiative. First Nations Tax Commission, 2012. Web. 16 January 2014.

Welcome to my course blog for UBC’s online version of ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres, or “Oh Canada… Our home and native land?” as it is described by our instructor, Dr. Erika Paterson. I am a fourth year student studying Biophysics at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. Some of my interests include triathlon, knitting, and cross-country skiing. At times I also like to knit objects related to my coursework, such as this sea monkey (BIOL 140) and dissected frog (for a biology prof).

Last year I took ENGL 222 Literature in Canada with Duffy Roberts, where we focused on the stories of Vancouver. ENGL 470A is my first experience with an online course, and I hope that it will be an enriching and fulfilling one.

We will be listening to many storytelling voices throughout the course, from Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water and The Truth About Stories to Edward Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? and many more. Drawing from readings and other media presented in the course, we will identify aspects of storytelling and relate them to the identity of the storyteller, as well as the role storytelling plays in literature. Class storytelling will take place in individual blog postings by class members and in comments on those postings and will culminate in an online conference to be held near the end of the course (Paterson “Course Syllabus”).

When I imagine my “native” land, I picture the Canadian West Coast, full of scenic and stormy oceanfront and lush with rainforest biodiversity. This is the setting where I grew up and where I feel most at home. Of course, I didn’t really grow up in the forest — I attended a city high school in Victoria, BC, rode my bike through trafficky streets, and enjoyed all the urban conveniences from microwave ovens to Gore-tex. But beyond the picturesque backdrop that the coastline of the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca, or Salish Sea as it has recently been renamed, provides us, I have long been fascinated by the minutiae of the living environment, from birds to plants to echinoderms. In fact, recognizing and understanding so many of the organisms that live on the coast comforts me, as I am familiar with and can imagine my part in each of their stories. Victoria is the homeland of several Coast Salish groups, who traditionally shared my preoccupation with the living environment, as this was their medicine cabinet, hardware and grocery store rolled into one (Turner 28). Going further than I in their storytelling, however, they spoke words of blessing to the living materials they collected, physically imbuing them with stories and thereby increasing their value and significance (Turner 8).

During this course, I would like to become more aware of the many layers of story a single object can hold. In particular, I am interested to hear about how applying different stories to the same place or object affect how “useful” we consider it to be.

Works Cited:

Paterson, Erika. “Course Syllabus.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. Web. 08 January 2014.

Paterson, Erika. “Instructor’s Bio.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. Web. 08 January 2014.

“Duffy Roberts.” Department of English. University of British Columbia, 28 July 2011. Web. 08 January 2014.

Turner, Nancy J. Saanich Ethnobotany: Culturally Important Plants of the WSÁNEC People. Victoria, BC: Royal BC Museum, 2012. Print.