King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water remains a veritable treasure trove of clever, thinly-veiled allusions to socio-political and pop culture figures and events, playing on a web of intertextual knowledge for an enriched, heightened multi-layered literary experience. This is arguably never more the case than in the novel’s excerpt of characters reading and watching Western novels and films (pg. 207-219) – a veritable ‘supercut’ of characters weaving their own personal histories in an out of the experience and nostalgia of collectively watching and reading pulp Western novels and archaic Western films. As Charlie puts it, many of the above are pretty “standard stuff” – but King is also careful to unpack the seductive allure of the tacky, stereotypical pop culture presented, and that, no matter how monolithically rooted in stereotypes and tropes the Western is as a genre, there can still remain a sordid, seductive pleasure in participating in the culture industry and consuming its familiar, hackneyed narratives (even for audiences being most directly targeted and harmed by said stereotypes). Fittingly, Alberta, who spends her days lecturing on the horrors of Indigenous history, is the character who has the least patience for the televised Western – but even she is sucked into having its images hyperbolically grafted onto her dreams after idly flipping past the Western on TV.

In hyperlinking King’s narrative ‘supercut,’ I hope to further King’s practice of establishing a grander and richer sense of making meaning, the immeasurable interconnections of narrative and engaging with imbedded stereotypes across a variety of media (appropriately, it is hard to distinguish between the scenes in Eli’s Western novel and the film that the majority of the other characters passively flip to). Poignantly, for Charlie, this intersection between fiction and reality, past and present, and the overlapping impetus for real life experience manifests in a pointed nudge towards his character arc of finding meaning in reconnecting with his father by coming face to (racist prosthetic-covered) face with his father appearing in a derogatory, demeaning role in an old Western – a role that Portland himself would consider a high point of his life. King narratively alternates between Charlie’s flashbacks to the Western he is dozing off to – and, in an almost Birth of a Nation homaging feat of cross-cutting, the ‘soldiers’ in the Western ‘win’ in tandem with Charlie’s flashback of Portland being defeated (on and offscreen) by colonizing force. The conflation is unmistakable: the jingoistic frontier mythology of ‘cowboys win; Indians lose’ has ingratiated every permutation of Western culture, and will prove insidiously hard to unlearn, no matter how toxic.

The following hyperlinks show my attempt to unspool King’s myriad of references and intertexts in the aforementioned segment. Enjoy!

“Portland”
Currently understood as a hip, fairly ‘white’ American city, Portland, Oregon still heralds the 9th largest population of Indigenous peoples in the country, with nearly 60,000 people and 130 tribal affiliations. King’s employment of an American city as name (instead of the eponymous Canadian provincial ‘Alberta’ for one of the novel’s primary protagonists) not only aligns Portland with the ‘Americanization’ of his sadly thwarted career playing Indigenous stereotypes in Hollywood, but to the novel’s overarching theme of Colonization erasing any Indigenous past – as happened in Portland, Oregon, as around the province – in favour of being re-branded and reinterpreted in a post-colonial context.

“Remington’s”
A tacky cowboy restaurant that King (circa Charlie) describes as “Disneyland with food” – fittingly named after a firearms company, thereby directly homaging the automatic weapons that helped colonizers massacre and displace Indigenous communities throughout the lands now colloquially understood as North America centuries ago. Completing the demeaning circle of harm, Charlie and Portland work at Remingtons dressed not as cowboys, but as almost cartoonishly stereotypical ‘Injuns’ – so mired in embarrassing, stereotypical tropes that Portland reminds Charlie to “Remember to grunt […] The idiots love it, and you get better tips.”

“Sitting in front of the television”
King frequently employs this image of an Indigenous person, usually a man, passively transfixed by the television, as an instant cypher for depression, and in evoking the particular state of Indigenous people being overwhelmed and despairing in the face of centuries of compounding adversities impeding them from enjoying proper quality of life – as Portland does while defeated at numerous points throughout his stilted acting career, as depicted here.

“Four Corners”
The geographic intersection between four US states – Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado – and an area famous for being the ancestral homes of numerous Indigenous tribes, including the Anasazi, Navajo, Hopi and Ute. In a further in-joke, Remington’s (firmly affiliated with Colonial ‘white culture’) is located in a gentrified neighbourhood, while the neighbouring ‘Four Corners’ (which King codes affiliated with Indigenous life experience – effectively the homes and communities that European settlers would displace with their Remingtons) is painted as being in a much more downtrodden, underdeveloped and low-income area, thereby further reinforcing the ideological power discrepancy.

“As long as the grass is green and the waters run”
As Flick puts it, the statement is rampant with sarcastic sociopolitical intent, both recalling flowery language used in land treaty agreements used to displace and marginalize Indigenous people from their ancestral lands. The romanticized wilderness language is further ironic, Flick articulates, in the fact that Colonial development resulted in untold environmental harm, thereby endangering the qualifiers articulated in the statement itself (158).

“Doris”
A possible reference to Doris Day, singer and actor famous from the 1950s onwards, who starred in several canonical Westerns, including Calamity Jane (1953), The Ballad of Josie (1967).

“Blue shirt and a red bandana”
An iconic cowboy look, pioneered by John Wayne in numerous films, and referenced in numerous contemporary cultural intertexts, including Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Charlie’s idolizing this look reinforces King’s overarching theme of the pervasive pleasure of participating in the culture industry, even at the expense of one’s own culture, history, and the systemic oppression of it.

“John Wayne”
Arguably the most iconic star of Western cinema – who, as Flick points out, increasingly has his hyper-masculine star identity conflate with being a swaggering, “injun-hating screen cowboy” (147). Further melding the layers of fiction and real life, King has Wayne actually cross paths with Charlie at Remington’s – a pristinely sour image of the quintessential fake movie cowboy lording over an actual Indigenous person disguised as a microcosmically fake ‘Injun.’

“Soldiers and peace and love”
King furthers his curt commentary on the dissonance between sweet, seductive language used by military authority figures in oppressing minority communities – primarily American Indigenous communities in this example.

“The white woman on the television began singing a song”
Many western films, such as Cat Ballou (1965), were also musicals, and used as vehicles to further star personas – often at the expense of trivializing their plots (and further indignantly reinforcing the harmful ideologies depicted therein).

“Straight from engagements in Germany, Italy, Paris, and Toronto, that fiery savage, Pocahontas!”
‘Pocahontas’ – arguably the most iconic figure of Indigenous people in Western pop culture (thanks largely to the 1995 Disney film, and, more recently as a tactic of racist and spectacularly crass, lowbrow bullying by President Donald Trump towards Senator Elizabeth Warren) – was a member of the Pamunkey tribe in Virginia. According to, in part, historical fact and Colonial legend, Pocahontas was married to Englishman John Rolfe, renamed ‘Rebecca,’ and paraded around England as an almost diplomatic mascot for English gentility – and, more harmfully, a symbol of the propensity of English culture to ‘civilize’ Indigenous cultures and people. King’s snide treatment of ‘Pocahontas’ as a faux-touring striptease act echoes the theme of ‘Pocahontas’ being a sleazy traveling act paraded around for ‘viewing pleasure.’

“[Portland] was wearing a black mask and he had done something to his nose and had painted it red. He looked silly”
Portland’s mask and red nose encapsulate many of the most harmful cartoonish ‘Injun’ racial caricatures. The abhorrently stereotypical costume is reified by Portland’s portrayal of the ludicrous stereotypes of Indigenous and First Nations people as ‘savage,’ ‘lusty,’ or almost feral. Portland’s degradation is calcified by this embarrassment being the only employment he can find as an actor, caricaturing his already caricatured early work portraying stereotypical ‘Native Chiefs’ in early Hollywood westerns – a final splash of salt in his irreconcilable wound.

“John Wayne took off his jacket and hung it on a branch” 
Clear foreshadowing for the jacket the four elders later gift to Lionel, tenuously revealed (in the magic realism spirit of the novel) to have been Wayne’s actual costume piece. The jacket is similarly aligned with George as well, a similar brash, uncouth white character who occupies a similarly antagonistic and faux-superior role towards Indigenous communities, attempting to disrespectfully photograph the Sun Dance at the novel’s climax.

“On the bank, four old Indians waved their lances. One of them was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt.”
More foreshadowing that the four elders can somehow hop between the worlds of Western fiction and the ‘real world’ of the novel. Their ‘spying’ on Lionel specifically watching the film alludes to their eventual intervention into trying to ‘fix’ his life. Lionel, fittingly, is oblivious to this, ignoring the amazing rupturing of the fourth wall by plunging his head into his chest in existential despair, ignoring the film.

“Today is a good day to die.” 
A phrase commonly attributed to Crazy Horse before the battle of Little Big Horn – but considered by many to have originated by a different Indigenous speaker at a different battle. Regardless, the phrase is now so imbedded into the cultural lexicon that it has become coopted by the Die Hard franchise – as inglorious a fate of sordidly ironic cultural appropriation as any.

“Iron Eyes”
A clear, tongue-in-cheek allusion to ‘Iron Eyes Cody’  – an Italian-American actor who gained consistent work as an actor by impersonating First Nations and Indigenous characters in Westerns and comedies.  C.B. – Portland’s actor friend – is clearly patterned after Cody.

“Iron Eyes Cody” – or, as his birth certificate would have it, the Italian ‘Espera DeCorti.’ One of Hollywood’s most famous ‘Fake Indians,’ and genesis for King’s ‘C.B.’ 

“Bursum.”
In creating Bill Bursum, Lionel’s boss at the video store, as Flick notes, “King combines the names of two men famous for their hostility to Indians” (148): Holm O. Bursum, New Mexico senator, who proposed the “Bursum Bill” – a piece of legislation designed to irrefutably lend colonists “squatters’ rights” on Indigenous lands, and Buffalo Bill Cody, purveyor of the infamous sideshow exploiting First Nations people as carnival entertainment – a clear predecessor for the kind of shill, hack entertainment and dismissive superiority towards Indigenous people championed by Bill Bursum in King’s novel. Bursum’s being aligned here with John Wayne having a jingoistic victory over the Indigenous characters in the Western movie that unites all the characters is a clear conflation of white privilege trampling over Indigenous rights, both crowing proudly while doing so.

WORKS CITED

A Good Day to Die Hard (film). Dir. John Moore. Twentieth Century Fox, 2013.

Barber, Sally. “Native Cultures of Four Corners, Arizona.” USA Today. Web. Accessed on March 17, 2019.

Cat Ballou (film). Dir. Elliot Silverstein. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1965.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1999): 140-172. Web. Accessed on March 15, 2019.

Hamilton, E.L. “The True Story of Pocahontas.” The Vintage News. Web. Accessed on March 17, 2019.

“Iron Eyes Cody.” IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. Web. Accessed on March 17, 2019.

Jurassic Park (film). Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1993.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1993. Print.

Krieg, Gregory. “Here’s the deal with Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage.” CNN. Web. Accessed on March 16, 2019.

Osife, Maiya. “The roots of Portland’s Native American community.” Metro News. Web. Accessed on March 16, 2019.

Pocahontas (film). Dir. Mike Gabriel & Eric Goldberg. Walt Disney Pictures, 1995.

Remington Arms. Web. Accessed on March 16, 2019.

Takatoka, as told by Lee Standing Bear Moore. “Today is a Good Day to Die.” Manataka Indian Council. Web. Accessed on March 17, 2019.

“What was the Bursum Bill?” Study.com. Web. Accessed on March 17, 2019.

In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation. Why do you think this is so?

“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
-Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), Casablanca

Thomas King’s acclaimed Green Grass, Running Water is an almost dizzyingly multi-layered story, unspooling numerous story threads, anchored by pop culture and sociopolitical benchmarks, all framed by an ongoing Indigenous Creation story – itself punctuated by bantering commentary by Coyote (both “Old” and contemporary), a satirically huffy Judeo-Christian depiction of God, and an ambiguous narrator figure (arguably King himself, breaking the narrative ‘fourth wall’ and interjecting as storyteller). But, acting as a piece of core connective tissue through the narrative Russian Doll of interacting stories and audiences is a notion of paradigm resistance that permeates each level of the increasingly metatextual novel.

On the surface, the disjunction between the characters and their array of conflicts and the grandiosity of King’s Creation narratives leads to the characters’ personal struggles feeling trite and unremarkable – comparatively not amounting to a hill of beans, in the Casablanca vernacular – in the face of the origin of life. However, what unifies all of the disparate story threads, is some notion of a frontier of resistance. All of King’s characters are seen, at some point in the novel, taking a stand against ideological conventions. Alberta’s steadfast decision to become a single mother leads to all manner of discrimination and scorn from friends, family, and especially the standardized medical system, depicted by King as almost incomprehensibly archaic (177). Eli, similarly, is depicted as softly countercultural radical by abandoning his stable but unfulfilling job as a university professor to occupy his childhood home in protest to it being torn down for the sake of a major dam, deflecting the political machinations of the government with gently obfuscating circular conversation about the weather (137). Even Lionel demonstrates a darkly comedic take on accidental resistance, when he is arrested for accidentally being strong-armed into partaking in (and being arrested at) an “American Indian Movement” protest in the United States (58-61) – an incident of sordid systemic discrimination that mars any trajectory in his later-life career.

Even King’s style of constructing and sequencing dialogue is pointedly atypical – and deceptively political in and of itself. King constantly depicts characters as having seemingly two simultaneous but seldom intersecting conversations, their concentric circles of communication occasionally wryly commenting on one another – but sometimes serving to avoid the conversation itself as a form of resistance. Take, for example, this exchange between Eli and Cliff Sifton, a government representative tasked with convincing Eli to relinquish his family home for the sake of expanding a local dam:

Sifton set his coffee cup on the railing. “You know, I always thought Indians were elegant speakers.”
“Storm’s coming.” 
“But all you ever say is no. I come by every day and read that thing those lawyers thought up about voluntarily extinguishing your right to this house and the land it sits on, and all you ever say is no.”
“Be here by tonight.” 
“I mean, no isn’t exactly elegant, is it?” 
“Maybe get some hail, too.”
(137).

To King, Eli’s act of continuously, belligerently refusing to engage in the same conversation as Sifton is itself an active form of resistance – an act of, in the face of storied systemic discrimination, simply holding fast and consistently, peacefully, changing the subject. Apart from the obvious intertexts of Indigenous Canadians being uprooted from ancestral homes due to controversial and disputed land treaties (and acknowledging treaties is about the only time Eli and Sifton end up having the same conversation [138]), Eli’s pointed disruptions in the flow of Sifton’s attempting to steer the conversation back to hegemonic, colonial control prove microcosmic for King’s storytelling throughout Green Grass, Running Water.

Ultimately, it’s my take that the consistent intertexts of Creation story – and the meta-commentaries therein by Coyote, ‘God,’ and the Narrator – serve a similar narrative function to Eli’s taciturn changing of the subject. As discussed in previous blog entries, one of King’s primary preoccupations is dismantling the cultural hegemony of the Christian Creation story of Genesis, in favour of positing and popularizing alternate Indigenous Creation stories. In Green Grass, Running Water, King purposefully inverts the cultural hierarchy of Judeo-Christian Creation stories with a twinkle in his eye, re-writing Noah as a lecherous boor (145), to the dominant in-text Creation story of Changing Woman (145), and inverts “God” to “Dog” (an in-joke further amplified by both by the anchor setting of King’s “Dead Dog Café,” the alignment both comparing Christian ‘God’ to a consumable tourist trap and fast food substance, but also in that the ‘Dog’ in the eponymous cafe is a complete hoax…). In demonstrating the two Creation stories intertwining, King further amplifies the theme of cultural decolonialization, demonstrating the fluidity and instability of spiritual paradigms as equally amorphous to others.

But I think that King’s juxtaposition of Creation with the seemingly menial struggles of his contemporary characters additionally serves a second purpose: namely, to establish the psychic weight of centuries of microaggressions endured by all Indigenous Canadians in the face of consistent sociopolitical maneuvers designed to disempower and displace them, and functionally render them culturally extinct. By cross-cutting between his contemporary characters struggling to, in their own respective ways, resist the roadblocks of society (Alberta with her disinterested love triangle and systemically thwarted aspirations for childbirth; Eli and the dam; Lionel’s career aspirations constantly sucker-punched by a sordidly unwarranted criminal record from his accidental activism) and a retooled Creation myth similarly plagued by pesky, rude intrusions (namely, the Judeo-Christian figures), King crafts an overarching sense of tribulations and solidarity.

A Navaho depiction of Changing Woman – without clear indication of breast size. King’s Noah would be crestfallen. 

By juxtaposing the Creation story’s Changing Woman’s journey from water to land in a canoe (badgered by sexual aggressor Noah) to Eli’s own troubles with (thankfully, less lusty) Noah surrogate Sifton, King seems to wryly imply the universality and timelessness of pesky, systemic obstacles to what should be a peaceful life – you can almost imagine King’s Narrator remarking ‘we had trouble keeping out of the water then, and we have trouble keeping out of the water now.’ Just as King’s contemporary characters each engage with stereotypical Western novels and films as a means of metaphorically contextualizing their own respective setbacks and discriminations, King’s juxtaposition of Creation myth and the stories of his contemporary characters serves to not only destabilize the Colonial dominance of the Christian Creation story – it equally speaks to the internalized narrative of Indigenous Canadians that irksome, endless systemic roadblocks and frustrations are, sadly, timelessly tantamount to existing as an Indigenous person, and unlikely to change any time soon.

I have yet to finish Green Grass, Running Water, and thus to see how King entwines his respective storylines and threads – a conflation seeming inevitable due to the four escaped Indigenous inmates, seemingly hopping between the spiritual and worldly realms of narrative. Still, I welcome all thoughts: do you think King’s juxtaposition of Creation and contemporary stories serves as an act of satirical resistance, and a means of empathy to the incessant political and systemic obstacles towards Indigenous life? Or is King’s stew of stories a means of rendering the tribulations of the contemporary characters all the sillier and more inconsequential in the face of the grandiosity of Creation? Regardless, one thing is indisputable: King can go down in history as the first scholar musing on metatextual spirituality to make such prolific use of the word “poop” (145) – a worthwhile and laudable moment in criticism, if none else.

-KH

WORKS CITED

American Indian Movement.Web. Accessed on March 5, 2019. 

Casablanca (film). Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942.

“Changing Woman (Rainbow, Silver, and Crystal) – Navaho Creation.” Pinterest. Accessed on March 6, 2019.

Hatch, Kevin. “You Say Potato, I Say Creation.” ENGL 470 99C Blog. Web. Accessed on March 6, 2019.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1993. Print.

Frye writes:

A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:

The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

“It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some riddle as ‘Where is here?’”
-Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (222)

In his seminal critique of Canadian literature, The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye makes a number of bold, broad, divisive, and, quite frequently, head-scratch-worthy claims. One of his more conventional yet pertinent assertions, however, is viewing “Literature [as] conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling” (234). Indeed, Frye speaks extensively of the ethereal, elusive condition of being Canadian, and how our literary output conveys a cavernous yearning to collectively, culturally self-identify, and how it serves as “an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada. It records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to, and it tells us things about this environment that nothing else will tell us” (217).

Northrop Frye, looking 100% the way his work reads. 

And yet, somewhat paradoxically, Frye seems to be harbouring a consistent snide disdain for art unduly derived from personal experience, finding it somehow antithetical to originality or artistry in form. He critiques most Canadian writing as leaning excessively on their own experiences as Canadian, stipulating “There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. […] If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context towards the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting” (216, emphasis mine).

As such, following this model of criticism (a transparently problematic one; but let’s hear him out), Frye seems to engage with the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent-General of the Department of Indian Affairs, in a contextually compartmentalized fashion, likely only citing Scott’s governmental title as an afterthought, rather than for its contextual impact on Scott’s poetic output. Viewed in a contemporary context, Scott’s elegaic, fawning language in writing about Indigenous Canadians, as cited by Frye, seems almost harmfully at odds with the harsher, overtly harmful reality of his instituted policies in the Department of Indian Affairs – this is the man, after all, who coined the phrase “Indian problem” (qtd. in Kariya 195), after all. Still, for Frye, Scott’s managing to, on the surface, delineate and distinguish between his more overtly harmful political policies and his more effusive poetic language in terms of engaging with Indigenous Canadians, would likely be considered as a positive.

This is not to say that Frye is necessarily in favour of the mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians (although, given that many of his ideological stances are as rigid and archaic as his language – “Canada began as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the east” [219]? Yeesh – who’s to say…), so much as in favour of a writer who, on the surface, seems able to bifurcate his ‘intrinsic’ art from lived experience as a Canadian (the aforementioned ‘circumference’) and the intrinsic experience of his poetic language. Frye appears more interested in the perceived dissonance between high and low culture in Scott’s literary output than any sociopolitical ramifications or contradictions in Scott’s life. For, Frye might protest, how could we possibly demean someone’s artistic output just because of atrocities committed in their personal life? This is a theorist who would have been eaten alive in the era of ‘Me Too…’

However, I’d actually argue that, despite this seeming schism between Scott’s poetry and politics, they actually work in tandem with each other towards accomplishing the same, equally devastating, objective. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Scott’s primary ideological project was trying to get rid of “the Indian problem.”  Here, I’d argue that his means of doing so was multifaceted: by rooting Indigenous Canadians as a thing of the past by ideologically rebranding them as archaic (or “primitive,” as Frye’s terminology has it) in his poetry, while instituting governmental policies of more tangible cultural erasure, Scott’s political and artistic objectives intertwine to a common goal of erasure and eradication. In Frye’s terminology, Scott is attempting to institute his own kind of “conscious mythology,” ideologically coding Indigenous Canadians as a people firmly rooted in the past, playing into stereotypes of them being on the cusp of extinction (King, The Truth About Stories 33), and, more than anything, as antithetical to his vision of a modern Canada  (which, far from coincidentally, conflates with the greater degree of contemporary ‘sophistication’ and ‘civility’ Frye finds in Scott’s other poetry).

Ultimately, not only has Frye’s rigid definition of intrinsic artistic integrity and the myth of originality been debunked by thinkers such as Mark Twain years before Frye’s writing, but his snide dismissal of Canadian context and content lending validity to artistic output is as short-sighted as it is dangerous. Dangerous in the sense of allowing the hypocrisy of allowing harmful figures such as Duncan Campbell Scott to further ideological objectives such as systematically eradicating the cultural presence of Indigenous Canadians through a tactical disconnect between artistic and political maneuvers, assuredly – but also dangerous in its dismissal of larger critical interrogation of what it truly means to be Canadian, and how we can adequately understand Canadian literature. A budding artist following Frye’s mould of critique would make a concentrated effort to strive for more intrinsic, universal storytelling, leaving out the “circumference” of Canadian context, but this would fly in the face of trends Frye identifies as integral to Canadian artistry.

If, indeed, Canadian literature is “an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada,” then it seems almost pointedly paradoxical not to claim that an understanding of Canada is integral to an appreciation of Canadian literature – and, indeed, what flourishes of navigating and interrogating Canadian sociopolitical context can help breed new understandings of both Canadian context and new heights of Canadian artistic output. I’d argue that the main function of art is to better elucidate and contextualize life – so, by that definition, what kind of art could we have that pointedly refuses to let life in? I think a lot of our earlier discussions of Indigenous First Stories and oral tradition, and the multifaceted functions they fulfilled as spiritual benchmarks, local history, sociopolitical doctrine, pop culture, and more. In essence, most First Nations and Indigenous storytelling is a wholly holistic means of accenting and contextualizing life and culture – and, in doing so, it seems predicated on the exact opposite ethos to what Frye privileges. Maybe I just answered my own rhetorical question on whether or not Frye would be an ally or pointedly the opposite to Indigenous Canadians…

As such, my closing question is this: Do you think there ever was such a thing as Frye’s notion of ‘intrinsic’ writing in a vacuum – a callback, perhaps, to the centuries old philosophy of Matthew Arnoldian “sweetness and light”?  Do you think that Frye’s proposed metrics of artistic integrity can fly in an increasingly globalized contemporary world? If, as Mark Twain proposes, there was never really such thing as an original idea in the way that Frye seems to be proposing, how can we better translate the specific cultural circumstances of a country, culture, or people  – particularly, in the context of our course, the stories, culture, and experience of Indigenous and First Nations Canadians, such as Thomas King’s notion of “interfusional” storytelling (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 186-187) – in a way that retains their specific, authentic cultural footnote, but remains accessible to a global audience? How best can we share their stories in a way that will ultimately benefit the storytellers? Perhaps navigating these potentially rhetorical questions will provide a better answer to Frye’s snippy take on what he considers (and I think our course unironically supports) the ultimate Canadian conundrum: “Where is here?”

-KH

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Web. Accessed on February 27th, 2019.

Frye, Northop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971. 215-253. Print.

Hatch, Kevin. “Orality, Curtain Lights (or: Build Your Own Artificial Authenticity! Some Assembly Required).” ENGL 470 99C Blog. Accessed on February 18, 2019.

Kariya, Paul. “The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development: The culture-building process within an institution.” Place/Culture/Representation. Eds. James S. Duncan and David Ley. London: Routledge, 1993. 187-204. Web. Accessed on December 9, 2018.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga: Broadview Press, 2004. 183-190. Print.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

“Mark Twain on Plagiarism and Originality.” Unicheck. Web. Accessed on February 27th, 2019.

Carlson writes:

“Harry Robinson’s account of literacy being stolen from Coyote by his white twin conform to all the standard criteria associated with a genre of Salish narratives commonly referred to by outsiders as legend or mythology with one exception – they appear to contain post-contact content” (56).

Why is it, according to Carlson and/or Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
-Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, 1920  (qtd. in Kariya  195)

Whoof.

Scott’s vitriolic, fire and brimstone words may evoke instant flinches of anger or disgust in a contemporary context. Nonetheless, they proved microcosmic of a disconcertingly common practice of his time (and one that, more than we’d care to admit, extends far beyond to a contemporary epoch): namely, that of Colonial political policymakers of predominantly European descent managing Indigenous and First Nations communities and people. In short, making decisions on their behalf, generally without consulting them (or often by outright harmfully discriminating against them), bereft of courtesy and empathy, and generally effectively treating the lives, living situations, cultural presence and lineage, and essentially quality of life of enormous communities of people with the comparative humdrum flippancy of a rung of agriculture or trade.

I’d argue that hindsight (but, again, these attitudes are far from exclusively rooted in the past) demonstrates two main predominant attitudes of exactly how said Colonial policymakers aimed to manage the people whose lands they were in the midst of setting up shop on: namely, as Thomas King might put it, either erasure or taxidermy. To some, the Indigenous and First Nations people were, as Scott succinctly spat, a “problem,” to be simply assimilated or otherwise stamped out. To others, the land’s initial residents were seen as effectively a walking talking ethnographic diorama. Their lives and cultures were to be preserved and cherished… insofar as they fulfilled the stereotypical image of how European Colonists envisioned them, and without any consideration of how said people might actually want or need to live. Both, as King puts it, “ree[k] of unabashed ethnocentrism and [sometimes…] well-meaning dismissal” (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial 184). And, ultimately, regardless of intent, history has shown the latter attitude to be, in many ways, largely just as harmful as the former.

Examples of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ Indigenous photography – King’s so-called “pretend Indians.” Curtis’ website, I see fit to point out, still carries the auspicious byline “A True Friend of the Indian” on google. I’ll just leave that here.

The editorial biases that Wendy Wickwire finds in Franz Boaz’ ‘sanitation’ of Indigenous storytelling, removing any faux-‘anachronistic’ language such as the word “gun” (or the elimination of more contemporary Indigenous stories from collections or chronicling altogether) to substantiate the illusion of all Indigenous stories being timeless, age-old fables (Wickwire 23) is a perfect example of exactly that same form of cultural erasure. It is the literary equivalent of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ Indigenous photoshoots, which, as King points out, were as much a game of dress up as a form of ethnographic documentation (The Truth About Stories 32-33). King later describes the kind of ascribed performativity of Curtis’ staged, stereotypical traditional costume-clad photoshoots as “a kind of ‘pretend’ Indian […] dressed up in a manner to substantiate the cultural lie that had trapped us” (The Truth About Stories 45). And, I think it’s safe to say, the ongoing pop cultural presence of this same ‘pretend Indian,’ satirical or not, shows the shelf-life and disastrous racial prejudice ripple effects from the cultural identity ideological constructed by Curtis, Boaz, and others.

Curtis’ ‘pretend Indian’ hyperbolized into ‘comedic relief’ racism in The Simpsons… in 2003. D’oh…!

King has two main salient points in his above remark: one, that projects such as Curtis’ and Boaz’ further reify the image of all Indigenous and First Nations people as an antiquated stereotype, furthering their being anchored in Canadian culture as functionally ‘a thing of the past’ – and, secondly, that generations of subsequent Indigenous and First Nations people would then need to, themselves, perform the ascribed stereotype to attain any bastion of Indigenous authenticity (as King himself experienced in his university years). As King puts it, it may be a lie, but it is one that serves to trap future generations, in terms of both external and internal cultural and aesthetic identity, all the way into present-day. And, to add insult to injury, the archaic aesthetic that Boaz and Curtis ascribe to their chronicling of Indigenous and First Nations words and images feeds into the domineering cultural pitfall of the assumed myth of ‘progress’: that Indigenous and First Nations culture (whether assumed to be good or bad) is antiquated, or ‘old-fashioned’ (hopefully people at least resist from using the word “primitive” now…). This, as King sombrely points out, is not only disastrously harmful in terms of contemporary treatment of Indigenous and First Nations people, but it serves to further bifurcate and emancipate individuals and communities from their actual cultural traditions, which may or may not fit the stereotypical marketing mould of ‘the Indian white people had in mind’ (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 185).

Of course, cultural images shape perception which shape sociopolitical treatment – and history also saw clear examples of how such well-meaning ethnocentrism could result in even more disastrous quality of life for the people purportedly intended to be protected by it. As King points out, the people Curtis was documenting were generally thought to be “poised at the brink of extinction” (The Truth About Stories 33). But, as Theodore Binnema and Kevin Hutchings argue, this attitude was corroborated by many Romantic European intellectuals during the era of Colonialism, cultivating the now infamous stereotype of the “noble savage” (116). Many of these well-intentioned European-intellectuals-turned-Canadian-policymakers, such as Sir Francis Bond Head, strove to protect the ‘noble, natural purity’ of Indigenous and First Nations communities from what they saw as the corrupting influences of European culture – the effect being an even further emancipation of First Nations communities from their ancestral lands to inhospitable new living spaces due to the desire to whisk them away from supposedly harmful European influence (122). Well-intentioned or not, these gestures demonstrate the same overreach of controlling Colonial cultural puppeteering, making decisions on behalf of Indigenous and First Nations communities, which, whether intended to be for their benefit or not, were only further building blocks towards the same project of presumed ‘extinction.’

So, the age old question: how do we move forward? As always, I welcome any thoughts and insights, but, to me, King has, himself, coyly provided the most astute answer to all non-Indigenous people weighing in: stop trying to put words into the mouths and imperiously make decisions on behalf of Indigenous people, and allow them to contribute to their own conversation. King’s genre classifications of Indigenous “interfusional” literature, like Wickwire’s chronicling of Harry Robinson’s stories, or “associational” stories – which King even articulates as being a clear entry point to learning about Indigenous culture and stories for non-Indigenous readers (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 186-187) – are a great starting point to a better sense of an ‘authentic’ Indigenous experience than the curated ethnographic stereotypes of Curtis or Boaz. Listening and learning to the accounts of actual people and communities, to me, seems like the most tangible and proactive steps for non-Indigenous Canadians to take towards complicating and reshaping ‘the Indian they had in mind.’

-KH

WORKS CITED

Binnema, Theodore and Hutchings, Kevin. “The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836-1838.” Journal of Canadian Studies 39:1 (Winter 2005). 115-138. Web. Accessed on September 27, 2018.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality and Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines. Eds. Carlson, Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson. Toronto: Uof Toronto Press, 2011. 43-72. Print.

Edward S. Curtis Gallery. Web. Accessed on February 18, 2019.

Kariya, Paul. “The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development: The culture-building process within an institution.” Place/Culture/Representation. Eds. James S. Duncan and David Ley. London: Routledge, 1993. 187-204. Web. Accessed on December 9, 2018.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga: Broadview Press, 2004. 183-190. Print.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

“The Bart of War” (Television episode). The Simpsons, Season 14, Episode 21 (Originally aired May 18, 2003). Web. Media clip accessed on February 18, 2019.

Wickwire, Wendy. “Introduction.” Living By Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Author Harry Robinson; Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 7-33.

First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview.

“The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy.

However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

“Don’t you just love cryptic stories? I certainly do.”
-Thomas King (11)

In writing this post, I’ve had to start by examining my own language, and my immediate tendency to err towards the phrasing ‘creation myths,’ rather than ‘creation stories.’ It’s a subtle turn of language, but one which, as King points out, contains copious subtext that, unintentionally, could rile and infuriate some, and likely amuse others. But should it? Does my initial phrasing contain a purposefully dismissive, inflammatory anti-spiritual bias – one which some would read as malicious and vindictive? Or is my brain just used to using the words ‘myth’ and ‘story’ interchangeably, without any implied bias or devaluation? As Chamberlin points out, any story – even the ones ideologically hard-wired as infallible scientific truths – requires a certain amount of trust, belief, and suspension of disbelief to take in (125). I don’t think it’s even that far-fetched to posit that the very act of listening to a story is inherently a leap of faith.

Initially, you’d expect this to promote a new level of tolerant inclusivity – that everyone is storytelling all of the time, and that a curious conversation could be built around which stories stick for who and why. But, as King articulates, Western culture is anchored on dichotomies (25) – and it is immediately unsurprising that a culture that largely leans on frontier mythology (see? there’s that pesky word again!) should largely pride itself on decisiveness, on taking a stance and taking a stand. The concept continues to be ingrained in Western audiences on all frontiers, both frivolous and vitally, devastatingly important. The dress is blue and black. The word is ‘Yanni.’  You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.

‘THE dress’ – aka, the microcosm of people’s propensity to wage wars – figurative or literal – over scrutinizing subtle differences.

Arguably, few such dichotomies could be as destructively divisive as those of spirituality, and their corresponding creation stories. Wars have been fought, people killed, and families have been torn apart over the inability to reconcile differing, ‘blasphemous’ beliefs. King astutely articulates that “contained within creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist” (10, Italics mine). With this in mind, the distinction between two stories of creation, and understanding one as sacred, the other as secular (King 25), isn’t as simple as a case of ‘agree to disagree.’ To those for whom the story is sacred, disbelief is a devaluation of their entire fabric of existence, of personal and collective self-definition. It can ultimately be seen as telling them everything they believe in is a lie.

Yikes.

King, however, could likely afford to make the assumption that an audience attending the CBC Massey Lectures Series would already be intimately familiar with the story of Genesis – as he puts it, “we live in a predominantly scientific, capitalistic, Judeo-Christian world governed by physical laws, economic imperatives, and spiritual precepts” (12). Indeed, he devotes less than a full page (in the written incarnation of his Massey lecture) retelling it, as opposed to the over 10 pages he spends recounting the Indigenous creation story of Charm.* In addition to the discrepancy in length, King’s contrasting tones in telling the two stories can be read as playfully silly on both parts. King plays Charm’s story as one peppered with silliness, talking animals, and self-effacing comedic asides, for the sake of making it more accessible and enjoyable to (presumedly) unfamiliar audiences.

However, his doing so also has the additional affect of making his use of archaic, biblical language in the telling of the story of Genesis (21-22) seem all the more pompous and itself silly by contrast. Similarly, King pokes at the supposed ideological infallibility of Genesis, immediately slyly articulating the crucial inferences and assumptions inherent in different tellings – and how slight tweaks in language can snowball into attitudes of ‘blaming Eve,’ and corresponding imbedded patriarchy (22). In this way, King’s sly, deceptively simple use of language can be seen as a means of respectively empowering and disempowering the ideological weight imbued in both stories, and levelling the proverbial playing field in terms of his audience’s receptivity to them.

Of course, to King, a story is never just a story. And, given King’s overarching, recurring commentary on the mistreatment of Indigenous people and communities, past and present, throughout Canada, it is tempting to apply such a metaphoric framework to his contrasting creation stories, and the parallel tensions between belief and disbelief. After all, as John Lutz suggests, the initial encounter between Indigenous and European communities can be seen as an inherently spiritual one (35) – effectively the ‘creation’ story for a deep-seated understanding of country, nationality, inheritance, and ownership – or the quintessential degradation of all these things – for an entire culture of people. King’s Charm creation story has a clever subtextual reading of being analogous for the experience of Indigenous communities encountering European colonists (who, like Charm, came proverbially tumbling out of the sky). In the story of Charm, the attitude of the animals towards their unexpected visitor is that of supportive collaboration, and the phrase “what are we going to do with you?” being implicitly welcoming and beneficial towards the invading party rather than suspicious (15). Conversely, the subtextual reading of King’s cited Genesis story is that of puritanical laws, legislation, and ultimately the perennial torment of Adam and Eve in the face of them (22).

Combining the metaphoric implications of the two stories (Indigenous communities were welcoming to European colonists, and were rewarded with European legislation ultimately served to, like Adam and Eve, displace them from their lands and perennially punish them) hardly seems like a stretch. And King’s articulation of the Genesis story being so foundational for so many Western audiences of European descent suggests how foundational similar mindsets of imposition, control, subjugation, and disproportionate consequences is for them. My read on this is not that King intends the alignment of his audiences with the colonists who wreaked havoc upon Indigenous communities so much as a rebuke as a call for empathy – a challenge to consider how foundational each of our creation stories can be in terms of establishing attitudes with the propensity to harm others.

King dismissively admonishes those who would leap to considering the creation stories of Charm and Genesis “the same,” rightly seeing the subtle tweaks in language and values to hold immense ideological weight (23). Nonetheless, time and again, I find myself wondering why people worldwide are so drawn to the small differences, rather than the far more overwhelming deluge of similarities, which, to me, seems the most straightforward path to Chamberlin’s notion of ‘common ground’ (208). Lutz, similarly, devotes his article to helping bridge the supposedly insurmountable gap between Indigenous and European peoples in their initial encounter by, in the wake of decades of scholarship unpacking differences, weaving together threads of comparison. To Lutz, the fact that the performances of the Indigenous and European people are different pales in relevance next to the fact that both are performing, and for similar objectives. He even dodges the inherent hierarchies present in most binary oppositions by positing that both “people behaved ‘rationally’ within the context of their own cultural definitions” (33). Simple as this may seem, as Lutz points out, the weight of historical hierarchal power imbalances makes it such that suggesting core similarities between parties commonly understood as oppressor and oppressed is inherently controversial, and almost an objectionable practice (32). As King puts it, “we do love our dichotomies. […] We trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas” (25).

However, the very act of understanding stories as metaphors is, in itself, complex and enigmatic – and, moreover, a practice we are constantly undertaking on every level of our lives. Finding the similarities between stories is what takes Harry Robinson’s Indigenous story of the “paper” from a simple, befuddling tale anchored on mysterious anachronisms to a scathing account of an Indigenous understanding of European colonialism and unceded land disputes (Wickwire 9-10). This act of ascribing sociopolitical commentary to Robinson’s story is inherently a practice of finding ‘sameness’ – and, the process of comparing and contrasting it to the Western account of European colonialism is one rife with the propensity for understanding and empathy. Telling the Indigenous perspective through playful stories, as King and Robinson do, is a means of making them accessible and palatable for an audience too accustomed to silencing them. As King points out, this method of storytelling can even be accessible by children (13), and a means of establishing less discriminatory and more accepting mindsets of ideological tolerance from a young age. King and Robinson’s stories preserve the weight of Indigenous righteous indignation and resistance, but with less fear of being discounted, devalued, or ignored, as King encountered in his days of more vitriolic Indigenous protests (66). There may be an inherent imbalance of respectability between King’s story of Charm and his recounting of the story of Genesis – but, as King is quick to point out, that imbalance was already there, and something he, as a storyteller, must carefully work against, for his story to fall upon more receptive ears. 

Not everyone would see it as such. I can already imagine many audiences taking King to task for (subjectively) devaluing Indigenous storytelling by aligning it with the superfluous goofiness of children’s storytelling. Part of this aforementioned culture of dichotomies comes a mindset inherently primed to find fault – a critique seeking out works and words that are problematic that, at times, can veer into the overbearing. Don’t get me wrong: carefully taking to task stories that are harmful is absolutely essential, and finding the recent cultural agency to do so with viable consequences and mechanisms for positive change is utterly essential. But, at the same time, scrutinizing word choice, while important, can also become exhausting – and, ultimately, a major deterrent for many to tell their stories in the first place (or, even worse: the wrong people, not plagued with such existential dilemmas, will continue telling their stories, and all we’ll get will be a deluge of bad stories). So, why are we so primed to anchor on differences, when it seems to me that the similarities often lead to far more fascinating macro-questions? Why is the sparring over whether the dress is black and blue or white and gold more interesting than the fact that so many people so confidently see it differently in the first place? And, why are we so primed to find fault in the telling of stories, rather than celebrating that they are told in the first place, and using them as stepping stones to conversation? I pose these as rhetorical questions, but avidly welcome any insights. Whether I agree or disagree with them, I firmly maintain that, for me, the conversation wherein they are circulated remains the paramount priority.

-KH

*I’m not sure if King had intended ‘Charm,’ the protagonist of his story, to recall Chamberlin’s discussion of ‘charms’ and how they “collapse the distinction between the imagination and reality” (175), but the coincidence was far too thematically lucrative for me not to comment on. 

WORKS CITED

Abad-Santos, Alex. “‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’: The Audio Clip That’s Tearing the Internet Apart.” Vox (May 16, 2018). Web. Accessed on February 7, 2019.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Aboriginal — Non-Aboriginal Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. John Lutz. Vancouver: University of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.

Weintraub, Karen. “Blue or White Dress? Why We See Colours Differently.” National Geographic (May 16, 2018). Web. Accessed on February 6, 2019.

Wickwire, Wendy. “Introduction.” Living By Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Author Harry Robinson; Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 7-33.

Read at least 6 students’ blog short stories about ‘home,’ and make a list of BOTH the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find and look for differences as well; look to see if you can find student peers who appear to have different values then yourself  when it comes to the meaning of ‘home.’ Post this list on your blog, and include commentary please.

It’s telling of how intimate and elusive a concept ‘home’ is that – upon having the immense privilege of being invited to glimpse into those of my fellow classmates – the first common ground that became immediately apparent was nearly everyone beginning their blogs by outlining how daunting, elusive, and unsettlingly emotionally vulnerable the act of sharing theirs was. There’s no question that this was my experience as well. Regardless, my own trepidation quickly dispelled with the deep comfort of noticing  how comfortingly familiar a narrative of ‘home’ arose across the board, even for those students whose life experiences varied dramatically from my own.

Appropriately enough, ‘home’ was not a fixed or singular concept for any single writer, across the board. This is perhaps unsurprising, as I did not come across a single blog where the writer had lived in a single place their entire life, instead finding a variety of stories of people struggling to reconcile homes of past and present. Ross and Sean both offered very similar accounts to my own experience navigating the distinction between ‘hometown’ and current home in Vancouver, while Georgia – my only fellow Ontarian I came across – demonstrated an amusingly similar dismissive indifference to our province of origin. Indeed, both Anna and Ross offered strikingly similar accounts to my own of how travelling outside of the country helped concretize and reify the feeling of Canada as home – perhaps an ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ kind of scenario.

For some writers, however, these warring concepts of ‘home’ spanned a far more expansive geographic distance, and far more of a translocation paradigm shift than any I have ever had to experience. Both Anna and Dana expounded beautifully on their experiences of immigrating across the planet, and building new homes in Canada, while still awash with vivid but fleeting memories of their homes of birth. I immensely appreciated this variety of perspectives, and the reminder that, while moving is always a jarring and emotionally laden experience, the loneliness and alienation inherent in acclimatizing to a new country, language, and culture (as Dana eloquently explained, even to the extent of having peers struggle to even articulate her name) really does extrapolate that feeling to a level beyond any I have ever had to make sense of. I thank my fellow students for their bravery in sharing their experiences here.

Many of us were drawn to the natural beauty of British Columbia as intrinsic to our sense of home and belonging here. Anna in particular isolated a beautiful moment of the sun shining over the Rockies on a trip to Banff a a moment of such serenity she temporarily found a sense of deep belonging and peace superseding most residential affiliations of ‘home’. The oceans, mountains, and general scenery have resonated comparably deeply with me since moving across the country nearly seven years ago, and I have also found myself more at ‘home’ while lost in a forest or gazing out over the water than even under the roof of my own abode.

Here is a picture I took from the seawall connecting Granville Island to Kits Beach – one of my favourite walks in the city, which reminds me of how privileged I am to reside in a place of such stunning natural beauty. Or, as I casually titled it, ‘Just Another Thursday.’

It’s this sense of unprecedented connection to the land that has also helped bring into sharp focus for me how appalling the unconscionable uprooting of Indigenous and First Nations communities on this same earth in which I sit and enjoy beautiful mountain views and sunsets is. If I can find this sense of mindfulness, belonging, and peace from a land I have only dwelt in for under a decade, it is all the more unspeakably tragic that countless people were wrested away from lands that not only they, but countless generations of ancestors before, forged stories and intimate relationships with. Sean and Georgia also ably articulated similar tensions in navigating personal senses of ‘home’ built on the unsavoury and unpleasant history of countless Indigenous and First Nations communities stripped from theirs – although Sean, interestingly, grounded his impressions with considerably more face-to-face interaction with Indigenous and First Nations communities in his upbringing in Penticton than my own upbringing in Ontario, where any land disputes or even Indigenous Canadians on the whole remained predominantly a convenient blind spot. Becoming better versed in historical accounts of how the history of the land I now live on has been shaped and changed through the centuries (and most recently through Colonization) has brought my incredible privilege and gratitude to be able to have these experiences here now to the forefront, and reading the comparable ruminations of my classmates has redoubled my efforts to never take this for granted. I particularly appreciated Georgia’s eloquence in navigating this experience, stating that she “learned that being at home in my own body, in my own knowingness of self and that which is beyond self and identity, allowed me to be grounded enough to offer my respect and to show up as a good guest at someone else’s home” (though I aspire to comparable confidence in feeling ‘at home in my own body’ and ‘knowingness of self’).

Still, perhaps the most common thread of connection across the board was the concept of ‘home’ being anchored in families and loved ones. Simran found her sense of home beyond a geographic dwelling place, instead rooted in the community and spiritual experience of her meditation centre – though the peace and positivity radiating from her own beautiful account marked a pleasant disconnect from my own early childhood experiences attending church, which I found largely claustrophobic and unsettling. Dana, in particular, offered the beautiful sentiment that “One day, when I have my kids in Canada, I believe I will feel fully grounded in the new soil.” If ‘home is where the heart is,’ as many of us referenced, with varying degrees of self-aware irony, the fact that so many of us are lucky enough to ground our sense of home in others we are fortunate enough to share in our lives, the prospect of continuing our family and laying down our own foundational roots – which will subsequently become ‘home’ for our children – is both a surreal and immensely powerful bastion of hope. So many of us, it seems, have felt ‘home’ to be an elusive and fluid concept – so, the prospect of being able to usher in a foundational sense of home for a new generation, imbued with more awareness and gratitude of whose ancestral home they live, grow, and play on, is comforting indeed.

-KH

WORKS CITED

Chalhotra, Simran. “Blog #4: Home Is Where My Heart Is.” Simran’s ENGL 470 Blog! Accessed on February 2, 2019.

Dyer, Sean. “Penticton: Peaches, Beaches, and The Syilx Nation.” Sean Dyer’s Canadian Literature Blog English 470. Accessed on January 30, 2019.

Hillam, Ross. “Home – Beautiful British Columbia.” Here’s A Thought. Accessed on February 1, 2019.

Roy, Susan. “Mapping Tool: Kitsilano Reserve.” Indigenous Foundations. Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Truhar, Dana. “Assignment 2:2 – My Home Story.” Dana’s CanLit Blog. Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Wilkins, Georgia. “no place/ everyplace/ my own/ someone else’s – home – assignment 2:2.” A Wilderness Called Someone Else’s Home: Georgia Wilkins’ English 470A Class Blog.  Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Zhang, Anna. “Assignment 2:2 – Home.” Understanding Canada – Canadian Literature 470. Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Write a short story that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify your sense of home.

My dad, bless him, likes to proudly inform people that our ancestry is “British-Canadian on one side, and Canadian-Canadian on the other.” By that he means that a genealogy test showed that, on one side of the family, I have English ancestors dated as having lived in Canada for centuries. I’ve tried gently reminding him that being descended from a long line of British tobacco farmers is not necessarily something to be proud of – nor, I’ve tried gently escalating to, does that make us ‘Canadian-Canadian’ so much as more liable to have had a direct ancestor take more active action into forcibly removing the country’s actual first inhabitants from their land, homes, and families. But, well-intentioned and actually quite eloquently aware of Indigenous and First Nations issues as he is, my dad is still apt to bust out this remark whenever given the chance. It’s a story he grew up with, after all, and a pretty hard one to uproot. His whole life, to him, this has been ‘his country,’ and ‘his home.’

Home, for me, has always been a much smaller concept, usually involving four walls and a family within them. That good ol’ fashioned contrivance is a boat that’s been rocked a fair few times throughout my upbringing, and probably helps explain why I initially took it so hard when my parents divorced in my early teens. In my eyes, as I hopped between houses and parental units, I wasn’t just grieving – I was homeless.

For a few years, I scrabbled to hold onto any dregs of my initial sense of home I could. I declined moving away for my undergrad, instead attending one in my hometown – a mid-sized city near Toronto, Ontario. I lived with my family, hung out with the same friends I had for 10+ years, religiously revisited the same books, movies, and even childhood cartoons I had always watched (to this day, the opening hair metal guitar riff of the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon is about as indicative of a deep-rooted sense of home to me as anything). Change became an ugly word to me. All in all, I did my (unconscious) best to puff up the ship in a glass bottle that was my life. For a while, it worked pretty well, too.

In my early twenties, I took my first major solo trip, spending months backpacking around Australia and New Zealand. It was a foundational experience for me in a number of ways, none the least being away from home for so long. On one hand, travelling abroad reified a number of (largely positive) Canadian stereotypes for me – other backpackers would initially bristle in suspicion when I talked to them, but then brighten and relax considerably when I mentioned I was Canadian (you could practically smell the whiff of ‘Phew! Not American’). Being away from Canada (from home?), I started to feel my first real rumblings of pride to be Canadian reinforced by new friends from around the world, and the itch of home meaning not just a house, not just a city, but a country, for the first time ever.

Emboldened, I sought out other Canadians in each hostel I stayed in with particular enthusiasm, seeking to further reinforce the now steadily conflating sense of ‘self,’ ‘home,’ and ‘Canada.’ In Queenstown, New Zealand, I came across a couple of other Canadians, who were equally keen to buy into the national jingoism. We spent a night together at the hostel we were staying at sharing stories of home (they were from BC and had never met an Ontarian before), our thoughts on being abroad (to them, generally a list of things they thought Canada had done better – umm, okay? thought young, non-confrontational me). As the conversation began to wane, we resolved to watch – what else? – a good ol’ Canadian movie, the Paul Gross war film Passchendaele.

Passchendaele (dir. Paul Gross, 2008).

Halfway through the movie, a thought catapulted across my head.

I was bored to tears.

No offence to Paul Gross (I’m not a fan of war movies – too much entrenched, largely harmful ideology – but, to me, this one was a bit hokey and generic, but earnest and largely harmless) – it was more the emptiness of the entire scenario that rang like a bell in my head. I realized I had had better conversations with backpackers from Germany than my fellow Canadians, and that the contrivance of the entire situation rang false to me. I was trying to fight homesickness by hanging out with fairly uninteresting (and a bit arrogant and catty?) people who just happened to come from the other side of the same gigantic land mass with arbitrary national borders as me, to whom the beauty and wonder of the other country we had the privilege to explore seemed completely lost on. I sullenly finished the movie (I am nothing if not a completionist), and quickly excused myself to bed.

I hold this experience in my heart as one of the first times I deeply realized that home need not be a particular point on the map, or set of four walls, so much as a feeling of belonging and deep peace. Over time, that feeling steadily morphed into a subtle, gentle magnet pointing elsewhere. Pointing west. Moving across the country to Vancouver was emotionally difficult for me, but never something I doubted. Home, I think I knew in my heart, had picked up and rumbled across the land. And I knew I’d better gather my stuff and follow, if I knew what was good for me.

It didn’t take much time before I was using the word ‘home’ to describe Vancouver rather than Ontario, even if the stumble between the two always struck me as poignant. Ontario was ‘home’ (ie: hometown – a place to see family, old friends, and bathe in memories), but Vancouver was home. A place that felt right for me to be in. A place with mountains and ocean, a place where my brain could be free to discover new wrinkles of thought and possibility. A place where I could properly learn the history of the country I’d grown up in, including the less jingoistic stories of barbaric colonialism that would make ‘early-twenties-New-Zealand-dwelling-Passchendaele-watching’ me cringe in shame and disgust (for part of that home growing up had been a tidy bubble of ignorance in regards to the people who walked these lands before my ancestors did; a bubble from which I could also proudly declare myself ‘Canadian-Canadian’ without an ounce of context). A place where I could become wise, and at peace, and reinvent my adult life in the shadow of mountains. A place where I could be me, not running away from the past, but building off of its scaffolds, like a Jenga tower.

Almost.

I spent the better part of my first year in Vancouver feeling agonizingly homesick, even if every time I went back to Ontario (which I was already, in my head and out loud, calling ‘home,’ not home), I felt even more out of place. I felt like I walked around like a ghost, not fully belonging here, and definitely not belonging there. I had tried so hard to graft a sense of home onto this beautiful place I’d moved to, but it still wasn’t quite right.

Since then, I’ve retreated my parameters a little bit, arguably even past the ‘home-is-four-walls-and-a-family’ model. I’ve made and lost friends and communities, fallen in and out and back in love with Vancouver (as beautiful as it is, it’s hard to get long-term invested in a city so claustrophobically expensive to inhabit), reconciled my always tenuous sense of patriotism with a national history I’m hardly proud of, and grown oodles as a person. For someone who’s always been so staunchly, stubbornly rooted and resistant to change, I’ve even generally carved out a sense of ‘home’ that, while I’m still pretty darn far from nomadic, I feel much more comfortable that I can pick up and take with me like a hermit crab.

(The secret is as cheesy as it is heartfelt, so brace yourselves!)

Home for me now means you can hold on the four walls. Home now just means family. And mine remains a pretty dispersed one, with members strewn across the country and the planet. But I’ve found a stable, abiding core in my life partner. For years, home meant living with her and loving her in my modest, messy apartment with her. Now, since talk of moving about in BC, or even elsewhere on the planet, home just means her. I may have always rolled my eyes at the expression ‘Home Is Where Your Heart Is,’ but it’s never resonated as much to me as it does now. Home can mean Ontario, or BC, or Canada. It can mean a particular dwelling space. But I now see all of those things as a conduit to the people (oh fine; mostly person) who I most want – nay, need – to spend my time with. Who bring out the best in me, and finally give me that feeling of belonging and deep peace. With that, home isn’t a where. It’s a who.

And that gives me more comfort than anything else ever has.

-KH

WORKS CITED

Alini, Erica. “Here are the most expensive – and cheapest – cities to rent in Canada.” Global News. Web. Accessed on January 28, 2019. https://globalnews.ca/news/4706857/cmhc-rental-market-report-2018/

Passchendaele (film). Dir. Paul Gross. Rhombus Media, 2008.

Spider-Man (television show). Dir. Bob Richardson. New World Entertainment Films, 1994-1998.

Not so long a time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, there existed a remarkably sophisticated new animal. This new animal was really terrific; top notch; spared no expense. This animal could not only do the basic rigamarole of eating, sleeping, making new, smaller animals, and trying to avoid being eaten by scarier animals – or falling off cliffs, and what have you. This animal figured out how to do all sorts of brand, shiny new things: namely, how to hold onto things with a sneaky, special claw, which allowed the animal to jam sticks together to make a den, or how to jam sticks together differently to make some glowing hot stuff.

“Ouch!” thought the animal. “But cooooool.”

Sticks continued to work out well for the animal. It used sticks to sharpen other sticks, to keep away the scarier animals, and catch and eat smaller and stupider ones. It used sticks for all kinds of neat stuff – even drawing pictures of itself on cave walls. Then, the animal wanted to have a better look at the pictures it drew of itself, so it got right up onto its hind legs, and had a good look at the picture it had drawn.

“Cooooool,” said the animal, out loud.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

You guessed it: we’re pretty familiar with the animal I’m talking about – as all the other animals became familiar with it too. “All right, all right,” they grumbled. “Show off.” And they named the flashy new animal HUMAN, and learned to increasingly give it some space. As one does with braggarts and pests.

For HUMAN became a braggart indeed. And one day, when HUMAN was fast asleep, after a day of sharpening sticks and doing stuff with them, the different parts of HUMAN threw themselves a lil’ party, to celebrate all the cool stuff they could do.

“All right, all right,” crowed Brain. “We’ve really been hitting it out of the park lately. What have y’all been up to?”

(“I mean,” chortled Brain, “I know, because I’m the knowledge centre of this whole shebang. But I like hearing y’all tell it.”)

So Body stood up, and told the assembly all about the incredible things it had been doing with HUMAN – how to hold things, and move things, and climb things, and run away from things, and throw things, and grab things, and jump off things, and…

“Yes, yes,” smirked Brain. “You’re very good at doing all the things I tell you to do. Well done.”

“Hold my beer,” said Heart. And Heart told a long, rousing story about how Body and Brain couldn’t do any of the interesting things that they did without it pumping away, giving them all the juice and inspiration they needed to keep on keeping on.

“Wow,” sniffed Brain. “I gotta hand it to you, Heart. You sure are useful. Anyone who helps me do what I do must be pretty darn cool.”

And so it went for a while, with Heart, Brain, and Body all telling story after story, boast after boast, of all the neat stuff they’d learned to do, and how excellent they felt learning to do those things. And it was quite some time before they realized they had another guest at the party. A guest that sat near the back, wearing a dark cloak and a dark hood, looking thoroughly out of place.

“Hey,” belched Body, who had had quite enough to drink, thank you very much. “Who’s that weirdo?”

“Chill,” hissed Brain. “That’s my estranged cousin, Bad Feelings. We don’t get on so well, any more. Just be polite, and keep your distance.”

“Zat so?” chortled Heart. “Hey! Bad Feelings! Did you hear all the cool stuff we’ve been up to?”

“Oh yes,” responded Bad Feelings, who spoke in a soft purr, almost inaudible, but perfectly clear. “I heard. You’ve been busy.”

“Darn right we have!” crowed Body, flexing itself for no real reason. “What about you? What have you been up to? Huh?”

“Can it,” murmured Brain, looking thoroughly nervous. “Just leave it be.”

Bad Feelings stood up. Its dark cloak whooshed theatrically as it did.

“What have I been up to?” purred Bad Feelings. “I’ll tell you. I’ve been watching. And learning.”

“Learning? Ha ha ha. Isn’t that my job?” blustered Brain, more nervous by the second.

“I have learned One Thing, which I know to be True,” whispered Bad Feelings.

A hush fell over the group. No one was laughing or swaying now. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped. No one asked Bad Feelings what the One True Thing was. They had started thinking that maybe they didn’t want to know, thank you very much.

But Bad Feelings told them anyway.

“All the things you have said today… are lies.”

A rumble passed over the party. Warning lights started to blink.

“Hey!” Brain frowned. “We’re waking up. But it’s not morning yet!”

Brain looked around. Bad Feelings was gone, and Body and Heart had snapped into action. But neither of them were looking so hot.

“Oooh,” burbled Body. “I don’t feel so good.” And sure enough, Body was shaking all over, and clenching up, and tying itself into all sorts of knots.

“Hey!!” squealed Heart, who was jumping up and down in place like there was no tomorrow. “That’s not how you do it, Body! Get it together!”

“Well maybe if you chilled out and stopped giving me so much juice, I would!” spat Body, curling itself into a ball and a pretzel at once.

“Both of you stop it!” said Brain, trying to sound both stern and calming at once. “I didn’t tell you to do any of these things. So cut it out!”

“What are you talking about, Brain?” said Body, its prezel-ball-self quivering in place.

“Of course you did,” panted Heart, jumping up and down.

Brain stopped and thought. Had it told Body and Brain to do all of these wacky things? Brain hadn’t thought so; it couldn’t remember doing so. But Brain looked up, and saw all kinds of paper airplanes flying out of its pockets, in all directions.

“Hey!” exclaimed Brain. It grabbed the closest paper airplane, and unfolded it. The paper airplane simply said ‘CRY.’

Brain snagged the next paper airplane and unfolded it. The airplane said ‘BREAK STICK.’

“What is going on?” trembled Brain.

“You tell me!” wheezed Heart, doing somersaults and jumping jacks at once.

“MMRRGRRFFFLLLDRRFFLL” mumbled Body, no longer able to respond through its pretzel self.

Brain was getting thoroughly flummoxed, and more than a little scared, when finally it snapped its fingers.

“Bad Feelings!” Brain called out. “Where did you go? You’ve started something disastrous, and we need it to stop – fast!”

But Bad Feelings was nowhere to be seen. There may have been the faintest purr of an amused chuckle in the distance – but it was pretty hard to tell over the acrobatics of Body and Heart.

“This is no good at all,” said Brain. “We’ve done all these amazing things! How are we supposed to keep doing amazing things if we’re stuck doing this kind of nonsense?”

There is no happy ending to this story, as you well know. Brain, Body, and Heart continued to make HUMAN do more and more amazing things. But the amazing things steadily became less and less amazing, and more and more silly, fruitless, and hurtful – to the other animals, to the planet, and even to HUMAN itself.

Brain fought and fought and fought to keep Body and Heart (and, sheepishly, itself) on task. It used all of its mighty Cerebrum to remind Body and Heart – and, grumbling, itself – of the stories of all the cool things they had done, with sticks and otherwise, and all of the even more cool things they could do if they could stop fussing around with this nonsense.

But it was too late. Bad Feelings had spoken its piece. And once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. And the world – and HUMAN – have regretted that story ever since.

-KH

MUSINGS

In terms of getting the idea for this story, it did indeed come from my Brain, but I think I was inherently channeling the ‘Heart and Brain’ strip from Nick Seluk’s wonderful Awkward Yeti comics – and maybe a teensy bit of the magic realism of Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out as well, if I’m being totally honest.

In terms of the story’s telling, I have a bit of an acting background, so I had figured I’d have fun paraphrasing my story and reiterating it orally. I actually found the opposite to be the case. I’m a chatty fellow, and thereby far from unfamiliar with ‘storytelling’ in a group setting (at least in terms of sharing personal anecdotes), but this kind of sharing a personal creative work orally felt far more unsettlingly unfamiliar to me than I’d expected. I felt overtly sheepish telling the story to my wife, and an adult friend, and its telling definitely suffered for it. The consensus was, universally, once they’d heard the oral version and compared it to my written version, that my written telling was more effective and skillful.

I had better success telling the story to my drama class of 6-8 year olds (which I think I’d implicitly anticipated, as I think I instinctively wrote this as a bit of a kid’s fable). In telling the story to then, I fed off their more eager investment and interest (kids get bedtime stories, and are thereby more accustomed to having stories shared with them orally, then a lot of we crusty adults out of synch with the oral traditions we grow up with), and my telling of the story picked up a lot more energy through them responding to it. It helped my playfully characterize each of the ‘characters’ (‘Body’ became more of a dumb jock; ‘Bad Feelings’ became much scarier; etc.), and build the dramatic ‘oomph’ of it. That said, this was a double-edged sword, as telling the story orally to my class of kids  also made the immutability of the ending play as a lot more sad – so much so, that I felt almost guilty sucker-punching the fun I’d built up earlier. As Thomas King rightly points out, stories can injure as much as cure (92), and the closing finality of the ‘once stories are shared, they cannot be recalled’ moral really hit home sharing it with a younger, more impressionable audience.

Telling my story orally from memory also made it clumsier – I felt like I’d lost control over the wording I’d carefully scrutinized, and it was hard to relinquish my intrinsic conflation of control and ownership. I actually felt a lot less ownership over my story telling it out loud – the empathetic actor in me couldn’t help but feed off the vice and emotions of each audience each telling, making it an inherently communal experience each time. In writing, it was MY story – but out loud it immediately became ‘our’ story (that said, I’d written it with a Thomas King-ian tone in my head, so I guess that inherently makes it ‘our story’ right off the bat). I found this pretty thematically fitting – for, indeed, my choice of story is, indeed, very much the story of ‘us’ – and the experience also forced me to become intimately acquainted with some Bad Feelings of my own. Hopefully it doesn’t stir up too many for you, dear reader, as well.

Regardless, as King puts it (and these sentiments now reeeeaaaally resonate): this story is yours now. Do with it what you will. Muse on it and post an insightful reflection comment. Sneer at my shallow faux-creativity, turn your nose up, and go find a better story to comment on. Shed tears, drink a glass of wine, and fall into an existential funk. Make a comic strip out of it – or perhaps an animated short narrated by someone appropriately irreverent – maybe Jack Black? But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.

You’ve heard it now.

Heart & Brain, from Nick Seluk’s effervescent Awkward Yeti comics. 

WORKS CITED:

The Awkward Yeti. http://theawkwardyeti.com/ Accessed January 23, 2019. 

Inside Out (film). Dir. Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen. Pixar Animation Studios & Walt Disney Pictures, 2015.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

Question #3: “Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1).  He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there”  (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1).”

“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name.” 

–Hamilton (2015), “It’s Quiet Uptown” 
Lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda

One of the beautiful paradoxes of stories, as Chamberlin articulates, is their ability to simultaneously provide both means of escaping the world and reframing it – offering a pleasurable distraction, but also elucidating salient concerns through fictional illustrations, and making them accessible. In the best case scenarios, stories can excel at providing cathartic pleasure through reframing the world, galvanizing audiences to find beauty in the mundane or everyday, as with Oscar Wilde’s claim that poetry ‘invented’ fog in London by teaching readers to appreciate it (136), providing anthems to get through tough times (145), or providing the means of literally re-writing the history and cultural identity of a country or people (150). However, Chamberlin also unpacks the cultural tendency to dismiss stories as more frivolous diversion than able to genuinely incite proactive societal change – as Derek Walcott puts it, “The classics can console. But not enough.” Despite Chamberlin’s imbedded retort (“Songs like that don’t really bring the dead back, or take you home, do they? Oh, but they do; they surely do” [75]), it’s hard to shake the culturally ingrained sense of doubt – the worry that, although words and stories may make us feel closer to the world we live in, that feeling may be nothing more than mollifying delusions of grandeur, and a refusal to engage with actual functional change.

In weighing this debate as I unspooled Chamberlin’s thoughts, I reflected on the propensity for some instances of personal or cultural trauma that, try as we might, are too cavernously affecting for words or stories to adequately lend escape or elucidation from – “moments that the words don’t reach,” as beautifully stated in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. I experienced a really powerful such moment in watching the Canadian film Indian Horse earlier this year.* Although my overall impression of the film was mixed, one particular moment, where director Stephen S. Campanelli and writers Dennis Foon and Richard Wagamese made the deliberate decision to bypass words, brought me so much closer to an experience of reality than any other means of storytelling could have.

**Spoilers for Indian Horse follow**

A substantial portion of the first half of Indian Horse is dedicated to a brutally uncompromising depiction of the horrific abuse of Indigenous children growing up in the residential school system. I, most likely along with many other audiences, sought out the film primarily for this dramatization – to feel a deeper sense of emotional empathy for the horrific mistreatment of other humans within my lifetime in my country; to accentuate my feelings of disgust and outrage from having read articles and testimonials on residential schools. In short: to feel closer to the world I lived in. However, good intentions or not, I found myself, sheepishly, generally distanced and disinterested during the first third of the film, caught up in scrutinizing elements of the film (a particular flatness in the performances; a stilted, ‘staged’ feeling to the dialogue) that threatened to only further distract me more from confronting the realities of the horrors depicted. It was the words of the story – the scripted lines, and a somewhat hokey authorial voiceover – that rang of faintly disingenuous artifice, further jarring me from its emotional truth, rather than immersing me deeper within it.

Then, there came a moment in the film that completely turned this sense around. A young girl in the school, and friend of protagonist Saul, is, at one point, so wracked with all-consuming grief at the school’s abuses – including being locked in a cage in the school’s basement – that she beats herself to death, bashing her head into the bars of her cage over and over again. No words are spoken – just the grotesquely slow, impassive, meaty sound. Thump. Thump. Thump.

It was this horrific moment – more specifically, the sonic, almost musical quality to it – that jogged me out of my critical distance, and became a fulcrum and anchor for all of my outrage and heartbreak, both at the story itself, and how unimaginably common it was for far, far too many real Indigenous children. The thump thump thump seared itself into my brain – a devastatingly perfect sensory microcosm for the slow, inevitable beating down of an array of cultures, and the experience of feeling so deeply, all-consumingly trapped, erased, and beaten out of existence. I’m not sure whether director Campanelli intended for this thump thump thump to reference the sound of distant Indigenous drums, but my brain made the connection, and it only further drove the moment sickeningly home. I was moved to tears watching – and listening to – this scene. And it felt like this one moment lent me more insight into the unimaginable psychic weight and trauma of the centuries of systemic abuse towards Indigenous communities, in Canada and around the world, than years of reading about it ever had. It was a moment that the words didn’t reach – but wordlessness did.

Chamberlin discusses how inevitably slippery, subjective, and politically hierarchal the mere act of using language as a means of communication inherently is (15). But the unambiguous universality in the sound of a little Indigenous girl smashing her head repeatedly struck me as a moment of horror, outrage, and tragedy – but also imbued with a sordid kind of hope. As Chamberlin puts it, “I believe that none of us […] will be able to rest in the Americas and call this place home until we acknowledge the brutal campaign, by design and by default, to deny the humanity of aboriginal peoples” (59). Chamberlin posits that acknowledgement is crucial to understanding, and that the ensuing understanding could – eventually – lead to a measure of healing and peace. And stories, words – and sometimes, knowing when to supersede the limitations of words – can help serve as incremental pieces of common ground towards making that healing and peace a reality.

-KH

Indian Horse (dir. Stephen Campanelli, 2017).

*There is, of course, a further level of irony that Indian Horse the film was adapted from the novel by Richard Wagamese – a powerful, wordless cinematic moment spawned by a repository of words. I have not yet had the opportunity to read Wagamese’s novel, and thereby can’t speak to how comparably this suicide scene is conveyed (if at all) by Wagamese’s written words. Regardless, my points regarding how well the film’s scene conveys this sensorial, affective trauma through its universally accessible horrific auditory musicality stands.

Works cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003.

Hamilton (musical). Music, lyrics, and book by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Grand Central Publishing, 2015.

Indian Horse (film). Dir. Stephen S. Campanelli. Devonshire Productions, 2017.

Hello, fellow readers of Canadian Literature, and Dr. Paterson!

My name is Kevin, and I am a former Film Studies major (and former Ontarian), currently working as an arts administrator and children’s theatre instructor. I look forward to meeting you all and hearing your thoughts as our course unfurls throughout the term!

My initial thought upon registering for this course was a tinge of sadness at how tragically  little exposure I’ve had to, effectively, most Canadian media output on the whole. Despite having taken 7+ years (and counting) of postsecondary arts education, pursuing Canadian content has been a despicably convenient blind spot throughout my adult and academic lives alike. If, as in the example of the Gitksan elder in Chamberlin’s introduction, we can understand a sense of belonging in a land by way of stories, I shudder to think of the kind of murky Hollywood vortex I have been inhabiting in my decades of life as a Canadian.

In part, I can attribute this to a culture of mass media convenience I have been recently working to counteract in my own life. Although the National Film Board of Canada has thousands of original Canadian titles available for streaming, there’s no ‘Canadian Cinema’ tab jumping out at us on Netflix. But I think the issue runs deeper than a comparative lack of exposure. My own understanding of Canadian national identity (and one echoed by many others in my life) has been one primarily of sheepishness and nonchalance in lieu of conventional patriotism. My own experience has found Canada to be a country better adapted for critique than pride – fitting, perhaps, for a country stereotypically associated with the word “sorry.” I’ve found these sensibilities reflected in most Canadian stories I have come across to date.

Unfortunately, as anyone who has been following the news this week will be all too well aware of, there is also somewhat of a brewing sense of Canada itself being out of synch with our own impressions of it – or, more aptly, what we are accustomed to idealistically constructing the nation as. The brutal arrests and conflict of the Wet’suwet’en people protesting pipeline construction on their traditional territory outside of Houston, BC – and, even more upsettingly, the corresponding media blackout, transparently attempting to quench news media circulation of the story – is as sickening to me as it is disquietingly unsurprising. As the story catalogues itself to the roster of similarly infuriating accounts in local news – absence of clean drinking water in reserves, and even, most horrifically, accounts of widespread forcible sterilisations among Indigenous women staying in Canadian hospitals – it becomes nauseatingly clear how ludicrous yet conveniently easy it is to construct cultural narratives of systemic mistreatment and abuse of Indigenous citizens being a thing of the past, and what vast and consequential steps would have to be taken to properly actualize on the aspirations of the national Truth and Reconciliation movement. As the course description has pointed out, the absence of circulated stories is as poignant and powerful as stories that are shared – and Canada, sadly enough, has thrived on doing just that, building a national identity of tolerance and inclusion on a bedrock of unceded land claims, systemic discrimination, and effective cultural genocide. Is it any wonder that the main connective tissue I’ve found in the Canadian literature I’ve pursued has been a sense of quiet, deep melancholy and regret?

As such, I am particularly keen to dive into ENGL 470, both to help remedy the dearth of Canadian stories in my own life, and to teach me to be a more curious and active listener – both to the multiplicity and diversity of Canadian voices surrounding me, and to pay particular attention to the stories not being told. In beginning to investigate Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, and his slyly repetitive circularity in reiterating his account of telling the story of the world on the back of a turtle to a variety of audiences, I’ve found myself reflecting back to my experience of watching Zacharias Kunuk’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen over ten years ago. At the time, I had a vivid sense of the film – ponderously meditative, and with a beguiling circularity in plot, yet with a more intimately entrenched sense of place than almost anything I’ve seen since – being so fundamentally unlike anything I had ever seen before. At the time, I lacked the vocabulary to articulate how utterly unfamiliar I was with any mass cultural output by any Indigenous Canadians. Now, I look forward to rekindling that same feeling of discovering something so fundamentally new yet simultaneously deeply familiar – to listening, to learning, and to garnering a more holistic, rich understanding of my homeland in the process.

-KH

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (dir. Zacharias Kunuk, 2006).

Works cited:

National Film Board/Office of Canada. https://www.nfb.ca/ Accessed January 10, 2019.

“The Wet’suwet’en and B.C.’s gas-pipeline battle: A guide to the story so far.” The Globe and Mail, January 8, 2019. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-wetsuweten-bc-lng-pipeline-explainer/ Accessed January 9, 2019.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

Kunuk, Zacharias (director). The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Alliance Atlantis, 2006.

Virdi, Jaipreet. “Canada’s shame: the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women.” New Internationalist, November 30, 2018. https://newint.org/features/2018/11/29/canadas-shame-coerced-sterilization-indigenous-women Accessed January 10, 2019.