3:2.

Question #5.

The question that I have selected for this week’s blog assignment asks us to examine parallels between King’s writing style in Green Grass Running Water, and Robinson’s in “Coyote makes a deal with the King of England.” I find the similarity in narrative voice most evident in comparing the Coyote narrative thread in King’s novel to Robinson’s story.  The non-linear, disjunctive and tangential style employed in King’s coyote sequence echoes that of Robinson’s narrative style. In both texts, the disjointed and slightly ambling narrative style mimics the peaks and valleys of conversation. I find that both of these texts reproduce, in a sense, the complexly shifting terrain of verbal communication. Both texts seem to mirror the pauses inherent in conversation, as well as the shifts in emphasis, the ungrammaticality, and the creative re-framing of words that happens in a conversation. The semantic play and the elisions in meaning that are present in both texts, seem to gesture to a communicative space beyond language itself.  As a reader, we may not wholly follow Robinson’s narrative, or we may find ourselves getting lost in King’s verbal play and digressions. In a sense, we are brought to the limits of language itself.  The pauses, and gaps in meaning, (which I find are also represented visually in the way in which the texts are arranged sporadically on the page) gesture perhaps to the extra-lingual, the multiple forms of communication that are present when we engage in conversation with one another. Both the coyote narrative in King’s story, and Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a deal with the King of England” invoke both the authority as well as the slipperiness of language. This makes me think of a phrase that struck me when I was reading Robinson’s story: “But that’s going to be your word from now ’til the end of the word” (72).  I feel that this play upon “word” and “world,” gestures to an understanding of language as ‘giving shape to our world.’ But simultaneously, when considered in light of what I have proposed about Robinson’s story- the way which the writing style both affirms and denies the supremacy of language- I think this verbal play can also be read as ironically tongue-in-cheek. What lies beyond the “end of the word?” I find that both King and Robinson’s texts, which suggest a confluence of oral tradition, literary tradition, and the everyday speech of conversation, are actively implicated in investigating this space beyond the “end of the word.” Both King and Robinson both invoke the ‘word’, in its ‘world shaping powers,’ as well as paradoxically gesture to its limitations, and to those ways of knowing which reside beyond language.

Works cited

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

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

I realize that this post is incredibly late, but I wanted to share it anyways.

In reading over some of my fellow students’s blogs concerning our stories of home, I found several through lines that permeated our narratives. I want to discuss three main elements that I found in common across our blogs.  Firstly, I found that there was a repeated emphasis on home as being something that is fluid and mobile, rather than something fixed and static. This was articulated in Hava Rosenburg’s story as home being “in transit,” both literally and figuratively: “Home is riding the 41 down Marine Drive,” and in Hannah Vaartnou’s narrative, as something which escaped easy definition but which she equates with the ocean (interesting to note how the sea is itself an iconic symbol of change and of kinesis). In both of these depictions, home is fluid. Notions of home seem to reject easily definable boundaries. Home seems to exist just as much in the “in-betweens” as it does in the centres. This notion is in dialogue with my own narrative of home, and my depiction of home as an ‘estuary.’ Secondly, there was a sense that the notion of home is not one without problems. In all three blogs that I read, home was not something that was taken up without a certain critical lens. Hayden Cook closes his piece by investigating the geo-politics of home. He asks whose home is it? Is it the home of “the people who live there, the Tsuu T’ina, the government who restricts development…?” His piece addresses the problematics of overlaying one narrative of home onto the other. In Hannah’s account, she juxtaposes her idea of home against the archetypal versions of home that we are exposed to through dominant cultural narratives and through the media. This tension between a culturally sanctioned version of ‘home’ and the home that we are constantly in the process of crafting, is one which Hannah’s narrative explores. Finally, I found there was an emphasis on nostalgia and memory in our accounts of home. I found again that there was a tension in these descriptions of nostalgia. On the one hand there was a sense of nostalgia in its seductive potential, as something to which we cling indulgently, and on the other hand, as something which is essentially illusory.

La Malinche by Jimmie Durham

2.6

Question 5

In his work “Orality and Literature: The Black and White of Salish History,” Keith Thor Carlson discusses the problematics inherent in European notions of “authentic” indigeneity. He writes, “While non-Natives have generally not been overly concerned with the historical legitimacy of Aboriginal legends and myths (if only because they assume them to be fiction) they have been greatly concerned with their authenticity” ( 55).  Carlson examines this eurocentric perspective, which holds that a Native story containing post-contact knowledge is somehow “not authentic.” To begin with,  this emphasis on pre-/post-contact is problematically eurocentric, in that it asserts European contact as the defining feature of an Indigenous temporal world view. Secondly, Carlson articulates that such an emphasis on “authenticity” challenges Salish modes of “truth making” and ways of knowing. By asserting the dominance of the Western conception of truth (indebted to Enlightenment epistemology) Europeans who question the “authenticity” of Native stories, risk violently overlaying one mode of “truth making” onto another. Carlson describes how the Salish history of literacy (which has been subjected to debates concerning its “authenticity” by European scholars) is embedded within a sacred narrative, making it, in essence, “sacrosanct” (59).  According to Carlson’s argument, to question the authenticity of these stories, which are embedded in a sacred narrative, is to fundamentally disrupt Salish frameworks of thought and ways of knowing. Lastly, the question of authenticity is implicated in a continual process of “Othering” which implicitly tries to keep Indigenous peoples in the “past,” as emblems of a static, “timeless” culture which can be juxtaposed against the “developing” cultures of the western world. This “Othering” is an ideologically loaded, and hugely troubling act, and one which I argue is still very much present today in the representations of Indigenous peoples in the popular media etc.

In thinking about constructions of authenticity, I was reminded of the artwork of Jimmie Durham. Durham’s work is frequently concerned with identity politics, and with undermining and exposing the ideologically weighted stereotypes that attempt to define “Indian-ness.” His work La Malinche, is a complexly ambiguous portrait which, in my opinion, speaks to the ways in which intersecting systems of oppression play upon the body. We do not know how to understand La Malinche; her hybridity is disorienting, and she troubles our understands of “authentic” indigeneity.

Here is a link to another of Durham’s works entitled Pocahontas’ Underwear, which deals with the problematics of exoticization and fetishization inherent in the “Othering” gaze.

Works Cited

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

Question 3

In “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance” Lutz writes, “One of the most obvious difficulties is comprehending the performances of the indigenous participants” (32). This statement contains an assumption about the nature of the article’s audience which I would like to examine. Lutz expands upon this comment by claiming, “The key and usually unremarked problem is that we have insufficient distance from our own and our ancestor’s world view.”  In this statement Lutz is demonstrating the extent of his own ‘unremarked’ assumption about his readership. By using the inclusive “we” and “our ancestors” (32) Lutz is actually excluding all non-europeans. This implicit exclusionary act betrays a certain ideological assumption about knowledge production and the institutionalization of knowledge. While Lutz’s article makes a concerted effort to promote critical self awareness on the part of the reader by emphasizing a  “defamiliarization of the familiar,” the article nonetheless reproduces certain ideas about academic authority and issues of power. The very fact that Lutz expects to be writing for an audience of european descent reveals the implicit power hierarchy present within the academic institution.  As an academic,  Lutz speaks from a position of socio-cultural authority, whose claims to knowledge also invest him with a certain claim to cultural capital. While it may be impossible to transcend such a position as an academic, it is nonetheless possible to gesture to this position of cultural authority in one’s work and to acknowledge some of the problematics that such a position entails. Perhaps an acknowledgement on Lutz’s part as to the structural inequities present in the ‘researcher- subject of study’ relationship would help to address some of the implicit assumptions in the text. This discussion makes me think of Thomas King’s commentary on postcolonial theory in Chapter 2 of The Truth about Stories.  While acknowledging the promise that postcolonial theory contains, King questions the extent to which post colonial theory actually affects the lives of colonized peoples. He writes: “I know that postcolonial studies is not a panacea for much of anything” (58).  I feel King’s comment speaks to the structural inequality that is still very much present within academia and institutionalized education.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “You’re not the Indian I had in mind.” The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto, Ont: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003. 31-60. Print.

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

August drips in fat oily droplets off the clusters of blackberries lining the railway. The air is thick with salt and the lingering smoke of fire pits. The berry studded bushes line the tracks owned by the BNSF Railway. The rail company runs a single-track mainline through the ocean side municipality of White Rock, British Columbia. How many times have I walked these tracks?  Born and raised in White Rock, the railway runs through my childhood like a river.  It cuts through my hazy childhood and rubs up against the shorelines of my adolescence.  At night, the tracks will become the mise-en-scène for the Friday night rites of teenage-hood. Bonfires, flaming testaments to the romances, the comedies, and the tragedies of burning youth, will erupt, defiantly leaving their mark on this seaside no zone. Being a teenager in White Rock, a town where birthing and dying are the two main pastimes, is a unique balancing act. Perhaps one could argue that adolescence in general requires a particular understanding of equilibrium, however, there is something about this post-card sea-town, flung out on the west coast of Canada, that demands a particular gangly grace from its teenage residents.

What is it about this particular crack in the late august evening? The fissure that splits its way through the sweaty air? What is it about this particular emulsion of light, with its heady mixture of gold- almost too ripe for photography- that has me intoxicated, spouting sugar drenched stories of ‘home’? How did I come to pin ‘home’ inside scent- inside summer, and blackberries, and bonfire smoke? Inside the over used metaphor of the railway?- a trope grown rusty with the once dewy eyed lustre of progress, now scarred with the violence of colonialism.

The railroad’s steel caress, that smears itself across a landscape that my ruthlessly virile ancestors once injected with their world affirming metaphors of a new life, runs through the unceded territory of the Semiahmoo First Nations.  I’m walking along a sprawling project in possession. To what extent are my stories of home fixed in such a project? Those stories that tell me where I’m from, where I “belong,” where I’m going. Those stories that make tidy little gardens out of unruly wilderness- that colonize mobility and liminality in favour of stasis and rootedness. Is my story like the railroad?: the great story making project of my forebears, who sought to unite a feral country from coast to coast, eclipsing the stories of others with their own.

I too have travelled coast to coast. I was sixteen, strapped in the back seat of my family’s minivan, making stories through the car window. It was one of those late august evenings maybe. Perhaps a bit like this one. A memory now lazy with haze and the bruised edges of dream. Somewhere in Ontario perhaps. A barbecue? A lake? Some pimped out Canadian kitsch dream, like the ones you see on postcards. The memory is faded now, torn and frayed at its edges, but I’ve still held onto it, an artifact from that time my parents trapped us in the car and drove us across this corrupted nation- puking my guts out on the dim future of my country’s shame. The nation’s body jellied and primped in the language of neoliberalism, ecological crisis, and silenced histories.

I fix my eyes on the point of convergence, where the tracks and the sea and the pine meet.  Glassy eyed and sugar tongued, I let the last dregs of the sun blur my story until it is no longer distinguishable from the hazy evening. Why cling to the steel through-line of story when perhaps ‘home’ is more like an estuary? Choosing wilderness over cultivated plots, I turn back towards my parents’ house.