2] In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility.

For this assignment I chose to research the Immigration Act of 1910. In line with the historical aims of the Canadian state to exclude individuals considered outside Canadian perceptions of the “white civil”, the act advocated the further monitoring of immigration into the country. It increased the authority of the federal cabinet in making judgements about what was to be considered suitable immigrants, and barred courts and judges from interfering with the decisions of the immigration minister. It also set out specific economic requirements for immigrants of particular countries. For example, Asian immigrants were required to have at least $200 in their possession, while immigrants from other countries were required to have at least $25 before being able to enter the country.

The 1910 Immigration act was thus one that encouraged exclusion from Canada on the basis of race and money.  Similar to the United States, Canada’s region had been inhabited by Indigenous peoples with strong cultural ties to the land and each other. Many of the Europeans that arrived to settle were in search of a new beginning: they wanted to start from scratch and build a new life. Starting from scratch was taken quite literally as it entailed the scratching out of Indigenous peoples and cultures to make room for the Canadian culture to be. These settlers, all European by birth and culture, where white, and had been conditioned by previous experiences in France and Britain, to hold the values of rationality and civility to high standards. Because of this, they (understandably) had a little trouble adapting to the vast natural landscapes of Canada which had nothing to do with the European infrastructure they had left. Instead of aiming to live in harmony with it, they opted for its destruction in order to make room for their own projects. The new settlers undertook the building of what was popularly coined in early Euro-Canadian terms as “the fortress”. Frye argues that Canadians have always felt that their adopted country’s nature was a vast and menacing one from which they had to shelter themselves. In a sense, this can also be extended to the Indigenous, who at the time, where racially devalued by the settlers, and seen as being closer to nature in terms of their lifestyles. In their aims of a new beginning, the Canadian settlers urbanized and industrialized many of Canada’s regions at the expense of nature and Indigenous cultures, and established political, military, educational, economic etc institutions. In simpler terms, they mirrored the European systems they had grown with, into Canada, whose society prior to European arrival, had been defined by complex Indigenous cultural systems.

The Canadian state they’d established sought to create a unity between the people of Canada’s European founding nations, and conversely did not consider Indigenous peoples and their cultures as being a foundational element in the making of Canada. As a result, the Indigenous suffered a great marginalization, and which was enforced legally, militarily, and politically. The 1910 Immigration Act, and the potlatch laws,  are both examples of legal and military enforcement of this. Indigenous systems of knowledge were consequently scattered, leading to a stagnation in their growth and national recognition.

Although the Immigration Act of 1910 didn’t specifically deal with the marginalization of “Indians” from Canadian society, it dealt with the exclusion of a much broader range of cultures from Canada. The questionable ethics of the act in barring courts from intervening with the opinion of the minister of immigration on who was to be considered a suitable immigrant, further goes to show where the aims of the Canadian state lay just a century ago, and definitely reinforces Coleman’s argument of the white civility project. It evidently pushed for the definition of the Canadian citizen to be one that excluded any variable deriving from European beliefs of white hierarchal superiority, and civility.

In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story.Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.

As I started to read Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England silently, I rapidly found myself getting lost in translation. My inner voice was not doing justice to the story, and made it more difficult for me to grasp the meaning of the story. To deal with this problem, I tried to innerly reproduce the colloquial tone I imagined Harry Robinson would have told the text with. Imagining him sitting on his chair counting the story to me, cleared up some of the challenges I was facing, but required much more focus and diligence on my part to keep up it. Halfway through I impulsively started reading out loud, and found that this method significantly improved my grasp of the story’s meaning. I could more clearly hear and reproduce the pauses, intonations and accents on passages such as this one:

“Do you know what the Angel was?

Do you know?

The Angel, God’s Angel, you know.

They sent that to Coyote.” (66)

The more I read out loud, the more I felt like I needed to be reading it to someone as opposed to myself. As King notes, the oral syntax of the story totally defeats the reader’s effort to read the story silently (and I add even orally) to themselves.

While reading the story out loud to my friend, the words came much more naturally to me. Having an interlocutor whose physical and verbal reactions I could perceive helped structure the way I told the story and allowed me to embody the persona of the story teller. The “you know”’s and Robinson’s rhetorical questions felt much more in place compared to when I was reading to myself (both orally and silently). The amount of times I had read it before retelling it out loud to my friend probably also helped in rehearsing the theatrical performance of the story.

The manner in which Wickwire structured the text as a running prose, with short and more extended pauses was crucial in the way I read to myself and to others, but alone, it did not help too much in telling me how to read the story for it to best understood. I don’t think I’ve ever read a text that pushed me so ardently into reading it out loud, with arm gestures, and a less literary, more colloquial tone. Reading it to myself, whether silently or orally, and telling it to an interlocutor made a palpable difference. When reading to my friend, the way I voiced the story was no longer only structured by the text’s set up. In reading it silently, I had trouble understanding, and I think this feeling transferred over as a fear that my interlocutor wouldn’t understand it either once I read it to her. Perhaps I had added motivation to make this story communicable and understandable to my friend, which might have been a factor in how I structured my oral performance.

This story is definitely not one to read to oneself, it seems made to communicate orally, and to be complimented with physical gestures to better convey its meaning.

Robinson, Harry, and Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.

3. We began this unit by discussing assumptions and differences that we carry into our class. In “First Contact as Spiritual Performance,” Lutz makes an assumption about his readers (Lutz, “First Contact” 32). He asks us to begin with the assumption that comprehending the performances of the Indigenous participants is “one of the most obvious difficulties.” He explains that this is so because “one must of necessity enter a world that is distant in time and alien in culture, attempting to perceive indigenous performance through their eyes as well as those of the Europeans.” Here, Lutz is assuming either that his readers belong to the European tradition, or he is assuming that it is more difficult for a European to understand Indigenous performances – than the other way around. What do you make of this reading? Am I being fair when I point to this assumption? If so, is Lutz being fair when he makes this assumption?

I chose to respond to this question because upon reading Lutz’ lines on the “obvious difficulty” of comprehending the performance of the Indigenous participants, I felt what I can best describe as a tone bordering condescendence. Being a Canadian professor at the University of Victoria, John Lutz falls into the European category, thus meaning that understanding the absolute truth of the Indigenous performances upon first contact with the Europeans, is also a challenge for him.
By assuming that his readers “must of necessity enter a world that is distant in time and alien in culture”, I think Lutz is assuming that his readers belong to the European tradition. This strikes me as understandable as Lutz position as a professor in Canada probably means that he deals more with readers of a similar tradition. Albeit this is also an assumption that likely has many counter examples in reality. I do think that my professor is fair in pointing out this assumption, as his wording rather explicitly implies a barrier of understanding between European and Indigenous. When considering the globalized world in which we live in today, and more specifically the large bodies of international and multi-cultural students that attend UBC and the University of Victoria, and who have come across Lutz’ work, it seems to me that he would have been aware that his readers didn’t necessarily all fall under the European tradition, and that several of them might have been able to understand these performances without undergoing the difficulties he mentions.

I’m inclined to think that Lutz perhaps takes his position as a professor who is well involved with the historical contacts and exchanges between European and Indigenous, as enabling him to be a more able decipherer of Indigenous performances. After all his work is devoted to his own entering of a distant time alien to his culture in order to better make sense of them. It seems to me, that in making this assumption Lutz was projecting his own experience, and assuming that his readers would all have to go through similar ones in order to understand what he managed to understand. I don’t think he is being particularly fair when making this assumption; it reflects a generalizing of his readers, and a slightly condescending image he has of them as not being capable of tuning their understanding to the elements underlying the Indigenous performances.

Chamberlain and Wickwire both note the importance of listening as a step to make sense of the first contact stories between European and Indigenous people. The documentation of these stories definitely provide a challenge as it requires the investigator or the listener to take into account the centuries of myths and stories that contributed to how the exchanges between European and Indigenous are treated today. I’d hate to think that Lutz was actually being condescending towards his readers, which leads me to propose another alternative for the assumption he makes. Even if he did assume that his readers were of a European tradition, this tradition has grown and evolved since the very first encounters between Europe and the Americas. The myths and stories that had shaped the Europeans’ perceptions of the Indigenous are no longer as trusted and valued as they used to be. This is evident when one notes the efforts that many Westerners go through to delegitimize these assumptions in the hopes of restoring equality between European and non-European. Perhaps when referring to a distant time alien in culture, Lutz could have also been implying the European culture prevalent in the era of discovery, as opposed to just the Indigenous one.

I do think that my professor is fair in pointing out this assumption, as its ambiguity does leave space for questioning. If this is in fact the assumption Lutz was making, it reflects a hypocritical irony on his part, as he is projecting inaccurate perceptions on his readers, thus boxing them in the flawed image he has of them, just as the Europeans and Indigenous upon first contact, perceived each other not with “fresh eyes”, but with perceptions based on previous assumptions they had made of each other.

Works Cited:

Robinson, Harry, and Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.

In reading several of the blog posts for the previous assignment, the concepts of tradition, and shared moments struck me the most. For instance, Caitlin Bennett’s post repeatedly mentions comfort, and the value of a shared routine as being crucial to concretizing her sense of home. In her post, Sierra Gale, notes certainty, familiarity, and feeling welcome, as important contributors to creating a home.

The practice of any tradition or routine is tied with its practitioner’s familiarity to it; How long he/she has been exposed to this tradition and partaken in it. It also seems the elements of familiarity and certainty are tied to the notion of comfort. It is a popular conception that Man’s fear is associated with the uncertain and the unknown, both elements which put us outside of our ‘comfort zones’. Kurt Riezler investigates this concept in The Social Psychology of Fear.

Bennett and Gale both reflect on the importance of family and friends in bringing out in us a sense of comfort and familiarity before we can think of a place as home. In his post Brendan Ha also reflects on this, by noting that the idea of home is constructed by the people we share it with. He accentuates this assumption by including antitheses of the idea, displaying Taro in his story as being disconnected from his family and thus lacking a feeling of belonging.

Taking from these three blogs, I list the following elements as assumptions that contribute to the idea of home:

Tradition: Associated with the length of time one spends in a place and how he/she relates to the place in terms of habit

Familiarity: Associated with the feeling of knowing where one is; not feeling alienated, uncomfortable, or awkward in an environment (wether purely social, physical or a mix of both). Tradition seems to play an important role in bringing familiarity about.

Belonging: A feeling brought about by the people we love and that make us feel accepted and comfortable. In his hierarchy of needs, Maslow covers the need to belong as one of Man’s most basic needs. 

Perhaps the one assumption that englobes these, is the notion that the concept of home exceeds the walls of a house, apartment building, or larger landscape, and that it has much more to do with feeling accepted and sharing one or more commonalities with those with whom we share our “home”.

I hadn’t given much thought to this question until I was confronted with the thoughtful bursts of a girl in her 20s emerging into her own life. The question of home first inserted itself into my mind when I moved to Vancouver, and until then, home had always been my 50’s house in DC. It was almost right after the universe had been brought to my infantile perceptions, that I was carried to this destination in a white thick cloth, securely lodged in my mother’s arms. In it, I watched my little brother grow up, my parents become weary of my teenage angsts, my hairstyles change, friends come and go, and the recurrent New-Years parties, set in a disguised garage better suited for the occasion, that undulated with waves of excited voices and dancing steps to Congolese music. Over little past a decade, I accustomed myself to the sounds of the cracking wooden floors, the clinking silverware, and the intermingling of my family’s voices. Quarrels and joys, winter mornings and snowy nights, slow Sundays and stressed Mondays, this house had witnessed and been home to it all.

This sense of home would be re-asserted daily during my continuous and stable living there with my family. But come 6th grade, we moved to my mother’s parents’ country of origin: Mali. There, home could only be temporary. It was given we’d only be staying for a few years. We’d rentend out our D.C. house, thus renovating it and painting the walls with new bare layers veiling our previous existences. The new house in Bamako could only be a temporary home as I’d known my real one was just on hold for the moment. Though even as such perceived, this house couldn’t really encompass the same definition of home as that of my original one. She didn’t know our stories, and we didn’t know hers. We were as much strangers to this house as it was to us. Three years could only change this by a small margin.

Things were different once I returned to DC. The continuous history I’d once been involved in creating within it was now staggered somehow. Plus, my teenage years gave me a different outlook on things that altogether rendered me with a more unaware sense on the significance of home. My underlying feeling was that home was where I felt comfortable in psychological terms. It expanded from my house to all the places where I’d recurrently gone to between home and school, and where I built up stories of the moments within them. This was the time of my teenage bliss. However my teachers’ constant pressings on where I was to go to college, and what I should be enticed to study, cut too short for my liking, this social and familiar time, transfiguring it into a mournful few years in which I bitterly and inwardly resented my impending separation from my familiar nest. 

It was a few years into studying in Vancouver that the question of home made its appearance. There I’d felt most at home in first year. I’d made friends with similar cultural backgrounds to my own, making it easier to joke about things like 5 hour long Nigerian movies, and displaying my cultural homes. This wasn’t the case in my years enrolled in a British high school. My backgrounds came off as too outside of the general sense of sameness and belonging. In second year I moved into an apartment, filling it with objects and photos from my DC home, in an effort to recreate what I longed for. It didn’t prevail. Roommate troubles, the diminishing gregariousness of first years settling into second, mixed in with my philosophical crisis on the makings of my society, and the lifelessness of these imported objects, all contributed to rendering Vancouver the furthest place from home. So much so, that after 3 years I got fed up, packed my bags, and returned to my home in DC. 

Although this house and its stories of my family will probably remain a defining element to my sense of home, I’ve seen through moving around the world, and traveling for shorter times, that home is truly, as they say, where the heart is. I’d first heard this sentence long ago, agreeing passively to it, as if it was an evidence that required no further reflection. But in the globalized world we live in, the heart is not always in a place it can call home. When starting a new job, or moving to a new country, we often feel strange to a place to which we may be even more strange. We can grow attached, indifferent or disgusted by its new foreign customs. We might get along well in it, or we might have trouble and settle into a passive and mechanic existence with no love for the place we’re in, thus permeating our willingness to see a place as home, or we take up a new destination we hope will better tend to our hearts’ comforts.

Home is where my heart is, and my heart has always lied in those of my mother’s and father’s, the beats of its affection always guided towards sincere family members and friends. The constantly changing physical landscapes of my whereabouts have complimented these beats. This is why my family house in DC, the little French bakery I’ve worked at since I was 14, Costa Rica with my best friend Tori, the dusty roads of Ivory Coast that lead to my cousins’ house, and the South-Eastern French rural paysages and its innumerable outdoor lunches, are all places where I’ve been made to feel a belonging. Having a globally nomadic lifestyle, my sense of home, outside of geographical concerns, has at its essence, always been where those who make me feel accepted and whole are. 

The world had been in existence for a while. It lived and breathed in still harmony. Its humans belonged to the beginning of time. They filled the space with their laughs, their whispers, and the constant beat of their million hearts. There weren’t many rules and those that did exist were thoughtlessly appropriated by each. They concerned moderation, sincerity, and careful demonstrations of love and respect. They weren’t seen as rules, but more-so as a common logic to employ in the goal allowing the world’s harmony be perpetual. 

There was however a rigid rule, concerning the containment of evil in the forbidden tree.

On a sunny clear-skied afternoon, a young girl with gold and brown curls, Pandora, lay about the grass with her gaze focused on the clouds above her. A ruffle close to her ears stole her attention. Rolling over on her stomach, she peered through the grass, her sight following the sound. Chin on the ground and squinted eyes, she located the moving thing, sliding and contorting. It was long, with curious yellow and black patterns. It had eyes like shining black almonds, a thin flat face with a long slit denoting its large mouth. It had a tongue like an arrow split in half, appearing and disappearing with hisses. 

Pandora was curious. Never before had she seen such a creature. She’d heard stories of something similar from her people, but young and still discovering the vast grandness of the world she’d entered only a few years back, she’d been too distracted to listen to the warning stories about the creature. As naive as Eve, she got up and followed the crawling animal to a new unknown. By the time they got there, the sun was setting sending the sky in a fiery furor. She watched the animal slither around the base of a tree. Her gaze moved up the trunk, to the sole branch at her reach. The others protruded from the trunk much higher, intermeshing with each other, as if forming the bars of a cage nearly impossible to escape from. The red sky peered down through them, watching Pandora barely taller than a banana tree, as she tiptoed, reaching up to pick a fruit redder than the sky. 

The hissing creature seemed asleep, tightly curling the tree in its hold, as if a belt securing a waist. Fearing the incoming darkness, Pandora made her way backa to her village, biting into her fruit every few steps. Once back, she encountered her young neighbor Adamah, and counted him the story of the strange creature, and her delighted discovery of a new tasty fruit. 

“You’ve condemned yourself Pandora” said a low humming voice behind them. 

It was Sofos. The eldest of the village. He stood seated on a fallen tree trunk, looking gravely upon the two youths. Rising slowly, as if the weight of the world had suddenly been thrusted upon his shoulders, he reached out his hand to Pandora. 

“Come.” he said. 

Pandora, stupefied, put her hand in his and without a word went along with Sofos. They walked in silence for what seemed to her like an eternity. She’d occasionally look up to his face, wanting to ask, wanting to know, but the sullen grey tones ornating his struck features froze the words in her throat. 

They stopped suddenly, a few steps away from a lake, glowing in a moonlit silver. Sofos knelt down in front of the lake, peering down at his own reflection. He invited Pandora to do the same, but summoned her not to say a word of what she saw in the treading waters. More confused now than ever, she stared at her reflection, looking back at Sofos’ occasionally. 

Her eyes focused on every aspect of her countenance. She noticed the pleasing reflection of the moonlight on her curls, and the deep green of her eyes until it was all the could see. A smug smile formed on her lips. 

“I look…” she started, but Sofos interrupted her suddenly. 

“Pandora, you are the first fallen. You have cursed your senses and your words. You’ve bit into the apple of discord. It has blinded your heart’s sight with that one of your eyes.”

“What?”

“You have unknowingly broken the sacred rule that our people have had for eternities by biting into the fruit of the forbidden tree.”

She looked at him horrified, but something in her felt Sofos was taking her case too seriously. She felt unchanged, she looked the same; why was he implying such grave consequences?

“You may however redeem yourself and spare the rest of us by vowing to craft your speech impeccably; you must now choose your words, thinking carefully of them and their meaning before you utter them.”

She felt a pinge of rejection. Her traits contorted into the face of anger. 

“You’re a liar!” she yelled suddenly. “I didn’t do anything wrong, this is unfair! I do not care what you say, I am going back to the village, I will tell who I please of my day’s voyage, and I’ll tell all of them what a crook you are!”

Her screams had pierced through the night’s air but Sofos, to Pandora’s surprise, stood still, seemingly unabashed by the furor of her words. They stood facing each other, as if in a duel. 

She looked at his face, searching for a hint of reaction. Although still and calm, his countenance was hardened, struck by the hurt her words had caused. She felt hints of regret and shame shooting through her, but her newfound prideful will not to cave to her heart’s reason obscured them. She started turning away, heading back to the village. Before she disappeared completely into the darkness of the woods, Sofos in a last attempt at getting her understanding, reached her hand to her slowly disappearing figure:

“Pandora, the words you choose to speak, can never be unheard; they can never be unspoken; Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. Be careful of the stories you tell, and those you listen to.” 

—-

I loved this creative writing opportunity. Adapting the story to my own words seemed easy until I got to the end. I did most of my rewriting during that part. I found that telling a story, and telling it to an audience (i.e. family/friends) was a big part of what I enjoyed for this assignment. In comparing this assignment to a more ‘regular’ one like writing a term paper in the hopes of getting a good grade, I felt less limited. I felt I was really putting more of myself in the story, and not trying to sound a certain way or appeal to a more or less rigid system of analysis and grading. Thinking up the story and telling it out loud felt much more meaningful then when I started typing it. It was a lonelier experience, and I felt much more enclosed in my own thoughts. (Don’t get me wrong, I love that, but the experience is different when you have a live auditor whose reactions you perceive as you tell the story). I think this draws on what King says about “the printed word” not having a “master”, “voice”, or “sense of time and place”(154).

When coming up with my version of story I had Milton’s Paradise Lost in mind, although the references to it don’t really pull through in my version, the genesis, and drew from various creation stories I’ve read s from Indigenous peoples in the US, and from the middle east and Africa. I also drew from Greek mythology, mostly for the names of some of the characters.

Works Cited:
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.

Explain why the notion that cultures can be distinguished as either oral or written is a mistaken understanding as to how culture works

In explaining why categorizing cultures as oral and written is a mistaken understanding of how they work, one must consider whether or not a clear distinction between orality and literacy can be made. In this blog post, basing myself on MacNeil’s publication on orality, and on Chamberlin’s If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground, I give an attempt at explaining why cultures cannot be distinguished by such categories due to the interrelated nature of literacy and orality. 

Before the earliest invention of writing  (3200 BC in ancient Sumeria), the peoples of our world relied on oral performance to communicate, share, and celebrate their beliefs. They used drawings and pictographs to represent their beliefs and ideas, and used oral speech to communicate them amongst each other.

It is an accepted theory that the invention of writing stemmed from the basis of existing pictographs and ideographs. Thus if we can consider orality as the primary manner in which humans communicated, and if we can consider literature as stemming from the visual performance attached to oral cultures, literature and orality cannot be separated. They are innately interrelated. Distinguishing between the two would in effect, create a gap between past and present. The present is what it is, because of past actions that led it to be as such. Just as literature is what it is because of humanity’s ancient traditions of orality. Distinguishing between orality and literature would fracture the story that explains how we got from orality to literacy. 

Drawing on Meschonnic’s definition of orality, Courtney MacNeil describes orality as not being ‘the opposition of writing, but rather a catalyst of communication more generally, which is part of both writing and speech”.  Donald Wesling and Teudeusz Slawek, also add on to the definition of orality as something that ‘is not what is spoken, but what allows one to speak.” In viewing orality as a catalyst to human communication, we must also view orality as the catalyst to literature, in the sense that literature is also a human effort to communicate. In this regard, literacy and orality cannot be separated. 

Now, moving away from the beginnings of literature and how they are intertwined with orality, let’s move on to how literature and orality are intertwined in the modern world. In her publication, Courtney MacNeil mentions the effect of technological advances, more specifically in the area of cyberspace, on how we see literacy and orality. In the modern world, mediums such as Skype, or phone technologies, allow us to facilitate oral communication. What’s so interesting and somewhat paradoxal about cyberspace, is that it allows us to use oral communication, using a medium that was constructed based on text. For instance, the phone, along with many modern electronic products we use, are based on a binary number system. But to have invented the phone, to have invented the binary codes that would allow them to function in the way that they do, someone, or a group of people had to come up with that idea and communicate it orally, before plans could be made to invent such a thing. So, if orality is to be considered a catalyst of communication, orality in its relation to communication technologies, can also be considered the catalyst to their invention.

In If This is Your Land, Then Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, Chamberlin mentions that “all so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing, albeit non-syllabic and non-alphabetic ones”(32) and cites “woven and beaded belts and blankets”(32) as examples of the forms of writing he speaks of. He then contrasts our modern “supposedly written cultures”(32) with the oral cultures afore mentioned, and describes them as having “areas of strictly defined and highly formalized oral traditions”(32). This speaks once again to how interwoven orality and literacy are in the modern culture many consider ‘written’ , and also suggests a wider definition of ‘writing’.  Perhaps writing is not just defined by what I’m doing right now, perhaps it cannot simply be defined by the action of putting words on paper wether cyber-paper (like this Pages document) or real paper you can feel and touch. 

I mentioned earlier that the invention of writing was done on the basis of already existing pictographs and ideograms. Let’s consider the Chinese alphabet, one very unique as compared to the couple dozen letter alphabets that the Western world commonly uses. The accepted theory is that the Chinese alphabet stems from non-linguistic symbols, or pictograms and that over time these non-linguistic visual symbols, evolved into the modern Chinese alphabet. Before Chinese pictograms became alphabetized, they were just simple visual representations of symbols recognizable to those engaged with the culture. Writing was not alphabetized, but much more picturesque. The beaded belts and blankets that Chamberlin speaks of can perhaps be considered the same way; a form of writing specific to a culture, and going hand in hand with its oral traditions. With this in mind, one can consider that there are many forms of ‘writing’ and ‘literacy’. Literacy doesn’t necessarily have to be constricted to the ability to read and write, but could be extended to the ability of listening and representing speech in visual form. 

Drawing from the examples and citations I’ve described, distinguishing cultures between oral and written is an inevitably flawed way of classifying cultures, as it suggests an underlying distinction between orality and literacy. If orality and literacy cannot be completely separated from one another, then neither can so-called written and oral cultures. 

Works cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003. Print.

Linguistics 201: The Invention of Writing.” Linguistics 201: The Invention of Writing. Western Washington University, n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. <http://cii.wwu.edu//vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing2.htm>

Lo, Lawrence K. “Ancient Scripts: Chinese.” Ancient Scripts: Chinese. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Jan. 2016. <http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html>

MacNeil, Courtney. “The Chicago School of Media Theory Theorizing Media since 2003.” The Chicago School of Media Theory RSS. WordPress, 2007. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.

Hello, and welcome to my blog page fellow readers and classmates! My name is Marie-Latifa, but feel free to call me Marie. I am French and Ivorian, and grew up for quite some time immersed in North American culture. My interests lie in art, literature, writing, philosophy and world history as far as it reaches. I am currently a 3rd year in UBC, majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies.

I have just enrolled in ENG470a, a course with an interesting focus on the intersections and departures between European and Indigenous peoples in the Canadian region.

Since the era of discovery and colonization, native lands throughout the world have been and continue to be influenced by the roots of Western European culture. I like to think that being both from Ivory Coast (a West African country colonized by France) and France, and having been lucky enough to grow up immersed in both my cultures of origin, has given me a unique understanding of the intersections between European and native cultures. In a world plagued by social issues, wars, and a blatant disrespect for our environment, I believe it the personal responsibility of all humans to do their best efforts to restore harmony and peace to our globe’s societies. I am no authority on how that should be done, and I think it true that there are more than many ways to do so. In an effort to help unite the voices of our world, I personally have chosen to vest much of my interest in the voices of native cultures (meaning Native Americans, Africans, Australian Natives, Indians etc.), on their significance in the modern world, and how they have been affected, and continue to be affected by the influence (wether coercive or economic) of Western European voices.

To further my interest in such issues, I’ve been reading Malian author Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s “Oui, mon commandant!” (Yes, officer!), a memoir recounting the narrator’s voyages throughout Mali while working as an officer for the French colonizers.

Because I am interested in learning about the cultures from which our modern societies stemmed from, I am tremendously excited to be a part of an English course that is focused on Indigenous cultures and how they have changed and evolved since the start of European action within and outside of them. Although it is unfortunate that many of the Indigenous voices that continue to make up modern-day Canada have been under-heard, forgotten or misheard, I find it very hopeful that professors such as Erika Paterson, and individuals all around the world find it a worthy cause to revitalize them, and encourage them to be known and spread.

I read a very interesting phrase I hadn’t heard before by Edward Chamberlin on the front page of the course’ syllabus: “now, it is more important than ever to attend to what others are saying in their stories and myths – and what we are saying about ourselves”. Although I only in lesson 1.1, I find it exciting that my professor chose this phrase to set the tone of the course, and am really looking forward to opening my mind to new perspectives and ways of considering Indigenous cultures.

Works cited:

Hampâté Bâ, Amadou. Amadou Hampâté Bâ Oui, Mon Commandant ! Mémoires (II). Paris: Actes Sud, 1994. Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Oui, Mon Commandant! Mémoires (II). WebPulaaku – WebAfriqa. Web. 13 Jan. 2016. <http://www.webpulaaku.net/defte/ahb/oui-mon-commandant/tdm.html>.

Paterson, Erika. “ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Jan 2016.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres Jan 2016. WordPress, n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2016. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/course-requirements/>.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004. Print.