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”.