Beyond the Walls You Create

“Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror.” (Mcluhan, 48)

Marshall Mcluhan’s assertion that the medium is the message puts forth the notion that the way in which messages are conveyed are just as, if not more important than, the messages themselves. While I understand this approach and see the many ways in which different mediums convey or affect messages, where I take issue is Mcluhan’s exclusions of any medium that he does not seem to deem “worthy”; those seemingly being pre-contact, non-european, not based in a colonial past with their invasive branches continuously reaching out to affect our lives today as both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. These “primordial intuitions” as Mcluhan calls them simply do no seem to meet his standards of affecting any message conveyed through them.

As well the issues in this idea lie in Mcluhan’s assumption that Indigenous societies had no form of written communication or “direction” without these written forms raises the question of what defines “written language” in Mcluhans opinion, as there are well documented examples of Indigenous groups recording histories in pictographs and other forms, such as the Maya and Inca, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics such as the one pictured below.

This act of creating a hierarchy in terms of method of communication serves only to reinforce colonial ideologies and practices that place european settler society’s ways of being above all else while oppressing those of the “other(s).” Mcluhan is actively creating a colonial framework, and all others must operate inside its limitations.

“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear… the phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the invention of the phonetic alphabet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension.” (Mcluhan, 44)

The assumptions at work in these theories put forth ideas of inferiority within those societies that do not necessarily conform to the limitations put in place by the invention and imposition of the phonetic alphabet Mcluhan is discussing. The disrespectful labeling of Indigenous peoples as simply “pre-alphabet” societies implies little significance to our ways of being, our ways of communicating with one another, our stories, our songs, our languages; it implies that since they are not written in a way that is familiar to western settler societies, they hold no depth or value in today’s “mass-age”. This labeling also places Indigenous societies and ways of being simply in the past, as though “pre-alphabet” ways of communication are long gone, static moments in a time long past that are not being carried forward in today’s society.

Defining Indigenous societies by a language and form of communication imposed upon them and their ability (or Mcluhan’s perceived inability) to conform to these methods while overlooking the violence used to force them upon our societies (i.e. Residential Schools) is a dangerous yet easy act to commit when one is focused more so on the the form of a message rather than its colonial, bigoted, imperial, disrespectful content.

A lack of understanding of the fluidity of Indigenous cultures on the part of Mcluhan lead him to believe our “pre-alphabet societies” cannot work within his colonial frameworks discussed above. What we as Indigenous peoples have done and must continue to do is disprove these outdated ideologies like this, by harnessing the power of the media and decolonizing the spaces of it both within and outside its frameworks through innovative methods seen in too many examples to list here. Be it through mobilization by way of online gathering such as Idle No More, art/history/resistance exhibits such as c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city or radio shows such as CiTR’s Unceded Airwaves. Our messages fit all these mediums and more, their content not to be overshadowed by their form, carrying messages of love, of resistance, of anger, of revitalization and more.

Mcluhan’s assertions of the importance of media and its conveyance of messages through different mediums are by all accounts of today’s society, true. It is for this reason that we as Indigenous peoples must work and are working within these spaces to decolonize them, at the keyboard and beyond we must take this work on so as to not repeat history and live up to Mcluhan’s outdated expectations and notions that the media has surpassed Indigenous ways of being in this world, and reverse them instead, using these spaces and their inherent power to relay our messages while also understanding the responsibilities of harnessing the power of media; holding ourselves up, while also holding ourselves accountable; thus mitigating any risk of social hierarchies being formed within these movements of resistance.

Our songs reach beyond the walls you create, our dances shake them to pieces, our stories cannot be confined to your A-Z logic and our histories live on today through these things, through our families; reaching further, deeper than the global village you speak of, Mcluhan, and have been doing so since time immemorial. It is for these reasons you have found difficulty if not the impossibility of replicating them in print, your “ditto machine” will fail time and time again in its attempts to form our ways of being into “uniformly repeatable ‘commodity(ies), they will not fit your “assembly line-mass production” ( Mcluhan, 50) methods.

Works cited

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. Gingko Press, 2001. Print.