I have a great story to tell you.

Not long ago, there was a small town where evil didn’t exist. The town was out in the forest, amid hundreds of trees and small creatures who co-existed peacefully with each other. The townspeople were friendly folks, and each of them had jobs to help the town run as smoothly and peacefully as possible.

Mark was a metalsmith. Heather was a woodworker. Gina was a doctor. Tim was a teacher. John was a firefighter and Kathy was a baker.

Everyone in town had a special job to do. Even the children helped with farming, cooking, cleaning, and feeding the animals. Giving everyone responsibility for the town made everyone care for it a little more, and gave everyone a sense of belonging. The community was strong and people cared for their homes, their land, the animals, and each other.

Then one day, a new person stumbled into town. Jimmy, a man from another town, a place where evil did exist, happened upon the town while exploring the forest. He left his home a few days prior, and got lost while hiking the woods. After a long night of wandering in the dark with nothing but his hunting rifle and a small pack, Jimmy was thrilled to see the light of the quaint, peaceful little town.

“Hey, stranger!” said Mark.

“Whaddaya want?” replied Jimmy.

“I’m just saying hello. Haven’t seen you around here before.”

Jimmy shrugged. “I’m from another town, far away from here. I got lost in the forest… Been searching for my way back for days. Where can I get some food around here?”

Mark spotted Kathy and waved her over. “This is Kathy, our town baker. I’m sure she can fix you up something warm to eat.”

Kathy smiled and nodded, “It’ll just be a minute,” and she hurried off towards her bakery.

Jimmy stood awkwardly with Mark, looking around. He glanced to his right and spotted a deer peeking out of the forest, slowly gnawing on some grass. “Deer meat,” he thought, “that’s what I need. Better than bread.” He cocked his rifle and shot, missing the deer’s head and hitting its stomach.

“Shoot,” Jimmy whispered. He readied his rifle again.

“What are you doing!” screamed Heather, running towards where Jimmy and Mark stood. Mark was shaking with a stunned look on his face.

“Why? Why would you do that?” mumbled Mark.

The deer was squeaking and writhing in the grass. More townspeople gathered around.

“I’m hunting. What? You people never seen a hunter before? You live in the woods…”

“What’s hunting?” Asked Tim, the teacher, who knew just about every word in the book but was baffled by this strange new one.

“Uh… Killing animals. To eat. Sometimes just for fun. And since I missed this deer’s head, we can’t eat ‘er anymore. So I guess this was just for fun.”

The townspeople stared at Jimmy, confused. How could you kill for fun? Death, to them, was a sad affair that only ever occurred in inevitable circumstances. Although evil did not exist, death still did, and death was always something sorrowful, something everyone wanted to avoid.

Very quickly, a crowd formed around the deer, which now lay completely still, its tongue hanging loose out of its mouth, its eyes glassy and open.

“I don’t like this,” said Gina, “You have to leave now, sir.”

Kathy came back with a basket of warm bread. She handed it to him, staring at the deer.

Jimmy shrugged, grabbing a piece of bread. With a full mouth, he said, “Oh, come on! This is nothing. Where I’m from, people kill other people. People fight in wars. This is just an animal. I’m not hurting anybody.”

“What do you mean, people kill other people?” said Mark.

“What’s war?” asked Tim.

Jimmy was stunned. How do these people not know what murder is? How do they not know war?

“Murder. Killing other people. Killing them, you know…. dead. War, countries fighting each other. Massive battlefields where people shoot each other, people bomb each other.”

The townspeople all began mumbling. War? Murder?

“See, killing this deer is nothing. This is survival. This isn’t bad.”

“I don’t like this,” said Gina, “You’re frightening the children and making the townspeople uncomfortable. You should leave.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry folks,” Jimmy said, chewing another piece of bread, “Just pretend I was never here.”

Jimmy disappeared into the forest again, but the deer still lay quietly and still. Blood soaked the green grass, and the children walked in the sticky, dark red residue. Nobody in the town knew what to do. Although Jimmy left, the memory of the day was still there. A town that never knew evil, never even heard the word, learned about murder and war, terrible things that happened in places not far from their own homes.

——

When I told this story to my partner, he laughed because of the use of hunting as an introduction of evil. I’m a omnivore and while I would never hunt, hunting out of necessity doesn’t bother me. Aside from that, he also found it hard to believe, seeing as evil has always existed in the world and imagining a town where the residents work together and are completely blind to evil reminds him of towns like Wayward Pines, or Stepford, where evil exists but is masked by mechanic, shallow, eerie niceties.

And I guess that reminds us that story is always shaped by history. Either the teller or the listener is influenced by what they already know. Then, of course, that new story becomes a part of them, however small, and influences the way they tell or hear the next tale. Strange how that works.

Works Cited:

Hodge, Chad. “Trailer.” Wayward Pines. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. Fox. Vancouver, BC, 13 May 2014. YouTube.

The Stepford Wives. Dir. Frank Oz. Paramount Pictures, 2004. YouTube.

“In many ways, home is an image for the power of stories. With both, we need to live in them if they are to take hold, and we need to stand back from them if we are to understand their power. But we do need them; when we don’t have them, we become filled with a deep sorrow. That’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, we go mad.”

Chamberlain, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? 

I work at the UBC Learning Exchange in the DTES, in the Drop-In, a safe space for DTES residents to meet people, drink coffee, play cards, and use the computer. While the Learning Exchange’s programming focuses on community engagement and community-based experiential learning, the Drop-In is a place where most people come because they know it will be safe, warm, and welcoming. Many of our patrons are homeless or nearly homeless. Others are living in poor conditions — SROs, poorly managed BC Housing buildings, bouncing from shelter to shelter. Some are just residents of the DTES, a community in flux, looking for a stable place to get to know people in their community.

Many of the regular patrons who visit the Drop-In are Indigenous men and women who live in the area. Aboriginal peoples are overrepresented in the homeless population of Vancouver, making up for over a third of the homeless population while only representing 2% of the entire population in Metro Vancouver (Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee, ii). Over my last month working at the Learning Exchange, I’ve gotten to know many of the regulars pretty well, and some of them have been generous enough to share their stories with me. Without getting into details, most stories I hear have to do with Aboriginal people being taken advantage of in their own homes, being displaced, being disrespected, being told that they don’t belong in a city that is rightfully their home.

This is where home gets tricky. Chamberlain says, “home may be in another time and place, and yet it holds us in its power here and now.” This is the case with many Indigenous people living in Vancouver, in the Unceded Coast Salish Territories. Home doesn’t exist here anymore. Since contact, white settlers have been taking things away from the Indigenous people. Language and land, two powerful aspects of any culture, were stolen from the Aboriginal people. Today, things are still being taken away. Entire city blocks are being gentrified to be more appealing to white middle class Canadians, who are colonizing the DTES by destroying the area because they think it’s their right to do so.

Photo by DM Gillis

The other aspect of the Learning Exchange is the English Conversation Program, a volunteer-run program that supports English learners by giving them a space to practice their language skills together. Most of the learners are Chinese seniors, many are low-income, living in Chinatown.

Just like the rest of the DTES, Chinatown is another rapidly changing area in Vancouver. Places like Matchstick Coffee, Bestie, Mamie Taylor’s, Nelson the Seagull have been weaseling their way into Chinatown and the DTES for years, getting a new kind of crowd involved in the neighbourhood.

Will these newcomers to the Downtown Eastside continue to use their comparative wealth as a tool of acquisition, compelling those they judge surplus to leave? At the moment, it looks that way. But the current drivers of gentrification must know that they’re small fry compared to the corporations that will follow, using their corporate power and wealth to displace them. And when all that is left is a Disney-fied strip mall of Starbucks, 7-Elevens and Money Marts, will the owners of Cuchillo and PiDGiN be proud to say that they helped make it all possible?

DM Gillis

I was chatting with my coworker outside of work the other day, standing on the corner of Main and Keefer, and we couldn’t help but notice the strange mix of people in the neighbourhood. There was a group of young, hip 20-somethings with sour looks on their faces skateboarding past a Chinese senior couple, shuffling slowly along the sidewalk. There were men is suits stepping out of the new Starbucks across the street (which I’ll mention in a minute), and a bustling Chinese market right next to where we stood. These images alone indicate to me that the town is changing.

The Keefer Block is a new condo development on Main and Keefer, and is a testament to the changes in the neighbourhood. The development’s website boasts the boutique apartments, saying that buying one of their being a part of Vancouver’s “vibrant cultural identity,” but that are really displacing people within that culture. You likely know of this building because it’s home to the first standalone Starbucks in Chinatown. If you didn’t believe Chinatown was dying before, this must convince you.

Artist Rendering of the Keefer Block. Very few features of Chinatown are represented in this photo — you’d almost think this was Yaletown.

Just like with the Indigenous people, Chinese peoples’ land is being taken away, their language is being stolen (signs are popping up in English only, making many businesses inaccessible to non-English speakers), and they are being displaced — priced out of their own neighbourhoods because yuppies want to live in a cool, hip, edgy neighbourhood.

The following is the trailer for Julia Kwan’s documentary “Everything Will Be,” a film that explores the rapidly changing Chinatown.

“When the horse dies, you walk on the ground. No matter how difficult, one must keep walking.”

So, what is home? I think it’s a place where you can firmly root yourself, where you’re welcomed and comfortable. For many, I don’t think the concept of home truly exists.

I’ll leave you with these questions (since I feel I’ve veered off of the prompt quite a bit): What do you think of gentrification? Do you agree that it destroys homes, cultures, and community? Or do you think it’s a necessary development, an investment, the natural progression of things?

Works Cited:

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

Everything Will Be. Dir. Julia Kwan. National Film Board of Canada, 2014.

Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness. (2014). Results of the 2014 Homeless Count in the Metro Vancouver Region.

“Keefer Block.” Vancouver Condo. Web. 23 May 2015.

Hi everyone! My name is Melissa, and I’m an English Lit major entering my fifth year at UBC. This summer, I’m filling my time working a co-op job at UBC Learning Exchange, trying not to freak out about my upcoming grad, riding my bike around the city, and, of course, learning more about Canadian history through literature!

I’m in love with Canada. No, seriously. Growing up in BC felt like such a treat to me. You hear it all the time, but it really is incredible to be able to see the mountains, the ocean, and the city all in one day. I won’t ever get over that luxury. I recently took a trip to Montreal and Toronto and I fell even more in love with the country. Canada is such a beautiful place to be!

Found on Of Two Lands (click for link)

Despite all this, I know there’s a lot more to Canada than beautiful landscapes and friendly strangers. That’s why I’m taking this course.

I’m thrilled to be a part of this class because it approaches Canadian Lit, a genre that is often underrated, in a completely unconventional way (read as: no Margaret Atwood). What really drew me to this course is the focus on learning more about Indigenous narratives, storytelling, and orature. These narratives are overlooked, and more often than not, completely forgotten, and I’m so glad to be a part of a class that not only looks at these stories but also critically looks at what is being told, what’s not being told, and why. We’ll also be examining colonizing narratives, something that will allow us to become more critical and aware readers. It’s so important to learn more about the way Canadian history is represented in literature and to learn more about alternative narratives. I’m looking forward to learning more about what “intersections and departures between European and Indigenous traditions of literature and orature,” really entails.

It’s not only the course readings that excite me, but also the way this course is being approached. Being a class that looks at alternate ways of storytelling, it’s fascinating to also be using unique techniques to learn. Not only this, but being a class that looks at intersections in two very different cultures, using modern mediums to teach literary history also offers its own innovative intersection. Blogging, creating “collaborative online working spaces,” vlogs, and even online group work — I’m thrilled to be a part of this!

If you can’t already tell… I’m looking forward to learning and exploring with all of you! Enjoy May long, and please, don’t be shy… Introduce yourself! 🙂

96% of Canadians are putting away the winter plaid and bringing out the spring plaid

— Stats Canada (@stats_canada) March 30, 2015

Works Cited:

49°20’34.1″N 123°06’53.5″W. 2014. British Columbia, BC. RSS. By Florent and Amberly. Web. 15 May 2015.

Stats Canada (Satire). Stats_canada. N.p., 30 Mar. 2015. Web. 15 May 2015. <https://twitter.com/stats_canada>.

“The UBC Learning Exchange.” UBC Learning Exchange. Web. 16 May 2015. <http://learningexchange.ubc.ca/>.