Monthly Archives: October 2016

2:6 Where Are Sue’s “Indians?”

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Question:

Read Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of Roughing it in the Bush, 1854. I use the Project Gutenburg website which has a ‘command F’ function that allows you to search the entire document by words or phrases. Moodie’s introduction is often read as a warning to would be emigrants as well as an explanation of why her family emigrated from Britain. See if you can find echoes of the stories discussed above: a gift from god, a second Garden of Eden, an empty/wasted land, the noble but vanishing Indian, and the magical map. By echoes I mean reading between the lines or explicitly within Moodie’s introduction. Discussing what you discover, use your examples as evidence to write a blog that explores what you think might have been Moodie’s level of awareness of the stories she carried with her. And accordingly, the stories that she “resurrects’ by her appearance in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Green Grass Running Water.

A:

Within Moodie’s introduction there is a definite conflict between the reality and the idealism of the emigrant narrative. Undoubtedly though, Moodie believes that the emigrant who works hard and under the lord’s guidance will prosper from the land: “The Great Father of the souls and bodies of men knows the arm which wholesome labour from infancy has made strong, the nerves which have become iron by patient endurance, by exposure to weather, coarse fare, and rude shelter.” These “souls and bodies” with iron patience will be god’s chosen. What will they receive for their labour? A gift: all emigrants who leave for Canada believe, in Moodie’s eyes, an inspiring narrative: “they go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country, to forget the past and to live in the future, to exult in the prospect of their children being free and the land of their adoption great” (Moodie).

Here we find the gift of god promised in the new settlement: a place with a history for the settlers to write. The stark lack of any Native inhabitants concerns or even interactions in Moodie’s introduction is also represented by the term “the land of their adoption” as the need for parenting is established. Emigrants receive Canada to raise up from a ground zero, reminding us of the “Chapter 1” that colonizers begin at, and the “Chapter 15” of the Natives they neglect in the process of “receiving” and cultivating their adopted land (Asch 31). Moodie’s emigrant is gifted a new beginning, a biblical rebirth, while the Natives, perhaps, see the rising tides of doom.

This gift from god is the garden of Eden with its “salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country.” The caveat for Moodie, seen earlier, is that only those chosen by god and endowed with iron patience will make this garden an actuality and “reclaim the waste places of the earth,” again commenting on the Natives’ usage of the land while keeping them out of the text. The wasted land of Canada require iron men who will “hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization,” driving further the implication that any previous inhabitants of the land are uncivilized. Implicit also in this advance is that Moodie’s civilization is the one and only civilization, she does not say “the advance of our civilization” or “English/European civilization.”

The most striking statement of the introduction comes early as Moodie relates the emigrant’s task to an “act of severe duty.” Not only is the land a gift, it is a gift that must be accepted and capitalized on. The necessity of this statement could even be said to emphasis the active European vs. passive/wasteful/invisible Native relationship that we can see in this very short introduction. The absence of any direct address to the Native people invokes the vanishing and noble Native narrative prompted in the question above; the land receives both glorified, holy applause and realistic brutality, the land symbolizing, perhaps quite consciously, the noble Native who needed to be reined in by civilization. The flowery language of the narrative Moodie finds to be a failure is paralleled by the realism of the empty and wasted: “what a mass of misery, and of misrepresentation productive of that misery, have ye not to answer for! You had your acres to sell.”  Taking the idealized land as the symbol of the noble Native, Moodie, reasoned on experience (“nineteen years in the colony”), addresses both the literal landsellers, likely European, but also the noble Natives who squandered their gifts and never became “productive.”

Moodie, while sardonically describing the lofty language of the romanticized emigrant, reinforces the narrative of the Europeans active responsibility to bring civilization and productivity to the land. They must fulfill this narrative because they themselves come from productive civilization and any land not yet under the “influence of the wise and revered institutions of their native land” must consequentially be theirs. 

King’s Susanna Moodie searches for Indians. From Moodie’s introduction alone we can see why she can’t find them in Green Grass, Running Water: she’s written them out of the conversation. She remarks that “we’re all Canadians” in King’s story, yet she’s on an adventure to find “Indians.” people surely present in her nation (158). King perceptively sees that the Canadian emigrant narrative neglects to give the Native people: an active role or even a voice.

Work Cited:

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. 1993. Rpt. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 21 Apr 2016.

 

2:4 Twins in This Canadian Land

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Question:

“If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact”43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.

Harry Robinson was told the Coyote twin story as an explanation for Aboriginal ownership of the land they had lived on and remembered living on, an explanation that may seem absurd to both Western and Aboriginal parties, but for different reasons. The stark truth that Aboriginal ownership is often pushed from consideration, that the “Indians belonged to the land,” creates a necessity for these ownership stories (Robinson, “Living by Stories” 9). However, Aboriginal conventions of establishing such ownership through stories and traditions did not match Western legal ownership concepts. J. Edward Chamberlin showed us earlier how such cultural divides in perception subvert, from one’s own culture, valid ownership claims, recalling the judge dismissing the First Nation’s woman’s “ada’ox” (“If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?” 20).

It’s fascinating how ownership establishes itself differently, yet remains, with a lot of reduction here, about living on and off of a particular piece of geographical land. The necessity for stories complements the necessity for laws across the cultures, perhaps clarifying how our myths of structure rule similarly anywhere.

This similarity is initially seen in the unifying aspect of Harry’s (the storyteller’s) two characters being twins, binding the two figures with the sacredness of kinship. A blood bond exists between twins, Here the storyteller highlights the common humanity that persists (but so often in silence) during first contact. It is also a moment of humility as both twin’s perceptions originate simultaneously with their tasks for creating the world. The younger twin, the thief, can be dismissed as evil or can be accepted as a part of all heritage as even the Aboriginals feuded and stole lands. This initial unity, I think, may be the most powerful moral message taken from the short, summarized version of the story.

The particulars of the story’s manifestation as a way to claim ownership for the Coyote’s descendants, the ones who followed the proper ordering of the world counteracts the previous humility–there is pride in being a Coyote. The pride too isn’t something to shy away from, it’s necessary, and is reflected just as easily in the “proper way of things” that Western ideology brought to North America. The written document reeks of the bible too, and in its stealing seems to comment on both the ability for a story to be misinterpreted or warped as well as the desire for people to make a story their own, to steal it. The written document, the “paper,” presumably was a part of the instructions for the “creation of the earth and its first inhabitants,” mirroring the testaments of European religion (Robinson, “Living Stories” 9).

The way out of conflict, the storyteller offers, was a book of codes detailing “the law from the time we finish” (10). The statement quoted shows that the tasks the twins were initially given were still unfinished. This gives the story a sense of an inevitable end, but also a future. Intriguingly, the two twins meet at the written, signalling some kind of forgiveness for the original sin from Coyote as well as a desperation, once again showing the duality of existence; of forgiving and needing help simultaneously.

The implications of this short story fire off in every direction: we all descend from the same family, but have our own stories and interpretations, that “Black and White” can unite on rules (interestingly in a written code), that oral and written come from the same “series of important tasks,” and many more (9-10).

My question going forward is simply what happened to the younger twin? What is the importance of Coyote requesting a law from the king?

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2:3 Home As a Verb

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After reading various home stories from my intriguing classmates (available here), here is the list of things I noticed:

Departure: the act of leaving home was almost always present in these stories. The fluidity of the term home perhaps starts here as one place or thing that can be left for another home. Simultaneous senses of home can exist together but one must always physically or mentally be in one idea when referring to it as home.

Destination: home was a place to arrive at, or to aspire for in many stories. It seemed to exist as an ideal, but an ideal that was loosely defined, existing at the limits of language, between the tangible and the imagined.

People: one would be hard pressed to find a home story that does not describe the people associated with that home, or perhaps necessary for that physical place to attain the term home; mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, support groups, movements, seem to all be worthy of being a home.

Animals/Nature: whether the actual environment or a horse one lives above , home came beside descriptions of living non-human creatures and landscapes. Home takes up both the transient living environment and the permanent, once again existing at a tension as in home being the place you leave and the place you arrive at. Emotions attached themselves to nature and then through those images of nature emotions became a part of the physical place.

Identity: home helps us understand who we are. Place helps us see what we are in relationship to it as Kaylie points out: 

It is the connection to this place—watching the waves role in and out with my breath—and the recognition of the connections between the living beings here, and between this life and this place. It is recognizing how I fit into this picture.

Home as a means for identity both hurt and bolstered many storytellers. Home put down constraints as a place where one was meant to feel safe, but if this meaning failed one was left disoriented. These constraints such as relationships, physical place, and other social identifiers could help though, giving people a sense of grounding.

Ineffable: The language of home seems to fail at its origin because it exists as a place one leaves and a place one returns to, as both the people and nature that inhabit it, as the identity one sheds and the identity one embraces. Home comes with contradiction. Storytellers reflected on childhood homes, some happy, some not, but those homes seemed to belong in childhood, and now there was a space to be filled by a different home. Home then changes but also grounds us.

What I’ve been trying to get at, but perhaps not well enough, through this list is that home is our “Believe it and not” challenge that J. Edward Chamberlin presents early on in his struggle with how to make sense of the word home when its definition contradicts between almost every individual (34). The term comes from  Paul Veyne’s response to the question of whether the ancient Greeks actually believed their myths or not, but it is equally applicable to our conceptions of home. We both believe in it as a destination and a place we are in right now.

Finally, the act of believing implicitly attaches itself to home with every  individualized conception of the word. To simply utter “home” becomes an action of the imagination, throwing us forward and backwards in time, urging us to analyze our current home, and escaping our tongues as we try to define what home means as we approach it, like the limits of Calculus.

Work Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada Ed., Vintage Canada, 2004.

Fish, Colleen. “Many Assumptions and Values Are the Same but Details Differ Greatly! – Ass #2.3.” ENGL 470 – Canadian Studies. N.p., 30 Sept. 2016. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.
Higgs, Kaylie. “Is This Home?” Creating Connections. N.p., 27 Sept. 2016. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.