Evil was first brought into this world by students. Not witches or warlocks,  not ghouls or ghosts, nor vampires or even Voldemort. Students. Students from all kinds of backgrounds, way back on January fifth, and they all came together for an English class. On the interwebs. A bona fide collection of students, interested in engaging with scholarly material and pursuing knowledge through discussion in a strange online setting. Well, not discussion, more dialogue actually. It was a dialogue to discover the crucial component of a Canadian literary canon. Some of the students suggested Margaret Atwood, others suggested Farley Mowat. It must have been exciting for the professor to hear all these great ideas! But as the class drew on, there was one student who had not suggested anything. Nobody was even sure if this student went to UBC. Having nothing else to share, this student told a story. It was a story full of long assignments and complex theories, of late Friday nights in the library and a dwindling social life; pure evil. This student had no input for the Canadian canon, and won no prize, so consequently the other students demanded a redaction in fear of the horrors of such a tale. “But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world” (King, 10). 

The process of approaching storytelling in this class has been incredibly difficult for me; as a prospective law student the idea of dialogue without debate is incredibly conflicting. However it is clear that this is the rule of law for stories, where previous events only influence (and do not shape) the stories that come after. I decided to play with the story and put our class in a cave having a party, an attempt to make a novel connection between our class and storytelling. But it has a serious implication; it does not suggest the existence of evil, but it does suggest the possibility of evil that can arise from a story. One of the most important details from this story is the fact that stories cannot be taken back; no give-backs or tradesies, redoes or re-spawns. We forgive but we don’t forget. With this in mind I want to turn to the residential schools of not long ago, and think about how there is a meta-narrative within the history of these schools. The attempts at assimilation are now part of the historical narrative between settlers and Aboriginals, and no matter what we do these events cannot be reversed. But on a deeper level, the settlers in fact changed the narrative that the Aboriginal students were learning, and they took those kids out of a native culture and taught them ‘white’ stories in an attempt to bridge the gap between Them and US. But this gap, which I will call the ‘otherness gap’, cannot be changed by dismantling the distinctions between Them and Us. Try as they might, the settlers could not reshape the Aboriginal communities but could only influence them, because the Aboriginal story had already been told and can never been swept away now that it exists. I think this is a crucial reason that dialogue rather than debate is essential in bridging the ‘otherness gap’ that currently exists between Western and Aboriginal cultures, because there is no debate to be had. There is no empirical right or wrong answer to the question of cultural superiority (if such a thing even exists), and our job is to understand this fact and to appreciate Them rather than preach about Us. Along this vein we see the importance on irreversible stories; a story can profoundly damage the relationship between Them and Us which will lengthen the ‘otherness gap’, making it imperative for us to attune ourselves to the consequences of the stories we tell.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi, 2003. Print.

Mean Girls. Paramount, 2004. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUFT35S7Jb4

“The Residential School System.” UBC Indigenous Foundation. Web. 24 Jan. 2015. <http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school-system.html>.