Home…it is common across humanity but also one at the heart of some of the most contentious issues. And home here meaning not the physical structure where someone lives, but that place where their hearts and dreams lie. As Chamberlin says, someone’s home is the place of their stories. The Gitskan elder famously asked, “if this is your land, where are your stories?” (1) Not to mention the countless country songs where people sang of yearning for a ‘Home on the Range’, because they had a physical place to live but it was not the place that their hearts lived. He describes how home is the “ideal place. Utopia” and “u-topia means: no place” (74). It is an interesting thing about words, that the description of home also means no place.

But while humans have always understood home is where the heart lies, they have also connected this to the land. And the land is physical and a reality not like home which is an imagined “image for the power of stories” (77). That is the source of tension in Canada. Canada is a mass of land, physically piles of earth and rocks with flora and fauna growing everywhere. And then there are the people.

The Aboriginal people of this land have a story, one that gives a meaning to the land they live on interconnected to their ancestors and everything around them: the sacredness of a location and the significance of another. As the old Khomani woman recognized a tree in the red desert sand and so many stories connected to it, so too do the Aboriginal peoples of Canada going back centuries.

And then there are the European immigrants and the story that they tell, one that tells of a land that was “terra nullius, a place where there was nobody” (48). They saw the piles of earth and rock and so on and also told a story about it, one that included manifest destiny and lumber and property titles amongst so much more.

Both these stories are both the truth…because they are believed as such. They contain contradictions after all the land was not terra nullius when the Europeans arrived and Aboriginal peoples did not exist here since the start of time. They negotiate the space “between reality and imagination, finally embracing both in a contradiction” (32). And conflict has arisen because both stories are connected to the same land. The question to the people in Canada today becomes: can there be many stories for one land?

For much of Canada’s history if not all, stories have been seen as requiring us to “‘believe it or not’” (34). We have to choose a story to be our truth, we have to choose only one imagined reality. But Chamberlin mentioned a second way of looking at stories; he said that the real task is to “’believe it and not’” (34).

These two ways are fundamentally different; one tells us to pick a side and draw borders. In Chamberlin’s words, to create and Us and Them. But the other allows many stories to be told for the same land. The imagined stories and the reality of the land are connected consciously and if we remain aware of this, we can learn to see many stories. “We come together in agreement not about what to believe but what it is to believe” (240). Chamberlin ended on this thought and I think it is the direction Canada needs to, and seems to be heading.

The story of a land that was terra nullius to the settlers and the story of the land of the people of the River of Mist (Gitskan translates to that) and so many other stories are being told. And we are learning to listen to all these stories.

Works Cited

Amarasinghe, Achila. “Home on the range-Cowboy Songs.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 9 June, 2008. Web. 22 January, 2016.

“Gitxsan.” Gitxsan. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.

Manitoba Government. Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission Final Report. [Winnipeg, Manitoba].: ,2001. Government of Manitoba. Web. 22 January, 2016.