For this blog, I will examine the references in Green Grass, Running Water from pages 38 to 48. These pages cover several of the different stories at play during the novel, and offer insight into some of the larger themes. In particular these pages all interrogate some aspect of settler perspectives of themselves and Indigenous people.

The first section begins with a conversation between Coyote and God/dog, who Flick claims to represent the God of the Old Testament, something supported by his authoritative behavior. In their conversation God expresses confusion regarding the trajectory of the story, namely in how it differs from how it is told Old Testament. God repeatedly asks “where the water came from” (King 38) . While I had initially failed to understand what the potential meaning might be, reading the scene as written in the Old Testament gave me an idea. In Genesis 1 where God creates the world, water is never mentioned. Instead after creating light and darkness God creates “an expanse between the waters to separate water from water” (Genesis 1) or sky. Perhaps by pointing out a plot-hole in the the text which settlers have used to justify their colonialism and marginalization, King is able to interrogate its mythos. The story continues, bringing up the First Woman, who falls from the Sky World to the Water World. Once she falls near to the water world, a group of ducks place her on the back of grandmother Turtle, and after proceeds to put mud on grandmother Turtle’s back. Afterwards, Old Coyote suggests the need for a garden. In the garden, a man named Ahdamn appears inexplicably, and begins to name things incorrectly. To pacify him she gives him an apple, which frustrates God/dog.

This passage juxtaposes two different creation stories, the one in the Old Testament and the creation of Turtle Island, which comes from Indigenous storytelling. The two stories challenge and contradict each other, just as God, does to Coyote. As is evidenced by my citation on the Old Testament, much scholarly effort has been applied towards understanding and contextualizing his behaviors. Less effort has been applied to Indigenous creation stories in terms of celebrating the nuance of them. But through comparing them, particularly through an Indigenous viewpoint, shows the nuance inherent to the stories from aboriginal cultures. Through the alternate perspective, the same events are also shown in a different light. In the Turtle Island Myth, women play a prominent role with both the First Women and grandmother Turtle, and they are highly capable, whereas Ahdamn, is effectively useless. In the biblical story, Eve is blamed for the fall of man, since in Genesis she forces Adam to eat the apple, something which has been used to justify the historic mistreatment of women. In Green Grass, Running Water by having the First Women, not only be competent and valuable, shows an inherent flaw in how settlers have chosen to interact with and interpret their mythos.

The next story returns to Alberta Frank, whose significance as a geographic location has been much discussed by Flick. She asks Charlie if she can bring Lionel with her when she visits him. Alberta is having affairs with both men, and uses them to satisfy her needs without seeking commitment. The also represent the settler-colonized binary, while both are Indigenous, Charlie works as a lawyer who helps to perpetuate colonial land practices while Lionel, according to Charlie is only a few years short of returning to the reserve to run for “council” (King 43). In essence Alberta’s “choice” and Charlie’s categorization of both men suggests the limited framework by which Indigenous people are characterized by settlers, either as “progressive” by working for settler interests or “regressive” by continuing to stay on reserve land and engaging with Indigenous community practices.

The final section returns to Dr. Joe Hovaugh, who is trying convince Dr. John Elliot of four old “Indians”. He claims their disappearances preceded disasters like the stock market crash which lead to the great depression and the eruption of the Saint Helens and Krakatau volcanoes. But as Elliot points out, there were plenty of dates that had no significant event. Regardless Hovaugh remains convinced that a pattern is there, and brushes Elliot off, as he thinks Elliot thinks this is a game comparative to Cowboys and Indians. The chapter ends with Elliot asking, several questions about where they went and why, as well as why they would want to leave in the first place.

This passage has two white authorities, whose names have been taken from Christian messages and missionary who converted Indigenous people to Christianity, attempting to understand Indigenous spiritual figures, but ultimately failing because of their refusal to step outside their own limited perspective as settlers. For instance, Hovaugh’s rejection of the idea that there is no specific connection tied to the date of disappearances mirrors the behavior of settler theorists when presented with contrary knowledge, something I have discussed in an earlier blog.  In essence, Hovaugh and the people he represents will never truly be able to comprehend beliefs and actions of Indigenous people when considering their actions through the perspective of settlers.

Works Cited

“An Aboriginal Presence.” Civilization.ca – First Peoples of Canada – Our Origins, Origin Stories, www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/fp/fpz2f22e.html.

Bonikowsky, Laura Neilson. “Frank Slide: Canada’s Deadliest Rockslide”. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 25 January 2019, Historica Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/frank-slide-feature. Accessed 19 March 2020.

“Cowboys and Indian.” Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cowboys and Indians.

“Encyclopædia Britannica.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adam-and-Eve-biblical-literary-figures

“Encyclopædia Britannica.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1 Jan. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Eliot-British-missionary.

Genesis 1 web.mit.edu http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/GEN+1.html

Mark, Joshua J. “Yahweh.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 22 Oct 2018. Web. 19 Mar 2020.

Laie, Benjamin T. “Garden of Eden.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 12 Jan 2018. Web. 19 Mar 2020.

Robinson, Amanda. “Turtle Island”. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 06 November 2018, Historica Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island. Accessed 18 March 2020.

Strawn, Brent A. “God in the Old Testament.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. . Oxford University Press. Date of access 19 Mar. 2020, <https://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-4>

For this assignment I chose to answer question four, which inquired into the ways in which King’s work in Green Grass, Running Water is a form of decolonization. I believe that the two ways in which King engages in narrative decolonization in Green Grass, Running Water are through the use of Indigenous patterns and structural story elements. The second way is through the blending and reiterating of previous characters from both Indigenous and settler narrative traditions in a manner which comments on these portrayals and creates a new understanding of the cannon of colonial literature.

The use of Indigenous patterns and story structure should be considered a form of decolonization because in the way it disables the prioritization of western colonial hierarchies and story structure forms. When reading Green Grass, Running Water I was struck by the ways it resembled another book that could be seen as a form of literary de-colonization, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which could best be described as a fantasy novel rooted in African history and culture. Black Leopard, Red Wolf challenges the way novels about Black diaspora are conceptualized. In an interview the author, Marlon James states: “I certainly enjoyed writing a lot of the tropes of medieval fantasy, but I also enjoyed upending them. So yeah, there’s fairies, there’s witches, there’s immense evil, there’s heroes, there’s shape-shifters. But a lot of the African mythologies deliberately upend those tropes, because they’re not European stories.” In this way, both books use narrative structures and convention that exist outside the Eurocentric setter colonial hierarchy. In Green Grass, Running Water this is shown through the use of the medicine wheel as the paradigm which the book structures itself in. In settler-colonial fiction, a similar structure might be the the life of Jesus. The importance of these structures is that they subconsciously shape our larger mythologies. Even if someone never interacted with the bible, they would likely understand elements and symbolism from it as it is prevalent in many of our stories. One example narrative pattern where a character dies and then returns, which is a reiteration of the death of Jesus. By removing these patterns and replacing them with Indigenous structures and patterns, King is able to eschew the colonial understandings of the world, and create a structure devoid of the narratives of the settler-colonizers.

Through the re-iteration of characters with ties to Indignity from both settler-colonial and Indigenous traditions King in an Indigenous narrative challenges the settler-colonial literary culture which controlled the portrayal of Indigenous characters to support western colonial hierarchies. In the reoccurring representations of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial narrative forms, Indigenous People are placed in specific narrative archetypes which serve to further marginalize them. For instance, they are often used to bolster white narratives, rather then existing in their own narrative structure. This is something which is touched on in the documentary Reel Injun which examines the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been represented by Hollywood. It also covers some of the portrayals of Indigenous people that King also addresses such as Hawkeye.

Both the documentary and Green Grass, Running Water deconstruct settler depictions of Indigenous people by forcing readers to examine the blatant falseness inherent to these portrayals. By using characters (at least in name) from previous works, King is able to build off of previous narrative contexts while also emphasizing the previous artifice inherent in settler-colonial portrayals of Indigenous peoples.

The addition of a figure such as Coyote, who is a figure of purely Indigenous conceptualization forces the canon of North American literature to address what has been absent (or forcibly removed) from its storytelling traditions, which are the stories and characters created by the first people to live on this land. It also adds these characters into the meta-narratives of Indigenous lives.

Ultimately both of these methods of decolonization serve to subvert and re-orient the reader to understand the previous role that settler narratives have played in their understanding of story, and through story, life.

Works Cited

“A Conversation With Marlon James and Victor LaValle.” Vulture, Feb. 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/marlon-james-and-victor-lavalle-have-a-conversation.html.

Diamond, Neil, director. Reel Injun. Domino Film Ltd., 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htyEJSEZYNU.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to answer question 6 regarding Lee Maracle’s essay. In the beginning of the essay, Maracle details the difficulties Indigenous communities in have had in coalescing their literary tradition and the intentional hurdles which where created by settlers to exert physical and cultural control over Canada. In effect, the Eurocentric control over the literary canon and all academic fields which legitimize literary criticism serves to maintain authority, and reenforce a specific narrative which places white perspectives at the apex of development and understanding. I found a similar parallel in Maracle’s discussion of how the white settler-colonial domination of critical institutions has prevented de-colonized Indigenous critical frameworks relating to their literary and informative traditions from being able to consolidate and discuss Indigenous works, therefore preventing them from being legitimized, in field of art history. For a long time, it was a ‘truth’ of the art history canon that abstract art was ‘invented’ by Vassily Kandinsky. However, a Swedish woman artist named Hilma Af Klimt had been creating abstract art years before he had. But her work never gained prominence, and because of her gender, her artwork, while seen by artist such as Kandinsky, was marginalized and was not elevated into the canon of art history until recently, when discourse surrounding her role has begun to permeate academic and cultural institutions.

Its worth pointing out that my example exists within the context of Western art history, and the marginalization Klimt experiences is only on the level of gender. Additionally an argument could be made that abstraction in art was created outside the boundaries established by the Western academic canon, as abstract artists borrowed “formal properties” of African art in their own work. African works, as with other forms of non-western are less credited for their influence in the development of abstraction, thus marginalizing their works. However, by applying the argument which Maracle puts forth, African arts should not need to be validated or understood in the context of European art criticism in order to be studied or have merit.

Maracle then proceeds to detail how literary criticism in Salish culture works, as an ever evolving discipline which spreads beyond storytelling and into to fields in the natural and social sciences. It also creates “requires that the myth-makers engage in discourse with the intellectuals of the nation whom they recognize as understanding the context we inherit” (Maracle 90). In comparison to the Western culture which dominates our current discourse, where story is often separate from discourses and sciences, all of these things are combined in the Salish storytelling tradition. In effect the Salish tradition works more like the entirety of academia, then one specific institution like literary criticism.

However, the colonial destruction of nature, a key aspect of Salish storytelling and the removal of the Salish people from their land, as well as stripping them of the ability pass down their oral informative practices, have prevented the Salish narrative practices from proliferating. Ironically, even though Frye barely mentions Indigenous storytelling in his detail of Canadian literary history, and the strong absence of a “Canadian Literary Culture” seems ironic as Canadians have robbed their Indigenous peoples of their abilities to pass down their already existing mythos. Canadians seem unable to define themselves through their literary practices, but peoples like that of the Salish Nation are able to define themselves culturally despite having their practices actively suppressed by the same institutions which bemoan a lack of a specific Canadian culture and identity.

Dyrschka, Halina, director. Beyond the Visible – Hilma Af Klint. Ambrosia Film, 2019.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: A Body of Writing.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures by Paul Warren Depasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma Larocque (z-lib.org), Broadview, 2010. Print.

Dr. Peri Klemm, “The Reception of African Art in the West,” in Smarthistory, December 20, 2016,  https://smarthistory.org/the-reception-of-african-art-in-the-west/.

Hello all,

This blog post will feature the 3 blog posts that I will be submitting for my evaluation. I chose them for a myriad of reasons, but I found the main commonality was that these were the questions or prompts that I continue to think about after I have posted them.

1. Orality and the Internet, my post for Assignment 1.3. This blog prompted me to reflect on the changes which have been the result of developing technologies such as the internet. It is a subject that has the potential for a longer period of study. Doing this assignment enabled me to consider ways in which our understanding of media types and the ways in which we exchange ideas may change in the future
2. No Place Like Home, my post for Assignment 2.2. I chose this blog because it was the one which I enjoyed writing the most. It allowed me to reflect on the place I grew up in the context of no longer living there. I went back last week for reading week and was thinking about Los Angeles in the context of my return my home city.
3. Limitations of Our Meaning Making, my post for Assignment 2.4. This post presented an interesting question, and the ways in which I grappled with the answer made it particularly interesting. Specifically I used other stories, and studies of stories themselves to address how we understand storytelling and it is categorized.  I enjoyed being able to analyze it in tandem with one of my other academic interests, theories relating to adaptation as well as some of the media I consume for fun.

For this assignment I chose to answer question 3 which prompted me to examine the comment Judge McEachern made at the trial of Delgamuukw v. the Queen, “We’ll call this the map that roared”, as well as Matthew Sparke’s analysis of the aforementioned comment. Sparke positions the geographic conflict between Canadian Settlers and Indigenous Peoples as that of two groups who share the same land but have different ways of relating to the world and the land which both groups live on. The innately is not a problem, but when one group, the settlers, controls much of the legal and political aspects relating to law and geography, a power imbalance which leads to the creation an asymmetrical conflict. The resolution to this conflict favors the Settlers, since they are the ones that act as the “referees” between the two disputing sides. Additionally due to the difference between Western Colonial and Indigenous understandings of geography, Indigenous geographic claims are delegitimized, in political and legislative contexts. A conceptualization of these issues and the conflict that has been created by them can be represented by the phrase “the map that roared”, as the crux of this conflict is interplayed through the physical map, as well as the circumstances (the court case) of Canadian law which forces Indigenous Peoples to have to prove their rights to lands which they have occupied first, to a political body consisting almost entirely by settlers.

While Judge McEachern, spoke these words with a diminishing intent, they were transformed into a symbol of “resistance in the First Nations’ remapping of the land” (468). This refusal to allow language to marginalize and reformation of such language into an expression of the challenge to the colonial injustices by the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people. This particular case, not only has particular relevance to contemporary news, as the Wet’suwet’en land defenders have currently been protesting the construction of a pipeline which was implemented without the consent of the hereditary chiefs. The use of colonial land designations is not just a problem among the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people. Settler-colonial legislated geography has been used to marginalize First Nations and other Indigenous Peoples throughout Canada. This is exemplified by Shoal Lake 40, which, despite living next to the main fresh water source for Winnipeg, had no access to safe, fresh water. Additionally, due to an aqueduct that was constructed by the Canadian government the community at Shoal Lake 40, had no safe or easy way to exit the now island. As of 2019, a road called, “Freedom Road” has been built enabling those who lived on Shoal Lake 40 to come and go from their community. This is another example of ideas relating to Sparke’s analysis of “the map that roared”. It is an issue that is crucial to the identity and survival of the Indigenous community in conflict. Additionally, their ability to inhabit their territory was diminished and otherwise ignored by the Settler-Colonial policies of Canadian governance. Both the communities at Shoal Lake 40 and the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en lands have to continually challenge the geographic designations of the Canadian Government, and the outcomes and discussion related challenges are what will shape this period of Canadian history and the relations between Indigenous People and Canadian settlers for generations to come.

Works Cited

When considering the ways in which first stories are understood are complicated, the limitations brought on by a change in media and the systemic destruction of Indigenous Peoples culture through practices such as residential schools. Dr. Paterson’s first potential reason, which is that storytelling is a “social” process, and the nature of hearing or reading them outside this context obviously effects their meaning. This made me think of Linda Hutcheon’s writings about the process of adaptation in her book A Theory of Adaptation. In it she discusses the complications of adapting a work to a different medium namely that “each medium, has its own specificity, if not its own essence” (Hutcheon 24). While her work generally tends to focus on european forms of narrative and media, I believe the case can also be argued for in the context of Indigenous forms of narrative such as storytelling. When stories change forms, they are altered to take a form that is more effective for that form of media. First stories were not only designed to be told orally, but they were initially created to be exchanged within Indigenous communities. Taking them out of this context thus changes how they are told. Dr. Paterson’s second potential reason, which was the structural removal of children (and culture) through residential schools and the Canadian government’s prohibition of storytelling within First Nations communities, is significantly problematic in oral traditions which require that stories be continually shared and passed down. An additional problem that I would suggest is that these first stories, and the stories mentioned in Wickwire’s introduction exist within Canadian/Colonial cultural baggage, linguistic differences, and frame of references. This is exemplified in Wickwire’s introduction when she discusses how anthropologists such as Frans Boaz and Claude Levi-Strauss’s attempts to represent, classify, and record Indigenous and Aboriginal stories created limitations for her own understanding of the stories Harry Robinson told her. For example, Levi-Strauss divided myths into “hot” and “cold” zones and furthermore designated Western mythology as being hot, or changeable and Indigenous mythology as “ahistorical and timeless”. When Wickwire was recording Robinson’s stories, she found that they fit into the category of hot stories, despite Indigenous stories being placed in the “cold” category. When I learned of this, I found it strange to even suggest that cultural mythology would only fit into one of these categories in the first place. In contemporary western culture, we constantly retell stories that fit into the monomyth tradition, with new forms which often exist outside of the historical narrative. The need to classify and distinguish, which is present in the Western academic tradition actively, clouds meaning when we attempt to assign arbitrary distinctions between different forms of storytelling

There is also the problem of translation between languages, particularly when it comes to cultural constructs and practices. This is apparently when the chap-TEEK-whl is translated to unbelievable.  To demonstrate the inherit problems of the shift between differing cultural and linguistic frames of reference, I’d like to turn to a first contact story that focuses not on historical examples of contact but of a speculative future contact in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Darmok” (while the article explores many additional interesting concepts related to language, it is more helpful for understanding what happens in the episode). In that episode the two groups struggle to communicate because the ways which language functions and relates to narrative and storytelling for both groups differs. Since both groups only have understanding of their language and culture, when they attempt to apply that to the other group, meaning becomes confused, just as how it does when we attempt to understand the meanings of first culture stories.

What stood out to me when I first read Chino’s piece was the way we both connected our concepts of home to food, specifically the food that we had associated with our experiences there, as well as common popular food items related to that location. This is perhaps due to food being significantly connected to memory and emotion. Food is also a communal experience. We eat with other people more often then not, and sometimes it is the experience of who you are eating with that matters more then the quality of the food itself.  Food based memories were something that were also mentioned by Nagi, in their story. In that story, the regular routine of going to a sushi restaurant every Saturday was strongly connected to their idea of home. It makes sense that home is in some ways defined by familiar patterns, and common occurrences. In some way, home can be seen as repeated patterns, and rather then one singular experience, a pattern of multiple experiences. Like stories, home can also be seen as a web of connections, experiences, and patterns. Additionally many of the memories Chino and Nagi mentioned also included the people in their life who lived with them in both places, particularly family, who were strongly connected to their conceptualization of home.

In contrast, both Gabi and Maya have had negative family experiences which have made the place that was supposed to be their homes feel less like a home. However, they both found home in other ways, such as Gabi finding experiences of home through her friends, and in places where she felt she was accepted. This connects, do the concept of the chosen family, where individuals designate family members, not by blood, but by those who generate feelings of “support and safety”. Like families, I also think that we choose what our home is. Sometimes, unfortunately the places we live in or the environments we find ourselves in do not allow us to feel safe or like we belong. But home is a designation, like family, and that is one which each individual feels and chooses for themselves.

Both Emilia and Jade connected their home to ideas relating to immigration, and like me, Emilia and Maya mentioned how our homes exist on land that had been taken from peoples who were there long before we were. Home can be a problematic notion when it was taken from others.

However, immigrants exemplify how home is something that is fluid and selected. People can have multiple homes, or the place we consider home can change throughout life. The largest connecting thread between all conceptualizations of home, were of places of safety and belonging more then specific connecting factors.

I did not know how to understand home until I left it.

For pretty much my whole life up until I turned 18, I lived in Los Angeles, California. That’s what I say at least. You have probably never heard of my hometown, although it is mentioned in a song by the Beach Boys, and like Vancouver, has been the backdrop many movies and television shows. Even so, I like to think of all of LA as home. You cannot know one single piece of Los Angeles to know the whole story. It is why I have often been frustrated when people ask me if all anyone in Los Angeles cares about is fame and movies. There are Latine people, who have been here long before the cameras got their start and whose culture has woven itself deep into the fibers of the city. There are a great multitude of cultures and nationalities who have settled here later on, which has created new traditions and fusions, as well as moments of conflict. I see this in my own family from Los Angeles. They had emigrated to Los Angeles, seeking to escape conflict in the Middle East. Once they arrived, they too began to weave themselves into the framework of Los Angeles. This is evident by the Thanksgivings I would have back at home, where turkey would be served alongside hummus, and homemade tamales. Family and home are interconnected, as the majority of my Middle Eastern family settled between Los Angeles and Orange County, at most a forty-five minute drive from each other. To them, Los Angeles is so intertwined with the concept of home that they cannot imagine living anywhere else. Some of them fail to understand why I would leave, a question mirrored by those who have asked me, while glancing up at almost endless rain of Vancouver. But to know a place, sometimes it helps to have an outside perspective. I never knew the effect of three months with little sun has on your mood, nor had I ever experienced the ephemeral sensation of cherry blossoms in the spring before I left California. By leaving my first home, I gained a new appreciation for where I was born. I learned to miss the silhouette of palm trees along the freeways at night, watching like quiet guardians. It’s hard to express how it feels to drive the freeways late at night, when the roads are finally clear, but it feels like home. 

My favorite thing to do, when I am back in Los Angeles is to drive up to the hills of Palos Verdes. I take a few friends, and possibly some ice cream, and we drive up the dark and winding roads, winding our way through until we reach our vantage point. From it you can see out onto the bay where I learned to swim. If you look far enough out on the water, on a clear day, you can see Catalina Island, where I had my first kiss. If you look east, the waves crash onto the sand, which ebbs its way onto the various collections of towns which make up Los Angeles. At night, it is lit up, and you feel distant, but also you realize that you are a tiny speck which makes up a collective place. 

(The view from The Palos Verdes Hills, after a rare rain)

That is a home, not just a geographic place, memories, or the people that fill it all in, but all of it together. It’s impossible to parse together when you’re in the midst of it, but if you take a step back you might be able to see a complete picture.

A long time before now, there was a fantastic storyteller whose name and gender have been lost to time who lived in a village.  Every night when the days work had ended, the villagers would gather around to hear the great tales the storyteller would create on the spot. The stories would vary from small anecdotes drawn directly from the days experiences to vast epics that would span entire nights.

One day, a stranger from a distant land came to the village asking if they could reside there. They were welcomed into the village. That night the stranger saw the storyteller telling a story to a crowd of interested onlookers. The stranger, who had many stories gathered in her travels asked if she too could tell a story once the storyteller had finished. The storyteller felt a strange feeling in their gut, but felt they had no other option but to allow the stranger to speak. The stranger told a tale of fantastic places and peoples far from anything the villagers could have imagined. The storyteller may have had an excellent grasp of storytelling but they were unable to compare to the newness of the stranger’s stories. After the stranger finished her first story, the villagers asked for more, and they stayed late into the night listening to another one of the stranger’s stories. As the days went by fewer and fewer people asked the storyteller to tell stories, and when the villagers did, it seemed they could hardly hold their attention.

The storyteller struggled to create stories which would hold their audiences attention. The jealousy bubbled in their gut, until one day, a few weeks after the stranger had come to town, the storyteller began telling a new story.

“I heard that the stranger was actually the horrible thief from one of her stories, that every town she goes to, she distracts the villagers with fantastical tales, then takes the possessions that the villagers value the most. Then she leaves with the villagers being none the wiser.”

The villagers perked up their ears, and begun spinning stories of their own.

“I saw it, I swear, the stranger walking into a home and taking villagers fine clothes.”

“She disappears during the day, probably to rob unsuspecting passersby.”

The rumors began to swell until one day, the villagers brought the stranger to the center of town to confront her for her apparent thievery. They shouted and spat in her face, until the stranger took her bags and spread their contents for the villagers to see. There were no items for the villagers, but their were small gifts for each of the villagers as a gift of thanks for being so hospitable.

The stranger turned to the crowd. “I had wished to thank you for the kindness you have shown a stranger, and I still do, but it is clear to me that you will always see me as an outsider.”

The villagers begged the stranger to stay, and continue telling her wonderful stories. The storyteller promised that they would take the story back. In response, the stranger said, “Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to.” Then the stranger left the village, taking her stories, never to return.

I told this story to my roommates, which was initially very nerve wracking. Although we have all told stories to each other before, I had never told one in such a full fantasy context. However, I began to realize that it was very similar to when we had all played dungeons and dragons, which is a game that consists largely of group storytelling.

After that, I had adjusted to telling the story, and had a lot of fun with the last part of it. I realized that human beings are natural storytellers, and it is a major way in how we relate to the world.

When I began to think of this assignment, I immediately began to think along the terms of what could be considered an evil story. In the original, the evil story seems to be comprised of acts and imagery that we associate with the experiences of evil such as “fear and slaughter, disease and blood”. However, stories involving such subject matters are not necessarily the only way a story could be evil. The first story that came to my mind as being evil was Birth of A Nation by D.W. Griffiths. This story fed heavily to narratives of Black men being violent and dangerous, enabled the Klu Klux Klan to return to prominence, which lead to significant amounts of murders, violence, and suffering enacted against black americans. While my story does not feature nearly as insidious ramifications, I wanted to highlight the ways in which stories can create problematic real life consequences.

Sources

Question: At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.  I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?

When I consider how technological advances in communication tools have changed the hegemonic structuring of orality within literary traditions. I think primarily of the internet, but also of mass communication devices such as television, radio, and film, which since the advent of sound and talking in film, have challenged the predominance of literary communication which had previously held dominance in western culture and academia. In a film studies course that I am taking concurrently to this one, we looked at this clip of the Jazz Singer, the first film which featured individuals speaking. It may seem insignificant to us now, but at the time it was seen as revolutionary. In retrospect, developments such as these have paved the way for the return to oral literary forms as they have enabled oral forms of storytelling to spread. The second key development is the internet which has enabled those with access to it to publish their own content without having to rely on publishing bodies, which tend to proliferate the voices of those who are in positions of socio-political power. There are plenty of online sites in which individuals can self publish their works without the need to publish work that fits outside of the current boundaries established by publishers. Not only that but there are also oral possibilities for communication which have been introduced by the internet. Sites such as Youtube and Vimeo have enabled people to orally share ideas while using visual evidence, through the use of what is called a “Video Essay”. This, as well as Vlogging, and other new media methods of communication, have enabled ideas and stories which relied on an oral component to be spread among anyone with access to the internet, and produced by anyone with basic editing software. In one of our assigned readings, Courtney MacNeil’s piece “Orality” she discusses how “cyberspace” has “created a world where the distinction between” oral media and literary media has “blurred”. The blurring of the two types of media challenges the way they had previously been viewed by academics as being distinct and separate, with literal media being placed in priority over oral. To me, this structuring replicates patterns of Western Colonial dominance, and is further problematized when the concept of access is considered. Structures of ideological power, such as academia have been found to “under-represent” “radicalized and Indigenous professors” (Frances Henry, et al,). This has resulted in white colonial voices, establishing patterns of narrative and value. While the internet is certainly not going to subvert colonial patterns of idealogical control all on its own, it has democratized the spread of stories and ideas along cultural and beyond national lines.

To address the ways in which Hypertext has contributed to the way in which ideas and stories are exchanged; I find that the Hypertext has contributed to our understanding of the ways in which ideas are interconnected. Our ways of storytelling inevitably connect to preceding ideas and stories. Starting as children, we learn how to tell stories by having them told to us. Hypertexts allows the writer to connect their ideas to the ideas of others. They also enable oral storytelling modes to be linked to written ones. This further decentralizes the written text and enables it to connect to the hypertext.

Works Cited

Crosland, Alan, director. The Jazz Singer. The Spoken Words That Caused A Sensation In “The Jazz Singer” (1927), YouTube, 19 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SzltpkGz0M.

Frances Henry, Enakshi Dua, Audrey Kobayashi, Carl James, Peter Li, Howard Ramos & Malinda S. Smith (2016): Race, racialization and Indigeneity in Canadian universities, Race Ethnicity and Education, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1260226

MacNeil Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory.   (Links to an external site.)Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 19 Feb. 2013