Question 2: In this lesson I say that our capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from the first stories is seriously limited for numerous reasons and I briefly offer two reasons why this is so: 1) the social process of the telling is disconnected from the story and this creates obvious problems for ascribing meaningfulness, and 2) the extended time of criminal prohibitions against Indigenous peoples telling stories combined with the act of taking all the children between 5 – 15 away from their families and communities. In Wickwire’s introduction to Living Stories, find a third reason why, according to Robinson, our abilities to make meaning from first stories and encounters is so seriously limited. To be complete, your answer should begin with a brief discussion on the two reasons I present and then proceed to introduce and explain your third reason from Wickwire’s introduction.

Due to our cultural and historical situation, our “capacity for understanding or making meaningfulness from first stories is limited for numerous reasons”. Two of these reasons are outlined by Dr Paterson. The first reason is the difference in the social process of storytelling between our current method and Indigenous tradition. In particular, the practice of reciting stories orally in special social situations is quite different from our standard mode of written, mass produced narratives. Rather than participating in the process, we become passive receptors to the story, diminishing its meaningfulness. The second reason which Dr Paterson outlines is related to the policies which the colonial government enacted to deliberately alter or erase Indigenous cultural practices. In particular, the outlawing of the potlatch ceremony and the forcible removal of children into residential schools dealt crushing blows to traditional methods of storytelling, and consequently to our ability to understand these stories and their implications.

In her introduction to Harry Robinson’s “Living Stories”, Wendy Wickwire presents another reason for our limited capacity to understand first stories. According to Wickwire, academics such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Franz Boas instituted anthropological definitions of storytelling which diminished the relevancy of first stories. Strauss, for example, identified first stories with “cold zones” of consciousness, which he identified as “resistant to change… timeless and ahistorical.” (11) In this way, indigenous stories were relegated strictly to the past, discounting their importance and validity. Indigenous stories became representative of an obsolete culture, one which was incompatible with European cultural characteristics of “constant, irreversible change.” (11)

In reality, Indigenous stories were not as static as Boaz and Levi-Strauss would like us to believe. As Wickwire points out, there existed many stories which addressed both the arrival of European colonizers and their origins as a people. The story about the white and black twins is an example of this. By creating a conception of Indigenous storytelling as situated strictly in the “deep past”(22), these anthropological analyses could fit with the overarching agenda of colonial powers to identify Indigenous culture, as a whole, as incompatible with change and progress. Europeans had both a “God-given purpose” and “science and reason” (Patterson, Web) on their side, something which Indigneous cultures could not have had if colonial practices were to be justified within Western consciousness.

Wickwire even points out deliberate doctoring of first stories in order to relegate them to the deep past. For example, the mention of a gun being traded with a deity-like being was edited out of a recording of a tale by Boas, “thus transforming what may have been intended as a historical narrative into the more desirable precontact myth”(23). I think it would be fitting to conclude that the traditional treatment of indigenous storytelling and first stories is congruent to a greater colonialist theme of discounting the validity of indigenous culture. This mentality served (and continues to serve) the justification of brutal colonial acts, including the institution of Residential Schools.

Works Cited:

Beehive Collective. The True Cost of Coal. 2013. Web. 15 Feb 2014.

“First Nations Potlatch” BC Archives. Web. 15 Feb 2014.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia Blogs, 2013. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books. 2005. (1-30)