Question: 6. Find three examples of names that need to be spoken aloud in order to catch the allusion. Discuss the examples as well as the reading technique that requires you to read aloud in order to make connections. Why does King want us to read aloud?

I chose to answer this question because though this was actually my third time reading Green Grass, Running Water, in previous readings I missed many of the allusions King makes. This time, reading along with the reading notes provided by Jane Flick, I realised that practically every name King includes in the work is an allusion. So, this time I decided to read the names out loud, and look into the references King is making.

1. Polly/Pauline Johnson:

A number of King’s characters come to us as guests at Latisha’s restaurant, The Dead Dog Cafe. Latisha markets her restaurant to tourists, pretending to serve them meals made of dog meat, poking fun at outsiders’ desire to consume a false and shocking version of Blackfoot culture. It’s interesting that Pauline Johnson appears to us in The Dead Dog Cafe, since she had often been accused of “capitalizing” on her Mohawk heritage. However, Johnson “took courageous political stances by presenting Indigenous perspectives and exploring issues of colonial stigmas, stereotypes, and racialization, as well as women’s rights and power struggles” (CanLit Guides). King’s allusion to Johnson asks readers to doubt settler or outsider standards of “authenticity” placed on Indigenous people.

2. Sally Jo Wehya/Sacajawea:

Though I recognized this name, even in my earlier readings of the book, I knew little about who was being alluded to. According to our reading notes, Sacajawea was ““Bird Woman” or “Boat Woman,” a Shoshone” (Flick 157). Sole woman and guide for Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the upper Missouri River” (Flick 157). I decided to research her further to better understand how King is using this allusion. In “Sacajawea: Witnessing, Remembrance and Ignorance”, Wanda S. Pillow works to unpack representations of Sacajawea in colonial narratives, noting that her interest was sparked by her presence in her children’s school curriculum (Pillow 46) which I realized was very likely how I’d become familiar with the name Sacajawea myself. While the image of Sacajawea guiding Lewis and Clark is often used to represent an ideal of settler and Indigenous collaboration, Pillow reveals parts of her story that are often left out: On the Corps of Discovery, Lewis and Clark met a French trader named Charbonneau “who was living at Fort Mandan with his French Canadian wife and two young Indian servants, who Charbonneau also claimed as ‘wives’ and took sexual privileges with. One of those servants was Sacajawea” (Pillow 47). She joined the expedition despite having recently given birth and they “covered more than 1800 miles before returning on 14 August 1806, with Sacajawea caring for her growing son, herself and the other males along the trail” (Pillow 48). However, Sacajawea’s story only became popular more than a hundred years after this expedition, as Pillow explains, she later “became key to retellings of the Corps expedition as both a symbol and emblem of manifest destiny, demonstrating the rightness of the expedition and all that followed. Sacajawea was written as a cooperative Indian who understood and accepted the superiority of white American men like Lewis and Clark, and accepted this destiny – a destiny that ultimately led to conquering and removal from lands of native peoples, her people” (Pillow 48). I’m grateful to King for having me revisit and rethink this story, and am disturbed to learn how it has been twisted to serve corrupt ideologies.  

3. C.B. Cologne/Cristóbal Colón/Cristofor Colombo/Christopher Columbus:

For me, even reading this name out loud wouldn’t have connected the dots between C.B. Cologne and Christopher Columbus in my mind. However, King’s naming choice brings attention to the way this figure’s name has changed through time and translation. This shift in name is indicative of how the colonial figure of Christopher Columbus has been so divorced from the actual man, Cristofor Colombo. Often described as a great explorer and credited with “discovering” the America’s, he of course had only stumbled into what was already inhabited land. Further, he and his soldiers committed large-scale violence, murder, and enslavement of Indigenous people. And yet, to many, he is still remembered in a heroic light, misplaced, just as King’s C.B. Cologne was when given those prominent movie roles despite being an Italian. I found King’s choice of the word Cologne for this name fitting as it evokes thoughts of a pungent and artificial odour.

I think King wants us to read out loud as a signal to the way his novel combines the oral and textual, much like Robinson’s work which King was influenced by. Further, I think these moments in which names take new forms when read aloud remind readers of how blurry the lines between writing a speech are and how they intersect, for example, when writing contains dialogue, or acts as a representation of speech.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature, vol. 161-162, 1999, pp. 140-172.

CanLit Guides. “E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake).” Canadian Literature. Web. August 19th 2016.

Pillow, Wanda S. “Sacajawea: Witnessing, Remembrance and Ignorance.” Power and Education, vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, pp. 45-56.

Question: In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester focuses on an analysis of Northrop Frye as Dr. Joe Hovaugh. She writes;
In Hovaugh’s carefully constructed world, meaning lies in circular and closed systems. Thus he draws a “deliberate circle around Parliament Lake.” He then draws another, and another (324). King’s narrator then describes Indian “gifts” and white “gifts” for us (327), defining each in a play on paradigmatic opposites (327). Real Indians don’t exist in this system. But in the novel Hovaugh’s organization of the world ultimately reveals itself as petrified and static. His is a world where circles are no longer cycles—where circles construct borders around knowledge. His world, unlike the world of the old Indians, exhibits a garrison mentality. 52
For this blog assignment, I would like you to find and describe other examples of Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s character that reflect aspects of Frye’s literary theories and ideas about the Canadian imagination – or, any element of Frye’s thought that you hear echoed in the pages of Green Grass Running Water.

At first glance, Dr. Hovaugh appears to be a character obsessed with nature, as he frequently sits “in his chair behind his desk and look[s] out at the wall and the trees and the flowers and the swans on the blue green pond in the garden” (16). However, plants and animals in their natural form are not actually what Hovaugh enjoys, but instead an ordering of nature, which places it within his control. While he obsesses over ordered and manicured nature, wild nature is something he cannot understand, which unsettles him, and which he attempts to disregard. When asked by Sergeant Cereno to detail his story, he says “In the beginning all his was land. Empty land” (95). This line demonstrates Hovaugh’s attachment to the myth of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery though which colonists viewed land available for settlement so long as there were no Christians living on it, thus disregarding Indigenous presence through religious justification. This land was of course full of life—human, plant, and animal—but because it evades Hovaugh’s ideas of order and civilization, he disregards it. As Bianca Chester points out, Joe Hovaugh’s name is a play on the word Jehovah, signaling the Christian origin of his ideologies. Hovaugh is constantly attempting to categorize what he sees: “he plotted occurrences and probabilities and directions and deviations on a pad of graph paper, turning the chart as he went, literal, allegorical, topological, anagogic” (389). Despite this work he fails to make sense of the story’s action and he struggles with his loss of control of not only The Four Old Indians, but also of the nature around him: “things in Canada seemed slightly wild, more out of hand, disorderly, even chaotic. There was an openness to the sky and a wideness to the land that made him uncomfortable. . . And the Indians” (312). Chester’s work explains that Hovaugh’s character is based on the influential literary theorist Frye. As the world of Green Grass, Running Water defies Hovaugh, the writing of “King’s text self-consciously defies categorization in Frye’s terms” (Chester 50). The novel is cyclical not linear, repeatedly returning to its beginning and reworking the story, which both changes and remains the same. Thus, “the open ended and dialogic quality of the storytelling contrasts with the literary theory” of Northrop Frye (49).

Just as Dr. Hovaugh orders nature in his garden, he also works to control the environment of his office. He obsesses over his desk, which he calls “a rare example of colonial woodcraft” that has been “stripped, repaired, stained blonde” and reminds him “of a tree cut down to the stump” (16). Though this desk acts as a symbol of colonized nature, it is still outside of his control: we read both at the beginning and the end of the novel that “Dr. Hovaugh seemed to shrink behind the desk as though it were growing, slowly and imperceptibly enveloping the man” (16, 426). The desk, the tree it came from, and the story all remain outside of Hovaugh’s control. Feeling unsettled by his desk, which moves and changes beyond his perception, he wishes for a more predictable piece of furniture: “he could picture the desk he wanted–black slate and brass, thin and sleek, a desk with drawers that opened and closed regardless of the weather” (77). However, we never see his wooden desk replaced. Another aspect of decor we see Hovaugh discuss is carpeting, more specifically, green carpeting, or plastic grass: while admiring Sergeant Cereno’s jacket, he says he “couldn’t recall ever seeing one quite so green. It reminded him of outdoor carpet” (74). Hovaugh prefers clean, bright, and artificial life, finding it somehow greener and finer than actual nature. Even after the events of this novel, in which his aims of control and order are undone, he still seeks comfort in the decor of his office environment, rolling “his toes in the soft, deep-pile carpet” (425), and returning to his fantasy of a limited and measurable world.

Dr. Hovaugh is eventually undone by his underestimation of nature, and particularly of water. When asked to begin his story again for Sergeant Cereno, this time from the very beginning, he says, “In the beginning, there was nothing. There was just the water” (97). In this statement, Dr. Hovaugh equates water with nothingness. The stories told by The Four Old Indians also begin with water, but this water is important and not to be underestimated. At the end of the novel, Coyote tries to start the story with “nothing” just like Hovaugh, but is corrected by the story’s narrator: “No,” I says. “In the beginning there was just the water” (431), separating the presence of water from an idea of nothingness. Indeed, in King’s novel, water is an important agent of the plot: right from the start we see it rising under cars and taking them away from their owners, including Hovaugh. When he finds his car stolen, we see him in the rain “soaking wet now, standing between two cars, up to his ankles in water” (315). It is water which undoes Hovaugh in the text, including at the end, when his attempts to control the The Four Old Indians fail, and these women’s work at fixing up the world results in “the dam g[iving] way, and the water and the cars tumbl[ing] over the edge of the world” (414). The way which King’s novel presents water as something powerful and as an agent of change reminded me of the movement of environmental personhood which is bringing rights to parts of nature like rivers and other bodies of water. Green Grass, Running Water succeeds in breaking literary convention, while bringing history and politics into play and discussion. As Chester puts it, King’s work suggests that “one should read stories as theory and as aspects of social process, rather than as literary play alone” (58), allowing his book to be both story and reality.

Works Cited

Assembly of First Nations. “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.” Assembly of First Nations, Jan. 2018.
http://www.afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/18-01-22-Dismantling-the-Doctrine-of-Discovery-EN.pdf

Cheater, Dan. “I Am the River, and the River Is Me: Legal Personhood and Emerging Rights of Nature.” West Coast Environmental Law, 2018.
https://www.wcel.org/blog/i-am-river-and-river-me-legal-personhood-and-emerging-rights-nature

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999).
https://canlit.ca/article/green-grass-running-water/

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. HarperPerennial, 2010.

Question 1: In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to both King’s article and Robinson’s story.

I’ll begin this week with a quote from Thomas King’s “Godzilla vs. Post Colonial”, which asks readers to confront our relationships with the assumptions we make, and how they dictate our actions:

“Assumptions are a dangerous thing. They are especially dangerous when we do not even see that the premise from which we start a discussion is not the hard fact that we thought it was, but one of the fancies we churn out of our imaginations to help us get from the beginning of an idea to the end” (King 183).

To provide an example for his discussion of assumptions, King tells us the story of his short basketball career in which, due to his height, it was assumed that he would be a good player. Even when he wasn’t, this assumption still pushed him and his coach to believe in his potential ability. This example dissects the way in which humans who are used to tidy stories which make linear “sense” to them, based on their ideologies, will follow pathways of action based on assumptions of their outcome regardless of their consequences or signs which tell them to do otherwise. King’s discussion of assumptions made me think about the way which our choices are often based on imagined narratives. When we impose our ideas of narrative structure and logic onto our lives, and base our actions on assumptions that we hear and consume around us, we are often blinded to realities that lie outside of them.

This relates closely to King’s discussion of the different styles of storytelling and literature which exist in First Nations’ cultures. Kings work opens up a number of questions for me: If my mind is trained to follow certain pathways, do I allow these story lines to dictate how I understand the world around me? Can I combat this? Can I retrain my mind to follow new paths, and stop relying on the assumptions of my culture? How does this affect my ability to listen to and understand stories which do not reflect what I’ve come to expect of narratives?

King takes issue with the term “post-colonial”, challenging some of the assumptions which the use of this term makes:

Post-Colonial “assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America. At the same time, the term organizes the literature progressively suggesting that there is both progress and improvement . . . [and] also assumes that the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature, providing those of us who write with method and topic. And, worst of all, the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization, and it supposes that contemporary Native writing is largely a construct of oppression” (King 185).

King’s dissection of the term “post-colonial” reveals the way in which it frames Indigenous existence, and further their culture, art, and writing, through its relationship to colonialism and settler culture. This way of thinking devalues the past, present, and future of Indigenous work, not allowing it to stand independently. Because settlers will always, to some degree, be unable to separate themselves from settler ideologies, I think it’s important that Indigenous artists be able to define and categorize their work for themselves.

King proposes his own list of categories for First Nations literature, while acknowledging that it cannot attempt to encompass the work of all First Nations Artists:  “I lean towards terms such as tribal, interfusional, polemical, and associational to describe the range of Native writing. I prefer these terms for a variety of reasons: they tend to be less centred and do not, within the terms themselves, privilege one culture over another; they avoid the sense of progress in which primitivism gives way to sophistication” (King 185).

The use of these terms combats a number of the problems with the term “post-colonial”, creating informative ways to categorize Indigenous work without framing it through a colonial lens. King’s terms place these artists instead within the ongoing traditions of their Indigenous cultures, as well as within a body of contemporary work which isn’t defined by a connection to colonialism.

I found that reading King’s “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” before approaching Harry Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England”, from his book Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory, made me think critically about the way I was consuming and processing this work. I tried to approach Robinson’s story with an open mind and attempt to stop myself from jumping to conclusions and assumptions about the work. King classifies Robinson’s work as interfusional literature, which he describes as “that part of Native literature which is a blending of oral literature and written literature” (King 186). While reading and re-reading Robinson’s work, I noticed that it felt more natural reading it out loud. In fact, in my first read through, I started reading silently, and ended up reading out loud instead. Even while I was reading silently, I still felt that the work was being spoken, and that the writing felt more like the transcription of a spoken story. I think this effect is result of Robinson’s unique and intentional style which allows his work to exist both in writing and in spoken word.

Robinson thus blurs the imagined lines between orality and literature. I believe that any attempt to clearly divide the written and oral is a false dichotomy and another assumption which needs to be broken down. Further, I find Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England” to be a valuable tool for viewing the oral/written binary as constructed in a variety of ways:

• While reading Robinson’s story, it was impossible to detach it from a storyteller; I was unable to read it without imagining someone there telling the story to me. I believe this effect was achieved due to elements of syntax and style. Here are some of these stylistic choices I noticed:
  • The work contains many short lines and widely varies the length of its sentences, which made the work seem conversational.
    “They not satisfied.
    They tighten ’em again and let ’em go.
    Fly around the same way.
    Three times” (Robinson 78).
  • The story’s repetition from line to line reminded me of a story being told orally, as the storyteller uses this repetition to emphasize important points in the story. This style choice strikes me as something uncommon in written stories.
    “Can never be sold.
    Can never be changed.
    Can be trade.
    That’s all.
    Can be trade.
    Can be surveyor, surveyor.
    Can be trade,
    but never can be sold” (Robinson 74).
• Further, Robinson’s work creates a dynamic between storyteller and listener. The speaker is passing on a story which has been influenced by millennia of tradition and storytelling. Listeners feel that the storyteller is carrying forward an oral history to today’s audiences.
• Finally, Robinson’s work removes the disconnect felt when one simply reads a text and doesn’t feel the human and the history behind it. We feel not only a connection between storyteller and listener, but also between the past/tradition and our context today.

Because of these aspects of Robinson’s story, it embodies what King describes as interfusional literature, blending the oral and written. It deconstructs binaries of thought which depict the spoken and the written as separate instead of fluid. Seeing this dichotomy deconstructed, and thinking about Robinson and King’s words this week, I’ve realized how I process writing myself is influenced by my experience with spoken narratives, and that when I listen to a story spoken aloud, it is in many ways also textual, as I conceive of the words in writing in my mind. I’m curious if others have felt similarly, perhaps reading the words someone has spoken over in your mind, or reading a book and imagining the sound of the words, perhaps feeling compelled to speak them out loud. Let me know in the comments!

This assignment also made me consider my roll as a storyteller in my job as a nanny. The children I work with are too young to read themselves, so I read many storybooks to them. I also tell them stories about my own life, or make up bedtime stories for them, sourcing from other stories I’ve heard and fusing them with the children’s interests. When I was a child, I looked forward to being told stories every night before bed. Here’s a short article about the benefits of telling stories to kids. I would like to add that I believe storytelling without a source text is equally beneficial, and has some further advantages as well, as it allows for more interaction and thus allows stories to be created by both the teller and listener.

Work Cited

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.
https://pennersf.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/godzilla-complete.pdf

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England.” Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory, Talon Books, 2005, pp. 64–85.
https://www-deslibris-ca.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/ID/409398

Talonbooks. “Harry Robinson: Living by Stories A Journey of Landscape and Memory.” Talonbooks, 2005.
https://talonbooks.com/books/harry-robinson:-living-by-stories

“Three Benefits of Telling Stories to Children.” Schoolbag: The Education News Site, Ministry of Education, Singapore , 18 May 2018.
http://www.citationmachine.net/bibliographies/411079210?new=true

The CanLit Guides Editorial Team. “Orature and Literature.” CanLit Guides, The University of British Columbia, 22 Nov. 2013.
http://canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/orature-and-literature/

I’m so grateful to have read stories of home from many of my classmates this week. So many of them have touched my heart and brought me to realizations about my own definition of home.

Cycling through homes – physical and personal

One of the most inspiration aspects of these stories was how many of us spoke about finding and making new homes. For a variety of reasons, many of us have left a previous home behind. Whether it was unhealthy, unstable, dangerous, or simply no longer fulfilling a need, we’ve moved out of old homes, and taken the brave and scary risk of trying to find another. Some of you have moved to new houses, new cities and new countries, and I have so much admiration for all of your courage.

While in all of the stories I read, old homes were left, not all of these stories ended in finding a new home. For many of us this is an ongoing process, and many of us will continue to change our homes throughout our lives. Kevin Hatch’s post made me consider how cycling through communities and friendships is also a form of moving from home to home, as we find acceptance in different circles and lay our hearts in different hands.

Reading many of your posts helped me realize that it’s okay not to know if I’ve found a home yet, it’s okay to be looking, and that home does not always come easily.

West Coast Dreams

One recurring idea I found in the posts I read was that of the West Coast ideal, what Vancouver symbolizes to people living elsewhere, or as Marianne Brownie puts it, what it means to “live among soaring mountains and beautiful but unpredictable oceans”. While I was still living in Winnipeg, coming to BC was a dream for me and my friends too; we saw it as a way to escape the snow, and as a city all-together more fabulous and exciting. Of course, this idealized envisioning of what life on the West Coast is like was not entirely accurate and likely didn’t prepare us for Vancouver’s high cost of living. However, the idea of this land as physically and naturally beautiful and thus a desirable home is deeply entrenched in Canadian ideology.

As someone who adores nature and loves to be in it, it’s difficult but important for me to consider the conflict which lies between a love of this land and my presence here as a settler whose society is responsible for actively exploiting and harming it. Here’s an interesting book called Reinventing Eden by environmentalist Carolyn Merchant which discusses our perceptions of nature as a commodity.

Homes and Shelter

Finally, in my reflection on this assignment and reading your blogs, I want to talk about the important distinction between being a person looking for a home in which they feel they belong, and being a person truly dealing with homelessness. While I may not have felt at home in a lot of the spaces I’ve lived, I have always had shelter and a place to rest my head, something which far too many Canadians don’t have today.

With the (even more freezing than usual) temperatures in Manitoba this year, stories of needless suffering due to the cold have been emerging. While governments are undeniably responsible for the ongoing homelessness in our country, they’ve failed to rectify their errors, or even to provide the basic means of living to many homeless people. While there are shelters in Winnipeg, many of them are difficult to get into, and fill up quickly. I was happy to see this new warming shelter opening up, and I think more spaces need to be created which allow people to come and rest their heads, no questions asked, because shelter is a basic human right which we all deserve.

Work Cited

Bae, Tony. “Home”. Web blog post. J.T. Bae: Korean and Canadian. UBC Blogs WordPress. 30 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/golgiapp/2019/01/30/home/

Brownie, Marianne. “To Home and Back”. ENGL 470 Blog. UBC Blogs WordPress. 27 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/marianneengl470/2019/01/27/to-home-and-back/

Hatch, Kevin. “Home is Where Your Rump Rests”. Web blog post. ENGL 470 99C Blog: Oh! Canada? UBC Blogs WordPress. 28 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/kevinhatch/2019/02/04/45/

Lu, Katrina. “Assignment 2:2 | The Terrifying but Beautiful Sea”. English 470 Blog: Identity in Stories. UBC Blogs WordPress. 30 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/katrinalu470/2019/01/29/assignment-22-the-terrifying-but-beautiful-sea/

Lumsden, Cassie. “2:2 – Home: The Family and the Familiar” Canada’s Literature: UBC ENGL 470A Blog. UBC Blogs WordPress. 28 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470blog/2019/01/28/2-2-home-the-family-and-the-familiar/

Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2013.
https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/books/9780203079645

Stackelberg, Marina von. “Winnipeg’s First 24/7 Warming Centre for People Under the Influence Set to Open This Week | CBC News.” CBC News, CBC Radio Canada, 4 Feb. 2019,
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-warming-shelter-opening-1.5004365.

Truhar-Pejnovic, Vladana. “Assignment 2:2 – My Home Story”. Dana’s CanLit Blog. UBC Blogs WordPress. 30 Jan. 2019.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/canlit470dana/2019/01/28/assignment-22-my-home-story/

Home is so many different things to me. While thinking about home this week, I keep coming back to a handful of images and feelings: to the rooms; to the walls and to the people in them; to feeling welcome; to being unwelcome; to squares of land assigned ownership; to considering what it means to be looking for a home here; and to wondering if a home in myself is a home enough.

In my early childhood my home was in a complex here in East Vancouver, there were other kids my age there and we would spend day after day playing in the courtyard, finding bugs and playing tag. Me and my younger brother shared a room with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Our mother put everything she had into making that space a happy one for me and my brother, even when we were broke, she never let us feel it. This place had always felt like home to me back then, like no other place has since.

Eventually my father won custody of me and my brother because he had a steady job and my mother didn’t. Today I know how lucky we were to have two parents who both wanted us, but even now I often look back at this part of my life with a lot of pain. We moved to Winnipeg to live with him, and I began my own journey with anxiety and depression which went undiagnosed. I remember I used to have nightly terrors, dreams that told me to fear the walls around me, that I was trapped. Ten year old me thought I was somehow very broken, but looking back now I think I was not so broken, but I simply missed my old home and my mother.

We would leave that house soon and hop around Winnipeg for a number of years, eventually staying for 8 or 9 years in a little green house on Garwood street. My feelings about this space are so mixed. It was sometimes beautiful and other times abusive. Some mornings I wanted to lay in my bed forever, and some nights I wanted to leave for good. Oh, the teenage runaway, it sounds like 100 cliche movies, but I know that so many of us do share these stories. My father often told us that we should leave and “see what it’s really like out there on your own”. He never meant it, just wanted to scare us straight. But almost inevitably, first my brother and then me, we each ended one of our fights with our father in a decision to leave home for good.

Since then I’ve never lived in one place for more than a year, and I’ve never felt attached to a space like I did as a child. Today this makes me realize how much the feeling of belonging somewhere was dependent on having people there who I loved.

Moving back to Vancouver as an adult brought me a boat-load of confusing feelings. The ocean and the rain and the trees and the grass were all shouting at me “remember us!”. More than anything, they reminded me of my mother and our time together here. I saw her and my childhood on every street corner that I recognized, at the parks she brought us to, even in the produce markets and how blackberry bushes grow in the alleyways.

However, staying here, and growing here, made me realize that this place was no longer my home, and that truthfully it never had been. While things were all so familiar, they were also all so different. And more so than before, I was here alone. Without my mother in this space it could never feel the same, she had moved long ago to follow us even while we couldn’t live with her. 

On top of that, while our place in east van had been a home, it had never really been our home. It never really belonged to us, as none of my other homes had. They were built on squares of stolen Indigenous land commoditized by settlers. They were all places we should never have been in the first place. Sitting in the park against the trees, fingers in the moss and head turned to the sky, this land that I loved was land that I wronged everyday as a consumer, as a settler, as someone working in a capitalist system in a colonial state, as a girl who wanted so badly to belong, but knew she could never count the number of girls who lost their own homes in these same places.

Today I live in a studio with my cat Sally. My relationship to this land continues to be complex and full of problems. I do find some hope for resolution in my desire to make this place a little better, to push towards decolonization, and to show love to the people I encounter. While I still long for the feeling of family and belonging in a space, I’ve been working to find that home of love and acceptance within myself.

In reading this over I realize that I’ve been very vulnerable with you all tonight. It was really important for me to share my emotional truth on this topic of home, so thank you for listening <3

Ever since there have been witches, there have been enormous and spectacular meetings of their witchy minds. Every 13th year at the 13th full moon, witches from around the world have come together for the Witches’ Invention Convention. Witches of all genders and races, sizes and shapes, and area of expertise have crossed the world to meet in a thick, foggy swamp, to show off their new concoctions, performances, spells, tricks and spectacles, impressing both their idols and peers. Every convention takes a new theme—flight, invisibility, transformation—and the witch to perform the best in that theme walks away with a spectacular prize.

At the 13th ever Witches’ Invention Convention, the prize was more magnificent than any of the witches could have expected: a mysteriously forged golden cauldron, which promised its user powers beyond that of any known witch. The cauldron was so powerful that many regarded it with fear. Fittingly, the challenge which accompanied this terrifying prize was to SCARE, SPOOK, STRIKE FEAR and FRIGHTEN as no witch has ever done before.

At this point in my story it’s important that I explain something about witches of this time: while today we often think of witches as cruel and evil creatures, this story takes place in a time before evil as we know it had entered our world, and while these witches might have been both sneaky and spooky, their actions worked in the names of mischief and fun, but not cruelty.

So, as the convention took off, witch after witch would call their audience to attention and perform trick after spook after scare. Some witches transformed into tall and towering ogres, others made shadows dance unexpectedly, and some cackled in earth rumbling, eardrum shattering pitches.

One young witch watched these performances in awe and envy of the skill he saw in the witches around him. Jealousy grew in him, having only begun his practice, and being unable to surprise many with his magic. He wanted to win the powerful cauldon to surpass his peers in skill, and win the fame and fortune he believed owed to him. When the judges came to his witches station, they asked if he had a terrifying trick to show them. Instead of telling the judges to leave, or performing a spell he knew wouldn’t impress them, he decided to try something new.

“I’m going to scare you today with the magic of words and the power of story-weaving”.

“That doesn’t sound very scary” they thought, “but the greatest of freights come to us when we least expect them, so tell us your story”.

The young witch told a story of evil beyond what their world had ever known, a story of pain and abuse and of wrongful murder, a story of hatred and calculated cold cruelty. When his story was finished he looked to the judges faces, hoping to see fearful eyes and gaping mouths, but instead, he saw them overcome with sadness and tears. “Your story did not scare us, but instead it has broke our hearts. You haven’t won our prize but your words have proven more powerful, they have the power of first evil”.

The young witch quickly regretted all they’d done, their greed and their prideful defiance, and they begged to take their story back. 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.

Storytelling Reflections:

The biggest surprise I had was not how much the story changed, which it did, a lot, but how fun it was to make the story my own. I wanted to stay true to the original story’s message, and to the vision I had of the story at first, but in telling it, it seemed to grow in every direction.

After telling this story and then writing it, I went back to read King’s version again. I was shocked to see how much of this version I had forgotten or remembered differently. Some elements changed in my mind over time, and some wording and description seem to have left my mind entirely.

This exercise made me realize that when I’d read the story the first time, I’d filled in a lot of details in my mind, contributing to the creation of the story while reading it: I’d already painted a backdrop/setting for the plot without consciously or purposefully doing so, and I’d seen images of the witches and their tricks. So, in writing my own version, I seemed to be looking back at not only my memories of what I’d read, but also of the world I’d created for the story in my mind, while reading it.

In the final chapter of If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories, Chamberlin asks that Canadians accept what he calls “underlying aboriginal title” to the land in North America. However, is a simple acknowledgement of this title enough? What are the implications of his choice of the word “underlying”? Why shouldn’t their connection to this land breach the surface of how Canada is organized today? This final chapter also suggests that such an acknowledgement would not necessitate a change beyond one of story or understanding, and that “it would be a fiction. The facts of life would remain the same” (231). This statement relies on an assumption that systematic stability is preferred, and that tangible change is unnecessary when we are able to find stories that place settlers and Indigenous nations on common ground. This sentiment is representative of a trap I believe much of Canada is caught in today: our government tells stories of reconciliation; Justin Trudeau poses for the media with Indigenous leaders; but meanwhile, in practice, our government funds pipelines which violate the consent of many First Nations’ communities and enacts violence against Indigenous land and water protectors. My overall impression of Chamberlin’s message in his final chapter, “Ceremonies”, is that while we need to change our stories, a point I agree with wholeheartedly, we need not expect large-scale, systematic change.

Words are important to Chamberlin, and “civilization” is one of the loaded words he discusses in his work. On page 31, he references a series of books called The Story of Civilization, which frame “civilization” as a result of agriculture. Reading these paragraphs reminded me of another exploration of the word “civilization” which is quite different from the one presented in Chamberlin’s text. Environmental activist Derek Jensen presents a contrasting definition of civilization in his work “Endgame; The Problem of Civilization” explaining its roots in the word “civil”, meaning “city”. This work explores the ways which being “civilized”, or having the majority of our populations living in cities, results in a need to import resources and creates an unsustainable relationship with the land that we live on. He also describes the ways in which civilizations are hierarchical and violent, deconstructing popular imaginings of the word as something progressive or positive. I find it interesting that while Chamberlin and Jensen’s dissections of the word take such different paths, one pointing to agriculture and the other to the formation of cities, both authors work to dismantle the idea that being “civilized” is somehow progressive or positive.

I have a question for you readers that also relates to Chamberlin’s focus on words and names: Despite acknowledging the problem with referring to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people as “Indians”, Chamberlin goes on to repeatedly use the word Indian to describe them throughout his text. Why do you think this is?

The word Chamberlin uses which I find most relevant to my discussion of his final chapter is “underlying”, which he uses frequently first in the phrase “underlying title” to describe settler responsibility to land, and then in the phrase “underlying aboriginal title”, to describe his desired shift in narrative to one which would “finally provide a constitutional ceremony of belief in the humanity of aboriginal peoples” (231). While I agree with his desire for a shift in narrative, a recognition of this land as Indigenous, and with his overall intentions for a change in ideology, what I wish to discuss further is his suggestion that a change in only story is enough. Chamberlin’s choice of the word “underlying” represents the type of change I see encouraged in his final chapter: one of our deeper understanding, but one which does not breach the surface, one which remains submerged and which fails to alter the systems operating on our lives today which are positioned in this work as above.

For me, the evidence of this issue lies in Chamberlin’s insistence that we can rely on settler institutions to follow through on this shift in ideology. He states that “the grumble about the practicalities of changing to underlying aboriginal title is beside the point. The lawyers would work it out, as they work out many other personifications and paradoxes that characterize our social and economic and political lives” (231). It’s clear that in these statements Chamberlin is attempting to quiet the worries of settlers who are resistant to change. However, the work of pleasing everyone cannot come before justice. We cannot dim the need for radical and systematic change as to not ruffle the feathers of those who the current system benefits most. Chamberlin posits that settler systems of law and government can simply adjust themselves, so that “contingent sovereignties could be articulated in law and reconciled with existing national constitutions” (231). However, attempting to simply “make room” for Indigenous issues within settler systems and failing to restructure these institutions on a large and meaningful scale may not be effective. As Michel Morden explains in “Indigenizing Parliament: Time to Restart a Conversation”, there exists “opposition to any project which seeks to envelop Indigenous peoples into Canadian institutions. This types of projects are often seen as diminishing the nationhood of Indigenous peoples and advancing the assimilationist project”. Simply hoping that our settler systems of law and government can do justice by Indigenous nations erases these institutions’ failures to do so historically and distorts the validity and importance of Indigenous forms of governance as well as the calls for self-sovereignty of many Indigenous nations.

At the end of Chamerlin’s book, he answers the question in its title, “If this is your land, where are your stories?”: the last lines of his text repeat this question and then read “on common ground”. It’s my opinion that this answer works to justify colonial violence, as would any argument against the Gitksan elder who asked this question while working to protect his nation’s home. This ending equates settler imaginings of this land as theirs to plunder with Indigenous relationships to the land as its kin and protectors.

While Chamberlin’s word choice frustrates me, perhaps the reason I take issue with some of this final chapter’s sentiments lies in his discussion of translation from earlier in the novel when he quotes W.E.H Stanner, saying “no English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and it’s homeland” (79). Perhaps it is not Chamberlin’s place to say what shift in wording and understanding can carve out a future of decolonization and whether or not a change in story is enough. 

While my post today is overall critical of Chamberlin’s book, I should mention that there were many aspects I also appreciated and enjoyed reading, including his discussion of the importance of preserving endangered languages, his deconstruction of binaries like “them and us” or “oral and written”, and his exploration of what it means to be without a home, among other elements of the work. However, after finishing the book, it was the ending I found most puzzling and was most interested in discussing.

Did others feel similarly about the final chapter of this book? Were any of you also expecting larger calls to action and change than were presented?

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume II Resistance. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2006.
file:///C:/Users/Suzanne/Downloads/Derrick%20Jensen%20Endgame%20vol.2.pdf

Michael Morden, “Indigenizing Parliament: Time to Restart the Conversation.” Canadian Parliamentary Review vol. 39 no. 2, 2016, http://www.revparl.ca/39/2/39n2e_16_Morden.pdf.

Hey folks and welcome to my blog!

My name is Suzanne and I’m a 4th year literature student at UBC. Today, I live, work and study on the traditional and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. I’m originally from Winnipeg which lies on the traditional territories of the Métis, Anishinabewaki, and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) peoples, and I’m of mixed settler ancestry. I’m writing this blog for my ENGL 470 class at UBC, which focuses on Canadian literary genres and includes the work of some important Indigenous authors such as Thomas King. For a number of reasons, I believe the content of this course will build on many of the most important themes of my personal education thus far. To explain why, here’s some info about me:

Once I graduate I plan to enter a teaching program and one day teach literature in a high school setting. I’m passionate about both reading and teaching books because of the works which changed my outlook growing up, not only allowing me to find happiness in my own life, but also opening my eyes to perspectives and experiences that were new to me. While I loved many of the books I was taught in high school, I feel that curriculums overwhelmingly over-represented the narratives of white/straight/cisgender/able-bodied settlers and Europeans, failing to even closely match the diversity of my classrooms. It’s my belief that Canadian classrooms should be inclusive to all students, supporting different learning styles, and teaching curriculums which create both mirrors and windows for students to see their own identities reflected in books, as well as learn new perspectives. Further, I believe teachers in Canada have a responsibility to actively work against the harmful and overproduced narratives which erase and distort Canada’s past and present colonial realities. Though many movements of educational reform exist today, I believe our school systems still have a long way to go, and I hope to be a part of that change.

My goals for this class are: to continue the ongoing work of overhauling and decolonizing my own ideologies; to rethink narratives which have been overproduced in canonical Canadian literature; to reread and rethink works I’ve encountered in the past; and to learn from some amazing works I’m yet to read!

This image of BC is from Native-Land.ca, a website I like because it allows you to see the complex and overlapping territories of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in North America. This website also provides advice on making meaningful land acknowledgements, and asks users to think critically about tools like this.

Work Cited

Burns, Amy. “A Cross Canada Inventory: Evidence of 21st Century Educational Reform in Canada.” Interchange 48.3 (2017): 283-92. ProQuest. Web. 10 Jan. 2019.

Marotta, Stefanie. “Decolonizing Classrooms.” Emerging Indigenous Voices, Ryerson School of Journalism, 2019, emergingindigenousvoices.ca/project/decolonizing-classrooms/.

Native Land, Mapster.