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.