Native Canadian Literatures

NATIVE MESSENGERS OF GOD IN CANADA?:
A TEST CASE FOR BAHA’I UNIVERSALISM (1996)

*** Christopher Buck, “Native Messengers of God in Canada?: A Test Case for Baha’i Universalism.” Baha’i Studies Review 6 (1996): 97–133.

*** Award for Excellence in Baha’i Studies. Association for Baha’i Studies, 1994.

EPILOGUE

Thereupon Tekanawitaˀ [Deganawida, the Peacemaker] stood up in the center of the gathering place, and then he said, “First I will answer what it means to say, ‘Now it is arriving, the Good Message.’ This indeed, is what it means: When it stops, the slaughter of your own people who live here on earth, then everywhere peace will come about, by day and also by night, and it will come about that as one travels around, everyone will be related. …

Now again, secondly, I say, ‘Now it is arriving, the power,’ and this means that the different nations, all the nations, will become just a single one, and the Great Law will come into being, so that now all will be related to each other, and there will come to be just a single family, and in the future, in days to come, this family will continue on.

Now in turn, the other, my third saying, ‘Now it is arriving, the Peace,’ this means that everyone will become related, men and also women, and also the young people and the children, and when all are relatives, every nation, then there will be peace as they roam about by day and also by night. …

Then there will be truthfulness, and they will uphold hope and charity, so that it is peace that will unite all the people, indeed, it will be as though they have but one mind, and they are a single person with only one body and one head and one life, which means that there will be unity.” …

When they are functioning, the Good Message and also the Power and the Peace, moreover, these will be the principal things everybody will live by; these will be the great values among the people.”

– Chief John Arthur Gibson, Concerning the League: The Iroquois League as Dictated in Onondaga, newly elicited, edited and translated by Hanni Woodbury in Collaboration with Reg Henry and Harry Webster on the Basis of A.A. Goldenweiser’s Manuscript. Memoir 9 (Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 1992): 36–41. 

ABSTRACT

Academic and popular interest has lent prestige to native spirituality and has brought it into prominence. The United Nations proclamation of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous People gave native peoples international recognition. A corresponding interest in native culture has “valorised” (brought respect to) native spirituality.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada took a position of advocacy on behalf of First Nations Canadians in its formal submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the fall of 1993. The strong native presence in Canadian Bahá’í community life raises the question of the place of native spirituality within a Bahá’í worldview.

Homefront “pioneers” have extended Bahá’í universalism to a recognition of the richness and authenticity of native cultural values. Such recognition has been supported by local Bahá’í policy, as attested in teaching pamphlets addressed to native peoples, in which the concept of First World messengers of God has been validated. Although theoretically acknowledged, explicit recognition of native messengers of God has yet to be formalised in Bahá’í doctrine.

This study discusses the possibilities of incorporating the principle of “Messengers of God to Indigenous Peoples” within formal Bahá’í doctrine, reflecting a development that has already taken place in popular Bahá’í belief in the North American context. A hitherto under-studied Persian text of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá establishes the principle in such a way that its explicit enunciation is now possible.

The problem of historical attestation remains. The prophetic credentials of Iroquois culture hero and statesman Deganawida are critically examined as a test case. The legend of Deganawida has a kernel of historicity overlaid by hagiography, with admitted Christian influence. Nonetheless, if the Bahá’í principle of “Progressive Revelation” can assimilate the Amerindian spiritual legacy as distinct from and developmentally asynchronous with Irano-Semitic and Sino-Indic religious histories, then it might be possible to accord Deganawida a provisional status with Bahá’í prophetology, and still affirm Bahá’u’lláh’s unific role in world history, as oral cultures take their place alongside the more familiar “literate” traditions.

https://www.academia.edu/36294314/_Native_Messengers_of_God_in_Canada_1996_

This essay interprets Daniel David Moses’s challenging experimental drama Kyotopolis, one of Moses’s “city plays” written at the end of the 20th century, in the light of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories of the Global Village that were developed in volumes such as The Gutenberg Galaxy. I show that First Nations Canadians have rapidly moved from their tribal societies to the Global Village of the World Wide Web. With the help of modern technology, whether it be in the fields of telecommunication or space technology, the remote reserves, where traditionally they had been cut off from contemporary developments, have now become part of the “Global Indian Village.”

Many Americans, and a few Canadians, have realized that our criticism of America is often not without a good deal of irony. Thomas King is such a person. King has shown a great interest in American-Canadian relations; as an American married to a Canadian, and who has written and taught in Canada for almost twenty years – to the extent that he is regarded, by Canadians, as a major Canadian author – his interest and insight is not surprising. As the son of a Cherokee father and a Greek/German mother, it is perhaps also not surprising that King should be similarly concerned with Native/non-Native relations. I will thus consider this triad in King’s writings – American, Canadian, Native – in the light of a particular question of self-righteousness. This question, crudely put, is as follows: Can Natives condemn non-Natives without calling up the same irony as when Canadians condemn Americans?

Margaret Laurence in ‘The Stone Angel’ appears to be thinking in terms of images and symbols. Her protagonist Hagar remembers her past as a succession of images and symbols which make the readers perceive her intense sensuous experiences and allowing us to connect and to feel one with her.  This paper will show how Laurence has been able to vivify and concretise her descriptions in the narrative through the use of images and symbols and will also highlight their significance per se.

Lee Maracle's narratives highlight the Natives' place in the colonialist order instituted by the whites, and indirectly the latter's response to the former. The most heartfelt story in this regard, " Bertha " alerts us to the pains associated with both acceptance and contestation of the colonizers' imposed new order and its crippling effect on women. The forms of racism experienced by the old protagonist, and by extension by her people, are represented obliquely rather than head-on. The article's purpose is to decode them through a textual exploration of the effects assimilation has on Native women as exemplified in the first story " Bertha. "
Résumé: Les nouvelles de Lee Maracle soulignent la place qu'occupent les Autochtones du Canada dans l'ordre colonialiste institué par les Blancs. Le récit le plus poignant à cet égard, «Bertha» attire l'attention sur les souffrances liées tant à l'acceptation qu'à la contestation du nouvel ordre imposé par les colonisateurs et, en particulier, sur leurs effets néfastes sur les femmes. Les formes de racisme vécues par la vieille protagoniste, et par extension par son peuple, sont présentées de façon détournée plutôt qu'aggressive. Le but de cet article est de les décoder par le biais de l'analyse textuelle des effets que l'assimilation a sur les femmes autochtones tels qu'ils sont illustrés dans la nouvelle «Bertha».

The present study situates the phenomenon of the flowering of Canadian magic realist prose in the context of Canadian literary tradition and discourses, and employs postcolonial approaches to literature to analyse different “spaces” of memory in selected examples of Canadian magic realist prose in English. Different dimensions of memory (individual and collective) are analysed as interlocking with other, variously conceived, physical, social and representational “spaces” of concern to magic realism.

Buttressed by talks Thomas King gave my students and a general French public, I examine the convergences of Native literature with postcolonial literary production (regarding both thematic concerns and discursive strategies), but I go on to demonstrate how King deviates from the paradigms of a writing of resistance.

Alexis de Tocqueville was critical of the destructive implications of American expansion and this sentiment is articulated most forcefully in his essay “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” written in 1831 during his American travels to Saginaw, Michigan. “Fortnight” is a biographical adventure story and an ethnography of the western-moving American frontier. Because “Fortnight” deals with the themes of the “wilderness” and the “vanishing Indian” of the American and Canadian frontiers, an instructive comparison can be made between “Fortnight” and a text narrated by John Tanner, someone Tocqueville met and interviewed during his travels in 1831 and who became a key source of Tocqueville’s knowledge about the North American Indians. Tanner’s “A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (US Interpreter at Sault de Ste. Marie) during thirty years of residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America” (1830) is both adventure literature and an ethnography of native life. Tocqueville used Tanner’s “Narrative,” in his work “Democracy in America,”to illustrate what white Indian experts of the time called the “miseries” of “savage” life, or what later commentators would patronizingly call the “pathologies”-alcoholism,internal warfare, disease,loss of territory - that would eventually doom Indians in North America to extinction. Yet there is more to Tanner’s text than this dispiriting message. One of the appeals of Tanner’s narrative today, and one of the reasons why there has been a reassessment of his text, is that it details the survival of native people as they move further westward and adapt to new geographies. Tocqueville is now a canonical  figure in the American political imagination, a “prophet” of American democracy. Tanner, if we bother to think of him at all, is remembered as a lost soul, a marginal figure who no longer belongs either to the native or the white culture he sought to rejoin. But when we read their texts together we can, as I have tried to do in my research, see them as documents that belong both to their time and to ours. They make statements, albeit in strikingly different ways, about geographic landscapes and colonial identities, about European imperial fantasies and native struggles for survival, about Canadian and American nation building, and they tell us much about the uses of ethnography, language, and interpretation.

Beatrice (Culleton) Mosionier is a Canadian Métis writer, whose first strongly autobiographical novel In Search of April Raintree (1983) has been recognized as a classic of contemporary Native
Canadian literatures. Her memoir, Come Walk with Me (2009), describes her life story from 1949
till 1987, covering also the period between 1987 and 2001 in a brief epilogue. In the memoir, Mosionier uses fragments of the transcript of an interview conducted with her mother in 1984 by Alanis Obomsawin to preface the three parts of her book. Apart from constructing the two lives as parallel and in dialogue with one another, Mosionier frames and dialogises her story also through references to the process of writing, publication and the success of her novel; and reaches out to readers to induce them to “walk” with her. The aim of the present article is to examine the narrative presentation of the process of self-discovery focusing in particular on the relational aspects of the life story. Mosionier’s memoir demonstrates her growing into the realisation of the fact that her identity is relational—she recognizes herself as part of a larger ethnic and social group, and later also as shaped by familial relations. While depicting “the self [that] is dynamic, changing, and plural” (Eakin 1999:
98), she conceptualises it in reference to what she believes to be an essentially static core identity, and as “channelled” through a life that largely follows a predetermined pattern.

Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New English Literatures. Ed. Dunja M. Mohr, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
(341 pages)

In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. From a variety of angles, the present collection seeks to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian--Asian and West Indian contexts.


Contributors
Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov

MULTICULTURALISM: A POWERPLAY OF 'WHITENESS' AS EXPLORED THROUGH THE POETRY OF THE DIASPORA


The idea of the Canadian nation as an independent entity within the North American domain and in the world at large, is complementary to its institutionalized 'history' that marks the Canadian Confederation of 1867 AD as the pivotal initialization of the process of nation-building through consolidation. With the Confederation of 1867 AD , the British colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were united into the Dominion of Canada along with the division of the old provinces into Ontario and Quebec. The popular notion of the Canadian nation as the land of 'two solitudes' has largely been derived from the power-politics of the 'pioneer' settler colonizers from France and Britain, the impact of which is felt, till the present day, through the lingual,economic,cultural and socio-political  constructs of Canada. Not only does the gaze of the 'two solitudes' marginalize the existence of age-old indigenous communities and traditions but also hegimonizes  'racial superiority' , thus essentialising the idea of Canadian 'whiteness' .Racial discrimination  that rests on the idea of the 'superiority' of 'whiteness' is felt very strongly in nations like Canada which previously  were settler-colonies. The policy of 'multiculturalism' in Canada subtly, hegemonically and hypocritically highlights the diplomacy of the nation that officially claims and aims to recognise the heterogeneity of different ethnicities while giving a 'visible minority' status to the diasporic communities. It is very interesting to note that the nation of Australia, with a similar policy of 'multiculturalism' and a history of colonization and repression of Aboriginal communities , initiated by the British with the arrival of James Cook hypocritically  establishes the idea of the 'imagined community' within the nation with respect to skin colour although under the garb of tolerance.

Paradoxically, the boon of 'multiculturalism', which was gifted to Canada and Australia by the 'visible minorities' works as a diplomatic strategy to essentialize the centrality of 'whiteness' while sequentially arranging the 'colour palette' around it. Therefore it is not surprising that the 'otherized entities' of these nations face the plights of a 'displacement' .The literature of the diaspora, as a result, powerfully works with the themes of nostalgia,together with a curious attachment to the homeland’s traditions, religions and languages; discrimination, 'hybridity', a quest for identity and intergenerational conflicts through the lens of lived experiences. My paper would address the ideas of 'belonging', 'anti-belonging' and 'racial discrimination' with respect to the policy of 'multiculturalism' through a comparative study of the poetry of the 'Asian' and 'South Asian' diaspora in Canada and Australia. I would like to refer to the works of Himani Bannerjee, Hiromi Goto, Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, Priya Mallik, Yasmin Gooneratne, Andy Quan and so on to highlight the myriad hues of the 'diasporic experience'.

Much of the time, academics consider questions about spirits, dreams, or the personhood of animals, but go to great lengths to state that it “doesn’t matter” whether these stories are “true” or not; only that they are accurate representations of “what people believe.” This essay explores the challenges and promise offered by taking truth seriously through the discussion of translation between Euroamerican and Native cosmologies, ontologies, and worldviews, primarily by using the tool of cosmological interrogation, which proposes multiple, self-reflexive inquiries into incommensurate classificatory systems, charter myths and truth claims. Furthermore, as insufficient hospitality toward indigenous cultures has resulted in the obfuscation and denigration of other ways of knowing as non-scientific, supernatural, animist, ill-informed, or fictional, this essay calls for a reevaluation of hospitality in light of the decolonial project, and a reconsideration of indigenous metaphysics, conceptions of personhood, relational thinking, and intuitive ways of knowing and being.

Since the Native Canadian playwright Tomson Highway imagines his plays in Cree before translating them into English, his dramatic texts  are, in the words of  Gayatri Spivak, “a history of the languagein-and-as-translation. “ As he acknowledges, Highway’s English is permeatedwith the rhythm of the Cree language: “I am actually using English filteredthrough the mind, the tongue and the body of a person who is speaking inCree”  Highway’s text introduces Cree orOjibway words and phrases, providing English translations for them infootnotes. The other characteristic which makes Highway’s plays distinct istheir sexual content, as transmitted both in the spoken text and in the stagedirections. Highway explains in an article titled “Why Cree is the Sexiest ofAll Languages,” that talking about sex in English is a terrifying experience, whereasin Cree it is the funniest, most hysterical and most spectacular thing in theworld.” In addition, visceral and sexual language is an essential component ofthe play, This paper will explore the process of translation and transculturation involved in the translation of Highway’s play The Rez Sisters, in the light of translationstudies theories and the notion of transculturation as coined by Fernándo Ortiz and expanded by Norman Cheadle in his book Canadian Cultural Exchanges.

Via micro-narratological readings of King's story collection One Good Story, That One, I invite you to rethink the Native writer's strategy of story-telling. King notably sucks you into the story, defamiliarises, deconstructs, and recontextualises when you least expect it.

This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.

The policies adapted by the whites in different colonies were different. In imperialist setups the natives were subjugated, but in 'settler' colonies elaborate strategies were devised to break the native societies. One of the policies was to take the native children away from the families. These children were kept in state and church run institutes to nurture them in white culture. In the recent years a lot many narratives written by these 'stolen' children have been published in Canada, the United States of America and Australia. These narratives are the vehicles for articulation of pain and trauma these children had to undergo. The current paper is a study of Shirley Sterling's My Name is Seepeetza. The story in the novel is narrated by a twelve years old girl. The young girl's authentic narration shows how Christianity was used as a tool to oppress and torment the young children by the missionaries. The young narrator not only narrates the trials and tribulations faced by the children in such residential schools, but also shows how the transmission of culture to the next generation was interrupted.