Indigenous Cosmopolitics and English Literacy in the Pacific Northwest

ABSTRACT

Western ideologies of literacy continue to affect outsiders’ understanding of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. The acquisition of print literacy and even the Christian beliefs of the main literacy teachers – missionaries – did not, in fact, assimilate Indigenous people in the ways the ideology promised. They have their own uses for and theories of literacy. As they combine two worlds and two powers – that of literacy and modernity and that of tradition and nature – they engage in what has been called cosmopolitics. However, early signs of this activity were erased by anthropologists who defined authentic stories as pre-contact and often filtered out signs of modernity, literacy, English language knowledge, and any content likely to offend their readers. However, a few seriously inauthentic early stories which explain Indigenous understandings of the centrality of ‘paper’ for colonial rule made it into print, and these stories are now being used to revitalise oral cultures. Western ideas about literacy and authenticity absorbed by contemporary non-Indigenous scholars and our ‘expert’ literacy skills continue to make it difficult for us to understand oral stories, even those about literacy aimed directly at us.

KEYWORDS:

• Orality
• literacy
• cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics
• Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples
• British Columbia Indigenous peoples
• oral stories
• land claims

Acknowledgements

I thank the Musqueam people for their kind hospitality on their traditional unceded territory. Without Wendy Wickwire, Julie Cruikshank, and the storytellers they worked with – Harry Robinson, Annie Ned, Angela Sidney, and Kitty Smith – I would have had nothing to say on this topic. I would like to further thank Wendy for suggesting I read the work of Madronna Holden, Patrick Moore for pointing me to Keith Thor Carlson’s recent work on literacy and Keith himself for permitting me to quote from an unpublished paper. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for pushing me to talk about Indigenous cosmopolitanism and to read Anne Salmond’s work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Margery Fee, PhD, FRSC, is a Professor Emerita of English at the University of British Columbia. She held the David and Brenda McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2015–2017) to work on early Indigenous oral and literary production. Recent publications are Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015) and Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016) co-edited with Dory Nason. Her book, Polar Bear, is forthcoming in November 2019 from Reaktion Books. With Daniel Heath Justice, she is co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded project, The People and the Text, led by Deanna Reder (thepeopleandthetext.ca).

Notes

1 ‘Animism’ here is a reference to Philippe Descola’s 2013 structuralist categorisation of worldviews.

2 Indigenous people kept the ties of kin and opened themselves to foreigners, often (but not always) by making these foreigners into kin.

3 See Gunew (2017: 1–13) for an overview of term and issues generated by what she calls ‘neocosmopolitanism’.

4 For example, two Indigenous scholars from British Columbia, E. Richard Atleo (Umeek) (2005) and Jeannette Armstong (2009) have published accounts of their cosmologies, respectively Nuu-chah-nulth and Okanagan/Sylix.

5 Descola (2013) calls the modern perspective ‘naturalism’ because of its view of nature as separate from culture; Latour’s point is that the modern constitution allows for many supposedly equivalent cultures (cultural relativism) but only one nature (as defined and understood by modern science). Thus, some use the term mono-naturalism for the modern perspective.

6 Roman Catholic missionaries appeared first on the coast; Modeste Demers arrived in what is now Oregon in 1838 and was the first priest to reach the mainland, travelling to Fort Langley (now in British Columbia) in 1841; the Christian message also travelled without missionaries, see Wickwire (1989: 18–20).

7 These stories were widely distributed in the Americas with many animals serving as hosts and guests. See Clément (2018).

8 A rich literature exists on what Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo call ‘writing without words’ (1994). Of course, the restriction of ‘writing’ to ‘linear writing in a phonetic alphabet’ privileges European languages and orthographies at the expense of many others, such as Chinese.

9 Three of the more famous ones were Samson Occam (1723–1792), George Copway (1818–1869) and Peter Jones (1802–1856).

10 See Moore (2018) on how English has been filtered out of stories told in Indigenous languages where the bilingual tellers use English to make rhetorical points or to situate themselves.

11 They were usually paid less (Neylan 2003: 172). Once residential schools had succeeded in destroying Indigenous languages, Indigenous men were less likely to be recruited as ministers of religion at all, since their language skills and ability to live in remote areas were what had made them desirable candidates in the first place.

12 Clément points to the gap between Indigenous commentators’ belief in the truth of stories, and the structuralist belief – outlined in detail in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ four-volume Mythologiques – that ‘a myth has no meaning in itself and produces meaning only within a system of large constitutive units that are called mythemes by analogy with phonemes of a language’ (2018: xii). This ‘large system’ was beyond the reach of individual storytellers, but supposedly accessible to anthropology. Clément also argues that Boas was less interested in the content of particular stories than in classifying them by theme and geographical distribution (2018: xix).

13 See McClellan (1970).

14 See Wickwire (1989: 17) on Robinson’s use of the term ‘God’.

15 See Fee (2015): chapter 7, ‘“They Never Even Sent Us a Letter”: Harry Robinson (1900–1990) on Literacy and Land’, for more on this story.

16 See Harvey (2013: 69–70; 73).

17 A similar publication was initiated by the Stó:lo Aboriginal Rights and Title office in 2001, see Carlson and McHalsie.