September 24, 2010
JULIE CRUIKSHANK, “The Afterlives of Stories”
1:30-3:00, Paterson (PA) 303
Abstract:
Globally, anthropological studies of oral tradition and narrative now emphasize the human agency of narrators and the diverse strategies they employ in specific times and locations. I will discuss successive versions of one story that Angela Sidney, a senior storyteller from the Yukon Territory, told in several contexts to differing audiences over five decades. Her intentional deployment of this narrative to comment on social relations in a modernizing world conveys her sharp insights about her changing subject position over time. She further acknowledges how conflict, consensus and hierarchy enter into historical representations. Almost two decades after her life ended, her story has a continuing social life in public commentary on northern Canadian land claims and self-governance agreements. Audiences take with them elements of her narrative, flesh them out and apply them to new contexts. The ‘afterlives’ of her narrative, I argue, direct us to think about the contribution of local social theories to scholarly narratives.
October 1, 2010
CAROLYN PODRUCHNY , “Ferocious Beasts and Miraculous Escapes: Telling Stories in the North American Fur Trade”
1:30-3:00, Paterson (PA) 303
Abstract:
All men who worked in the fur trade, whether as labourers, merchants, clerks, interpreters, or trappers, told each other stories as a means of remembering home, making sense of their working environments, figuring out solutions to everyday problems, commemorating events and people, and teaching themselves tools to thrive in their work and lives. The stories they told each other became more complex over time, as men from diverse backgrounds joined in and added to the folklore discourse. French Canadians from the parishes near Montreal, Orcadians from northern Scotland, and British and American merchants came to the interior of North America to work in the industry. There they met a range of indigenous people, and worked closely with speakers of Iroquoian, Algonquian, Siouan, and Athabascan language groups living around the Great Lakes, on the northern plains, in the boreal forests, and in subarctic scrublands.
Although they belonged to dramatically different cultures, with distinct cosmologies and epistemologies, all groups had an expressive culture based on oral forms of communication. They had similar means of developing and preserving knowledge and teaching the young through stories – these created sites of communication where intellectual meeting grounds could be developed. They influenced each other’s views of their worlds, introduced new ideas to each other, and shaped each other’s stories. The rich histories of encounter, trade, alliance, intermarriage, and ethnogenesis can be traced through the tangle of stories that have survived in oral traditions and the fur trade documentary record.
This talk challenges the characterization of oral history as an imprecise art by revealing how sophisticated cultures able to thrive for centuries in difficult environments necessarily developed successful ways of preserving and sharing knowledge that was critical to their survival. Evidence from oral traditions may lack specifics such as dates, individuals and places, but they more than make up for these silences in their utility in suggesting themes and paths of analysis that are hidden in other kinds of evidence. Like all historic evidence, the contexts of the stories should be carefully assessed, especially since stories are performed for specific audiences, often in recurring formulaic narratives and they are told to help people understand their present, rather than objectively reconstructing past events.
October 29, 2010
JOHN GREYSON, “Rex vs. Singh: Story, Truth, and Film”
1:30-3:00, Paterson (PA) 303
Abstract:
Professor and filmmaker John Greyson will be presenting and discussing Rex vs Singh (2008), an experimental 30-minute film he co-directed with Richard Fung and Ali Kazimi. The film tells “one” story in three different, overlapping ways. It is based on a historical event from 1915 when undercover police in Vancouver arrested two Sikh mill-workers, Dalip Singh and Naina Singh, and accused them of sodomy. Between 1909 and 1929, an inordinate number of men tried for sodomy in Vancouver were Sikhs and in 1914, only one year before the arrest of these workers, the Komogata Maru, a ship carrying 376 potential immigrants from British India, most of whom Sikhs, was turned back after sitting in Vancouver harbour for two months without being allowed to land.
Following a screening of the film, there will be an on-stage interview with Professor Greyson and then a Question-and-Answer period with the audience to talk about the film, and about the relationships between film, storytelling, and histories of the present.
November 5, 2010
PAMELA SUGIMAN, “Whose Story Is It? Personal Memory and Stories of the Internment of Japanese Canadians”
1:30-3:00, Paterson (PA) 303
Abstract:
During the Second World War, on Government order, 22,000 persons of Japanese descent were uprooted from their homes on Canada’s west coast. In the years that followed, they endured property loss, family separation, deportation, and dispersal. Throughout my life, I have heard many stories about these years of suffering and struggle. In this talk, I highlight three of the most powerful. The first set of stories is rooted in childhood. As a Sansei (third-generation), I did not directly experience the internment. Yet my family shared fragmented memories of it, memories that surpassed the wartime events themselves, and shaped my existence as a Japanese Canadian child growing up in Toronto. The second story is one that was crafted years later, by architects of the campaign for Redress from the Federal Government. This narrative, inspired by a political agenda, was designed to educate a public audience about our collective losses and the violation of our citizenship rights. Finally, as an academic, I myself have generated stories, in interviews with 75 Nisei (second-generation) women and men. These stories are rooted in personal memory. Many converge with the other two narratives. Others depart significantly. I address these points of departures, and consider the political and ethical dilemmas that they raise. Bridging past and present, history and subjectivity, personal memories inspire questions about storytelling and the construction of history – what is remembered, what becomes diffused – and whose stories we tell.
November 19, 2010
ALAN MACEACHERN and RYAN O’CONNOR, “Back-to-the-Landers, Looking Back”
1:30-3:00, Paterson (PA) 303
Abstract:
Those who moved back-to-the-land in the 1970s did so to live not just more simply, but on their own terms. Unlike those who formed communes to experiment in creating new societies, many back-to-the-landers were by their independent actions rejecting society altogether. Prince Edward Island became a popular Canadian destination for them. The beautiful scenery and arable soil were attractions, but so too were the abandoned and overgrown farms, the forests that had grown back or never been cleared. It is ironic, then, that the back-to-the-landers found themselves immersed in a society that had never left the land, but which was trying to gain the modern trappings they were leaving behind. In establishing themselves in rural PEI, the back-to-the-landers simultaneously validated Islanders’ traditional way of life and brought fresh ideas as to what that way of life could be. Having come to escape society, they ultimately helped to transform it.
We will discuss our oral history project “Back to the Island” that captures the stories of back-to-the-landers who came to PEI in the 1970s – those who gave it up, those who moved to town, and those who are still living the lifestyle today.
November 26, 2010
An Evening of Music and Musing with Singer-Songwriter MISS EMILY BROWN
7:30-10:30 pm, Carleton University Art Gallery
Abstract:
The final presentation in the 2010 Shannon Lecture Series will be a musical performance by Iroquois-based singer-songwriter Miss Emily Brown. In the winter of 2009, Emily was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant for composition, which she used to research and write her second album, In Technicolor. The project began with her grandmother’s wartime journal, but developed into a complex compendium of songs dealing with themes of femininity and independence under extreme duress. In this presentation, Emily will weave together songs from In Technicolor, thoughts on the process of moving from archive to artwork, and reflections on her unique position as a storyteller/historian.