Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
DeWitt, Zachary
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
There exists, within Indigenous theory and literary scholarship, a simultaneous belief in the educative power of Indigenous fictions for settler readers and the assertion that it may well be impossible for a settler reader to ever understand Indigenous culture within its cultural context. A myriad of tensions arise between these competing worldviews — those related to questions of differing epistemologies, the legacy of colonization, and the continued integrity and survival of Indigenous knowledge. In analyzing Haisla and Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, this thesis attempts to step through some of these tensions by looking at Indigenous story as an expression of relational and responsive theory, rather than as a cultural object. I argue that Monkey Beach offers a unique confrontation with the tensions that many settler readers experience when they read, even as it asks such readers to move beyond them, in an effort to narrate Indigenous survival. Following from the work of Indigenous theorists and scholars, I argue first that the novel is interested in the education of both its main character and the reader, before turning to a reading of the pedagogical affect of spirituality in the novel. I show that explicit engagement with the novel’s spiritual themes not only represents an underexplored aspect of Monkey Beach, but also that discussions of spirituality help us engage with questions of epistemology and tensions in perspective. More specifically, this thesis takes seriously the reality of spiritual forces in Monkey Beach, and how the signification of those forces shapes the perspectives along which they can be understood. In forwarding this argument, I propose that attention to spiritual matters — and more specifically, the way that story is cosmological — helps us attend to Indigenous survival and offers us a different perspective through which settler readers respond to Indigenous fiction.
Questions of Perspective in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach: Learning with Story and Spirituality in Indigenous Fiction by Zach DeWitt B.A.Sc., Quest University Canada, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) April 2024 © Zach DeWitt, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Questions of Perspective in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach: Learning with Story and Spirituality in Indigenous Fiction submitted by Zach DeWitt in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Jodey Castricano, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisor Dr. Kerrie Charnley, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Allison Hargreaves, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Jessica Stites Mor, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences ______________________________________________________________________________ University Examiner iii Abstract There exists, within Indigenous theory and literary scholarship, a simultaneous belief in the educative power of Indigenous fictions for settler readers and the assertion that it may well be impossible for a settler reader to ever understand Indigenous culture within its cultural context. A myriad of tensions arise between these competing worldviews — those related to questions of differing epistemologies, the legacy of colonization, and the continued integrity and survival of Indigenous knowledge. In analyzing Haisla and Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, this thesis attempts to step through some of these tensions by looking at Indigenous story as an expression of relational and responsive theory, rather than as a cultural object. I argue that Monkey Beach offers a unique confrontation with the tensions that many settler readers experience when they read, even as it asks such readers to move beyond them, in an effort to narrate Indigenous survival. Following from the work of Indigenous theorists and scholars, I argue first that the novel is interested in the education of both its main character and the reader, before turning to a reading of the pedagogical affect of spirituality in the novel. I show that explicit engagement with the novel’s spiritual themes not only represents an underexplored aspect of Monkey Beach, but also that discussions of spirituality help us engage with questions of epistemology and tensions in perspective. More specifically, this thesis takes seriously the reality of spiritual forces in Monkey Beach, and how the signification of those forces shapes the perspectives along which they can be understood. In forwarding this argument, I propose that attention to spiritual matters — and more specifically, the way that story is cosmological — helps us attend to Indigenous survival and offers us a different perspective through which settler readers respond to Indigenous fiction. iv Lay Summary Amid calls for Canadians to read novels written by Indigenous authors, a challenge arises: how do we read the stories of cultures other than our own? This thesis explores this question, by looking closely at Haisla and Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach. To do this, I underscore the importance of thinking about learning through Indigenous texts, drawing on the work of various Indigenous scholars who argue that stories are expressions of theory, and shape relations with the world and the reader’s perspective. Then, I argue that Monkey Beach offers us a perspective through which we might come to understand spirituality. Through these arguments, I show how this theoretical perspective might attend to calls for reconciliation and Indigenous survival. v Table of Contents Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii Lay Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1: Learning in Monkey Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Familial Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Nusa and Familial Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Nusa and the Reader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Chapter 2: Learning with Haisla Spirits: Spirituality in Monkey Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Work Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 vi Acknowledgements Acknowledging the land — or in nsyilxcən, acknowledging tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ — in a thesis about the perspectives through which meaning arises, requires that I speak to land as tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ or to that combined life that exist through the animacy of the world. As such, I did not merely write this thesis on Syilx/Okanagan land, but through the experience of place — an experience of the sun catching snow-speckled hills, an experience of dry pines and cool streams, and an experience of magpies dipping through the sky. The Syilx/Okanagan people remain rooted in this place — inheriting all the rights and responsibilities that such a grounding entails — in spite of the many violences of ongoing colonialism. I have had the great privilege of living, working, and playing here, as an uninvited guest in their world, while writing this thesis. For that I am truly grateful. I wish to acknowledge the unceasing work of my supervisor Dr. Jodey Castricano, without whom this thesis would certainly not exist. I will forever cherish their mentorship on this project. I am also most grateful to both Dr. Kerrie Charnley and Dr. Allison Hargreaves, who both supported my work with compassion and a critical eye. I could not have asked for a better committee. While my parents sometimes tell me that this Master’s degree is “your thing”, I would not be here without their lifelong support. Thank you both. To Emi, thank you for everything. I wish you didn’t have to keep teaching me to believe in my writing. Finally, the UBCO community has been beyond welcoming. To my friends — Jess, Amal, Liam, Karis, Brian — and to the many professors I have had the privilege of learning from, thank you.1 Introduction In her work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Métis scholar Aubrey Jean Hanson discusses the final report’s calls to action. Particularly, Hanson comments on the value of “reading for reconciliation,” the possibility that Indigenous literature might offer non-Indigenous readers — those most likely to uphold colonial power relations — a better view of Indigenous life and struggle in a colonized world. Yet, Hanson is quick to point out an interpretive tension: On the one hand, then, the suggestion that non-Indigenous people can also educate themselves by reading Indigenous literatures seems like an excellent one. […] I believe that Indigenous literatures have a lot to contribute to the work that Canada needs to do to relearn, reimagine, and re-story its relationship with Indigenous communities. On the other hand, however, I must interrogate the assumption that I make in comparing my own experience — namely that I learn about Indigenous people when I read Indigenous literatures — with that of others, particularly readers outside of Indigenous circles. (71) Here, Hanson articulates the question of perspective, built on cross-cultural narratives and learned epistemologies — with which readers of different backgrounds read differently — that come to challenge an easy claim about the benefits of Indigenous literature for Western readers. While it is quite common to assume that literature has an educative and empathetic function (Keen vii), Hanson echoes the vast work of Indigenous and settler scholars alike, who write about the different ways that Westerners are ill-equipped to engage with Indigenous thought and spirituality. Different notions of place, theory, and history, combined with the historical privileging of Western epistemology in colonial society are all said to limit the interpretive ability of the Western reader; 2 and perhaps more importantly, as Hanson notes, reconciliation “has the potential, if not carefully theorized, to be mobilized by official discourses in order to reinscribe Indigenous expression within the norms of the state” (Hanson 70). The interpretive tensions here demands that settler scholars like myself not simply question how we read Indigenous fiction, but also question how we interrogate the status of the knowledge with which we read, the histories from which it arises, and how Indigenous fiction offers interpretive considerations and understandings. I open my consideration of Haisla and Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach with these interpretive challenges to draw into focus the difficulties that arise when reading works of Indigenous fiction. As a settler scholar who has become interested in engaging with Indigenous texts, not only for the possible reconciliatory power that Hanson refers to, but also for their literary and aesthetic qualities, I have often come against the challenges that Indigenous scholars notice in the settler’s approach to Indigenous literature: misunderstanding being a simple risk that scholars propose (Todd 9), possible appropriation and stereotyping being the more violent excesses of my engagement (Hanson, Todd, Emberley). Offering a thesis to both Indigenous and settler scholars as a white settler — who grew up on the stolen Suquamish lands, and who now writes on the unceded lands of the Syílx people, after working within the Western scholarly tradition — certainly produces a level of anxiety in my writing, one produced by my engagement with scholarship foretelling the complexity of my position, but also one borne, more simply, of the more granular complexities that come of any attempt to earnestly engage with cultural difference. More simply, I feel a tension in attempting to speak to the settler experience of Indigenous literature and the Indigenous experience of Indigenous literature simultaneously.1 1 Stó:lō and Skwah scholar and artist Dylan Robinson articulates, and perhaps performs, this tension of readership in Hungry Listening. The first “limit” he identifies is one of language — one that his settler readers will not be able to overcome without learning Halq’eméylem (25). He then asks his settler reader to skip the next section and rejoin in the following chapter. I note this to forward the importance of address — and to make clear that while I hope my 3 Yet, Monkey Beach demands a response. Being a text deeply concerned with and informed by the traumas suffered by Haisla people at the hands of Western colonization, and their survival through those systems, the novel deals with the complex cultural position of Haisla knowledge in a colonized era. The novel interweaves Lisamarie’s journey to find her brother Jimmy, who is lost at sea along the coast of British Columbia, with stories from her childhood and young adult life, stories that ultimately frame the complexity of Lisa’s experience of Haisla knowledge. In other words, Robinson navigates the world of colonialism, showing the legacies of land theft and the violence of residential schools, the colonial institutions that trace the entirety of Lisa’s search for Jimmy, and the modern condition of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, connecting these historical experiences with the persisting influence of Western culture and values on Indigenous communities, while engaging with the pressing question of Indigenous survival beyond these systems. Through this narrative, the text presents a loving representation of Lisa’s experiences with her family — experiences that recall Haisla story, theory, and spirituality, and recall the enduring value of Haisla tradition — while also considering the way that certain Western cultural ideas inform both Lisa’s and the reader’s approach to thinking of Indigeneity. This is where my response becomes most complex, as the novel impels its reader to engage with Haisla culture, even while distancing them from the learning that it often offers. In impelling the reader to consider specific aspects of Haisla cosmology and the impact of colonization on the survival of that theoretical structure, Monkey Beach defies any easy understanding of the cultures that inform its construction; in this way, the text, through its engagement with the complex array of cultural work can speak, at some level, to the experience of Indigenous readers, my interpretive process (especially in its more personal moments in the second chapter) reflects my own experience of approaching Monkey Beach as a text born of a theoretical framework different than my own. In other words, as much as I want to forward Indigenous theory in an effort to explore Indigenous cosmology and survival, my approach will always carry with it an interest in how the settler might learn from Indigenous literature — an approach which still finds interest in the perspective of Western scholars. 4 positions that inform Lisa’s experience, depicts exactly the challenge of perspective that Hanson identifies. Just as Monkey Beach deals with the epistemological and cosmological perspectives through which Haisla people understand the world, it also explores how varying forms of interpretation shape understandings of cosmology and spirituality. In other words, the novel pulls its readers through a complex cosmological landscape, demanding engagement with specific aspects of Haisla cosmology, even as settler scholars are shown the limits of their engagement. In exploring this landscape, my response becomes specifically directed towards a consideration of the relationship between epistemology, learning, and perspective. Robinson often recalls what Lisa has learned, as her memories of her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, and her other family members take the form of an informal lesson, imparting some knowledge about the local flora, and the stories of Haisla history and culture. Ma-ma-oo is a central figure in the text — as Lisa’s Elder and guide through their colonized world. And this is how Robinson positions much of the novel’s teaching: as an aspect of familial relationships, and a process supported by community. In drawing such focus, the novel seems to depict and perhaps enact the Haisla concept nusa, or Haisla teaching practices — as described by Robinson in her work The Sasquatch at Home. As Ma-ma-oo teaches Lisa, the settler reader also learns through the narrative itself; it is, in other words, the story that teaches. Further, the text frequently calls on the reader, literally calling them to act in specific ways, while also questioning their position and offering reasons why they, as non-Haisla people, might not understand the text within its cultural context2 — often with reference to the various 2 While we will certainly see examples of this in the novel, Robinson has also addressed this challenge in interviews: “General ideas I feel very comfortable using […] but I feel uncomfortable [detailing specific Haisla traditions]. I kept some scenes more or less true as they would happen, but I reworked stuff and made certain parts up” (Robinson qtd. in Methot). Elsewhere, Robinson has commented on the dangers associated with sharing Haisla traditions, saying that, in the wrong hands, knowledge of Haisla culture allowed for most targeted approaches by Western actors (Sasquatch 13). If the novel demands my response, my response must be attentive both to the protocols and practices of Indigenous communities — the author’s ability to discuss certain aspects of their culture — and my own complicity in continued colonial assimilation of Indigenous knowledge. 5 Western perspectives that have adversely influenced Lisa’s community. Such references explore the various worldviews that the Western reader might bring with them as they interpret both the text and the world. It is here that the simple claim — Monkey Beach is about learning — opens onto much more complex questions of positionalities, interpretations, and histories, and perhaps more specifically, how story motivates engagement with such complexities. The text engages carefully with the question of epistemology, in other words, considering how Lisa and the reader think of and experience Haisla culture, how various Western epistemologies and theories influence thought. Spirituality and understandings of spirituality are emblematic here: Lisa’s learning most often involves her relationship with and understanding of Haisla cosmological forces, and how different understandings of spiritual experience outlines her interactions with and understandings of the spiritual forces in her life. In this way, the novel ties Haisla spirituality — the various ghosts, spirits, dreams, and visions that Lisa experiences — to questions of learning and perspective. All of this is to say that my analysis of Monkey Beach cannot just approach what the text means, but must instead explore what the text teaches, and how the text motivates thinking about Indigenous cultural and spiritual difference. It also means that my analysis needs to not only follow the text, but also the perspectives that arise in responding to the text. As such, I need to briefly establish some of the tropes in the academic work on Monkey Beach. Overall, a literature review shows that scholars often seem more interested in litigating the novel’s identity — and its adherence to certain constructed norms — rather than understanding what the novel might be teaching. This discussion can perhaps best be epitomized with the words of the late Stó꞉lō scholar Lee Maracle, who said “that she wasn't sure that, for her, Monkey Beach qualified as a Haisla book because Robinson wrote like a mainstream writer” (Dobson 2). This anxiety about the novel’s identity and this interest in its relationship to “mainstream”, Western cultural tropes abound. In his 6 essay on the novel, settler scholar Robert Appleford argues that the novel demonstrates a “fundamental anxiety over the inscription of Haisla cultural values within the text” (2). As such, for Appleford, there is no “authentic” Indigeneity in Robinson’s novel, but rather her characters “search” for identity (8) — hence the journey that Lisa undertakes becomes metaphor. As such, engaging the novel is always problematic and “contingent” (10), for there is no authority on which to engage with the Indigeneity of the text. But there is a tension here, as authors will often call for Indigenous specific approaches to the text or analyze anthropological accounts of Pacific Northwest Indigenous culture and spirituality to understand the cultural references within the text (Soper-Jones 19-20, Appleford 2-3). Michèle Lacombe considers the various frameworks through which the novel might be understood — offering a very cogent essay on various scholarly approaches to Indigenous literature written within Canada, all to address the links between art and politics (254) — but still ends her essay by noting that “fewer Canadian literary critics have considered Indigenous theory in their own commentaries about Native literature” (266). There is a simultaneous anxiety about reference to Indigenous identity, but a fixation on the necessity of engaging with authentic Indigenous culture. In this way, it seems that analyses will often interrogate the novel’s position, and sometimes attempt to attend to the text’s intellectual and cultural heritage, without doing the far more complex work of thinking with Indigenous literature — that is, thinking of the novel’s content through the perspective that the novel offers its reader. In this way, Indigenous identity is often the vector along which scholars access and discuss Monkey Beach, even while those same scholars seem to avoid doing the work of engaging with the text as a specific instance of cultural experience. I think that Taryn Plett offers a very compelling summary of this tension: “Monkey Beach clearly demonstrates that Lisamarie is not caught between two worlds. Western readers and critics are caught between two worlds, or rather, 7 between two ideas of what constitutes Native and Western worlds” (30). Being caught between these two ideas, scholarship becomes caught up in debates about the text’s cultural position, rather than an engagement with what the novel teaches about how scholars and readers think of culture — and in the context of this thesis, about spirituality. In other words, even as the novel interrogates contingent identities, resists certain interpretive approaches, and challenges certain political understandings of art, it does not do so to those ends, but rather to establish the grounds upon which Lisa learns of her culture, and perhaps more pressingly, to explore the epistemological limits along which the reader learns of Indigenous culture and experience. Scholars seem more interested in the significations and identities that can be used to explain the text — rather than the way that Monkey Beach structures certain epistemological approaches to those significations. This is not to say that these scholars do not speak to an empathetic and ethical approach necessary to engage with Indigenous texts. The question of identity is certainly a concern of the novel — but it is woven with Lisa’s learning, and specifically her learning about spirits. I offer this summary of the literature to propose that there is a sort of “disengagement” (McKegney 81) from the novel’s teaching — a specific disengagement that allows scholars to avoid first, a consideration of the assumptions on which their analysis rests, and second, the spiritual questions that the novel impels us to consider. In the first case, discussion of Indigenous identity as partial or contingent perhaps recalls what Nłéʔkepmx and Syílx author and scholar Nicola Campbell calls the “deficit model”,3 which overlooks “deeply activated reconnection to cultural knowledge and towards culturally-infused stories” (162), for reiterated narratives of trauma and colonial “dis-ease” 3 More specifically, the “deficit model” comes of research on Indigenous education. Cree and Metis educator and scholar Lyn Daniels writes of the supposed “problem” of educating Indigenous students, and the colonial education models that arise to in response to this perceived “problem” (8). I employ this term here because Campbell uses it to oppose the importance of “reconnection”, and thus offers us a way to approach Indigenous literary texts as reflections of reconnection and cultural reutilization. In other words, it offers us an understanding of the perspectives that search only for the way Indigenous text represent deficits, rather than represent Indigenous knowledge. 8 (Younging qtd. in Campbell 79). Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck also decries “damage-centered narratives” (“Suspending Damage” 422). Instead of focusing on stories of the damage Indigenous people experience, settler scholars are asked to attend to “reconnection”, as Campbell says, and “desire”, as Tuck says (“Suspending Damage” 416). Reconnection and desire, as we shall see, fall firmly within the purview of the text’s engagement with familial teaching and tradition, aspects of the narrative which can so easily be overlooked when engaging only with the text’s identity, or the damage that Lisa and her family have suffered at imperialist hands. Such analyses recreate certain ways of conceptualizing Indigenous people and their experience — in other words, recreate narratives that do not serve Indigenous communities. In the second case, scholarly disengagement with the novel’s teaching appears in the way scholars address spirits and ghosts in Monkey Beach. While, as I will argue, the novel is quite clear about the role of spirits in Lisa’s experience — being quite explicit about their reality in Haisla culture — scholars often see the novel’s depiction of ghostly matters as metaphor — or more specifically, an aspect of the text that needs analytical demystification — rather than an explicitly mysterious and complex aspect of Lisa’s experience and heritage. Lydia Efthymia Roupakia, for instance, brings up the novel’s engagement with spirits, but then shifts the discussion: “Living with ghosts implies a politics of memory and of inheritance” (284). There is an obvious truth to this claim, but Roupakia’s essay does not explore the ways that Monkey Beach actually constructs the relationship between Lisa and Haisla spirits, instead seeing the spiritual forces in the text as a metaphor for the ethical challenges that both Lisa and the reader face. This is often the perspective that scholars take when approaching the novel’s spiritual elements — not seeing them as aspects of Lisa’s experience, but as a textual element ready for analysis, often directed towards much more general extra-textual, aspects of Indigenous life. This type of analysis stops short of giving actual 9 attention to the spirituality that the novel deals in, and often teaches through. Perhaps more specifically, Lisa will come to see spirits as something other than metaphor or anthropologically defined cultural artifact, and the text will encourage the reader to follow suit. The scholarly resistance to understanding the reality of spirits perhaps also speaks to the debate about the novel’s relationship to the Canadian Gothic. Western Gothic literature, born as a response to the Enlightenment, has always been interested in ghosts, death, the mysterious, the symbolic and the unexplained — offering, as Jodey Castricano writes, “a thought experiment regarding slippages in the ‘things represented’, and doing so in a critically risky way by addressing that which has consistently and systematically been excluded from numerous interpretive ‘turns’” (Gothic Metaphysics 13). Jennifer Andrews argues that Monkey Beach “transports the Gothic to a Native context” (9); certainly, we might find this appealing in the abstract, as Lisa finds slippery spirits all about her, and attempts and ultimately succeeds to communicate with the dead. But, as Castricano points out in their recent chapter on Monkey Beach, such a claim says as much about a certain Western perception of what the Gothic contains, as it does about the novel (Gothic Metaphysics 163). Understandings of ghostly figures, and their place within literature brings us again to the question of perspective — specifically what motifs are excluded or included by the Gothic, and what representations can be seen by this specific interpretative perspective — and calls us again to consider how certain epistemological structures motivate specific readings of the text’s inclusion of spirits, and how the text teaches us to regard spirits, and perhaps even speak with them. With this brief review of the literature in mind, my response to Monkey Beach attends to the important Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous storytelling and theoretical perspectives (Justice, Simpson, Watts, Cariou, Tuck and Ree), while also exploring the interpretive complexities 10 that lie between cultural significations. To do this, in my first chapter, I argue that the novel deals in processes of learning and perspective. I will focus on aspects of the narrative that draw specific attention to Lisa’s relationship with Ma-ma-oo and the various teachings that she provides both to Lisa and the reader. There is, I argue, value in looking closely at the Haisla-specific4 understanding of learning — as told in Robinson’s lectures in The Sasquatch at Home — and offer an engagement with the narrative teaching at work in the novel. This exploration of the text will open onto the importance of perspective in analysis — both as Lisa takes on new perspectives, and as the text invites the settler reader to consider their own approach to the narrative. Most simply, I show that approaching Monkey Beach, and other Indigenous texts like it, demands that settler scholars see the narrative as properly theoretical — as a communication of cosmological positions. Through this engagement with theory, I address some of the ways that Monkey Beach challenges the deficit model and exemplifies those stories that, as Campbell argues, “represent ancestral narrative strands, traditions, spiritual protocols, cultural wellbeing and teachings” and those stories that “contribut[e] to reclaiming our Indigeneity” (162). I hope that my more theoretical approach to Monkey Beach can adequately attend to Campbell’s call — showing not simply what culture the novel represents, but rather how stories represent culture. In the second chapter, I argue that Robinson’s engagement with perspective becomes most apparent in how she discusses aspects of Haisla cosmology and spirituality. Spirits, ghosts, and 4 My focus on Haisla cosmology is not an attempt to root the characters within some essentialized notion of Haisla culture — as I find the above arguments about hybridity and ambiguity somewhat convincing — but rather to attend to the calls of proponents of Indigenous literary nationalism. Specifically, as Daniel Heath Justice says, “I’m suspicious of claims of universal values between all Indigenous peoples around the world, as such broad assertions too often gloss over real and meaningful distinctions between communities, regardless of whatever else they may share” (27). In other words, my attention here — which will be made explicit with reference to The Sasquatch at Home — is an attempt to remain attentive to the text without the spurious application of generalized and abstractive notions of what constitutes Indigenous. Yet, this does not mean that I avoid referencing various Indigenous scholars — as their work certainly echoes in Monkey Beach. In a certain way, I am unconvinced that nationalist and hybridist readings are mutually exclusive. Partly, this seems to be an excessive generalization in itself, as much can be gained from drawing connections, and building coalitions — but this is certainly an argument for a different paper. 11 dreams are not simple metaphors to be parsed, but rather are real aspects of Lisa’s Haisla experience — and by extension, challenges to certain Western perspectives that diminish their reality. The novel’s investment in the reality of Lisa’s spiritual experience, and disinvestment from easy metaphorical understanding of ghosts recalls Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”, and specifically their depiction of decolonization as an “unsettling” material process (3), rather than as a metaphor for social justice (21), or for a certain type of learning (19-20). It is, in other words, a certain materiality — in this case, materiality of spirits and spiritual experience — that remains vital to understandings of Indigenous cosmology present in the text. Robinson’s depiction of the psychologist Ms. Jenkins is of great import here, but further analysis of the text details many of the complex aspects of haunting and spiritual belief, those at home within Indigenous theory, but also often found within studies of the Gothic and more theoretical studies of haunting theory (Tuck and C. Ree).5 Lisa’s spiritual experience, and explicit directions for the reader to engage with the spiritual aspects of the text, open onto larger epistemological questions, revealing the differences between interpretations motivated by Western thought and perspectives held by Indigenous people; ultimately, these difference draw readers to consider what it means for them to learn from Indigenous story. Perhaps more specifically — and finding further resonance with Tuck and Yang’s work — the unsettling way that the novel engages questions of spiritualty offers a complex view of Indigenous futurity, and the meaning of decolonization, both reveling in the emotional power of Lisa’s spiritual 5 While not unrelated, Gothic studies and the study of haunting might be better described as parallel or overlapping endeavors — the former being at home in literary studies, and the latter being the extension of continental philosophy, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida, into cultural studies and sociology. They both share a Freudian influence, particularly with respect to his influential essay “The Uncanny”. Castricano’s work in both Cryptomimesis and Gothic Metaphysics bridges the gap between these two fields; their work in the latter book also draws Monkey Beach into this intersection. As such, their work will remain central to this thesis. So, while not distinct, this thesis engages with several scholars whose work I would hesitate to describe as part of Gothic research; I draw this distinction merely to reflect the different theoretical positions that this thesis brushes against. 12 experience and detailing the real and unsettling implications of a shift towards a more spiritual perspective. Spirituality, in other words, is uniquely positioned to offer a certain epistemological challenge to the Western hegemony. With a more tentative and creative structure, I explore these implications in my second chapter, attempting to coalesce aspects of the novel’s interest in teaching about Haisla spirituality and to explore the unique challenges of writing about Indigenous cosmology. I argue that the text provides the reader an opportunity to shift their attention towards the mystery of spiritual or ghostly experience, while navigating the complex and differing cultural signifiers that delimit spiritual understandings. In writing about her experience of Indigenous literature and her desire to teach Indigenous texts, Helen Hoy writes that “I can't teach it, and I can't not teach it” (45). I have felt similarly in writing this thesis — “I can’t write it, but I can’t not write it”. But it is through this tension that Monkey Beach engages a specific reconsideration of the Western reader’s engagement with Indigenous fiction and Indigenous culture generally. In this way, this thesis is as much a response to Monkey Beach as it is an analysis of the perspectives that Monkey Beach calls us to consider. In writing of perspective, learning, and haunting in Monkey Beach, I do not merely attempt to craft a thesis, but to find the text in the moments where it speaks most powerfully to the value of learning about and from Indigenous cultures and knowledges. In this way, my thesis recalls my own attempt to respond to what Monkey Beach might offer me as a Western reader — and perhaps my own attempt to open onto perspectives other than my own. 13 Chapter 1: Learning in Monkey Beach Monkey Beach follows the childhood and early adult life of Lisa, from her time in school, to the various relationships she forms with her family members. With much of the novel being told through flashback, Lisa often recalls the joy she felt during various trips with Ma-ma-oo and other family members along the beaches and through the woods of Haisla territory. Lisa and Mick wander through the bushes, picking q⁰alh’m, “the thimbleberry and salmonberry shoots” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 73); Lisa, her parents, her aunt and uncle, and Mick go fishing for oolichan around Kemano and the Kitlope river (110); Ma-ma-oo teaches her about the Haisla spirit world; and her mother tells her Haisla stories about the land and the relations that they encounter (113-14). Most simply, I think this interest on Lisa’s part — and Robinson’s consistent depiction of these Haisla experiences6 — points to the importance of teaching in Monkey Beach, and how such lessons often reveal the complex ways that knowledge is structured. More specifically, I find that the novel consistently shows how teachings arrive with love and respect both for Lisa and for what she learns. The teaching is always caring, regardless of what is taught — be it Mick’s past activism and experience of Canada’s residential schooling, Ma-ma-oo’s discussions of Haisla cosmology, or the small words of advice and practical lessons offered by her extended family. In this way, the novel is not merely about the knowledge taught but about how it is taught — or more specifically, how pedagogy creates epistemology. In this chapter, I want to explore learning in Monkey Beach by looking closely at how teaching and learning shape Lisa’s experience and frame 6 Its important to note that some stories cannot be told to non-Indigenous people — and those that are often require permission to share. As Suzanne Methot points out, in an interview with Robinson, Indigenous people “must strike a balance between [their] artistic freedom and the privacy of [their] community and a culture that the colonial government once sought to eradicate” (Methot). This is something that Robinson is familiar with, as her uncle Gordon Robinson got some “flack” for sharing Haisla stories in written form (Methot). As I proceed in this section with care, I also approach with the somewhat risky assumption that Robinson has shared stories that I may engage with critically. 14 her understanding of Haisla culture, and her experience of that culture. To this end, I will reference Robinson’s discussion of nusa — the Haisla word for teaching protocols — in her book The Sasquatch at Home. I believe that looking to nusa in the novel not only assists in the settler reader’s understanding of Lisa’s experience of Haisla culture and the transmission of traditions, but also helps us understand the ways that the novel asks readers to learn from Indigenous story — and aids in their engagement with the Haisla culture in the novel. As such, I will first look to the novel’s presentation of Lisa’s learning, with specific focus on her familial teachings and relations, and then turn to how the reader might learn from the narration’s teaching. Familial Lessons Lisa’s trip with Ma-ma-oo to dig for oxasuli offers us a very prescient example of the novel’s depiction of teaching — revealing the complex and interlocking nature of Haisla knowledge and the way it is framed. As Lisa hikes through the forest with her grandmother, she takes on the position of a student, being taught about the dangerous and “powerful medicine” (151), and the historical and cultural significance of oxasuli to the Haisla people. When they find one of the plants, Ma-ma-oo says “[i]t protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine” (151), while also being “[g]ood for arthritis” and “[j]oints” (152). Not only does Lisa learn about the plant’s use and where to find it, but Ma-ma-oo’s description of the oxasuli teaches of a certain interconnection or indistinction between the material and spiritual; the plant does not only relieve painful symptoms if used properly but offers spiritual protection as well. Teachings are complex in this way, with one lesson bringing another. After gathering several oxasuli bulbs, Ma-ma-oo begins collecting cedar branches, after which she leaves tobacco for the tree. Lisa asks for an explanation, which Ma-ma-oo provides: “The tobacco is for the tree spirits. You take something, you give something. I’m asking for protection. Going to go up in the corners of my house. Put 15 these in your bedroom. Hang them up like this” (152). Here, Ma-ma-oo’s lesson gives way to the importance of reciprocity with the world. Within the experience of harvesting a specific plant, we find layered lessons about the cultural significance of oxasuli, a lesson which then branches into further cosmological concerns around the use of flora endemic to Haisla territory. But the lesson does not only focus on the use and cosmological significance of oxasuli, for it also offers Lisa an opportunity to understand her position with her family, and Haisla history. As Lisa asks questions about the plant and its connection to ghosts, Ma-ma-oo speaks of Lisa’s mother’s grandmother — who was a “real medicine woman”, who could help people communicate with the dead (154). In speaking about oxasuli, family history comes to inform Lisa’s experience; she is part of this history, as she too experiences spirits — specifically a little red-haired man who visits her at night, and often predicts future tragedies. Because of these dreams, Lisa uses the opportunity to surreptitiously ask Ma-ma-oo about spirits. Sensing Lisa’s distress, and immediately understanding Lisa’s question for what it is, Ma-ma-oo reassures her that these powers are a “gift” that runs in her family (153). Poignantly, Ma-ma-oo touches Lisa’s hair at this moment (153). The simplicity of touch here, reflecting Ma-ma-oo’s love for Lisa, highlights how the text is not merely interested in what Lisa learns — what specific facets of Haisla knowledge Lisa needs to know — but also how Lisa is learning: through the loving relationships of her family members and their knowledge of the history and the connection Haisla people have to the land and spirits. The whole scene is given over to the relationship between family members, between an Elder and their student, and infused with the learning that comes of that relationship — about history, cosmology, and the knowledge of flora. Teaching is not simply about passing on knowledge, but is a coming to understand with another, responding both intellectually and emotionally to a person, and the possibility of their growth. This relationship is sometimes 16 humorous or impatient — as Ma-ma-oo shakes her head with an ironic “[y]ou kids” in response to Lisa’s somewhat childish response to learning about the dangers of oxasuli (152) — but there is always care for both the complexity of their engagement, and care for the learner. Lisa’s relationship with Mick further elucidates Robinson’s investment in the emotional texture of familial teaching, while also revealing the way that Lisa often acts on her learning. Early in the novel, Lisa recalls a fight she had with Frank — her childhood bully-turned-friend. After the fight, both of the children end up in the emergency room, at which point Frank’s mother calls Lisa a “monster” (67). When recounting this to Mick, he reassures Lisa, telling her that she is his “favorite monster in the whole world” (67). In saying this, Mick not only consoles Lisa, but also teaches her to love what others find monstrous or “freaky” (319) about her — everything from her distaste for the attitudes of her female classmates, to others’ distrust of her belief in ghosts. Mick’s presence in Lisa’s life often evokes the importance of both strength and acceptance: Mick teaches her a distrust of Western narratives around Indigenous people — resulting in a young Lisa singing “Fuck the Oppressors” in class, after a teacher demands that she read a textbook condemning Indigenous people for their supposed cannibalism (69). Most simply, Mick empowers Lisa, teaching her not only to love herself, but to love her heritage and culture. And most powerfully, there is reciprocity in their relationship. After Mick’s funeral, one of his friend’s tells Lisa that she “did [Mick] a lot of good” (146), helping him recover from the trauma brought about by his experience in residential schools. Just as Ma-ma-oo gave tobacco to the tree spirits, Lisa gave back to Mick. Familial teaching in Monkey Beach works on reciprocity, be it trade for items, or familial love and acceptance. Familial connections, and the education they impart, certainly span Lisa’s experience, but also connect her to the Haisla spirit world. Ma-ma-oo often tells her about the Haisla relation to 17 the dead. Early in the novel, Lisa’s grandmother teaches her how to speak to her grandfather Ba-ba-oo, who has passed away, by burning the foods that he liked while he lived (79). As Nicola Campbell notes in her analysis of the novel: “The characters of those who are deceased are vibrant, tangible, loving, embody connection to the past and future and they each provide tremendous healing. The roles played by those who are dead are significant, even more so than the roles of those who are alive” (150). As the novel progresses, and both Mick and Ma-ma-oo die, Lisa feels their presence strongly, recalling their lessons often. In other words, familial teachings draw connections across time. Further, we see Lisa act on these connections: we might recall a small scene when Lisa throws some tobacco into the fire for Mick (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 148), clearly giving him a gift, as she learned from Ma-ma-oo (79). When Campbell speaks of healing, she speaks of the power that specific teachings have in connecting Lisa to the people in her life who have passed on, and to her Haisla heritage. This healing certainly opposes a certain fixation on Lisa’s damage, and the damage-centered narratives about Indigenous people, showing how learning draws powerful intergenerational connections. The text’s interest in resisting damage-centered narratives, however, does not mean that the novel completely overlooks damage. In this respect, I might join several scholars in arguing that the novel spends so much time exploring Lisa’s learning because she is, in some ways, a cultural outsider (Roupakia 283, Appleford 9), one separated from Haisla culture because of colonial violence, and the intergenerational damage that such violence has wrought on Indigenous communities. She does not speak Haisla language, which is necessary for her to really understand “the old stories” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 211); there is a distance between her and what Ma-ma-oo calls “the old ways” (154). Perhaps most importantly, the novel also documents both the past and present Western influences that continue to separate her from her heritage. Learning, in 18 other words, is necessary in order to counter damage — necessary for the revitalization of Haisla knowledge. Lisa identity is somewhat “fragmentary” (Little Bear 84) — a fragmentation that perhaps, as Roupakia says, aids in Lisa’s resistance towards stereotypes associated with Indigenous characters (283), but also belies the lasting damage done by assimilatory Canadian policies towards Indigenous people. In this way, Monkey Beach seems to reveal the importance of earnest engagement with the ways that Indigenous people practice Indigenous teachings in the wake of colonization. In other words, the question of which characters are inside and outside Indigenous knowledge — how the text demonstrates contingent identity (Appleford 9) or reveals Lisa’s supposed outsider status (Roupakia 283) — seems less important than the way that Robinson describes the experience of learning as an Indigenous person, and how that learning frames familial relationships, traditional knowledge, and, as we will explore later, Lisa’s developing spiritual understanding. Nusa and Familial Pedagogy Thus far, my analysis has perhaps been somewhat predictable. I have essentially glossed some of the ways that Monkey Beach speaks to common Indigenous knowledge systems; the importance placed on reciprocity with the land (Simpson 154, Deloria, Jr. 154), the animacy of other-than-human beings (Deloria, Jr. 152, Little Bear 78), the importance of receiving teachings from human and non-human Elders (Baker 274, 277, Simpson 150), and the value of supporting relations can all be found in Robinson’s writing. While I think pointing out that the novel explores these aspects of Indigenous thought remains an important part of such analyses, I want to look closer at the novel’s engagement with these teachings, and specifically ask how the text frames learning for the reader. To do this, I turn to The Sasquatch at Home and to Robinson’s discussion of her own interactions with the oxasuli. 19 In The Sasquatch at Home, Robinson recalls joining an Indigenous youth Rediscovery Camp, where she engaged with both young men and elders in her community, as part of her research for writing Monkey Beach. She recalls that “[o]ne of the elders at the camp was excited that I was interested in the old medicines and was hopeful that I would carry our knowledge to the younger generations. I asked her about oxsuli, a powerful plant more commonly known as Indian Hellebore” (E. Robinson, Sasquatch 33). The elder takes her to see the plant. After some description, Robinson says that “[she] knew the root was used to keep ghosts away and for good luck,” but then notes that her Elder taught her more — specifically “how to use the root to cure headaches” (34). As in Monkey Beach, this passage points to the relationship between the pragmatic use of a plant and its spiritual position. But here we also find Robinson’s personal experience: the Elder tells her “You should get to know its energy,” she said. “Lean in and study it.” “Okay.” “I’m glad they’re growing back here,” she said. “They haven’t for a long time.” As I leaned in to study the oxsuli,7 my rubber boots slipped in the mud and fell on top of it and squashed it. The elder was quiet as I picked myself up and tried to unsquash the plant. “Maybe you should stick to writing,” she said. (34) This scene should be familiar. Here, the learning is presented through dialogue, and with a fair amount of humor; there is a personability to the learning. In this way, the story that Robinson tells not only relays information about a plant, but comes to describe the Haisla perception of oxasuli, 7 This name is spelled oxasuli in Monkey Beach and oxsuli in The Sasquatch at Home. I opted for the former spelling simply because my focus is on Robinson’s novel. 20 a perception interested in the plant as cultural, spiritual, and practical8 — all of which is bound in certain humorous humility in the face of an honest mistake. Put more clearly, there is a holism to the description, one that this list — cultural, spiritual, and practical — entirely betrays, as it separates the multifaceted Haisla perception of oxasuli into distinct categories. And, much like Lisa’s engagement with the oxasuli gives way to Ma-ma-oo speaking about Lisa’s gift, Robinson’s experience with oxasuli gives way to her own experience and powers: with the elder’s comment that she should “stick to writing”, we find Monkey Beach, and the writing contained within. Robinson too learns from oxasuli, just as Lisa does — even while each learns of the plant in their own way. While there is certainly an interesting discussion about the role of the author here, and how Robinson’s own experience as a Haisla woman comes to inform the text, this is only partly why I bring up The Sasquatch at Home. For perhaps more importantly, Robinson implicitly couches this story in a particular theoretical understanding, having earlier defined the Haisla word nusa, a definition which should come to inform our reading of this story. Yet perhaps “definition” is not quite how Robinson gives her readers an understanding of the word — for she recalls her trip to Graceland with her mother to give us a sense of the word’s meaning. After Robinson receives a literature prize, she decides to take her mother to tour Elvis’ home, as her mother was a major fan of the King. After they arrive and sign up for the platinum tour around the manor, Robinson puts on an audio-tour headset, while her mother “left hers hanging around her neck, ignoring the flow of traffic and irritated glances as she slowly made her way through the entrance” (11). When Robinson’s mother arrives at Elvis’ mother’s room, she stands and trembles before the space (11). Robinson joins her and thinks 8 I want to thank Carrie Terbasket for pointing me to this aspect of the story. 21 […] there, at that moment, while Mom was telling me stories about Elvis and his mother, I was glad we’d come here together. You should not go to Graceland without an Elvis fan. It’s like Christmas without kids—you lose that sense of wonder. The Manor wasn’t that impressive if you just looked at it as a house. More importantly, as we walked slowly through the house and she touched the walls, everything had a story, a history. In each story was everything she valued and loved and wanted me to remember and carry with me. This is nusa. (12). What does Robinson mean here? Primarily, it seems that Robinson describes the value of learning about something — in this case, the life and home of Elvis — from a person who cares deeply for what they are teaching. Her mother, being an Elvis fan, is a source of stories and knowledge — knowledge that differs from the information that the audio-guide provides. There is an embodied emotional and relational texture to what her mother relates: she trembles when standing in Elvis’ mother’s room and continues her storytelling. She also sees past the apparent simplicity of the house, finding the history and stories that emanate from the space. But the teachings that she provides her daughter in this moment are not just about Elvis or his Manor, but about her own values; these are bound together. “In each story was everything she valued and loves and wanted me to remember and carry with me,” Robinson realizes; these stories are about the passions that exceed the explicit “content” of the lesson. The story, in other words, teaches, giving emotional texture to an understanding that transcends a simple transfer of knowledge. So, while Robinson provides a definition of nusa in her footnotes, saying explicitly that it is the way of teaching 22 children Haisla protocols (43), the Graceland story communicates this meaning as well, while additionally showing the impact of learning through story.9 This narrated definition, this teaching-through-story offered by Robinson, begs the question: does Monkey Beach contain depictions motivated by nusa, or perhaps more clearly, does Lisa’s learning arrive through story? In some cases, it does. Stories about Lisa’s relatives communicate her heritage but also the storied history of her family: in the case of the oxasuli scene, Ma-ma-oo speaks about Lisa’s great-grandmother, a story which both brings her closer to understanding the nature of her powers — the cosmology that informs her experience — while also recalling her great-grandmother’s skill as vocalist and dancer (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 154). Later, Ma-ma-oo shares a song with Lisa, written by her great-grandfather after the passing of his wife. Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa that she sings it when she thinks about Mick’s passing (174). The song, passed down through the generations, is a heartbeat, one that aids in Lisa’s understanding of death and mourning, and preserves the love of her family across time.10 In a similar vein, Katherine Meloche writes of the Stone Man story that Lisa’s mother Gladys tells her, arguing that such stories “teach [Lisa] proper protocol[s] towards elders and the land” (63). This sort of learning also seems to arise from the other-than-human as well: most notably, with Ma-ma-oo’s repeated reference to the dangers of oxasuli, recall the dangers of engaging with spirits, and the care that Lisa must take in coming to an understanding of her spiritual connection (371). Most generally, the novel’s interest 9 I would be remiss to point out that much of this analysis mirrors the work of Katherine Meloche in her PhD dissertation. Her work is vital to developing an understanding of the specific Haisla protocols and traditions that Robinson writes with and should be considered by anyone interested in the more specific aspects of Haisla cosmological structure. I want to thank Kerrie Charnley for pointing me towards this dissertation (which I wish I had found earlier in my research process). 10 While it is perhaps outside the scope of this thesis, I would be remiss to comment on the relationship between Eden Robinson and her uncle Gordon Robinson, whose work she draws from in telling the histories of the Haisla community (Lacombe 262). The narrative becomes intergenerational in an extra-textual way, not simply commenting on the way that stories pass down but passing them down through the medium of the text. The magic of reading with nusa in mind is seeing these layers, seeing how stories and relationships form a strong warp through which the weft of the specific narrative can pass. 23 in Lisa’s learning seems to reflect Robinson’s description of nusa — as it outlines an embodied and theoretical understanding of story and its effects on the listener and teller. In other words, Lisa learns from her family, and “[i]n each story was everything [they] valued and loved and wanted [Lisa] to remember and carry with [her]” (E. Robinson, Sasquatch 12). Now, I want to connect this specific discussion of nusa and its Haisla-specific context — both within Robinson’s lectures and her novel — to a more general idea in Indigenous theory: stories teach, and more specifically, stories create theory. Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts argues that the Haudenosaunee story of Sky Woman is not just an “abstraction” shared between humans but rather an affective, literal, and embodied relationship, a history that “directly extends to our philosophies, thoughts and actions as Haudenosaunee people” (Watts 26). Similarly, Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson argues that “a ‘theory’ in its simplest form is an explanation of a phenomenon, and Nishnaabeg stories in this way form part of the theoretical basis of our intelligence. […] ‘Theory’ is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community, and generation of people” (Simpson 151). Both Simpson and Watts argue that story is not separate from theory, that explanations of phenomena form a continual generation and embodied practice with other-than-human agents — the land, water, plants, and non-human animals. Stories, like that of Skywoman, and in this case, stories of engagement with oxasuli and other family members, work to bind together communities, work to draw connections between Indigenous peoples and their land. In other words, stories come to structure the complexity of life. This complexity is not only narrated, but often physically manifest in art and practices. In describing sweetgrass traditions, Potawatomi scholar and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says that “[s]weetgrass, as the hair of Mother Earth, is traditionally braided to show loving care for her well-being. Braids, plaited of three strands, are 24 given away as signs of kindness and gratitude” (Kimmerer 203). Such gratitude reminds us of the phrase “all my relations” — which speaks to both immediate family, collective humanity, and the “kinship” with the “other-than-human” (Justice 87) — while also recalling what might be learned from these kinship ties. I want to draw specific attention to the intimacy of the interrelations here. Métis scholar and artist Warren Cariou writes of his relationship with a braid of sweetgrass — a braid he was given by a filmmaker who he befriended at a workshop. He kept the braid by his bedside, and its smell would remind him of his time with his new friend and the workshop itself (“Sweetgrass Stories” 343). Cariou shows that stories do not only act as the basis for both large theories about the world, but also as the basis for intimate interpersonal structures that both transcend the human and recall close ties. In other words, stories shape discussions of cosmological relationships, and recall interpersonal bonds — bonds that exist between families, friends, and broader ecological communities — and how those bonds teach Indigenous people about their place and their responsibility in the world. The complexity here cannot be contained in this brief review but suffice it to say that nusa is a Haisla-specific depiction of a set of relationships that many Indigenous communities develop through story. Of course, the importance of cultural traditions and stories amongst Indigenous communities should not completely surprise us — both within the context of Monkey Beach and within the greater context of Indigenous theory. Meloche came to very similar conclusions, and offered a very similar analysis, in her dissertation, where she argues that “[Lisa] is dependent on her family and relations to honour their responsibility and teach her the proper protocols and knowledge systems through nusa to enable her investigation [of her brother’s disappearance]” (62). However, in considering epistemology, perspective, and learning, I want to focus on how this perspective on story within both Haisla protocols, and Indigenous cosmology generally, shapes 25 how non-Haisla reader understand their interpretation of learning in Monkey Beach, and more generally, how story-as-theory aids in understanding Indigenous stories. More specifically, Robinson’s descriptions of nusa, and the comments of scholars writing about the relationship between story and theory, should give us a more careful perspective on the role of storytelling, one that engages with the power such stories contain in framing Indigenous people’s cosmological and epistemological understandings and ultimate survival in the face of colonization. As such, I think that this engagement with the theoretical dimension of story offers the non-Indigenous reader a way of thinking about Indigenous story that differs from certain strands of Western literary theory — which often treat story as an object ready for interpretation, rather than an agent, carrying theoretical and relational power. In other words, my use of the word nusa here is not intended to contain all of the theoretical teachings in the novel, as Robinson does remind us that the term is specific to Haisla-specific protocols, not more general questions of learning;11 rather, I hope to draw focus to the emotional texture through which Robinson writes of nusa, and look for that texture in my analysis of her novel — looking carefully at the way that the novel can be seen to teach, can be seen to structure certain theories of relationality. Further, and perhaps more abstractly, I believe more explicit interest in the theoretical import of storytelling opens onto new vistas through which to interpret Indigenous texts, vistas which draw into focus the cosmological questions that scholars often chafe against. Nusa and the Reader Scholars have pointed out that, if Lisa learns from Ma-ma-oo’s stories, the reader is also in a position to learn from Robinson’s stories. Indeed, this paper follows from the more general belief 11 Perhaps most specifically, nusa cannot just be translated to “pedagogy” or “education”. 26 that reading such texts can aid in learning about Indigenous culture, and aid in the reconciliatory process. While this is certainly an analytical perspective that can attend to aspects of the text’s teaching, attention to nusa, or at least the theoretical implications of the narrative, reveals that an Indigenous novel’s teachings might not be as simple as drawing out specific lessons from certain characters or depictions (what I might call a didactic narrative), but might indeed require attention to what I might call the narrative’s educative function or affect. Seen this way, familial love in the teaching of Indigenous traditions is not just an experience that Robinson writes about, but rather a specific exploration of the way that teaching might be conducted. Similarly, reciprocity is not simply a theme of the narrative — one that Lisa learns from Mick and Ma-ma-oo, and then acts upon later in the novel — but rather an explicit comment on, even an ethical claim about, relationships in the world. Generally, moments of learning, of growth, and of love between family members — both those human and non-human beings — bring together teachings that frame the learning that the reader themselves might attend in their own experience. To look more carefully at the theoretical dimensions of story in Monkey Beach, I want to pay more careful attention to the way that the novel addresses the reader — and perhaps draws them towards certain acts of engagement, or specific theoretical ideas. In attempting to understand Lisa’s cultural position, settler scholars should not, I think, only look for the “moral” of the story (Watts 21), but rather explore framing, those moments where perspective is made explicit, and moments when that perspective draws out the theoretical. No aspect of the text seems better suited for such analysis then those strange passages which direct the reader to take certain actions or give them certain considerations. These moments detach themselves from the explicit narrative, becoming a mysterious presence in the text that directs the reader from afar. I have been asked to contact the dead, to go to a cemetery, and to find a map — all of which aid to the novel’s investment 27 in spiritual considerations, but also which push engagement with perspective-taking, and the way that thinking informs perspective. These sections of the text show that the novel is not merely an account of what Lisa learns, and not merely a collection of teachings or morals that the reader might come to know, but rather a sort of pedagogical “handbook” aimed at creating an understanding of the role that story plays in that learning. Monkey Beach opens with an extended exploration of place — specifically directing the reader to physically engage with a map: “Find a map of British Columbia. Point to the middle of the coast. Beneath Alaska, find the Queen Charlotte Islands. Drag your finger across the map, across the Hecate Strait to the coast…” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 4). This extended passage often comes up in analyses of the novel, as scholars use it to understand Robinson’s political engagement, or how the novel introduces the spaces Lisa exists within (Lacombe 263-64, Appleford 8). However, while these arguments offer us much to think about, specifically with respect to considerations of how a certain colonial representation of space does not align with the complexity of Lisa’s Haisla sensibilities, such analyses often ignore what is most startling: this passage addresses the reader — asks them to act, to take the map in hand, and look closely. This passage does not simply establish themes or place, but goes further, immediately locating the reader, asking them to take place seriously through this specific embodied action. Importantly, the novel does not give us the shape of the map, does not call us to imagine the map, but rather directs our body in coming to understand a physical map. We are told to drag our fingers along named land masses (bearing colonial signifiers) and over bodies of water. If we recall what Robinson says about nusa, we can see a similar teaching style at work here: Robinson recalls how her mother walked around the Elvis Manor, saying “we walked slowly through the house and she touched the walls, everything had a story, a history” (E. Robinson, Sasquatch 12). Robinson asks us to do the 28 same here. There are moments of explicit teaching — the narrative tells us that “[t]his is Princess Royal Island, and it is famous for its Kermode bears, which are black bears that are usually white” (4) — and the narrative directs this teaching towards the reader and their relationship with both the text and the map. In other words, the narrative calls the reader’s perspective into question, inviting them to engage with the novel as a space that needs to be “mapped” differently, or even as a space that exists beyond the map. Many such moments exist in Monkey Beach and each time Robinson invites the reader to explicitly participate in their learning — often with the implication that they might change their perspective. While, at a certain level, all novels invite this sort of engagement — or at least, a reader might endeavor to read with this sort of theoretical analysis — Monkey Beach seems somewhat unique in how it attends to the reader’s interpretation. This direct address calls the reader to see the narrative as properly theoretical, engaged with relationships in the world, and engaged with the way that we all think of, and think with, those relationships. As I go on to argue, many aspects of the story directly ask the reader to engage; we are given directions for making oolichan grease (86), a direction that invites us explicitly to share in this aspect of Haisla culture; we will also be told to contact the dead (139, 178, 212). The “find a map” passage establishes the importance of this sort of engagement to the novel and prepares the reader to take these passages seriously. More importantly, this passage opens onto the challenge proper to the novel, the challenge that asks the reader to think: what does this novel want of me and how do I respond to such demands? In this way, it seems (to me at least) that when the reader begins to read stories as expressions of theory, they do not only begin to teach, but also begin to demand a certain approach from the reader — demanding an active response that acknowledges the narrative’s power to direct attention and shift perspective. Just as there is a relationality between the beings on Turtle Island, 29 a reciprocity that Ma-ma-oo demonstrates when she speaks about the cedar trees, so too is storytelling relational, reflecting both the “co-creat[ion]” of stories between the teller and the listener, and a conscious recognition and power of such creative forces (Ullrich et al. 247-48). The novel is, in other words, a sort of “performance” to which the reader must respond (Simpson qtd. in Justice 25). Perhaps most simply, this chapter proposes that Robinson’s engagement with Lisa’s learning and Ma-ma-oo’s teaching is not a simple proxy for the reader’s learning, but rather a perspective through which the reader might engage more carefully with the story itself. In other words, if the novel is about learning, it is a learning born of the complexity of story, perspective, and interpretation, where character’s experiences offer a direction along which the reader might read, rather than being a simple narrative device producing didactic lessons. As such, I intend for this chapter to, first, establish an understanding of the Haisla-specific theoretical approach non-Haisla readers might take while reading, and learning from, the novel, and second, to engage carefully with readings of Indigenous narrative that resists, at some level, a fixation on the damage experienced by Indigenous people — seeing exactly how Indigenous story moves beyond “damage-centered narratives” through, in this case, familial teaching. But this first chapter has been somewhat simplified and narrowly focused. As the novel develops, Lisa’s experience of Haisla cosmological figures inform the novel’s pedagogical effect. Lisa attempts to learn about her spiritual connection, and the novel gives us three explicit “contacting the dead” lessons (139, 178, 212). With these directions, Robinson draws the reader into considerations of spiritual or supernatural matters, and the important questions of learning that come of a spiritual perspective. Further, such considerations only reveal further perspectival complexity — as Monkey Beach takes on an array of different cultural and emotional responses to Lisa’s experience of spirits. As such, 30 in the next chapter, I ask: how might the Western reader come to understand Robinson’s fraught invitation to learn from Haisla cosmology and spirituality? 31 Chapter 2: Learning with Haisla Spirits: Spirituality in Monkey Beach Thus far, I have spoken at length about the value of a certain theoretical approach to the narrative in Monkey Beach — specifically looking at Robinson’s depiction of nusa, the Haisla-specific pedagogy that she describes in The Sasquatch at Home. I explored the various ways that the text is interested in learning — not only as it pertains to Lisa’s life but also to the reader’s experience of the text. Despite making this claim, I have written little of what the more pedagogical aspects of Monkey Beach serves to teach. As such, I turn now to the far more complex question: what ideas, theories, and relationships does the narrative which is Monkey Beach communicate to the reader? Primarily, I want to argue that the novel teaches its reader about Haisla spiritual matters. But I have found, in attempting to put together an argument that attends to the perspective the novel asks us to take, that an argument about the spirituality in Monkey Beach is as challenging to articulate as it is necessary to understand. Not only have few scholars really engaged with the way that the novel presents spirituality, but also the novel revels in a variety of tensions that it refuses to fully resolve — while also asking the reader, often explicitly, to engage with those challenges. So, while I want to argue that Monkey Beach provides a certain spiritual teaching — and perhaps even gives the reader some knowledge of and connection to spiritual matters — I find instead that the novel really reveals a necessary resistance to schematizing spiritual teaching even while inviting engagement with such cosmological considerations. In this way, the novel ultimately mediates the complexity found in approaching stories with the understanding that they communicate theory — for Monkey Beach creates and recreates the terms of the reader’s epistemological engagement, and frames the challenge of learning along differing cultural, emotional, and historical lines. 32 Most simply, this chapter reflects my experience of running up against a specific tension: if Lisa struggles consistently to understand the way that spirits communicate with her, how could I reasonably attempt to cut through such experiences with any cohesive depiction of the spiritual? More specifically, I want to attend to a complex tension in Monkey Beach that arises between, on the one hand, the spiritual forces and experiences that exceed any easy understanding — the spirit world that exists as an animate force, and those “magical things” “living in the world” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 316) — and on the other hand, the various cultural perceptions, epistemologies and signifiers that quickly rise to explain these forces. I think that, if settler scholars are to approach aspects of the novel as a certain teaching, even a certain nusa, and learn, not only with the novel, but also with spirits, we must engage with this tension — specifically looking to how it drives together particular cultural understandings, rooted in Lisa’s Haisla heritage but also those signifiers associated with other cultures, and an unassailable sense of the spiritual, one that partially resists any specific depiction of the spirit. In an attempt to approach this complexity, I proceed in this chapter with an experimental and partially narrative analysis of Haisla spirituality in Monkey Beach. This chapter does not only work from Lisa’s experience and other scholarly works, but also works from my own struggles in understanding some of the tensions that arise from my research, and the struggle of writing the spiritual, which not only goes against the grain of certain academic discourses, but also requires a sort of writing that resists the explanatory and argumentative.12 Through this experiment, I hope to explore the novel’s complex relationship to spirituality, and draw some connections that might aid in the navigation of Indigenous literature. 12 In organizing these complexities through a more experimental style, I draw from the work of Eve Tuck — specifically the style of her creative autoethnographic piece “A Glossary of Haunting”, co-written with C. Ree — and the work of Jodey Castricano, specifically their term cryptomimesis, a “kind of writing that is self-referential yet co-exists in a relation of correspondence with other writing”, and thus “preserves desire” for the unspeakable (Cryptomimesis 43). Finally, I attempt to follow, in my own way, from the structure of Monkey Beach which revels in temporal and narrative disjoints. 33 ~~~~ Vanessa Watts says that Anishinaabe stories really “happened”, and that they cannot be reduced to “the moral of the story is…” (Watts 21), reduced to some ethical or theoretical lesson that exists separately from the narrative. The story is not simply a referent or metaphor; the story is the theory, the cosmology. The same can perhaps be said of Robinson’s story about her mother’s experience of the Elvis house — as the story “was everything she valued and loved and wanted me to remember and carry with me” (E. Robinson, Sasquatch 12), as the story is what Robinson recalls in describing nusa. At the end of Monkey Beach, Jimmy, now spirit, says to Lisa: “Tell her” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 374). ~~~~ If I am remembering myself correctly, I came to an academic interest in spirituality and spiritual experience through the work of Jacques Derrida. In Specters of Marx, he begins with the deceptively simple claim that “learning to live” requires that we learn “to live with ghosts” (xvii-xviii). Being haunted seemed, at the time, to be a path towards understanding the historical and cultural context of living on lands stolen from Indigenous people, and a path towards attending to some sort of reconciliatory project. But, to cut a long story short, I soon ran up against what Eve Tuck and C. Ree call “the particular and the general” (640). Lincoln and Lincoln offer us a clear picture of how this tension manifests in discourse. They describe a difference between, on the one hand, scholars (like Avery Gordon and Jacques Derrida) who see ghosts as ontologically “ambiguous” (Lincoln and Lincoln 196), “recede[ing] into signals, matters, and traces” (195) that can easily become a sort of floating, airy metaphor for the general victim, the enslaved, the disappeared and murdered (194), or as a 34 challenge to a certain ontological dogma (192); and on the other hand, scholars (like themselves) who attend to the “material” “spiritual experience” (196) and the “culturally specific beliefs” that outline the materiality of spirits and delimit specific histories of violence (197). A tension forms between “anthropological and religious-historical studies” of culturally specific ghosts (197) and the “spectral turn” (Luckhurst qtd. in Lincoln and Lincoln 193) opened by an interest in Derridean hauntology and postcolonial concern for the many traumas of imperialism (192). In this way, learning to live does not only require our attention to, as Derrida says, “the ghost of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, by the victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of extermination, victims of the oppression of capitalist imperialism or any other forms of totalitarianism” (xviii), but also looks for “place-bound ghosts” (Lincoln and Lincoln 197) who “appear as fully extant and active animate beings [and] confront the living in direct, non-mediated, and even menacing fashion” (198). While they acknowledge the value of the spectral turn, Lincoln and Lincoln ultimately come down on the side of the particular spirit — the import of cultural position, and the value of an anthropological approach. So, feeling chastised, I turned my attention towards the particular, in an effort to overcome a certain abstraction that comes of the general ghost. But as I shifted my attention, I think I found that Lincoln and Lincoln make a subtle mistake here: it is the particular and the general, not the particular or the general. In other words, this framing is a false dichotomy: the experience of the spiritual dimensions of earthly life will always be bound to places, peoples, histories, and stories, but this does not make spirituality any less ambiguous or complex. Further, and with respect to engaging ghosts towards reconciliatory or decolonial ends, it is a certain ambiguity or generality that allows ghostly narratives to seep into the unconscious, especially of those not directly 35 informed by the culture from which the spiritual force arises. I realized then that my analysis becomes more complex when I run the ambiguity of spirituality against its specific cultural depiction. Or at least, this is what I found when I read Monkey Beach — which reveals the tension created when privileging the particular over the general, and the reverse. The novel takes pains to reveal the limits of a cultural perspective, while revealing the precise importance of that culture; or, put differently, the novel takes pains to represent spiritual experience, while refusing to adequately outline what it is actually representing. There is a complex attempt here to simultaneously find the general and the particular — an attempt necessary to invite the reader — settler or otherwise — into a perspective attentive to Indigenous cosmologies, but also aware of the complex mystery that arise along spiritual experiences in a secular age. ~~~~ As most scholars note, Monkey Beach charts Lisa’s developing understanding of Haisla culture and her spiritual perception, using her journey to rescue Jimmy as a way to recall this spiritual development. Having inherited a spiritual connection from her mother, Lisa often experiences the presence of Haisla spirits — most notably the little man with red hair, who we later learn is the spirit of the cedar tree, who presents her with confusing and macabre visions. During her childhood, his “arrivals and departures” “had no meaning” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 27), but as she grows, she comes to understand that the little man foretells, and perhaps forewarns, of tragic events. By the end of the novel, she is not just convinced of the truth of the little man’s predictions, and that “magical things [are] still living in the world” (316, emphasis added); she also learns enough of her connection with spiritual matters, to travel to the land of the dead, learn of Jimmy’s fate and return changed. 36 This summary here, I think, is missing some specificity: Monkey Beach explicitly depicts Lisa’s attempts to engage with the spirit world, and the narrative often implicates the reader in her engagements. During her high school years, her friend Pooch — who is also partial to ghostly understandings of the world — gives her a book called “Voodoo for Beginners”, in which she finds “the chapter ‘To communicate with the Restless Dead’”; she tries the “spell”, hoping to contact Mick (220-21): The first time I tried it, nothing happened. I fell asleep. Jimmy woke me for breakfast. The second time I did it, I saw neon-colored geometric patterns swirling and merging until I was so dizzy that I had to open my eyes or puke. The third time, I felt like the bed was on water and it was rocking in the waves. I drifted upward, floating, watching spinning lights swirl in front of me, and then I didn’t feel my body. When I tried to open my eyes, I snapped awake. I sat up, yawning and stretching. (221-22) In this passage, I find an explicit and active attempt to engage with spirits (and notably one that comes to Lisa from outside of her own cultural heritage, though we will return to this later). Most obviously, the spell seems to provoke, in Lisa, a shift in perspective — with the “neon-colored geometric patterns” and “the bed” “rocking in the waves” indicating something of a meditative experience, one that lies, as is said earlier, “between waking and sleeping” (139). Attention to the spiritual seems to impel shifts in consciousness, perhaps a shift away from a certain colonial reality-concept — and contacting the spiritual certainly requires an address unmoored from direct consciousness. Later, the novel turns this spell to the reader, during several “contacting the dead” lessons (139, 178, 212). As with the “find a map” passage, the nusa at work in these passages offers the 37 reader direct commands — commands which seem similar to those that Lisa finds in “Voodoo for Beginners”. The third “contacting the dead” lesson perhaps shows us exactly how Lisa cast her spell, and shifted her perspective, while, more importantly, directing the reader to the same shift: Lie down. Wear loose clothing. Don’t play any music. Especially don’t play any of that New Age, sounds-of-the-humpback-whale music. Be still. Close your eyes. Keep your arms flat by your side, your legs uncrossed and relaxed. Begin by becoming aware of your breathing. Then your heartbeat […]. If you have not contacted the dead after several ties, examine your willingness to speak with them. Any fear, doubt or disbelief will hinder your efforts. (212) The contacting the dead lessons offer explicit procedural steps — offering the nusa through which the reader will not only attempt to connect with spiritual matters, but also consider their willingness to engage with the spiritual, even as they are engaged in literary interpretation. The novel, ultimately, concerns itself with how the reader directs their attention, how their perspective informs the way that they perceive the spiritual — both in Lisa’s experience, and their own. However, this lesson is complicated with a closer, more rigorous reading: contacting the dead is caught between the ways that people come to understand spiritual experience, and the experience of the spiritual itself. The reader is warned against New Age music, is asked to use a Vodou spell, and most importantly, is confronted with the very human fear of the dead, spirits, and alterity — even as they are asked to examine their willingness and attend to the spirits. The closer I look the more complex my looking becomes. ~~~~ I have chosen the word “spirituality” to punctuate this chapter’s specific engagement with Lisa’s experience of spirits, and to act as my container for more general questions of Indigenous 38 cosmology, tradition, and belief. But perhaps more accurately, the word has chosen me, articulating the angles of my tongue as I attempt to speak. There is a certain vagueness to the word “spirituality”, one which perhaps offers me some safety. “Religion”, on the other hand, feels out of the question. These assumed connotations are not surprising, for a US-born white settler, steeped in the Christian Protestant tradition. Within my heritage, spiritual connections are made manifest through a certain institution, and a specific place — the church (Owen 11) — which mediates a connection to the divine, often through the priest. In many Indigenous cultures, sacred spaces are one with the land (LaDuke 72) — lakes and earth holding sacred sites, through which Indigenous people tell and enact stories (75, 77). These differing relations to the spiritual gesture at the subtle difference between Western conceptions of the spiritual and the religious — and more specifically, the way that the word spiritual bends understanding, especially of non-Haisla readers. On the one hand, Lakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. argues that There are serious questions whether Indian tribes actually had any conception of religion or of a deity at all. Wherever we find Indians and whenever we inquire about their idea of God, they tell us that beneath the surface of the physical universe is a mysterious spiritual power which cannot be descried in human images that must remain always the ‘Great Mystery.’ (152) Elsewhere, Deloria, Jr. says, “‘[s]pirituality’ is the popular name for religion because Indians refuse to separate religion from everything else” (qtd. in Owen 12). As explored earlier, oxasuli is not merely good for arthritis, but also scares away ghosts, and recalls the dangers of an overconfident and uniformed approach to spiritual matters. It is the combination of the “religious” and “everything else” — or perhaps an experience of the world seen as spiritual. However, on the other 39 hand, the use of the term “spirituality” to describe Indigenous cosmological understandings arose in parallel with the New Age movement, and within that context, “spirituality” implied a “mishmash of borrowed ideas and practices” (Grimes qtd. in Owen 11), rather than the organized and cohesive spiritual traditions that Indigenous communities have carried since time immemorial (Owen 11). Attention to interconnections, the refusal to separate the material from spiritual, a respect for other-than-human agency, and an appreciation of dreams are, of course, not a “mishmash” but a cohesive cosmology, a set of what might be call religious beliefs that interlock, establish relations, and recall stories. These semantic considerations perhaps give way to the more important question: if I am to use the term spirituality, out of convenience or for its reference to the “Great Mystery”, to what do I reference with such a signifier? Deloria, Jr. seems to imply that the reference itself is impossible — perhaps even a perversion. In some ways, Monkey Beach seems to agree: the spirits at the end of the novel, to whom Lisa offers her blood, are unnamed, and represented illusively. Yet, on the other hand, Indigenous communities have many images or signifiers of spiritual figures — in the case of Monkey Beach, the little man, and the spirits of her departed family members. Indeed, Indigenous people tell stories about these figures — shape spiritual understandings through their representation and the ceremonies through which they can be known — in other words, stories organize certain religious understandings. In speaking of spirituality, we become caught between the general idea — the “Great Mystery”, or the cosmological force that might be felt around the edges of human experience — and the specific manifestation of that force through human perspective. ~~~~ 40 During her journey to Monkey Beach, Lisa stops the boat along the shore of Blind Pass. Turning away from the prying eyes of binocular-clad boaters, she steps into the woods to relieve herself. Upon coming back to the shore, she meets Greg, a white guy who paddled to shore to escape his nagging parents. He’s perhaps overly friendly; Lisa thinks: “Oh my god. The last thing I expected was to have some guy try to pick me up” (216), before hiding her Ziplock bag full of toilet paper. He says “how glad he is to see someone his own age and how he hadn’t realized it would be so empty in the wildness. He goes on to say how beautiful it is, how spiritual it is getting back to nature” (216). I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, traversing a world very similar to Lisa’s. At the risk of sounding a bit like Greg, there is something magical and spiritual about such landscapes. Mist through coniferous trees excites the mysterious; light rain on the soft grey sea conjures an eternal agential motion. I guess I am just trying to say that I understand Greg’s comment — and perhaps share, at a certain level, his desire to find some spiritual experience. But is this scene a joke at my expense?13 Lisa’s response is anything but conciliatory — all she asks is if he has any cigarettes. After he complains a bit about his family and then expresses some hope that Lisa might invite him to the party that she has invented in order to escape the conversation, she hops back in her boat, and shoves “off like he had the plague” (218). There’s an 13 I would be remiss to point out that examples of this sort of humor at the expense of settlers spans Robinson’s work, and often become fodder for scholarly analysis. In Monkey Beach, settler scholars consider the scene when Lisa and Pooch joke about giving visiting Westerners an “ancient Haisla greeting” — which involves them raising their middle finger (Robinson 219), which Taryn Plett describes at some length (40). We might also recall a scene from Robinson’s “Queen of the North” (that Helen Hoy writes about in How do I Read These?), where a Westerner asks the main character Adelaide to describe the proper way to eat frybread. While responding amicably, Adelaide thinks to herself “With your mouth, asshole” (qtd. in Hoy 3). Such jokes are not only key to highlighting a certain overly-reverent perspective with which Westerners approach Indigenous culture and knowledge (Hoy 3), but also point out a voyeurism that many Westerners take when approaching Indigenous culture — especially as Adelaide is ogled by the Westerner while attempting to respect the Haisla culture he consumes. While these scenes are most often “funny because they’re true”, they also reveal the limitations of certain Western engagements, while creating a humorous space through which to engage with the often-awkward experience of attempting to understand cultural differences. 41 irony here, one which becomes more diffuse and attenuated the longer I consider the passage. On the one hand, the irony is obvious: a comment on how a certain spiritual desire on the part of settler people recreates a certain colonial danger, one not dissimilar to the various diseases that decimated Indigenous communities after contact — hence, the reference to the plague. On the other hand, other aspects of the novel seem to give people like Greg and myself a certain point of access — Monkey Beach directs us to contact the dead, while also giving us a partial view of nature as seen by Haisla people. Perhaps more explicitly, the novel never says that Greg is wrong — it is “spiritual” “getting back to nature” or at least there is something spiritual about nature. This is where we must step into an epistemological discussion, a consideration of what the spiritual means to these characters, and how they think of nature. In this way, the joke here, in a certain sense, is not only ironic because Lisa avoids an ignorant white guy, but also because Greg doesn’t really seem to think about what he is saying, he doesn’t “examine his willingness”, despite being, ostensibly, correct that there is something spiritual found in an experience of nature. Still, I can’t help but feel a little like Greg — misty-eyed before a sublime spirituality I imagine, one that proceeds me, and one that allows me to deny the monumental task of thinking the spiritual. ~~~~ In their work on Monkey Beach, Castricano notes a certain Western “history of rationalism”, and “materialist drive to eradicate ‘superstition’ or ‘mysticism’ in the name of psychology” (Gothic Metaphysics 161). Rationalism, materialism, and psychology all have a place in understanding the way that scholars distance themselves from spiritual matters — both within Monkey Beach, and academic culture writ large (Derrida 11, Castricano, Gothic Metaphysics 161). Castricano is particularly attentive to depictions of the novel as an inheritor of Gothic tropes, an 42 argument leveled by scholars Jennifer Andrews. Indeed, Andrews makes explicit the idea that “the mind cannot be trusted” (Gothic Metaphysics 161), that Lisa’s spiritual experiences will always be in her head, or an effect of “psychological confusion” (Andrews 19). Castricano notes the Freudian undercurrents of such an understanding of the spiritual, one which perceives experiences like Lisa’s not as a “living” part of the world (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 316), but rather as a psychological projection of a certain repressed trauma, or further, as a pure literary metaphor (Castricano, Gothic Metaphysics 157). These “received ideas” (160) — like that of the “real-unreal divide” (167) and a certain Western secularism — of course perpetuate imperialist perspectives directed towards the Indigenous other.14 What Castricano ultimately points to is the “limit” against which scholars chafe (Gothic Metaphysics 167): namely, the possibility that Lisa is right, that “magical things [are] still living in the world” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 316, emphasis mine), and that Lisa does experience spiritual forces. The Freudian Gothic — or more generally, a psychological perspective on spiritual experience — allows scholars to maintain this limit, at the expense of a further spiritual understanding (Gothic Metaphysics 156). It is undoubtedly true that the novel deals with the spiritual limits against which both Lisa and the other characters chafe. Despite her frequent run-ins with Haisla spiritual figures, and her ultimate success in traveling to the spirit world, Lisa experiences an overwhelming dismissiveness towards her spiritual experience. The novel opens with Lisa recalling a dream (or is it a vision?) to her mother Gladys, only for her to respond, jokingly, that Lisa “needs Prozac” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 3). Later, Lisa remembers similar experiences with her father, who “looked at [her] 14 This is, as Castricano points out, not a rejection of the Gothic as a potential perspective from which to view Monkey Beach, and instead a consideration of the approach required here. Indeed, Castricano argues that, within Monkey Beach, “the phenomenology of ‘settler’ Gothic — including its Freudian-centered critical practice — is reconfigured and, thus, defamiliarized in relation to Haisla culture and the spirit world” (Gothic Metaphysics 162). In other words, the novel offers us a challenge to our understanding of what the Gothic itself even can contain — especially being a genre which always deals with anxieties bourn of unstable meaning (155). 43 like [she’d] taken off her shirt and danced topless in front of him” when she talked about her dreams (20). Her family’s half-joking, half-disbelieving response to Lisa’s experiences is matched by a similar reaction in the face of her spiritual knowledge — as Gladys also dismisses ghostly experiences (153), as do other Haisla community members (320). Certainly, it feels as if many characters believe, as Ma-ma-oo claims, that there is not much use for the “old ways” (154). Castricano points to Lisa’s experiences of the psychologist Ms. Jenkins as paradigmatic of this perspective — showing that the psychologist’s denial of the spiritual seems to reflect a history of secularism (Gothic Metaphysics 158). Lisa meets with Ms. Jenkins who proceeds to explain away Lisa’s belief in ghosts as “an attempt to deal with death” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 273). The session, it should be said, is awkward and uncomfortable — not only because of the psychologist’s “frazzled” appearance, or her insistent denial of Lisa’s experience of spirits, but because of “the thing” “beside her, whispering in her ear” that Lisa notices immediately, and immediately attempts to ignore (272). The session continues with Lisa overhearing snippets of what the thing says to Jenkins — “… screws her? Do you think he thinks of you? When he puts his hand on your thigh, does he imagine hers?” (273). As the tension builds, when Jenkins asks Lisa if she is “sure” that she believes in ghosts, the “thing” detaches from the psychologist, and arrives at Lisa’s side, “feeding” on her, and conjuring traumatic memories, specifically, Mick’s gruesome death (274) — before giving her the words that “Ms. Jenkins wanted to hear” (274). When the session ends, Lisa finds her face numb where the thing had touched her “like [she’d] had a shot of Novocaine” (274). When she arrives home, she thinks to herself: “I knew it was wrong to want the thing to feed on me again, I knew it was bad. But without it, the night was long and empty and endless” (275). 44 We can immediately see how this scene reveals a certain failure to accept spiritual experience on the part of the psychological institution — a denial which itself seems rooted in a certain psychological trauma. Most simply, if Jenkins dismisses Lisa’s ghosts, she will always mis-diagnose her own. But this scene does not only seem to reveal the affect of Jenkins’ denial: to extend Castricano’s analysis here, we also find a certain emotional texture, one seemingly produced by the collision of disparate epistemological perspectives on the spiritual. While settler scholars should be quick, in other words, to question Andrews’ easy depiction of spiritual experience as “psychological confusion”, specifically for how it constructs a negative perspective towards the spiritual, we should still understand how this scene depicts emotional tension through a certain spiritual confrontation. More specifically, this scene reveals that the description of spiritual experience causes tensions or fractures that occur between overly secular worldviews and those invested in the “Great Mystery”; these tensions then create asymmetrical emotional fragmentation. Lisa’s thoughts upon returning home reveal the emotional toll of holding both a powerful and near-incomprehensible spiritual experience and the other’s denial of that experience. The novel depicts, with Lisa’s experience, what Little Bear calls “jagged worldviews colliding” — the “fragmentary perspective” developed within colonized Indigenous communities informed by both Indigenous traditions and experience, and various imposed colonial ideals and assumptions (84). Indeed, Little Bear continues: “[n]o one has a pure worldview that is 100 percent Indigenous or Eurocentric, rather, everyone has an integrated mind, a fluxing and ambidextrous consciousness, a precolonized consciousness that flows into a colonized consciousness and back again” (85).15 15 In this regard, I might also recall Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s claim that that the Western history of “[t]rading the Other deeply, intimately, defines Western thinking and identity” (103). Engagement with Indigenous communities around the world has perhaps led to this ambidextrous consciousness — with the addition that such a consciousness is overwhelmingly asymmetrical, privileging a certain European “universal” which can “lend its quality to any suitable object” (Braidotti 14). Such privileging leaves Western people’s identity contingent upon perceptions of what has been understood as Indigenous. The Western asymmetry, of course, lead to the genocidal 45 Monkey Beach reveals the emotional texture of holding all of this complexity; and further, the novel reveals the way that the spiritual is often the grounds upon which the fragmentation becomes most apparent. More specifically, Lisa finds it emotionally difficult to attend to her specific experiences, and her own particular heritage when confronted with these epistemological assumptions, lodged within the hegemony arrayed against her. ~~~~ “A Glossary of Haunting” is a strange autoethnographic text. The “composite narrator” Eve Tuck and C. Ree write a glossary of terms that exist “without [their] host” — detached from any text that contains the terms which they define. In the entry “Am I telling you a story?”, the narrator writes, In telling you all of this in this way, I am resigning myself and you to the idea that parts of my telling are confounding. I care about you understanding, but I care more about concealing parts of myself from you. I don’t trust you very much. You are not always aware of how you can be dangerous to me, and this makes me dangerous to you. I am using my arm to determine the length of the gaze. (640) In this text, they speak as a sort of ghost — a “becoming-specter”, a “future-ghost” — to avoid “surveil[ance]” (643). Certainly, as Robinson references in her lecture: “it was recognized that whatever the missionaries knew about our culture, they tried to suppress. The less they knew, the safer our traditions remained” (Sasquatch 13). In this way, Indigenous authors might find some safety in ghosting themselves, making themselves ambiguous in the face of a colonized world. need to “kill the Indian in the child” — which left many Indigenous people with more Western culture than their own. 46 Maybe Appleford is right when he says that Lisa is the “magical thing” (9) — a ghostly figure, protected by her liminality, made safe by the carefully demarcated distance of the reader’s gaze. It seems that spirits need to keep themselves safe too. In an interview, Robinson recalls writing of spirits. “‘I had one poke me in the butt,’ she laughs. ‘Another was just so pissed at me – yelled and shouted. Gave me nasty dreams all night.’ ‘I would know when it was wrong to write about certain things,’ she says of their not-so-subtle hints. ‘There are some places that are not for me to go’” (qtd. in Methot). Robinson seems invested in offering, within her text, some protection — prose that does not reveal what is wrong to reveal. Here too, a tension: the act of writing them down makes them knowable, fixes them, ascribes to them a language that they do not speak. On the other hand, elders have encouraged Haisla people to “tell it like it is, because what we don’t get down will probably be lost” (The Sasquatch at Home 15). What, then, does it mean to write of spirits? The host is “missing” (Tuck and Ree 640). ~~~~ Lisa says: “I used to think that if I could talk to the spirit world, I’d get some answers. Ha bloody ha. I wish the dead would just come out and say what they mean instead of being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing” (17). As I read on, and attempted to organize this chapter, I couldn’t help thinking that Robinson was “being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing” — that her depictions of spirituality were not actively accessible — perhaps not even educational. But that seems, at least after sitting with the novel for so long, to be the magic of Monkey Beach. The structure of the novel — its non-linear narrative threads, its frequent passages of detached description, its unexplained detours — does not only get into your head but puts you into Lisa’s experience of living in a colonized world, and more specifically, living with her spiritual 47 connection in a colonized hegemony distrustful of manifestation of spiritual experience that exceed a certain Judeo-Christian norm. If we, as readers of Monkey Beach, are to examine our willingness to engage with spirits, we might need to look at the tensions, the slips, the places where meaning fails to materialize, rather than the places where it becomes all too apparent as to what is being said. In other words: if Lisa chafes against the communications of “passive-aggressive” spirits and against the disparate aspects of human culture that haunt her experience, then so too must the reader. ~~~~ It often feels as if Monkey Beach doesn’t want the reader to map Lisa’s learning about spirits onto specific traditions — even, to a certain extent, Haisla. Most obviously, Ma-ma-oo comments that those who knew “the old ways are gone” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 154) and that “to really understand the old stories … you had to speak Haisla” (211) — implying that knowledge of the meaning of these traditions are, to a certain extent, lost and what remains requires skills that neither Lisa nor the reader can attain in their “original” form. A sort of anthropological perspective is devalued here — or at least, there is no attempt to craft a fully authentic, cohesive understanding of Haisla culture. What we should see instead is the tension that arises in understanding spiritual experiences in the wake of cultural genocide, and in a world cluttered by various signifiers of spirituality, even while that same world devalues spiritual experience. The little man’s representation depicts this conflict quite explicitly. He does not merely appear to Lisa as Ma-ma-oo describes him (with red hair), but sometimes “dressed like a leprechaun” (132), sometimes in a “strange cedar tunic with little amulets dangling around his neck and waist” (132), sometimes in “plaid” (21). The primary spiritual character that Lisa interacts with dresses, and perhaps even performs, cultures other than Haisla — the leprechaun of course being an Irish 48 mythological figure, and plaid, another name for Scottish tartan, being another garb endemic to Western culture. Readers are left to speculate.16 Does this represent a certain assimilation of even spiritual figures at the hands of Western culture? Or does reference to an Irish figure in Scottish apparel reveal a certain similarity between, or even solidarity with, the Irish who, much like the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, were colonized by the British? Or, perhaps, do these two questions miss that the little man is an active agent, one who chooses his garb as he sees fit — perhaps even attempting to relate to Lisa in some way, acknowledging her cultural position? In sum, these questions reveal that our speculation upon the little man requires a simultaneous attention to the specificity of his Haisla position, and his confounding resistance to a strict traditional depiction. The text’s seemingly offhand reference to Vodou17 exists in a similarly tense position. Lisa finds some spiritual success when experimenting with the book “Voodoo for Beginners”. This reference brings forth a series of challenges. To synthesize: Lisa manages to approach the little man, by using a spell she found within a commodified and popularized representation of Vodou traditions — an often-misunderstood spiritual belief system associated with the African diaspora in Haiti, the Caribbean and Southern United States (Boaz ix, xiv). We could, perhaps too quickly, draw a connection between Vodou and Haisla culture, as both are rich spiritual traditions existing in similarly precarious positions along the margins of the Western status quo, while being adversely 16 This word recalls Derrida’s comment that “speculation always speculates on some specter” (183). In saying this, Derrida pokes at the partial arrival of meaning, and the way that analysis remains predicated on further partial understandings — predicated on meanings made ghostly by their inherently referential representation. In considering Derrida’s formulation, we might then argue that the spiritual can never be made known outside of ghostly signification, ideas with a history. Our speculation then, in this case, is a certain refusal to pin such specters down, a refusal to erroneously give into a specific representation — this would be an injustice to the complexity of the meanings that haunt Robinson’s writing. For Derrida, this would perhaps represent endless intertextuality; for myself, I would see this as the power of the mystery. 17 This spelling is more appropriate — as “voodoo” is considered a religious slur in modern academic writing (Boaz vii). 49 “imagined” — meaning appropriated — by Western culture (McGee 232-33, Boaz ix).18 However, Vodou’s marginal status, its “exotic” flair, is exactly why Lisa learns this spell: having been commodified by Western culture and distributed as magical, Vodou can only be represented through its understanding and signification by the dominant culture. The similarities between Vodou spirituality and Haisla spirituality are made, seemingly, of their comparative position to the dominant culture, not necessarily their cosmologies. The narrative does not allow for spirituality to escape the grasp of its representation — leading us, at every turn, to question our experience of spiritual representation. However, despite all of this, Lisa does manage to find some spiritual knowledge in “Voodoo for Beginners” — successfully using the spell to receive a message from the little man, which leads to a vision of Jimmy. At its most simple, the novel here reveals the ease with which a certain understanding of “spirituality” magnetizes various cultural legacies — drawing together disparate cultures, despite their more particular heritages — while also revealing a certain pragmatic power that comes of such fluid signification. Yet, the novel’s warning against the use of “New Age, sounds-of-the-humpback-whale music” (212) seems relevant here. New Age spirituality — a zeitgeist forming in Western society in the 1970s — has been criticized extensively for its appropriation of othered cultures. The Lakota people, for instance, write that the spiritual traditions of Indigenous people have been “desecrated, mocked and abused at the hands of non-Indian ‘wannabes,’ hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled ‘New Age shamans’ and their followers” (“Declaration of War” qtd. in Owen 62). Robinson’s inclusion of New Age certainly feels like a pointed warning to the reader, 18 While there is much more that could be said here, I might confine myself to noting that “voodoo” is ultimately the word used to construct, often legally, the supposed savagery — specifically, religious savagery — of Black people in the southern United States (Boaz xi). It should be clear that there is an explicit parallel between Indigenous spirituality and African-diaspora religions like Vodou — but I will not propose such an argument here, save to note the significance of the reference in Monkey Beach. 50 one that should be carefully considered (both as it applies to Indigenous spirituality and knowledge, and as it applies to Vodou traditions). But Robinson still depicts what is, ostensibly, the bread and butter of the New Age movement — spiritual meditation practices — as a path to a sort of spiritual experience. Repeatedly, readers run up against the narrative’s engagement with spiritual signifiers to both admit and deny a certain spiritual engagement, to both warn against and allow understanding. While the other affect of this distancing is, as Soper-Jones reminds us, to “proceed with caution” (Sommer qtd. in Soper-Jones 17), there seems to be further considerations at work here — those specifically related to how spirituality becomes understood through signification and a certain anthropological specificity. ~~~~ Sometimes, I have to remind myself that, as the narration cautions, “[a]ny fear, doubt or disbelief will hinder your efforts” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 212). I am afraid of writing — afraid, perhaps of conjuring too many ghosts, ghosts that I can’t draw into my writing. For the ghost is a force with plasticity, shifting with context and metaphorical signification. My fear, in one way, comes of not knowing how to speak with them, for I do not know whom I am addressing; in another way, my fear comes of feeling the other lingering affects of colonization, and being unable to contain, within my perspective, a cohesive understanding of this violence. And this is perhaps my position. As Warren Cariou says, for Native readers and writers, there is no reason that these Indigenous ghosts or spirits should be frightening. Native people already have plenty of evidence in their daily lives of how the legacies of colonialism have been passed down through generations; they do not need specters to fulfill that function. (730) 51 I am perhaps lucky to simply be afraid in the face of colonization — not having experienced such traumas. Robinson’s kind reminder that my efforts to understand will only prevent my engagement seems more than apt, in this light. Cariou continues however, But Native writers do represent spirits in their work nonetheless; it is just that these spirits are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror. They may be malevolent beings such as the wihtikow or the skeleton-spirit Pahkakos, but they may also be figures of healing, ceremony, or political action. Or they may simply be ancestors. And while many such spirits do seem to address the transgressions of the colonial past, they usual do so as part of a call for some kind of redress or change in the present. (730) Cariou recalls here that there is a specificity that has power for Indigenous people, and a specificity that makes action possible within the present. Might the specific spirits in Monkey Beach call for some redress? And might looking for moments of redress, moments through which understanding can foster, be the moments that challenge a fear that hinders and paralyzes? At the end of the novel, Jimmy says: “Tell her.” ~~~~ After Lisa attempts the Vodou spell and finds herself caught up in her own shifting perspective, she sees the little man: “It had been relaxing, I was thinking, until I heard the creaking. It was the little man. But this time his red hair was stringy red and he was hanging by his neck from a yellow rope, smiling at me as he swung back and forth” (221-22). Before she can attend to this macabre image, she hears crows cawing in the backyard. Going to the window, she finds a vision. A dead crow lies “at an odd angle”, while others circle its body. Then, 52 Jimmy ran onto the back lawn and carefully cradled it against his arm. He stood in the predawn greyness and flung it upward. I watched the transformed baby crow soar upward, shrink to a tiny dot, then disappear behind the clouds. When I looked back down, the lawn was empty and the crows shifted silently on the back porch waiting. I stood at the window, trembling […] I understood that I had just had a vision, but I was afraid to think about what it meant. (222). Much like my approach to Jenkins’ “thing”, I can easily find all-too-easy demystifications of this scene, but they will ultimately resist attempts at a complete analysis. I could speculate on Jimmy’s care for the crows, and here specifically, the seeming life and futurity that he provides to the dead crow. I could even offer this scene as a certain symbolic foreshadowing of the end of the novel, when Jimmy saves Lisa as she sinks beneath the waves: just as he tosses the crow skyward, so to does he push Lisa to the surface. I could also propose a certain symmetry between the little man’s appearance — who always prefigures death — and Jimmy’s interaction with the crow, as Jimmy will ultimately die in attempting, in his own way, to pursue justice, in attempting to put the wrong right. But this sort of analysis seems at odds, again, with the emotional challenge that Lisa faces in the narrative. As the vision ends, Lisa “was afraid to think what it meant” (222), even when she knows it was a vision, and one that requires her interpretation. Indeed, she trembles — she is afraid to engage with what the spirits are telling her. While we are given some spiritual communication, readers are not ultimately privy to any speculation on Lisa’s part. Instead, we are given over to fear, uncertainty, and tension. 53 As such, we might find it slightly odd when Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa: “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts” (265). For Lisa they are not just ghosts — with the implication being that they are unreal in someway; the spirits she experiences are affective, and often looming and indescribable, while also being implicated in her conscious desire to understand her heritage and the hegemonic Western perspectives which distrusts such heritage. But, on the other hand, acknowledging that the ghosts are, indeed, just ghosts, may allow Lisa to overcome her fear, and approach spiritual communications without a paralyzing fear, but rather an acknowledgement of the often-unnerving, tensions that they reveal in Lisa’s thought and experience. Even as the spirits seem to conjure up a sort of pure unknowability, Ma-ma-oo says, at the end of the novel, “[w]hen its time for you to go, you go […] Nothing you can do or say will change it” (371), which seems to offer some resolution. Lisa can continue forward with what she inherits, attending to that inheritance, while understanding the tensions that will always be implicit within that inheritance. ~~~~ When scholars do discuss the spirits in Monkey Beach, they often reference various anthropological studies of Haisla and Pacific Northwest Indigenous culture. At first blush, this sort of approach seems to attend to the particulars of Haisla culture, offering an understanding of both Lisa’s experience, but also how the novel represents the cultural history that Haisla people preserve. However, I want to question how exactly such studies are utilized within the analysis of the novel — for anthropological research does not necessarily help us attend to the epistemological features of Haisla culture. Indeed, anthropology can just as easily shift into an approach that generalizes the particulars. 54 Appleford’s essay on the b’gwus offers an apt place to start in engaging with certain anthropological approaches to the novel. After exploring the narrative history of b’gwus, and breaking down their etymology in Haisla culture, Appleford argues that “Robinson's allusive evocation of Aboriginal history within the rumoured history of the b'gwus indicates how the projection of human fears and desires on near-humans replicates the neo-colonial projection of similar fears and desires on Aboriginal peoples” (9). This argument belies a very easy shift from the specificity of Haisla fears and their cultural and epistemological understanding of spirits, to a general “projection of human fears” — a shift in other words, that assimilates the meaning of b’gwus into a trick of human psychology. Here, the b’gwus is a particular instance of this general human trait — a universalized example, rather than a figure born of a spiritual tradition. In this way, the anthropological approach can, in the first case, recreate a similar denial of real spiritual experience, a denial that Castricano finds in a certain Freudian psychological approach to gothic literary tropes and in analyses of Monkey Beach, and in the second case, produces quiet shifts from particular engagements and depictions of the spiritual, to homogenized depictions of general human experience. In other words, the anthropological analysis demystifies spiritual matters through the exploration of granular details, and the psychological desire to understand why spiritual beliefs existed. Such analysis ties down the spiritual. As such, certain anthropological perspectives allow scholars to avoid engaging with the tension that forms between spirits and human apprehension of their affects. However, I would never deny that an attention to anthropological research allows for the particular aspects of culture to come to light. Soper-Jones main engagement with anthropological research comes when speaking of the “Cannibal Dance”, which is seen as the “keystone to the entire interaction between mankind and the supernatural, between the bestial and humane facets 55 of human nature” (Walens qtd. in Soper-Jones 19).19 She draws a connection between the dance — which involved the quelling of the supernatural cannibal with the “menstrual blood of the highest-ranking women in the clan” (20) — and the end of the novel, where Karaoke leaves Josh her bloody maxi-pad (20). There is a compelling engagement here, one which attends explicitly to the cosmological legacy within which both Lisa and Robinson find themselves; further, the specificity of the comparison allows for Soper-Jones to navigate between the specificity of the novel with the more general desire to mediate and understand human experience and violence. However, her analysis here seems incomplete — and perhaps belies the way in which anthropological research fails to attend to the experience of the cosmology that it attempts to describe in objective terms. Soper-Jones skips over how the Cannibal Dance mediates the “interaction between mankind and the supernatural”, focusing instead on the bestial. Indeed, Soper-Jones draws the much more interesting, if complex, connection — between the spiritual mediation of the Cannibal Dance and the end of the novel, when Lisa offers her blood to the spirits to find Jimmy — only to move on quickly (23). This “stepping over” — over both the text and the secondary literature — reminds us, perhaps, that “seeing ghosts is a trick of concentration” (E. 19 In lieu of opening onto the complex position of the “Cannibal Dance”, or Hamat’sa, within discourse on Indigenous history, I might merely recall a profoundly precise moment from the novel: Lisa recalls, when responding to her teacher’s exaggerated claims about Indigenous cannibalism, that “Ma-ma-oo told [her] it was just pretend, the eating people, like drinking Christ’s blood at Communion” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 69). This line opens onto the important sociological distinction between “gustatory cannibalism”, and “ritual” or “symbolic” cannibalism (McDowell xix) — while also pointing out the obvious irony that Christian communion might be described aptly as a certain symbolic cannibalism, one not entirely dissimilar to the Hamat’sa. While there much can be said about the exact line between gustatory and symbolic cannibalism, and much that could be said about their existence throughout human history (McDowell xx), I think that Lisa’s response here is an apt one for our purposes — drawing into focus the racist double standard and recalling how the “cannibal epithet” has been used to animalize most cultures constructed as other by the Western world (McDowell xix). More generally, I wish I could take the time to explore the Hamat’sa in detail, especially as it relates to an understanding of cultural difference. The recent book Writing the Hamat’sa, by Aaron Glass, sheds much light on this ritual’s complex history, working through both the errors of anthropological research and the current position of such traditions in various Coast Salish cultures — detailing the ways that Kwakwaka’wakw people understand their heritage “in the wake of its history of hyper-representation” within the eyes of non-Indigenous people (9). It is this sort of engagement, with both anthropological history, and attentions to current Indigenous theory and continuing spiritual experiences and significations, that might be most fruitful in understanding perspective and cultural heritage. 56 Robinson, Monkey Beach 212), a trick that anthropology does not necessarily aid us in pulling. I cannot only focus on the cultural details — as if these details arrive objectively — but also on how those details fall within, or more importantly with out a certain Western interpretative capacity, and how, ultimately, settler scholars consider the particular details in relation to the text. It would be easy, based on these two examples, to show that anthropology allows for a certain denial of the spiritual. However, anthropological and cultural analysis does uniquely attend to the particular, offering us a way to access particular cultural motions, and thus draw more general connections. In this way, anthropology can help us understand the motion between the particular and the general, and offer us a certain understanding of the care that must be taken in understanding the particular — or as Cameron synthesizes from several post-colonial theorists “[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak] emphasizes the importance of understanding the ‘singular’ not so much as an instance of the general, but rather as that which marks, in Baucom’s words, a ‘cryptic, secretive space…, discloses the presence of that withheld space, but “guards” its secret’” (389). Monkey Beach absolutely carves out private and hidden spaces: most obviously, Lisa sometimes feels “uncomfortable” sharing stories about her time with Ma-ma-oo, due to their “private” nature (80). If there is something hidden in Lisa’s experience, and something hidden in Monkey Beach itself, a singular that settler scholars think that we can safely approach, then it might be approached, in its hidden state, to consider how such a hiding informs our understanding of the text — and how the hidden specific, courses through the general. This is perhaps the ghostly power of the specific. As Castricano notes in Cryptomimesis “talking with [emphasis added] ghosts does not only mean being in conversation with them” but also “means to use them instrumentally and, in turn, whether one knows it or not, to be used by them” (134). In approaching an understanding of the hidden and specific, this with-ness demands a careful sort of reciprocal theory-crafting, a dance between the 57 reader and the novel, which resists the urge to demystify, but looks instead to how the text is both “divulging and hiding” what it contains (Castricano, Cryptomimesis 29). Hence, this thesis’ engagement with nusa and the theoretical nature of story — an engagement with the possible educative qualities of the text, and an engagement that calls attention to the specific limits against which such education might graze. Indeed, my approach to nusa in this thesis has reflected the tension between its specific Haisla context, and its compatibility with the more general analysis of the interrelation of story and theory. Even as we find our approach marred by the difficulty of accessing the specific, those specifics are still with us, and can inform analysis from afar. In this way, anthropological studies might aid in opening onto this educative quality, but the text will always guide the perspective through which they find inclusion.20 ~~~~ I’ve had some doubts about the directions of this thesis. I wondered if the “contacting the dead” lessons would help me write. I tried it, and nothing happened. I tried it again, but it was too late, and I fell asleep. The third time, nothing happened again. I think I had a strange dream during my second attempt, but I don’t recall it. But, even if I managed to cast this misremembered spell, the language of the dead is backwards (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 140). This essay is an act of translating my lack of language, my lack of experience, my lack of cultural proximity. The “host” is lost (Tuck and Ree 640). I will try again. ~~~~ Lisa has a dream of Jimmy on Monkey Beach and embarks on a lengthy journey to see if her dream held any meaning (137). At the end of the novel, she arrives at Monkey Beach, and 20 I think an example of this sort of inclusion can be found in Katherine Meloche’s PhD dissertation Mediating Law, where she carefully explores the specific aspects of Haisla protocols, social relations, and legal structures to explore the way that the novel ultimately reflects Haisla experience (35-77). 58 makes a sacrifice to the spirits in order to find Jimmy. When she enters the land of the dead, she sees her grandfather Ba-ba-oo and Mick as they wander through the woods looking for Christmas trees (367-68), then Jimmy’s actions — the revenge he sought on behalf of Adelaide — on the Queen of the North (369), and finally, Ma-ma-oo recalling the dangers of contacting the dead — “It’s like oxasuli. Unless you know how to use it, it will kill you” (371). Lisa seemingly wakes from these visions, to find herself struggling underwater. “Jimmy stands beside [her] and holds his hand out for [her]. The moment [she] touches it, warmth spreads down [her] arms” (372). He then gives her a shove, and she rises through the water. At the surface she finds Ma-ma-oo, Mick and Jimmy standing on the shore, with many others in the background singing in Haisla — a song that Lisa can now understand (373). The others say: “Take care of her yourself, wherever you are going” (374). Lisa closes her eyes, and she can see “Jimmy shaking his head” as he says, “Tell her” (375). The novel ends with Lisa lying on Monkey Beach, listening to the howl of the b’gwus. There is a tendency, on the part of scholars, to give into the “ambiguity” of the novel’s ending (Appleford 7) — often arguing, more specifically, that the end represents an “open-ended” conclusion to the tension that Lisa feels between Indigenous and Western culture (Lacombe 266). Indeed, Appleford argues that Lisa’s attention to the spirit world is a “failure” (8) — as she does not ultimately find out what really happened to Jimmy — offering a rather pessimistic reading of the novel’s conclusion. Giving into this ambiguity seems like a betrayal of the novel’s clear attempt to promote some sort of spiritual learning, and certainly contributes to, what I see, as an overly pessimistic view of the novel’s understanding of Lisa’s identity and potentiality. What I find, at the end of Monkey Beach, is an engagement with the complexity of Indigenous survivance. According to Chippewa scholar and author Gerald Vizenor, “survivance” is “moving beyond [Indigenous people’s] basic survival in the face of overwhelming cultural 59 genocide to create spaces of synthesis and renewal” (qtd. in Tuck, “Suspending Damage” 422). Eve Tuck expands upon Vizenor’s work, using “survivance” to “humbly submit that the time has come for our communities to refuse to be complicit in our further categorization as only damaged, as only broken” (“Suspending Damage” 422). Tuck’s use of the word only is important here, for we must acknowledge the violence done to Indigenous communities, but also attend to the way that those communities continue to both survive and “create spaces for synthesis and renewal.” The ending of Monkey Beach seems to be working through such spaces, and specifically, the space that spiritual experience opens for Indigenous people. On the one hand, the end certainly remains ambiguous as to the exact meaning of Lisa’s inclination towards spirits, but also, on the other hand, it partially divulges the ways that Lisa can take up cultural revitalization through her attention to the spirit world. Perhaps most obviously, the end culminates with the fulfillment of Lisa’s desire for a spiritual response to the trauma in her life. As Eve Tuck implies, survivance recalls the importance of “desire”, as much if not more than surviving beyond “damage” (“Suspending Damage” 416). Despite the ambiguity, despite the secrets, I find desire. I find desire when Mick and Ma-ma-oo both tell Lisa what they would have her do with her life: Ma-ma-oo calling on her to have kids, and Mick saying that she should “give ‘em hell” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 373) — a desire that, while overwhelming, and “multivocal” (Roupakia 290), reflects her specific connection with each member of her family. I find desire when Jimmy pushes Lisa to the surface — saving her from beneath the waves of the spiritual. I find desire when Lisa can understand the Haisla words that her extended family sings: “Aux’gwalas”, “Take care of yourself, wherever you’re going” (374). Through all of this, I find survivance and renewal. But I find desire caught most painfully in Jimmy’s final words to Lisa: “Tell her” (374). On the one hand, Jimmy asks Lisa, with a simple and devastating command, to explain to Adelaide 60 what happened — to tell her about the cycle of violence that brought about his revenge quest. There is damage here, systemic colonial violence manifesting in violence towards Indigenous people perpetrated by Indigenous people. But, on the other hand, Jimmy asks Lisa to tell a story and in that story is perhaps “everything [he] valued and loved and wanted [Adelaide] to remember and carry with [her]” (E. Robinson, Sasquatch 12). Telling a story in the face of violence, one that recalls both pain and desire seems to attend explicitly to a metafictional reading of Monkey Beach — in which Robinson takes up Jimmy’s call to attempt to represent all this desire and pain. And in the end, Jimmy, now spirit, directs the reader towards a story to tell. 61 Conclusion I began this thesis with the following claim: Monkey Beach demands a response. I explored the many ways that the text insists on being approached: from specific direct calls within the narrative, to the various engagements with Haisla spirituality, to the general injustice of colonization and the development of a certain reconciliatory perspective towards Indigenous survivance. I showed that such a response will always face tensions: the tension between the desire to understand, and the impediments to understanding; the tension between what can be known and what must remain hidden; the tensions in language and history; the tension found between the particular and the general. In a certain way, this thesis is a sort of performance of these tensions: on the one hand, the first chapter deals explicitly with the possibility of an earnest and positive educative affect within Indigenous literature for the settler scholar, the possibility of learning from the theory within Indigenous story; the second chapter, on the other hand, explores the challenges that Indigenous literature poses to a non-Indigenous reader, recalling the limits along which settler experience and consciousness must chafe while learning from the most intimate aspects of Lisa’s Haisla experience, and Indigenous culture generally. While there is power in being afflicted by complexity, I do not think this performance would be complete without a certain return to the possibility found in the first chapter, a return to the theoretical power of storytelling. In other words, and in attempting to find some conclusion, I want to reflect on my interest in the interrelation of theory and story and give some general remarks on the perspectives explored within this thesis. Early in Monkey Beach, the reader is told the following: “At Kemano, there is a graveyard. Leave our house with its large, black-eyed windows staring out at the channel. Follow the path down the beach…” (E. Robinson, Monkey Beach 82). The direct call for us to visit the graveyard 62 recalls, of course, the “find a map” passage, and perhaps tells of a certain sort of nusa at work, or at least a certain narrative teaching. Once we have followed the path laid out by the novel, we are told that: All graveyards should have moss-covered trees creaking in the wind and the sound of the waves grating the round stones on the beach. The trees are so high and large here that under this canopy, even the brightest day is pale. Wander slowly, careful where you step. No neat rows of crosses, no meticulous lawn, no carefully tended flowers will guide you. Too sterile, antiseptic. Headstones carved into eagles, blackfish, ravens, beavers appear seemingly at random. In the time of the great dying whole families were buried in one plot. Pick wild blueberries when you’re hungry, let the tart taste sink into your tongue, followed by that sharp sweetness that store-bought berries lack. Realize that the plumpest berries are over the graves. (82) In this passage, the novel again recalls a certain reciprocity, but one marked, importantly, by the violence of “the great dying” — the genocide of Indigenous people and culture. The last line, which appears perhaps as a morbid conclusion to our journey into the graveyard, calls us to enact reciprocity in a profoundly visceral way: consume, and ultimately enjoy, the best berries, the berries fertilized by the dead. Following from a certain literal reading of this passage, one attendant to the interrelation of story and theory, and the power of direction in the novel, we are being asked to take up regeneration, the creation of life from death.21 There is a reciprocity here, but one that perhaps pushes us further, in relational to the death of Indigenous people. These directions do not allow us the illusion that our engagement is abstract and metaphorical — for an engagement with 21 I want to thank Allison Hargreaves for pointing me to this reading of this passage. 63 spirituality, as outlined in Monkey Beach, will always be visceral, real, and affective.22 I think that settler scholars, like myself, find here that any engagement interested in the theoretical possibilities that arises from Indigenous literature, always exists along side an honest engagement with the horror that informs much Indigenous literature. In other words, for a certain regeneration to occur, there must be direct engagement with the violence. The graveyard scene — and the accompanying edict to consume berries grown of the dead — seems to recall one of the main struggles that settler scholars face in approaching Indigenous literature: approaching with care and empathy, while also endeavoring to learn and risking novel interpretations of such literatures. In Indigenous theory and Indigenous literary studies, there is a certain edict for the settler scholar to “proceed with caution” (Sommer qtd. in Soper-Jones 17). Scholars write of the necessity of reading with “methodological humility” (Narayan qtd. in Hoy 18), of paying attention to Indigenous “cultural grounding” (Kovach 101) or writing with “responsibility to Indigenous communities” (McKegney 85). Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith outlines Māori-specific practices of conduct for researchers, including “Aroha ki te tangata (a respect for people)”, “Titiro, whakarongo … korero (look, listen … speak)”, and “kia mahaki (don’t flaunt your knowledge)” (124). Monkey Beach itself recalls this sort of caution at several different points — perhaps most obviously when Ma-ma-oo says that “to really understand the old stories, […] you had to speak Haisla” (211). Care must be taken around everything from cultural position to linguistic phenomenology (Castricano, Gothic Metaphysics 164). There are many reasons to be cautious, to interpret carefully — indeed, the second chapter of this thesis took this sort of care seriously. 22 To be sure, the call to consume the berries is not one that the Western reader can take up literally — unlike finding a map, where the direction is much more immediately accessible — and thus there is a certain need to understand these directions metaphorically. In this way, my reading here perhaps recalls the reality of spirits and their simultaneous diffusion in experience. 64 However, an overly cautious approach does not, itself create strong work indebted to Indigenous storytellers and knowledge keepers or necessarily work towards pedagogical ends. In his work on this sort of caution, settler scholar Sam McKegney discusses the way that non-Indigenous readers, interested in Indigenous literature and theory, often approach with a certain “provisional” or “qualified” perspective. He describes the work of settler scholars who spends time foregrounding their “assumptions” (Hoy qtd. in McKegney 83), acknowledging their ignorance, and “subject position” (Eiganbrod qtd. in McKegney 83). McKegney then comments that, while such qualifications are often warranted, the affect is deleterious to learning: “By qualifying their statements with admissions of lack of cultural knowledge, critics can consider themselves freed from attempting to gain that knowledge, which inevitably will lead to weaker criticism” (84). Care can easily turn into a certain self-depreciation — creating a deadlock that hampers learning. Further, this sort of self-deprecating care can easily manifest as a sort of over-zealous criticism, one which fixates on a certain lack in scholarship rather than one that attempts to approach the novel. As Taryn Plett says more simply, “it is much easier to criticize the work of others than to propose an alternative reading” (75). There is a certain fixation, in these readings, on the damage (real, perceived, and possible) created by Western scholarship — a fixation that I engaged with at several points. In concluding, I want to show that there is a certain sort of “damage-centered” criticism here. In taking an overly cautious approach, one weary of any Western interest in Indigenous culture, one suspicious of any attempt to make sense of Indigenous knowledge by settler scholars, “damage-centered” criticism abdicates a certain response to the novel itself. Attention to damage, and perhaps even attention to the way that the settler scholar’s approach might be damaged and damaging, can prevent an earnest engagement with what the text might be demanding of its reader 65 — and certainly can obscure the aesthetic beauty and political survivance that exists in spite of imperial violences. In other words, overly careful readings of the novel — ones that either detail the way previous scholars have gotten it wrong, or readings that fixate on the easy criticism of Western, settler culture — create a certain distance from the narrative and the theory contained within, while protecting the scholar from a certain risk associated with proffering a new reading. My argument here would never entertain the idea that readers of Indigenous fiction could ever throw caution to the wind — especially as a settler scholar interested in exactly the tensions that arise when reading as an outsider. Rather, I think that this thesis has shown what an engagement with this tension might entail, and what it might mean to consider how caution parallels experimentation, risk, and surprise. In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”, queer theorist and literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a certain framework through which to understand the dynamics of care and risk — by opposing the titular paranoid and reparative perspectives. Sedgwick argues that the paranoid reading follows from the legacy of certain critical theories, notably, work following from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which have privileged a set of overly suspicious interpretive habits — research concerned with “the process of false consciousness, and the method of deciphering” (125), research that might be described as “subversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the present, the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure” (143). Immediately, I might note that critical attempts to contextualize the fraught position of Indigenous knowledge — to show, for example, the limits of Western understanding, to “historicize” (125) perceptions of Indigenous culture — certainly fall into this sort of suspicious approach towards knowledge construction. But Sedgwick’s interest ultimately lies in how the dominance of such critical methods foreclose other critical possibilities (125) (she 66 is rightly not interested in forwarding a paranoid critique of paranoid readings). As such, she proposes the reparative reading as another possible critical approach. If the paranoid reading is “demystifying”, bent on understanding how certain historical schemas perpetuate harm and reflect deleterious ideological positions (146), then “the desire of the reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive”; “its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture” (149). The need for new modes of thought, for ideas that develop and “nurture” present communities, best represents the reparative analysis. This is of course entirely consistent with the work of Tuck’s call for a focus on desire, certainly matches Vizenor’s depiction of survivance, and recalls the power of Campbell’s discussion of spiritual guidance in Monkey Beach (162). But what Sedgwick offers us here is a specific description of the motion from a critical, paranoid reading towards the desiring, reparative reading: “I am also, in the present project, interested in doing justice to the powerful reparative practices that, I am convinced, infuse self-avowedly paranoid critical projects, as well as the paranoid exigencies that are often necessary for nonparanoid knowing and utterance” (129). Put another way, readers cannot leave behind paranoia, just as readers cannot avoid damage; such paranoia must “infuse” the reparative, help us develop a response to damage and a response to legacies of violence. It is perhaps obvious — in order to repair, one must understand damage, or that life comes of death — but this depiction offers a clearer purpose of the critical analysis of damage, in our case, critical analysis of colonial violence, intergenerational trauma. It is from here that we step into an understanding of what “knowledge does” rather reiterating the way that knowledge “simply is” (124) — an active and agential understanding of knowledge that aligns with the theories of Indigenous scholars explored above. 67 My purpose in referencing Sedgewick to conclude here is not simply to allow her work to crystalize the claims of the Indigenous scholars referenced above — as her work certainly seems copacetic with the work of Watts, Simpson, Tuck and, to a certain extent, Robinson’s understanding of nusa. Instead, referencing Sedgwick recalls a certain challenge that we, as critical scholars of Indigenous literature and theory, are always navigating: the challenge of finding ways to make our work, as settler scholars, socially affective and politically powerful — in other words, reparative. Sedgwick calls for such reparative readings; Tuck calls for “a moratorium on damage-centered research” (“Suspending Damage” 422). But the method of reading, the methodology that replaces paranoia, is always somewhat elusive. While I am weary of making too strong a claim — especially as this thesis draws to a close — I do wonder if a closer attention to the explicit ways that Indigenous narrative is theoretically and politically active creates the epistemological frame through which this type of methodology (if it can be called that) can grow — a methodology that will allow for the attentive scholar to access the repair and desire that their care so often endeavors to find. Seeing Indigenous story and knowledge as active — or, as Watts puts it, knowledge as embedded in place, undistinguished from the place from which thought arises (21), or, as I find in nusa, knowledge as indistinguishable from story in all their emotional, historical, and cultural complexity — might be exactly the perspective required of readings that search for repair, demand repair. As Justice says, “stories can be good medicine”, “[t]hey can drive out the poison, heal the spirit as well as the body” (5). In this way, the Indigenous perspective on the reparative affect of story is not that readers require a new method, but rather that stories themselves hold the theoretical perspective that so many scholars desire. If this thesis is a performance of a certain tension — between the desire to learn, and the challenges posed to that learning — then it is a performance 68 that ends with a gesture towards the important motion between damage and survivance, and how that motion might be mediated by story. I began this thesis with the following claim: Monkey Beach demands a response. The novel directs us to go to the graveyard and taste the sweetest berries. It directs us to contact the dead, to respond to the spiritual complexity that underpins its construction. It directs us to engage with colonial horror and familial love. At every turn, readers are confronted with complexities, even as we are asked to respond. In Sedgwick’s words perhaps: as we read Monkey Beach, we must take on a certain willingness to be surprised — accepting the “terrible surprises” along with “the good ones” (146). And at the end, we awake, like Lisa, on the shore, unsure of what exactly how we have been asked to think, but simultaneously sure that we have heard both a story that teaches, that shifts our perspective along the lines of Haisla culture, and also a story that calls for the narration of further theories, further histories, and further cultural considerations — one that, in other words, calls for additions and accretions. I would not be so bold as to say I have forwarded a reparative reading of Monkey Beach, but I am sure that Monkey Beach — and many Indigenous texts like it — demands this desiring approach, a reading mediated by the stories and theories that they endeavor to tell. 69 Work Cited Andrews, Jennifer. “Native Canadian Gothic Refigured: Reading Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 73, Spring 2001, pp. 1–24. Appleford, Rob. “‘Close, Very Close, a b’gwus Howls’: The Contingency of Execution in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Canadian Literature, no. 184, 2005, pp. 85–101. Baker, Janelle Marie. “Do Berries Listen? Berries as Indicators, Ancestors, and Agents in Canada’s Oil Sands Region.” Ethnos, vol. 86, no. 2, 2021, pp. 273–94. Boaz, Danielle N. Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur. Oxford University Press, 2023. academic.oup.com, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197689400.001.0001. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013. 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Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Vintage Canada Edition, Vintage Canada: A Division of Random House of Canada Limited, 2001. ---. The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling. University Of Alberta Press, 2011. Roupakia, Lydia Efthymia. “On Judging with Care and the Responsibility of an Heir: Reading Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 2, Apr. 2012, pp. 279–96. utpjournals.press (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.3138/UTQ.81.2.279. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Second Edition, Zed Books, 2012. Soper-Jones, Ella. “The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 15–33. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 29, no. 1, 2016, pp. 4–22. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124. 74 Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 2009, pp. 409–27. Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. “Exemplar Chapter 33: A Glossary of Haunting.” Handbook of Autoethnography, Left Coast Press, Inc., 2013, pp. 639–58. www.academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/3570271/A_glossary_of_haunting. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–40. Ullrich, Jessica Saniġaq, et al. “Storying and Re-Storying: Co-Creating Indigenous Well-Being through Relational Knowledge Exchange.” American Review of Canadian Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, July 2022, pp. 247–59. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2022.2095498. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20–34.
Thesis/Dissertation
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Castricano, Carla Jodey, 1947-
Questions of perspective in Eden Robinson’s Monkey beach : learning with story and spirituality in Indigenous fiction
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