Open Collections

DeWitt, Zachary

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.

Text

2024-05-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88282

English

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/