Nature Power. Harry Robinson
the film industry, for its marginalization of Native voices. She called it “cultural theft, the theft of voice.” Having just completed Write It on Your Heart, I was naturally interested in her ideas.
Two years later, discussions about appropriation occupy front and centre stage, not just among First Nations peoples but in the whole literary community. Just recently, artists from across Canada attacked Joyce Zemans, director of the Canada Council, for comments she made about the council’s approach to the issues of “appropriate” voice and subject matter. Within the academic community, from anthropology to historical geography, “appropriation” and “representation of voice” are key components of a growing “postmodernist critical theory.” Stimulated by James Clifford and George Marcus in Writing Culture and George Marcus and Michael Fischer in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, many academics are questioning the very legitimacy of the traditional “scientific” approach to the study of the cultural “other,” that is, the very process of objective research. The British-based literary theorist David Murray, in his recent book Forked Tongues, argues that most North American texts are “representations” permeated with ideology, much of which can be related to the power relations embedded in the dominant society.
Today the Native community continues to drive this critical awareness. Where anthropologists talk about false representation, Native commentators decry the appropriation of their voices. At a forum entitled “Telling Our Own Story,” held in Vancouver in January 1990, members of the Committee to Re-establish the Trickster criticized the “silencing the real Native voices that do exist right now and have existed for thousands of years.” They asserted that Native peoples have a right to be heard.
Nature Power attempts to be respectful of these concerns. Harry Robinson wanted his stories to be heard, because he knew they contained important knowledge. As the artifice of the White world enveloped everything around him, Harry wanted everyone—Native and non-Native—to understand that there were ways other than those of the White man. He was haunted by the possibility that his knowledge would die with him: “I’m going to disappear, and there’ll be no more telling stories.”
My role has been to help Harry reach a broader audience with his stories. But I am also present as listener and collaborator. I cannot speak for Harry or for the Okanagan people, but I can speak from what I have learned. I was close to Harry; I travelled with him and cared for him. My world and my way of thinking were changed by this experience. Harry knew this. When he was gravely ill in the spring of 1983, he spoke to Michael and me in perhaps the most serious tone I had ever heard him use. He told us,
So, take a listen to these, a few times and think about it, to these stories, and what I tell you now. Compare them. See if you can see something more about it. Kind of plain, but it’s pretty hard to tell you for you to know right now. Takes time. And then you will see. And him [Michael]. That’s all. No more stories. Do you understand?
These words have remained with me.
One thing I learned from Harry was that he never fictionalized stories. Indeed, the very concept of fiction was foreign to him. This was driven home to me about a year ago while I was spinning through a reel of Department of Indian Affairs document reproduced on microfilm. As I passed by file after file, I suddenly recognized something—the 1889 letters from the relatives of “Ashnola George” (written in the hand of an Oblate priest, Father Lejeune) directed to the warden of the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster. The letters revealed a desperate search by an Okanagan woman for the body of her nephew, whom she was told had died at the prison.
I had heard Harry tell that story and had reproduced it in Write It on Your Heart as “Captive in an English Circus.” The archival account backed up Harry’s version on every point, even though Harry had been told the story twenty years after it had taken place—and had recounted it to me a full century later! Moreover, unlike the formal records, Harry’s account reveals what actually happened to George Jim, who had been abducted from the prison and taken to England where he spent his life as a circus showpiece.
The stories in Nature Power are also true. Yet many of them deal with things that on one level seem fantastic—people dying and then returning to life, people materializing from natural objects, disembodied voices predicting the future, and so on. Are we to take such stories seriously? Having spent time with Harry Robinson, having experienced his precision and clarity and knowledge, I certainly do. Indeed, the truth and accuracy of Harry’s words in Nature Power have made me think anew about what is “real,” what we “know,’ what is “true.” In the West we have built a civilization around the “true” story of a man who died and was resurrected after three days. The people in Harry’s stories experienced nature deeply and directly in a way that I cannot know, but that Harry wanted me, and others to appreciate. To Harry, great powers in life were to be gained from encounters with natural beings, from relationships with nature and with the land. Perhaps not all of us can “know” the truth of this world, but hearing from one who does should change our consciousness.
Today the future of the planet is at stake. Everywhere traditional cultures are dying, and nature is dying with them. As Chief John Tetlenitsa of Spence’s Bridge, a community not far from Hedley, explained as early as 1912, “The snams [the Nlaka’pamux equivalent of the Okanagan shoo-MISH] are forgetting us nowadays because of the coming of the white man. They are leaving the country.” Harry Robinson’s stories convey a very different cultural understanding of, and relationship to, nature. They explain the long-standing antagonism between Native peoples and White people, and its source in that simple White lie told at the beginning of time. From this lie, two forms of power emerged—one, the “power of nature,” and the other, the “power of paper and writing.” As the presence of old people like Harry recedes into historical distance, more and more people—academic and non-academic, Native and non-Native—question whether the world that Harry depicts was ever “real,” whether it ever existed. Drawing on both traditions of power, Nature Power provides an answer.
At the launch in Keremeos, after years of waiting patiently (one of Harry’s home-care assistants believed that in the final months of his life the wait for the book had kept him alive), Harry finally witnessed the ceremonial blessing of his book by the Okanagan spiritual leader Napoleon Kruger. Harry will not be able to launch Nature Power himself, but I hope that readers will follow his instructions.
Take a listen to these
a few times
and think about it.…
See if you can see something more.…
Takes time, and then you will see.
REFERENCES
Barbeau, Marius. “How the Twin Sisters’ Song Saved Tetlenitsa,” The Star Weekly Magazine, 10 January 1959.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Cline, Walter. “Religion and Worldview,” The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington. Edited by Leslie Spier. General Series in Anthropology, No. 6. Menasha: George Banta Publishing Co., 1938.
“Frightening Attack on the Imagination,” The Globe and Mail, 28 March 1992. Letters to the editor.
Godfrey, Stephen. “Canada Council Asks Whose Voice Is It Anyway?” The Globe and Mail, 21 March 1992.
Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore. “Stop Stealing Native Stories,” The Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990.
Marcus, George E., and Michael J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Mourning Dove. Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Edited by J. Miller. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
“Telling Our Own Story: Appropriation and Indigenous