Reviving Native Culture and Tradition with the Help of Elders – A Study of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Canada, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2012-11-23 04:01Z by Steven

Reviving Native Culture and Tradition with the Help of Elders – A Study of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

The Criterion: An International Journal in English
Volume III, Issue III (September 2012)
8 pages
ISSN 0976-8165

A. Kamaleswari, Assistant Professor of English
Saiva Bhanu Kshatriya (S. B. K.) College, Aruppukottai, India

Elders should be role models for everyone. Elders should be teachers of the grandchildren and all young people because of their wisdom. Elders should be advisors, law-givers, dispensers of justice. Elders should be knowledgeable in all aspects of Innu Culture. Elders should be teachers for everyone of the past history of Innu people. Elders should be teachers of values to be passed from generation to generation… We place great importance in our elders. Their directions for us will guide our lives. (Statement by the Innu delegation from Sheshatshiu Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, April 27, 1989).

The role of Elders has become increasingly meaningful in First Nation Communities, especially urban communities. Elders are important for their symbolic connection to the past and for their knowledge of traditional ways, teachings, stories and ceremonies. A number of community organizations in Toronto, such as the Native Canadian Centre, Anishnawbe Health of Toronto, Aboriginal Legal Services to Toronto, First Nations House of the University of Toronto and many more have introduced either a resident “Elder”, “a visiting Elder programme, or an Elders’ Advisory committee to provide guidance and information to the organization and its community. Such a strategy provides the community with contact with tradition, traditional beliefs, ceremonies and experiences and a philosophy unique to First Nation Cultures. If the knowledge of tradition is lost, the Native identity will be lost. They are symbols of Aboriginal culture not only in their words and actions but in their very being. This paper is an attempt in analyzing the revival of Native culture and tradition in Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed.

Intimate familiarity with Native culture is a key to the survival of the Métis. It can help them to take pride in being Métis and to retain their Métis identity. Without it, they are most likely to become nothing and fail in a pluralistic society. Maria Campbell, born in 1940 in Northern Saskatchewan, produced her book. ‘Half-breed’, in 1973. This is a story of her own life up to the time she became a writer. Campbell never dreamed of becoming a writer. It was growing frustration and anger with her powerlessness that spurred her to write about herself. Since then, she has been active in publishing short illustrated histories for children, which include ‘The People of Buffalow’ (1976), Little Badger and the Fire Spirit (1977), Riel’s People (1978) and Achimoona (1985). These books are designed to provide young Native people with Native stories, which help to instill in them a pride in their heritage and a positive self-image…

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Deconstructing Race: Gobinism and Miscegenation in Pearl S. Buck

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Philosophy on 2012-11-23 03:46Z by Steven

Deconstructing Race: Gobinism and Miscegenation in Pearl S. Buck

The Criterion: An International Journal in English
Volume III, Issue II (June 2012)
8 pages
ISSN 0976-8165

Aysha Munira

The 17th and 18th centuries saw the emergence of the idea of race, along with the rise of colonialism and transatlantic slave trade. By the end of the seventeenth century, the racial category of “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery, in the United States. The specific identities of Africans were engulfed and rendered “black” by an ideology of racial exploitation, leading to the establishment and maintenance of a “color line.” The consolidation of racial slavery was an outcome of a period of indentured servitude. This led to a racially polarized society and shaped specific identities for the slaves as well as white. With homogenization of the colonies as a whole, the new term of self-identification evolved as white (Omi and Winant).

In the conception of race, the discovery of the most perfect female human skull at the Caucasus Mountains, near the purported location of the Noah’s Ark was used to establish and explain racial hierarchy starting from the Caucasoid on top. Theologically, humans are supposed to have come from Adam and Eve, but it is alleged that with the increase in population, some groups in later descendants degenerated and digressed into deviations, which is also used to explain racial hierarchy. On the other hand, the polygenists believe that human had different ancestors. Till the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of archaic subspecies was held, with corresponding cultural and biological manifestations. But the contemporary anthropologists do not hold the idea of race as valid. Race as a scientific reality is no more accepted. The macroracial terms used in order to categorise, e.g. light and dark are not able to cater to the diversity of humanity and therefore are being rejected (Mukhopadhye and Henze). The Columbia Encyclopedia documents that many physical anthropologists believe that the concept of race is unscientific and flawed, since the genetic variations within one race are as many as there can be found between the macroracial groups, (“Race.”). Hence, the term race is unsound especially when applied in order to ethnopsychologize and hierarchize the human species. As to the question how the colours and physiognomic differences marking one set of people different in appearance from others come about, the answer lies in “mutation , selection, and adaptational changes in human populations” (“Race.”) that took place with the passage of time. Race is commonly understood to be the colour of skin or difference in physiognomy that goes into the making of one race different from others.

Despite the scientific truth, race has been used, throughout human history in varying degrees, as “a disfavored means of judging human reality and potential” (Brown). For centuries, the western society has perceived the world as Eurocentric, in terms of exploiting it for albocratic purposes. The various kinds of Eurocentric social discourses reflect and endorse the notion of superiority of white race to the coloured. For sociologists, psychologists and phrenologists there are various ways to define race and explain the reason why there exist hierarchical parameters that declare one race to be superior to the others. Historically speaking, the success of the white race has led to Gobinism or the belief that comparative lightness or darkness of skin colour is a determiner of superiority or inferiority of a particular race. Using the differentiation between essence and existence and Hegelian distinction between ‘to be’ and ‘to have become’ as used by Simone de Beauvoir, (Beauvoir 15), the concept of race and racialization as a basis for another kind of hierarchization can be taken as another human folly to maintain the status quo of global power politics. To Howard Winant, notion of race as an “objective condition” is illogical and flawed. Race can only be understood as a “dynamic flexible social construct” (Chancer and Watkins 50). If an amount of uncertainty or accidental occurrence may be considered to be the law of the universe (Madison), little validity remains to hold the view that success as well as tts resultant seeming superiority of one race is decisive of human worth and not the result of chance and accidents in the history of evolution. It leaves space for a change in the fortunes of the history of peoples.

Race as a notion of hierarchy is also invalidated by the fact that “All human groups belong to the same species (Homo sapiens) and are mutually fertile” (“Race”). This reality of mutual fertility at the same time, has given rise to one of the biggest social problems of human history, the mixed race children.

Even a cursory glance at Pearl S. Buck’s fiction reveals the fact that as a transnational and what she calls a “culturally bifocal” (Conn xiii) person, she subscribes to the constructionists’ idea of race. She holds the view that mutual fertility is a boon for the human species as it creates better progeny that the humanity should be proud of instead of being ashamed of and embarrassed about. For Pearl S. Buck, the cause of the coloured people and the mixed race children was very important and she devoted much of her time and energy for the new breed with different colours and physiognomic features. Laura the chief protagonist in The New Year reads Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, The Fallacy of Race by Ashley Montague which echoes the author’s idea about miscegenation:

When we combine oxygen and hydrogen, we obtain water…When we combine zinc and copper, we obtain an alloy, bronze, which has far greater strength, and numerous other qualities, than the unalloyed metals comprising it; that is certainly getting more out of a mixture than was put into it. When two pure bred varieties of plants or animals unite to produce offspring, the latter often show many more desirable qualities and characters than the stock from which they were derived. Surely the varieties which man presents in his various ethnic forms would suggest that something more has been produced out of the elements than was originally brought into association. (Buck, The New Year 217).

Pearl Buck’s is a perfect eugenic solution. She extols the result of miscegenation. Laura like Pearl S. Buck reaches the conclusion that hybrid is an improvement upon the originals and should be valued as an example of human’s forward march in the process of evolution. It is a symbol of unity rather than of discord and dispute between the progenitors. Kim Christopher and the likes are “a step into future” (Buck, The New Year 218) and so is her husband’s recognition of his son publicly…

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