TELLING STORIES ABOUT PLACES
Sylvia Bowerbank
McMaster University
The woman is almost seventy now. She has
lived in Hamilton the Steel City for most of her life.
These days, weather permitting, she walks down to the bayfront
to look around. From the shore of the new Bayfront Park or
Land-fill Park she can see across the bay to the apparently
wild shoreline below the cemetery where her mother and grandmother
are buried. A little to the east, the masts of moored sailboats
can be seen off Lasalle Park, the place where the famous explorer
was said to have landed in 1669, and where she and other Hamiltonians
used to picnic on Sunday afternoons. That was in the days when
they could still catch a ferry the Lady Hamilton, and later,
the Macassa at the foot of James Street North; they would take
it to the canal, get off for a swim, and then take it over to
Lasalle Park to eat. To the east, she can also see the dark
and dramatic smokestacks of Stelco where, during the 1970s,
her son worked to put himself through university. In the far
distance to the east, she can just make out the arch of the
Skyway bridge which carries the Queen Elizabeth Highway over
the deep canal and narrow beach strip that separate Hamilton
Harbour from Lake Ontario.
The woman has lived on the beach strip three times during
her life. During the 1980s, she lived in a cottage on Burlington
Beach. For that reason, she was designated a stake-holder
and got to go to environmental meetings where there was much
official talk of tearing down the cottages in order to turn
the strip into a nature preserve. Earlier, during the 1950s,
she lived on the Hamilton side of the beach strip under the
Skyway Bridge just as it was being built. It was said at the
time that the Skyway would be the most important transportation
corridor in Canada, that it would make Southern Ontario powerful
and prosperous. Even earlier, during the 1940s, she lived for
a while in a tent on Van Wagners Beach, but the family had
to move when the waves washed them out. That was during the
hard days of the war. The sweeter days of her childhood occurred
during the 1930s to the west of Bayfront Park on the headland
where Dundurn Castle has stood for well over a hundred years.
From where she now stands, she can see that headland and the
high-level bridge over the old Desjardins canal beyond which
lies the misty, marshy bay known as Cootes Paradise. She can
recall the very path, below the high-level bridge, which she
and the other kids would follow down to their secret swimming
place. The water was deep and dangerous in the places where
the old canal had been been dug, but she felt safe in the company
of Big Junie, the St. Bernard. Nowadays, it is said, that only
toxic carp thrive in the waters of Cootes Paradise and the Bay.1
The woman s personal history is written on the Bay Area
landscape. The nature of the place is ever changing. As she
leaves Bayfront Park, on a September day in 1996, the woman
remembers a time when the very land on which she now walks was
all water. In the past, this was the end of Strachan Street
and, during the early 1960s, her cousin s house was at the
bottom of the hill with its back door opening onto the bay.
The woman knows and cares for the Bay Area and its peoples.
Such a knowledge is, of course, personal and interested. The
quality and beauty of this particular environment is directly
linked to the well-being of her children, her grand-children,
and her great-granddaughter. In a different kind of society,
she might be an elder: her stories might be told as a matter
of course and her knowledge respected. In our society, the stories
of ordinary peoples relationships to ordinary places remain
largely a hidden and untapped resource for understanding the
complicated, shifting connections between human behaviour and
environmental conditions.
The Bay Area is more fortunate than most other ordinary
places in that its ecosystem is presently the subject of an
ongoing research project, known as the Ecowise Project. The
project has been undertaken, in large part, by local researchers
who work at McMaster University which is situated just above
the shoreline of Cootes Paradise. The Ecowise Project, from
its outset, aimed to be interdisciplinary and participatory
in its methodology: it includes researchers from the humanities
as well as from the natural and social sciences, and it actively
seeks the involvement of the Hamilton community. Yet, as a recent
essay by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic demonstrates, the Ecowise Project
has had difficulty in meeting its own admirable objectives.
Although the explicit intention of the researchers is to study
the relation between the human/cultural environment
and the natural environment, in fact, priority is given implicitly to traditional natural science perspectives
on rehabilitation of an ecosystem. 2
Stefanovic s findings are important because they show
that, even at its best, environmental research is still struggling
to find an appropriate process for articulating the deep connections between natural environments and human
culture. As part of the interview process, Stefanovic asked
the Ecowise researchers to speak freely about their vision
of the sense of place of the Hamilton Harbour ecosystem. 3 In the process, the researchers became, for a time,
story-tellers in their own right. Although the stories are not
included in Stefanovic s published account, in her summary,
a distinctive pattern emerges: the researcher s stories expressed
a considerable degree of detachment from and even disdain for
Hamilton as a place to live and work:
& several researchers simply disliked the city and
avoided taking visitors to the urban areas. Other responses
indicated that if the visitors were to be taken to the downtown
at all, it was by car, and one would drive through, rather than
linger in any area of significance.4
The stories
just told are too sketchy to represent the lived reality of
either an environmental expert or of an ordinary citizen. Yet,
they illustrate two distinctive sorts of narratives about the
same place; they express contrasting structures of feeling and
knowledge: the researcher s academic detachment and the woman
s life-long connectedness to the human settlement of the Bay
Area. Both sorts of narratives express valuable ways of knowing
and caring for the environment of the Bay Area. Many other such
place-based stories could be told. To understand the environmental
behaviour of individuals, groups and communities, I would argue,
researchers need to know much more about the various structures
of feeling and knowledge including their own that motivate
people in their daily and life-long habits in relationship to their local environments. People s
stories encode these structures of feeling and knowledge.
During
the early seventeenth century, when the first Europeans visited
the Bay Area, a people known as the Neutrals lived here, and
the land and water were teeming with life, with fish, fowl,
wolf, deer, moose, beaver, wild cat, black squirrel, duck, flocks
of wild turkey and crane, corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins,
chestnuts and apples.5 What has happened since then? Telling our stories
about the past, as well as about the present, will help us to
articulate our own region s historical ecology, the ongoing
dialectical relations between human acts and acts of nature,
made manifest in the landscape. 6 It is important for researchers to collect
both historical and contemporary narratives in order to document
personal and communal memories of people s activities, habits
and feelings relating to the Bay Area environment. The study
of historical and contemporary stories would make it possible
to trace the informal patterns of use of the Bay, and the social
pressures and customs that have shaped usage. Oral testimonies
can be used, at the very least, to supplement the official record,
which often mutes the voices of ordinary women, children and
men. From these materials, we would be able to develop an historical
map of the various structures of feeling and knowledge that
have informed people s relationships with the Bay; and to trace
the historical changes in individual and communal uses of the
Bay through the stories of the people who experienced, and continue
to experience, those changes.
To understand the linkages between people s lives and
the condition of the environment, we need to develop a multilayered
sense of place as co-created by generations of diverse peoples
that have inhabited, and still inhabit, the Bay Area. To illustrate
the rich diversity of stories inscribed on the Bay Area landscape,
I recall one historical moment two hundred years ago, in June
1796, when two Devonshire natives, John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor
of Upper Canada, and his wife Elizabeth Simcoe walked on the
headland overlooking the Bay (to the east) and, the frog marsh
known as Cootes Paradise (to the west). With the same shrewd
approach that had improved their Devonshire properties, the
Simcoes were planning the future clearing, management, and prosperity
of the Bay area. Meanwhile, out on the water, a group of Mohawks
were fishing from canoes and catching salmon. At that moment,
in June 1796, the Bay Area was a contact zone for two competing
discourses of wise land use.7 Despite
displacement from their original homeland to the south, the
Mohawk group continued to follow distinctive ecological practices,
including minimal interference with the flora and fauna of Cootes
Paradise and the Bay. As Elizabeth Simcoe notes in her journal,
they did not trouble themselves to kill wolves, clear cut
forests, or drain swamps.8 The Mohawks, it seems, put no stock in
industry and development. Their way was to fit in with the place
and to live as it required. In Teachings from the Longhouse, Chief Jacob Thomas describes the ecological practice
of the Mohawk culture as a complex system of communal restraint:
When native people hunted animals, they
did so in a way that helped keep a balance. Many people believe
that natives lived on venison alone, but that is not true. They
changed their diet with each season. In the fall they would
go hunting, because there were no more green vegetables; the
winter was the time to eat meat and to allow nature to rejuvenate.
In June, July, and August, the animal kingdom was restored and
native people refrained from hunting.9
In the late eighteenth century, both the
English and Mohawks were new to the Bay area; they brought with
them two very different systems of economy and ecology, two
distinct notions of what constitutes paradise. The broad
narrative strokes of these two systems are well known, but the
details, the individual and nuanced stories of how those two
systems got played out on the local landscape, are yet to be
revealed.
Storytelling as Knowledge-Making
Story-telling remains an important cultural
practice by which we, as individuals, transmit our knowledge
of nature-as-lived-experience to our children and neighbours.
A good story is a nuanced and unique mode of expression, rich
in sensual detail, individual gesture, and specific context.
As an ancient strategy of survival, story-telling connects a
society to its own history and its own place. All of us have
unique stories to tell that would particularize our relationship
with nature : significant encounters with wild animals; memories
concerning the sacred landscape of childhood; and little undertakings
of daily life by which we try to make a difference in the ecological
well-being of our households and neighbourhoods. Many individuals
although lacking interest in extremist ideology or talk of
a Green revolution desire to and indeed are deliberately struggling
to change their own attitudes and habits. As Luc Ferry remarks
in The New Ecological Order, The love of nature strikes me as being composed of democratic passions
shared by the immense majority of individuals who wish to avoid
a degradation in their quality of life & . 10
In intellectual circles, the very words nature and
ecology are understood as contested, historically situated,
and highly politicized terms.11 In our communities, we need to negotiate a shared,
if shifting, understanding of what we mean by nature in
the sense of a mediating structure by which we live together
with non-human nature. As Neil Evernden writes, debates about
nature are really about what constitutes a good life. 12 As neighbours, we need to articulate
a shared repertoire of stories about local plants, animals,
and people, in this case, of the Bay Area.
As environmental experts and researchers, we need to
start implementing a participatory methodology that would respect
people not only as sources but as co-producers of bioregional
knowledge.
It must be admitted, however, that stories are not readily
translatable into good policy. Nor do they directly serve the
interests of decision-makers, self-appointed or otherwise. And
it is also the case that, in general, people have lost the habit
and art of communal story-telling. Sometimes, during public
meetings, people fall into irresponsible complaining and narrative
digressions. Even the most sacred of our indigenous ideas is
ever in danger of appropriation and commodification by the global
(so-called) village. It is so easy for our words to reproduce,
or to get co-opted into the multinational project of management
and mastery. Our stories often unwittingly personalize and animate
prefab narrative patterns such patterns as, the nostalgic longing
for a past harmonic estate; the Disneyfication13 of our encounters with wild animals;
or the utopian designing of the Green city. The stories we create
are rarely as free and as good as we might want them to be.
In such a world, how do we, as citizens, learn to tell
good stories that exemplify our expertise and responsibilities
as inhabitants of the local environment? By what method, by
what process, can public servants and researchers learn to listen
and to interpret these stories justly without imposing their
own metanarratives? How might the positive and often intangible
values found in local stories (such as affection for one s
home place) get translated into community-directed and community-implemented
environmental policy? By what criteria do we as citizens even
begin to sort out what constitutes a positive, as opposed
to a suspect, value? And, ultimately, how
do we, as local and powerless communities, translate our stories,
which often reflect diverse and conflicting desires, activities,
interests and philosophies, into a coherent approach to environmental
care-taking? The answers to these questions, obviously, will
not be determined by one essay writer. The collective process
by which a multiplicity of local narratives will eventually
get transformed into good practices remains to be negotiated,
in myriad ways, at the level of the bioregion.
Practising Green Civility
The book Winning Back the Words, by Mary Richardson, Joan Sherman and
Michael Gismondi, tells an instructive story of a group of citizens
in northern Alberta who challenged the expert environmental
claims made on behalf of the proposed Alberta-Pacific (Alpac)
bleached kraft pulp mill. In order to criticize Alpac s plans, during
public hearings, the group used a number of interesting rhetorical
tools: song, poetry, humour, story-telling, life-history, and
outrageous or arresting metaphor. 14 Nevertheless, the outcome was discouraging: even
after the public hearings were held, local stories were told,
and the appointed environmental review committee finally advised
against the project, the contested project went ahead anyway.
Local environmental knowledge was no match for officialdom,
once it had made its plans. Moreover, the hearing process itself
divided and disrupted the community; it intensified local confrontations
over the environment rather than facilitating a search for
common ground. 15
Given the flaws in the process, the writers of Winning Back
the Words make two recommendations relevant to
the concerns of this paper: 1) that we, as citizens, use innovative
literary tools to critique suspect projects and to invent alternative
solutions to local problems; and 2) that we develop sustained
political activity beyond the hearing process to allow for
greater involvement of non-scientists in environmental decision-making.
16 Many of us in other communities have
come to similar conclusions. Thus, we are seeking new modes
of gathering to negotiate our collective relationships with
nature. We are seeking to create effective rhetorical spaces
to borrow Lorraine Code s phrase17
that legitimate, rather than discredit, the good stories of
ordinary people as co-producers of environmentally sound knowledge
and behaviour.
The greening of communities requires the conscious invention
and deployment of appropriate cultural as well as material
and social technologies.18 Story-telling is a cultural technology
of connectivity and groundedness; stories are told in the flesh,
on the ground, by a body in a specific place. In Scattered
Notes on the Relation Between Language and the Land, David
Abram claims that oral cultures are conversant with nature;
they are, he says, in themselves, to some extent, participant
with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves participant, that
is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. 19 Oral
stories are less distanced, less abstracted from their wild
origins, than written texts. Even within highly literate cultures,
the very telling of stories always occurs in a specific place
and thus reenacts the earthly rootedness of human language.
20 To listen and to honour the stories of our neighbours
is to respect and to nurture indigenous knowledges and initiatives.
As inhabitants of the Bay Area, we have a shared interest in
knowing the historical ecology of our homeplace. It matters
to me and my neighbours that we develop ways of life, as well
as scientific projects, to ensure the return of the salmon and
the frog to banish the carp from Cootes Paradise.
The word story is perhaps too general a term to designate
the democratic form of narrative I am advocating. I also want
to bring into play the term testimony or testimonial narrative.
The testimony is a public, yet personal, narrative form which
uses life experience strategically as evidence of the truth
of the speaker s words. In a recent essay, John Beverley discusses
the emergence of the testimonio in Latin American societies as a democratic
form of narrative that lets people speak for themselves, to
bear witness, as it were, to the urgent issues in their lives.21 Even when the testimonies are written
down, the narrative form attempts to approximate the original
orality of its production as a living testimonial to the urgency
of the problems and struggles for survival related by the story-teller
as witness. It is my contention that, if testimonial stories
regarding the speaker s relationship with the environment were
told in legitimating public spaces, this very process itself
would indicate to the speaker that the telling is to be mindful
and responsible. Such stories are not merely subjective; they
become inter-subjective because they presuppose that tellers
and listeners are engaged respectfully in a dialogic process.22
These days, there are many hopeful signs in the Bay Area.
The year 1996 is a special year here because the city of Hamilton
is celebrating its one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. Every
day, stories illustrating affection and concern for the natural
and built environment of the Bay Area appear, for example, on
CHCH TV and in the Hamilton Spectator. During the past year or so, there has
been a marked improvement in local cultural literacy. I conclude
by mentioning just two of these initiatives: first, the recent
publication of On the Edge: Artistic Visions of a Shrinking
Landscape, edited by Catherine Gibbon, a book in which the
some of the finest local artists explore and celebrate the deep
connections between the identity of the people and the eco-system
of the Bay Area. 23 And second, there has emerged a unique
group called Our Shared Home: An Ecomusée Initiative,
which is inventing a museum without walls, featuring as
its main attractions the natural and human treasures of the
Bay Area. The Ecomusée aims to nurture a shared attitude
of respect, appreciation, and responsibility for our home place.
24 Its activities include scheduled events
in various places around the Bay Area, guided by knowledgeable
inhabitants. Anyone interested is encouraged to lead an Ecomusée
event and to tell a story about a particular place in our watershed
which he or she knows and loves.
The Ecomusée is an important, and potentially
transformative, initiative for two reasons: first, it structures
its activities around the place-based knowledge and story-telling
of ordinary citizens; and second, it creates appropriate rhetorical
spaces in which to tell our own stories: a gathering in Rock
Chapel to watch a lunar eclipse, a neighbourhood stroll through
Hess Village, a story-telling circle on the Battlefield of Stoney
Creek. As yet, the Ecomusée is a small group, made up
mainly of local historians, outdoor enthusiasts, students and
teachers. Over time, if the group stays true to its principles,
a multiplicity of people s diverse environmental narratives
will emerge. In its own modest way, the Ecomusée is struggling
to put into practice a new sort of civility a green civility
based on bioregional values and knowledges Such local initiatives
are neither naive nor inconsequential. On the contrary, to tell
and to listen to our own Bay Area stories is to bear witness
to the possibility of co-inventing a good future together on
common ground with all our human and non-human neighbours.
***
References
1This essay is dedicated
to my mother Margaret Bowerbank, in appreciation and respect
for all the walks on the bayfront we ve taken together and
for allowing me to use her stories in my opening narrative.
For their various contributions, I would also like to thank
Catherine Gibbon, Karen Bakker, Noel Fraser, Mary O Connor,
Sara Mendelson, Mark Meisner, the anonymous referees of Alternatives, the members of the Ecomusée
Initiative, especially Cheryl Lousley, and finally, Dolores
Wawia for all our conversations about Ojibway story-telling.
Since its presentation at the Writing and a Sense of Place Symposium
in August 1996, this essay has been published in Alternatives Journal, Volume 23, #1 (Winter 1997), pp.
28-33.
2Ingrid Leman Stefanovic,
Interdisciplinarity and Wholeness: Lessons From Eco-Research
on the Hamilton Harbour Ecosystem. Environments. Vol. 23 #3 (1996), p.
88.
3Ibid., p. 86.
4Ibid., pp. 87-8.
5Frank Ridley, Archaeology of the
Neutral Indian (Port Credit, Ontario: Etobicoke Historical Society, Ontario, 1961),
pp. 1-5. Also see William G. Dean, The Ontario Landscape, circa
A.D. 1600, in Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations, ed. Edward S. Rogers
and Donald B. Smith (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994.), pp. 3-20.
6Carole L. Crumley, Historical
Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation, Historical Ecology:
Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole L. Crumley (Santa Fe,
New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1994), p. 9.
7Marie Louise Pratt defines
contact zones as social spaces where cultures meet, clash,
and grapple, with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical
relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths
as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. In
Arts of the Contact Zone, Profession 91, (New York: Modern Language
Association, 1991), p. 34.
8Lady Elizabeth Simcoe,
The
Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe, ed. J. Ross Robertson (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1911),
pp. 319-324.
9Chief Jacob Thomas, with
Terry Boyle, Teachings from the Longhouse (Toronto: Stoddard, 1994), p. 130.
10Luc Ferry, The New Ecological
Order,
Trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995),
p. 143; his italics.
11For further reading,
see Languages
of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. L. J. Jordanova
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), and Neil
Evernden, The Social Creation
of Nature,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
12Evernden, The Social Creation
of Nature,
p. 5.
13Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature:
North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Toronto: Between the
Lines, 1991), pp. 176-190.
14Mary Richardson, Joan
Sherman, and Michael Gismondi, Winning Back the Words: Confronting Experts in an Environmental
Public Hearing (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1993), p. 16.
15Idem.
16Ibid., pp. 175-176.
17Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces:
Essays on Gendered Locations (New York: Routledge, 1995), ix-x.
18 Greening refers to
the ongoing process of effecting a voluntary transformation of the
behaviour and sensibilities of the peoples of industrialized
societies in light of emerging ecological knowledges.
See Sylvia Bowerbank, Towards the Greening of Literary
Studies, Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature
Comparée, 22: 3-4 (September/December
1995), p. 443.
19David Abram, Scattered
Notes on the Relation Between Language and the Land, in Place
of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology, ed. David Clarke Burks (Washington,
D.C.: Island Press, 1994), p. 122.
20Ibid., 127.
21John Beverley, The Margin
at the Centre: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative), De/Colonizing the
Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women s Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith &
Julia Watson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992),
pp. 93-94.
22Code, Rhetorical Spaces, pp. 60-67.
23On the Edge: Artistic
Visions of a Shrinking Landscape. Ed. Catherine Gibbon, (Erin, Ontario,
The Boston Mills Press, 1995).
24Information about Our
Shared Home: An Ecomusée Initiative can be obtained
by contacting Ecomusée, c/o Wayne Terryberry or Cheryl
Lousley, Department of Athletics & Recreation, Room IWC
201B, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1. Telephone:
(905) 525-9140, ext. 23879; FAX: (905) 526-1573; e-mail: terryber@mcmail.cis.
mcmaster. ca
