This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
“[L]anguages, like all living things, have to live within environments, to which they must adapt. A language that only survives in the classroom, like a plant that only survives in a flowerpot, or an animal that only survives in the zoo, is a different thing—and in some respects a lesser thing—than one that survives in the wild…as a functioning part of a cultural ecosystem, where chatter, laughter, conversations, stories, songs, and dreams are as continuous as breathing” (Bringhurst, 2002, p. 10).
Our guest blogger this fortnight is from the Wet’suwet’en Nation, born in Smithers, northern BC, and is a Chef/Activist/Filmmaker.https://chefmaluh.ca/who-we-are
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
My name is Marlene Hale and I am from the Wet’suwet’en Nation, born in Smithers, BC north.
I am a Chef/ Activist/Filmmaker.
I am speaking today on “The Making of a Matriarch.”
Recently, I’ve been watching the Disney+ show Shōgun, a historical fiction drama about the political entanglements between a daimyo (feudal lord) outmaneuvering political rivals, and an English sea navigator shipwrecked in 1600s Japan.
The show is visually stunning, emotionally captivating, and, of importance for this blog post, linguistically inspiring. That is, the show is almost entirely in Japanese, interspersed with English dialogues here and there (which is supposed to stand in for Portuguese). Further, aside from wading through my plurilingual repertoire to navigate the intricacies of the English subtitles, the Japanese on-screen speech, and the occasional translanguaged phrases (e.g., padre-sama, meaning Father, and sama being an honorific for, in this case, a religious authority)[1], I am also immersed in the natural world depicted in the series, a world that is both alive and dynamic (one episode I saw included scenes of a landslide-causing earthquake). And it’s in this intersection of dynamic, ever-shifting language acts and natural phenomena that I find myself writing this blog post.
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Do you ever get that feeling where you know you’ve done something wrong, but you can’t for the life of you tell what it is or how you’re supposed to know? I’ve felt that way a lot as I move through different places and different communities within them. For instance, I’ve noticed that when I run up against a social norm in Canada, people generally won’t tell me directly like they might back home. Instead, I’ve learned to notice what I call the “Canadian huff”—an almost imperceptible sigh that shows that a boundary has been crossed but is not worth addressing. That’s how I learned not to ride my bike across a crosswalk in Nova Scotia and how I learned not to wear my shoes indoors in Québec.
Depending on how you feel about it, you could parse the Canadian huff as passivity, politeness, or passive aggression. But whatever you choose to call it, I’ve noticed that that tendency for subtlety is not confined to etiquette, but keys into broader patterns of how information is sometimes conveyed in Canada—or at least in Quebec—compared to other places I’ve spent time.
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
A comment on my teacher evaluation haunted me. While other students praised my patience or provided simple feedback like, “He’s good”, one student wrote that I “did not have enough experience” but “has potential”. I felt like I was a teenager being scolded by well-intentioned parents. The latter comment was particularly devastating because this student noticed that I was not teaching to my full potential. And they were right.
