September 10, 2016

It took the sea a thousand years,

A thousand years to trace

The granite features of this cliff,

In crag and scarp and base.

 - E.J Pratt, Erosion

xxx

I talked to Dr. Dean yesterday about using Evans’ Seaweed books as the center of my research diary and she warned me about the trouble regarding cultural appropriation in his works. As mentioned before, Seaweed is a First Nations man of Salish descent, and from what I’ve gleaned from the back cover, he uses some spiritual aspects of his culture to solve crimes. This is problematic because the author is neither aboriginal, nor even Canadian. It’s been giving me a lot to think about, because I feel in this case these books are stuck between current society’s equal desires to avoid cultural appropriation while at the same time achieving fair cultural representation. Should non-aboriginal writers be deterred from writing from the perspective of an aboriginal person? Where does the line between empowering and exploitative lie?

At first I thought it was cool that Evans chose a First Nations person as his protagonist, because this set him apart from other detective novels, and to me it made the books seem more uniquely Canadian. But looking back on it now, I can see how that line of thinking is exploitative of Coast Salish culture in creating a “Canadian” character. By tokenizing a culture, Evan’s may be using Silas’ aboriginal identity to make his book “emblematic” of the country, in a way. I’d have to read it to know what Evans does with the character, to know if he’s being empowering or exploitative.

But ultimately, this isn’t what I wanted in the first place.  My initial idea for the book was to use it as a lens to look at Willow’s Beach, and Silas Seaweed is looking like a can of worms I don’t want to open for this particular project. So Dean suggested I make this more of a historical research project, looking into the history of the beach, tracing it back to when it was wild.  But what interests me more is her question, which echoed mine in the first entry: can Willow’s Beach even count as a wilderness? So while I intend on doing some research into its history, I am more interested in looking into the elements of the present-day beach that may still be considered “wilderness”, perhaps comparing today’s wilderness with past wildernesses? Anyway, that’s the plan for now.