[.ca] If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding ... (ISBN 0676974910)

Amazon.ca:
When a meeting over land claims between a First Nations community in northwestern British Columbia and government officials comes to an impasse, a Gitksan elder asks, "If this is your land, where are your stories?" This question, which gives the title to J. Edward Chamberlin's profound reading of post-colonial culture, turns the issue of ownership on its head and places the onus of establishing the right to claim on the settler. It also invites an act of self-reflection on the part of "civilized" (i.e., settler) society, opening the way to a deeper level of understanding and mode of co-habitation in the world. The author, an aboriginal adviser who has worked on land claims in Canada, Africa, and Australia, examines the complex nature of home in a globalized world where migration, diaspora, and resettlement are everyday affairs and where the question of who has the right to lay claim to a place is at the very heart of so many violent struggles and conflicts. The tales of the North American tribal communities and African praise songs, cowboy songs and nursery rhymes, creation stories and constitutions, myths and mathematics and scientific theories--these are some of the storytelling traditions that he uses to explore and reveal the linguistic relativity that is at the heart of a society's "ceremonies of belief" that guide their functioning and existence. Chamberlin wisely goes beyond the culture of victimhood, the rhetoric of blame. His goal is to create a ground upon which a genuine dialogue that addresses and redresses entrenched attitudes towards one's place in the world can occur. This is a thoughtful and timely book which seeks to establish the condition for understanding to take place across the cultural divides. --Diana Kuprel