Where Is the Voice Coming from?
Milena week 8 Where Is the Voice Coming From? – Rudy Wiebe
Themes: - Relationship with the past; - dying of the nation – loss of community - the problem of history – objective, impartial? - Fact/fiction - The first Nation’s/the white - The journalist - Almighty voice – visionary This is a short story by Rudy Wiebe in which we have as the main theme the relationship btw the FNP, or the indigenous people, and the white settlers. The event that is being described – a young Indian guy that is in the story referred to as the Almighty Voice, stole a cow and then he was prosecuted for that, there was a kind of chase for him, and they made a kind of an ambush, a pit, he was there and didn’t want to surrender willingly, so he was rather defiant, he was defending himself and while doing that he killed some of the policemen and of course, he was accused for that and then killed. We can say that this is a trivial event because it happened all the time. Rudy Wiebe starts with these facts about when it really happened, location, date, protagonists, names, museum dedicated to this, badge numbers of the policemen, and he turns this fact into a kind of a fiction, into this story. As another main theme there is the relationship with the past – what is the relationship of the modern people to the past, how they account for the whole imperialist tradition of the white people who came there and stole the land from the FNP, what is their account of the story nowadays. Then, what we have here is the process of the slow dying of the nation and the alienation of the individual. He says that these facts should create the main body of history. Are there different interpretations of history? Of this event? He takes this event and gives us two different interpretations of the same story. The question is whether historical data should be regarded as objective and impartial? History should be
Themes: - Relationship with the past; - dying of the nation – loss of community - the problem of history – objective, impartial? - Fact/fiction - The first Nation’s/the white - The journalist - Almighty voice – visionary This is a short story by Rudy Wiebe in which we have as the main theme the relationship btw the FNP, or the indigenous people, and the white settlers. The event that is being described – a young Indian guy that is in the story referred to as the Almighty Voice, stole a cow and then he was prosecuted for that, there was a kind of chase for him, and they made a kind of an ambush, a pit, he was there and didn’t want to surrender willingly, so he was rather defiant, he was defending himself and while doing that he killed some of the policemen and of course, he was accused for that and then killed. We can say that this is a trivial event because it happened all the time. Rudy Wiebe starts with these facts about when it really happened, location, date, protagonists, names, museum dedicated to this, badge numbers of the policemen, and he turns this fact into a kind of a fiction, into this story. As another main theme there is the relationship with the past – what is the relationship of the modern people to the past, how they account for the whole imperialist tradition of the white people who came there and stole the land from the FNP, what is their account of the story nowadays. Then, what we have here is the process of the slow dying of the nation and the alienation of the individual. He says that these facts should create the main body of history. Are there different interpretations of history? Of this event? He takes this event and gives us two different interpretations of the same story. The question is whether historical data should be regarded as objective and impartial? History should be