In class when reviewing “An Athabasca Story” I noticed a plethora of people had questions on who Elder Brother is and what the last part of the story means. I did my essay on “An Athabasca Story” and figured out Elder Brothers part in the story and analyzed it. I thought I would share my information with everyone and thought it would also help with studying for the midterm.

As we all know Elder Brother cannot die but is alive through all of us. He is in our cars, our heaters, and anything we use that needs oil. In the last part of the story the narrator says, “you might hear a knocking, rattling sound down deep in the bowels of the machine. Thats Elder Brother, trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out” (Cariou, 75). When we hear these noises Elder Brother wants us to stop our car and turn it off and think about him inside of our car as oil. What he really wants us to do is to stop and think about the tar sands. He is trying to get our attention through the noise he is making by telling us to stop the car and stop the tar sands. Some may or may not have noticed when reading the story that there is also a motif, with this quote and a quote in the beginning that says, “His stomach was like the shrunken dried crop of a partridge. It rattled around inside him as he walked, and with each step he took the sound made him shiver even more” (Cariou, 70). The motif is the rattling of the partridge and the rattling of Elder Brother in the car. Elder Brothers shrunken up stomach is foreshadowing what is going to happen in the end of the story. In the end of the story Elder Brother is trying to make us more aware of the tar sands and stop them or else our world is going to shrivel up like a dried crop of a partridge.

We pointed out in class that the narrator does not use quotation marks when people are talking. That is because the story is a folktale and it is told around a camp fire. The narrator is the I in the story and the you is the people listening to the story. There is a connection between the narrator of the story and the earths voice. They are connected because they are both telling people what to do which correlates back to the lesson of the story. The lesson of the story is to always listen when told to do something because something bad may happen if you do not listen. Elder Brother learned from the worker to be greedy and take the dirt for himself but when Elder Brother was taking the dirt the earth told him to stop but Elder Brother did not listen. He ended being stuck in the dirt and asked the earth for forgiveness but he got no response. Because Elder Brother did not listen he ends up stuck in oil and has no way of getting out. The narrator is trying to tell us in the story to stop using the oil that they are burning from the tar sands because we use it for almost everything in the world. The earth is telling Elder Brother to stop taking all the dirt. Both of these have ended up in people not listening and bad things happening to them which is the lesson of the story. For example, Elder Brother did not end up dying but he is now trapped in this place where he cannot get out. Another example is our earth has already started to overheat and the narrator is trying to make us more aware of what will happen if we continue to stop doing nothing.

I attached a link to Warren Cariou the author of “An Athabasca Story” reading an excerpt from the novel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmZ-ej_Sx5Q