An Athabasca Story

Athabasca Break Down

Alli S 1 Comment

I became very interested in “An Athabasca Story” mainly because I was confused on how Cariou wanted the last few paragraphs to be portrayed to the reader. I did a lot of research which I used for my close reading but I broke down almost every aspect of “An Athabasca Story” to be able to picture it better.

Cariou grew up in Saskatchewan and when he heard that his community and northern Alberta were under the threat of oil sands, he traveled to Alberta to create a documentary on the natives who have been dealing with these fears. While he was there, he spoke with an elder who told him some stores. Cariou said that his stories started to blend in with what he saw there(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmZ-ej_Sx5Q). I viewed Elder Brother as a Native American who lived off the land in the forest. There was some discussion in class on whether he was human or not but it stated that he wore moccasins, had fingers and toes, and spoke English.

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The Athabascan Allegory

kwylie5 4 Comments

In class, we briefly noted that “An Athabasca Story” was not merely a short story, but rather a narrative of a story being told. I took this idea home and developed it further, into a theory, and the topic of my close reading paper. Upon closer reading and interpretation, I came to the conclusion that the story is not only a folktale, but a Native American style allegory, written similarly to the orally dictated and passed down Native American tales we have here.

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The Pits of Despair?

zbigley@uoregon.edu 2 Comments

In class, we talked about the tar pits in Canada. They are obviously terrible for the environment and they help Canada’s GDP immensely, but we didn’t talk about why they are so awful for the environment.

The tar pits excrete oil sands and create a barren wasteland of ugly earth that can be seen from space. The miners not only clear the areas of all life and green, but they destroy the water supply in the surrounding areas. A report about water usage in the mines said, “To produce one cubic metre (m3) of synthetic crude oil (SCO) (upgraded bitumen) in a mining operation requires about 2–4.5 m3 of water (net figures).” The oil sands mining company is currently allowed to divert 359 million m3 of water, more than two times the amount needed for the local city. This is a problem that changes not only the environment in a negative way, but it is hurting the locals in many ways.

The locals are not only unable to fish and hunt, as was mentioned in lecture, but their lively hoods are completely changed by the oil sand pits as well. They are forced to assimilate into the culture that the sands bring with it. That means that they get jobs mining the sand and in production. My question is; is it worth it? Is it worth the jobs? Their lives are completely changed by this monster that comes charging in and seems to destroy everything in its path.

While I might not agree with the politics necessarily, I thought that this was a very interesting video on the tar pits.

It made me think about all the things that they go through up there and how the big companies get away with a lot. It is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

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Effects of Narrative Discourse

abbyk 3 Comments

I find narrative discourse to be very interesting and very important to any story told. While it may seem like it does not have that much effect on the story I think it has more impact than anybody realizes. As we discussed in class, narrative discourse is the manner in which a story is told. This can include style, diction, syntax and vocabulary. Although sometimes we do not realize it as we are reading stories, the narrative discourse of the story completely changes the effect it has on the reader. The stories we have read thus far are a great example of this.

The one that stuck out to me the most as having a unique narrative discourse was the Diary of an Interesting Year. This story was told in a very casual, personal way. Writing the story as a diary made it a lot easier for the audience to connect with the author and the story they were telling. If this story had not been told in the first person or had not been written in short, choppy sentences, it would have seemed a lot less realistic and would not have gotten the point across in the same way. While the actual events in the story have a huge emotional impact on the reader, the manner in which it is told also makes a huge contribution to the story. I know a lot of the kids in our class really connected with this story and it really helped all of us understand the personal effects climate change could have on all of us. The storyline itself cannot get all the credit for this; the narrative discourse combined with the story helped to get the point of the story across.   Contine reading →