In a small town in the northern Coast Mountain area of British Columbia there is a high school with 501 students. Here 80% of the students are First Nations (Native Americans). Only 46% of all students who enter grade eight graduate. That information was the only quantitative piece I needed to launch me into a passion- ate inquiry into why students in this northern community could not get a high school education.
For many years I had been a professional writer who investigated problems of teens and then wrote and published books about those problems. I knew I could find out from the teens how they saw their chances for graduation, and write about it. However, I was now a Ph.D. student, one of those who had protocols, expected avenues of study, and rules and regulations about research.
Narrative was my first love. I had been listening to and collecting stories from teens for years, taking their stories and translating them into my own narratives about the issues that concerned them. It was a process that was comfortable, a way I came to understand their point of view and see the world from their perspective. My concerns around education in this northern community were personal as well as academic as my youngest son is Aboriginal and a member of the Gitxsan Nation. I had watched racism from behind his shoulder as he experienced the school system in another community. I had seen how prejudice worked and was suspicious that prejudice, racism, and colonialism were at the basis of the high drop-out rate here. But the teens might tell me something else. I could not know from my history or experience what they were experiencing. I had to ask them and listen to what they thought was important.
“Write this as a novel,” my advisors said. I was excited by this suggestion and, once it was a possibility, I was obsessed with researching and writing my thesis that way. My Ph.D. committee was enthusiastic, but I had a niggling feeling that I was the canary being lowered into the mine. I had never read a Ph.D. thesis that came close to a novel. My committee assured me that it had been done before—once.
I had done research in the past that put me into the communities that I was researching, listening to the stories of the people, learning piece by small piece about their lives, expanding my own knowledge as I heard the stories and trying to translate these stories into fiction and non-fiction. Publishers like to keep the genres straight, and while they like stories in non-fiction text, they like the writer
to be clear that the book is non-fiction. Inviting me to take my research and translate it into fiction in order to present the facts is the basis of any fiction writing, but this thesis had the added moral imperative to adhere to the real-life issues and accurately reflect the reality of the situation. Publishers would not be happy with this. The academy might not be happy either.
However, if the purpose of the research was to find out the underlying problems teens had in getting an education, and communicate those findings to the readers, fiction was an efficient way to do it. As a fiction writer I knew that truth was often better served in fiction than non-fiction. I had published ten novels and 12 non- fiction books. I had always tried in the research process of writing those novels to find out what was behind the issues. Wolcott (1990) discusses “trying to get it right” in Eisner and Peshkin (1990). Like Wolcott, I was not so much concerned with the ability of an objective researcher to replicate my work around the issue of education for these teens. I was concerned about trying to understand what the view looked like from the teens’ position, and to honestly portray that. I wanted to be able to see what it was that they saw, what mattered to them, what participants in my research thought about the subject matter and why they thought that way. I knew that I would not find a whole truth; I would find bits like puzzle pieces. I would take those pieces and form a picture, all the while knowing that there were probably important pieces hidden from me. Perhaps someone else will take my picture and add the hidden pieces and change the picture so that we all contribute to understanding. My work would then be important, but not necessarily a stand- alone final picture of the situation. I will probably always learn more about the subjects I research. My advisors were offering me a chance to use my way of representing “truth” in the powerful media of fiction. I couldn’t resist.
In my education department at the university I had to first present three com- prehensive exams, that is, three extended essays on theory, methodology, and implications for teaching. This was definitely non-fiction, and typically academic. I was typically academic in that I consulted the work of others to find out if my view of the problems had support, and if there might be something else I could consider. I studied the work of the feminists who understand that women look for knowledge in relationships and that understanding relationship leads us to understanding why phenomenon occurs (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1969; Ellis, 1997; Mulqueen, 1992; Roman, 1992). I looked at the nature of stories as it leads us to understanding (Bruner, 1987; Cohan & Shires, 1988). Kerby’s work (1991) on the importance of narrative in developing self made me understand the psychological importance of stories, and Storm (1972) gave me one cultural view on the importance of stories.
I looked at the importance of stories as a way of teaching (Archibald, 1997; Bellanger, 1997; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Crook, 1995; Leggo, 1995; Noddings, 1984; Wolcott, 1990). I looked at indigenous women’s need for stories (Allen, 1992), and L. T. Smith’s (1999) work on the role of colonization on indigenous people. I studied the effects of racism and prejudice on learning and the notion that to succeed in a “white” school system, students are asked to negate “being Indian,” a problem the students of Hazelton assured me faced them (Aronowitz & Giroux,
1991; hooks, 1994; G. H. Smith, 1999). I looked at how stories influence curriculum and read the works of Kincheloe (1997) and Aoki (1996). I studied the work of Tierney and Lincoln (1997) and Van Manen (1990), and reaffirmed my belief that knowledge comes through the researcher, and is influenced by the experience, understanding, and skills of the researcher.
I had a great tension within me between my need to embrace the academic voice on the issues I was studying and my belief that my own research would be more vital and more accurate, and more truly reflect the students’ lives, than anything I could read. The above list of references shows my concern that my research needed to be grounded in the past before readers would be comfortable trusting it. This is the discipline of academia that I have not been able to shake, in spite of the great encouragement I have had from my mentors to rely on my own perceptions, research methods and results, and my ability to communicate those. I still felt I needed to point out how many theorists agreed with me. Finally, I had to understand that although the academic references were interesting to read and helped shape my perspective, they did not belong in the novel. If I wanted to allow the students to speak in this novel, I had to give them the space, and that meant leaving the theorists out.
Academic readers of the completed thesis did embrace this idea, as my thesis was shortlisted for the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies dissertation award the year I presented it.
The process of research and writing was a long one. The protagonist had come to my mind early in my research—Trudith Robinson, 19 years old in grade 12. She sat up there in a pocket of my head commenting on all I saw, asking questions, making suggestions. What I heard, saw, and speculated on in the community sifted through Trudith’s point of view. Because I was constantly viewing the community and the school system the way Trudith would see it, I was able to find information that I otherwise might have ignored. I saw the culture, the physical landscape, and the social situation from her point of view.
The landscape—something I had not considered before I started the research, other than the idea that the town was a very long way from the city of Vancouver —became much more important as I stayed in the community and saw it through the eyes of this young woman. The mountain was real, and symbolic. It became a character in the story and so became one of the challenges to education that students must combat or come to terms with. The geography, the presence of the mountains, the distance from big cities, the severity of the winters all seemed to play a part in the way in which students got their education. At first I did not notice it very much. Of course, I was impressed with the majesty of the mountains, partic- ularly Stiik’yoodinhlx, but it wasn’t until I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker and drove him up the hill from the village that I realized that I had acclimatized myself. In the winter, when it is cold, it is unconscionable to let a person walk when you have a warm car. I never pick up hitchhikers in the Vancouver area; in this community, I was different. If I had changed that much in a few days, how did the country affect the students who lived there? That question, I did not ask directly. What I did was try to observe and convey in the novel the sense, the emotional tie that people have
to the land, trying to make the reader aware of the geography, and its influence. The mountain seemed a symbol of all that kept the young people from leaving.
I could have written in a report that students in this northern community feel oppressed by the mountains, particularly the mountain Stiik’yoodinhlx, and the distance from cities which represent a new life, opportunity, and a career. I could have stated that students have dreams that they see taking place a long way from their community, but see no way of realizing those dreams.
Instead Trudith tells the reader how she feels about the landscape:
One day the mountain will move over me, snuff out my life, obliterate me. It looms above as it has done since long before I was born, an imposing presence, a guardian, a menace, a fate.
“When the rocks roll down the side of Stiik’yoodinhlx, someone dies,” my granny said. And, after the loose rocks tumbled down the side in a tiny avalanche, always someone died.
Stiik’yoodinhlx. The word rattled in my thoughts with the guttural punch
of the Gitxsan language. “Roche de Boules,” the map says. And Rock de Bull is what the people call it. A French name for the English map, but
Stiik’yoodinhlx is the Gitxsan name that gives us in our language the
powerful, relentless heart of the mountain.
It will come one day, inch by inch, creep over my legs, trap me, spread over my body and crush my head into the gravel and dirt. Grind me into pebbles, dust to dust. Absorb me the way it has absorbed my ancestors.
The graveyard is across the valley on a small plateau above the town. From the graves of the dead, the monuments to spirits, families and Clans, you can see the Seven Sisters, the range of mountains to the south-west, and Sik’idt’ox and An T’am’hlxw, the mountains to the northwest. They seem to be normal mountains, put there by the Creator eons ago to keep our valley dry in the winter and hot in the summer. Average, usual, rocky, granite mountains. But the Creator hurled Stiik’yoodinhlx to the edge of our town to control us.
While both ways of relating the information give the same information, the narrative, the story of Trudith, pulls the reader in and lets the reader understand Trudith’s point of view. I hope this demonstrates that a reader will care more about the problems of a student if they can relate to that student, and they will relate more intimately if the writer can bring the student alive to the reader. Fiction can do that much better than non-fiction.
Part of my skills as a writer included interviewing and listening for the stories people told me, but part of my acceptance in the community came from factors which are not discussed in academia. I am a grandmother, and, in this community, grandmothers are given respect. I am the mother of one of the band members and so any children of his, my future grandchildren, may attend this school. I had been a public health nurse and I am still a nurse who has done work in teen suicide and eating disorders. This was an obvious background in social problems that the
professionals in the community found reliable. As well, those years in public health nursing gave me some skills in approaching communities. These attributes were of great help in obtaining the stories I needed to write the novel; they are not attributes that the academy necessarily recognizes.
The other aspect of the research that was advantageous to me and which is seldom discussed in literature was the friendship I received from several of the women in the community. That was wonderful and unexpected, and very influ- ential on how I saw the teens’ problems. Friends made suggestions, introductions, and gave me cultural experiences that I would never have managed by myself.
I believe that when you go into a community to do research, you should offer some skill or service, so that the community gets an immediate benefit from your being there. I traded creative writing instruction with the students for their time and information about education; I offered my books on suicide prevention to the professional community and was available for any assistance they wanted. I did spend one evening with the drug and alcohol worker and the RCMP (police) officer searching the town for a young man they thought was considering suicide, so I know what it is like to be out in the biting cold of a November night worried and feeling responsible. If a researcher wants to absorb the “truth” of a situation, he or she must be willing to be vulnerable, and to be part of that community.
Because this community is so distant from my university—about 1200 km (750 miles)—I stayed for four or five days every time I traveled there. I lived at a bed and breakfast on the Reserve (land controlled by local Aboriginal Nations) and researched in the high school and in the community. I made a deal with the students in the high school. I’d trade them 40 minutes of creative writing instruc- tion for 40 minutes of discussion around their experiences with schooling. We did this exchange eight times. I listened to a youth committee in the local Band Office (the political arm of the Aboriginal Nation) talk about their view of schooling and their assessment of prejudice in that system. I talked to nurses, drug and alcohol workers, teachers, the assistant school superintendent, the native education prin- cipal, my son, and his friends. I kept a journal of my experiences and conversations, and my reflections on those. I shadowed a student for a morning and accompanied her to all her classes, trying to see her day as she saw it.
Because I was researching in a culture that was different from my own, I needed help. The grandmothers nudged me and sometimes commanded me to be sure to interview this person or that, to attend this celebration, but not that one.
It is daunting to begin a novel. I am never sure that I can finish it, but I did reach a point where I felt I had gathered enough information, and Trudith was hammering away in my head demanding her story be written.
When I spoke with students in the high school, they talked of ambitions that had no representatives in their town: actors, interior designers. Trudith, for some reason, appeared in my mind with the ambition to be a travel writer. She wrote a poem about this.
Write what you know, Ms Macmillan said. I will not.
I’m not going to write poetry about the close, gray sky
the dense air, pushing on my head the looming rocks, gray monsters disappearing into steel gray rivers and flat gray soil.
I’m going to write about
magenta bougainvillaea cascading down whitewashed walls.
Sand beaches warm yellow with captured sun green palms etched against
cobalt skies,
braying donkeys with fiery red and tangerine blankets on cobbled streets overhead multicoloured washing hanging window to window
flapping at the scarlet plants potted on the sills. I’m going to write about
turbaned merchants
hawking pottery, rugs and silver
sitting under striped purple and green awnings smoking deep black pipes, stirring dusty pods chanting in lilting accents prayers to foreign gods. I’m going to write about
deep green rivers in southern jungles slipping between tall, willow-green plants floating tufts of white seeds.
Parrots, flying prism colours through aerial plantations. Snakes slipping into ferns pouring through rippling skin rich brown with fire-orange slashes disappearing into the rustling grasses. I will not write about
snow,
the enclosing mountains, the village,
or
Stiik’yoodinhlx.
I am not sure if anyone could write a novel as a thesis if they had never written a novel before—possible, but very difficult, because learning the form of a novel is a skill that takes time. It is not a skill that is taught in graduate school, so, unless the writer has had experience with this form, he or she might be bogged down in the structure of a novel. Because I had written so many novels previously, I didn’t
have to think much about how to write a novel. I also had a group of fellow novel writers who could read my work and make suggestions.
Typically, writers are a mass of insecurities. Mine came out in the conflict I felt between writing the novel as it came from the community, and writing a thesis to please the academy.
I was so intimidated by the academic community that my first draft of the thesis had 150 pages of academic background which, my advisors said, only got in the way of the novel.
“If you must have it, cut it down,” they said. “Let the novel tell the story.” I was worried that I was challenging the academy by submitting a novel. I felt I had to give readers some indication that I understood the theory behind the problems of education I found, but I could not inflict that kind of didactic prose into a novel. It would ruin it.
Within the novel Moving the Mountain are the insights the students gave me in the stories they told. I have taken their narratives and transformed them into another narrative. Readers can enjoy the novel, appreciate the characters, and come to some understanding of what life is like in this northern community, or readers