Finding Kluskap: A Journey into Mi'kmaw Myth

Chapter 4: Knowing How and Where to Be

4 My journey from Alpha to Potlotek took a number of years, and it led me through various kinds of research, a lot of conversation, and even some hiking. Through the process, I began to detect a vision of modernity that could not be fully situated in more dominant discourses where modernity had seemingly buckled under itself, clearing a space for the languages of both postmodernism and its critiques. This is the context in which I would like to consider the Saint Anne’s Mission, since I believe that the mission reflects a meaning of religion and modernity that cannot not be accounted for within many of our established academic discourses. Until the 1960s, scholars generally held that the Enlightenment had initiated a scientific, political, and economic shift in Western culture that had ensured that modernity would, as a matter of course, become a secular period. From this perspective, one of the fundamental assumptions underlying modernity was the necessity for creating a rupture with what was regarded as the naivety of the pre-modern period; and to this end, the emergence of the binary concept of secular/religious undercut the idea of transcendence in the West. This movement away from an effective meaning of transcendence reached a peak in the later part of the twentieth century with the concept of postmodernity, an idea that sought to avoid certain kinds of conceits that were implicit in Western modernity.1 If the idea of religion was destabilized by the rationality of the Enlightenment and its expressed knowing how and where to be knowing how and where to be 73 goal of fracturing its intellectual relationship with the medieval period, it was ostensibly rendered obsolete by many postmodernists. Postmodernism is a mode of thought that sees the contemporary world as a place in which cultural diversity and indeterminacy are inherent features . As Manuel Arriaga says, postmodernism is thus conceived of as a “disruptive event” in the history of the West, engendering as it does a deep skepticism in respect to universalizing Enlightenment concepts such as rationality, objectivity, truth, progress, and freedom.2 Some argue that the rise of technological capitalism and consumerism underlies the emergence of postmodernist thinking, that this phenomenon altered the relationships among classes to such a degree that older distinctions between elite and popular cultures have been muddled.3 From this perspective, the experiences of “marginalized” people (for example, the working classes, indigenous peoples, and women) have been sites of alternate cultural meanings that have been historically concealed by Enlightenment discourses, meanings that have emerged from the interrelationships that have characterized these sites.4 Narrative (or, more specifically, metanarrative) and text are structures that haunt postmodernist thought and discourse. In North America, postmodernism began in departments of literature and cultural studies and then moved into the arts and architecture. It was the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne (1979) that signaled the entrance of philosophy into this discourse, and it was Lyotard who turned the phrase that has arguably remained the most famous formulation of the term postmodern that we have. “Simplifying to the extreme,” he wrote, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” At issue in this definition were universalizing ideologies that had provided a cultural foundation for the modern West, but had ultimately failed to provide an adequate basis for social cohesion. On this account, their failure has been responsible for the rise of a general perception of the meaninglessness of life in the West.5 Jacques Derrida would take up the state of “incredulity” and turn it loose on the concept of text through a technique he called deconstruction. Derrida’s work hinged on the assumption that the West had been metaphysically burdened by “logocentrism” in all its guises, including language, reason, and the concept of God. His critique of modernity was thus framed in terms of writing and, particularly, in respect to his concept of différence—the impossibility of any textual element “referring only to itself.” All elements of a 74 finding kluskap text, he argued, refer to other elements not obviously present, such that no text can exist that is not in some sense an entailment of other texts. There is, then, no simple presence or absence that can be identified with any certainty. Rather, there are differences, and “traces” that create a train of meaning. Deconstruction provided a constructive critique of the Western philosophical tradition from the...