Kwantlen Mythological Narratives

Creative writing is a powerful, ancient, and yet delicate practice. We write -- quietly, often in isolation, in tentative and mercurial moods. We revise, and turn back upon our own narratives, and wonder about the reception our work might meet in the world. Sometimes we hide manuscripts in drawers, or take deliberate action -- as did Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi -- to prevent our words from making their way to an audience. Kafka and Gandhi were both unsuccessful in preventing their writings from being destroyed; but their impulse to do so, to keep hooded the hawk of their creativity, is common among writers of all stripes.

We're not sure that we have, really, anything to say; or we are afraid that if our words are not well met we might ourselves be wounded. Or we believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that words have their own life, for good or for ill, and that writing is a means of seizing the power of the gods. This course attempts to explore this conversation -- between the writer and the wider world -- and to find ways of bringing our writing safely out of hiding.

We will be exploring myth, and writing craft, and method, and the strategic practices every writer must learn in wrestling with narrative. Each of us will examine our strengths -- the ways in which the natural mood and flavour of our writing makes itself known -- and our vulnerabilities as well: how we get stuck, or lazy, how we lost confidence and gain doubt. How we learn to shut down and hope the whole thing will go away.

This course is about writing, and reading, and making a claim for the fundamental right of storytelling. Within that context, we will explore the ancient practices of myth-making (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of writing (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers of writers and myth-makers).

The threshold between fact and fiction (which is not the same as that between truth and lie) is one of the territories of myth. In this course we stake out that territory, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Myth involves the search for truth, and fidelity to fact, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

The course will include a variety of learning experiences contingent upon regular attendance and dedicated participation. Because creative writing and mythology are both interactive processes, much of the class time will be devoted to group experiential exercises, individual reflective tasks, collaborative endeavors, composition, and practical assignments.

We will create a collaborative environment in this class. We are not going to cobble together the type of group one often hears about in the arts: competitive, cut-throat, critical. Repeat: we are not creating such a group. Instead, we will direct our efforts toward building upon the individual strengths of each participant, finding ways for each of us to be self-reflective in terms of assessing our creative work, discovering a means of protecting the quality and integrity of our writing. The creative spirit is remarkably persistent, yet it is also fragile, especially at its inception, and we must be conscious of this fragility. Think about it: did you not experience, as a child, the strangulation of your creativity in school, by way of a culture of insensitive peers or teachers? Why do you think hardly anyone feels comfortable singing in public, or dancing, or drawing, or reading their written work to others? We have, most of us, been the victims of inappropriate feedback and judgment. We have to be careful about this, in our course, so that we do not harm one another.

And, finally, the goal of the course (from my point of view, at least), is to have fun: to preserve and nurture the creative and imaginative spirit that is the foundation of all the arts and sciences.

Themes for Mythological Narratives

The class structure involves 14 sessions. These sessions will be balanced between presentations (by the instructor and students) academic material, group collaboration, and composition. The content for each session will evolve as the semester progresses. We will cover the following themes (though, perhaps not in the order listed below):

The Nature of Myth

Definitions of mythology (a body of myths) and mythopoetic (the making of myths). Clarifications of common misunderstandings about myth (e.g. that myths are false, or that myths obfuscate factual information). An introduction to myths as carriers of cultural knowledge in the arts and sciences. Consideration of myths as versions of truth and as effective containers for sacred, social, political, or scientific information (e.g. in ancient astronomy and contemporary religion). Examination of myth-making as a fundamental and necessary function of human nature. Consideration of the persistence of the myth-making function and its role in the contemporary world (e.g. the mythologies evolving around 9/11). Examination of the relationship between myth and truth.

Myths of Ancient Sumer and Egypt

Introduction to the historical background of the origins of Western mythology and literature. Explication of Sumerian and Egyptian world views, with particular emphasis on spirituality, mythological concepts, and approaches to the imagination. Reading of excerpts from core Egyptian and Sumerian texts, with particular emphasis on myths that form the foundation of the literatures of the West. Examination of the ways in which science and mythology were entwined in the practices and perspectives of the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. Introduction to Egyptian hieroglyphic, the most elaborate writing system ever developed, and the role of hieroglyphs in the transmission of myth. Exploration of the transmission of Sumerian and Egyptian mythological ideas into the contemporary world (e.g. the eye on the American dollar bill).

Greek Influences

Exploration of the transmission of myth from the Sumerians and Egyptians to the Greeks. Explication of Greek adaptations of and contributions to myth, with emphasis on the traditions of philosophy and theatre. Reading of selected Greek literary and mythological texts. Examination of the ways in which science and mythology were entwined in the practices and perspectives of the Greeks. Examination of the ways in which Greek texts subsequently influenced the development of European literatures.

Myths of China, Japan, and India

Introduction to the historical background of the origins of Eastern mythology and literature. Explication of ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Indian world views, with particular emphasis on spirituality, mythological concepts, and approaches to the imagination. Exploration of the possible connections between ancient Indian myths and those of ancient Egypt and Sumer, with particular focus on Kundalini yoga. Reading of excerpts from ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Indian mythological texts, with particular emphasis on myths that form the foundation of the broader literatures of Asia. Exploration of the transmission of ancient Chinese and Indian mythological ideas into the contemporary world (e.g. Confucianism and Taoism in modern Asian business practices, and the Tibetan world view).

Shamanic Myths and Cultures

Introduction to the mythologies of ancient aboriginal cultures from Canada, Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Introduction to the mythologies of contemporary aboriginal cultures from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Explication of the shamanic world view, with particular emphasis on spirituality, mythological concepts, and approaches to health and healing. Reading of excerpts from transcriptions of ancient and contemporary shamanic myths, poems, and songs. Exploration of the transmission of ancient shamanic myths, by means of epic poems and songs, into the contemporary world (e.g. the art of the aboriginal peoples of the Northwest).

Europe and the Middle East

Introduction to the transmission and adaptation of ancient myth in the European cultures of the Common Era. Exploration of the Hermetic traditions, the rediscovery of ancient texts, and the influence of these developments on European art and literature after 1500 CE. Examination of the integration of science and mythology in the development of the intellectual and political traditions of Europe and North America (e.g. the Washington Monument and the ground plan of the Mont-Royal neighbourhood in Montreal). Introduction to the Grail mythologies and their foundation role in Western literature from 1500 CE to the present. Reading of excerpts from the mythological texts of Europe and the Middle East. Examination of European myths and their relevance to contemporary politics, sports, entertainment and pop culture in Canada.

The Psychology of Mythology

Introduction to the tradition of twentieth century myth scholars (Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircia Eliade) and their attempts to integrate all myths into a single continuum of human inquiry and expression. Reading of selected texts by Jung, Campbell, and Eliade. Examination of the relationship between myth and personal psychology (e.g. dreams). Exploration of the psychological models used by scholars to describe the underlying impulses and functions of myths (e.g. the collective unconscious). Consideration of the myths of individuality, the psychological functions that derive from these, and the interplay between personal and social mythologies. Consideration of the necessity of myths and of the development of new myths.

Mythopoetics in Contemporary Arts and Literature

Examination of the many ways in which myths pervade contemporary literary and creative traditions. Reading of selected contemporary and mythological texts from the genres of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Consideration of the ways in which myths are conjoined, truncated, and adapted for contemporary readers. Introduction to the artist as a mythological figure (the trickster), and to the mythological role of the artist in contemporary society. Exploration and application of mythopoetic writing strategies.

Mythology in the Contemporary World

Consideration of current personal myths, familial myths, cultural myths, and world myths (e.g. myths of apocalypse, myths of the United States as the gunslinger, the myth of Canada as the North). Examination of popular myths, controversial myths, and myths which have persisted for hundreds or thousands of years essentially unchanged. Reading of excerpts from contemporary mythological texts in the political and social spheres. Exploration of the contemporary role of myth in world politics, religion, and spirituality. Consideration of the future directions of myth in literature, culture, and human nature.

Mythological Motifs and Themes

Chenrizi
Dave Bowman
Set
Hamlet’s Mill (Precession)
Manjushri
Thoth
Lady of the Lake
Tara and White Tara
Gnosticism
Yggdrasil
Mithras
The Angel of History
Songlines (Yiri)
Hermes
Sedna
Viracocha
Wandering Jew
Zarathustra
Chukwu
Gilgamesh
Hanuman
Horus
Diana the Huntress
Shebtiw
Shamir
Mandala
Popol Vuh
Tetragrammaton
Stone of Scone
Loki
Olmecs
Tuatha De Danann
Akhenaten
Whiteness of the Whale
Faust
Bodhisattva
Willendorf Venus
Sonchis the Saite
Utnapishtim
Hagar
Hopi Stones
Allat of Kaaba
Nazis in Antarctica
Kotodama
Edda
Vedas
Lu-Dong bin
Trimurti
Padmasambhava
Scota
Ganthet
Kwan-Yin
Piri Reis Map
Bardo Thodol
Knights Templar
Enoch / Metatron
Don Jaun Matus
Pagan Christ
Tzolkin: 2012
Dogon and Sirius
Blake’s Jerusalem
Norrin Radd
Tulku
Corpus Hermeticum
Ptah
Kalevela
Four Horsemen
Odin
Giza and Orion
Black Elk’s Vision
Sunyata
Corbenic
Hanged Man
Golem of Prague
Rainbow Body
Kundalini
I Ching
Niu Heimar
Freud Jung “bosh”
Ayu Khandro
Nephilim
Synchronicity
Double Slit Experiment
Voynich Manuscript
Tesla Death Ray and Tunguska
Maitreya
Morphic Resonance
Ark of the Covenant
Fulcanelli
Chupacabra
Adam’s (Rama’s) Bridge
Avalokitesvara
Icelandic Elves
VALIS
Syzygy
Spear of Destiny
Emerald Tablet
911 Conspiracy
Alchemy
Kaliyuga
White Goddess
Lao Tzu
Sasquatch / Yeti
Dimlahamid
Area 51
Guardian Angel
Robert Monroe’s Emitter
Foundation Stone
Sangreal
Siddhi
Archetype
Reptilian Humanoids
Bermuda Triangle
Skull and Bones
Prometheus
Library of Alexandria
Ogham
Akashic Records
Enso
Lhamo La-tso

Readings for Mythological Narratives

Required Course Texts

Suggested Books

Assignments for Mythological Narratives

Three writing assignments are required for this course: a research essay and two creative compositions. The research essay involves you choosing a specific mythological theme or thread and exploring it in some depth. We will discuss this project at length in class. The creative writing compositions are opportunities for you to discover and explore the myths surrounding your own life. Again, we will discuss these projects in class.

For philosophical reasons, I do not prescribe a particular length for the projects: a great essay can be a few pages long (as we'll see). Yet it is difficult to craft a good essay in less than a few thousand words. So, if you prefer a guideline for the length of the projects, I offer two recommendations: make them as long as they need to be; make them somewhere between two and five thousand words. There is no upper limit on the length of the projects.

I'm not interested in how much you can write but rather in the quality of your writing. Perhaps you write like Hemingway, perhaps like Melville or Tolstoy. I don't know, and maybe you don't know either. But I can tell you this: writing a shorter piece of great precision is more difficult than writing a longer, more relaxed and wandering work. In the context of smaller projects every word is on display and under scrutiny, whereas in longer works the sheer bulk of the material tends to hide various flaws. Melville, in fact, is a good example of this.

You may write short narratives in this course, but please do not write short form as a means of avoiding work. You will know, I will notice, and neither of us will be happy. Instead, make your work as long as it needs to be. If you compose a lovely, resonant, short piece, you will receive an excellent evaluation. But as I said, writing shorter pieces is actually more difficult.

With reference to good, short pieces, I suggest (strongly) looking at the poetry of W.S. Merwin, his lovely un-punctuated poetry in which the bare words embody some strange and familiar light. Here's an example of what I mean:

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

The three written compositions are worth 25 per cent each of your final grade.

Group Presentations

Each student will be a member of several different peer groups; each peer group will present mini-presentations (roughly fifteen minutes each) on various mythological motifs and characters. Each class session will involve presentations, with one presentation from each group. Class time will be given for preparing the presentations. The structure and content of the presentations will be discussed in class.

The group presentations are worth a total of 25 per cent of your grade.

Evaluation of Assignments and Presentations

My primary focus, as an instructor, is to assist you in developing your creativity. Grades are quite far down on the list of priorities for me. I am focused on your engagement with the process, your commitment to your own work, the extent to which you show up, metaphorically, to be as present as you can be. These are evaluation criteria for me.

Attendance and Participation

The expectation is that you will attend all sessions and involve yourself in the class process. Your willingness to engage creatively with the learning process, to take appropriate personal risks, and to participate in group activities are all central to your involvement in this class. Because developing a style of creative writing is very much a process of blending your own personal awareness with skills and practical techniques, your own emotional involvement in the class is as important as your academic knowledge of the material.

Grade Inflation

Almost every semester there are students who do well on the assignments, complete all the associated learning goals of the course, participate well, and wonder why they do not receive a grade of one hundred percent (or 98, anyway). Here is the reason: almost every semester there are students who demonstrates a level of commitment that goes beyond the course requirement. Such students complete extra work, or hand in exemplary assignments, or undertake a significant amount of personal development in addition to the course expectations. Such students typically receive the highest grades.

If you do reasonably well in the course you will receive a reasonable grade. Very high grades are intended for extra or exemplary work. Unfortunately, over the past thirty years the post-secondary educational system in North America has participated in a process of grade inflation. Since the 1980's, the average grade for typical course work has been increasing by about 25 per cent each decade. Elevated assessments do not accurately reflect the work of most students. Even worse, grade inflation has caused many students to expect high grades for average work. I am not a particularly stringent assessor; but I will not inflate grades artificially.

In this course, a small number of students will (likely) receive high grades, most students will receive grades in the middle range, and a few students will struggle with lower grades. If you are uncertain about your assessment for a given assignment, or if you wish to know where, roughly, you are along the distribution curve of the class, or if you would like suggestions for how to improve your grade, please ask me for clarification.

Stages in the Creative Process

The creative process (and the process of individual development) is a mythological journey, in which first there is:

The Call…
a beginning, an initiating force (or event) behind all creative and personal development. The Call is an unexpected event, a trauma, an intrusion into the sedate and comfortable lives we craft so carefully. In creative work, the Call is the moment of vision. In turn, it is a stage requiring of us a disruption in routines, an openness, an encouragement of the mystery. In myths and stories, the Call takes the symbol of the unexpected letter, or the sudden injury, or the surprising twist away from the ordinary. The Call is the gateway, and is followed in turn by:
Refusal of the Call…
in which we assert for business as usual, for the way things were, for the re-establishment of our ordinary world. The task of the artist (and the writer, and the person) is to refuse to refuse. We must slow down, and listen, and open the eye of seeing. Universally, the opening of that eye is assisted by:
The stranger…
who we meet on the road: the wise one, the elder, the mentor. The stranger offers compassionate assistance, evokes our openness and our patience. Without the stranger, neither the work of creativity nor of healing is possible. With assistance from the stranger (who is an archetype, and may therefore also be a trusted friend), we cross the threshold, take a deep breath, and enter our own wilderness. Clarity is required here, and intent, and a willingness to open the gate. Wind lies on the other side, and the unknown. Our path lies that way, toward:
The labyrinth…
in which we become confused and disoriented. We seek but do not find shelter. We become lost, and fall into ourselves. Trusting the process is the task here: dealing with the dark, the cliff, the shadow. Discomfort, fear, and inertia become companions. We hear the monster which haunts all labyrinths, and which is our own inner life projected outward. But the labyrinth has one path only: toward a confrontation with the monster. We must keep going. All tales confirm this. And if we do keep going — simply, with trust, with purpose — we:
Face the monster…
and find the beast to be our own wisdom in disguise. The monster is a teacher, a guide, an enemy who becomes an ally. From the monster we learn:
 Clarity…
and we move onward to discover the still point at the center of the labyrinth. Healing and spirituality and creativity reside at this center. Peace is made with the past there. We gather up the scattered threads of our inner knowing. We recognize the illumination to be found at the centre, and in so doing we begin to shape the tale of our journey. Above all other junctures in creative work, the still center is of the core and essence. It is here that all parts of ourselves align, and for a moment we glimpse ourselves all the way down into the Soul. When the still point arrives, creative work is almost done; healing is almost done. But first we must make our way back into the world, by way of:
The shallows…
and the bridge, which will deliver us back to the world we departed so long ago. That land now seems foreign, and strange, and we find ourselves uncertain about how to find our place within it. Creativity, after all, is a journey of the inner life, and is only peripherally about what we craft. Creativity is the personal path inward, toward our own discoveries. The shallows and the bridge are ways forward, and outward, to:
 Return…
to the world, to the bright day of sharing our discoveries with the community. And yet, because the inner journey is so rich, and intense, and powerful, often we:
Refuse to return…
and instead we become addicts of the creative process and of personal development (of healing, of recovery, of transformation). We want to form an institute to change the world, or move to a mountain hut and leave the world by way of the imagination. Creative and personal work become their own hurdles on the path. We dream of becoming the eternal traveler on that wondrous path. But, as the old stories tell, there appears again:
The stranger…
who calls us back (and who need not be the same stranger); the one who invites and demands that we share our work with the world — so that they too might see, and know, and be healed. They set watch fires for us, and they wait, and we embark upon a mysterious journey back. We cross:
The return threshold…
and enter the world again. We bear gifts of wisdom and of healing. We have been burned by the light of illumination and are healed. We share our gifts with the community; and in this celebration there is a pausing, a:
Conscious integration…
of what we have undertaken and learned, a recognition of wholeness and completion and healing. We become the stranger for others. We have crossed the wide sea and know its ways. We rest, for a moment. And in this space of quiet, while we are not paying attention:
The cycle begins again.

A Sample Mythological Narrative

Jasper Queen


The Jasper Queen

The indomitable spirit cannot be diminished -- by negligence, by war, by time spun farther than the grasp of memory. This occurs to me on September ninth, in the Egyptian gallery of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, as I stand before the only remaining fragment of an ancient sculpture. The body has vanished, and most of the head is gone. What remains is a small artefact, about six inches high: an elegant mouth -- smiling, in repose -- and the beginning curve of a face, carved from yellow jasper. Between ragged fractures where the stone is sheared off -- one just above the top lip, the other below the chin -- the mouth has been sculpted with astonishing precision by the craft of a culture now strewn across the debris field of history. This statue, all that's left of the queen of a remote age, was fashioned in devotion and shattered by war, almost twenty-five centuries ago. And still, she smiles.

I remain in the gallery for a long while, absorbing the details of this remarkable object: bright and smooth, polished to a high sheen. Yellow jasper, symbol of the imperishable, the rain-bringer, a stone reputed to drive away evil spirits, has long been associated with healing. Perhaps this mouth, so fragile, the instrument of a forgotten voice, has been preserved by virtue of the jasper's protection. This relic endures, even as the Taliban destroy stone Buddhas in Afghanistan. In countless guises, the instinct for beauty prevails.

Two days later, back home in British Columbia, as I prepare to work a stone I found on the mountain north of where I live, terrorists fly hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, into the Pentagon, into the ground. Like their ancient allies, they tear down the standing stones, endeavor to destroy all that is foreign and strange. The old fires have not stopped burning.

I am drawn away from the shop and into my grief for many days. I sit with my wife in the quiet sanctuary she has made of our yard. The first ochre leaves appear, and we wonder how to make sense of such unfathomable events. My eight-year-old daughter writes a poem about the end of summer, in which birds fly to nice, warm places. Safe passage. As the season turns, I pray that I find the wisdom to weigh, in my own small and quotidian life, the will to heal against the wish to harm.

When I can no longer abide images from the television, when the rawness within me must be assuaged, I return to my workbench. My affliction is softened as I cradle my tools and guide them across the stone, restoring a shattered visage. The dust gathers into great storm clouds as I work, falls like ash onto every surface of my shop. The facade of the stone cracks, gathers itself into the contours of a resolute chin, a strong mouth and a cheek rising toward a restful eye.

Rage and tears and a strange dread, lurking and tenebrous, find their way into the rhythm of my work. Bits of loose stone fall onto the floor, abrade my skin with their sharp edges, scrape the benchtop I so carefully protect from harm. I persist, straining to reclaim, in the grain of dark stone, the soft faces of those now lost to our sight. I mourn the death, too, of the isolated innocence of my culture. And I try to answer the questions of my four-year-old son, who cannot understand why the hijackers would hurt anyone. He devises surprisingly elaborate plans for talking to them, for asking them to stop.

He watches me work, brings me tools, draws close in this time of elemental fear. My hands, searching for the stone's redemption, trace their way across the emerging contours of a jaw, and the rough edge where the forehead will be. I imagine the craftsmen of the jasper queen, and I wonder, as I inspect my work during a bright and warm afternoon, if it's her voice I hear, humming among the trees out back. I discover, once again, that the simple work of hands is a guide in my own healing. I am shaped by the work of creativity as a stone is by tools. And I am sustained, finally, by the hope that my one stone might stand with the destroyed and colossal Buddhas, with the scattered and the fallen, with those on their way back home.

Creativity can be a deep sustenance -- whether in stone or wood or soil. And though my carving is crude, fails utterly to match the surpassing skill of those ancient craftsmen, I persevere; for the work of creation calls not only to the practiced hand. Slowly, easing into the surface, I peel back the many layers that hide the finished face. The air is thick with transformations.

I wash dust from the stone. The bright surface beneath, smoothed by countless tool strokes, appears alive. Dark striations weave their way across the rudimentary cheek, and flecks of white -- feldspar -- scatter like snowflakes along the brow. There's more work, much more: the nose, the eyes, the left side of the jaw. But I've begun. And as I gaze upon the face before me, collected from the ashes of mountains and the visions of my own troubled days, I glimpse a woman both serene and fair. She looks upon our fractured world with an indomitable spirit. And she smiles.

A Sample Mythologocal Narratives Essay

Plato wrote that the past is like the wake behind a boat; it spreads, and diminishes behind us, and merges with the surrounding sea. The past rolls under and is gone.

We stand upon the foredeck of Plato's boat, gazing forward, cleaving our path toward the future. Along the track of our traveling many things are lost – because we are always searching ahead, because the wake is jostling and turbulent, because our craft is small and the ocean is vast.

It is by means of this manner of journeying into the future that our knowledge of ancient peoples is vanishingly small. We know a fair amount about the last thousand years of our history, we surmise a sketch of the thousand years before that – and of the remote ages before that, we know very little. Snatches, really, vignettes gathered from scattered documents and fragmentary tales. For the great majority of the history of modern humans – a hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand, no one knows – we understand almost nothing. Along our own coasts, which once were at lower altitude than they are now, ancient villages lie hidden beneath the wake of passing boats above.

And yet, old stories have been handed down from that long, invisible stretch of years: fables, epics, mythologies of archaic and unknown origin. Among those ancient tales is a set of related motifs, from many cultures, that tell of seafarers who found their way to distant shores. In China, Polynesia, Japan, Egypt, Africa, Scandinavia – in most places bordered by the sea – we find fantastic tales of oceanic travel. On our own coasts – in Haida Gwaii, and along the sheltered eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and inland all the way to the Kootenays – similar stories are told of those who came long ago, and lived upon the land, and vanished.

For at least a century, since archaeology and anthropology became sciences based on hard evidence, such cultural tales have been dismissed as folklore and wishful thinking. The evidence simply did not support the stories. The timelines claimed by various cultures seemed inconsistent with what was surmised about technologies and methods from various historical and pre-historical periods. The ruins of ancient sites could not be found (near Atlin, for example, or near Telkwa, both sites where aboriginal tales describe cities of utmost antiquity). The longevity of known sites could not be established from existing data (the Nanaimo petroglyphs, for example). Eventually, the scientific consensus was that the claims of myth were just that: imagined tales, with no actual basis.

But within about the last decade, a wealth of new evidence challenges, and will likely soon overturn, traditional scientific views concerning human migration in the ancient world. The emerging data comes from various fields: genetics, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and the developing field of archaeo-astronomy. Working sometimes in concert and other times in conflict, these fields are leading us through a fundamental paradigm shift in our perspective of the past.

The history of science consistently confirms something we easily forget: that most of our certainties will turn out to be wrong. What's turning out to be wrong at the moment is our conception of the peopling of the Americas. The standard theory – the Bering land bridge, ice-free corridors, southward migration – has begun to give way to a more nuanced and complex view involving multiple waves of ancient immigrants arriving at different times and by disparate means.

Debates and developments within the scientific community typically take place in closed meetings at universities and at conferences not attended by the general public. But the conversation about ancient migration has become very public since the 1996 discovery of a skeleton known as Kennewick Man. He was found on the banks of the Columbia River, in Washington State, by a pair of spectators watching hydroplane races. Initially, local aboriginal groups claimed him as one of their own; an ancestor, perhaps a fallen warrior from long ago.

But archaeologists who studied Kennewick Man found a curious thing: he is not aboriginal. His remains are old – approximately 9,300 years old – but he is not an ancestor of any current aboriginal population. In fact, he's Asian. He may be an ancestor of modern Pacific Islanders, or of the Ainu people of northeast Asia. In either case, he traveled here more than ten thousand years ago, likely with a small population of others like him who made their careful way inland and across the Pacific Northwest.

Kennewick Man is not the only oddity of the ancient human landscape. Many so-called anomalous remains and sites have been found in both North and South America: Monte Verde, for example, in Chile, and the entire collection of colossal stone remains in Mexico known as the Olmec culture. Along British Columbia's Inside Passage, near the Yuculta rapids, stone sculptors carved somber faces into twenty-six granite boulders on the shore, more than at any other site on the Pacific coast. The carvers are long gone, vanished but for these stone traces of mystery.

As the number of anomalies has accumulated, the trajectory of the scientific conversation has changed too: from dismissal, to caution, to contention, and finally to a new consensus. That final, new consensus has not yet fully emerged, but its basic elements are already in place: many groups of migrating people came to North and South America – ten, twenty, perhaps as much as thirty thousand years ago – in separate and commingling waves of odyssey, exile, and accident.

And how did they come? By boat.

Imagine those ancient mariners, navigating by the stars, uncertain of their destination, traveling in what might have been open canoes or out-rigged rafts or makeshift kayaks. No compass, no map, no protection against the sea's indifference. Nothing but sheer guts and necessity.

They came at different times and, no doubt, by varying means: from Japan, Russia, Southeast Asia, Polynesia (likely from Europe, as well). They established settlements here, lived upon the land for some stretch of time, then disappeared. Perhaps they were subsumed into existing or descendant groups. Perhaps most of them were wiped out by an asteroid impact 13,000 years ago (as one recent theory suggests). But no one knows. The descendants of the original, pre-migration peoples still exist in Japan, Russia, and Polynesia. They are the Ainu, the Jomon, the Polynesians; and they are still here, thousands of years after small clusters of their people sailed across the sea.

The puzzle of the most archaic groups is deepened by the fact that sea levels are now as much as 30 metres higher than they were 10,000 or more years ago. Villages that once lay at the seaside are now long immersed, swept by the amnesia of the waters, erased beneath Plato's persistent wake.

However, anomalous underwater stone sites have been found in Japan, Cuba, Malta, Egypt, and elsewhere. After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, stone artifacts from an ancient and fabled submerged city, once dismissed by archaeologists as mythological, were washed up on the beach by the force of the tsunami. These artifacts include six-foot high statues of the head and shoulders of an elephant, a horse in flight, and a reclining lion.

In Haida Gwaii, traditional myths tell of the ancient rise of the sea, of ice floes moving across the land, of sudden and drastic upheavals that transformed the islands. And those Haida myths also speak of an earlier people, now gone, who inhabited that mystic place long ago, and of whom nothing is now left but ghosts.

Those ghosts take many contemporary forms: the sea-wolf petroglyph south of Nanaimo, the unique Christina Lake petroglyph, the funereal mound at Keremeos, the persistent tales of the fabled city of Dimlahamid in northern British Columbia, between the Bulkley and Skeena rivers. And Kennewick Man, of course, who may have known, when he was alive, the meaning of the stone sculptures at Yuculta, or might himself have carved images into stones scattered across a river delta. His people were here, after all – in what is now Vancouver, and Victoria, and inland by way of the rivers – and the settlements of our people today are laid over those of his people by thousands of years of rainfall, wind, and memory.

And yet the ancient evidence swells, and spreads, and cannot be laid to final rest: scattered human remains, colossal in their age; Polynesian chicken bones found in Peru; genetic anomalies among various cultural groups (the Scots, for example, may be descended from ancient seafaring Egyptians).

The old boats are gone, of course, long undone by the alchemy of salt water on wood. But the tales remain, and have not surrendered their claims of authenticity. And now, finally, science is coming forward to meet the mythological narrative. The new and shared story, woven together by the threads of both science and cultural memory, is this:

No single people came first to the Americas, but instead many came, in small sorties and great armadas, during a period of human history about which we are profoundly ignorant. Before the Ice Age and after it they arrived, and made homes for themselves, and left only the tiny traces typical of the human story. Their cultures appeared and vanished again (as our cultures will also).

These disparate groups were united by the sea, the great trackless track that challenged and delivered them. The mariners of today are the descendants, in spirit, of those early nomads who first harnessed the wind. We pass over their graves, somewhere between the shore and the deep water. Watch for that place – 30 metres of depth – and recognize, as you pass over that line, the legacy you inherit: love of the wide waters, the quest for adventure, the longing for what lies over the horizon. These are the gifts of the vanished peoples, whom we will never know except by the ways in which we are stirred, even now, by their ancient dreams.

Attendance, Participation, and Assessment

The expectation is that you will attend all sessions and involve yourself in the class process. Your willingness to engage creatively with the learning process, to take appropriate personal risks, and to participate in group activities are all central to your involvement in this class. Developing a sense of personal, academic, and professional direction is very much a process of blending your own personal awareness with abilities and practical techniques. Therefore, your own emotional involvement in the class is as important as your academic knowledge of the material.

You will be expected to attend lectures, participate actively, and complete all course assignments. While attendance is voluntary (as it is in most post-secondary courses), the key to success in any course involves taking time to integrate material from lectures, discussions, activities, and your own reflections. If you miss class, it is your responsibility to catch up. Please ask your instructor if you are unsure about how to do this.

The following (not exhaustive) list of considerations will be used in determining the quality of your attendance and participation:

Assessment Criteria for Attendance and Participation

Assessment Philosophy

Effective participation in this class has multiple dimensions, some of which may be measured objectively (such as effective writing) and some of which are signals of interpersonal ability and self-awareness. Interpersonal abilities are subtle, difficult to quantify, complex beyond any measurement scheme, and are the single most important predictor of life success. Accordingly, we pay great attention to interpersonal ability in this class, and we offer the following guidelines for assessing your own development in this area:

Those who possess exemplary personal abilities are relaxed, open, responsive, and kind. Often they exhibit abilities that we tend to assign to the social sphere: personal warmth, consideration of others, hesitancy to judge, sensitivity to emotions. To some extent, these features – which are aspects of temperament more than they are learned skills – can be evaluated using rating scales based on observation. Empathy rating scales are often used for this purpose in counselling training programs. Such scales, or other, similar assessment measures, are useful as baselines, or starting points; but they cannot replace the interpretations of peers and colleagues – of regular people, in other words – in assessing the quality of interpersonal ability. There are simply far too many factors in interpersonal communication for any standardized evaluation procedure to measure.

On the other hand, many details of interpersonal ability are well-known, and may be summarized as follows:

Please pay attention to these qualities and abilities as we move forward.