Auto/ethno/graphy as Continental Driftwork: A Fragile Weathering of Icebergs Drifting and Stories Shifting …

Abstract

Drawing on conceptions of post-structuralist geographies as driftwork, Marcus Doel (1999) contends that “geography is an act, an event, a happening” (11). Sometimes a storybook becomes an event. A story happens as a geographical event. As a teacher of English Language Arts, I want to engage the reader in the story of Lulie the Iceberg (Takamado 1998) as geoliteracy¹ as eco-literacy²—as an act, an event, a happening—drawing from a teaching life as auto/ethno/graphy, and from a teaching praxis within the conceptual space of a/r/tography. Working out on the slope [/] de-stabilizes the text and those working nearby. I want to work with David Jardine (2006) as he weaves his words like textus—with a story whose telling is not yet over.

Poststructuralist geography is a driftwork . . .

Marcus Doel 1999, 3

Driftworks in the plural, for the question is not of leaving one shore, but several, simultaneously; what is at work is not one current, pushing and tugging, but different drives and tractions.

Jean-François Lyotard 1984, 10

Education must become like textus, like a text, a story whose telling is not yet over.

David Jardine 2006, xii

A story always begins somewhere in the middle. This one began in the summer of 1976. I was co-instructor of an Inuit classroom assistants’ course in Iqaluit on Baffin Island. I had lived in the Arctic for five years and, having just completed a two year teaching assignment in Pangnirtung, was preparing to depart for Japan in search of another teaching adventure. An unexpected opportunity to visit Greenland presented itself mid-summer. It was impossible to resist. I flew from Iqaluit on Baffin Island to Kangerlussuaq or Søndre Strømfjord in Greenland (Grønland). We embarked on the M.S. Disko, a passenger ferry, and traveled north along the west coast of Greenland. We docked at Jakobshavn, now Illulissat, where we disembarked from the ferry for scenic tours by smaller motor boats to drift slowly alongside Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO Heritage Site with an active glacier. We witnessed the birth of an iceberg as an arche-texture of wonder to cadences of ice music. We had been drifting within the splendor of icy passageways for some time but now this was to be the ultimate ice show. It would be decades later, in a classroom in Vancouver, that a story book would arrive at my door to begin a series of recollections as an evocative event in an auto/ethno/graphic journey; a traveler’s tale transforms itself with a series of close reading events. This time, an iceberg named Lulie, newly calved, embarks on a journey to the Antarctic in search of the Elders. The story follows me to my teacher preparation and graduate classes in the Nation’s capital. And reminds me to remember the wisdom of my Elders.