Student Question
How is intentional fallacy discussed in "Goodbye, Snauq" by Lee Maracle?
Quick answer:
One example of intentional fallacy which is discussed in "Goodbye, Snauq" has to do with the narrator's response to the Squamish Nation's decision to sell their rights to Snauq to the Canadian government for $92 million. The narrator initially fails to allow herself to assess the decision based on the impact that it has on her, but she eventually realizes that the "impact" of the decision is as important to the story as the decision-makers' intentions or reasons.
Intentional fallacy is the fallacy of grounding an assessment of some text or action or behavior on the person's intention rather than on one's own response to that text or action or behavior. Waking up after having passed out in front of a classroom full of students, the narrator of "Goodbye, Snauq" says to these students, half of which are Indigenous,
"There is so much more to history than meets the eye. We need to know what happened, and what happened has nothing to do with the dates, the events, and the gentlemen involved, it has to do with impact."
The narrator has received a letter from her "own government, the Squamish First Nation government," acquainting her—as a result of her ancestry—with the news that "a deal had been brokered" by the Squamish Nation and the Canadian government: the Squamish Nation would be paid some $92 million to surrender any...
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further claim for the area of the country known as Snauq. Throughout the text, she wrestles with her feelings about this: first getting very drunk and thinking of her ancestors and family members, feeling as though she "had no right to feel this depressed, to want to be this intoxicated, to want to remove [her]self from this decision, this moment, or this world. " She feels that she "had no right to curse the century in which [she] was born, the political times in which [she] live[s], and certainly [she] had no right to hate the decision makers, [her] elected officials, for having brokered the deal." In short, the narrator attempts to deny or ignore her own feelings about the forfeit of Snauq, a town to which she feels personally linked and in which she'd hoped, one day, to live. She realizes that the $92 million is "more than triple [their] total GNP [...]" as though she would assess the decision by how lucrative it is. The narrator considers the Indigenous people who built Snauq and were then not allowed to participate fully in the life of the place, who were forced to choose between their own Indigenous identities and abandoning those identities in order to fit in with their colonizers. In short, she tries to assess the decision to sell their right to Snauq in lots of different ways, all while trying to dull the "rage" she feels with wine. It is her response and her acknowledgement of that response which is demanded for her to come to terms, or something like it, with the decision. It is only when she passes out and comes to, surrounded by concerned students, that she realizes that the "impact" of the decision on her is as important a part of the history of the decision—perhapsmore important—than all the reasons for having made it. So she and her students go to Snauq so that she can say goodbye.