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Cultural Customs: Door-Knocking

jackrabbit

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jackrabbit

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Once I found out I was a TCK (in June, I think!) I started thinking about all the cultural differences between north Canadian Native culture, and south Canadian suburban white culture. There are actually a lot of differences, some subtle, some blatant. One my family still laughs about is door-knocking.

In white suburbia, you go to a door, and if there’s no doorbell, you rap on the door three times (knock-knock-knock), wait a bit, and then do another set of three. If there’s still no answer and you’re really desperate, you might knock hard five times, and then you pretty much give up and go home. Or, if it is a good friend and the door is unlocked, you knock to let them know you’re there, open the door a crack, yell “Helloooo!” and then step inside.

The first difference in native culture is natives don’t knock as a rule. If the door is unlocked, doesn’t matter if they’re a complete stranger, they just walk right on in. It’s almost an insult to one’s hospitality if a guest feels they have to knock. You can immediately tell the ethnicity of a visitor - if they don’t knock, they’re native, if you hear somebody walk up the steps and start knocking, you know right away that they’re white. And then the house occupants start laughing at them, because knocking on an unlocked door is so, well, white, and dorky and socially backwards.

However, it all changes if the door is locked, especially if the native wanna-be-guest knows you’re home and not answering. Remember how I mentioned white people do a polite 3x knock, wait, do it again, and then usually leave unless they throw in a last 5x ‘hey is anybody home‘ knock? Well, once you get a native person to actually knock, they do not stop. Until you open the door or they get bored, whichever comes first. See, on a reserve, there’s nothing pressing they have to go do (the government pays them, so most don’t have jobs) and they’ve got all day.

Once at seven in the morning, a native man -who’d come to the door to propose marraige to my Mom, no less - started knocking. We were sleeping. He did not stop knocking. We woke up. We did not want to let him in. He knocked for half an hour. At the tail end, he got so frustrated he began kicking the door. (Very romantic marraige proposal.) When we were certain he’d left (at now seven-thirty a.m.) we opened the door to find a pointillism drawing of wildlife sitting on the step. He was proposing, alright - leaving the drawing was just the same as if in white culture he’d left a diamond ring.

My Mom did not marry him.

 What are your cultural experiences with door-knocking or customs of house-entering?


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August 6, 2008 | Filed Under General Forum 

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Comments

3 Responses to “Cultural Customs: Door-Knocking”

  1. 1
    Ayako
    Ayako Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 1:19 am

    jackrabbit: This is very interesting…and funny too. :)

    Door knocking ‘rituals’ differ from country to country. When I was in Paris 20 years ago, I was inside a toilet of a restaurant when a French woman tried to open the door, so I knocked from the inside.

    I thought I was saying this to her: Someone is inside. Please try another stall.

    However…

    French woman: There is someone inside the toilet! She is locked inside - someone please come open this door please! < —-She said this in French but I got the drift and panicked!

    Who knows if this lady was just a strange lady but I am guessing it’s not customary to knock from the inside of a toilet to let people know it’s occupied in France? ;)

    (Is this spam?)

  2. 2
    Unregistered
    mish.wsl Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Ah, that marriage proposal bit was hilarious. I don’t think I’ve come across any door knocking customs, since all the countries I’ve lived in aren’t the safest and all of us lock our doors anyway. XD But I usually have that kind of experience with wearing shoes. In Western Countries like South Africa or Australia, everyone wears their shoes in. And my mom goes absolutely balistic on the inside because in Asian culture you take of your shoes everytime, but she couldn’t exactly say anything! And after all the cleaning she did, you can see why she was annoyed. :P Eventually, most people learned that they HAD to take off their shoes in our house.

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  3. 3
    Brice
    Brice Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 9:38 am

    LOL That’s a funny marriage proposal. I logged in just to comment. haha

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