This is a review of The Truth of Stories by Thomas King.
This review examines the ways in which the Native American stories collected by Thomas King have been used to shape lives, value systems and public policies. It pays special attention to the controversial way stories have been used both to reflect and to manipulate images of oppressed ethnic groups.
In six essays, a Canadian professor of literature gives a Native North American perspective on the relationship between stories, culture, and social history. Thomas King's blend of storytelling and analysis models a creative approach to critical methodology.
This review not only introduces an important interpreter of Native American stories, but also suggests ways in which Euro/American scholarship can learn from Native American traditions.
The ability to storytell scholarship is rare, but Thomas King weds knowledge and narrative with deceptive ease in these six essays on Native American literature, history, and identity. With folkloric repetition and strategic asides to the audience, he illuminates one story by telling others, some personal, some tribal, and some national, all the while commenting on the process of storytelling itself in the tone of informal oral narrative. He has had some practice. A professor in the English Department at the University of Guelph, King has also written fiction noted for its interwoven narrative patterns (Medicine River; Green Grass, Running Water; Truth and Bright Water; One Good Story, That One). His radio show, the Dead Dog Café, collected a faithful following partly because of the kind of humor he displays in these essays – wry and right on target. His sense of pace, of building momentum, pausing for suspense, and bringing the story home, is unerring. So with this kind of attention to telling, what's the tale?
King begins at the beginning, with the childhood story that has shaped his life and two creation myths that have shaped and reflected divergent cultures, the Judeo‐Christian story from Genesis and the Native story of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. The first is hierarchical, directive, and ultimately punitive. The second is cooperative, persuasive, and ultimately complex. (One quibble: we never learn which Native tradition this story comes from.) A master of the rhetorical question, King asks us:
What if the creation story in Genesis had featured a flawed deity who was understanding and sympathetic rather than autocratic and rigid? Someone who, in the process of creation, found herself lost from time to time and in need of advice, someone who was willing to accept a little help with the more difficult decisions?
What if the animals had decided on their own names? What if Adam and Eve had simply been admonished for their foolishness?
I love you, God could have said, but I'm not happy with your behaviour. Let's talk this over. Try to do better next time.
Stories are both wondrous and dangerous, as King illustrates with Leslie Silko's witch story from Ceremony. What if we start out with the wrong one?
Well, try again. King offers us plenty of choices in these essays, first delivered as the 2003 Massey Lectures and then honored in book form with one of Canada's highest literary accolades, the Trillium Award. Keeping his discourse from becoming a “duck‐billed platitude” is the fun King pokes at himself, us, and the stories themselves. King has also written two children's books, A Coyote Columbus Story, 1992, and Coyote Sings to the Moon, 1998, and his storytelling tone recalls Julius Lester's irreverent contemporary vernacular in adapting African American lore, especially the Brer Rabbit stories (Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales, 1999) and a folktale twice removed from Zora Neale Hurston's “How God Made the Butterflies” (What a Truly Cool World, 1999).
There is a tall tale element here, too. In the second essay, which explores issues of identity and racism, King describes various journeys that he undertook in search of himself, including one car trip for which his mother prepared him with “an entire tree of bananas, a vineyard of grapes, an orchard of apples and oranges,” and much, much more. His sarcasm heats up in the third essay on nationalism and colonialism. Citing some lurid descriptions of Native Americans by early white settlers (“savage and wild, strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as garden poles”), King skewers the national identification of a mythic figure – the “wild, free, powerful, noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, solitary” but dead Indian – versus the urban, educated reality that is himself and other writers he knows. These writers he considers in the fourth essay, beginning with Louis Owens – who killed himself in an airport parking lot on the way to a conference – and ending with Robert Alexie's Porcupines and China Dolls, in which the protagonist “puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. And in the novel, as in life, whether he lives or dies depends on which story he believes”.
In essay five, the tale of Coyote's cheating the ducks out of all their original long beautiful feathers serves as King's analogy to legislation that has robbed Indians of their land and cultural status. The interweaving of story and history here is particularly effective, and the essay ends, as do all the others, with a reminder of the segment's dominant story and an admonition: “Take it. It's yours. Do with it what you will … Forget it. But don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now.” In fact, all the essays begin with a tale within a tale about “the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle”. No one knows how many turtles, “but it's turtles all the way down. The truth about stories is that that's all we are.”
King's “Afterwords” explores the difference between oral and written, private and public stories, along with the ethics generated by them. “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story.” Of course, it is risky to tell different stories. When Barre Toelken told the story of giving back his research tapes to be destroyed by Yellowman's widow (“The Yellowman tapes, 1966‐1997” in Journal of American Folklore, 1998), he was excoriated by anthropological academia. But maybe if enough different stories get told, things change. Maybe European American scholarship has something to learn from Native American scholarship. Whatever the case, I have told you the story of King's book. Read it for yourself, or forget it, but do not say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You have heard it now.
