Question: First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

King creates a genuine tone in his telling of the earth diver story while he uses a sober voice to recite the sense of veracity in the case of Genesis. In his first line, he already gives the reader a hint to the reason behind these styles of telling. In the Diver story, King uses a tone that highlights the story’s exuberance, but diminishes its authority, while, in Genesis, he uses a tone that creates a sense of authority. Examining the purposes of these stories, we see that the main aspect that both stories coincide with is the creation of the world and the origin of humans, but their purposes strike deeper than what meets the eye. The church of the medieval era was a position of great power and influence over the people at the time. “Genesis” was one of their holy scripture, which was a method to inform and pass knowledge to the masses. It would become less genuine if the Pope or the priests decided to recite the Genesis in the same manner that King had done with the “Diver” story.

Whether ancient or modern Western culture, it is a product of monotheism and hierarchies. A system of power that puts heavy emphasis on control, law, and order. The story of Genesis is a clear representation of this mode of culture with having a single creator who knows everything. The order is kept by spreading the belief if a single being, a creator of everything that rules and governs the world. Meanwhile, we see that the Diver story is quite the opposite. There isn’t a single creator, and Charm isn’t even the power that created the world. The world existed before Charm, and it is her two children that built the world up through the help of the other water creatures.

It is clear as day to see the differences between the stories. Although King urges us to see through the dichotomies between stories, I believe it is because of the innate dichotomies between Eastern and Western styles of stories that King tries to reveal the hidden purposes of each side. The stories that we tell ourselves are often a means to explain the unexplained, but this isn’t always the case for every story out there. The stories told by the Western cultures of the world aren’t used in the same manner as the ones told by other cultures. If we look at the stories of Jesus Christ and God, we find it clear throughout history that it was a means to control and dictate order, rather than a medium to pass down knowledge. For example, if we look at the story of the “Rainbow Crow“, originating from the Lenapé people, it a story that explains how the world obtained winter, fire and why our crows are black and squawk. On the other hand, if we look at Genesis, we see that strict powers of God govern the world, and God punishes those who move out of line.

King isn’t highlighting the dichotomies to undermine his message of blurring the lines between story; rather, he is encouraging us to look at the messages behind the stories, as well as the teachers who tell them. It is clear that the world is divided by many dichotomies, and it shows in the stories as well. For example, “Genesis” speaks of night and day, man and women, and the rotation of the earth, sun, and the moon. Similarly, the “Diver” story follows in a similar suite with the twins representing light and dark, winter, summer, sun and shadow, and chaos and order. Although these dichotomies exist, it also parallels each other between stories. King may want to highlight the fact that the dichotomies are shared values or beliefs between cultures, just like the Charm and Genesis stories.

Works Cited

Hìtakonanu’laxk. Rainbow Crow (Mànàka’has). Interlink Books, New York, 1994.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are the Stories? Vintage Canada, 2004.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Marsden, A.J. & Nesbitt, William. “Myths of Light and Dark”. Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/myth-the-mind/201805/myths-light-and-dark, Accessed Febuary 7, 2020.