In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.

Why do you think this is so?

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If stories are the vehicle through which we navigate conflicts to reach a point of a more stable stasis, where does this resolution come from, how does it manifest itself in relation to what has happened, and why is it so powerful? In order to answer this week’s question, I approached it not by thinking about the starting point at once, but by looking at the destination to make sense of the beginning in the context of the whole narrative trajectory. Why is the beginning written as it is, constructed by the author as a point of departure from which the characters and other forces diverge and converge?

First of all, we must study the peculiar structure of this story. The story is written in four parts and consists of a multitude of characters whose lives are set on very different courses and directed by diverse personal philosophies. Eli has chosen to relinquish his comfortable status to fight for a cause charged with moral conviction, while his nephew Lionel seeks to improve his social status and is a helpless puppet in the current of events that swirl about him. Alberta seeks to live a life of complete autonomy and control, while the forces operating at the backdrop of the story seem to be continuously pulling the characters ever closer towards the sundance, whether or not they are willing participants. In other words, they must confront their sense of community and individualism and engage in a precarious balancing act of convergence and divergence. Because of the way King seems to unravel his novel into several yarns of narrative, the novel can easily be mistaken as a collection of short stories told simultaneously, if it were not for some unifying element. The creation story might possibly serve as the unifying element to make sense of their point of departure and provide hints to their ultimate destination, but King doesn’t need to use the creation story to tie these characters together. These main characters are of Native descent, and their common ground could easily have been their heritage. Furthermore, all the characters are connected in a genealogical web with familial links and a history of correspondence, so the creation story, in my opinion, is not the necessary basis for connecting the characters themselves.

I suspect that the creation story plays an elemental role in this narrative because King hopes to engage the reader with his story. It is difficult for an Aboriginal writer to tell an Aboriginal story to a non-Aboriginal audience . How does an Aboriginal writer even begin to convince the reader that the story is worth listening to, that it’s not just some mythical legend that has little in the way of instructing our 21st scientific worldview? King does so with the creation story, because that way the non-Aboriginal audience has some footing, or even a stake in the story. At the point of creation there are no boundaries separating the Natives and the Europeans. The nexus between the reader and the stories that he is confronted with becomes a locus that has been decolonized by first removing the authoritative tone of the European voice (with the effect emphasized by entitling the Christian God as Dog). As we proceed in King’s novel after this partial erasure of preconceived notions, we are encouraged by this narrative device to disarm our sensors for veracity and expose ourselves to the ambiguity of literature and of life itself, where absolute answers begin to blur and we begin to approach, albeit cautiously, the subjective nature of truth. This seemingly dangerous philosophical quagmire is actually the only possible point of story creation, because new stories can only be told once past stories are displaced through distortion, deconstruction, and destruction. However, the process of revitalizing old stories can ultimately create a more inclusive and intimate space for the accommodation of all cultures.

I will end this entry with a lighter analogy: spending Canada Day 5000 kilometers away from home in Moncton, New Brunswick. What makes this city figuratively closer to home (or home itself) then 40 km south of Richmond across the US border? My connection to home in Moncton begins with the creation story of Canada 148 years ago, when places of disparate histories and impossibly vast distances converged in a single document, and today we continue to observe the ways in which Canadian cities and its people incessantly moving farther from and closer to one another as the forces and agents act upon one another. There is no objective truth in the Canada national narrative, but we can certainly trace our point of origin and I hope that it might inform us of our direction as we head into the future.

WORKS CITED

Choi, Timothy. “Four Flags.” 2015. JPEG file.

“Sun Dance” Native Americans Online. N.p. N.d. Web. 3 July 2015. <http://www.native-americans-online.com/native-american-sun-dance.html>