I think that these are two extremely different stories about how the earth was created. I think King showed such different stories to highlight different cultural backgrounds. One is about religion, about showing that God is the almighty, and how the bible was passed down. The other one might be passed down by oral storytelling and has probably been modified more in the details because it is more collaborative and less authoritarian. Indigenous people have always been working together as a group and as a family. There is much more of a community focused perspective on life than Western ways of knowing and living. They recognise that they need each other in life and they have always been a community. That might be the reason why the earth was told to be made by Charm and other animals collaborating with the earth. They need to feel the power of being united. On the other hand, in the western story God has created the earth. They have a religious background and they have followed it for the past century. It is their belief and how a lot of Western people were taught about the world. I think King showed these two very contrasting stories because it creates a very black and white effect; only one story can be the ‘right’ one, the ‘believable’ one. But when we start to analyze the stories and compare how they teach us different values and worldviews, we can begin to realize how misleading it is to think so black and white. When we read both stories consecutively, we can start to reflect on what our beliefs are, and why they may be so different from others’, which makes us also understand and appreciate different worldviews more. If we can look at the two stories, and we choose which one is more believable to us, we must consider why we think it is more believable. Is it because the story is inherently more true, or because it is more aligned with what we were taught as children growing up in certain cultural context?
References
King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: a Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press Inc., 2010.
Hi Coco!
It was really interesting to read your thoughts on the difference between the creation stories of Christianity and the Native American.
My blog post about these two creation stories also had the notion that they were somewhat contrasting one another. But in the sense of credibility of the two stories, but when I read your blog post that they were actually trying to teach different values such as community and helping one another, I could really see that considering these two as black and white is really unnecessary.
But if there is no creation story for a particular culture, how would the people of that culture cope with the absence of their origin?