Answering Question 1
With his introductory “‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened'” to The Truth About Stories Thomas King is asking his readers to examine storytelling from a (post)colonialist perspective, to confront issues of narrative appropriation, cultural genocide, and the subsuming of counter-narratives by hegemonic, colonial master-narratives. He does this through his overtly contrasting presentations of two first stories, the authoritative Genesis against the captivating tale of how Charm fell from the sky, and his subsequent discussion of belief and binaries: West versus Indigenous, Christian versus Native, hierarchy versus cooperation – colonizer versus colonized. It is that latter dichotomy which, although perhaps not explicitly arrived at by King in his introduction, is what concerns us most here: to take the perspective of Western hegemony, Genesis is the Christian truth of the world and Indigenous creation myth is just that, “myth” and nothing more, an entertaining story to tell one’s friends or family to be in awe of the wondrous storytelling capacities of the mystical Indian.
Following his poetic, captivating telling of how Charm fell from the sky, King writes of the story as perhaps being “a little exotic,” like “the colourful T-shirts that we buy on vacation” (20). Eventually, he writes, these shirts, these stories, are “left to gather dust on shelves” (21). In North America, Native stories are exoticized and rendered fables. The Canadian Museum of History has a dedicated page to the cataloging of what they call “traditional stories and creation stories,” narratives that they must emphasize are “more than legends,” “embodying a view of how the world fits together” (“Traditional Stories and Creation Stories”). Are Christian creation narratives similarly systematically curated as entertaining artifacts, contextless pieces of an exotic culture meant for museum preservation?
No. The Bible, for many, is the truth – it is the North American truth. It is the master narrative. Look no further than the phrase the gospel truth to mean an absolute truth — and its cultural usage, as in the song of the same name from Disney’s Hercules, where it is used to describe the “honesty” of the Muses’ rendition of Hercules’ tale in opposition to the supposed fantasticality of the grandiose “Greek tragedy” version that the Muses so object to — to understand the significance of Biblical narrative in the formation of Western sociocultural hegemony. King confronts and wrestles with this dichotomy in his introduction because our society imposes a dichotomy. He recounts the story of Charm as just that – a story, well-written and fantastical, with clever dialogue and settings imaginatively described. In contrast, his recounting of Genesis is short and matter-of-factly straightforward, as though expecting us (rightfully so, for most of us Western readers) to be familiar with the whole framework already – “a less misogynist reading would blame them both,” he writes, revealing Genesis as a tale so well-understood, so ubiquitous, in North America that there exist myriad readings of it.
In many ways, the process of decolonization begins with removing Indigenous storytelling from voyeuristic museum halls and returning the traditions and tales to the communities who told them first. Aman Sium and Eric Ritskes for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, in an issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, write of Indigenous storytelling as “an act of living resistance”, examining its political and decolonizing power as a form of community resurgence. As Lenard Monkman for CBC notes, the 1885-1951 potlatch ban instituted against the First Nations by the settler Canadian government has had long-lasting effects on Canada’s First Nations and Indigenous peoples: this settler-colonial imposition against the storytelling and truth-telling traditions of Canada’s Native communities – the stories, as J. Edward Chamberlin notes, which “tell people where they came from, and why they are here” (2) – has led to the loss of many ceremonial and leadership traditions for Indigenous women. The erasure of Indigenous truth-telling leads to the loss of Indigenous culture and community. King’s dichotomous presentation of the two first stories in his introduction is how he confronts the appropriation of Indigenous storytelling by our settler colonialist state and the use of Western, Christian, settler colonialist first stories to assert a hegemonic dominance on stolen land. We can learn perhaps, through his work, that it is time this appropriation be stopped, the erasure of Indigenous storytelling be counteracted. This is what Metis artist Kenneth Lavallee is doing through his examination of the intersection between Indigenous and Biblical creation stories, his confrontation of this “dichotomy” between these two worlds. Is it truly a dichotomy?
Works Cited
Ice River Films. “What do Indigenous mythologies and Biblical creation stories have in common?” CBC Arts, 5 Mar. 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists/what-do-indigenous-mythologies-and-biblical-creation-stories-have-in-common-1.4560570. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
“Traditional Stories and Creation Myths.” Canadian Museum of History, https://www.historymuseum.ca/history-hall/traditional-and-creation-stories/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Menken, Alan. “The Gospel Truth.” YouTube, uploaded by xFliiy, 18 Sept. 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRq7lLawQB4. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Sium, Aman, and Eric Ritskes. “Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. I-X, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19626/16256. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Monkman, Lenard. “Historical ban on potlatch ceremony has lingering effects for Indigenous women, author says.” CBC News, 25 Mar. 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/historical-ban-spirituality-felt-indigenous-women-today-1.4036528. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.
Hi Leo,
Thank you for this perceptive post. I grappled with this same question and appreciate the insight you bring to it. I especially agree with your discussion of how King evokes the exoticization–and ultimately exploitation and suppression–of Indigenous storytelling and admire your gestures toward the decolonial efforts of people like Kenneth Lavallee toward common ground.
Your point about “the loss of many ceremonial and leadership traditions for Indigenous women” reminds me of a chapter of Rebecca Solnit’s (perhaps almost classic) book “Men Explain Things to Me” in which she meditates on the women who are erased in patrilineal genealogies (like many Biblical ones)–invisible presences whose acts of making and telling are nonetheless integral to our lives and cultures (Solnit calls them the “grandmothers”; 72).
Biblical narratives, as we know all the better from our readings this week, certainly played a significant role in underpinning colonial missions of hegemony. I’m not sure I agree with you, however, about the extent to which the Bible is “the North American truth” today. A latent, ubiquitous (perhaps in a certain way “authoritative”) cultural and psychological presence, certainly, but the “truth”? Do many people even acknowledge that Genesis includes not one but two creation stories which differ in significant detail? So King’s apparent dichotomizing critique starts to look a little bit overdetermined (he could, you might think, have more pertinently critiqued neoliberal capitalism). But maybe that’s part of the point, part of the subtle destabilization of dichotomies that you point out.
Thanks again!
Hey Connor, thanks for the great reply. I get what you mean about my usage of the word “truth” – what I meant with that word is what you write, of the Bible being a “ubiquitous cultural and psychological presence.” So less so “truth” by the dictionary definition – like you write, many, many individuals and institutions misinterpret and misrepresent Genesis – deliberately or otherwise. That’s something else to consider: the shaping of “truths” or untruths, ubiquitous cultural narratives to fashion hegemonic values and subjugate. I’m thinking of Chamberlin and his usage of “truth” when he writes of how the “storytelling traditions to which they belong tell the different truths of religion and science, of history and the arts” (2). Perhaps it is better to consider Biblical narrative more simply as a master text, or master narrative, but this brings us to examining Indigenous narratives as “counter” – they were here before the Bible came to North America and did not arise out of settler-colonialism. This dichotomizing — which the literature still often falls prey to, a clean-cut differentiating between master- and counter-narratives in examining oppressed/oppressive identity and liberation — is what King is criticizing in “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” in his critique of that term, “post-colonialism,” as establishing a “chronological order” and depending “on the arrival of Europeans for their raison d’etre” (189).
Thanks for the Solnit mention as well, great connection!
Leo
Thank you for such a well crafted and thoughtful post.
Your writing made me think about aspects of King’s writing that I hadn’t considered before. For instance, the ways that King appears to apologize for the fanciful aspects of the story as he starts it off — preparing the audience for an engaging story. You point out how King defensively mentions the exoticism of the story “like the colourful T-shirts that we buy on vacation.” He heads off the audience’s predisposition to doubt and judge a story on the basis of Judeo-Christian values. I had recognized these aspects as a comical part of the narrative, one that is pointing out our biases as we listen for entertainment. But I hadn’t considered the careful art of it, how he is both setting up the story — dispelling biases before they could be articulated so that those distractions could be ignored — and also pointing out a distinct difference in how these stories need to be treated to be considered on the same level; all in a few small parentheticals.
It makes me wonder about how you write about the erasure of indigenous culture. Is this tactic that King is using to highlight our biases necessary because as a culture we have silenced and erased indigenous voices and their traditional stories and customs? Or is this a psychological aspect of colonial dominance, not acknowledging the various cultures that differ from the Judeo-Christian, European standard?
The short (and accurate) answer, I’m sure, is both, but I’m curious if there is one in particular that you feel inspired King’s style in this chapter, more?
Hi, Zac. Thanks for the reply. As to your question – I believe that King was inspired by both aspects, the latter of which I hadn’t thought of as much until you put it into the words you did. So this dichotomy between master/counter-narrative is dangerous not just in its erasing of Indigenous voice and history but also in its hierarchical placement of this “Judeo-Christian” standard as not only superior, but also alone – it’s a hierarchy that erases everything below it, a pseudo-hierarchy in many ways. Thanks for your great insight!