— Ludwig Wittgenstein
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?
Thomas King represents these two stories in two very different, almost oppositional ways, representing the different world views, and spiritualities that these stories are told from. The biblical tale talks about the hierarchy of creation, with God at the top, and humans having dominion over the land. It expresses the ideology of our creation being an act of an authority figure that we must be devoted to in order to survive the ultimate turmoil of existence. Meanwhile, the story of Charm talks about the world as an imperfect place, where mistakes are made, characters are flawed, and yet still have value with how they live. No authority instructed Charm on how to make the world. But with the support of her newfound community of animals, she was able to help them make the land for them, on and near which they can live in harmony in pursuit of their survival. (23)
King is doing a few things by setting these two stories at ends with each other. First, he is showcasing how these two ideologies have shaped history. He is, of course, representing beliefs that are in some way contrary with each other, because when we view how these two worldviews interacted with each other in our past, the result was one worldview assuming dominance over the other, and attempting to control them “for their own good.” The dominance of one group over another is not an idea that is formed in Charm’s story of creation, but is rather built on over and over again throughout the many stories in the Bible. Here, King is comparing the worlds of these two culture’s spiritualities and the world that makes up our history.
Second, King is breaking from the colonial norm of assuming one truth and embracing the complex nature of the world that lives outside of our minds. It is a colonial mindset that finds co-existence of opposing views discomforting. After all, where in the Biblical story all truth and all power points towards god, in the story of charm, life is permeated with cooperation and harmony.
Dichotomies are a colonial construct. Believing that there is an inherent, mutually exclusive opposition between states of being (rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, etc.) is a way that colonial mindset boils down complex ideas into easy to understand bites that let us to make what feels like meaningful statements about the world. As King puts it “we trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” (25)
We have ideas about how the world is black and white that we have been taught to embrace as soon as we start learning the English language. As young children we learn all about male and female, boy and girl, and yet there is no standard in grade-level education where students are expected to develop a broader understanding of the differences between gender identity, gender expression, sexuality, and sex, and how the many variations along the spectrum between boy and girl, male and female, are expected to fit in to what we know.
It feels controversial to say, but few, if any, of the binary ways of thinking that we accept in everyday life actually line up with reality and our lived experience. That is not to say that the colonial framework is fundamentally flawed (though this may be contested), but more that the language that we have learned in this culture simply does not recognize a gap between what our words boil down we understand and the complexity of what we experience.
The idea that things are black and white are an essential part of what King describes from the colonial creation story: all creative power lies with God, and it is through his actions that anything exists. (24) With ultimate power, knowledge, and good will in the hands of one being, there exists the faith that there is one single truth, and only one perspective that matters.
With this objectivity, the world that we take in can be easily divided up into categories that we can share and compare with others. We categorize ideas into ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and ‘success’ and ‘failure,’ because our words demand that we put things into these categories, rather than accept them as something broader.
King puts these two stories at ends to showcase how the colonial framework of competition and hierarchy has a tendency to dominate our ways of thinking. He is showcasing how colonial thinking alters our expectations. By posing these two stories in conflict, King is demonstrating how these two worldviews have clashed in the past, continue to clash in the present, and how these two stories express the ideologies that each culture holds dear.
I had misread the final paragraph in this chapter when I read it the first time. King had previously set the scene, talking about how the conceit of the biblical narrative seems to fuel our thirst for goods such as electricity and private property, and allows us to control the expression of race and gender which we make them discriminatory. Through this, I read the final lines as “but don’t say you would have lived your life the same way had you only heard this story.” I quickly realized my mistake, though I thought the implication here was clear, and I have not been able to stop thinking of it this way: The stories that we grow up with shape the way that the move through the world.
Green, Hank. “Human Sexuality is Complicated….” YouTube, uploaded by vlogbrothers, 12 Oct. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXAoG8vAyzI
King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: a Native Narrative. Anansi, 2007.
Quinn, Emily. “The way we think about biological sex is wrong.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 6 Mar. 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_quinn_the_way_we_think_about_biological_sex_is_wrong
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico.
Bonus Link:
Piapot, Ntawnis. “9-year-old Sask. girl embraces identity through makeup, ribbon skirts.” CBC Indigenous, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/9-year-old-indigenous-girl-makeup-identity-1.5921066. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021,
7 replies on “Blog 2:4 :: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Hi Zac,
We answered the same prompt this week, and reading your answer made me mentally revisit what I wrote in my own blog post. I think your insight that “dichotomies are a colonial construct” is a really sharp one, one that is so deeply engrained in my own settler-colonial brain that I did not even realize the fallacy of assumption I was making until you pointed it out. You are right; colonialism seeks to categorize the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and thus has a dichotomy located squarely at its core.
However, I also have to wonder if dichotomies are always tied only to colonialism. Since before the colonial era, humans have tended towards a binary view of the world; for example, divine vs. profane. Furthermore, dichotomies like male vs female have defined centuries of societies. Essentially since humans began to form civilizations, this biological difference has rendered a perceived inherent opposition between men and women that has dictated the lives of both since before settler-colonialism, even since before Christianity; societies that do not even practice Christianity still tend to subordinate women. Thus, while I concede that dichotomous thinking is absolutely a core tenet of colonialism, and that other cultures may not rely on binary organization and see the world as more unified (as it seems King is suggesting certain Indigenous communities do), it seems like perhaps binary thinking is something rooted deeper than colonialism alone.
I am very curious to hear your thoughts on this; my thinking is not complete here, as one person’s thinking can never be, and I think there is a lot of room for discussion here!
Hi Victoria,
Thank you for your response! My thinking was not entirely complete either. I still have a lot to say in my original post that didn’t make it in.
I mostly intended to describe the character of colonialism, and didn’t think much about the implication that dichotomies might be somehow unique to it. I think that the colonizing culture has created language around dichotomies and a fear of contradiction, but that doesn’t need to be exclusive to the colonial world. But what I do think is the case is that black and white thinking seems to be essential to the colonial mindset in a way that it isn’t in other parts of the world.
In this same vein, I do not believe that this colonial mindset invented the dichotomous gender roles that are so common in the world that we are situated in. But this colonial mindset has amplified and perpetuated the oppression of gender roles that stray outside of the dichotomy that it is happy with. For instance, indigenous women’s roles in leadership and agriculture was evidence of white superiority to settlers, as indigenous communities did not respect the same dichotomous gender roles as Victorian Europe.
https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/marginalization_of_aboriginal_women/
I’ve been trying to think of other examples of dichotomies that exist outside of a particular culture but I am having some difficulty. If you have any ideas, let me know! Yin and Yang come to mind, but most philosophies representing the dualist views of light and dark tend to be dialectical and openly embrace contradiction in ways that the European colonial culture would not.
Hi Victoria,
Thanks for a great comment. I am thinking that colonialism, in terms of one group of people subjugating another group of people to foreign rules and taking the land and natural resources, is indeed an ancient practice, more ancient than the Roman Empire, and more ancient than beginnings of christianity. As for the possibility that “…since humans began to form civilizations, this biological difference has rendered a perceived inherent opposition between men and women that has dictated the lives of both since before settler-colonialism, …” there is a great book called The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler, that tells a different story. Thanks for a thoughtful comment!
Hi Zac,
I found your blog post really interesting to read about how the world is so complex, yet, people of colonial societies tend to view it through this “black and white” lens. I especially found your last paragraph to be intriguing because I agree on the fact that our perception of the world and how we live deeply relates to the experiences we grow up around. I think that’s why when we get older we tend to believe that we are seeing the real world through an “objective lens,” however, one could argue that is only because they have experienced the world through one cultural perspective. I think until we break down this binary way of thinking and begin to look at the complexity of topics like gender as you mention, we will continue to follow this belief where we think we see the world objectively.
Anyways, that was an awesome blog post, I really enjoyed reading it!
Hi Kyle,
Thank you for your comment!
I want to hear more about the “objective lens” you’re describing. It’s an interesting idea about how our perception of the world hardens as we get older, believing our point of view to be ‘objective.’ Perhaps this is partly that our perspective tends to be ‘confirmed’ by the world we live in: our binary ways of thinking come from the world we grew up in, and so we see our own ideas reflected back in it. Like an echo-chamber.
But then maybe this experience isn’t unique to older people. If you ask a child about the way the world is, they are often ready with an answer and it can be difficult to change their minds. We tend to think of this kind of behaviour as quite child-like, but then you also recognize this rigidity as something that is quite unique to aging in this culture.
Hi Zac,
Thanks for another thoughtful and informative post. I especially loved your connection to gender and sexuality – relevant and apt examples of something seen as binary that has been proven time and again to be anything but.
Your discussion of dichotomous thinking made me recall a twitter post I saw the other day. I searched for it, but I cannot find it and so I will try to paraphrase. The post said something along the lines of: The fact that many settlers’ reaction to Indigenous claims for land rights and decolonization elicit questions like “You want us all to just leave? Where would we all go?” is such an example of colonial thinking. This is assuming that Indigenous people’s only option is to do the same thing that was done to them and that conquering/killing/oppressing is the only way to exist in a place.
I thought this was a really interesting example of dichotomies as a colonial construct.
Without meaning that this is necessarily the goal, how do you think we work ourselves out of this kind of dichotomous thinking when it is so entrenched in our colonial culture?
Hi Laura,
I really liked your connection to the #landback movement, and it reminded me of some of the posts on twitter and instagram I saw back in October. I’ve found a similar post to the ones I saw, link down below! This one focuses a lot on what the actual implications of #landback would be, and how they wouldn’t mean “send settlers back to Europe” even just in the pragmatic sense, but also talks about what you alluded to: how conquering and displacing people is just the colonial mindset for how one group comes to “own” the land.
I think that a large part of moving away from this dichotomous mindset would involve a lot of antiracist change to take place, including de-centering white, male voices; and allowing stakeholders from all aspects of life to be included in the discussion, not just those who maintain power.
In a way, a dichotomous mindset is nurtured by the echo-chambers that we see throughout social media and the real, social world as well. When the only voices you hear on a particular topic come from the same white, patriarchal understanding of how things are done, then anything that doesn’t line up with that same understanding will feel ‘wrong.’
A lot of this de-centering work can be done from the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action (below). But certainly not all of it, and not even close to half of it. But a lot of this work is already being done by activists. So I suppose the real change will be in getting people to listen to the people that are trying to get this work done.
https://twitter.com/iridienne/status/1315591917267083264
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/indigenous-people/aboriginal-peoples-documents/calls_to_action_english2.pdf