1.) 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…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?

                                                               –  Lesson 2.2, Blog Prompt #1

This weeks blog prompt does one extremely important and powerful thing: it forces us to stop and reflect on the ideologies and belief systems that structure our lives.  At first, King’s use of dichotomies in his retelling of the two creation stories, the “The Earth Diver” story on one hand and the “Genesis” story on the other, appear problematic and incorrect.  They support the very detrimental type of binary thinking that exists in so many other aspects of our society, including the hierarchical dichotomy created between oral and written cultures by the by the scholars at the Toronto School of Communication that suggest “communication is a competition between eye and ear”.  Yet this is the exact type of flawed thinking that so many, including Chamberlain, MacNeil, and King himself, criticize and caution against.  So, as readers, and critical thinkers, we are faced with a dilemma.  Why does King demonstrate and almost even encourage the very thing he opposes?

In my reading, I believe King’s true thoughts and purpose can be found just below the surface of a very “tongue-in-cheek” performance.  It is true many times that one cannot see the flaws in one’s actions or thoughts until we are removed from the situation and forced to come face to face with them and the inevitable repercussions that come with them.  By structuring his retelling of the two creation stories in a way that supports the dichotomized way of thinking that is the “elemental structure of Western society”, King shows us the fault in our habits by allowing us to come to the conclusion ourselves.  It is our knee-jerk reaction to want to structure things in dichotomies, to see one thing, in this case a creation story, as “the one” or “true”.  It’s comfortable and safe and fits the other dichotomies that we have grown up abiding by “rich/poor, black/white, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature, male/female” and so on, even if they don’t make sense or are toxic.  When King says “and theres the problem…if we believe one story as sacred, we must see the other as secular”, he is not making a statement, but rather probing us to question this belief that we hold, not him.  Is it true that only one story must rule as truth above the rest?  Its true, they are vastly different.  One has cooperating talking animals, a main character named Charm, while the other “celebrates law, order, and good government” created out of competition and authority.  But as we learned with last week’s blog assignment on homes, difference doesn’t mean inauthenticity.  Many of us had quite varied ideas of what home was, in from road trips in dingy cars to dorm rooms to nature landscapes all over the world.  But that doesn’t make any one of ours stories or beliefs of home any less true or real.  There is no one true story or definition of home.  They all feel real to the people they belong to, the people that choose to believe in them.  The same exists about creation stories.  Therefore, the “tidy dichotomies” that King exemplifies in his retelling of the Native “The Earth-Diver” creation story and Christian “Genesis” story exist for us to do one thing: tear them down.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003.

Li, Charmaine. “2.1 A Home With Many Adventures” Canadian Yarns and Storytelling Threads. The University of British Columbia Student Blogs, n.d. Web. 11 June 2015.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. N.p., 2007. Web. 11 June  2015. <https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/>.