Assignment 2.2
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? (Paterson)
I think King sets us up as readers raised in the Western tradition to realize that there may in fact be other perspectives.
In his book, his stories are read and reading is characteristic of European academic culture. Just like Lutz refers to the “centuries-old stories that the participants brought with them” (32), King sets his readers up to look to the early European practice of reading, traditionally a task only performed by religious officials who would then share their knowledge as an authority with worshippers. This demonstrates how the tradition of reading and information keeping is intrinsically bound to religion in Europe. It also further perpetuates the hierarchical arrangement that Europeans supported, methodically organizing the world according to God, man, animal, and plant status. On the contrary, Dr. Paterson reveals a marked difference between this divisional society and the diverse “openness” of indigenous societies in North America. The fact that European society was highly structured according to religious belief and monarchical rule and had comparatively little diversity amongst countries contrasts the variety of creation myths told across North America by different groups. As Dr. Paterson cites Lutz again in her lesson, she reiterates how common thread connecting these different groups is the relative open channels of contact between “the spiritual, the natural, and the human worlds; spirits, ancestors, humans, animal, plants, rocks, the sea and the landscape are alive and interconnected over time and space” (Paterson, Lutz 32).
Where I’m going with this, is that even as I attempt to explain away the differences between Europeans and indigenous peoples, I also support a neat dichotomy because it is necessary to the act of analysis. And this is the fact that I think King is forcing us Western practitioners to confront: the fact that stories cannot be neatly organized for a universal understanding and analysis. They’re messy, can be interpreted differently, and don’t necessarily need to support a single authority. We definitely saw that in the story of the witches that we all retold. Storytelling presents a challenge to the Western tradition, because the West supports literature versus the openness of sharing an oral story (we considered earlier how literature was more concrete than sharing a story).
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I found this question particularly interesting to answer because of the way Dr. Paterson phrased the sacredness of creation stories. I grew up in a home that was not just agnostic but almost anti-religious. When my father found out that I joined my friend one morning after a sleepover for Sunday school at the age of 10 he was not pleased. For me, the experience at Sunday school was one where I liked being rewarded a gummy worm each time I correctly read a sentence from a weird book. I didn’t care who Adam was. I also didn’t understand that the other children in the class actually believed the stories we were reading. Growing up without a story of creation, without a faith to uphold has conditioned me to be a person who doesn’t consider creation stories in terms of binaries because I actually don’t consider creation stories except for classroom settings where I am asked to so. For me, the notion of religious or spiritual belief is almost ludicrous (sorry, I don’t mean to offend anyone!) and when I read Genesis or the story of Charm, they are placed on the same internal bookshelf as To Kill A Mockingbird or The Awakening. In other words, it’s easy for me to forget that others do hold these stories we discuss so often in the classroom as sacred and if someone had asked me to define “religion” or “faith” or “creation” up until about the age of fourteen, I wouldn’t have known what to say. From this perspective, I think it’s odd that we treat Western and aboriginal stories as a binary to consider when I cannot identify with either tradition.
References
Engelhart, Katie. “The Age of Atheism: “If God Exists, Why Is Anybody Unhappy?”.” Salon. Web. 10 Feb. 2014. <http://www.salon.com/2014/02/15/the_age_of_atheism_if_god_exists_why_is_anybody_unhappy/>.
Lutz, John. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Aboriginal — Non-Aboriginal Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia, Web. 10 Feb. 2014. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470/unit-2/lesson-2-2/>.
“Sunday School Changes Everything.” YouTube. YouTube, 25 June 2012. Web. 10 Feb. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvx4nMH3sA>.
Hello Jessica!
Thanks for your perspectives on creation stories. I was especially interested in your comments on the role of reading in European culture and history. I also really liked your idea of the “internal bookshelf” (Bernoe). What types of material do you store there, i.e. just books or also personal stories and memories or…?
Speaking as an atheist, at least in the sense of not adhering to a particular framework of religious belief, I’m curious if there are any stories that have a special place in your internal bookshelf. By this I mean the place others might reserve for religious texts. For me, I would have to place some of my scientific beliefs there, since I unconsciously refer to them as I interpret my day-to-day experiences, for example the role my nervous system plays in instinctual vs. choice-based decision-making, or maybe even the effects of my actions on an evolutionary or geological time scale. What do you think about this?
Cheers,
Keely
Hey Keely, my internal bookshelf is full of stories! My feeling of religious texts is mainly how I appreciate their narrative/entertainment value. That sounds weird, I know, but since I don’t value the “sacredness” the same way as someone who is Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or First Nations, I treat the stories as stories. Like on par with a good book or poignant comment in a movie. I tend to have a flair for the dramatic and think of my life in terms of how I could structure a narrative around certain moments, and so I always think of new information in terms of how I could incorporate that into my bigger picture or concept of how the world works. Gah that sounds crazy.
Hi Jessica!
I really liked your last line, “I think it’s odd that we treat Western and aboriginal stories as a binary to consider when I cannot identify with either tradition” because I, too, grew up in an agnostic setting, and do not truly identify with either story. However, I was wondering what you thought about the content of each story? Personally, although neither story is sacred to me, I still really enjoyed “The Earth Diver.” On the other hand, I have a lot of issues with the content in “Genesis.”
Cheers,
-Greta