For this week’s post, I decided to respond to the following prompt:
First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories … [and] provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview … 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, question 1)
“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2) states storyteller and author Thomas King near the beginning of each lecture, or chapter, in his 2003 Massey lectures and book The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Telling two different creation stories, he draws comparisons between them, while proposing that “[i]f we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (King 25). By doing so, he to also seems to create dichotomies between the perspective suggested in both stories, such as cooperation and competition, and creates a choice to decide which story to “keep.” However, King and other authors, such as J. Edward Chamberlin, suggest that creating these dichotomies can be dangerous as they can encourage one to choose between “false alternatives” (Chamberlin 24). Still, by creating these comparisons, King also implies some similarities between these creation stories, creates an alternative story to what is often found in mainstream Canadian society, and helps to draw attention to the power of stories.
To expand, both stories present a different perspective on the origin of people and the world as we know it — and both have elements that are more “mythical” seeming, inviting the audience to “believe it and not” (Chamberlin 160), regardless of how “authoritative” the story’s words might sound. Beyond this, stories, such as these, underlie and influence much of society, including what is often perceived to be fact and truth and share this commonality as well. Yet, when one looks at these stories more closely, they are just that: stories — and stories, no matter the topic, still need the imagination and belief to be brought into the world.
However, as King suggests, these creation stories still have numerous differences if looked at from a storyteller’s perspective (23), including that one of them is better known and, as a narrative, underlies a broader part of Canadian society (including laws, economics, and media), whether or not people are conscious of it. By contrasting these stories, one could say that King isn’t creating a choice so much as exposing an alternative narrative to those often found in mainstream society. King provides the opportunity to see that there is an alternative way, or an alternative story, of understanding how people have come to be in the world, and how people can continue to “fit” into its larger picture.
In this sense, stories can affect the way we interact with and perceive the world. As suggested by King (in the context of sharing a number of family stories with his audience), “I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live” (emphasis added) (9). In a similar way, one could say that, whether or not one “believes” in them, the stories that are shared with us, especially those reenforced through society, are still are chained to us and affect who we are and our perspectives on the world.
More explicitly, King ponders the powerful impact that stories can have on people, and prompts his audience to do the same, by asking: “[d]id you ever wonder how it is we imagine the world in the way we do, how it is we imagine ourselves, if not through our stories … For these are our stories, the cornerstones of our culture” (95). By reflecting on and comparing the two creation stories, King creates this opportunity for his audience to see similarities between different stories, see an alternative story to the one often told, and recognize the power that stories can have on society, especially by altering the way people imagine the world around them. In this way, while stories, such as the two shared by King, are often referred to as “creation stories” in the sense that they express how the world began and/or how people came to live in a place, one could argue that they are still “creating stories” and contributing to creating cultures, including “Canadian culture.”
A representation of a few different forms of story that can affect one’s perception and understanding of society and, in this case, law.
In fact, perhaps the most important part of the ideas that King highlights through the contrast of these two creation stories is to remember that “[t]he truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (King 2) and, for this reason, the stories we tell ourselves, and that we allow to become a part of us, are especially important. In other words, “‘we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves … If we change the stries we live by, quite possibly we change our lives’” (Ben Okri qtd. in King 153).
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