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?

“Don’t you just love cryptic stories? I certainly do.”
-Thomas King (11)

In writing this post, I’ve had to start by examining my own language, and my immediate tendency to err towards the phrasing ‘creation myths,’ rather than ‘creation stories.’ It’s a subtle turn of language, but one which, as King points out, contains copious subtext that, unintentionally, could rile and infuriate some, and likely amuse others. But should it? Does my initial phrasing contain a purposefully dismissive, inflammatory anti-spiritual bias – one which some would read as malicious and vindictive? Or is my brain just used to using the words ‘myth’ and ‘story’ interchangeably, without any implied bias or devaluation? As Chamberlin points out, any story – even the ones ideologically hard-wired as infallible scientific truths – requires a certain amount of trust, belief, and suspension of disbelief to take in (125). I don’t think it’s even that far-fetched to posit that the very act of listening to a story is inherently a leap of faith.

Initially, you’d expect this to promote a new level of tolerant inclusivity – that everyone is storytelling all of the time, and that a curious conversation could be built around which stories stick for who and why. But, as King articulates, Western culture is anchored on dichotomies (25) – and it is immediately unsurprising that a culture that largely leans on frontier mythology (see? there’s that pesky word again!) should largely pride itself on decisiveness, on taking a stance and taking a stand. The concept continues to be ingrained in Western audiences on all frontiers, both frivolous and vitally, devastatingly important. The dress is blue and black. The word is ‘Yanni.’  You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.

‘THE dress’ – aka, the microcosm of people’s propensity to wage wars – figurative or literal – over scrutinizing subtle differences.

Arguably, few such dichotomies could be as destructively divisive as those of spirituality, and their corresponding creation stories. Wars have been fought, people killed, and families have been torn apart over the inability to reconcile differing, ‘blasphemous’ beliefs. King astutely articulates that “contained within creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist” (10, Italics mine). With this in mind, the distinction between two stories of creation, and understanding one as sacred, the other as secular (King 25), isn’t as simple as a case of ‘agree to disagree.’ To those for whom the story is sacred, disbelief is a devaluation of their entire fabric of existence, of personal and collective self-definition. It can ultimately be seen as telling them everything they believe in is a lie.

Yikes.

King, however, could likely afford to make the assumption that an audience attending the CBC Massey Lectures Series would already be intimately familiar with the story of Genesis – as he puts it, “we live in a predominantly scientific, capitalistic, Judeo-Christian world governed by physical laws, economic imperatives, and spiritual precepts” (12). Indeed, he devotes less than a full page (in the written incarnation of his Massey lecture) retelling it, as opposed to the over 10 pages he spends recounting the Indigenous creation story of Charm.* In addition to the discrepancy in length, King’s contrasting tones in telling the two stories can be read as playfully silly on both parts. King plays Charm’s story as one peppered with silliness, talking animals, and self-effacing comedic asides, for the sake of making it more accessible and enjoyable to (presumedly) unfamiliar audiences.

However, his doing so also has the additional affect of making his use of archaic, biblical language in the telling of the story of Genesis (21-22) seem all the more pompous and itself silly by contrast. Similarly, King pokes at the supposed ideological infallibility of Genesis, immediately slyly articulating the crucial inferences and assumptions inherent in different tellings – and how slight tweaks in language can snowball into attitudes of ‘blaming Eve,’ and corresponding imbedded patriarchy (22). In this way, King’s sly, deceptively simple use of language can be seen as a means of respectively empowering and disempowering the ideological weight imbued in both stories, and levelling the proverbial playing field in terms of his audience’s receptivity to them.

Of course, to King, a story is never just a story. And, given King’s overarching, recurring commentary on the mistreatment of Indigenous people and communities, past and present, throughout Canada, it is tempting to apply such a metaphoric framework to his contrasting creation stories, and the parallel tensions between belief and disbelief. After all, as John Lutz suggests, the initial encounter between Indigenous and European communities can be seen as an inherently spiritual one (35) – effectively the ‘creation’ story for a deep-seated understanding of country, nationality, inheritance, and ownership – or the quintessential degradation of all these things – for an entire culture of people. King’s Charm creation story has a clever subtextual reading of being analogous for the experience of Indigenous communities encountering European colonists (who, like Charm, came proverbially tumbling out of the sky). In the story of Charm, the attitude of the animals towards their unexpected visitor is that of supportive collaboration, and the phrase “what are we going to do with you?” being implicitly welcoming and beneficial towards the invading party rather than suspicious (15). Conversely, the subtextual reading of King’s cited Genesis story is that of puritanical laws, legislation, and ultimately the perennial torment of Adam and Eve in the face of them (22).

Combining the metaphoric implications of the two stories (Indigenous communities were welcoming to European colonists, and were rewarded with European legislation ultimately served to, like Adam and Eve, displace them from their lands and perennially punish them) hardly seems like a stretch. And King’s articulation of the Genesis story being so foundational for so many Western audiences of European descent suggests how foundational similar mindsets of imposition, control, subjugation, and disproportionate consequences is for them. My read on this is not that King intends the alignment of his audiences with the colonists who wreaked havoc upon Indigenous communities so much as a rebuke as a call for empathy – a challenge to consider how foundational each of our creation stories can be in terms of establishing attitudes with the propensity to harm others.

King dismissively admonishes those who would leap to considering the creation stories of Charm and Genesis “the same,” rightly seeing the subtle tweaks in language and values to hold immense ideological weight (23). Nonetheless, time and again, I find myself wondering why people worldwide are so drawn to the small differences, rather than the far more overwhelming deluge of similarities, which, to me, seems the most straightforward path to Chamberlin’s notion of ‘common ground’ (208). Lutz, similarly, devotes his article to helping bridge the supposedly insurmountable gap between Indigenous and European peoples in their initial encounter by, in the wake of decades of scholarship unpacking differences, weaving together threads of comparison. To Lutz, the fact that the performances of the Indigenous and European people are different pales in relevance next to the fact that both are performing, and for similar objectives. He even dodges the inherent hierarchies present in most binary oppositions by positing that both “people behaved ‘rationally’ within the context of their own cultural definitions” (33). Simple as this may seem, as Lutz points out, the weight of historical hierarchal power imbalances makes it such that suggesting core similarities between parties commonly understood as oppressor and oppressed is inherently controversial, and almost an objectionable practice (32). As King puts it, “we do love our dichotomies. […] We trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas” (25).

However, the very act of understanding stories as metaphors is, in itself, complex and enigmatic – and, moreover, a practice we are constantly undertaking on every level of our lives. Finding the similarities between stories is what takes Harry Robinson’s Indigenous story of the “paper” from a simple, befuddling tale anchored on mysterious anachronisms to a scathing account of an Indigenous understanding of European colonialism and unceded land disputes (Wickwire 9-10). This act of ascribing sociopolitical commentary to Robinson’s story is inherently a practice of finding ‘sameness’ – and, the process of comparing and contrasting it to the Western account of European colonialism is one rife with the propensity for understanding and empathy. Telling the Indigenous perspective through playful stories, as King and Robinson do, is a means of making them accessible and palatable for an audience too accustomed to silencing them. As King points out, this method of storytelling can even be accessible by children (13), and a means of establishing less discriminatory and more accepting mindsets of ideological tolerance from a young age. King and Robinson’s stories preserve the weight of Indigenous righteous indignation and resistance, but with less fear of being discounted, devalued, or ignored, as King encountered in his days of more vitriolic Indigenous protests (66). There may be an inherent imbalance of respectability between King’s story of Charm and his recounting of the story of Genesis – but, as King is quick to point out, that imbalance was already there, and something he, as a storyteller, must carefully work against, for his story to fall upon more receptive ears. 

Not everyone would see it as such. I can already imagine many audiences taking King to task for (subjectively) devaluing Indigenous storytelling by aligning it with the superfluous goofiness of children’s storytelling. Part of this aforementioned culture of dichotomies comes a mindset inherently primed to find fault – a critique seeking out works and words that are problematic that, at times, can veer into the overbearing. Don’t get me wrong: carefully taking to task stories that are harmful is absolutely essential, and finding the recent cultural agency to do so with viable consequences and mechanisms for positive change is utterly essential. But, at the same time, scrutinizing word choice, while important, can also become exhausting – and, ultimately, a major deterrent for many to tell their stories in the first place (or, even worse: the wrong people, not plagued with such existential dilemmas, will continue telling their stories, and all we’ll get will be a deluge of bad stories). So, why are we so primed to anchor on differences, when it seems to me that the similarities often lead to far more fascinating macro-questions? Why is the sparring over whether the dress is black and blue or white and gold more interesting than the fact that so many people so confidently see it differently in the first place? And, why are we so primed to find fault in the telling of stories, rather than celebrating that they are told in the first place, and using them as stepping stones to conversation? I pose these as rhetorical questions, but avidly welcome any insights. Whether I agree or disagree with them, I firmly maintain that, for me, the conversation wherein they are circulated remains the paramount priority.

-KH

*I’m not sure if King had intended ‘Charm,’ the protagonist of his story, to recall Chamberlin’s discussion of ‘charms’ and how they “collapse the distinction between the imagination and reality” (175), but the coincidence was far too thematically lucrative for me not to comment on. 

 

WORKS CITED

Abad-Santos, Alex. “‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’: The Audio Clip That’s Tearing the Internet Apart.” Vox (May 16, 2018). Web. Accessed on February 7, 2019.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003.

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

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. John Lutz. Vancouver: University of British Columbia P, 2007. 30-45. Print.

Weintraub, Karen. “Blue or White Dress? Why We See Colours Differently.” National Geographic (May 16, 2018). Web. Accessed on February 6, 2019.

Wickwire, Wendy. “Introduction.” Living By Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Author Harry Robinson; Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 7-33.