What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories?
In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.
“No, no, says that GOD. That’s not the way it starts at all. It starts with a void. It starts with a garden.” Thomas King Green Grass Running Water, 40.
The creation story that I am most familiar with is the one from the Genesis. The one where God created the world in 6 days. The one where God said “Let there be light” – and light appeared.
The creation story told by King in The Truth About Stories starts out with “the Earth and how it floats at the back of the turtle” and how it’s turtles all the way down.
The most significant difference in the creation story told in the Genesis depends solely on one character, while the creation story told by King is dependent on an infinite number of turtles holding the Earth up. This is significant how different both these cultures are presently. The North American culture is based on the idea of individualism. Whereas the Aboriginal culture is more about the interdependence of people coming together to help and support each other. This underlying difference between cultures and creation stories is the fundamental point of difference is where conflicts arise.
One of the similarities in both creation stories, is the appearance of matter from nothing – the quality of mysticism. Where did God come from? Where did the Earth come from? Where did the turtles come from? In Green Grass Running Water, the story started where Coyote was dreaming and God came from the dream. In The Truth About Stories, King doesn’t tell us where God came from, or where the earth or the turtles came from. They were just there. This is a quality of faith – the faith that they were just there and that was the beginning.
“There is a story I know and it’s about the earth how it floats in space on the back of the turtle….and in all the tellings and all the tellers the earth never leaves the turtle’s back and the turtle never swims away.”
The other similarity I found is the language used of absolute certainty. In the Genesis, the language used was one of authority and finality. “Let there be…. – and it was done.”, the authority of God was never questioned. At the same time, the storyteller in The Truth About Stories is never questioned either. “There is a story I know”, is how King starts the creation story. Both these creation stories have a sort of unchanging quality to them. Even though in King’s creation story, little aspects are changed depending on the tone, pauses, responses from the audience, how the story begins and how the story ends remain the same. Just like the Christian creation story. There are many different versions of the bible and in different versions, God says something different but the result is the same. It’s almost as if both stories are self-aware of the tweaks that happen in the process of storytelling, but in all the tellings and the tellers of both stories, the begin and they end the same. The story remains unchanged.
As a side note, it is interesting to reflect on the perception that oral stories are more susceptible to change and that literature is more definite in nature. However, in this example, the Bible has been changed many times by many people, and so the ability for a story to change is not dependent on the medium that the story is told in. I think that stories change because people are dynamic and people will always add their own tweaks during the retelling of a story. It is the process of consuming stories and living them.
In The Truth About Stories, each chapter starts out with the same creation story, and from that story connecting to issues of identity of being Indian within the context of a culture that functions from the creation the story in the Genesis.
How we live our life depends on the story that we tell ourselves where we come from, where we want to go and how we can get there. There is no one right story and there is no such thing as a better story. Perhaps there is such thing as a better storyteller, but there is no such thing as a better story. Stories are what they are – stories, and in the end that that’s all we are.