3:2 Q7 – Describe how King uses the cyclical paradigm of the Medicine Wheel (and a little help from Coyote) to teach us to understand, or at least to try to understand the power behind the stories we tell ourselves.
We all like to start and end our stories in a similar fashion. We are taught these patterns at a young age; nursery rhymes and childhood bedtime stories. There’s a certain way stories start, progress and end. This primal understanding of how stories work and function is taken steps further by Thomas King’s explanation of the Medicine Wheel. In understanding the cyclical paradigm of the Medicine Wheel, we can begin to understand how and why we tell the stories that we tell, and what it is exactly that makes it powerful.
When we repeat, we start over. When we finish a lap on a track, we begin again. There is a sense that repetition and circularity is inherent in our lives, and evidently storytelling. Our minds like connections and relations. In reading Thomas King’s text, there is a sense that we pulled deliberately into making these connections. We return once and once again to certain images that King wishes for us to see and pick out. The cycles of the Four Women who fall from the sky is a prime example of this, “being Indian” (King 72), “being unruly Indian” (King 225), “being another Indian” (King 396) and impersonating a white man (Paterson). This kind of circulation of repetitive language is a deliberate move by King to stand beside the Medicine Wheel in depicting the power and importance of circularity in stories that we tell. What I also find fascinating is also how language in stories, can be catalysts for other stories that stem from the original. What it means to be an ‘Indian’ is a story in itself. What it means to be an ‘unruly Indian’ is a story in itself. What it means to be just ‘another Indian’ is again, a story in itself. Stories grow stories, with language as its soil and life as its water. The power of stories is in its language, and it’s continual life through repetition and circularity, whether oral or written.
I think the value of understanding the Medicine Wheel for me is in its applicability to understanding how stories work, thrive and depict our lives. The circularity of the Medicine Wheel is essential. For me, stories exist in a four dimensional World. Beyond the 3.D movies we watch in theaters now, there’s a sense of being in the story, one with the story. That’s where the Medicine Wheel begins to do its wonders on me. The quadrants of the wheel, as Professor Paterson rightfully points out, represent aspects of the World beyond its color, but also life cycles, seasons and states of being (Paterson). The power of stories is in its ability to paint a reality, whether of the past present or the future that inherently encapsulates all elements of the wheel. Stories often depict life, and have the cyclical nature of life embedded within the form itself. People, and their lives, in our stories, go through seasons in their life, and often endure dynamic states of being. And when that stories or struggle is over, it begins again, again and again. Just like life and it’s tribulations, the wheel continues to spin, stories continue to be made. The Medicine Wheel, in this sense, mirrors life and it’s ever cycling re-birthing of stories to be told.
Isn’t ‘life’ merely a continuous collection of stories we learn and tell?
Works Cited
King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
Svoboda, Elizabeth. “How Stories Change Hearts and Brains – Elizabeth Svoboda – Aeon.” Aeon Magazine. N.p., 12 Jan. 2015. Web. 09 Mar. 2015. <http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/once-upon-a-time-how-stories-change-hearts-and-brains/>.
“The Medicine Wheel and the Four Directions – Medicine Ways: Traditional Healers and Healing – Healing Ways – Exhibition – Native Voices.” U.S National Library of Medicine. U.S. National Library of Medicine, n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015. <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/exhibition/healing-ways/medicine-ways/medicine-wheel.html>.
Hi Jeff,
I’m really glad you chose this topic. At the Aboriginal Centre at UBC-Okanagan, there is a medicinal wheel on the ground and I’ve always been really drawn to it. What it means, what it can do, and I think in essence the medicinal wheel is about healing. It’s about the coming together of different forces around us, to heal us.
Part of the healing comes from being aware. Being aware that life is a cycle as you mentioned, and that patterns are inevitable, but within the cycle, there is growth, there is death. So to be able to find the power within that cycle to nurture positive things, and let the negative things fade.
In everything, there is a season.
I liked what you said about stories grow stories. Which is very true. I think that King is aware of the cyclical patterns of stories and here he uses repetition to emphasize how the “Indian” has been represented. He talks in circles, because he wants us to be aware of the circles that has made up our thinking of the present. The circles that confine us and define us. In that process, to uncover that what is “Indian” is fiction. It is a story that has been told and retold in different words. Herein lies the power for us all, to define who we are, not as what we were told to be, but who we want to be.
Qihui Huang.