In “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative” by Thomas King, King presents two stories that are vastly different: one, based on Native myth, about Charm and the animals that helped create the earth with her, the second, based on Judeo-Christian doctrine outlining the hierarchy that is God, who created the earth, and placed man to rule the animals in it. From the get-go, our background knowledge of the stories we’re told predispose us to internalize one of these stories as more credible, and the other as not, even though both, according to Lutz, are equally based on irrational mythologies and beliefs (Lesson 2:2). In terms of Western belief and culture, according to King, we have a “perfectly serviceable creation story”, that consequently means when it comes to non-Christian monologues and Native creation stories, “we listen to them and then we forget them” (King 21).

King, like Chamberlain, believes in the importance of meeting each other in our misunderstanding and bridging our stories to eventually bridge the gap between “us” and “them” (Chamberlain 233). It seems rather misleading then, that King would encourage binary thinking when it comes to creation stories. His claim that if we are “to believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (King 25), seems to contradict the previously stated beliefs. However, King may be presenting these dichotomies as a warning of the dangers involved in such cut and dry, black and white, worldviews. He calls these dichotomies—and our tendency to love buying into them—an “elemental structure of Western society”, which we trust simply because they are easy, unlike those pesky complex enigmas which take time, tolerance, and patience on both parts, to understand (25).

This detrimental tendency to categorize everything into dichotomies, reaches beyond the boundaries of storytelling, and underlines the first encounters between Natives and Europeans, as well as underlines the rest of the events between Natives and Europeans. King’s warning against binary thinking is a fair and justified one when we consider the ways Western doctrine has negatively led to the violence against Natives. Concerning the treatment of Natives by Europeans, in this lesson, we were asked to “stop and ask yourself, how would you answer these questions — using the stories you already know?” The only justification I could possibly conjure and jot down was that the Western people felt what they were doing was not a punishment but a treatment option. Even while trying to be as sensitive as possible, and as open-minded as possible to “step outside and see one’s own culture as alien” (Lutz 32), my language, suggests I am still justifying and sympathizing with engrained European belief. Why am I defending their actions at all? It is binary thinking that leads to such devastating consequences for the side deemed unfit, barbaric, and in need of intervention. No matter the intention, when dichotomies are created, ignorance and misunderstanding are sure to follow.

Considering the idea of why such violence was used against the Natives, and considering my own response and justification, a story came to mind by Leslie Marmon Silko, titled “Lullaby”*, about a Native woman who had her children taken from her because they were being treated for Tuberculosis. Overtime, the children learned to speak English, and consequently forgot how to speak in their native tongue—the only language their mother understood. This violent separation was beautifully chronicled, and presented an example of how binary thinking, no matter how good the intention, can have such detrimental effects on the personal lives of the people it tries to “fix”. While our Western tendency, influenced by our Christian roots, is to accept our own truth as the one and only healthy, correct, freeing truth, King’s example suggests there are consequences to this way of thinking.

Even now, in our course, and in our individual pursuits of a higher education, there are binary systems ingrained in us that must be met with a serious effort to understand and meet each other on another level besides opposing.

 

*I know it may seem long and unnecessary, but please do read “Lullaby”, it was a really eye-opening story, at least for me personally.

Works Cited

Chamberlain, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?. Toronto: Random House. 2004. Print.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.

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.

1. Home is a concept that is continuously changing, and in turn, affecting the way we perceive our self-identities. As Lian Lister observed on my post, “we grow, we learn, we unlearn, and we have to adjust our concepts on home to accommodate our new knowledge and experiences”. 

2. 3/5 of the student blogs I read happened to associate ideas of home with the physical presence of a house. I think this is partly due to the cultural importance our society places on permanent places of residence that you can “come home to”, but I think on a more personal level, our places of residence bring with them memories of the other people who may be residing or may have resided there with us. In one of the blog posts, ancestry played  a great role in the physical building of the home as well as living in it. This generational settling created an image of home that had to do with both the physical home, as well as the conceptual home.

3. Like Erika ‘s story, as well as my own, the idea of ethnicity and identity based around it shifts to match who we want to be, and how we want to be perceived. Erika chose to identity as Swedish at some points because Swedish people are beautiful, and Irish at other points, because Irish people are smart. For myself, working in a restaurant, when people see the name “Milica”, their first question is always “where are you from?/what are you?”. And I almost never respond Serbian/Croatian. I always respond with one or the other, depending on the day, or which one I think of first. Sometimes, if I say Croatian, people will jokingly say “do you hate Serbians?” (I’m not kidding), and sometimes, if it’s a Croatian or Serbian person, they’ll get quiet if I choose the wrong one. So much of what we identify as personal traits, actually seems to be tied to ethnicity, and what people perceive an entire nation to be.

4. Personal growth and experience changes the way we may perceive the same place. By keeping an open dialogue, bouncing ideas off of one another, and keeping our minds open to the different ideas of home, and what this could mean for different individuals living in the same place, a common ground is gained, that isn’t necessarily built on common views shared, or common experience, but on a mutual level of respect. This is more-so an observation I gained from reading the comments and dialogue, rather than the stories themselves.

I was 20 days old when my family left my birthplace of Mostar, Bosnia and Hercegovina because tensions had finally led to a devastating blow-out between Croatians, Serbians, and Bosnians. One of the pivotal cities being fought over was my hometown. My mum was a Croatian woman, my father a Serbian man, and because of this, we really didn’t have anywhere to go but out.

My family, to this day, refuses to talk about all of this, so the little information I do know, I have pieced together myself, and because of this, my frame of reference is based around when I learned it. With no one willing to talk, I replaced explanations with personal logic and meaning, and now, my identity is weaved with my 5 year old logic that Bosnians were the bad guys, and my 13 year old shock that I am part Serbian, and my 22 year old dismay that the idea my dad adamantly supports is the same idea that at one point, justified killing hundreds of people in a barn. 

I never knew what I was or where I came from. When I showed up to kindergarten as the new kid, the first question a boy asked me was why my English sucked and where I came from, because it sure wasn’t Canada. I didn’t know how to answer him. It didn’t help that my former country of Yugoslavia, at the time, was being diced and sliced, and that borders, like in so many other cases, are easily drawn on maps, but are detrimental for the ethnic groups that need to reconcile them on the ground. I remember the first time the reality of this sunk in for me. I was in my first year of college and had just read Thomas King’s “Borders”, and the idea that my identity, and everyone else’s identity for that matter, had nothing to do with the lines drawn on a map, hit me like a ton of bricks.

My identity seemed to always be shifting. Growing up, my mother told me I was Croatian. My father, rather than correct her, worked to challenge her through my sister and I. From a young age, instead of using the Serbian/Croatian term for dad, he told me to call him Babo, a term of endearment used by Muslims in Bosnia. In 1995, he took me to a protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery against Western intervention in the Bosnian war. The only thing I knew was that my Babo was always right, and that whatever he was, I was too. I was 12 years old before I finally found out, ethnically speaking, that I was half Serbian. Suddenly, I needed to make room for a new identity, but that was alright, because for once it was supported by real evidence, and not the justification that it was my dad pissing off my mum. I could finally explain to people that I was born in what used to be Yugoslavia, but that the country was divided up, and for now, I’m born in what is Bosnia and Hercegovina. I am not Bosnian, because that is a term used by Muslim’s who are native to the land, but do not identity as either Croatian or Serbian. Is your brain hurting yet? Mine has been for years.

This is who I am by birth. But at a young age, I welcomed the idea of being Canadian with such open arms—partly because everyone around me seemed to be Canadian, and partly because it encompassed such simpler borders, both geographically, and figuratively. The price of giving up my Serbian/Croatian cultural roots seemed fair, for the chance to rid myself of oppression, war, and lies. All I knew was, that watching a Canadian beer commercial, I felt a sense of loyalty, to the simple ideas it presented. It looked so easy to be Canadian. Give us hockey, mountains, and beer, and we don’t have to talk about the oppression, the war, and lies, that seem to make up every country.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that like my Serbian/Croatian identity, my Canadian identity—what I consider to be my home and my values, is constantly changing, and I am constantly learning. Most importantly, there is an underbelly to everything, and I have to acknowledge it if I want to lay any claim to it, because I need to claim it as a whole, faults and all.

I have a great story to tell you. It’s about how evil came into the world. One day, ages and ages ago, a group got together, of 4 of life’s children (not figuratively, but literally. Life gave birth to four of them and they all came out a little wonky). Every night, they got together and drew from a lottery the name of one person whose life they would try and ruin. So on this night, they drew the name of a woman, and after passing it around for a while, and thinking long and hard, they started talking about the worst possible things that they could come up with.

The first, War, cried out, “I’m going to blow through her country and destroy every place she’s ever loved.”

This plan received several nods of approval. But of course, Poverty being poverty, not waiting for the right time or place, cut in saying, “that’s nothing. Once she flees her land, I’m going to take away everything she owns, and make her struggle to support her family until the day she dies.”

Divorce clapped her hands gleefully, knowing where there was poverty, she was sure to follow. Impatiently, she yelled out “and then I’ll rip their family apart and they’ll scatter into different homes and different cities!”

“Think of the children”, cooed Insanity.

“Why? You never do”, Divorce shot back.

“You’re right”, chuckled Insanity. I guess after you’re done with her, it’s my turn. I’ll tear through her mind and leave her traumatized from everything you heartless things have done to her. But of course you know I’m the worst, so I’ll throw in some depression, and when her kids have reached their own end, my grand finale will be Schizophrenia.”

“Harsh, but I think we have our winner” Poverty and War chimed.

“At least she’ll have something to write home about. Or at least enough to write a memoir about”, Divorce threw out.

As they were all getting their coats on and getting ready to leave, in walked Life’s last child. After all, she always undoubtedly showed up at the end.

“Sit down”, she said.

Here’s what I’m going to do. War, after you’ve taken her security, and after Poverty has stripped her of her possessions (a little weak if you ask me), Divorce will come in, as always. Is no one else getting bored of the same repetitive things happening to these silly people? At least Insanity will spice things up with the shear chaos of depression and schizophrenia.

And here is where I come in. After all of this, I’m going to convince this woman that nobody is going to believe her; that nobody cares. She’ll stop telling her stories. She’ll think that people have stopped listening. And then she should be as good as dead, because we all know we are our stories.

“That’s dark”, whispered Insanity.

“Brilliant”, said War.

But it can’t happen, they all agreed. You can do whatever you like to someone, but you can’t take away their truth, and their stories.

We can get along without that kind of thing. Take it back. Call that story back, they all said.

Doubt coyly smiled and shrugged, knowing it was too late.

For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

 

The story I decided to tell was one that helped me sort through my own truth in a way. Edward Chamberlain, in the previous novel that we studied “If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?” suggests that

“We hold to stories and songs that chronicle the things we dread

precisely because they provide us with some sense of order.”

       While the story I told of my mother’s life and the introduction of evil to it, as I have seen it, may be different from the one she would tell, it is still a true story in the sense that it is my truth. It converges the reality of imagination, where the facts of my experience are balanced with the formalities of my expression (222).

Which brings up the question of why, when having to tell a story, I turned to my own life experiences to explain something as seemingly universal as “evil”? Here is where Thomas King’s idea, in his narrative “The Truth About Stories”, rings true for me. King claims that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2), helping justify my immediate reaction to explain an idea through personal experience because experience is all I have to reach in to.

King asks the question, “do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is […]?” (26), but for me, the question becomes: do the stories we tell reflect ourselves as we truly are? Can we as individuals, or as a nation, create and recreate our identities however we see fit?

Works Cited

Chamberlain, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?. Toronto: Random House. 2004. Print.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.