Assignment 2:4

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?

In “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative”, Thomas King demonstrates, in the way of story-telling, the problematic aspects of the monotheism-based dichotomy, where different cultural beliefs exist in competing and hierarchical relationships. He suggests that such an “easy” way of thinking might lead to situations where cultural complexities and choices of beliefs are at stake (King 25). In the context of cross-cultural exchange informed by the monotheism-based divisions, according to King, cultural complexities are likely to be reduced to simplified and opposed terms, such as “civilized/barbaric”, with superiority as well as negative connotations involved (25). Such dichotomy-based conceptions with egocentric and dismissive characteristics, as identified as “the elemental structure of Western society”, might lead to the distrust of the cultures of “them” which seem to contradict those of “us” (King 25).  In the context of Christian-monotheism-based dichotomy, for example, if the Christian Creation stories are accepted as “sacred”, then the Creation stories BY the Native North American people, which also claim to be authentic, will be automatically categorized as “secular”. Such categorization implies the Christian European’s cultural hegemony that undermines the First Nation stories’ credibility as well as their status; despite the fact that “these two creation stories are essentially the same” from a theologian’s perspective (King 23). In King’s words, “if we see the world through Adam’s eyes, we are necessarily blind to” the Native stories (25). In my own words, given the “omnipoten, omniscient, and omnipresnt” (King 24) and “martial” (King 26) nature of the Christian God who insists that “there’s only one rule” (King 21) and “a single deity” (King 24), the Native Creation myths have to be eliminated in order to be “invisible” to Adam’s eyes.

The consequences of the European ideas of monotheism-based dichotomy were devastating to the Indigenous people and their cultures which are known for diversities (“Lesson 2:2”). The European settlers saw the Indigenous traditions “through the lenses of their ancient stories” (Lutz 3) informed by “firm and distinctive hierarchies and divisions” (“Lesson 2:2”). From this peculiar dimension, the “Indians” were immediately assumed to be “originated outside of the Garden of Eden” and conveniently classified as a kind of primitive species from “somewhere between the realms of man and animals” (“Lesson 2:2”), as opposed to the Europeans who were proud to be descendants of Adam and Eve. Once the dichotomy was readily established, the European colonizers, armed with the supremacy of science and reasons, were determined to enact “God’s will” that might include a “divine” plan of excluding the “Indian” oral traditions just because they did not seem to fit into the European “cosmology, mythologies, and histories” (“Lesson 2:2”) under the circumstances of the “Christian monologues” (King 21). According to Paterson, in a 75 years’ time between 1880 and 1951, the First Nations institutions such as telling and retelling of stories at the potlatch were outlawed by the Indian Act (“Lesson 2:2”). Moreover, the continuity and credibility of Indigenous oral traditions were seriously disrupted as First Nations children were “cut off from their community and family stories” due to their mandatory attendance of the residential schools (“Lesson 2:2”). The major cause of such a brutal genocide of Indigenous cultures is very likely to be rooted in the ethnocentric notion of monotheism-based dichotomy that creates fierce tensions and inequitable power relations between distinctive worldviews held by different cultural stories.

In order to prompt his readers to reflect on the conventional Western paradigm of monotheism-based dichotomy critically, King retells the two Creation stories, one attributed to the Christian Europeans and the other Indigenous people, by pairing them up in a binary opposition in a subversive way. Despite the centrality of the Christian Genesis and the marginalised status of the First stories in reality, in King’s story-telling narratives, the believability of the Native Creation story is instead given more credits while the Christian one’s seems to be undermined. Such a creative dichotomy that frames the story-telling narratives is further reinforced by a neat analysis of the contrasting characteristics of the two stories, in which the values that the Indigenous myth represents, as opposed to the Christian ones, continue to be favoured in a contemporary paradigm. For example, being influenced by “different strategies in the telling of these stories”, a general modern audience is very likely to find themselves identifying more with the imagery of a “comic” world of equality and cooperation and balance crafted in the Native story, than the authoritative, hierarchical and chaotic world in Christian Genesis (King 22-24). Then the story-telling ends up abruptly with a tough question: here are the choices and which one do you choose? At this point, it manifests itself as a false choice based on a simplistic and exclusive dichotomy. The interpretation of the values that claim to be characteristic of respective stories seems to be deliberately selective for the sake of making up a binary opposition, overlooking the cultural complexities of each story; not to mention that the distinctive values of both stories are not mutually exclusive, as one may argue that a world of competition and a world of co-operation simply represent two sides of one coin. After all, Creation stories are ONLY stories that are used by different cultures to “understand the world in which they exist” (King 10), with no issues of believability or authenticity involved. In this sense, both the Christian and First Nations beliefs that “define the nature of the universe” (King 10) from divergent dimensions make equally perfect sense. In my opinion, they could also work together in an cooperative way, contributing to providing diverse and comparative perspectives for human beings to make complete sense of the complex world.        

Works Cited:

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

Lutz, John. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indignenous- European Contact. Ed. Lutz. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 1-15. Print.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2 First Stories”. ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Sept 2016. University of British Columbia Blogs. 2016. Web. 7 Oct. 2016. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-2/lesson-2-2/