1. 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?

Thomas King is trying to show us, I believe, a few things by emphasizing the believability of either the Earth Diver story or Genesis. I think he is showing us how the way you tell a story is important. It affects how the story is received and what is believed. The second point King may be making, and that I believe in personally, is that the Earth Diver story IS Genesis. It’s the same story, told in a different way. I think that we don’t need to choose one creation story to believe – I think they’re all one way of telling the same story: how we came about to exist. This includes science. Genesis, the Earth Diver Story, and Science all attempt to explain the magical mystery of life on Earth.

Then King does this brilliant thing. He highlights all of the dichotomies in the two creation stories…with confidence. But you can tell he’s up to something, it’s subtle, but it’s there. In answer to the question, King is trying to get us to think to ourselves: “Hey wait a minute, that’s not true, there is more than just one or the other – there’s a third option – and there’s a fourth! In fact, there could be endless options!” Well, I think he’s making a point so that when we think about the binary world he presented to us as not being totally binary, we might also think of the “us/them” dichotomy between cultures as not necessarily being binary. We may even be more open to different creation stories, or first contact stories as each having elements of truth, each having value.

Since I believe that all creation stories are an attempt to explain a phenomenon, I don’t think any one story is more important than another. I respect each version, and I can see similarities between them all. For example, the Earth Diver story truly does sound like a version of Genesis – living and inanimate things on earth were made of mud, while in Genesis, we were made of clay. The way a story is told and they way a person was trained to receive and PERCEIVE truth affects what our truths are. This applies to first contact stories and how they are taught – whether in school, in textbooks, or at home, verbally.

Stories of creation, found all over the world in all cultures show us our human commonalities. We all want to explain our existence, and we use stories to do this.

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