The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”

Each time this idea is mentioned, King follows it up with a quotation about stories from other Native writers. These quotations inform the theme of each chapter, but the overall theme of the work is encapsulated by this repeated quotation. King’s argument is that the stories we tell and the stories we share about the world, its origins, ourselves, our presents, and our pasts inform who we all are as people and who we might become. King’s belief that stories are all we are also implies that changing stories can change the world.

“That’s always a good way to start a story, you know: you’ll never believe what happened.”

This is how King says his brother introduced the story about reconnecting with their father’s second and third families. While this story is important only to King and his brother, its opening is universal. King explains that telling a story is a bit of a trick, one that, if done right, can have profound power. By using an effective opening, King suggests the audience will stay engaged, as “one of the tricks to storytelling is, never tell everything at once […] to keep everyone in suspense” (7). If you can grab someone’s attention with a story, you can unleash the larger power of storytelling.

“I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live.”

King writes this after repeating the story about he and his brother meeting their father’s second and third families, a meeting that is bittersweet because they do not meet their father but do gain information about him, including the fact that he did not tell any of his other families about King and his brother. King asks what “makes my mother’s sacrifice special? What makes my father’s desertion unusual?” (8). But since these stories only matter to him and his brother, he answers, “absolutely nothing” (9). Still, even though the stories matter only to him and his brother, the stories have power over them. Thus, this quotation articulates the control or power a story has on an individual and suggests, by extension, that some stories have some hold on some people and that stories as a whole matter to everyone.

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

This quotation is King’s summation of the ending of a story about witches told by Native novelist Leslie Silko. Silko’s story is about how evil came into the world. It came from a witch who told a story of “fear and slaughter, disease and blood. A story of murderous mischief” (9). The audience asks to “call that story back” (10), but, of course, it is too late. Once a story is told, it is known. This is a theme in King’s book. Whether it be the fictionalized Indians of American history or the truth about his father, stories are powerful because they cannot be unheard or unknown. You can choose to respond to stories in new ways, but you will always know what the story was. Society always knows the story it used to tell about Native Americans and, even though that story is no longer told in the same way, the consequences of the original telling still exist. In other words, you cannot unwrite the past even though you can reinterpret it.

“Take Charm’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”

Each chapter ends with a slight variation of this quotation. Sometimes the sentence order or phrasing changes, and the proper nouns always change depending on the subject of the story told in the chapter. However, the idea never changes. King argues that stories have a profound power on us but that we have the power to make of them what we will. That is, we could hear a story about Indians and use that to justify discrimination, or not. We could hear a story about the creation of the universe and choose to ignore it, or not. Stories have power over us, but only if we let them. And in either case, King advocates that stories really should not be used to justify an action that did not occur. We must take ownership of our actions and our responses to stories.

“Native culture, as with any culture, is a vibrant, changing thing […] But the idea of the ‘Indian’ was already fixed in time and space.”

King sets up the context for Edward Sheriff Curtis’s photographs. He suggests that the idea of a fixed Indian culture is not real but that the imagined idea of an “Indian” does not change. Thus, when Curtis set out to photograph Indians, he really set out to photograph his set idea about what an Indian was. This is a theme of the text as a whole. King argues throughout that Native people have had to live with a double consciousness of sorts, with one eye toward the reality of being a Native American and the other fixed on what society expected of Indians. King also argues the image of the “Indian” has had a profound power to shape the world for Native Americans.

“What the camera allows you to do is to invent, to create. That’s really what photographs are. Not records of moments but rather imaginative acts.”

This quotation comes while King discusses his photography project along with the photos taken by Edward Sheriff Curtis and Richard Throssel. The latter men created images of Indians that did not reflect reality so much as imagined versions of reality. Yes, they were photos of Indians, but the Indians were styled so that they looked like “Indians,” meaning that these photographs showed the viewer what the viewer expected to see. But what the viewer expected to see was an act of imagination, not a reflection of reality. Thus, even a person famous for being an Indian, like Will Rogers, would not “appear” Indian when judged against the photos imagined by Curtis and Throssel, proving the power of the image over reality.

“You’re not the Indian I had in mind.”

This quotation is spoken to King by a German crew member aboard a ship to New Zealand. This crew member, the cook, says that he has read a number of Westerns and had a “fair idea of what Indians were supposed to look like and that [King] wasn’t what he had imagined” (48). This suggests that anywhere King goes in the world, he must confront the idea of the imagined Indian, meaning he is constantly asked to live up to others’ expectations even though those expectations are not rooted in reality.

“In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations.”

This quotation comes after King recounts a long list of people, arts, and characters that have either depicted or embodied the idea of the imagined “Indian” informed by the photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis and by American Romantic writers. This extensive list includes various Western movies, the Atlanta Braves mascot, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Land O’Lakes Butter, which demonstrates the pervasiveness of the imagined Indian. Because it is so pervasive, King suggests that it does not matter to us whether that idea of the Indian is real, since the image certainly is. In a postmodern sense, then, the image becomes the reality. In any case, King argues that the image, like stories, has great power over us all.

“Rather it was the wild, free, powerful, noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, solitary Indian—pardon me, solitary male Indian—that Europeans went looking to find. A particular Indian. An Indian who could be a cultural treasure, a piece of North American antiquity. A mythic figure who could reflect the strength and freedom of an emerging continent. A National Indian.”

King introduces another fictional conceptualization of the Indian created by white people. Interestingly, this “National Indian” was used to link white North Americans more closely to the continent and the land, and was created only in the regions that were no longer trying to conquer Indian lands (while of course people in Western Canada and the Western United States were still doing so). Like other conceptions of fictional Indians, the “National Indian” was not rooted in reality but was imagined to be real by whites. This justified the further extermination of Indians who did not fit this ideal while also encouraging some Indians to believe they had no future as Indians, as the “National Indian” was to be the last of his people.

“Maybe entertainment is the story of survival.”

King summarizes his point about Indians always being thought of as entertainers. This point is exemplified in the story of Ishi, who was forced to entertain whites in a museum. The fact that Ishi was entertainment to whites helped him survive, but he certainly cannot be said to have lived a satisfying life as a museum exhibit. Clearly King wants Native Americans to do more than merely survive, though he wonders if being entertainment “isn’t so bad” if all a people has left are their stories (89).

“We both knew that stories were medicine, that a story told one way could cure, that the same story told another way could injure.”

This quotation is about King and his friend, Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. Owens killed himself in a parking lot in Washington, and King wonders about the story Louis told himself right before committing suicide. Here and at many other points in the text, King remarks about the power of stories. Stories can heal us or they can wound us, but either way they have power. King knows that whatever story Louis thought of as he killed himself, it must have had power, and “for that instant Louis must have believed it” (95). One wonders if Louis would have killed himself if he had told this story in a way that helped him rather than hurt him.

“If we stopped telling the stories and reading the books, we would discover that neglect is as powerful an agent as war and fire.”

King earlier discussed how people tend to regard written works as more legitimate than oral stories. However, he reminds readers that Native American culture had a long history of using both before the 1500s. The European conquest of Natives resulted in the loss of oral stories and storytellers as well as printed stories, such as the texts that burned in the Aztec library at Tenochtitlán. To King, it does not matter if a story was written or spoken. What matters is that stories are remembered and shared, for otherwise they may as well be destroyed by disaster.

“The border doesn’t mean that much to the majority of Native people in either country. It is, after all, a figment of someone else’s imagination.”

King has lived in both the United States and Canada. Readers may note the occasional Canadian spelling of words (defence instead of defense, for instance), and King often talks about why he brings up Canadian examples instead of American ones or vice versa. However, he argues here and (implicitly at least) throughout the book that such distinctions really do not make a difference to him or other Natives. Prior to European settlement in North America, there was no concept of national borders. Even now the concept is, like the concept of the “National Indian” or the “authentic Indian” of popular imagination, an artificial creation. Of course, like the imagined Indian, the border between two countries has important consequences, even if it is purely imagined.

“I tell them to myself, to my friends, sometimes to strangers. Because they make me laugh. Because they are a particular kind of story. Saving stories, if you will. Stories that help keep me alive.”

The stories King describes in this quotation are the three stories he tells in Chapter 4: one of encountering a storm on the way to Canada, one of playing a basketball game, and one of a conversation with an old man. The stories do not really matter, but King tells them often because they help save him. In other words, the process of sharing stories is life-affirming. In believing the stories, King chooses to remember happy instances that make him laugh rather than dwelling on dark stories. As he explains, “whether [someone] lives or dies depends on which story [that person] believes” (118). This is why King chooses to believe in happy stories, even though they’re not “particularly illuminating” (119).

“Oh, they like you well enough, said Coyote. They just like your feathers better.”

In the story of the Coyote and the Ducks, Coyote tricks the Ducks into giving him their feathers by lying that the Human Beings are after them. The Ducks ask what humans don’t like about them, and Coyote responds with the above quotation. This serves as a metaphor for King, with the Ducks standing in for the Indians and the Coyote standing in for the Canadian and US governments. Coyote ends up with all the beautiful feathers while the Ducks grow back smaller feathers, and then Coyote leaves. Similarly, Native people have lost large swathes of their land to Canada and the United States. As King says, “we don’t have much land left, but feathers are feathers” (129). However, he also notes that the Coyote will always want more.

“Such as the [story] we like to tell ourselves about injustices and atrocities and how most of them have happened in the past. We tell ourselves that, as we have progressed as a species, we have gotten smarter and more compassionate.”

This quotation comes in the middle of King’s discussion of the Coyote and the Ducks. He says there are other stories that “are just as much fun and much shorter” (127) before explaining that our belief in forward progress is one such story. He writes that the story we tell ourselves about slavery is that it was a mistake we won’t make again, and that when we do make mistakes in our own lifetime, “we say that was an aberration, a creature of the moment” (127), meaning we lie to ourselves that nothing that happened in the past or in the present is ever our fault. Here King touches on a few themes that recur throughout the book: first, that the past itself is a story; two, that stories help us justify our actions; and three, that our interpretation of and belief in stories influence the present world.

“And if you point out that all of these so-called gifts were paid for by Native people, sometimes more than once, and that treaties are legal, binding documents that cannot be dispensed with just because one party suddenly finds them inconvenient, bureaucrats, politicians, and an uninformed public roll their collective eyes and mumble platitudes about ‘the need to move ahead’ or the danger of ‘living in the past’ or the fact that ‘times change.’”

This quotation concerns the treaties Indians have signed with white people and the laws imposed upon them by Canada and the United States. Specifically, it describes a response to the American House Concurrent Resolution 108 of 1953 and the Canadian White Paper of 1969. Both acts aimed “to get government out of the ‘Indian business’” (137). They essentially apologized for ever having made treaties with Indians or promising Indian tribes anything, and came from a belief that the governments had “given these things to Native people out of the goodness of their hearts” and “that Native rights had been ‘gifted’ to Native people” (138). This, of course, is not something King agrees with, as he does not see the “gifted” privileges of being an Indian as being a gift at all but something granted as a result of having their lands and culture taken away. But to point that out is to be accused of “living in the past.” Of course, the past is never something the white person needs to move beyond, but rewriting the narrative does not mean the damages are undone or rewritten. As King says in Chapter 1, “a story cannot be called back” (10).

“No need to send in the cavalry with guns blazing. Legislation will do just as nicely.”

One of the themes of Chapter 5 is that legislation enacted by the Canadian and US governments eliminated the number and power of Indians. These laws have had two different consequences for the Native community: “one, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence” (130). Here King analyzes the success of these laws in eliminating Indian territory and people while also connecting to the storied past of cowboys and Indians. He flippantly suggests that the need for actual fighting was eliminated by paternalistic laws that accomplish the same goals the army had in the 1800s: the eradication of the Indian.

“Killing one deer was more than enough, and having done it once, I could not imagine doing it again.”

King finishes his story about working briefly as a deer culler in New Zealand. Though he successfully completed the job he was hired to do, it left him feeling unsatisfied. His racist partner Paul assumed King would be good at hunting because he was an Indian, but Paul also espoused a worldview “that things either had value or they didn’t” (146). With such a worldview, King knows there would be no end to the killing, implying that such a view informs the relationship between governments and Native peoples. As this quotation suggests, King understands the idea of killing once but does not understand why someone would do it again and again. That is, he can understand white settlers’ original impulse to take over Native American lands; what he doesn’t like is that they keep coming back for more.

“Unlike most other ethnic groups, we have two identities, a cultural identity and a legal identity, and the argument that I want to make is that we should be able to take both of them with us wherever we go, whatever we do, and with whomever we do it.”

Earlier King described various pieces of legislation that attempted to define who is and is not an Indian in Canada and the United States. Here he argues that such distinctions should not be made and that individuals should be able to decide for themselves what parts of their identity they want to keep and utilize. Though this quote is specifically about legal status, the underlying thought applies to other points on labels made throughout the text. King does not believe anyone should be restricted to another person’s definition or image of an Indian or non-Indian (or to any other label). He argues that labels do not help anyone besides the person doing the labeling.

“But for the most part, I think of oral stories as public stories and written stories as private stories.”

This quotation introduces the last dichotomy King himself creates. Though he admits that it, like all dichotomies, is overly simplistic, he makes the distinction because he wants the reader to know there are stories he can tell out loud and stories he cannot. He uses this distinction to introduce a story he cannot tell aloud, one that is too painful and one that leads him to conclude that it is easier to tell a painful private story than to act better in public in real time. After blending the oral and the written traditions for most of the text, it’s interesting that King ends with a distinction that some things can only be written and others only spoken. But, of course, he would also argue that even though dichotomies are too simplistic, they do serve a function, as not everything can be blended.

“No one tells me what to do. No one tells me what to do. No one tells me what to do.”

This quote exemplifies the “action adventure” we “tell about cigarettes” (158). Because King admits that the only difference between “Sanctioned Addictive Drugs and Banned Addictive Drugs” are the “stories we tell about them” (157), he suggests that each of us tells a different story about the bad decisions we make. The changed italicized word in each sentence changes the emphasis on the behavior—in this case, smoking—and the explanation for it. In the first case, the speaker rejects being told anything; in the second, rules apply to others but not to the speaker, who emphasizes their identity foremost; and in the third, the speaker rejects the right of one specific person to give directions. These subtle shifts in emphasis change the meaning of the sentences, just as the subtle shifts in the way a story is conveyed change the way said story is received.