The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative
Thomas King tells us a story in The Truth about Stories: “It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes.” Each of the five chapters opens with the same paragraph, and then twists slightly. Someone, somewhere, asks the storyteller what was below the turtle–and gets the response, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
Then he goes on, “The truth about stories is that’s all that we are.” By the end of the book, even if you don’t believe him, you’ve heard his story. And, as he closes each chapter, “Just 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.”
Summary
Part autobiography, part reflection on the impact of American colonialism on native peoples, The Truth about Stories is deceptively simple. King examines “the Native experience” from different angles, recalling how he was mistaken for a Mexican by the father of his high school prom date, investigating the photographic journey of Edward Curtis in the early twentieth century, explaining the intricate rules that govern whether someone is legitimately “American Indian”, and so on.
As with the other books, one of the central problems is epistemological: how do you know who or what someone is? In particular, what is an Indian? The story of Curtis is an interesting illustration, because his photographic expedition was purportedly to raise awareness of “vanishing Indian culture” and to save them. However, he avoided taking photographs of the Indians as they actually appeared–with moustaches, or women wearing cotton dresses, etc. He actually brought along “Indian” items (sometimes mixing elements from different tribes) to make his subjects look more Indian.
Today, when Native people try to demonstrate who they are (say, for scholarships or benefits), they’re asked things like
Were you born on a reserve?…Do you speak your Native language?…Do you participate in your tribe’s ceremonies?…Are you a full-blood?…Are you a status Indian? (55)
Contrast the rules surrounding “status Indians” with being “French.” Being French is a matter of maintaining a language and a culture. Who you marry has little to do with being French. For Indians, however, only certain tribes are recognized as “Indian.” And you can lose your status as an Indian: If two status Indians marry, their children are status. If one of their status children marries a non-status person, their children remain status. However, if these children maries a non-status person, their children are not status. This is the case even if everyone involved are full-blooded Indians. The great-grandparents may be status, but their great-grandchildren are not. (This refers to Canadian laws, by the way.)
Eventually, there will be no more status Indians, despite having treaty lands. King points out that Indians have two identies: “a cultural identity and a legal identity”, but they are separate. Both of them, though, are subject to remaking by others–the first by people like Edward Curtis, the second by national laws.
Epistemology
What does King’s book have to say about the liberating epistemology of postcolonialism, which elevates the local and native knowledge, eschews emphasis on boundaries and property? Well, it carries an “implicit expectation that, through exposure to new literatures and cultures and challenges to hegemonic assumptions and power structures, lives would be made better. At least the lives of the theorists.” (59)
The epistemology of property, a theme mentioned by Young in Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, becomes a way to “liberate” the Indian (from his land). In the late nineteenth century, Merrill E. Gates, a self-proclaimed “friend of the Indian” said, “The desire for property of his own may become an intense education force…Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers–and trousers with pockets in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars.”
Capitalism becomes–whether out of malicious intent or sheer ignorance–a way to bring culture to the Indian and dissolve the difference between the native and the colonial, by assimilation. Amendments served to disenfranchise Indians if they served in the military, got university degrees, became a clergyman or a lawyer, etc. The goal was to eliminate the Indian through legislation (if you think this is exaggeration, King cites Duncan Campbell Scott in 1920, deputy superintendent of Indian affairs, saying just this).
So what is the solution to all of this? King closes with a story about friends of his, who adopted a child with FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder). He reflects on how alcohol is highly addictive and damaging, and yet it is simply regulated, unlike other drugs. The difference between alcohol and cocaine? The stories we tell, says King.* Eventually, his friends’ marriage broke up as the child grew to have violent behavioral problems. King recognizes the missed chance he had to be a support, to talk to them, and wonders if it would have made a difference.
He weeps “for the world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure….because it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my deispicable behavior, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a friend, as a human being, than to have to live the story of making a sustained effort to help.”
This seems to be another common thread so far in the readings: what is the power of description? In some ways, narrative is powerful–constructing the way we see entire groups of people. In other ways, however, it is helpless to do anything. Can postcolonialism, in itself, be a positive ethic which accomplishes change? So far, the answer seems to be no.
*This continues to be my major concern with the readings so far–cocaine and alcohol do have some vastly different biological impacts. While our stories are wrapped up how we understand the biology, I think there’s a way to navigate between a naive empiricism and an unmoored postmodernism.
Image: Little Dog, 1907, by Edward Curtis. From Old-Picture.com.