The Truth About Stories (13 page)

When that storm came through, I was just getting ready to pick my
tomatoes. They were big and red. Real ripe. But that storm beat me to it. First the
rain. And then the hail.

And here the old man stopped and helped himself to
more tea. And then he sat back and looked at the table.

I tried to be sympathetic. You must have been upset, I said.

Nope, said the old man, without even the hint of a smile. Always good to
have some ketchup.

During the 1960s, when many of us hoped that love would prove more
powerful than hate, herds of young people — “hippies,” if you were
from Yorkville, or “flower children,” if you were from Haight-Ashbury, or
“bums,” if you were from Pittsburgh — made their way to reserves and
reservations throughout North America, sure that Native people possessed the secret to
life. Or at least something middle-class North America didn't have.

That something turned out to be poverty. Or at least poverty was what they
saw. And as quickly as they arrived, most left. After all, living simply was one thing,
being poor was quite another.

What was not readily apparent at first glance from the window of a
Volkswagen van or from the comfort of a refitted school bus was the intimate
relationship that Native people had with the land. And here I am not talking about the
romantic and spiritual clichés that have become so popular with advertisers, land
developers, and well-meaning people with backpacks. While the relationship that Native
people have with the land certainly has a spiritual aspect to it, it is also a practical
matter that balances respect with survival. It is an ethic that can be seen in the
decisions and actions of a community and that
is contained in the
songs that Native people sing and the stories that they tell about the nature of the
world and their place in it, about the webs of responsibilities that bind all things.
Or, as the Mohawk writer Beth Brant put it, “We do not worship nature. We are part
of it.”
¹⁰

This is the territory of Native oral literature. And it is the territory
of contemporary Native written literature. The difference is this: instead of waiting
for you to come to us, as we have in the past, written literature has allowed us to come
to you.

I'd like to say that both efforts have been worth it. But I'm
not sure they have. It seems to me that sharing our oral stories with ethnographers and
anthropologists and sharing our written stories with non-Native audiences have produced
pretty much the same results. And, at best, they have been mixed.

Some of the essential questions that Native storytellers and writers have
raised about, say, the nature of good and evil have been ignored. The Trickster figure
— a complex arrangement of appetites and desires — has been reduced to
cartoon elements. The land as a living entity has become a mantra for industries that
destroy the environment. Mother earth, a potent phrase for Native people, has been
abused to the point where it has no more power or import than the word
“freedom” tumbling out of George W. Bush's mouth.

It is true that scholars have taken on the task of considering Native
literatures within a postcolonial context and this, in and of itself, has been
heartening, but most of us don't live in the university, and I can only imagine
that the majority of Native people would be more amused by the
gymnastics of theoretical language — hegemony and subalternity, indeed —
than impressed.

All of which will sound as if I'm suggesting that Native writers
should only write for Native readers, that these are our stories, that we should tell
them for ourselves.

If only things were that simple.

Yet, truth be told, this is what it appears we are beginning to do.
Remember those four writers I started to mention? The Canadians (if you believe in
maps): Robert Alexie and Harry Robinson, Ruby Slipperjack and Eden Robinson? These four
are creating their fictions, I believe, primarily for a Native audience, making a
conscious decision not so much to ignore non-Native readers as to write for the very
people they write about.

No, I can't prove it.

So it's lucky for me that literary analysis is not about proof, only
persuasion. In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that
something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be
true.

So allow me to
suggest
that we look at Robert Alexie's
novel
Porcupines and China Dolls
. Just as an example. One of the more
intriguing offerings in 2002, the book neither generated much critical acclaim nor made
any of the shortlists for literary prizes. The blurb on the jacket of the Stoddart
edition warns us that this is the “story of a journey from the dark side of
reality … a story of pain and healing, of making amends and finding truth, of the
inability of a people to hold on to their way of life.”

Certainly sounds like the Indians we know.

The jacket copy also makes it sound as though
Porcupines and China
Dolls
could be one of those depressing indictments of social policy and racial
bias, a case study docudrama with all the romantic underpinnings and tragic disasters of
a good soap opera. But Alexie is not writing
that
story, and he is not writing
for
that
audience.

“In order to understand this story,” Alexie says in the first
chapter, “it is important to know the People and where they came from and what
they went through,”
¹¹
and for the first two chapters, Alexie
gives the reader a lightning-quick tour that includes a mention of creation, the arrival
of Whites in 1789, the arrival of missionaries in 1850, and a brief history of life at a
residential school.

All in the first sixteen pages.

For the non-Native reader, this briefing is too little to do much good.
For the Native reader (and in this case, a particular Native reader) who knows the
history and the way the weight of this knowing settles over the rest of the book, it is
simply a way of saying “once upon a time.”

In
Porcupines and China Dolls
, James Nathan and Jake Noland
return from Aberdeen residential school, where the girls had been scrubbed and powdered
to look like china dolls and the boys had been scrubbed and sheared to look like
porcupines, and where each night, when the children cried in their beds, the sound was
like “a million porcupines crying in the dark.”
¹²

Native writers are particularly keen on the return of the Native.
Momaday's Abel returns from World War II, as does Silko's Tayo. James
Welch's unnamed narrator in
Winter in the Blood
returns from the city, as do June and Albertine in Louise Erdrich's
Love
Medicine
. In
Slash
, Jeannette Armstrong's Tommy Kelasket comes
home from jail, as does Garnet Raven in Richard Wagamese's
Keeper'n
Me
. And, for that matter, in my first novel,
Medicine River
, Will also
comes home.

These returns often precipitate a quest or a discovery or a journey. For
James and Jake, their return involves simply a sorting out, an ordering of
relationships, memories, and possibilities, an attempt to come to terms with the past,
an attempt to find a future.

I suspect that many people who come to this book will leave it annoyed
and/or puzzled and/or bored by the novel's biting satire, by its refusal to
resolve the tensions that it creates, and by a narrative style that privileges
repetition, hyperbole, and orality as storytelling strategies. Non-Native readers will
probably tire of hearing about the sound of “a million porcupines crying in the
dark,” and cringe at the mantra of people growing ten, then twenty, then thirty,
then forty feet tall with pride as they “disclose” the sexual abuse they
suffered at residential school or the relentless cycle of attempts and failures as
characters try to put their lives in order. But in all this, there is a delightful
inventiveness of tone, a strength of purpose that avoids the hazards of the lament and
allows the characters the pleasure of laughing at themselves and their perils. For the
Native reader, these continuing attempts of the community to right itself and the
omnipresent choruses of sadness and humour, of tragedy and sarcasm, become, in the end,
an honour song of sorts, a song many of us have heard before.

All Natives?

Of course not.

There's no magic in the blood that provides us with an ethnic
memory. But there are more of us who know this song than there should be.

So what? What difference does it make if we write for a non-Native
audience or a Native audience, when the fact of the matter is that we need to reach
both?

Take Louis Owens, for instance. Maybe if
Porcupines and China
Dolls
had been written earlier and more people had read the novel and
understood the story, Louis and the rest of those workers wouldn't have had to
walk home that summer.

I don't believe it, but then, I'm a cynic.

Maybe if Louis had had the chance to read Alexie's book, he would
have gotten on that plane and gone to the conference.

I'm not sure I believe this, either.

Ironically, in many ways, Louis's story is Alexie's story. At
the beginning and the end of
Porcupines and China Dolls
, James puts the barrel
of a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. And in the novel, as in life, whether he
lives or dies depends on which story he believes.

And this I do believe.

Which is why I tell those three stories over and over again. The story of
the time my son and I came to Canada. The story of my short career as a basketball
player. The story of an old man and his garden.

And there are others.

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.

Of course, you don't have to pay attention to any of these stories.
Louis's story is not particularly cheery. Alexie's story doesn't have
a demonstrably happy ending. Neither participates fully in Western epistemologies, and
my three don't have a moral centre nor are they particularly illuminating.

But help yourself to one if you like.

Take Louis's story, for instance. It's yours. Do with it what
you will. Cry over it. Get angry. 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.

V

T
HERE IS A STORY
I
KNOW
. 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. Sometimes the
change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the
details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it's the dialogue or the
response of the audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never
leaves the turtle's back. And the turtle never swims away.

One time, it was in Moncton I think, a woman with a baby in the audience
asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of a turtle, what was
below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told her. And below that turtle?
Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.

The woman began to chuckle and rock her baby, enjoying the game, I
imagine. So how many turtles are
there? she wanted to know. The
storyteller shrugged. No one knows for sure, he told her, but it's turtles all the
way down.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are.

“There are stories that take seven days to tell,” says the
Cherokee storyteller Diane Glancy. “There are other stories that take you all your
life.”
¹

I like Coyote stories. And one of my favourites is the one about Coyote
and the Ducks. Not the one where the Ducks dance around with their eyes shut while
Coyote grabs them one by one and tosses them in his hunting bag. And not the one where
he tries to talk the Ducks into teaching him how to fly.

The other one.

The one about the feathers.

And it goes like this.

In the days when everything was beginning, and animals were still talking
to humans, Coyote had a beautiful fur coat of which he was very vain. Every day Coyote
would come down to the river and look at his reflection.

Goodness, but I have a lovely coat, Coyote would whisper to the water, and
then he would give himself a hug.

One day while he was admiring his fur coat, he saw six Ducks singing and
dancing and swimming around in circles. Back and forth they went, spinning and turning
and diving and leaping in the sunshine. Now, in those days, Ducks had lovely long
feathers that shimmered and flashed like the Northern Lights. And when the Ducks
had finished singing and dancing and swimming around in circles,
they carefully cleaned each feather and straightened it and fluffed it up, so that it
glowed even more than before.

That is certainly a wonderful song, said Coyote, who was a little dizzy
from watching the Ducks swim around in circles. And that is certainly a beautiful
dance.

Yes, said the Ducks. We sing to keep everything in balance, and we dance
for peace and generosity, and we swim around in circles to remind everyone of our
relationship to the earth.

And those are certainly lovely feathers, said Coyote. Yes, said those
Ducks, they certainly are.

I would certainly like to have one of those lovely feathers, said Coyote.
It would go so well with my excellent fur coat.