The Truth About Stories (17 page)

Who will tell our stories?

The one about Coyote and the Ducks, for instance. Take it. It's
yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to your children. Turn it into a play. 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.

T
HE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES
is that that's all we
are.

The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that “In a fractured age,
when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in
them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way,
or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in
ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with
meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our
lives.”
¹

For Native storytellers, there is generally a proper place and time to
tell a story. Some stories can be told any time. Some are only told in the winter when
snow is on the ground or during certain ceremonies or at specific moments in a season.
Others can only be told by particular individuals or families. So when Native stories
began appearing in print, concern arose that the context in
which
these stories had existed was in danger of being destroyed and the stories themselves
were being compromised. The printed word, after all, once set on a page, has no master,
no voice, no sense of time or place.

Of course, written stories can be performed orally; although, apart from
authors on reading tours to promote their books and parents reading to children, this
seldom happens.

And oral stories can be stuck in a book.

But for the most part, I think of oral stories as public stories and
written stories as private stories. I know I will generate disagreement on this point.
After all, we are surrounded by books that can be read by anyone. We have public
libraries, public bookstores. There would appear to be nothing private about Shakespeare
or Jane Austen or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Margaret Atwood. These writers and their
works are known to the world. But the act of reading is a private act. And no matter how
many people may have read a book or an article or a poem or a short story, each person
reads that story themselves, by themselves, whereas oral stories generally have an
audience in which there is a group dynamic. Though it could be argued that both reading
and listening, in the end, are individual acts.

And then there's television.

So I'm probably wrong.

Nevertheless, it's a distinction I make. Oral stories. Written
stories. Public stories. Private stories. Stories I can tell out loud. Stories I
cannot.

This is one of my private stories.

It is doubtful I will ever perform it as an oral
piece because, for a variety of reasons, I choose not to do so.

And because I can't.

This is the only place you will find it. Contained within these mute marks
on a silent page.

Sounds portentous, doesn't it. Or at least poignant. Mute marks.
Silent page. Hyperbolic language to entice you to read the next sentence. Just another
cheap literary trick.

There's a family I know. A family with whom I used to be friends.
John and Amy Cardinal and their three children, Franklin, Amos, and Samantha, or Sam as
everyone knows her. John is a painter. Amy teaches psychology at a university. Two cars.
Two cats. A solid brick home built in the 1920s with hardwood floors and a nice
backyard.

Your more-money-than-average Canadian family.

Franklin and Amos are the Cardinals' natural children. Sam is
adopted. This is a distinction I am loath to make. Within Native culture, by and large,
where a child comes from, and how she becomes a member of a family or a community, is
not an issue. I make it here only because I don't want you to think poorly of Amy
Cardinal.

Sam suffers from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD).

For those of you who don't know what fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
is, here's a quick tour. Alcohol consumed at any point during a pregnancy can
affect the fetus. No amount is known to be safe, any may be
destructive to varying degrees. FASD is the designation for a range of neurological
disorders that affect the brain as well as other structures. Drinking on or around day
twenty-eight, for example, can produce distinctive facial morphology — small,
wide-set eye sockets, the absence of a philtrum, a thin upper lip. While not all FASD
children exhibit these features, they do share — to varying degrees — an
inability to do abstract reasoning, to control impulses, to generalize from one
situation to another, to learn from experience, to make choices, and to understand the
effect that behaviour has on others.

School is difficult for a child with FASD, and, as she progresses, the
workload can become completely and utterly overwhelming. Most often the frustrations
that arise from not being able to meet the demands and expectations of others are
brought back to the family, and the frustrations are taken out on parents and other
siblings. FASD children are extremely difficult to parent under the best circumstances,
and there is little chance that they will ever be able to live as completely independent
adults.

While you can modify the child's environment and reduce the occasion
of stress, there is absolutely nothing you can do to reverse the effects or undo the
condition. It is both devastating and completely preventable. It simply requires that
women who become pregnant don't drink.

I know. Yet another burden to place on women. Another stone's weight
of blame.

This is why I want you to know that Sam's condition wasn't
Amy's fault. And I want you to know that it wasn't Sam's fault. And if
we wanted to blame someone
and could discover who the
“bad” mother was, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Much too late
for blame to do any good, much as we love to point fingers. Much too late for blame to
make a difference.

We live in a strange world, do we not? We know that alcohol and tobacco
are highly addictive drugs, yet we allow their use as part of our ongoing social
activities. We encourage companies to ferment a variety of liquors and manufacture
cigarettes and cigars of every shape and size, chewing tobacco and snuff. We make few
objections to corporate suggestions that drinking and smoking are pleasurable, that
these products will help you to be accepted. Even loved.

At the same time, because we understand alcohol and tobacco and their
potential for disaster, we maintain boundaries around these highly profitable drugs.
Loose ones to be sure. We don't say that you can't smoke or that you
can't drink, we just put age limits on these activities and try to regulate where
and when you can do them.

You can't smoke in public buildings; do it outside.

You can't drink and drive a car; call a taxi.

But with other drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, we have no such
understanding. These are banned addictive drugs even though they have much the same
effects as alcohol and tobacco.

Sanctioned Addictive Drugs and Banned Addictive Drugs.

And the only real difference between them are the stories we tell.

The stories we tell about alcohol are romances. Wine
is for lovers, single-malt scotch for successful entrepreneurs, beer for young nubile
women and virile young men who can't afford anything else.

The stories we tell about cigarettes are action adventures.

We smoke to look cool, to let the world know that we don't care.
Screw you, we say, when we light up. You don't like it? Tough. You want a piece of
me? Come and get it.

No one
tells
me what to do.

No one tells
me
what to do.

No one
tells me what to do.

When I was younger, we drank beer to feel good and smoked to look good. We
drove up and down the main streets of North America, with a six-pack on the seat next to
us in case we ran into a good time and our smokes rolled up in the sleeves of our
T-shirts so you could see our muscles.

Sanctioned Addictive Drugs. Banned Addictive Drugs.

But great stories. Very effective. Very enticing. Very hard to resist.

It would be simplistic to say that Sam's birth mother must have
liked the story about alcohol, for there were probably other stories that she
“liked” just as well — the one about being poor, for example, or the
one about being worthless — but for Sam and her parents, the story was neither a
romance nor an action adventure.

I know what you want to read next. You want to read how Amy and John
dedicated their lives to helping Sam,
how Family and
Children's Services supported the Cardinals and provided them with assistance in
coping with Sam's behaviour, how the school Sam went to set up a special program
to help her succeed, how the health care community in the town where the Cardinals lived
did research on FASD and discovered a methodology, a regimen of vitamins and exercises
and special learning aids, perhaps, that allowed Sam to manage her condition, how the
Cardinals' friends and neighbours came together, how the community helped to raise
this troubled child.

What you want to read is how the distress of a child and a family engaged
the compassionate and ethical responses for which North America is supposed to be
famous.

Yeah.

That's a story I'd like to read, too.

Unfortunately, North America has no such ethics.

Really we don't. Now, I'm not saying that we don't have
any
ethics. I'm just suggesting that we don't have the ones we
think we have.

For example, in North America, we talk about our environmental ethic. And
we point to instances such as the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill in Alaska that
devastated miles of coastline and the response of the public to that disaster —
when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people rushed in with mops and sponges and began
cleaning seabirds, while crews with high-powered steam units blasted the oil off rocks,
and boats with oil-retardant chemicals and oil-containing booms surrounded the spill and
sucked it up — as proof that such an ethic exists.
Certainly the outcry over the offence was loud and sustained.

And then there was Enron.

Remember that one? Business ethics. When it was discovered that the
company's directors had cooked the books, that they had lied about Enron's
economic health to make the stock's position in the market look much better than
it was, that they had made substantial profits just prior to the collapse by selling off
their personal holdings, investors and the public stood ready to lynch everyone involved
in the scandal.

To listen to the noise generated by these two events, you would have
thought that we cared.

But, in fact, we don't. Not in any ethical way.

Oh, sure, we don't like oil on our beaches, and we don't like
to be robbed. In this day and age, oil tankers, we insist, are supposed to be safe.
Financial institutions are supposed to be bastions of integrity.

But we do nothing to prevent such disasters from happening again. And if
they do (as they most certainly will), our reaction will be the same, because the story
we tell about moments such as these is that they shouldn't have happened, that
they're someone else's fault, that they're the price we pay for our
way of life, that there's no way to avoid them completely, that the environment
and investor confidence will recover eventually.

John and I were friends. Good friends. We went out for coffee at least
once a week, caught the occasional action film, played a little golf, told jokes,
talked. We went to
Barbados together with our families and to Costa
Rica, shared a cottage at Lake Simcoe, flew to British Columbia and skied Panorama. My
kids played with his kids. I knew that Sam's behaviour was a problem, but when she
was around other people and had things to keep her occupied, she managed reasonably
well. There would be flare-ups, to be sure, moments when everything came to a stop while
we sorted out emotions.

And, of course, I expected that, as time went on and as Sam matured, the
difficulties would work themselves out.

But they didn't. By the time Sam was a teenager, the behavioural
problems had intensified. I told John that all teenagers go through difficult periods,
that eventually they come out the other side as reasonable human beings. It was a
platitude, something you say because it's what you're supposed to say, not
because it's true, and both of us knew it.

John did not manage any of this very well. He was angry much of the time.
Angry that Sam was the way she was, angry that Amy had insisted on adopting because she
had wanted a daughter, angry because he felt trapped in a world not of his making, angry
that they couldn't get any meaningful help from health professionals.

Angry that he was angry.

For my part, I began to keep my distance. I stopped calling. I made
excuses. I didn't return his calls. Not all at once. Gradually. Until it was as
though we had never known each other.

Then one day, I decided I should call and see how he
was doing. Amy answered the phone. In the background, I could hear Sam abusing her
mother, calling her a bitch and slamming doors. At one point Sam grabbed the phone and
yelled “Fuck off” into the receiver. After that I listened to Amy's
breathing, while Sam raged through the house, the sound of breakage trailing in her
wake.

Is this a bad time? I asked.

No, Amy told me, no problem.

I felt guilty. Maybe John hadn't exaggerated the situation. I had
been his friend, and I had done nothing to help.