The Truth About Stories (4 page)

Is it our nature? Do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is,
or did we simply start off with the wrong story? Like Silko's witches in the cave,
conjuring up things to impress each other.

Making magic.

Making faces.

Making mistakes.

I'm dying to remind myself that the basis of Christian doctrine is
rectitude and reward, crime and punishment, even though my partner has warned me that
this is probably not a good idea. Tell a story, she told me. Don't preach.
Don't try to sound profound. It's unbecoming, and you do it poorly.
Don't show them your mind. Show them your imagination.

So am I such an ass as to disregard this good advice and suggest that the
stories contained within the matrix of Christianity and the complex of nationalism are
responsible for the social, political, and economic problems we face? Am I really
arguing that the martial and hierarchical nature of Western religion and Western
privilege has fostered stories that encourage egotism and self-interest? Am I suggesting
that, if we hope to create a
truly civil society, we must first burn
all the flags and kill all the gods, because in such a world we could no longer tolerate
such weapons of mass destruction?

No, I wouldn't do that.

Though certainly we understand that we clear-cut forests not to enrich the
lives of animals but to make profit. We know that we dam(n) rivers not to improve water
quality but to create electricity and protect private property. We make race and gender
discriminatory markers for no other reason than that we can. And we maintain and
tolerate poverty not because we believe adversity makes you strong, but because
we're unwilling to share.

Ah. You've heard all this before, haven't you.

You may have already leaned over to a friend and whispered, Platitude.
Platitude, platitude, platitude. Thomas King the duck-billed platitude.

But give this a thought. What if the creation story in Genesis had
featured a flawed deity who was understanding and sympathetic rather than autocratic and
rigid? Someone who, in the process of creation, found herself lost from time to time and
in need of advice, someone who was willing to accept a little help with the more
difficult decisions?

What if the animals had decided on their own names? What if Adam and Eve
had simply been admonished for their foolishness?

I love you, God could have said, but I'm not happy with your
behaviour. Let's talk this over. Try to do better next time.

What kind of a world might we have created with that
kind of story?

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in the wilderness, broke and
homeless, the story of being made in God's image, of living in paradise, of naming
the animals must have gone to our heads, for while we weren't the strongest or the
fastest or the fiercest creatures on the planet, we were, certainly, as it turned out,
the most arrogant.

God's Chosen People. The Alpha and the Omega. Masters of the
Universe.

It is this conceit we continue to elaborate as we fill up our tanks at the
gas station, the myth we embrace as we bolt our doors at night, the romance we pursue as
we search our guidebooks for just the right phrase. The lie we dangle in front of our
appetites as we chase progress to the grave.

Or as Linda McQuaig so delightfully puts it in her book
All You Can
Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism
, “The central character in
economics is Homo Economicus, the human prototype, who is pretty much just a walking set
of insatiable material desires. He uses his rational abilities to ensure the
satisfaction of all his wants, which are the key to his motivation. And he isn't
considered some weirdo; the whole point of him is that he represents traits basic to all
of us — Homo Economicus ‘R' Us, as it were.”
⁴

It was Sir Isaac Newton who said, “To every action there is always
opposed an equal reaction.” Had he been
a writer, he might
have simply said, “To every action there is a story.”

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.

II

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 Lethbridge I think, a young boy in the audience asked
about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of the turtle, what was
below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told him. And below that turtle?
Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.

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

The truth about stories is that that's all we are. “You
can't understand the world without telling a story,” the Anishinabe writer
Gerald Vizenor tells us. “There isn't any center to the world but a
story.”
¹

In 1994, I came up with the bright idea of travelling around North America
and taking black-and-white portraits of Native artists. For a book. A millennium
project. I figured I'd spend a couple of months each year on the road travelling
to cities and towns and reserves in Canada and the United States, and when 2000 rolled
around, there I'd be with a terrific coffee-table book to welcome the next
thousand years.

I should tell you that I had not come up with this idea on my own. As a
matter of fact, Edward Sheriff Curtis had already done it. Photographed Indians, that
is. Indeed, Curtis is probably the most famous of the Indian photographers. He started
his project of photographing the Indians of North America around 1900, and for the next
thirty years he roamed the continent, producing some forty thousand negatives, of which
more than twenty-two hundred were published.

Curtis was fascinated by the idea of the North American Indian, obsessed
with it. And he was determined to capture that idea, that image, before it vanished.
This was a common concern among many intellectuals and artists and social scientists at
the turn of the nineteenth century, who believed that, while Europeans in the New World
were poised on the brink of a new adventure, the Indian was
poised on the brink of extinction.

In literature in the United States, this particular span of time is known
as the American Romantic Period, and the Indian was tailor-made for it. With its
emphasis on feeling, its interest in nature, its fascination with exoticism, mysticism,
and eroticism, and its preoccupation with the glorification of the past, American
Romanticism found in the Indian a symbol in which all these concerns could be united.
Prior to the nineteenth century, the prevalent image of the Indian had been that of an
inferior being. The Romantics imagined their Indian as dying. But in that dying, in that
passing away, in that disappearing from the stage of human progress, there was also a
sense of nobility.

One of the favourite narrative strategies was to create a single, heroic
Indian (male, of course) — James Fenimore Cooper's Chingachgook, John
Augustus Stone's Metamora, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha — who
was the last of his race. Indeed, during this period, death and nobility were
sympathetic ideas that complemented one another, and writers during the first half of
the nineteenth century used them in close association, creating a literary shroud in
which to wrap the Indian. And bury him.

Edgar Allan Poe believed that the most poetic topic in the world was the
death of a beautiful woman. From the literature produced during the nineteenth century,
second place would have to go to the death of the Indian.

Not that Indians were dying. To be sure, while many
of
the tribes who lived along the east coast of North America, in the interior of Lower
Canada, and in the Connecticut, Ohio, and St. Lawrence river valleys had been injured
and disoriented by the years of almost continuous warfare, by European diseases, and by
the destructive push of settlers for cheap land, the vast majority of the tribes were a
comfortable distance away from the grave.

This was the Indian of fact.

In 1830, when the American president, Andrew Jackson, fulfilling an
election promise to his western and southern supporters, pushed the Removal Act through
Congress, he did so in order to get rid of thousands of Indians — particularly the
Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles — who were not dying and
not particularly interested in going anywhere.

These were not the Indians Curtis went west to find.

Curtis was looking for the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the
imaginative construct. And to make sure that he would find what he wanted to find, he
took along boxes of “Indian” paraphernalia — wigs, blankets, painted
backdrops, clothing — in case he ran into Indians who did not look as the Indian
was supposed to look.

I collect postcards. Old ones, new ones. Postcards that depict Indians
or Indian subjects. I have one from the 1920s that shows an Indian lacrosse team in
Oklahoma. Another is a hand-coloured rendering of the Sherman Indian School in
California. A third is a cartoon of an Indian man fishing in the background while, in
the
foreground, a tourist takes a picture of the man's wife
and their seven kids with the rather puerile caption “And what does the chief do
when he's not fishing?”

One of my favourites is a photograph of a group of Indians, in full
headdresses, golfing at the Banff Springs Hotel golf course in 1903. The photograph was
taken by Byron Harmon and shows Jim Brewster and Norman Luxton, two Banff locals,
caddying for what looks to be five Indians who are identified only as “two Stoney
Indian Chiefs.” I like this particular postcard because there is an element of
play in the image of Indians in beaded outfits and full headdresses leaning on their
golf clubs while their horses graze in the background, and because I can't tell if
the person on the tee with bobbed hair, wearing what looks to be a dress and swinging
the club, is an Indian or a White, a man or a woman.

But the vast majority of my postcards offer no such mysteries. They are
simply pictures and paintings of Indians in feathers and leathers, sitting in or around
tipis or chasing buffalo on pinto ponies.

Some of these postcards are old, but many of them are brand new, right off
the rack. Two are contemporary pieces from the Postcard Factory in Markham, Ontario. The
first shows an older Indian man in a full beaded and fringed leather outfit with an
eagle feather war bonnet and a lance, sitting on a horse, set against a backdrop of
trees and mountains. The second is a group of five Indians, one older man in a full
headdress sitting on a horse and four younger men on foot: two with bone breastplates,
one with a leather vest, and one bare chested.

The interesting thing about these two postcards is
that the solitary man on his horse is identified only as a “Cree Indian,”
while the group of five is designated as “Native Indians,” much like the
golfers, as if none of them had names or identities other than the cliché. Though
to give them identities, to reveal them to be actual people, would be, I suppose, a
violation of the physical laws governing matter and antimatter, that the Indian and
Indians cannot exist in the same imagination.

Which must be why the White caddies on the Banff postcard have names.

And the Indians do not.

It is my postcard Indian that Curtis was after. And in spite of the fact
that Curtis met a great variety of Native people who would have given the lie to the
construction, in spite of the fact that he fought vigorously for Native rights and
published articles and books that railed against the government's treatment of
Indians, this was the Indian that Curtis believed in.

I probably sound a little cranky. I don't mean to. I know Curtis
paid Indians to shave away any facial hair. I know he talked them into wearing wigs. I
know that he would provide one tribe of Indians with clothing from another tribe because
the clothing looked more “Indian.”

So his photographs would look authentic.

And while there is a part of me that would have preferred that Curtis had
photographed his Indians as he found them, the men with crewcuts and moustaches, the
women in cotton print dresses, I am grateful that we have his images at all, for the
faces of the mothers and fathers,
aunts and uncles, sisters and
brothers who look at you from the depths of these photographs are not romantic
illusions, they are real people.

Native culture, as with any culture, is a vibrant, changing thing, and
when Curtis happened upon it, it was changing from what it had been to what it would
become next. But the idea of “the Indian” was already fixed in time and
space. Even before Curtis built his first camera, that image had been set. His task as
he visited tribe after tribe was to sort through what he saw in order to find what he
needed.

But to accuse Curtis of romantic myopia is to be petty and to ignore the
immensity of the project and the personal and economic ordeal that he undertook. He
spent his life photographing and writing about Indians. He died harnessed to that
endeavour, and, when I look at his photographs, I can imagine this solitary man moving
across the prairies, through the forests, along the coast, dragging behind him an
enormous camera and tripod and the cultural expectations of an emerging nation, and I am
humbled.