The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Chapter 2 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. After reiterating that stories are “all we are,” King discusses a photography project he started in 1994, one in which he would travel across North America and take black-and-white photographs of Native artists (32). This project was influenced by the work of Edward Sheriff Curtis, who spent the first three decades of the 20th century taking thousands of photographs of Indians. King argues that Curtis’s photos reflect a desire to document the “last Indian” in the literary era known as American Romanticism (33). In this era, perceptions of Native Americans changed. Where once Indians were thought to be inferior, Romantics believed the Indian to be a symbol of their own ideals, as Indians embodied nature, exoticism, mysticism, and eroticism (33). Thus, writers and artists created the fictional noble Indian “who was the last of his race” (33). Curtis set out to document such an Indian but found that reality did not comport to this ideal. Instead of photographing the Native Americans as they were, Curtis dressed the Indians he photographed in the clothes of other tribes so that they “looked more ‘Indian’” and so his “photographs would look authentic” (36). While King is happy that these images exist, as otherwise fewer photos of Natives would exist, he sees problems with the photos because they ultimately just “show race,” which despite being intangible is still a thing we “believe we can see” (44).

Throughout the chapter King relays other anecdotes from his own life to drive home the point that “everyone knew who Indians were” and “what we looked like,” including himself (53). He recounts anti-Mexican discrimination he saw growing up in Roseville, California. There, when he was 18, a girl would not go out with him because his parents did not want her dating a Mexican, which they thought he was because he did not dress like an Indian. He goes on to describe a journey he took on a German ship to New Zealand. Aboard the ship, only one crewmember had any idea what a Native American was, but his idea was formed by Western novels. The crewmember told King, “You’re not the Indian I had in mind” (48). In New Zealand and later Australia, he learned of racism toward Indians from India and Aboriginals. Even in Oceania, though, the people he encountered had heard of cowboys and Indians and had a pre-formed image of what King should be.

King also discusses the way Indians themselves imagine the Indian experience. He writes about a visit to a Will Rogers museum in a McDonald’s in Oklahoma in 1994, at the start of his photography project. Rogers is a “conundrum” for King (43). He was the most famous star in America for a few years in the 1930s, and he was a Cherokee who did not look Indian “in that constructed way” or the “way Curtis wanted Indians to look” (41). In thinking about Rogers, King worried that the artists he photographed would not appear Indian, just as Rogers did not. King also brings up the photographs of Richard Throssel, a Native American photographer and contemporary of Curtis who also dressed his Indians up to look more like the invented Indians.

King did not finish his photographic project. He continues to take photographs of Native artists as they are, but he wonders what good the project will do. He ends the chapter admitting that he is no better than others because he is also obsessed with defining identity politics based on appearance, as he wants “to look Indian so that you will see me as Indian because I want to be Indian,” even though he, as a middle-class Indian, can “afford the burden of being Indian” (59). What matters in the end are the stories he heard and made up while taking photographs of Indian artists, those “stories we make up to try to set the world straight” (60). King concludes Chapter 2 by again asserting that the reader can make of the stories what they will, as they have “heard it now” (60).