83 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas KingThe Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Let Me Entertain You”
Chapter 3 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. After the usual mention of stories being “all we are,” King recounts speaking at a small Northern California college, where he told the story of Ishi. Ishi was the last of his tribe and in 1911 was arrested by a sheriff who didn’t recognize him as an Indian. Two anthropologists took Ishi (and gave him the name Ishi) to a museum where he lived out his days as an exhibit for whites. King wowed the college audience with the story but then was dismayed to realize he and the other Native American speakers did not get paid, unlike the other speakers. He asks rhetorically, “What were we, I wanted to know, entertainment?” (66).
The chapter next discusses the early history of interactions between whites and Native Americans. While some explorers wrote positive reports on the Indians and their way of life, the Puritans saw the Indians primarily as an obstacle to their goal of acquiring land. Thus, “the Puritans set about creating the stories that were needed to carry the day” (75). These stories depicted Indians not as “strange and exotic” but as “graceless and savage people, dirty and slothful in their personal habits, treacherous in their relations with the superior race” (75). It is this version of Indians that endured in fiction and historical records until the second half of the 19th century, when people who no longer saw many Indians (primarily those living east of the Mississippi River in the United States and Canada) became enamored of a certain type of Indian, one who had not fought the white man but was “wild, free, powerful, noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, [and] solitary” (79). King calls this figure a “National Indian,” one who could serve as a cultural treasure connecting the North America that existed before colonization with the emerging country of the United States (79). This mythical missing link is the Indians King imagines the Boston Tea Partiers a century earlier were attempting to embody by dressing as Indians during their protest. King argues that the National Indian, though he never existed (and King notes that the National Indian was always thought of as male), could be made up quite easily.
This made-up Indian was a friend to the white man and served two purposes, according to King. He was the type of Indian who could survive while the other Native Americans were dying out, proving to Indians themselves “that they had no future as Indians” (84). Later 19th-century Indians, such as author Charles Eastman and entertainer E. Pauline Johnson, took that lesson to heart. The mixed-blood Eastman wrote that he was an “American” who had learned much from civilization while retaining his “Indian sense of right and justice” (85). Johnson, also of mixed blood, performed poetry shows half in Indian clothing and half in an elegant evening gown. Both Eastman and Johnson enthralled white audiences and showed implicitly that Indians could adapt to white civilization.
King ends the chapter by discussing a review of a radio show he used to appear on in Canada. The reviewer categorizes King and the other hosts in varying degrees of authenticity, describing King as “a bundle of contradictions” that enmeshed both a “first class and first nations” background (88). The name of the review asks if the radio performers are “Comic Heroes or ‘Red Niggers’” (89), and King wonders if Indians will ever be allowed to move past that dichotomy. He suggests that being “entertainment is the story of survival” (89). He again tells the reader they can make of the stories what they will, as they have “heard it now” (89).
Chapter 3 Analysis
In Chapter 3 King asks whether Indians can be thought of as anything other than entertainment by whites. To answer that question, King compares the story of Ishi to those of Charles Eastman and E. Pauline Johnson, all of whom were contemporaries. While Ishi was literally put on display as the last of his people, the embodiment of an uncivilized savage, Eastman and Johnson toured as the missing link between the civilized and the exotic. All three were entertainers, though only Ishi really did not choose his lot. King notes that Ishi was told he could leave but he had no place to go, and was essentially trapped as an exhibit. Johnson and Eastman, though, were conscious of the fact that they were entertainers. King recognizes that he himself has been both Ishi and Johnson before. In his meta-anecdote about not getting paid for telling the story of Ishi, he wonders why Indians are always seen as entertainers. However, when discussing his radio show, he recognizes that he is consciously entertaining an audience but complains instead about the white reviewer attempting to label him as part of a dichotomy of “authentic” and “inauthentic Indian.” He wonders if being an entertainer requires him to play a type of minstrelsy in which he must wear traditional Indian clothes—a “four-strand bone choker and beaded belt buckle” (88)—to signal that he is authentic. While being entertainment has perks, being regarded solely as entertainment means one will never be seen as a real person who exists between the dichotomies of authentic/inauthentic and entertainment/not entertainment.
Speaking of dichotomies, King introduces another dichotomy society created for Indians at the turn of the century: Indians could either be like Crazy Horse, the “wild” Indian who never joined civilization, or like Eastman, “who saw in White culture the only future that was available to Native people” (87). Here as in other conceptions, King implicitly asks to be placed between those dichotomies—to be someone who can tell Native American stories while wearing whatever clothing he wants. As with every dichotomy King brings up, his goal is to prove that such dichotomous labels need not be the only labels we assign to ourselves.
Finally, this chapter explores another tension in the relationship between the imagined Indian and the dominant white culture. In tracing the history of white and Native interactions, King reveals the artifice that existed from the beginning. Indians were depicted as savage to serve the needs of the white narrative. Because whites wanted land, they had to prove that they alone deserved it. And yet when Indians gave up that land, the Indian then became a figure whites needed as a missing link between a primitive past and a civilized present in North America. The creation of a “National Indian” (79) who “was a friend to the White man” and who was “strong, brave, honest, and noble” (82) created an Indian whom whites could admire and even dress up as in celebration or patriotism while retaining justification to kill Indians who did not embody their ideals. As was the case with the Indians depicted in Curtis’s photos, the National Indian ultimately helps justify the racism against all other Indians. The Indians who can entertain are good, while the ones who fight against whites are bad. And, as King notes, there is no place for women in this conceptualization, as the National Indian was always conceived of as a male.
And how does this tie back to Ishi, the man indirectly forced to embody the National Indian ideal in a museum? He survived and did not have to live in prison the rest of his days, but it was hardly a life. When King suggests that “entertainment is the story of survival” (89), he is being coy. Yes, Indians survive by being entertainment, but Ishi and King both prove that mere survival is not enough.
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