The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Chapter 1

Reading Check

1. a turtle’s back (Chapter 1)

2. stories (Chapter 1)

3. A woman falls from the sky. (Chapter 1)

Short Answer

1. He says that it is turtles “all the way down.” (Chapter 1)

2. She was discriminated against because she was a woman. (Chapter 1)

3. One describes a competitive world and the other describes a cooperative world. (Chapter 1)

Chapter 2

Reading Check

1. Native artists (Chapter 2)

2. They dressed them up to reflect their own ideas about how Indians look. (Chapter 2)

3. Will Rogers (Chapter 2)

Short Answer

1. He was a photographer in the early 20th century who traveled the country taking photographs of Native people. (Chapter 2)

2. Before the Romantic era, Native peoples were seen by the majority culture as inferiors, but the Romantics projected their own ideals onto Native people and recreated their image as the “noble Indian.” (Chapter 2)

3. The imagined Indian who never really existed but who is represented in photographs is what erases the existence of real, living Native people. (Chapter 2)

Chapter 3

Reading Check

1. a museum (Chapter 3)

2. They were not paid. (Chapter 3)

3. the Puritans (Chapter 3)

Short Answer

1. The “National Indian” is an imagined Indian who personifies nobility, freedom, wildness, and wisdom. This fictionalized Native symbolically links the pre-invasion landscape with the emerging American culture. (Chapter 3)

2. The rebels who dumped tea into Boston Harbor dressed themselves as Indians, trying to link themselves symbolically with the ideals embodied by the “National Indian.” (Chapter 3)

3. The reviewer establishes two categories, “authentic” and “inauthentic” Indians, making it clear that there is no room in the “authentic” category for Native people whose lives resemble those of the non-Natives around them. (Chapter 3)

Chapter 4

Reading Check

1. Louis Owens (Chapter 4)

2. House Made of Dawn (Chapter 4)

3. He has a metal plate in his head. (Chapter 4)

Short Answer

1. King disputes the ideas that written stories are more sophisticated than oral stories and that written stories are somehow more complete than oral stories. (Chapter 4)

2. Cooper created a dichotomy between white and Native thinking, claiming that whites use reason while Natives use instinct. (Chapter 4)

3. He claims that Owens’s choice to commit suicide hinged on which story he believed. (Chapter 4)

Chapter 5

Reading Check

1. their feathers (Chapter 5)

2. the Dawes Act (Chapter 5)

3. culling deer (Chapter 5)

Short Answer

1. Coyote says that humans like ducks “well enough,” but that they like their feathers more. (Chapter 5)

2. The feathers metaphorically stand for the land lost by Native peoples to the U.S. government. (Chapter 5)

3. These laws define Indian peoples out of existence. (Chapter 5)

Afterwords

Reading Check

1. the story about the earth on turtle’s back (Afterwords)

2. fetal alcohol spectrum disorder/FASD (Afterwords)

Short Answer

1. He says that oral stories are primarily public, while written stories are primarily private. (Afterwords)

2. It is easier for him to live with the story of his failure as a friend than it would be to live through supporting the family, which tells him how much he prioritizes comfort and pleasure. (Afterwords)