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.
Symbols & Motifs
Turtles All the Way Down
Every chapter but one begins with King telling the story of turtles holding up the earth. King argues that each time the story is told, it changes slightly for the speaker and the listener. What the turtles represent, then, is something permanent that does not change in the story. Every time the story is told, the ending is the same. What changes for the speaker and listener or reader are the details that lead to that ending. This suggests that stories both do and do not change.
Additionally, the turtles relate to the book’s larger project. The creation myth that ends with the earth being held up by turtles is different from the Judeo-Christian creation myth. King does not advocate for one over the other but indicates that we should imagine both as stories, not truths, and then choose to believe them or not. We can take from each creation story what we will, but we should wonder what impact such stories have on us and the world around us.
Photographs
Photographs dominate several chapters of The Truth About Stories. King writes of the artificially constructed photos of Indians taken by Edward Sheriff Curtis and Richard Throssel, and the effect those images have on other Indians. He also describes the postcards he collects that contain images of stereotypical Indians. King suggests that photographs don’t capture the truth but instead create an imagined act. Still, King appreciates that photos of Native Americans exist, even if they are constructed. The power of a photo is its permanence for good or ill, and having photos of Indians—even complicated ones—is better than not having photos. Photos prove that something existed, even if that something was purely imagined.
King also has his own photography project that attempts to capture the truth of Native artists. This project suggests that he thinks photos, like stories and Native literature, can resurrect and reinterpret the past.
Four-Strand Bone Choker
The four-strand bone choker is an example clothing that King associates with traditional Indian attire. It’s what he wears as a youth so that he doesn’t look Mexican or white. He brings it up again when he wonders if he should have worn one to make himself appear more authentically Indian to audiences and to a reviewer of his radio program. The choker is not an example of attire worn by his family or tribe; it is just a piece of clothing that is generically Indian. However, the generic Indian attire is what non-Natives picture an Indian wearing, so, paradoxically, the inauthentic attire is what makes the wearer appear authentically Indian to the dominant culture.
Dichotomies
King uses the framework of dichotomies throughout the text to contrast Native and non-Native traditions, but he also criticizes the dichotomies that have been placed around Natives for centuries. While he argues that people do not always fit into dichotomies, King often creates his own, suggesting implicitly what he makes explicit at other times in the book: The stories we hear about our lives are internalized. He uses dichotomies because that is the framework he has always been taught, even though he recognizes that this is a flawed framework. As this example demonstrates, several of these dichotomies create paradoxes in real life. For example, even as King rejects the idea of the imagined “Indian,” he still wants to appear more “Indian” and so wears generic clothing and accessories (like the bone choker) to signal his authenticity.
Stories
This is an obvious recurring symbol, as every chapter is about the stories we tell. King uses a mix of personal stories, historical facts and quotations, literary analysis, and traditional stories to make his larger point that stories are what we are. The fact that everything he brings up—whether it be legislation, historical accounts, or clear works of fiction—is described as a story highlights this point further. Since nothing is fact and everything is narrative, stories are all that have power in the world, for the stories we believe make us who we are and the world what it is.
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