The Trouble with True Stories: Thomas King's, the Truth about Stories

Massey Lectures began in 1961 under the patronage of the first Canadian-born Governor-General, Vincent Massey. Given by prominent Canadian and foreign intellectuals, the lectures were held at the University of Toronto until 2002. Since then, all of the five lectures comprising each series have been given in different Canadian cities, and these lectures subsequently broadcast on CBC radio. If nothing else, the Masseys have a history of portentous titles (Time as History, Beyond Fate, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Malaise of Modernity, and so on). With Truth About Stories, Thomas King, Guelph University English professor and acclaimed author of fiction and children's literature, appears to follow in the same grave train. But with his subtitle, A Native Narrative, he may be playing the Trickster, for the seeker (and the audience for the Masseys is, after all, supposed to be more public than academic) of truth is bound to be perplexed, at least on first reflection, by King's anecdotal, autobiographical narratives which abruptly intersperse the private with the political. King contends that control our lives (p. 9), and, eventually citing Nigerian writer Ban Okri, he asserts and re-asserts that stories all we are (pp. 62, 122, 153). insistence that we shape our world(s) by the we tell (and that, one might extrapolate), we can only progress if we tell new that based on our consideration of other stories, is certainly salutary. But it is also platitudinous and as empty of political meaning as the formal promulgation of a new Chair of First Nations or Postcolonial or Black Studies. Real, structural change, involving, say, facilitating the admission of First Nations or Black (or, much more to the point, poor and/or digitally disenfranchised) students or individuals to universities and public institutions and workplaces is just not within King's ambit. Moreover, beyond King's allusions to the centripetency of stories, and his apocopated descriptions of jobs he once had, auditors and readers need to see and hear King showing this as much as telling it. King's repetition of the stories all we are refrain strikes a sane and noble chord, yet his reparation to stories all we are also gestures to the irresolution-and indeed, probable irresolvability--of his status as a part-First Nations, part-European person. King is at once trying to represent himself and to represent who he feels he is variously represented as. He refers fleetingly to a desperate desire for (p. 92), but acceptance is here a multivalent signifier. He says he'd rather annoy than placate (p. 102), but he could mean he'd rather prevaricate than placate. title of King's lectures could just as well be: The Trouble with Stories: Other People Keep Telling Different Ones. general trajectory of the lectures is from the familial to the communal, the personal to the political. In chapter (lecture) one, King reflects on the discrimination his Greek mother faced as a working woman in the United States, and the Indian father who disappeared before King was old enough to know him. King is therefore mixed-blood (p. 92), neither categorically European nor Native. Having discussed the ambiguous racial profile he grew up with, King writes toward the discovery of his mission--or, as he ages, just position--in life. He largely sets aside his significant literary, academic, and broadcasting achievements and goes on to talk about his efforts to document photographically Amerindian history, and the attempts that have been made before, by both Americans (Edward Sheriff Curtis) and Indians (Richard Throssel). He offers vignettes from his work experience as a clerk and a shiphand and a hunter and a professor, the while referring to other first nations writers, notably Louis Owens in chapter four. Through the middle sections of Truth about Stories, King argues that the only legitimate history North America has is Native, hence the American fetishization of the Native through branding, from butter and baking soda to beer and baseball teams. …

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