The Truth About Stories (3 page)

What do we have to do? asked the Eels.

It's easy, said Charm. One of you has to dive down to the bottom of
the water and bring up some mud.

Sure, said all the water animals, even though they had no idea what mud
was.

So, said Charm, who wants to try first?

Me! said Pelican, and he flew into the sky as high as he could and then
dropped like a knife into the water. And he was gone for a long time. But when he
floated to the surface, out of breath, he didn't have any mud.

It was real dark down there, said Pelican, and cold.

The next animal to try was Walrus.

I don't mind the dark, said Walrus, and my blubber will keep me
warm. So down she went, and she was gone for much longer than Pelican, but when she came
to the surface coughing up water, she didn't have any mud, either.

I don't think the water has a bottom, said Walrus. Sorry.

I'm sure you're beginning to wonder if there's a
point to this story or if I'm just going to work my way through all the water
animals one by one.

So one by one all the water animals tried to find the mud at the bottom
of the ocean, and all of them failed until the only animal left was Otter. Otter,
however, wasn't particularly interested in finding mud.

Is it fun to play with? asked Otter.

Not really, said Charm.

Is it good to eat? asked Otter.

Not really, said Charm.

Then why do you want to find it? said Otter.

For the magic, said Charm.

Oh, said Otter. I like magic.

So Otter took a deep breath and dove into the water. And she didn't
come up. Day after day, Charm and the animals waited for Otter to come to the surface.
Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, just as the sun was rising, Otter's
body floated up out of the depths.

Oh, no, said all the animals, Otter has drowned trying
to find the mud. And they hoisted Otter's body onto the back of the
Turtle.

Now, when they hoisted Otter's body onto the back of the Turtle,
they noticed that her little paws were clenched shut, and when they opened her paws,
they discovered something dark and gooey that wasn't water.

Is this mud? asked the Ducks.

Yes, it is, said Charm. Otter has found the mud.

Of course I found the mud, whispered Otter, who wasn't so much dead
as she was tired and out of breath. This magic better be worth it.

Charm set the lump of mud on the back of the Turtle, and she sang and she
danced, and the animals sang and danced with her, and very slowly the lump of mud began
to grow. It grew and grew and grew into a world, part water, part mud. That was a good
trick, said the water animals. But now there's not enough room for all of us in
the water. Some of us are going to have to live on land.

Not that anyone wanted to live on the land. It was nothing but mud. Mud as
far as the eye could see. Great jumbled lumps of mud.

But before the animals could decide who was going to live where or what to
do about the mud-lump world, Charm had her baby.

Or rather, she had her babies.

Twins.

A boy and a girl. One light, one dark. One right-handed, one
left-handed.

Nice-looking babies, said the Cormorants. Hope they like mud.

And as it turned out, they did. The right-handed Twin
smoothed all the mud lumps until the land was absolutely flat.

Wow! said all the animals. That was pretty clever. Now we can see in all
directions.

But before the animals could get used to all the nice flat land, the
left-handed Twin stomped around in the mud, piled it up, and created deep valleys and
tall mountains.

Okay, said the animals, that could work.

And while the animals were admiring the new landscape, the Twins really
got busy. The right-handed Twin dug nice straight trenches and filled them with
water.

These are rivers, he told the animals, and I've made the water flow
in both directions so that it'll be easy to come and go as you please.

That's handy, said the animals.

But as soon as her brother had finished, the left-handed Twin made the
rivers crooked and put rocks in the water and made it flow in only one direction.

This is much more exciting, she told the animals.

Could you put in some waterfalls? said the animals. Everyone likes
waterfalls.

Sure, said the left-handed Twin. And she did.

The right-handed Twin created forests with all the trees lined up so you
could go into the woods and not get lost. The left-handed Twin came along and moved the
trees around, so that some of the forest was dense and difficult, and other parts were
open and easy.

How about some trees with nuts and fruit? said the animals. In case we get
hungry.

That's a good idea, said the right-handed Twin.
And he did.

The right-handed Twin created roses. The left-handed Twin put thorns on
the stems. The right-handed Twin created summer. The left-handed Twin created winter.
The right-handed Twin created sunshine. The left-handed Twin created shadows.

Have we forgotten anything? the Twins asked the animals.

What about human beings? said the animals. Do you think we need human
beings?

Why not? said the Twins. And quick as they could the right-handed Twin
created women, and the left-handed Twin created men.

They don't look too bright, said the animals. We hope they
won't be a problem.

Don't worry, said the Twins, you guys are going to get along just
fine.

The animals and the humans and the Twins and Charm looked around at the
world that they had created. Boy, they said, this is as good as it gets. This is one
beautiful world.

It's a neat story, isn't it? A little long, but different.
Maybe even a little exotic. Sort of like the manure-fired pots or the hand-painted
plates or the woven palm hats or the coconuts carved to look like monkey faces or the
colourful T-shirts that we buy on vacation.

Souvenirs. Snapshots of a moment. And when the moment has passed, the hats
are tossed into closets, the
T-shirts are stuffed into drawers, the
pots and plates and coconuts are left to gather dust on shelves. Eventually everything
is shipped off to a garage sale or slipped into the trash.

As for stories such as the Woman Who Fell from the Sky, well, we listen to
them and then we forget them, for amidst the thunder of Christian monologues, they have
neither purchase nor place. After all, within the North American paradigm we have a
perfectly serviceable creation story.

And it goes like this.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
without form, and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was
light.

You can't beat the King James version of the Bible for the beauty of
the language. But it's the story that captures the imagination. God creates night
and day, the sun and the moon, all the creatures of the world, and finally, toward the
end of his labours, he creates humans. Man first and then woman. Adam and Eve. And he
places everything and everyone in a garden, a perfect world. No sickness, no death, no
hate, no hunger.

And there's only one rule.

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die.

One rule. Don't break it.

But that's exactly what happens. Adam and Eve break the rule.
Doesn't matter how it happens. If you like the orthodox version, you can blame
Eve. She eats the apple and brings it back to Adam. Not that Adam says no. A less
misogynist reading would blame them both, would chalk up the debacle that followed as an
unavoidable mistake. A wrong step. Youthful enthusiasm. A misunderstanding.
Wilfulness.

But whatever you wish to call it, the rule has been broken, and that is
the end of the garden. God seals it off and places an angel with a fiery sword at the
entrance and tosses Adam and Eve into a howling wilderness to fend for themselves, a
wilderness in which sickness and death, hate and hunger are their constant
companions.

Okay. Two creation stories. One Native, one Christian. The first thing
you probably noticed was that I spent more time with the Woman Who Fell from the Sky
than I did with Genesis. I'm assuming that most of you have heard of Adam and Eve,
but few, I imagine, have ever met Charm. I also used different strategies in the telling
of these stories. In the Native story, I tried to recreate an oral storytelling voice
and craft the story in terms of a performance for a general audience. In the Christian
story, I tried to maintain a sense of rhetorical distance and decorum while organizing
the story for a knowledgeable gathering. These strategies colour the stories and suggest
values that may be neither inherent nor warranted. In the Native story, the
conversational voice tends to highlight
the exuberance of the story
but diminishes its authority, while the sober voice in the Christian story makes for a
formal recitation but creates a sense of veracity.

Basil Johnston, the Anishinabe storyteller, in his essay “How Do We
Learn Language?” describes the role of comedy and laughter in stories by reminding
us that Native peoples have always loved to laugh: “It is precisely because our
tribal stories are comical and evoke laughter that they have never been taken seriously
outside the tribe. . . . But behind and beneath the comic characters and the comic
situations exists the real meaning of the story …what the tribe understood about
human growth and development.”
³

Of course, none of you would make the mistake of confusing storytelling
strategies with the value or sophistication of a story. And we know enough about the
complexities of cultures to avoid the error of imagining animism and polytheism to be no
more than primitive versions of monotheism. Don't we?

Nonetheless, the talking animals are a problem.

A theologian might argue that these two creation stories are essentially
the same. Each tells about the creation of the world and the appearance of human beings.
But a storyteller would tell you that these two stories are quite different, for whether
you read the Bible as sacred text or secular metaphor, the elements in Genesis create a
particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies — God, man, animals,
plants — that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in our Native
story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations — Charm, the
Twins, animals, humans — that celebrate equality and
balance.

In Genesis, all creative power is vested in a single deity who is
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The universe begins with his thought, and it is
through his actions and only his actions that it comes into being. In the Earth Diver
story, and in many other Native creation stories for that matter, deities are generally
figures of limited power and persuasion, and the acts of creation and the decisions that
affect the world are shared with other characters in the drama.

In Genesis, we begin with a perfect world, but after the Fall, while we
gain knowledge, we lose the harmony and safety of the garden and are forced into a
chaotic world of harsh landscapes and dangerous shadows.

In our Native story, we begin with water and mud, and, through the good
offices of Charm, her twins, and the animals, move by degrees and adjustments from a
formless, featureless world to a world that is rich in its diversity, a world that is
complex and complete.

Finally, in Genesis, the post-garden world we inherit is decidedly martial
in nature, a world at war — God vs. the Devil, humans vs. the elements. Or to put
things into corporate parlance, competitive. In our Native story, the world is at peace,
and the pivotal concern is not with the ascendancy of good over evil but with the issue
of balance.

So here are our choices: a world in which creation is a solitary,
individual act or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in
harmony and
slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and
moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined by
co-operation.

And there's the problem.

If we see the world through Adam's eyes, we are necessarily blind to
the world that Charm and the Twins and the animals help to create. If we believe one
story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular.

You'll recognize this pairing as a dichotomy, the elemental
structure of Western society. And cranky old Jacques Derrida notwithstanding, we do love
our dichotomies. Rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature,
male/female, written/oral, civilized/barbaric, success/failure, individual/communal. We
trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of
contradictions, fearful of enigmas.

Enigmas like my father.

I have a couple of old black-and-white pictures of him holding a baby with
my mother looking on. He looks young in those photos. And happy. I'm sure he
didn't leave because he hated me, just as I'm sure that my mother
didn't stay because she loved me. Yet this is the story I continue to tell myself,
because it's easy and contains all my anger, and because, in all the years, in all
the tellings, I've honed it sharp enough to cut bone.

If we had to have a patron story for North America, we could do worse than
the one about Alexander the Great, who, when faced with the puzzle of the Gordian knot,
solved that problem with nothing more than a strong arm and a sharp sword.

Perhaps this is why we delight in telling stories
about heroes battling the odds and the elements, rather than about the magic of seasonal
change. Why we relish stories that lionize individuals who start at the bottom and fight
their way to the top, rather than stories that frame these forms of competition as
varying degrees of insanity. Why we tell our children that life is hard, when we could
just as easily tell them that it is sweet.