Thomas King

Explores how stories shape who we are, how we understand and interact with other people, and how Native American culture ties into storytelling, from creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native American literature.

A Native Narrative

The Truth about Stories

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Maggie Gordon

The Truth About Stories is a powerful lecture about, unsurprisingly, stories, and how they shape our world. In particular, King deals with narratives about Indigenous people and how they erase and minimise Indigenous experience. They shape the way that Indigenous people are seen. They create realities. He smashes these assumptions, forcing readers to look beyond the stories that we know, seeing past stereotypes into what we refuse to think about.

The Truth about Stories A Native Narrative

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