The Truth About Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

but I’m not happy with your
     behaviour. Let’s talk this over. Try to do better next time.
    What kind of a world might we have created with that
     kind of story?
    Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in the wilderness, broke and
     homeless, the story of being made in God’s image, of living in paradise, of naming
     the animals must have gone to our heads, for while we weren’t the strongest or the
     fastest or the fiercest creatures on the planet, we were, certainly, as it turned out,
     the most arrogant.
    God’s Chosen People. The Alpha and the Omega. Masters of the
     Universe.
    It is this conceit we continue to elaborate as we fill up our tanks at the
     gas station, the myth we embrace as we bolt our doors at night, the romance we pursue as
     we search our guidebooks for just the right phrase. The lie we dangle in front of our
     appetites as we chase progress to the grave.
    Or as Linda McQuaig so delightfully puts it in her book
All You Can
     Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism
, “The central character in
     economics is Homo Economicus, the human prototype, who is pretty much just a walking set
     of insatiable material desires. He uses his rational abilities to ensure the
     satisfaction of all his wants, which are the key to his motivation. And he isn’t
     considered some weirdo; the whole point of him is that he represents traits basic to all
     of us — Homo Economicus ‘R’ Us, as it were.” 4
    It was Sir Isaac Newton who said, “To every action there is always
     opposed an equal reaction.” Had he beena writer, he might
     have simply said, “To every action there is a story.”
    Take Charm’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what
     you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But
     don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if
     only you had heard this story.
    You’ve heard it now.

II
YOU’RE NOT THE INDIAN
I HAD IN MIND
    T HERE IS A STORY I KNOW . It’s about
     the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this
     story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the
     change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the
     details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the
     response of the audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never
     leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.
    One time, it was in Lethbridge I think, a young boy in the audience asked
     about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of the turtle, what was
     below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told him. And below that turtle?
     Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.
    The boy began to laugh, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how many turtles
     are there? he wanted to know. Thestoryteller shrugged. No one knows
     for sure, she told him, but it’s turtles all the way down.
    The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. “You
     can’t understand the world without telling a story,” the Anishinabe writer
     Gerald Vizenor tells us. “There isn’t any center to the world but a
     story.” 1
    In 1994, I came up with the bright idea of travelling around North America
     and taking black-and-white portraits of Native artists. For a book. A millennium
     project. I figured I’d spend a couple of months each year on the road travelling
     to cities and towns and reserves in Canada and the United States, and when 2000 rolled
     around, there I’d be with a terrific coffee-table book to welcome the next
     thousand years.
    I should tell you that I had not come up with this idea on my own. As a
     matter of fact, Edward Sheriff Curtis had already done it. Photographed Indians, that
     is. Indeed, Curtis is probably the most famous of the Indian photographers. He