The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Chapter 5 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles and the same assertion that stories are “all we are.” King then recounts the Native story of the Coyote and the Ducks. The story takes place when animals still talked to humans and when Ducks “had lovely long feathers that shimmered and flashed like the Northern Lights” (122). Coyote keeps asking the Ducks for additional feathers so he can make himself look prettier. The Ducks stop giving him feathers until he lies, saying that Human Beings will try to steal their feathers unless they let Coyote disguise himself as a duck and protect them. When the Ducks refuse to give him new feathers, Coyote says he and the Ducks must fight the Human Beings. The Ducks ask what is it about them that Human Beings don’t like. The Coyote says, “Oh, they like you well enough [...] They just like your feathers better” (127).

King uses the story of the Coyote and the Ducks as a metaphor for Native American legislation passed by the US and Canadian governments. While the Ducks end up losing their long beautiful feathers, the short feathers we know ducks have today grow in their place. Treaties made between tribes and governments used to take massive amounts of Indian land, but for the most part, “that erosion has slowed” and “even stopped in some areas” (129). King writes, “We don’t have much land left, but feathers are feathers” (129). However, the problem is that governments, like the Coyote, will always want more.

Most of the chapter discusses the various laws Canada and the United States have enacted concerning Native Americans. This legislation has had two different goals for the Native community: “one, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence” (130). He traces the history of the 1887 Dawes Act, which sought to break up Indian reservations by dividing each reservation into pieces, some of which Indians got and some of which were sold or auctioned off to white settlers. Once their land was no longer communal, “Indians would become citizens, and magic, presto, be transformed into…well, not Indians” (131). However, the bulk of the legislation King addresses accomplishes the second goal of legalizing Indians “out of existence” (131). He describes the first such act, Canada’s 1876 Indian Act, an act that “paternalistically defines who is an Indian and who is not” (132). With other acts, Canada and the United States have eliminated protections for Indians that the governments had insisted were “gifted” to the tribes in the first place (137).

Finally, King comes to more recent laws, including the US Indian Arts and Crafts Act and the Canadian Bill C-31. These acts “ask the more modern question, ‘Whom will we allow to be an Indian?’” (139). The former act makes it illegal for a non-Indian to sell crafts as “Indian made”; however, it defines a non-Indian as anyone who is not a member of a tribe that is recognized at the state or federal level (140). Thus, anyone who for whatever reason does not have tribal status is defined as a non-Indian even though they could identify as a Native person. C-31 also seems to be positive on the surface: It eliminated part of an existing Canadian law that allowed Indian women to lose Native protections or status through marriage. However, the law also states that after two generations of marriage between Natives and non-Natives, the offspring lose status as Indians. Thus, over time the number of people legally defined as Indians will decrease so much that “in fifty to seventy-five years, there will be no status Indians left in Canada” (144). Worse, laws such as these pit Indians against each other, as “legal categories [...] have made us our own enemy” (149). King’s central point is that Indians have a cultural and legal identity, and that Indians “should be able to take both of them with [them] wherever [they] go, whatever [they] do, and with whomever [they] do it” (149). Laws that define who is or is not an Indian preclude that possibility.

Throughout the chapter King recounts a job he took culling deer in New Zealand. He learned how to do it but quit the job after shooting one deer, because, as he writes, one kill “was more than enough, and having done it once, I could not imagine doing it again” (147). This chapter ends by telling the reader to make of the story what they will, as they have “heard it now” (151).