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After our discussion on last Thursday, I need a long time to clear my thoughts and my understanding of Thomas King. As Thomas King has raised many ideas in his book about stories, story-telling strategies, history and the conflict between black and white people in that age, there is no simple answer to the question of whether the myth reflect the world as it is .

But I want to make some notes for my thinking.

1.       Why we tell stories esp. creation story?
Driven by human nature of curiosity, we, and our ancestors tend to find an explanation to the origin of world and human races. That’s where our creation story comes from. But the reason we are telling our children the original creation story is that this is a tradition, a representative of culture development and a trail of the history of the past world.

2.       Why oral/writing story?
From my perspective, story-telling creates a more vivid scene of the story, and also mixes up with more personal emotion and idea of the story teller. After decades and generations’ adjustment, the whole change of the story is caused by no coincidence but a grand trend of culture development. From the story, we may feel in reality that the story is alive and it gains permanent life through voices and memories. But writing story is essential to keep marks for the change of stories. From them we can trace back the history.  As long as oral culture doesn’t die, they are really hand in hand.

 For Thomas King, the oral culture represents the literature spirit of Native Indians. In this culture, the story is equal to memory, and the memory, though not objective, is the history and truth. No individual can be the absolute observer of the history. But countless storytellers and their audiences can. It’s their group power which memorizes the truth of the world.

3.        Why Thomas doesn’t like the Genesis story?
For most creation stories in the world, they have their own divine or god to create land and animals. But the Genesis story happens to be the original story of the colonists and their offspring who occupied the land of Indian. Then the god-like commands and hegemony of the white people means something. So Thomas expresses his strong feeling towards Genesis in his book.
Also in the history, there is a phrase called ‘Manifest Destiny’, which propagates the expanding of territory and culture in the name of god. Just like Genesis told us, the god created humans and brought the light, and then the white people, who actually act like god, proclaim themselves as races with forgiveness, reasoning and goodness and make the differences according to the color, or in Cooper’s way, gifts. No one authorizes the white people the power to make good and evil out of different races. Thus, Genesis should only be a group of people’s truth, but not all of them. The good and the evil comes from a partial opinion but not an objective understanding of the world. That’s why Thomas has this feeling.

4.       Anne raised a question at the end of the discussion. Is the attempt of destroying evil misguided?
Thomas said yes maybe. But I think it is the definition of good and evil, or the assortment of good and evil being misguided. In so many creation stories, god knows which is good and which is evil. They have the power and ability to do so cause they represents the absolute justice. But we don’t. Human, or one of the races don’t. The desire to destroy evil is never wrong, but who is evil? Who has the power to say so?

5.       Most of the creation stories our classmates posted all share same view, that the omniscient divine create a world out of Hundun, or primary chaos, or Nun, or darkness. But few of them, like Egyptian story, believe that gods are created by the nature. They have to obey certain rules too, same as man kind. The divine or the superpower may explain why there are so many complicated life forms and grand natural phenomena around us, but the power they hold to define right and wrong, can never be held in one person or one race in the name of justice.