Title: The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative  

Author: Thomas King  

Genre: Non-Fiction

Publisher: House of Anansi Press

Format: Paperback    

Pages: 208

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Synopsis (Goodreads):

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.

Review:

This is a book I read for school. A bunch of teachers read this over the summer and we are going to discuss it when we get back to school. I enjoyed reading about how important story telling is in Native American culture, and how it can be used as an important teaching tool. King spoke eloquently about how the perceptions of First Nations people are misconstrued due to many historical misconceptions.

One thing that bothered me was how it seemed like there wasn’t a lot of structure to the book. Yes it is written in sections, and the sections are about specific themes, but he talked about many different things and went a bit ranty in some parts. He had one line of thought and then it was broken by another line of thought, then he would come back to his original line of thought. And I am not saying this is technically is a bad thing, but it is not something I enjoy. It was too broken for me. However, this book focuses on an important topic and I encourage people to read this if they would like to widen their perspectives on the importance of story telling in First Nation culture!

Happy reading bookworms!