Ethical Imagination

Stories can be marvelous and they can be hazardous, and that tension drives Thomas King's The Truth About Stories. King, a Native novelist and scholar, looks at how the tales we tell and hear shape our sense of ourselves and of the people around us. His subjects range from creation accounts and personal recollections to historical anecdotes, injustices, and racist propaganda, all considered against Native cultures' long relationship with storytelling.

King blends humor with autobiography, drawing on his childhood in California and his years as an academic in Canada, as well as his identity as a Native North American. Much of his inquiry concerns the stories told by and about Indigenous people. He argues that so much has been written about Indians that the real people hardly matter, since the Indian mostly exists in the public imagination. He also looks at how Native writers, including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, and Robert Alexie, have answered these inherited images with alternative accounts that challenge them and imagine other futures.

King's central claim is that storytelling brings social and moral obligations for Native and non-Native readers alike. Each listener or reader is answerable for what they choose to take in and act on, because once a story has been heard, it cannot be unheard.