The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Chapter 4 opens with the same story about the earth being constructed on the backs of turtles. After the usual mention of stories being “all we are,” King tells the story of his friend Louis Owens, “a Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer” who killed himself (92). Louis and King “both knew that stories were medicine” (92), and King describes a summer Louis spent picking tomatoes until a mob attacked the black and Native workers in the working camp. Louis and the other young men had to walk many miles home from the camp, and King wonders if Louis thought about this story or another when he killed himself. King knows that, “whichever one it was, for that instant Louis must have believed it” (95).

Most of the chapter is about oral and written stories and how Native writers blend the two forms. King notes that there are two great assumptions about the power of written stories over oral stories. First is the idea that stories, “in order to be complete, must be written down” (95). Second is the idea that written literature “has an inherent sophistication that oral literature lacks” (97). King focuses his argument on disproving these assumptions through a discussion of modern Native literature.