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Only Drunks And Children Tell The Truth Summary

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Stories are important to people’s identity, and shape who they are. When contrasting “Pretty Like a White Boy” and Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth by Drew Hayden Taylor, there are many similarities and some differences. “Pretty Like a White Boy” is an account of Drew Hayden Taylor’s life. While Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is a fictional story about a protagonist, Janice, who faces some of the same struggles reflected in Taylor’s personal experiences. Topics like identity, racism, and making peace with reality are shared between both texts. Both protagonists struggled with their personal identities. In “Pretty Like a White Boy,” as the title suggests, Taylor struggles with his identity because of how he looks. As an Indigenous …show more content…

Taylor describes a personal experience in a film set in “Pretty Like a White Boy” about a nine-year-old non-Indigenous girl who didn’t believe Taylor was an indigenous man because of how he looked. After two days of being pestered by the girl, Taylor felt he needed to prove his ethnicity to the girl: “I whipped out my status card and thrust it at her” (505). Ultimately, the little girl was confident that he was not an indigenous man as a result of prior racial prejudice about how an indigenous man should look. In Janice’s case in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, her biological family expected her to be accustomed to their ways of life because that’s where she came from, despite Janice being raised by a Caucasian family her whole life. Regardless of the struggles faced by Taylor and Janice, they have been able to make peace with their situations. Taylor uses humour in “Pretty Like a White Boy” to describe creating a new nation after overcoming the feeling of being caught between two races/cultures for so long: “I’ve spent two many years explaining who and what I am repeatedly, so as of this moment, I officially secede from both races. I plan to start my own seperate nation. Because I am half Ojibway, and half Caucasian, we will be called the “Occasions” (507). On the other hand, Janice came to terms with herself and her identity: “Whatever. Anyway, the robins or starlings, whichever the nest belongs

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