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Summary Of On The Back Of The Turtle By Thomas King

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Thomas King in On the Back of the Turtle tells a story of creational myths which reveals Native American and First Nation interrelationships anent European ancestral North Americans dichotomy amid modern society. Firstly, before analyzing these stories and their relation to the text (which is frequent), it is relevant to delineate what they are, creation myths, given their polysemy. Jarold Ramsey defines myths as "sacred traditional stories whose shaping function is to tell the people who know them who they are; how, through what origins and transformations, they have come to possess their particular world; and how they should live in that world, and with each other" (4). In other words, myths embody the cognizance of an individual or communities …show more content…

Therefore, myths are more than stories. However, when analyzing the distinction on how Indians (I use this term because Thomas King also does in all of his books) differentiate between stories and myths, one can conclude the words seem to be synonymous. In the Back of the Turtle, King’s cynosure is based on two myths, or stories; one Christian and the other Blackfoot, that both portray different nuance to its listeners. In fact, the metamorphosis of the words in listeners cognition changes so much so, determining where they are from, that the narrative meaning actually are viewed, at times, as different genres. For the Native perspective stories are at the center of their dichotomy, as King descried in his book, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, where each chapter commences with disparate versions of Native creation story. King argues that “the truth about stories is that is all we are.” Robert Ringington corroborates this idea in his review of King’s Coyotes Canon, stating Native American story telling is “the key to their way of theorizing. Stories function as metonyms, parts that stand for wholes. Each story is connected to every

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