9 - King's Contestatory Intertextualities: Sacred and Secular, Western and Indigenous

Summary

Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of culture, and stories are used in a number of ways and for a multitude of purposes.… They can work to oppress or to liberate, to confuse or to enlighten.

Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive

Introduction

As he grew up as the son of a Greek and Swiss mother and a Cherokee father, Thomas King's childhood “involved a continual movement between communities and across various racial and cultural boundaries” (Davidson, Walton, and Andrews 2003, 4). The crossing of these borders equipped him with an acute understanding of how potentially harmful a dominant culture's narratives may be for the members of a minority group (Andrews and Walton 2006, 603). In The Truth about Stories, a testimony to his keen awareness of the power of stories, King comments on the discursive legacy of non-Native writers in a North American context: “Great stuff. And potent. So potent, in fact, that not only did these wishful fictions convince Whites of the imminent demise of Native peoples, but they also persuaded many Native people that they had no future as Indians” (King 2003, 84). Consequently, many of King's works are concerned with revising and/or subverting both the master narratives justifying the European colonial agendas and the biblical stories that often inform these master narratives. One of the most important literary techniques that King employs in this deconstruction of Eurocentric and/or colonial positions is the use of intertextual references that can be traced back to a spectrum of semiotic systems ranging from religion, literature, and the arts to popular culture.