A Sovereign Voice and the Power of Stories

As I was reading through both Scott Richard Lyon’s article and Thomas King’s narrative I couldn’t help but remembering a concept we went over in my Post-colonial theory online class with Dr. Clemens.  For the first week Dr. Clemen’s had us listen to a TED talk from African author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if you have the time I suggest watching it because it is applicable to the readings which we have done this week. Here’s a link to the her speech on the single story.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
 

(If you have the time I suggest you watch it. Better yet just watch it. She’s a great speaker and an even wonderful writer.)

The premise of Adichie’s TED talk was the danger of telling a single story. Even though her speech focused on the way African’s are understood in terms of colonialism I think the premise holds true for the way Native American’s are viewed through colonial lenses. As I stated in my first post, symbols are a source of power, and can be used to control.   Stories work exactly the same way because they can function through the use of symbols and symoblic messages.   But what’s most interesting about stories is that whoever tells a story has the power to change lives, destroy lives, create lives, tell lies, and tell truth….and so on.  Thomas King even states this by saying “I tell stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live. Stories are wondrous things. And they are Dangerous” (9).  The danger of stories is that they can become myth that functions as truth.   This is where it is most important to understand the danger of the single story.  When the same story is told over and over again, it eventually is accepted as truth.  

 

The story of Colonization goes like this:

Europeans were the most civilized group of people that lived on the face of the Earth. Eventually they needed to populate the world with their divinity and supremacy.  Soon they reached forth and discovered new lands with people that were less fortunate than they.  They weren’t European so they weren’t civilized.  They were savage, barbaric, demonic, and needed to be brought into the light.

 

This is just one side of colonization but one story that is told over and over again.  I must admit by telling it I fall into the trap of telling a single story. NOT all Europeans were like that, just as I am sure there were some indigenous people that seemed terrifying to the Europeans at first.  But when we only look and see single aspects of certain things, or in this case tell single stories, we risk not seeing the full picture.  

Thomas King in his narrative The Truth About Stories starts each section with a story.  It’s the same story everytime, with the same premise, however each time the person telling the story changes, and the person listening to the story changes as well.  I love the way King uses this story as a message because it functions as a symbol, and it distorts the way we normally tell stories—always the same way, always the same people, and always the same plot. However, King demonstrates that it is easy to manipulate the way we tell stories—once again this is where the danger of telling stories, they can easily be influenced and changed.

It is through the single story that the image of the Romantic/literary Indian was created, and King goes to great length to stress this concept.  King explains this through detailing how Edward Sheriff Curtis took it upon himself to photograph the dying Indian—along the way Curtis took wigs, costumes, and stuff associated with Indian’s as props for his pictures (King 35-37).  King says that the reason for this is because Curtis was trying to recreate the image of the Native American that was already engrained in American society and the public mind.  It wasn’t hard for Curtis to recreate and revive the single image of the noble Romantic Indian because “Native culture, as with any culture, is a vibrant, changing thing, and when Curtis happened upon it, it was changing from what it had beent o what it would become next. But the idea of “the Indian” was already fixed in time and space” (37).  Once again the Romantic Indian cuts it really close to being a single story, an image that represents power and control—created through the use of stories, language, and racial discourses.  People see what they want to see when we are told things are a certain way and must never change. 

 

Although I mentioned the dangers of the single story, there is a positive side to telling stories.   King within his narrative interweaves multiple stories to create one story of oppression and misunderstanding.  But through interweaving these stories King is doing something much more important than telling stories.  In one part of Chapter 2 King mentions that Will Rodgers, an iconic Native American, was “what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic” intellectual, and individual who articulate the understanding of a community or a nation” (41).   Through his many and interweaving narratives King becomes an organic intellectual himself.  How ironic is it that King points out somebody else as organic intellectual! As an organic intellectual, King is able to make a political and cultural statement.  His stories are his own, but they are his to share—to his people both Native Americans and Americans because he is a cultural hybrid himself.   Yet through creating a single story King is able to locate his own voice of sovereignty unconstrained by history and images of the native.  His single story becomes a mass encapsulating story, a call to action.  

I mentioned the concept of a sovereign voice and I’d like to explicate the meaning of that statement but first it’s important to examine a section of Lyon’s essay.  Richard Lyon’s in his essay “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What do American Indians Want from Writing?”  states that “sovereignty, as I generally use and understand the term, denotes the right of a people to conduct its own affairs, in its own place, in its own way” (450).  However he takes the concept of sovereignty a step further by saying that even though “the meanings of sovereignty have shifted and continue to shift over time,  the concept has nonetheless carried with it a sense of locatable and recognizable power” (450).   Through this statement it is clear that sovereignty’s power lies within the simple act of recognition.   

King redefines sovereignty within the telling of stories.  Stories=Power/Power=Sovereignty.  His voice and the voices he gives the people within his stories function as an act of re-appropriation.   By reclaiming his own heritage and culture, King demonstrates that the single story can be dangerous, but it can also be used to reaffirm freedom and culture. 

 

I’d like to leave you with a song that I heard while listening to NativeRadio.  It ties so perfectly to Lyon’s article on Rhetorical Sovereignty and the first few Chapters within King’s narrative.  It provides a warning, and it provides a call to action. 

Enjoy, and decolonize your mind.  

Power is one voice, one cry, and one sovereign story.