The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What does the term “oral tradition” mean? What are some characteristics of oral traditions?

Teaching Suggestion: Depending on your students’ level of familiarity with the term “oral tradition,” you may wish to offer them one or more of the following resources to help them approach these questions. Student backgrounds will impact whether their understanding of the term is primarily academic, cultural, or personal. All of these perspectives will enrich the discussion of the topic, and you might consider encouraging students to share answers through small-group or whole-class discussion.

• This brief overview from UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” site explains what oral tradition encompasses and how it remains significant today.
• This thorough discussion of the North American indigenous oral tradition is from the University of British Columbia’s site “Indigenous Foundations.”
• This 3-minute Button Poetry performance by two young Pacific Islanders shares the importance of oral traditions to indigenous communities.

2. What do you know about Native American storytelling? What are some of the ways in which it generally differs from storytelling in Western literary traditions?

Teaching Suggestion: Students can answer the first part of this question without preparation, as a form of schema activation. As with any schema activation question, some answers will contain misinformation and all answers are likely to be incomplete. Given the potential for culturally insensitive answers, it may be better for students to answer this first part of the question in writing. The second part of this question is intended to help students construct a more accurate understanding before beginning King’s text. Before students attempt this second part of the question, they can gather information using one or both of the following resources:

• This thoughtful essay by a Ponca author describing some typical purposes and characteristics of Native stories
• This in-depth profile of Native American storyteller Perry Ground, from the Cornell Chronicle

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

What story that you have heard, read, or watched has had the most influence on the way you see yourself or the world around you? How did the story influence you? What features of this story caused its impact? Was it the characters, plot, language, or some other feature? What role does our own storytelling play in the way we understand ourselves and our lives?

Teaching Suggestion: The majority of the questions in this prompt will be easy for students to answer from their own experience. The final question, however, may be more difficult for some students. This question asks them to consider themselves as the storytellers of their own lives and to think critically about the ways in which their own narratives construct their understanding of themselves and the world. The following resources may be helpful in clarifying these concepts for students:

• This thorough article from TED introducing the concept of narrative identity
• This 14-minute video in which researcher Marina Lambrou discusses the narrative construction of identity