Research Paper on:
Canadian Storyteller Thomas King

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
approaching the subject directly, but by telling a story. In his short story, "Trap Lines," the problems of communicating a cultural heritage from one generation to the next  in a modern environment is dramatized as a father talks about his difficulties communicating with his own teenage son, and through reminiscing about the "mystery" that was his father. In  "One Good Story, That One," King shows how the Native American art of storytelling is not about the past, but weaves the past and present into something real. "One  Good Story, That One" is basically a long dialogue from an unnamed speaker. He starts out stating his intention to tell a story, an old story, "one hundred years,  maybe more" (313). Napiao, his friend, has brought visitors to his "summer place," three whitemen. King is quick to introduce the American Indian motif of listing things. The visitors are  "Whiteman" -- "No Indianman, No Chinaman. No Frenchman. Too bad, those" (313). AS the narrative progresses, the white men are anthropologists, come to record stories from Native American culture.  Napiao urges the narrator to tell a good story, "maybe not too long," cause the white men are "pretty young, so to sleep pretty quick" (314). The narrator suggest  a story about Jimmy who runs the store near Two Bridges, or the one about Billy Frank and the dead-river pig, but Napiao assures the narrator that these wont do.  Obviously, to the narrator, stories are stories whether from the past, or ones about the people of the present -- everything has value. So, the narrator begins a story "Good  Indian story." It is a creation story about "Ah-damn" and "Evening" and gives a marvelous rendition of the biblical Genesis story as seen through Native American eyes. The Tree of