Truth, Life, and American Indian Lit

In class a while ago, Hobby was talking about verisimilitude-- the appearance of something containing the utmost truth. Realism is something we generally take for granted, yet to a very large degree, the American Indian literature we've read has questioned the boundaries between the real and the illusory. Even dating back to the trickster tales, characters were fooling each other nonstop, making them believe things opposite to the truth. 

I’m most immediately reminded of the beautiful story contained within our American Indian Trickster Tales anthology, “Tricking the Trickster.” The story, Sioux in origin, recounts how Iktomi the Spider-Man tricks several rabbits into letting him eat them, but then has his food stolen away from him by an equally wily group of coyotes. Of course, Iktomi ends up having the last laugh at another group of easily fooled chumps, but the flow of the story is not what I find the most rapturous about the piece. Instead, it’s the asides. There’s a gorgeous moment early in the story dealing with both truth and perception of storytelling; I’m just going to quote it below.

At one time there lived two little boys and their grandmother in the west. She is always telling them stories about Ikto, Iktomi, the smart-ass Spider-Man. They want to know whether Iktomi is a man or a spider. He is both; he is a spirit of the mind. The boys are listening to their grandmother’s voice. They say: “Things that we don’t know, we want to know.”

The first thing that grabs me about this is Iktomi’s existence as both a man and a spider, “a spirit of the mind.” The duality that the authors bring up and nearly as quickly dismiss is nothing short of gorgeous, and just as easily can apply to the stories and life we’ve experienced: is it truth? Is it lies? Perhaps it’s both, after all—Iktomi could exist not to trick us, but to cause us to realize the things we’ve been deluding ourselves with. Maybe all of life is a joke, as the Spider-Man says. To quote the other famous Spider-Man, after all: “I mock; I’m a mocker.” Laughing at things can be the only way of truly dealing with them. 

I’d just like to end with the other great thing I love about this passage—the quote at the end. As I progress further and further through this class, I’ve begun to think of it as a path towards more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world and myself. That is why the boy’s chant at the end is so invigorating and even inspiring. As I progress further through this class and even through life, delving into the great paradox of truth and our perception of it in our lives, I’ll keep repeating this phrase as a rudder to steady my progress and keep open my mind. As the boys said, after all: “things we don’t know, we want to know.”