Precarity and the stories we tell: Post-truth discourse and Indigenous epistemologies in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

Abstract

This article stems from the assumption that the stories emerging from distinct cultural traditions constitute discrete epistemologies that determine how human individuals and societies face ontological vulnerability and precariousness. Focusing on Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), it examines the differential agency of two interlocking sets of stories and their respective epistemological systems. Consequently, the article is divided in two main parts. The first examines the novel’s rendering of the tensions between the Enlightenment’s investment in the search for empirical truth, and its current alignment with unfettered neoliberal capitalism and post-truth discourse. The second part reads the novel’s use of ancestral Indigenous stories as a counterpoint to the stories of modern progress underlying western epistemologies. The emerging question is whether Indigenous ways of knowing embedded in ancestral stories may potentially show the way toward an “ecology of knowledges” that lessens precarity and works toward ecological sustainability.