#truthtelling — Public Fediverse posts

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Truth-telling and justice

* “I can understand how Corowa is now known as the place where we have 40 neo-Nazis march up and down our main street on a Saturday morning. Now we’re starting to remove flags. I can understand how someone can see it cascading.”
A regional NSW council voted to remove the Aboriginal flag to promote ‘unity’ – it did the opposite >>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/26/a-regional-nsw-council-voted-to-remove-the-aboriginal-flag-to-promote-unity-it-did-the-opposite

* "The rise in voting support for One Nation, which mirrors the success of populist politicians in the United States and United Kingdom, provides further evidence of the rise of a more hardline, right-wing populism, which often celebrates rather than questions the history of European imperialism.”
>>
Opposition to moving Australia Day from January 26 is hardening: new research
https://theconversation.com/opposition-to-moving-australia-day-from-january-26-is-hardening-new-research-273795

* "People don't understand that the current policies are still embedded in their colonial roots.” >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-25/truth-telling-closing-the-gap-indigenous-affairs-agenda-2026/106260862

#PostReferendum #zeitgeist #SettlerSociety #FirstNationsPeoples #WhitePrivilege #WhiteSupremacy #EuropeanColonialism #FarRight #EthnoNationalism #dehumanisation #Empire #Australia #equality #governance #NSW #TruthTelling

Image: NSW North Coast tribal boundaries, Tindale's map 1974

Truth-telling and justice

* “I can understand how Corowa is now known as the place where we have 40 neo-Nazis march up and down our main street on a Saturday morning. Now we’re starting to remove flags. I can understand how someone can see it cascading.”
A regional NSW council voted to remove the Aboriginal flag to promote ‘unity’ – it did the opposite >>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/26/a-regional-nsw-council-voted-to-remove-the-aboriginal-flag-to-promote-unity-it-did-the-opposite

* "The rise in voting support for One Nation, which mirrors the success of populist politicians in the United States and United Kingdom, provides further evidence of the rise of a more hardline, right-wing populism, which often celebrates rather than questions the history of European imperialism.”
>>
Opposition to moving Australia Day from January 26 is hardening: new research
https://theconversation.com/opposition-to-moving-australia-day-from-january-26-is-hardening-new-research-273795

* "People don't understand that the current policies are still embedded in their colonial roots.” >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-25/truth-telling-closing-the-gap-indigenous-affairs-agenda-2026/106260862

#PostReferendum #zeitgeist #SettlerSociety #FirstNationsPeoples #WhitePrivilege #WhiteSupremacy #EuropeanColonialism #FarRight #EthnoNationalism #dehumanisation #Empire #Australia #equality #governance #NSW #TruthTelling

Image: NSW North Coast tribal boundaries, Tindale's map 1974

Truth-telling and justice

* “I can understand how Corowa is now known as the place where we have 40 neo-Nazis march up and down our main street on a Saturday morning. Now we’re starting to remove flags. I can understand how someone can see it cascading.”
A regional NSW council voted to remove the Aboriginal flag to promote ‘unity’ – it did the opposite >>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/26/a-regional-nsw-council-voted-to-remove-the-aboriginal-flag-to-promote-unity-it-did-the-opposite

* "The rise in voting support for One Nation, which mirrors the success of populist politicians in the United States and United Kingdom, provides further evidence of the rise of a more hardline, right-wing populism, which often celebrates rather than questions the history of European imperialism.”
>>
Opposition to moving Australia Day from January 26 is hardening: new research
https://theconversation.com/opposition-to-moving-australia-day-from-january-26-is-hardening-new-research-273795

* "People don't understand that the current policies are still embedded in their colonial roots.” >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-25/truth-telling-closing-the-gap-indigenous-affairs-agenda-2026/106260862

#PostReferendum #zeitgeist #SettlerSociety #FirstNationsPeoples #WhitePrivilege #WhiteSupremacy #EuropeanColonialism #FarRight #EthnoNationalism #dehumanisation #Empire #Australia #equality #governance #NSW #TruthTelling

Image: NSW North Coast tribal boundaries, Tindale's map 1974

Truth-telling and justice

* “I can understand how Corowa is now known as the place where we have 40 neo-Nazis march up and down our main street on a Saturday morning. Now we’re starting to remove flags. I can understand how someone can see it cascading.”
A regional NSW council voted to remove the Aboriginal flag to promote ‘unity’ – it did the opposite >>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/26/a-regional-nsw-council-voted-to-remove-the-aboriginal-flag-to-promote-unity-it-did-the-opposite

* "The rise in voting support for One Nation, which mirrors the success of populist politicians in the United States and United Kingdom, provides further evidence of the rise of a more hardline, right-wing populism, which often celebrates rather than questions the history of European imperialism.”
>>
Opposition to moving Australia Day from January 26 is hardening: new research
https://theconversation.com/opposition-to-moving-australia-day-from-january-26-is-hardening-new-research-273795

* "People don't understand that the current policies are still embedded in their colonial roots.” >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-25/truth-telling-closing-the-gap-indigenous-affairs-agenda-2026/106260862

#PostReferendum #zeitgeist #SettlerSociety #FirstNationsPeoples #WhitePrivilege #WhiteSupremacy #EuropeanColonialism #FarRight #EthnoNationalism #dehumanisation #Empire #Australia #equality #governance #NSW #TruthTelling

Image: NSW North Coast tribal boundaries, Tindale's map 1974

But here’s the truth, our work has always been about liberation, not saving whiteness from itself.

Our survival is not your safety net.

And our rest is resistance…because without it, there is no future beyond the myth of white supremacy.

#Mediocre #IjeomaOluo #MythOfWhiteSupremacy #BlackLiberation #SystemicRacism #RacialJustice #Exploitation #BlackHistory #CollectivePower #TruthTelling #ProfitWithoutOppression #KimCrayton

We lay blame and fault on the government, because we can't control the capitalists, until the capitalists become the government, and then it is too late.

#Capitalism #PoliticalCorruption #PowerAndControl #SystemicInjustice #TruthTelling

If you’re feeling the same way, if you’ve been questioning what’s real, what’s right, and what’s worth rebuilding, join us inside the Profit Without Oppression (PWO) community.

This is not just a learning space. It’s a doing space. A place for people ready to lead differently, live more fully, and divest from the lie that profit requires harm.

Link in Bio

#History #MediaLiteracy #Unlearning #TruthTelling #Disinformation #CommunityMatters #PWO #ProfitWithoutOppression #LiberationWork

Australia's semantic struggles over a "one and only" reality or a pluriverse?
From the 'heart of darkness' to the “sanitised” articles of sub/urban place names.

"Some (Wikipedia) editors told us they felt it was their responsibility to include First Nations’ perspectives, even though they met with heavy resistance. One, Lucas, had repeatedly tried to include First Nations place names, often unsuccessfully. He no longer edits Wikipedia. “I just ran out of energy for it”...One or two editors “were going around removing Aboriginal place names from all the articles about Australia and Australian places”.
>>
https://theconversation.com/we-analysed-35-000-wikipedia-entries-about-australian-places-some-sanitised-history-others-privileged-fiction-over-reality-241364
#wikipedia #SettlerSociety #Australia #SocialImaginary #ImaginedCommunity #fiction #violence #FirstNations #TruthTelling #naming #IndigenousKnowledge #pluriverse #EditWars #WorldMaking #EpistemicInjustice #language #framing #worldviews #AI

#IndigenousAustralian lawmaker confronts British royals: ‘#YouAreNotMyKing'

Story by Hilary Whiteman
October 21, 2024

“Britain’s #KingCharlesIII had just finished giving a speech to #Australia’s Parliament House on Monday when an #Indigenous senator began yelling, 'You are not my king.'

“From the back of the room, Independent Senator #LidiaThorpe shouted at the royal couple, 'Give us our #LandBack, give us what you stole,' as security officers moved to escort her away.

“The interjection came as King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Australian capital Canberra to meet the nation’s leaders, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

During his speech, King Charles acknowledged Australia’s #FirstNations people, who lived on the land ‘for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers over 230 years ago.

“‘Throughout my life, Australia’s First Nations people have done me the great honor of sharing so generously their stories and cultures,' King Charles said.

'I “can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.'

“Earlier, a traditional Aboriginal welcoming ceremony was held outside Parliament House for the royal couple, but for many of the country’s Indigenous population, they are not welcome.

“The arrival of British settlers to Australia led to the #massacre of #IndigenousPeople at hundreds of locations around the country until as recently as the 1930s. Their [descendants] still suffer from #racism and #SystemicDiscrimination in a country that has failed to reverse centuries of disadvantage.

“Thorpe, a #DjabWurrung #Gunnai #Gunditjmara woman, has long campaigned for a treaty and has previously voiced her fierce objections to the British monarchy.

“Australian’s Indigenous people never ceded #sovereignty and have never engaged in a treaty process with the British Crown. Australia remains a Commonwealth country with the King as its Head of State.

“During her swearing-in ceremony in 2022, Thorpe referred to Australia’s then-Head of State as 'the #colonizing Her Majesty #QueenElizabethII,' and was asked to take the oath again.

“She did so while raising one fist in the air.

“On Monday, protesters stood with an Aboriginal flag as the royal couple visited the Australian War Memorial. A 62-year-old man was arrested for failing to comply with a police direction.

“Before she yelled at the King, Thorpe turned her back during a recital of 'God Save the King,' Australian media reported. Images showed her wearing a possum-fur coat, standing in the opposite direction of other attendees.

“#TheGreens party said in a statement that the King’s presence was 'a momentous occasion for some' but also a 'visual reminder of the ongoing #ColonialTrauma and legacies of #BritishColonialism' for many First Nations people.

“In the statement, #Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, a #YamatjiNoongar woman, called for the King to be clear in his recognition and support of ‘First Nations #justice, #TruthTelling and #healing.'

“‘He now needs to be on the right side of history,' she added.

“The Australian Monarchist League demanded Thorpe’s resignation after what it called a 'childish demonstration.’”

Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/australia/lidia-thorpe-confrontation-king-charles-australia-intl-hnk

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/Sv2D6

#TruthAndReconciliation #StolenLand #Genocide #CuturalGenocide #Racism #GreenParty #GreenPartyAustralia #AbolishTheMonarchy #NoKings

#IndigenousAustralian lawmaker confronts British royals: ‘#YouAreNotMyKing'

Story by Hilary Whiteman
October 21, 2024

“Britain’s #KingCharlesIII had just finished giving a speech to #Australia’s Parliament House on Monday when an #Indigenous senator began yelling, 'You are not my king.'

“From the back of the room, Independent Senator #LidiaThorpe shouted at the royal couple, 'Give us our #LandBack, give us what you stole,' as security officers moved to escort her away.

“The interjection came as King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Australian capital Canberra to meet the nation’s leaders, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

During his speech, King Charles acknowledged Australia’s #FirstNations people, who lived on the land ‘for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers over 230 years ago.

“‘Throughout my life, Australia’s First Nations people have done me the great honor of sharing so generously their stories and cultures,' King Charles said.

'I “can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.'

“Earlier, a traditional Aboriginal welcoming ceremony was held outside Parliament House for the royal couple, but for many of the country’s Indigenous population, they are not welcome.

“The arrival of British settlers to Australia led to the #massacre of #IndigenousPeople at hundreds of locations around the country until as recently as the 1930s. Their [descendants] still suffer from #racism and #SystemicDiscrimination in a country that has failed to reverse centuries of disadvantage.

“Thorpe, a #DjabWurrung #Gunnai #Gunditjmara woman, has long campaigned for a treaty and has previously voiced her fierce objections to the British monarchy.

“Australian’s Indigenous people never ceded #sovereignty and have never engaged in a treaty process with the British Crown. Australia remains a Commonwealth country with the King as its Head of State.

“During her swearing-in ceremony in 2022, Thorpe referred to Australia’s then-Head of State as 'the #colonizing Her Majesty #QueenElizabethII,' and was asked to take the oath again.

“She did so while raising one fist in the air.

“On Monday, protesters stood with an Aboriginal flag as the royal couple visited the Australian War Memorial. A 62-year-old man was arrested for failing to comply with a police direction.

“Before she yelled at the King, Thorpe turned her back during a recital of 'God Save the King,' Australian media reported. Images showed her wearing a possum-fur coat, standing in the opposite direction of other attendees.

“#TheGreens party said in a statement that the King’s presence was 'a momentous occasion for some' but also a 'visual reminder of the ongoing #ColonialTrauma and legacies of #BritishColonialism' for many First Nations people.

“In the statement, #Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, a #YamatjiNoongar woman, called for the King to be clear in his recognition and support of ‘First Nations #justice, #TruthTelling and #healing.'

“‘He now needs to be on the right side of history,' she added.

“The Australian Monarchist League demanded Thorpe’s resignation after what it called a 'childish demonstration.’”

Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/australia/lidia-thorpe-confrontation-king-charles-australia-intl-hnk

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/Sv2D6

#TruthAndReconciliation #StolenLand #Genocide #CuturalGenocide #Racism #GreenParty #GreenPartyAustralia #AbolishTheMonarchy #NoKings

#IndigenousAustralian lawmaker confronts British royals: ‘#YouAreNotMyKing'

Story by Hilary Whiteman
October 21, 2024

“Britain’s #KingCharlesIII had just finished giving a speech to #Australia’s Parliament House on Monday when an #Indigenous senator began yelling, 'You are not my king.'

“From the back of the room, Independent Senator #LidiaThorpe shouted at the royal couple, 'Give us our #LandBack, give us what you stole,' as security officers moved to escort her away.

“The interjection came as King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Australian capital Canberra to meet the nation’s leaders, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

During his speech, King Charles acknowledged Australia’s #FirstNations people, who lived on the land ‘for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers over 230 years ago.

“‘Throughout my life, Australia’s First Nations people have done me the great honor of sharing so generously their stories and cultures,' King Charles said.

'I “can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.'

“Earlier, a traditional Aboriginal welcoming ceremony was held outside Parliament House for the royal couple, but for many of the country’s Indigenous population, they are not welcome.

“The arrival of British settlers to Australia led to the #massacre of #IndigenousPeople at hundreds of locations around the country until as recently as the 1930s. Their [descendants] still suffer from #racism and #SystemicDiscrimination in a country that has failed to reverse centuries of disadvantage.

“Thorpe, a #DjabWurrung #Gunnai #Gunditjmara woman, has long campaigned for a treaty and has previously voiced her fierce objections to the British monarchy.

“Australian’s Indigenous people never ceded #sovereignty and have never engaged in a treaty process with the British Crown. Australia remains a Commonwealth country with the King as its Head of State.

“During her swearing-in ceremony in 2022, Thorpe referred to Australia’s then-Head of State as 'the #colonizing Her Majesty #QueenElizabethII,' and was asked to take the oath again.

“She did so while raising one fist in the air.

“On Monday, protesters stood with an Aboriginal flag as the royal couple visited the Australian War Memorial. A 62-year-old man was arrested for failing to comply with a police direction.

“Before she yelled at the King, Thorpe turned her back during a recital of 'God Save the King,' Australian media reported. Images showed her wearing a possum-fur coat, standing in the opposite direction of other attendees.

“#TheGreens party said in a statement that the King’s presence was 'a momentous occasion for some' but also a 'visual reminder of the ongoing #ColonialTrauma and legacies of #BritishColonialism' for many First Nations people.

“In the statement, #Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, a #YamatjiNoongar woman, called for the King to be clear in his recognition and support of ‘First Nations #justice, #TruthTelling and #healing.'

“‘He now needs to be on the right side of history,' she added.

“The Australian Monarchist League demanded Thorpe’s resignation after what it called a 'childish demonstration.’”

Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/australia/lidia-thorpe-confrontation-king-charles-australia-intl-hnk

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/Sv2D6

#TruthAndReconciliation #StolenLand #Genocide #CuturalGenocide #Racism #GreenParty #GreenPartyAustralia #AbolishTheMonarchy #NoKings

#IndigenousAustralian lawmaker confronts British royals: ‘#YouAreNotMyKing'

Story by Hilary Whiteman
October 21, 2024

“Britain’s #KingCharlesIII had just finished giving a speech to #Australia’s Parliament House on Monday when an #Indigenous senator began yelling, 'You are not my king.'

“From the back of the room, Independent Senator #LidiaThorpe shouted at the royal couple, 'Give us our #LandBack, give us what you stole,' as security officers moved to escort her away.

“The interjection came as King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Australian capital Canberra to meet the nation’s leaders, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

During his speech, King Charles acknowledged Australia’s #FirstNations people, who lived on the land ‘for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers over 230 years ago.

“‘Throughout my life, Australia’s First Nations people have done me the great honor of sharing so generously their stories and cultures,' King Charles said.

'I “can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.'

“Earlier, a traditional Aboriginal welcoming ceremony was held outside Parliament House for the royal couple, but for many of the country’s Indigenous population, they are not welcome.

“The arrival of British settlers to Australia led to the #massacre of #IndigenousPeople at hundreds of locations around the country until as recently as the 1930s. Their [descendants] still suffer from #racism and #SystemicDiscrimination in a country that has failed to reverse centuries of disadvantage.

“Thorpe, a #DjabWurrung #Gunnai #Gunditjmara woman, has long campaigned for a treaty and has previously voiced her fierce objections to the British monarchy.

“Australian’s Indigenous people never ceded #sovereignty and have never engaged in a treaty process with the British Crown. Australia remains a Commonwealth country with the King as its Head of State.

“During her swearing-in ceremony in 2022, Thorpe referred to Australia’s then-Head of State as 'the #colonizing Her Majesty #QueenElizabethII,' and was asked to take the oath again.

“She did so while raising one fist in the air.

“On Monday, protesters stood with an Aboriginal flag as the royal couple visited the Australian War Memorial. A 62-year-old man was arrested for failing to comply with a police direction.

“Before she yelled at the King, Thorpe turned her back during a recital of 'God Save the King,' Australian media reported. Images showed her wearing a possum-fur coat, standing in the opposite direction of other attendees.

“#TheGreens party said in a statement that the King’s presence was 'a momentous occasion for some' but also a 'visual reminder of the ongoing #ColonialTrauma and legacies of #BritishColonialism' for many First Nations people.

“In the statement, #Greens Senator Dorinda Cox, a #YamatjiNoongar woman, called for the King to be clear in his recognition and support of ‘First Nations #justice, #TruthTelling and #healing.'

“‘He now needs to be on the right side of history,' she added.

“The Australian Monarchist League demanded Thorpe’s resignation after what it called a 'childish demonstration.’”

Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/australia/lidia-thorpe-confrontation-king-charles-australia-intl-hnk

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/Sv2D6

#TruthAndReconciliation #StolenLand #Genocide #CuturalGenocide #Racism #GreenParty #GreenPartyAustralia #AbolishTheMonarchy #NoKings

Reflecting on Change, by the #WabanakiREACH Board

August 8, 2024

"REACH has been through many changes and transitions over the years, evolving from an idea of #decolonization to becoming an official non-profit with a board, staff and many volunteers. It has been quite the journey thus far and we continue to transform to meet the emerging needs of the people in the #Dawnland.

"Many of the same individuals who formed #Wabanaki REACH gathered in 1999 to improve the state’s compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act (#ICWA). When tribal and state child welfare professionals first came together for that purpose, they did not envision the impact they would continue to have twenty-five years later.

"The Tribal-State ICWA Workgroup initiated the historic #Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission to further the work of increasing ICWA compliance and honoring tribal self-determination. As the Commission was launched, REACH began to form as an organization, first with a fiscal sponsor to help us gain access funding and administrative support for our work. Then in 2018, REACH became an official non-profit organization.

"In 2015, the Truth Commission’s final report spoke to the importance of the Tribal-State Workgroup and Wabanaki REACH. The Commission's recommendations continue to guide their respective work.

"The Tribal-State ICWA Workgroup continues to meet regularly to practice co-case management of ICWA cases and provide support to tribal child welfare partners; they recruit, train, and support community members to serve as ICWA Qualified Expert Witnesses; they provide a day-long educational experience for caseworkers, assess and update state child welfare policy, provide #ICWA education to Guardians ad Litem, attorneys, judges, and other service providers, and they helped create the new state law Maine Indian Child Welfare Act in 2023.

"REACH’s decolonization work centers on how to restore Wabanaki lands, water, culture, and people by:

- Continuing truth-telling initiatives. Beyond the Claims:Stories from the Land and the Heart is completing its work that sought to deepen understanding of the experiences and impacts of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. We are focusing on what needs to come next.

- Supporting Wabanaki wellbeing through education, building and celebrating community, reclaiming Wabanaki ways, and protecting the earth we share. REACH supports Native inmates with newsletters, books, peace and healing circles, and sweat lodge ceremonies. Food sovereignty work has been focused on creating medicine gardens, restoring clam beds, supporting food pantries, and partnering on events to increase awareness of protecting the fisheries. We hold wellness gatherings and provide direct support to community members in need. This summer, REACH supported sending 21 Wabanaki youth to summer camp.

- REACH has developed and provides impactful educational programming, believing that when people more deeply understand what happened in this territory they wish to be part of writing a different history for our grandchildren.

"The truth and reconciliation commission has truly helped people understand intergenerational trauma and strength and the process of truth, healing, and change that is now taking place in many forms in both Wabanaki and non-native spaces. We are so heartened to see these planted seeds of decolonization sprouting all over Wabanaki territory."

https://www.wabanakireach.org/reflecting_on_change_wabanaki_reach_board

#IndigenousPeoplesDay #WabanakiAlliance #TruthAndReconcilation
#Colonization #BoardingSchools #MaineSettlementAct #NativeAmericans #PenobscotNation
#Maliseet #Passamaquoddy #Mikmaq #FirstNations #MaineTribes #TruthTelling

#WabanakiREACH Celebates #OralHistory Exhibit Opening with Gathering at #SipayikMuseum

wikhikonol: stories + photos at the Sipayik Museum, 59 Passamaquoddy Rd., #PleasantPoint, Maine. Exhibit runs June 20 through October at the Sipayik Museum, Point Pleasant Peninsula.

6 June 2024

SIPAYIK | PLEASANT POINT, ME (June 4, 2023)– "Wabanaki REACH has partnered with the Sipayik Museum to present wikhikonol, an oral history exhibit featuring #stories alongside #photography by #Wabanaki artists #NolanAltvater and #MayaAttean. The exhibit, which opens June 20 with a celebratory gathering, is part of Wabanaki REACH’s #truthtelling initiative Beyond the Claims– Stories from the Land & the Heart.

"Wabanaki REACH has recorded and preserved over forty personal oral history interviews from #Wabanaki and #Maine communities in hopes to illuminate the humanity behind the Maine Indian land claims era and demystify the #MaineIndianClaimsSettlementAct of 1980. The organization has been focusing its efforts on building an accessible archive of interviews, creating educational resources for the greater community, and making space for healing and truth-telling to happen.

"wikhikonol marks Wabanaki REACH’s second public offering related to the project following where the river widens, an original community-devised play performed on Indian Island last fall.

"wikhikonol features text and audio of stories that emerged in the interviews, complemented by photographs of Wabanakik and its people. Beyond the Claims is led by Wabanaki ways of being and knowing to further Wabanaki REACH’s crucial work of bringing truth, healing, and change to the #Dawnland.

"'Our intentions were to create a deeper understanding of the Maine Indian #LandClaims, a tumultuous period in tribal-state history that still impacts the Tribes today. We wanted to capture stories from people with lived experiences during this time, uplift stories that exemplify the Wabanaki people's unique relationship to their homelands, and create tools for learning and understanding so we can ultimately move toward a more just and understanding future together', said #MariaGirouard, Executive Director of Wabanaki REACH.

"Wikhikon is the #Passamaquoddy word originally used for #birchbark maps but now refers to book, image, map, or any written material. For this exhibit, it can be understood as a visual tool for storytelling that offers spaces for relations and understandings to emerge from the Land and from the people who are connected to it. It is a term that challenges and resists dominant, western understandings of stories and the Land and the relationships in which they attempt to force Wabanaki people into.

"Nolan Altvater said, 'This exhibit is a celebration of the myriad relations that Wabanaki people have with our homelands. The stories blur the lines between image and word while inviting the audience to critically think and learn with the literacies of our land beyond the claims of the settlement act'.

https://www.wabanakireach.org/press_release

#NativeAmericanHistory #WabanakiHistory #WabanakiAlliance #Maine

Amid Continued #Sovereignty Campaign, #Wabanaki REACH Creates Play as Part of Truth-Telling Project

Evan Popp, Maine Beacon
Thu, August 31, 2023

"As part of a truth-telling initiative that seeks to illuminate the issue of land claims and the 1980 #SettlementAct as well as celebrate the resilience of #Indigenous communities, the group #WabanakiREACH has partnered with a #Maine-based #theater organization to create a play developed by and for #Wabanaki people.

"The play, titled where the river widens, is an original, community-developed production and is being put on in partnership with #ThreadbareTheatreWorkshop, a group located on the Blue Hill peninsula. The work is the first public offering based on a project in which Wabanaki REACH — an organization supporting Indigenous self-determination through education and other restorative practices — spent a year gathering more than 40 oral history interviews from Wabanaki people and those in Maine about Maine Indian land claims and the 1980 Settlement Act.

"As Beacon previously reported, Wabanaki tribes have long argued that the Settlement Act has stifled tribes’ economic development and allowed the state to treat sovereign Indigenous nations as municipalities, creating a paternalistic and unfair relationship that no other federally-recognized tribe is subject to. Given that, the Wabanaki have created a grassroots movement in the last couple years behind reforming the Settlement Act to recognize the tribes’ inherent sovereignty, but opposition from Gov. #JanetMills has stymied such efforts despite broad support for change from the public.

"Earlier this year, tribal leaders also attempted to pass a bill to ensure that the Wabanaki would have access to most federal laws that benefit Indigenous tribes around the country. Proponents of that legislation noted that because of the Settlement Act, any federal law enacted after 1980 for the benefit of tribes across the U.S. that impacts the application of Maine law doesn’t apply to the Wabanaki unless they are specifically included in the measure by Congress. However, Mills in June vetoed the measure pushed by tribal leaders to rectify that situation.

"Given the power of the stories Wabanaki REACH was able to collect on the subject, Maria Girouard, the group’s executive director, said the organization felt it was important to share those experiences with a wider audience via theater.

“We were so moved by the stories we gathered, it was a natural next step to talk about theater as a way of continuing to move the conversation from the head to the heart, to reach more people, and to gather in community,” Girouard said.

"The play is set outdoors along the #PenobscotRiver, which itself has been the subject of land claim disputes and issues related to tribal sovereignty. It stitches together music, song, dance and the interviews from Beyond the Claims: Stories from the Land & the Heart — the name of the Wabanaki REACH truth-telling initiative.

"A news release about where the river widens also describes it as a 'poetic, spare, lyrical movement through stories, place, and time” and a thought-provoking play that “not only illuminates a complex and tumultuous era, but celebrates the beauty, creativity, and resilience of Wabanaki people.'

"#Threadbare said they are excited to be working with Wabanaki REACH on the play, which features #LilahAkins, #EstherAnne, #NickBear, #WolatqinBear, #AndreaFrancis, #MariaGirouard, #DaleLolar, #GeorgeLoring, #MargoLukens, #JoshuaMcCarey, and #ErlenePaul as co-creators and performers.

"'Threadbare’s way of co-creating, not only with community members but inspired by them, aligns so beautifully with Wabanaki REACH’s values of connection and joy,' said Kate Russell, artistic director of Threadbare Theatre Workshop. 'I am grateful for the generous folks who have come together this summer to create and perform this play — they are brilliant.'

"There will be two public performances of the hour-long play on Indian Island on Sept. 16 and Sept. 17 at 5 p.m. With space limited, those who want to attend must register ahead of time to reserve seats by visiting wabanakireach.org."

https://news.yahoo.com/amid-continued-sovereignty-campaign-wabanaki-222018960.html

#IndigenousNews #WabanakiConfederacy #PenobscotNation #Maliseet #Passamaquoddy #Mikmaq #FirstNations #MaineTribes #Arts #Theatre #TruthTelling #NativeAmericans

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