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According to the 1991 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue, you can buy a custom carved totem pole or a painting by Rosie the Elephant. These two advertisements did not sit on opposing pages, although they should, for they form a wonderful cultural diptych; the poles are carved by an authentic Native carver, and the paintings are rendered by an authentic elephant. This has little to do with my essay, which is not available in the catalogue, but it did suggest certain things to me about the power of advertising, the value of authenticity, and the need for essential Truths. And it reminded me of my summer vacation. Last summer, I was at the Sun Dance on the Blood reserve in southern Alberta. Old friends had invited me up. I had never been to a Sun Dance before. When I told several of my neighbours in St. Paul where I was going, their eyes slowly glazed over and I imagined them conjuring up images of Catlin’s romantically rendered Indians hanging about by their pectorals from poles. In all honesty, I was not sure what to expect myself, but I was reasonably sure that I would have better luck seeing this kind of white-male eroticism at the theatre than I would on the Alberta prairies. As it turned out, I was right. If my neighbours had gone with me that July, they probably would have been disappointed, for the major activities at the Sun Dance involved an incessant coming and going: go to the store to get bread; take the kids in for a doctor’s appointment; grab another load of wood; run to town for more ice; drive the bags of garbage to the dumpster in Standoff; duck home and take a shower. 307 thomas king “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” History, Story, and the Cant of Authenticity And constant preparation. Each lodge had coffee. Food was everywhere. Not a conspicuous show of food, just its constant presence—a pot of stew, soup, a picnic ham, bread, apples and bananas. And all around, elders, adults, and children were on the move, circling the camp, visiting. You can sit in one lodge all day, and, in between the preparations, and the dances, you will be able to meet and greet many of the people in the camp, for the Sun Dance is a consummate social ceremony as well as a religious one, and that is the way it should be. It is also an occasion for storytelling. I was sitting in my friend’s lodge enjoying yet another cup of coffee, minding my own business, when the flap of the teepee was pulled to one side and two elderly women and a younger man entered. We greeted each other; the women settled themselves on their side of the lodge and the man and I settled ourselves on our side. For a while, no one said a word. Finally, one of the women, a woman named Bella, leaned forward, looked at me, looked at the ground, and looked back at me. “I hear you’re a historian,” she said. I quickly told her it wasn’t true, that I was a writer, a novelist, a storyteller . But she waved me off. “Same thing,” she said, and she began to tell this story. There was a young man who came to the reserve to talk to elders. He was from a university (Bella didn’t say where), but when she said the word university , she slowed down and stretched out each syllable as if she were pulling on an elastic and the man sitting next to me started to laugh as if he had just heard an excellent joke. Bella waited until he stopped and then she continued. The man, Bella explained, wanted to hear old stories, stories from back in the olden days, stories about how Indians used to live. So she told him about how death came into the world, how Old Man and Old Woman had argued over whether human beings should live forever or whether they should die. Old Man thought they should live. Old Woman thought they should die. So they made a wager, a bet. Old Man got a buffalo chip and they agreed that if they threw the chip in the river and it sank, then human beings would live forever. If it floated, the human beings must die. There are no surprises here. The chip floated, and, as Bella explained to the man, that...

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