Abstract
The paper explores the vision of future and re-evaluation of past in the novel The Back of the Turtle by acclaimed Indigenous writer Thomas King and the role of community as it once was and as it might someday be. It also investigates the way myth is used as narrative in this work and the importance of myth for maintaining or re-building community.
In the opening of The Back of the Turtle, Thomas King presents the reader with a dismal picture of land and community after ecological catastrophe; life is non-existent, community is destroyed. However, the story the characters share and the myth they inherited evoke building new relationships and restoring their identities and consequently the community.
Community is perceived as quintessential but threatened in any realm of time. Preserving or re-building community and relationships within and beyond it depends significantly on stories and myths people share and narrate.
Myth and stories is a way we relate to the world and to the community and so reading past and visioning future can happen only through them. The trust and hope in stories in contemporary Indigenous writing reinstates the importance of narrative and literature in culture as such.