King introduces the turtle creation story, noting it changes slightly with each telling but always ends with 'turtles all the way down.'

King's mother takes a job at Boeing and faces workplace discrimination because she is a woman.

King's father abandons King and his brother when they are children, leaving the family without explanation.

King contrasts a cooperative Native American creation myth with the Adam and Eve story, arguing they construct opposite worlds.

King launches a photography project across North America to capture Native artists as they actually are.

Photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis is revealed to have dressed Native Americans in other tribes' clothing to look more stereotypically Indian.

King speaks at a Northern California college about Ishi's story, then discovers he and other Native speakers received no payment.

Ishi, the last surviving member of his tribe, is taken to live as a museum exhibit after being arrested by a sheriff.

King introduces his friend Louis Owens, a Native writer of mixed blood, who has died by suicide.

King argues that Native written literature began when N. Scott Momaday published a novel focused on the present rather than the imagined past.

King tells the story of the Coyote tricking the Ducks out of their feathers as a metaphor for how governments take Native land.

King describes the Dawes Act's strategy of dividing communal reservation land into individual parcels to dissolve Indian identity and citizenship.

King reveals how Canada's Indian Act and Bill C-31 work together to mathematically eliminate Indian legal status over generations.

King tells the private story of friends John and Amy Cardinal, whose adopted son Sam has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

King admits he would not change his behavior even now, because comfort and pleasure override his desire to do right.

King opens by introducing the turtle creation story and sharing how his parents' choices shaped his early life, establishing that stories control us. He then reveals how photographer Edward Curtis distorted Native identity by staging inauthentic images, while King's own photography project sought to tell a truer story. Moving through history, King traces how Ishi became a symbol of Native people being treated as spectacle rather than as human beings. He then explores how Native literature, beginning with Momaday's breakthrough novel, created new stories focused on the present and future rather than the imagined past. Through the Coyote and Ducks fable and legislative history, King shows how governments used laws as stories to strip Native Americans of land and identity. The book closes with King's confession that even he, a professional storyteller, failed to live up to his own values when his friends needed him most.

The headline events behind King's central argument that stories make us who we are.

King's brother receives news from their father's new family only after their father has already died.

A girl in Roseville, California refuses to date King because her parents believe he is Mexican, not Indian.

Aboard a German ship to New Zealand, a crewmember tells King he is 'not the Indian I had in mind.'

King visits a Will Rogers museum inside an Oklahoma McDonald's and identifies Rogers as a 'conundrum' who did not look stereotypically Indian.

King stops his photography project without completing it, unsure what good capturing Native artists as they are will do.

The Puritans create stories depicting Indians as savage and treacherous to justify their goal of acquiring land.

Whites create the idea of a 'National Indian'—noble, wild, free, and always imagined as male—as a cultural missing link.

Mixed-blood writer Charles Eastman presents himself publicly as an American who has retained his 'Indian sense of right and justice.'

E. Pauline Johnson performs poetry shows split between traditional Indian dress and an elegant evening gown.

A reviewer describes King's CBC radio show persona as 'a bundle of contradictions' mixing first-class and first nations identities.

Louis Owens spends a summer picking tomatoes until a mob violently attacks the black and Native workers in the camp.

King plays in a basketball game in Lethbridge where other players have been falsely told he has a metal plate in his head.

King visits an old man whose tomato crops were destroyed by a storm, who cheerfully says it is 'always good to have some ketchup.'

King kills one deer while working as a culler in New Zealand, then immediately refuses to continue the job.

King briefly reconnects with John Cardinal and discovers that John has left his family.

King's secondary stories ground his larger arguments in vivid personal experience, beginning with his brother's belated connection to their absent father. His travels—from Roseville, California to a German ocean liner to an Oklahoma McDonald's—repeatedly confront him with others' fixed, imagined versions of what he should be. The historical sections trace how the Puritans weaponized storytelling to cast Indians as savages, and how later figures like Eastman and Johnson navigated survival through conscious performance. King's own experiences as a radio personality, a deer culler in New Zealand, and an unpaid speaker reveal the ongoing burden of being seen only as entertainment. The three circular stories from Chapter 4—the storm, the basketball game, the old man's ketchup—show how personal stories keep us alive even when larger narratives fail us. The pool closes with King's brief, painful reconnection with John Cardinal, who has by then left his family entirely.

Personal encounters and historical anecdotes that illuminate the gap between image and reality.

King makes his central assertion for the first time that 'the truth about stories is that that's all we are.'

King realizes his father left the family not from lack of love but for reasons that defy any simple moral explanation.

King concludes that creation stories do not reflect the world as it is but actively construct the world we inhabit.

King argues that Curtis's photographs gave a fictional Indian 'form and power' while real, living Indians became invisible.

King discovers that Native American photographer Richard Throssel also staged his photos to make subjects match the invented Indian image.

King admits his desire to appear authentically Indian reveals how even real Indians are burdened by the false image they must perform.

King reveals that the invented 'National Indian' figure was designed to prove to real Indians they had no viable future as Indians.

King concludes that for Native Americans, being entertainment has been the fundamental story of survival.

King moves to Canada and begins examining how white culture separates written from oral stories and privileges the written form.

King concludes that whether Louis Owens lived or died depended entirely on which story he chose to believe about himself.

King exposes how Canada's Bill C-31 will eliminate the legal category of status Indian within roughly two generations through marriage rules.

King concludes that legal categories defining Indian identity have turned Native Americans into their own worst enemy.

King and his family gradually withdraw from the Cardinals as Sam's behavioral problems intensify and make contact increasingly painful.

King admits that even knowing the outcome, his desire for comfort would still prevent him from helping the Cardinals.

King closes by warning readers not to claim they would have lived differently if only they had heard these stories, since they have heard them now.

King's turning points begin with his foundational assertion that stories are all we are, and his realization that his father's absence defies the simple moral frameworks stories usually impose. He then traces a series of revelations about how false images of Indians have come to hold more power than real Indian people, exposing how even Native photographers and Native people themselves have internalized those images. The historical narrative pivots when King reveals that the noble 'National Indian' was designed not to honor real Indians but to prove they had no future, making entertainment the only available path to survival. In Chapter 4, the emotional core shifts as King connects Louis Owens's death to the stories available to Native people and argues that survival depends on which story one chooses to believe. The legal revelations of Chapter 5 expose how Bill C-31 is engineered to legally eliminate Indian identity within two generations, turning Native people against each other. The book ends with King's starkest confession: he knows what his failures cost the Cardinals, and he would still repeat them, because comfort always wins over courage.