Thomas King's first book, Medicine River (1989), was the very first Canadian novel selected to be translated in France for Terre Indienne, a collection devoted to Native writing run by the French publisher Albin Michel. To launch the novel in 1997, the prestigious international literary festival Etonnants Voyageurs, held annually in May in Saint Malo, invited King as well as other Native writers such as James Welch to give readings. King also accepted my invitation to come and give talks and readings in nearby Rennes, where I was then teaching, both to a specialized audience of academics and graduate students and at a philosophical café, open to the general public. The broader framing issue involved considering the confrontation, clash, or overlap of civilizations. The discussions thus entailed repositioning the complex matter of just how contemporary Native literature can be identified or defined—to a transatlantic audience—within such historical, national, and canonical matrices. This included engaging with the question of influence: the reciprocal influence between white and Native literatures as well as the influence of oral storytelling on contemporary Native written literature. These are issues which King had, of course, addressed in different ways in his “Introduction” to An Anthology of Canadian Native Fiction, and which he would expand on in his Massey Lectures, collected in The Truth about Stories. But I wish to start out by stressing and interconnecting certain points King raised in his Rennes talks, which will serve to underpin the following critical discussion of his novels.