A changed audience, not a changed story, is what finally made residential-school testimony credible

Evidence

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Norman Retasket, a survivor of the Kamloops school, observed, “If I told the same story three years ago,” about what happened at the school, it would have been seen as “fiction.” Now his stories are believed. “The story hasn’t changed,” he said. “The listener has changed.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 853

Categorization

• XREF: This inversion of credibility - story constant, listener changed - rhymes with Klein’s own doubling device where she is read differently depending on who is listening. Also connects to the Parable of the Sower theme of who gets believed.
• SHARE: The single sentence ‘The story hasn’t changed. The listener has changed’ is worth sending to anyone interested in epistemology of testimony or how public opinion shifts.
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘The listener has changed’ compresses an entire theory of how belief conditions shift - more than a moment of hope, it’s a mechanism of historical legibility that Klein will implicitly use for the Mirror World.