Month: July 2015

My assigned pages were from “Eli Stands Alone stood at the window….” to “Charlie looked out at the clouds,” pages 94-102 of the class edition.

The passage features Clifford Sifton’s attempts to build a dam and Eli Stands Alone’s attempts to stop him.

According to the Jane Flick article from our reading list, Clifford Sifton (1861-1929) was a real person who promoted settlement in the west and encouraged displacement of the Native population. She also notes that he held a government position and that he suffered from deafness.

Flick says that Eli Stands Alone is an allusion to Elijah Harper, and may also be inspired by the name Pete Standing Alone, the subject of a National Film Board documentary. Elijah Harper blocked the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord in 1990 in the Manitoba legislature when he voted against a debate that did not include adequate consultation with First Nations.

The Canadian Encyclopedia page for Elijah Harper provides some additional background on his political career, noting that he was the first Aboriginal person to hold a seat in the Manitoba legislature. AMMSA also has an overview of Elijah’s actions against the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord that illustrates how influential he was and how much opposition he faced.

Another blog that I found points out a possible connection between Eli Stands Alone and Elijah from the bible, as both characters stand firm in their conviction in the midst of significant opposition. I found this suggestion quite interesting, since it seems to fit with what I’ve read so far about the way King combines Indigenous and Christian mythology.

I read the dam itself in Green Grass, Running Water as a powerful symbol of “civilization” taming nature, so it’s easy to see a lot more in these scenes than just the specific situation that the characters are dealing with.

Given the above context, Eli Stands Alone is firmly positioned as a heroic character who fights for Indigenous rights and is able to literally stand alone against the opposition, representing not only himself but the other people who have taken on similar roles through history. Similarly, Clifford Stanton is a character with a history of ignorance and adversity, with his deafness taking on a double meaning.

At the same time, I think the similarities between these characters are also worth noting. In the book, each character is quite friendly to each other, at least in the present, and they both share different perspectives on the politics behind the dam; in reality, both of the people the characters were based on held positions in government.

By basing his characters off of these historical figures, King not only adds to our understanding of them but also imagines a meeting between them that couldn’t actually happen—although it’s easy to wish that there had been someone like Elijah Harper to stand up to Clifford Sifton in the early 1900s.

Finally, we can perhaps find some additional meaning in the law and public relations firms that defend the dam, which also add to our sense of the conflict as a political one. Jane Flick says that “Duplessis International Associates” brings to mind both duplicity and the political corruption of the Duplessis regime in Quebec, while “Crosby Johns and Sons Inc.” is a reference to John Crosbie, a Minister of Justice who was involved in a scandal.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999)

Gregor, Roy Mac. “The feather, Elijah Harper and Meech Lake.” AMMSA. <http://www.ammsa.com/node/17819>

Marshall, Tabitha. “Elijah Harper.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. <http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/elijah-harper/>

“Standing up against rules: ‘Eli Stands Alone.'” Exploring Canadian Literature. <http://janjan89.weebly.com/1/post/2010/10/standing-up-against-rules-eli-stands-alone.html>

In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation. Why do you think this is so?

I chose to answer question #1 for this week’s assignment—I felt that it was particularly interesting because creation stories and stories of an earlier time that are based in mythology play a significant role in the book, and it’s something that has come up several times in the previous lessons.

I think part of the reason that King needed to tell these earlier stories is because they continue to live on in the present and affect our interpretation of more modern stories. The old stories act as a context that allow us to more fully understand, in much the same way that, as I noted in an earlier blog, Harry Robinson seemed to argue for the importance of understanding the cultural context.

Starting with the beginning of creation is one way that the story tries to shake us out of our own Christian context, which most of us have probably absorbed whether or not we are religious. The character of GOD is no longer the creator of everything, but just one mythological figure who came along afterward, and a somewhat undignified one at that.

Including the rewritten story of Adam and Eve has a similar effect of destabilizing the assumptions we might hold. Most of us probably wouldn’t question why Adam’s name appears first whenever we talk about the story, but by listing the “First Woman” first, the story invites us to wonder. Changing Adam’s name to “Ahdamn” also makes him seem much less noble and more ridiculous. The story of Noah’s Ark is given a similar treatment: by the time we’re given the image of Noah as a whiny would-be rapist who loves big breasts and runs around in poop it’s very difficult to take him seriously.

Alberta’s unconventional desire to have a child without marriage or sex breaks the rules of our creation stories, so it makes sense that King’s attempt to destabilize those stories and introduce new ones might make it easier for us to understand her. And even Eli’s desire to stop the dam is probably more understandable in the context of a creation story that is more based in nature.

Starting with creation stories also has the effect of showing the reader how all of these stories are connected to each other and emphasizes that these stories are not always linear constructions with a simple beginning, middle, and end, as we often think of them.

I wrote the above without having heard King’s own ideas about what he’s doing, but when I started looking for his interpretation I found that it seemed quite close to mine. I’ll leave you with a quote from an interview he did with Peter Gzowski that seems to sum up his intention:

I started off […] working on the assumption that Christian myth was the one that informed the world that I was working with. And the more I got into the novel I discovered that I couldn’t work with that: it didn’t give me enough freedom to work with my fiction, so all of a sudden one day I thought, my god, why don’t I just recreate the world alongmore Native lines, and use Native oral stories—oral Cretaino stories—rather than the story that you find in Genesis. So I went back, and I began to use that as my basis for the fiction, and then […] sort of [dragged] that myth through Crhistianity, through Western literature and Western history, and see what I came up with.

Works Cited

Clenshaw, Ray. “The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid.” Flickr. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/rayzilla/8067705775/>

“Peter Gzowski Interviews Thomas King on Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature. <http://canlit.ca/pdfs/articles/canlit161-162-Peter%20(GzowskiKing).pdf>