2.Coyote Pedagogy is a term sometimes used to describe King’s writing strategies (Margery Fee and Jane Flick). Discuss your understanding of the role of Coyote in the novel.
In their essay Coyote Pedagogy Knowing Where the Borders Are in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water Margery Fee and Jane Flick present the term “Coyote Pedagogy”. Within this term, Fee and Flick describe the educational experience of reading Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. King forces the reader to surpass cultural boundaries by mixing imagery of both First Nation and Western culture into clever jokes and dialogue. Unless the reader is able to breach cultural confinements to engage with and appreciate a variety of symbols, they will not understand as King intended them too. “There is no reader of this novel, except perhaps Thomas King, who is not outside some of its networks of cultural knowledge. But every reader is also inside at least one network and can therefore work by analogy to cross borders into the others. We want to put as much emphasis on the “knowing” in our title as on the “borders”: borders are constructed by what you know and don’t know. Coyote pedagogy requires training in illegal border-crossing” (Flick and Fee 131). The need to understand a plethora of symbols within both First Nation and Western culture is the basis of Coyote pedagogy.
In terms of character, Coyote embodies the familiar trickster from First Nation storytelling and an extremely important figure within the Native North American mythology of traditional oral literatures. According to another article by Flick, “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water”, Coyote is believed to be “one of the First People, a race of mythic prototypes who lived before humans existed. They had tremendous powers; they created the world as we know it; they instituted human life and culture” (Flick 143). From this, we can infer that Coyote is the equivalent of God in Judeo-Christian culture. Coyote’s importance in GGRW is to aid the reader in the recognition of the cultural distinctions that King proposed. By adding Coyote into the creation story as a representation of First Nations culture he enables the reader to open their mind to a larger picture. On the opening page King immediately describes Coyote as a creator of the world “In the beginning, there was nothing. Just Water” (King 1). However, GOD makes an appearance within the first few pages as well. In order for the reader to understand the beginning of GGRW they must understand and appreciate First Nation creation stories AND Western culture creation stories. I feel like Coyote is extremely important as he/she enables the reader to look between the lines of the story and to read what is not written.
Works Cited
Flick, Jane, and Margery Fee. “Coyote Pedagogy”. Canadian Literature161/162 (1999). Web. 21 Mar. 2016.
Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature161/162 (1999). Web. 21 Mar. 2016.
King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
Hi Cait,
I liked your reading of GGRW. Your final sentence here – “Coyote is extremely important as he/she enables the reader to look between the lines of the story and to read what is not written.” was a great summation of what I viewed the character to be in my reading of the text, and it links back to this idea of the reader as part of a network of cultural knowledge.
A lot of texts in this course, including this one, really seem to ask the reader to not feel like they are committing sacrilege for reading between the lines and inferring new contexts from diction choice. That is precisely what makes literature debatable and opens the grounds for conversation. When we read the bible, which has plenty of versions (King James, International Version, Lexham, etc.), the essence of the texts – the commandments, didactics, and oaths all take the same form over many translations. And while King’s story here is no biblical text, the wording challenges us to use our imaginations.
For me this is a really important aspect of literature – it’s this openness that make texts like Kafka’s Metamorphosis so engaging – we can only guess what the creature looks like based on a handful of choice adjectives and descriptive details. One of my favourite passages is in the beginning of GGRW:
“So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs around.”
We can only proceed to imagine the physical manifestation of the “dream”, and this is followed by a funny play on dyslexia with the Dog/God exchange. King is having fun with language here, which is it’s own conversation, but this exchange also gives us a pallete to create our own visuals for which I find captivating. So when you say “he [Coyote] enables the reader to open their mind to a larger picture” – I feel that you are spot on in the literal AND visual sense.