Write a blog that hyper-links your research on the characters in Green Grass Running Water using Jane Flick’s reading notes.

The section of the book that I have done my research on is pages 126-135. I was particularly drawn to this section because I just had to figure out what Bill Bursom’s garish television display had to do with Machiavelli and why “The Map” was so significant. The following section is of Latisha Red Dog’s encounter with a group of tourists at the Dead Dog Café.

Lionel Red Dog’s employer, Buffalo Bill Bursom is a combination of two historical figures “famous for their hostility to Indians” according to Jane Flick (21). The infamous Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show created a glamorized version of the conflict between the Natives and European settlers for public entertainment. Bill reaps the benefits of having the Indians perform in his show, while suggesting their motive for protecting their rightful homes are primitive and savage. The show promotes a sense of national pride, while suggesting that the Americans have a right to cultivate and build a home on Indigenous land. The second figure that the character is modeled after is Holm O. Bursom, a New Mexican senator. The senator was in charge of drafting a bill that would settle a land dispute between the Pueblos and non-Native folk. The Bursom Bill allowed the state court to settle the disputes, which would have resulted in rulings in the favour of affluent white folk. When the Pueblos became aware of the Bill, they managed to defeat the bill by testifying before Congress of their rights to the land.

The combination of these two historical figures create a character who takes advantage of the Native community by employing someone they know in order to bring in business from the reserve. While Bill is taking advantage of Lionel’s place in the community, he has also set up the pretense that he is helping Lionel get back on his feet so he can afford to go to school. Bill suggests that Lionel and Charlie Looking Dog are interchangeable by telling Lionel that he just needs an ‘in’ to the reserve. In this way, Bill reduces Lionel down to his race while making such derogatory comments such as, “you guys get all that free money” and “[a]ll you guys are related” (80). While not blatantly harmful, the internalized superiority that Bill perpetuates towards the Native community stifles Lionel’s ability to grow and maintain a healthy relationship with his community.

Bill is eager to show off his television display to Minnie Jones, and decides that it is a “unifying metaphor” (128). It is significant that the television display is a map of Canada and the United States. The map is symbolic of a linear, Western logic, that has historically been used to oppress the rights of Native peoples. Minnie Jones asks Bill, “Do all the sets have to show the same movie?” (127). A movie is a constructed narrative, as is a map, as we have previously discussed. When Minnie asks this question, it is as if she is asking if there is room for more than one narrative.

But what about Machiavelli? The Prince, that Bursom keeps recommending, is one of Machiavelli’s best known pieces, and the use of the term ‘Machiavellian’ is attributed to this work. This points to the fact that Bill condones manipulative tactics in order to achieve success in his business. This detachment from moral standards is reflected by Buffalo Bill, Holm O. Bursom, and of the fictional Bill Bursom. Bill goes on to say that this kind of thinking is “outside the range of the Indian imagination” (129). However, I would argue that the existence of alternative narratives exist outside of the oppressive, European imagination.

Latisha’s narrative runs counter to that of Bursom Bill. Here, an Indigenous female  successfully runs a business based on co-operation as opposed to a European male running his business on exploitation. Though Latisha could have claimed the role of the “Native victim”, she has taken control of her life and has become a successful business owner. At the Dead Dog Café, Latisha tricks her (often European) visitors into thinking she is actually using dog meat in her food, explaining that it is a “treaty right” (132). Of this strategy, Kerstin Knopf writes that”by referring to (non-Native) written history, [Latisha] gives them the proof they want” (265). By appealing to the Western power structures, and using them to her favor, Latisha is challenging the assumed morality of legal documents. Thomas King says in an interview, “The joke is that Natives did not create that construct. That construct is created by whites and it was created as an oppressive thing. . .those designations were created for advantage and not for ours, and as soon as that advantage shifts then the construct itself needs to be revisited” (Andrews, 163).

Jane Flick suggests that Latisha’s Dead Dog Café may be “a play on Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is Dead” (22). Nietzsche’s statement was made to suggest that the Christian God could no longer serve as the credible source for moral principles and assumptions. Further, this was a rejection of an objective and universal moral law. Similarly, King challenges the biblical Christian stories and the notion of God by sharing alternate creation stories of First Woman and Coyote. In this way, both King and Nietzsche question the validity of an authoritative Christian morality.

Works Cited:

Andrews, Jennifer. “Border Trickery and Dog Bones: A Conversation with Thomas King.” Studies in Canadian Literature. June 1999. Web. 25 July 2016. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/14248

Donaldson, Laura E. “Noah Meets Old Coyote, or Singing in the Rain: Intertextuality in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. 2.7.2 (1995): 27-43. JSTOR. Web. 25 July 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20736846

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes.” Green Grass, Running Water.Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994. Print.

“God is Dead.” Philosophy Index. Web. 25 July 2016. http://www.philosophy-index.com/nietzsche/god-is-dead/

Hallsall, Paul. “Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527): The Prince, 1513.” Medieval Sourcebook. Fordham University. July 1998. Web. 25 July 2016. https://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/machiavelli-prince.asp

Hyslop, Stephen G. “How the West was Spun- Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.” HistoryNet. 8 May  2008. Web. 25 July 2016.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010. Print.

Knopf, Kerstin. Aboriginal Canada Revisited. University of Ottawa Press, 2008. Google Books. Web. 27 July 2016. https://books.google.ca/books?id=VmGuDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=latisha+red+dog&source=bl&ots=HIKM2wUJ14&sig=ATh4w524Pio-6BlHRX-7XrEZoYY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj70I7Y5pTOAhVQ42MKHRCNBhsQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=latisha%20red%20dog&f=false

Martinez, Mathew, San Juan Pueblo. “All Indian Pueblo Council and the Bursom Bill.” New Mexico History. Web. 25 July 2016. http://newmexicohistory.org/people/all-indian-pueblo-council-and-the-bursum-bill

Wernitznig, Dagmar. Europe’s Indians, Indians in Europe: European Perceptions and Appropriations of Native American Cultures from Pocahontas to the Present. University Press of America (2007): 84-89. Google Books. Web. 27 July 2016.

3.2.4 “Identify and discuss two of King’s “acts of narrative decolonization”. Please read the following quote to assist you with your answer. “The lives of King’s characters are entangled in and informed by both the colonial legacy in the Americas and the narratives that enact and enable colonial domination. King begins to extricate his characters’ lives from the domination of the invader’s discourses by weaving their stories into both Native American oral traditions and into revisions of some of the most damaging narratives of domination and conquest: European American origin stories and national myths, canonical literary texts, and popular culture texts such as John Wayne films. These revisions are acts of narrative decolonization.”

Thomas King revises and subverts traditional Judeo-Christian narratives in order to challenge the readers’ assumptions and disrupt the hierarchy of Eurocentric narratives above others. In offering a narrative from the point of view of Indigenous characters, King exposes us to alternate forms of storytelling and the harm done by some of history’s canonical literature.

King retells the creation myth in the Garden of Eden beginning with First Woman falling from the sky. The collaborative effort in the way that First Woman creates the world with the help of the animals echoes the storytelling methods of the Indigenous communities. The creations stories offered by each of the Four Old Indians in the narrative speaks to the way that the narrative is influenced and changed by those who tell it and their experiences. The changing of narratives gestures to a collective and inclusive storytelling experience that differs from the rigidity of the Judeo-Christian creation story.

This retelling not only reveals that the creation story is Eurocentric, but also misogynistic and harmful towards the environment. In this narrative, First Woman chooses to leave the Garden of Eden because God is being unreasonable. She challenges his authority and openly defies his orders to stop eating. First Woman is given the autonomy and agency to do as she wishes, and avoids being demonized for encouraging the fall of man. By offering a different view of the creation story, King challenges the authority of the Christian faith.

John Wayne movies and many other Westerns portray Native Americans in one or two prototypes. They are often either portrayed as a helpful guide in navigating the wilderness in a subservient role to the white protagonist, or people to be conquered in order to gain rights to a land that is ‘rightfully’ theirs. The exploration and domination narrative that is so prevalent in settler and Western narratives promotes the claims toward a land that is in need of cultivation. By portraying the Native American population as primitive, the colonial narrative justifies their brutality by asserting authority. The Four Old Indians change the outcome of the John Wayne movies in order to assert their presence in a land that is their home, not succumbing to the claims of ownership by the European settlers.

James H. Cox argues that the Four Old Indians “[replot] doom as survival of, and resistance to, colonial violence and dominations” (220). In the climax in Green Grass, Running Water the Four Indians cause a breach in the dam, destroying the plans of corporate development and returning the land to its natural state. This is symbolic of the Indigenous people actively breaking through the societal confines, and reclaiming their position in the land and in the narrative space. The novel as a whole offers a narrative that opposes the simplification of Indigenous culture. The characters that King portray struggle with their identities, offering a much more complex portrait of the Native American people than the ones mainstream media so often confines them to. Through this, King inverts the hierarchical structure, and moves the issues faced by the Indigenous people to our central consciousness instead of keeping them as sideline characters in a narrative that is intent on trivializing their struggle.

Works Cited:

Cox, James H. ““All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something”: Thomas King’s Revisions of Narratives of Domination and Conquest in “Green Grass, Running Water””. American Indian Quarterly 24.2 (2000): 219-246. JSTOR. Web.

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

Smith, Nicole. “Paradise Lost by Milton: Satan, Heroism and Classical Definitions of the Epic Hero.” 7 Dec. 2011. Article Myriad. Web.

Witcombe, Christopher L.C.E. “Eve’s Identity”. Eve and the Identity of Women.2000. Web.

3.1.6

“In order for criticism to arise naturally from within our culture, discourse must serve the same function it has always served. In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon. What will its function be in our societies?” (88)

In the following paragraphs in her essay, Maracle answers her question describing what she sees to be the function of literary criticism in Salish society. Summarize her answer and then make some comparisons between Maracle and Frye’s analysis of the role of myth in nation building.

Lee Maracle begins her essay by outlining the deficiencies of traditional literary criticism in assessing First Nations’ narratives. Maracle asserts that “Western literary criticism fails to make any kind of full, fair, or just sense of Indigenous work because its orientation…is to diminish Indigenity” (83). Traditional literary criticism is advanced by European literature and archetypes, which “appl[ies] pressure on non-European writers to apply themselves to mastering the canon and to abide by the Euro-traditional story” (83).  In this way, Canada maintains its position in “white-settler primacy” and values narratives that conform to this structure over those provided by the marginalized voices of the Indigenous community (83).

According to Maracle, theorists in the Indigenous communities apply analysis in connection to their society’s knowledge with consultation to the “original story base” (84). Criticism is done by individuals within the culture who understand its base (84). Maracle stresses that these criticisms cannot “be done by disconnected individuals who apply themselves to studying another society’s knowledge, foundations, history, and its definitions of the production of literary products” (84). In other words, Western theorists cannot use their terms to define and criticize literature produced from a system like their own. The current education system is based on colonial discourse and ‘post-colonial’ theory only serves to maintain European privilege. Further, it is possible for those who pursue studies in First Nations academically, to have examined all manners of text from several different Indigenous peoples without having encountered any forms of orature. In some cases, oratory constitutes the sacred texts of First Nations people (85).

Maracle differentiates story from oratory, stating that oratory carries knowledge, while story reshapes understanding (91).  Oratory transfers information and theories that can be developed into myth or stories. Gathering and examining in a group “is the appropriate process for Salish people to examine story, [as it helps encourage] discourse around healthy communal doubt” (86). In examining these knowledge bases and old stories, the people are able to extrapolate notions of nation, community, and humanity and assess their value for growth and transformation (85). From these old stories, come the creation of  a new series of myths that alter the direction of the narrative and clear old obstacles. In this way, the creations of myths is a constant re-evaluation and positioning of oneself in a greater narrative. In the Salish community, the myth-maker is responsible for the knowledge of history and original processes in the interest of the nation within the culture.

In The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye presents two aspects of nation-building in the concepts of identity and unity—identity derived from culture and imagination, and unity rooted in politics and an international perspective towards the nation (xxii). Frye describes Canada as an “obliterated environment. . .with its empty space, its largely unknown lakes. . . [and] its division of languages” (xxiii). Frye presents the physical landscape as an antagonistic force against the unity of the country, without acknowledgement of the people who have occupied, and have knowledge of, this land prior to colonization. From this metaphor, one can assert that it is impossible to create a unified identity when one does not include all of the land, and the voices of the people who occupy it. Though he looks to rejects the forces of colonialism on literature, Frye enforces the logic that it falls upon.

Frye refers to myth as the “integral meaning” (xxiii) in a literary work, something that informs, rather than dictates the work. The myth functions as a “structural principle” (xxiii) and Frye looks at it as something to be uncovered, rather than created. Frye looks towards the imagination and history to inform works of literature, rather than myths like the Salish people.

Works Cited:

“Canadian Wilderness.” gap360.com. Web.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Concord: Anansi, 1995. Print.

Maracle, Lee. Across Cultures / Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures. Ed. Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque. Broadview (2010). Google Books. Web. 5 July 2016.