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.