Settler Relations

Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman, Weaving the World into Being” (2007), Lauren Raine

What I love so much about how King articulates “Thought Woman” is his parallel with her to Robinson Crusoe. Immediately off the bat as she navigates her way across the territories that King describes, he lets her self-determine as “Robinson Crusoe […and] in charge” (318). The significance here, is that King is turning the negotiations of Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s same-titled novel, on its head.

No longer is Crusoe the ‘discoverer’ of a ‘vacant’ or ‘empty’ island, turning it through the clever manipulation of the land’s many-resources into a civilized(ish) fort and home. This manipulation of space and time is a long-since criticized relic of a certain type of history in literature—Colonial Literature. What happens then, when Thought Woman becomes or embodies a Crusoe-like way of moving about the land—putting flowers in police officer’s hair, criticizing and critiquing how they exist in this space? The parallels become a speaking back to the histories of Colonial literature and the way that the settlement projects of North America draw so heavily from these canons in their effort to legitimize the deep violence they were responsible for.

Pushing or expanding this idea of Crusoe into a decolonizing lens is a tricky subject. I am fascinated by King’s use of him especially in relation to Thought Woman. Specifically, the idea that Crusoe creates a simulacra (LINK), or attempt at modernism through his treehouses and family-driven religion. Recent literary scholars have broken apart Crusoe’s role in early-colonial modernism. I cannot escape this idea of the’ almost-civility’ that Crusoe inhabits (things are close to being civil and modern, but still almost ‘savage’) in relation to how Green Grass Running Water is so often challenging, undoing, and going back in popular means of story-telling. King is joining scholars like Karen Lawrence (1992) in their effort to chip away at the legitimacy and efficacy of Crusoe as a grand figure of modernism and capital–effectively decolonizing these Western Canons.

This embodied playfulness or trickery that King continuously uses in the novel, not just through Coyote, I argue, but through almost every one of his characters effectively begins to talk back to traditional or Western schemas.

I think to the ways in which Thought Woman is represented in the many oral traditions of indigenous peoples, and am struck by the imaginig of spiders and webs in relation to her. Keeping the deliberate, strong, well-planned, and often beautiful webs that spiders create in dialogue with Crusoe’s own ‘almost-modernity’, lets us see another means to an end that King is toying with. Thought Woman’s hand in creation and beginnings can be read as natural forces talking back to the colonial dogma that Crusoe brings. What better dismantling of such a western script as Crusoe seemingly ‘dominating’ and ‘controlling’ nature in his elegant and modern treehouse (humanity laboring and turning the tree into a home) than Thought Woman’s literal creation of nothing—a web and universe?

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel, and N. C. Wyeth. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Scribner, 1983. Online.

Karen Lawrence, ed. Decolonizing tradition: new views of twentieth-century” British” literary canons. University of Illinois Press, 1992. Online.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. E-Book.

Raine, Lauren. Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman, Weaving the World into Being. Digital image. 2007.