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.

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King’s very first act of narrative decolonization in Green Grass Running Water is the re-telling of the Judeo-Christian creation story.

The biblical version cites God as the sole creator, who created the world out of nothing and said “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis).

This notion of being made in God’s image contributed to the idea of white supremacy and European American settlers justified colonial acts of aggression and exploitation of Native people by claiming it was necessary to enlighten the non-white ‘primitives’. They saw it as their duty to teach them to be educated Christians.

King’s subverts this narrative that enables colonial domination in a number of ways in his re-telling. He infuses it with elements of the First Nations creation stories about the Earth Diver. In his re-telling, he acknowledges that there was something before the creators. There was water. In this story, creation is not a solitary act; it’s an ongoing process. There is also no one dominating thread of narrative about how things came about. There are mysteries and lots of unexplained occurrences. For instance, Ahdamn (King’s take on Adam) comes into the story, unexplained.

King also undermines the male-dominant monopoly of power found in the biblical version. One example of this can be found in the naming scene. In Genesis, Adam is given the authority by God to name all the creatures in the world – “Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” Naming should be seen as an exertion of influence or power and in King’s re-telling, this is turned into a farce:

 “You are a garage sale, Ahdamn tells the Bear.

We got to get you some glasses, says the Bear” (GGRW, 41)

It becomes comical as Ahdamn is trying to come up with names for animals/plants that already have their own. It’s also interesting that the animals and plants reply back and contradict him. Both the humour and the backtalk serve to undermine his authority, making it clear that Ahdamn doesn’t actually rule over all living creatures as his counterpart does in Genesis. In fact, in King’s story the names of the animals and trees are all capitalized – they are on equal footing with the humans. By doing this, King challenges that sense of entitlement man has in the biblical creation story.

King also revises a number of canonical texts and popular shows which are informed by colonialism and which present it as a natural order of things. One example is his appropriation of Robinson Crusoe.

If you have read the novel by Daniel Defoe, you’ll know that the civilizing mission is a thread that runs throughout. In the novel, the castaway Crusoe rescues a Native of the island, whom he re-names ‘Friday’. (This is reminiscent of Adam naming the creatures in Genesis.) Crusoe keeps him on as a servant and teaches him how to dress, eat and speak like a ‘civilized’ man – and instructs him to call him Master. What struck me is that in the text, Crusoe immediately sees Friday as an inferior and Friday is depicted as being instantly submissive to him.

King’s dialogue between Thought Woman and Robinson Crusoe challenges the notion of cultural superiority present in the work.

“So pretty soon Robinson Crusoe comes…and that one looks at Thought Woman. And he looks at her again.

Thank God! Says Robinson Crusoe. It’s Friday!

No, says Thought Woman. It’s Wednesday.”(GGRW, 294).

This funny exchange points out how ridiculous it is that Crusoe tries to claim her as his possession the minute he spots her. But Thought Woman refuses to be re-named ‘Friday’ and be cast in the role of the colonized. In fact, by the end of this exchange, she inverts the roles of dominance. “I’ll be Robinson Crusoe. You be Friday,” she tells him (GGRW, 295). Finally, she simply leaves him behind and floats away. She later uses his name as a guise, to help fix the world.

By taking these dominating narratives and appropriating them, King creates a text that is liberating in some sense. These re-worked narratives challenge the colonial construct that is prevalent in European creation stories or popular western texts and they free themselves from it.

 

WORKS CITED

Bottez, Monica. “Cyclical Time and Linear Time in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” University of Bucharest Review XI.1 (2009): 74-80. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.

“Genesis 1.” Bible Gateway. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

“The Civilizing Mission.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age: Topic 4: Texts and Contexts. W.W. Norton and Company, n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.