Lesson 3.2

Topics

  • Reading strategies
  • Narrative threads in Green Grass Running Water
  • Coyote Pedagogy & the Medicine Wheel

Objectives

At the end of this lesson students will be able to:

  • Develop a reading strategy for hyper-texting Green Grass Running Water
  • Discuss the inter-play of oral stories and textual narratives as history, myth and literature in Green Grass Running Water
  • Recognize and discuss many of the allusions and symbolic play in Green Grass Running Water
  • Recognize and discuss differences between European literary production and First Nations storytelling traditions

Lesson Description

In the last unit we pieced together a number of readings and stories to gather a good sense of the early historical and cultural processes of creating a Canadian literary canon. Many of the writers we have read thus far occupy the pages of Thomas King’s novel (in one guise or another). One of your tasks for this unit is to learn how to discover and extend King’s many allusions in Green Grass Running Water.

This lesson will assist you in developing an overview of some of the unfamiliar territory of Green Grass Running Water. On your first reading of this novel, you will encounter many cultural allusions and symbols that may be foreign to you, and a part of our task for this lesson is to develop a reading strategy for discovering these allusions and in turn tracing some paths toward understanding. We will begin by identifying and discussing the three distinctive narrative threads that King weaves together: 1)’ I Says’ and Coyote, who act like “master narrators” telling us the story, 2) the characters of Blossom, Alberta, who are preparing for the annual Blackfoot Sundance, and 3) the Four Old Indians, who have escaped from Dr. Joseph Hovaugh’s hospital in order to fix the world.

This lesson places special emphasis on learning how to recognize the significant differences between European literary production and First Nations storytelling traditions. In many ways, Green Grass Running Water is a novel about different story-telling traditions, which in turn reflect different, and sometimes conflicting worldviews.

Assignments

Assignment 3:4/ Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box, and respond to one comment on your blog.

Assignment 3:5. Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

At the end of this lesson, you will find a list of questions. Read each of the questions and select one that you would like to answer for your blog assignment.

Required Readings

  • Instructor’s Blog
  • King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
  • Chester Blanca. “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.
  • Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

Required Viewing & Listening

Introduction to Green Grass Running Water

“So, in the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water. Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep” (1).

These are the first two lines of Green Grass Running Water. With these lines King evokes a universal form of story, the creation story. And, he introduces a particular character from First Nations story traditions, Coyote. We all already know that in the beginning there was nothing — but who is Coyote? And, what are those strange symbols on Page 3? What language is this and how is one to pronounce this? It appears impossible to read aloud. Take note right now, that speaking the words of this novel aloud will become important to your reading in many interesting ways. Most interestingly, many of the allusions you will discover are found through listening – rather than reading.

Within the first few pages of Green Grass Running Water it becomes quickly apparent that this novel is going to take you into some strange and unfamiliar territory where you will meet both known and unknown mythical characters. My first word of advice for your reading is to simply allow yourself to “not know” all the time. Enjoy the humor and be touched by the characters you will easily understand, and after you have finished your first read, then begin again and pay attention with the assistance of this lesson.

Coyote Pedagogy

In classroom discussions, when I ask, “Who is Coyote?” — students will most often think first of Wile E. Coyote. To quote one student blog:

Coyote makes me think of the popular cartoon character who seems to be a fool and provides entertainment as he faces failures. Relentless in his chase after the roadrunner, he seems to be an icon in the cartoon world as the never succeeding character. Is that the essential fate of coyote characters in entertainment? Does Coyote from Green Grass Running Water expel those foolish characteristics?

Because Green Grass Running Water is populated with both subtle allusions and overt references to a multitude of characters from popular culture, it is no surprise that students should, at first glance, attempt to understand this Coyote via the attributes of a cartoon character from their childhood viewing of American television (and there is little doubt in my mind that this first impression is one King would like you to think about). However, if you have studied some First Nations literature and are familiar with what appears to be a universal character in First Nations storytelling, the Transformer, sometimes also called the Trickster, you will be quick to recognize Coyote as a Trickster. Another important thing to note is that “Trickster” is a name for a character type that is found in European traditions, most familiar perhaps as renditions of the fool in some of Shakespeare’s plays. The name Trickster has been used to denote First Nations characters like Coyote, Raven, and Nanabush, because, at first glance, these characters share similar capacities to turn things upside down and shake up reality as the traditional European Trickster types. However, as we discussed in unit two, within the First Nations traditions Coyote is understand as a “Transformer” with attributes that are unique from those of the European fool. For now, I suggest that if you are interested in understanding the Transformer figure in more depth, you take a look at some of the suggested readings for this lesson and familiarize yourself with the discussions around the Transformer figure in First Nations story traditions. This will help you to begin to appreciate that while there is much to learn about Coyote – we should also pay attention to what Coyote has to teach us.

The Medicine Wheel

As for the symbols on page three, you will notice that the novel has four sections which each begin with similar symbols. Translated each section of the novel begins with a direction and a colour: East is Red, South is White; West is Black, and North is Blue. These section headings refer to the four directions and colours of the Medicine Wheel, another symbolic gesture that may be foreign to you. The name Medicine Wheel is also not a native term, but was initially used around the turn of the century by Americans of European ancestry in reference to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel located near Sheridan, Wyoming. The Medicine Wheel is integral to a First Nations worldview, and a beginner’s understanding of how the Medicine Wheel works is a good way to understand how the overall ethos and narrative structure of Green Grass Running Water work.

The Medicine wheel presents a circular paradigm that can be used for understanding just about everything; the trick is to examine questions or problems from all four directions. In this sense, the Medicine Wheel is a tool for healing both individual and community problems – but it is also a tool for teaching, which is really the same thing as healing in a First Nations worldview. Learning is healing and healing is learning. Picture a circle with four quadrants representing the four directions each with a colour: East is Red, South is White, West is Black and North is Blue. The four directions symbolize the four states of a life cycle: birth, youth, parents and elders. These cycles correspond to the four seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter, which are connected symbolically with the four states of being: physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual, and the four elements: water, air, fire and Mother earth. As the Wheel turns, it is also returning, and in this way all of these elements are continually connecting and reconnecting; the past meets the present and things begin again. Life is cyclical and ALL things are inter-connected — that is the lesson of the Medicine Wheel, which is central to a First Nations worldview and an ethos that seeks balance and harmony.

So, how (and why) does King use the Medicine Wheel — or perhapsit is better to ask, how King uses the cyclical paradigm of the Medicine wheel (and a little help from Coyote) to teach us to understand, or at least to try to understand the power behind the stories we tell ourselves?

Let’s start with the most obvious allusions to the Medicine Wheel: four is a sacred number. The novel has four sections, with four headings that when translated, are the same as the names of the Four Old Indians, according to Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s files, Mr. Red, White, Black and Blue. It is the four Old Indians who narrate the stories of the four mythical women who fall from the sky. Take note of how each of these sections begin: “this according to …” The mythical Women who fall from the sky correspond to the four life cycles: First Woman/ Birth, Changing Woman/ Youth, Thought Woman/ Parent, Old Woman/ Elder. The four women who fall from the sky are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which will be unfamiliar to many non-First Nations.

There is no doubt that King wants us to work to get the story. His invitation is specific, it is up to you to bother to find out what the symbols mean. Reading this novel means you have to be willing to “pay attention”, to speak the words out loud, to “listen up”–to look it up and, perhaps the most important reading strategy to begin with, is to be willing not to know. King is inviting his readers to enter into a matrix of cultural knowledge that should confuse many non-First Nations, and when you encounter characters like First Woman inside what you think is the Garden of Eden, you need to accept that she is NOT Eve behaving strangely, but rather, she belongs to a different story, a different worldview.

The Medicine Wheel reminds us to make connections. The “I” that says, reminds us to see the cycles. As a reader of this text, you really do need to listen carefully, and I find that visualizing some of the scenes also helps to make connections. For example, look at the cycles of the Four Women who fall from the sky. A woman falls out of the sky, has an encounter with a Western character, and in the end is arrested and sent to prison in Florida for “being Indian” (72), “being unruly Indian” (225), “being another Indian” (396) and for impersonating a white man. It is the same story repeated four times: the story of Indigenous resistance against European forms of oppression and colonization.

What I find most fascinating here is how King manages to use stories to teach us how stories work, all stories: yours, theirs and mine. We have studied how stories work; orally told stories constantly change, absorbing and transforming their own context as they work to connect and reconnect the past with the present. With this novel, King tells stories that absorb and transform the narratives of Western literature, religion, history, colonialism, and popular culture, in order to connect and reconnect, in other words, in order to “fix things.”

Mind Your Relations

“‘Everyone’s related, grandson,’ said the Lone Ranger” (King 298).

The third narrative is the realist story thread of Alberta, Lionel, Charlie, Latisha, and Eli Stands Alone. Here, beginning in Alberta’s history classroom, you will encounter numerous allusions to real historical characters who played one role or another in history, and literary characters who played their roles in novels, or perhaps the authors of novels or poems that “we” all studied in high school. By the time you read your way to Alberta’s classroom, you have encountered enough familiar and peculiar allusions that you should be curious enough to want to know just who are Henry Dawes, John Collier, Richard Pratt et al. and ­– what are the connections, the joke or the point that King is making? And, accordingly you should by now have become a participating reader; playing a role similar to the storyteller’s listener (refer back to Unit 1: lesson 1:2).

You have numerous resources available to help you seek out the knowledge you need to discover the meaning of all King’s references and allusions. I pointed out one way at the beginning of this lesson; to speak the words out loud in order to hear the allusion. You will also need to refer to the articles in the Canadian Literature special issue (161/162) to assist you, as well as your instructor’s blog and student blogs. For your next assignment, I will be assigning specific characters of the novel to each of you to hypertext the allusions (so as you work on this assignment be sure to take note of allusions when you discover them) and with that assignment we will be able to cover a lot of specific territory and no doubt as a class we will connect many narrative dots. With this lesson however, I would like you to focus on acquiring a good overall sense of the flow of the novel. With this in mind, I have a list of question for your blogs.

BLOG Questions

  1. In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.

    Why do you think this is so?

  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.
  3. What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story or stories you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories ?
  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. James Cox. “All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web April 04/2013.

5. Narratives assume, in Blanca Chester’s words, “a common matrix of cultural knowledge.” The Four Old Indians are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which excludes many non-First Nations. What were your first questions about and impressions of these characters? How have you come to understand their place in the novel.

6. Find three examples of names that need to be spoken aloud in order to catch the allusion. Discuss the examples as well as the reading technique that requires you to read aloud in order to make connections. Why does King want us to read aloud?

7. Describe how King uses the cyclical paradigmof the Medicine Wheel (and a little help from Coyote) to teach us to understand, or at least to try to understand the power behind the stories we tell ourselves.

8. Everyone is on the move in this novel, road trips abound and in order to hit the road what do we need? — a road map. At the same time, Lionel, Charlie and Alberta are each seeking direction in life. As Goldman says, “mapping is a central metaphor” (24) of this novel. Maps chart territory and provide directions, they also create borders and boundaries and they help us to find our way. There is more than one way to map, and just as this novel plays with conflicting story traditions, I think King is also playing with conflicting ways to chart territory. What do you think lies at the centre of King’s mapping metaphor? Marline Goldman, “Mapping and Dreaming; Native Resistance in Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

9. King’s “preoccupation with mapping” (Goldman) is interrelated with the constant returning to Fort Marion. For the Women who fall from the sky, all roads lead to Fort Marion. Goldman suggests that King selected this episode in history because the Ledger Art of the Fort Marion Indians consists of “drawings [that are] acts of Native self-representation” (26). With this in mind, discuss why all roads lead back to Fort Marion in the novel, and be sure to consider the possible parallels between Dr. Hovaugh’s fictional institution in Florida and the historical Fort Marion.