Describe 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.
The Medicine Wheel, to many Native American tribes, has been used by generation after generation to reflect and represent not only health and healing, but also the entire cycle of life. The manner in which King wrote his novel, Green Grass, Running Water, is, in itself, written in a cyclical structure: he starts his novel with the phrase “In the beginning, there was nothing. Just water,” and he continues to end the first part of his story with the exact same phrase. In addition to this, the simple start of King’s phrase, “in the beginning,” alludes to the core structure of a traditional creation story. This is significant in that creation stories are, ultimately, symbolizes the roots of a community’s beginnings, culture, and unique traditions. By doing so, King is helping us, as the readers, to get a glimpse on the power that stories can hold in influencing the very ways in which we live our lives. One interesting thing to note, however, is the fact that, along with the nothingness and water, was Coyote – who seems to have existed from the beginning of time, implying that Coyote himself had no creator: he simply existed.
What I noticed regarding the structure of the Medicine Wheel was that each of its four points seem to be of equal importance: if one is taken away, the Wheel would no longer work. Each of the four sections of the wheel represent different things: the four traditional directions (North, South, East, West), each stage of life (birth, youth, elder, death), seasons of the year (spring, summer, autumn, winter), and even the colors of the human race. The entire structure to the wheel is cyclical, from the mythical Women falling from the sky, First Woman/Birth, Changing Woman/Youth, Thought Woman/Parent, and Old Women/Elder, to the representation of the four states of the Earth. Eventually, due to the cyclical nature of the Wheel, we will eventually find ourselves once again at the beginning of each state of being, as the cycle of life continues. As is central to what a First Nations worldview is about, everything that happens on Earth is connected with each other – and changing one thing has the ability to change everything else.
The important thing to note is that the Medicine Wheel ultimately teaches us that all the seasons and lessons that it teaches are what keeps the world in balance: it represents the eternity of the existence of life. Every living being will ultimately experience each part of the circle and will understand the lessons that each stage teaches them.
On the The first color, White, is depicted in the the character of the Ishmael, who represents the white men. It also represents the cardinal direction South, and peace and happiness, which, in essence, implied that “happiness lived in the South.” The next color, Black, is represented by Robinson Crusoe, and symbolizes the end of life’s cycle. Blue, represented by Hawkeye, symbolizes defeat and failure – and King further expresses this by Coyote stealing the blue colored Nissan and ending up stuck in the dam – a dead end. Finally, Red, who is depicted by the Lone Ranger, symbolizes success, and the reawakening of new life. It is also the color of fire, which was an essential life source for many nations since the beginning of time.
By telling the story of Green Grass, Running Water in such a cyclical manner, reflecting the cycle of the Medicine Wheel, King has emphasized and demonstrated the power that stories can have over one’s understanding of them. As I read the story over again a second time, and then a third time, I notice things that I did not first notice – proving that stories have the power to be retold and repeatedly interpreted in many different ways, but that they will also ultimately have an end – similar to the how the cycle of life will one day have an end but will eventually be able to begin anew again.
Works Cited