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.

Coyote is the quintessential trickster in the Native American oraliture. Yet, on top of stirring up trouble and testing moral precepts, Coyote also has “attributes that are unique from those of the European fool” (Lesson 3.2). Former Simpc Indian Band chief and university administrator has this to say about an a Coyote sculpture on Thompson Rivers University campus: “With the coyote we wanted something very symbolic to Interior Salish people. The coyote is a transforming creature that has significance to all Interior Salish people – transforming people in so many ways from what we know today.” Coyote is not only a playful shape-shifter and trickster, but also a creator and teacher. In Green Grass, Running Water, King’s portrays Coyote in a new light that nonetheless continues to trick and transform readers.

Upon my first reading of the novel, I was surprised and disorientated to find Coyote popping up in all over the place: dancing in the rain in a street corner in Blossom, arguing with ‘I says’, peeping into Fort Marion. He jumps fluidly between all three narrative threads, between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive.’ I think King does this not only to remind readers of Coyote’s mythical character, but also to introduce a worldview in which the supernatural bleeds into the tangible all the time. Coyote’s historical permeability speaks to his nature as a shape-shifter: he is unconfinable and indefinable. It’s interesting to note however, that although he participates in both worlds just like the four Indians, ‘real’ human characters such as Lionel, Eli, and Alberta do not seem to notice his interjections.

The four Indians do, however, they help solidify Coyote’s identity as the traditional trickster. It’s hinted that he was the one who impregnated Alberta and the virgin Mary, and caused the Great Flood:

The last time you fooled around like this, said Robinson Crusoe, the world got very wet.
I didn’t do anything, says Coyote. I just sang a little […]
But I was helpful too, says Coyote. That woman who wanted a baby. Now that was helpful […]
Helpful! Said Robinson Crusoe. You remember the last time you did that?
“We haven’t straightened out that mess yet,” said Hawkeye
Hee-hee, says Coyote. Hee-hee. (King 416)

Coyote is an important character through which King accomplishes what James Cox terms acts of “narrative decolonization” (All This Water Imagery). Weaving in Native American characters like Coyote, King revises Western origin stories, and offering alternative explanations which undermine the metanarratives of the dominant discourse. In the novel, Noah’s Flood and the Immaculate Conception are just products of a canine’s well-intended mishaps, not acts of divine wrath or mercy. In this role, Coyote infiltrates, upends, and transforms the European American narratives which have been most central to the tenets of colonialism.

However, King’s Coyote is far from omnipotent or omniscient even if omnipresent. As the “master narrators” of the story, ‘I Says’ and Coyote keep up a friendly banter which nonetheless makes it clear that ‘I Says’ is teacher and Coyote is student.

Coyote functions as an extension of and a stand-in for the reader, modeling reader response. Often stumped, he turns to ‘I Says’ for help:

“Is this a puzzle?” says Coyote. “Are there any clues?” (100)
“I can see that”… “But I don’t get it,” says Coyote. (419)

Like him, the audience has access to all three narrative threads, and similarly, they have limited omniscience. Coyote is constantly corrected and told that he is “wrong again” (349). Like Coyote, we often have to readjust our values and expectations as we encounter the new and often jarring perspectives or worldviews presented in Green Grass, Running Water.

The badinage between ‘I says’ and ‘Coyote’ also reflects the organic spontaneity of oral storytelling. By making this relationship a narrative thread, King highlights and privileges the dynamics between storyteller and listener. Coyote often asks outrageous questions like whether Coyotes are Indians or not. Like him, the reader may make side comments or non sequiturs that are ‘ignored’ by the characters of the story. Neither can the audience control the trajectory of the narrative: “Coyote’s,” ‘I says’ tells him, “don’t get a turn” (327). When Coyote finally gets a turn to tell his tale, it turns out to be a reiteration of the beginning of the novel—he can only repeat what the authorial narrator has put in his mouth.

Nevertheless, Coyote remains full of curiosity and indefatigable enthusiasm. Like him, readers are encouraged to remain thoroughly engaged with the story. What Coyote teaches us, then, is precisely to be teachable, to be okay, as Professor Paterson says, when we do “not know” (Lesson 3.2). As Teacher, Transformer, and Trickster all in one, Coyote embodies the ignorant reader while retaining his Native roots. King’s Coyote Pedagogy is not only an effective way to pattern reader response and implicate the reader as a character in the novel, it also re-enacts the dynamic relationship between orator and listener, showing how both can contribute and participate in the tale, how both play the role of narrator and character.

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Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. March 21, 2016

James Cox. “All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web. March 21, 2016

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

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.2.” ENGL 470A: Indigenous Lit. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

Ramsey, Jarold. “Coyote (legend).” Oregon Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

Explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye. You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

In The Bush Garden, renowned Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye argues that great literature is independent of social-historical context. “The forms of literature,” writes Frye, “are autonomous: they exist within literature itself and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (Frye 234). The failure of Canadian writers to recognize that literature is a closed system is precisely the reason why the nation has yet to produce a classic thus far. However, the inability of Canadian author to pull us “toward the center of literary experience itself” does have its merits: in this lacuna, readers become aware of the author’s social and historical setting.

What, precisely, are the qualities of the “Canadian” context? Noting the predominant focus on Canadian life in Canadian literature, Frye posits that the Canadian imagination records that which it has reacted to—nature. This environment is a barren and unoccupied wasteland—“terrifyingly cold, empty, and vast” (245)—and it has left an indelible mark on the Canadian imagination. “One wonders,” writes the theorist in his discussion of the frontier, “if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested so built into it” (222). The Canadian landscape has come to represent for him that which is unknowable and morally inexplicable; Canada’s “obliterated environment” represents for him “the riddle of unconsciousness” (245), the epitome of which is death.

What I found most disturbing about The Bush Garden was that Frye, a centuries after settlers like Susanna Moore, continues to imagine Canada as a terra nullis. “Canada,” he writes, “with its empty spaces, its largely unknown lakes and rivers and islands… has had this peculiar problem of an obliterated environment throughout most of its history” (xxiii). The irony, of course, is that Canada suffers not so much from an effaced environment but from an erased history. By imagining Canada as “empty, unknown, obliterated,” Frye discounts that the fact this land has been populated, named, and cultivated by the First Nations for thousands of years.

Rather than asserting equal claim to the land, Frye’s Indian occupies a primitive role in his theory of “conscious mythology” (234). Presenting perhaps the English literary equivalent to stadial history, Frye proposes,

As society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts… become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.” (234-5)

Indians occupy that first step, possessing “a mythology that included all the main elements of our [the Canadian’s] own” but remained incompatible with Canadian culture (235). Note that by using the first person plural possessive “our,” Frye assumes a division between Indian and reader. With one fell stroke of his pen, he writes them out of any role within contemporary Canadian society and relegates them to “literary conventions of the nineteenth century” (235). Instead of seeing E. Pauline Johnson as a Native writer who sought to inculcate intercultural understanding through her poetry and performances (fun fact: Johnson’s performance costume is housed at the Museum of Vancouver), Frye dismisses the popularity of native writers as demonstrative of “the kind of rapport with nature” symbolized by the Indian that is central to pastoral myth (240). And we must remember that Frye doesn’t see much in nature, quite literally.

Returning to the question posed by Dr. Paterson, Scott’s purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures would be irrelevant to Frye because literature exists autonomously. There is nothing incompatible between mourning a vanishing people and actively instigating cultural genocide because great books are undetermined by the socio-historical environments in which they are spawned. Furthermore, Frye has no room in his theories to include the Native consciousness or legacy in the Canadian imagination. Grey Owl and Pauline Johnson were but brief and peripheral moments in Canadian literary history. (Did you know that Grey Owl was British?). Frye’s Indian is fictive—an object of literary criticism, mythic—a relic of the past, and archaic—excluded from the present and future reality of Canada.

Northrop Frye was a trailblazer of the 1960’s cultural nationalist movement—a movement focused on rejecting Canada’s ties to Britain and America, determined to free itself of the “colonial mind-set.” Dr. Patterson’s explanation of the dual nature of colonial identity is relevant here:

The settler-colonist than, is seen as occupying a space between the colonial powers and the Indigenous peoples… The dual identity… then is the settler-invader who dispossess the Indigenous peoples under the authority of colonial powers, and the settler-colonist who resists the authority of colonial powers in their dreams and efforts to build a nation that they could call home. (Patterson)

Canadians during the 1960’s failed to recognize that they retained a history of both colonized and colonizer. In fact, even as great thinkers like Frye tried to extricate themselves from colonial narratives, they ended up perpetuating a colonizing paradigm.

To end, I’d like to leave you with two thoughts: Firstly, is it not ironic that Northrop Frye, for all his preaching about great literature being independent of social-historical context, is famed precisely for his literary work in locating the Canadian imagination? Secondly, Frye may actually be correct in thinking of literature as “a conscious mythology,” for indeed, The Bush Garden itself is a prime example of how literature continues to perpetuate and solidify myths within a society. White man, whether asserting his right of place on the literary stage or political map, continues to displace the Native.

“17 Funny Snow Images That Will Keep You Warm with Laughter While the Blizzard Keeps Piling It Up.” Independent Journal Review. 2015. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

CanLit Guides. “Poetry and Racialization.” Canadian Literature. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

“Grey Owl: Trapper, Conservationist, Author, Fraud.” CBC Archives. CBC/Radio Canada, 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Patterson, Erika. “Lesson 2.3.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

“Pauline Johnson’s Performance Costume.” Museum of Vancouver. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.