Hyperlinking Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King
For this assignment I chose to focus on a few groups of consecutive pages that relate to the telling of the creation story that includes First Woman. I chose these pages because when I first read them, I felt as though there was a lot I was missing out on, but pushed ahead in order to finish the required reading. I was also particularly drawn to these passages because of previous academic work I’ve done on Paradise Lost by John Milton. Up until now, the only garden of Eden I was familiar with was Milton’s, and I found King’s very compelling. For this assignment I will focus on pages 38, 39, 40 and 41, as well as 68, 69, 70, 71 and 72.
Coyote and GOD (dog backwards)
In the beginning, there is Coyote and water. Coyote is a tremendously powerful and popular figure in Native North American mythology (Flick). What makes Coyote so special, is that though he is intelligent and powerful, like modern Christians imagine God, Coyote also has flaws. Coyote’s down-to-earthiness (ie – offering to apologize (King 38), exhibiting a selfish interest in other coyotes (38), lying about eating food in the garden (69) ) is approachable. The way in which he listens to and engages with the “I says” storyteller, makes him a perfect audience for the orality of King’s tale. Also, Coyote’s presence in the creation story as both “Old Coyote” (39) and as the listener, serves as a force in the resistance of colonial representations. Unlike the GOD character, who continually tries to control and dictate the story so that it matches the Christian myth of creation (despite its similarities to other creation stories), Coyote’s presence surreptitiously affects the audience on the level of perception and challenges us to consider alternate realities. This challenging reflects a central aspect of the oral tradition – when a story is being told, new information is added, perceptions change, the story changes and the audience moves on.Some argue that this fluidity makes the oral tradition biased and subjective, and therefore flawed. Adversely, GOD is not accepting of the changes Coyote and First Woman bring to his mythology. The literary tradition of the Christian myth cannot account or adjust for new information or perceptions. Enlightenment thinking deems that because of this, the literary tradition is rational and objective, and therefore superior. This is reflected through the GOD character’s fragile superiority complex, when he claims ownership of the garden and bosses First Woman and Ahdamn around (41). This strikes at the heart of the difference between cultural motivations for sharing stories. Coyote’s oral stories seek to teach, heal and entertain. GOD’s story only wants to inform. I found it interesting that when Coyote is speaking, his speech is flanked by quotation marks, while GOD’s are not. Perhaps this is another allusion to the oral versus literary tradition.
First Woman and GOD
These characters really helped me to understand the oppositions King is playing with in this novel. First Woman is the poster child for opposition. In this myth,instead of bring created from a rib, she helps to create the entire world as we know it with the help of the sky and water animals. Much like Coyote, First Woman is a character whose story resists not only the colonial influence on oral history and Indigenous culture, but on the nature of power. GOD who cries out “What happened to my void?” (38 – emphasis mine) and stomps around making sure everyone knows he is angry (69). According to the article hyperlinked above, the GOD character tries to gain power with coercion. (Sound familiar?) First Woman is collaborative and maintains referent power, the most valuable, because of her positive attitude (endless optomism about adventures (72), confidence in leading others (straighten up, mind your relations – 39), ability to make friends and share with allies (40), and ability to think on her feet and adapt to new situations (71).
Looking at the origins of power for First Woman and GOD (who came from Coyote’s dream) brought up all sorts of connections I was able to make – the idea of divine right and even the, somehow legally binding notion that Canada was empty when the Europeans “found it”. It makes me wonder – if you need to justify your power so frequently, are you ever really all that powerful?
I enjoyed looking closely at the connections I was able to make in these passages. I found so many oppositions, as well as instances and examples of concepts we’ve already studied in this course. I kept fretting over whether I had found the right connections or allusions, until I realized that King is intending for me to be the audience who actively contributes to my own understanding of the story, and I did just that 🙂
Works Cited
Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. 28 July 2016.
King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
sandrawu
July 29, 2016 — 4:33 am
Hi Laura,
I really enjoyed your post, particularly your hyperlink to “The Doctrine of Discovery is less of a problem than terra nullius.” I find it so interesting that the principle of terra nullius asserts that ‘discovered’ lands are immediately assumed to be of an ’empty’ state, thus eliminating the process of moral reasoning and justifying for a European power when they swoop in and colonize the Indigenous nations.
Just like how GOD attempts to control and dictate indigenous stories so it can correspond and reinforce Christian beliefs and values due to its insecurity and superiority complex, European nations that conduct cultural genocide lack real, convincing power that the First Woman possesses instead. Which gets me wondering: if European civilizations have been so successful in wiping out countless Indigenous tribes, what is fuelling their growing insecurities and need for control? Does greed make people greedier, or are there inherent flaws in the way European and North American civilizations think to begin with? I’d love to know what you think!
Cheers,
Sandra
LauraSavoie
July 31, 2016 — 1:07 am
Hi Sandra 🙂
I really love your question about greed breeding greed and the nature of insecurity in colonial powers. It’s one that I stumbled across when I was writing my blog post, but I felt I couldn’t answer it well enough so I just let it stew in the back of my head.
I think that in the terms of the colonizer / people being colonized, the colonizer is consistently looking for terms and facts and figures to justify a) their presence there and b) their superiority. I think that when that starts to slip, the cracks in their logic begin to show and rather than losing actual power they lose their image or facade they worked so hard to create?
Basically, I don’t know. But thank you so much for the question! hahaha. I’ll keep thinking
chartils
July 29, 2016 — 10:57 pm
What a great point on power! It makes me think about how King holds the power that allows so many allusions to be present and affect the reader in different ways. Particularly because Christian narratives are quite well known in Canada and he alters them to include a Native woman.
What did you think about the other stories that the Changing Woman encounters? Noah’s Ark, Moby Dick, Garden of Eden being only a few.
Through King’s writings these familiar stories that typically only involved Christians or which excluded Native influence or affect or even presence are now presented here as being intimately intertwined. How does this play into your discussion?
LauraSavoie
July 31, 2016 — 1:06 am
Hi Chartils (sorry, can’t seem to find a way to figure out your not screen-name – super awkward)
Your point about King’s power while telling this story made me think of my boyfriend’s opinion. Apparently he’s read Green Grass Running Water as well, and he didn’t like it because he found it preachy! I was surprised because while I can understand how my boyfriend perceived it was preachy, I liked that about it! Authors really do have a lot of power of persuasion when sharing their work with an audience 🙂
I can’t comment on Moby Dick (because I’ve never read it and missed most obvious allusions my first time through) but I thought that Noah’s Ark and Garden of Eden + Changing woman was really neat. Ever since I read about the Medicine Wheel I’ve been seeing that everywhere in this book, and Changing Woman’s attitude during the telling of these typically Biblical stories embodies just that. I love her attitude of “Well, another adventure” and she just keeps rolling, changing, adapting and in a way healing. Her story never stops even if it is affected by outside sources, just like Indigenous culture will never see it’s end, no matter how hard colonial forces try.
natasha heine
July 30, 2016 — 3:02 pm
Hi Laura,
First of all, great visuals for this post. Secondly, I really enjoyed the content you provided to match the visuals! I like the point that you made about how Enlightenment thinking has led us to believe that written material is more valuable than information and stories that survive through oral tradition, yet this is the wrong way of thinking about the two forms of language. As we have previously discussed in this class, the emphasis on written language as superior to oral traditions is very Western-centric, and this really closes us off to new ways of thinking and understanding. I think that King’s novel does a really good job at making us aware of all these missed opportunities for understanding when we are not exposed to Native creation stories, or oral storytelling in general.
The allusions and hidden meanings in the novel can only be found when we know that we actually have to look for something. I think if I read this novel outside of this class I would have had no clue how many references I was missing. But reading it in the context of this class I can see that there is a lot I would have not understood, and this is because the way we learn things in university and through our society mostly derive from Enlightenment thought. What are your opinions on this?
– Natasha
LauraSavoie
July 31, 2016 — 1:11 am
Hi Natasha 🙂
Thanks for your kind words regarding the sausage dog. Hahaha. I thought I might offend some people, but it was what Google gave me!
Reading your comment made me consider another angle of the whole oral vs. literary debate. I think that all of these allusions we’re looking for, the ones we keep missing, would be easy to understand if the story had been told to us. Say someone mentions a name that sounds something like a celebrity and someone else laughs, the laugh is a cue that something beyond the literal meaning is happening. We could talk to the people around us or ask questions, just like hyperlinking, and have all the information we needed right there.
I think that through formal education, we’re taught to engage with literature in a very specific way, and that doesn’t always allow a) time or b) the freedom to wiggle around and figure out what means what to who.
I’m having epiphanies that can be tracked to the first couple lessons – so embarrassing. Where were these thoughts 4 weeks ago?