Pages 171-182

On page 171, we have a scene with the four Indians. Their names hold extreme symbolic importance as names in and of themselves, examinations of identity and identification:

Ishmael is a name most known as being that of the protagonist of Herman Melville’s excruciatingly complex Moby-Dick. As notes that Te-Ed lesson, Ishmael begins by “telling his own story,” but later, upon boarding the Pequod, becomes instead “an omniscient guide for the reader” (Morrell 2020). Ishmael’s complicated role is a well-storied debate in the literature, and as Susan VanZanten Gallagherr notes in the abstract of her paper examining this issue, “as the narrator of Moby-Dick, Ishmael has long provoked critical problems,” with long disappearances from the action, descriptions of scenes or dialogues he was not witness to, and an erratic style (1). We may thus consider Ishmael to be an example of an unreliable narrator, withholding or manipulating information, pressing doubt and subversion upon the narrative, twisting the storytelling structure to serve their own needs. That famous first line of Moby-Dick – “call me Ishamel” – is a testament to the novel’s deep examinations of narrative and telling, of perspective and protagonist. The character himself has no last name, no family, hardly a backstory to speak of save for his desire to explore the open waters – it is Ahab instead who takes the role of protagonist later in the novel, as Ishmael fades into the background, absent for long chunks of the narrative while remaining, somehow, omniscient of the events of the Pequod. Thus Moby-Dick confronts the fundamentals of storytelling – just as is Green Grass, Running Water, with its narratives-within-narratives, with its first-person narrator in the Coyote portions and third-person narration in the “realistic” stories, its weaving-together of a multitude of plot threads to form a cohesive whole. Who – ask both King and Melville – tell our stories? And how, with what motivations in mind? Who adopts whose voice?

Ishmael is also a Biblical name. He is son of Abraham, ancestor of the Ishmaelites and the Arabs. The name itself derives from the Hebrew Yishma’el, meaning “God will hear” or “God will listen.” It is a theophoric name, meaning it carries in itself the name of a god, most commonly in Greek religion (Parker 53). So in Ishmael, or Yishma’el, King is providing us with another name for (a) god/God, alongside Dog-God and Dr. Joe Hovaugh.

As notes Jane Flicks in her reading notes for Green Grass, Running Water, Hawkeye is a moniker for Natty Bumppo, protagonist of the Leatherstocking Saga by James Fenimore Cooper (141-142). Scholar Thomas Jordan for Disability Studies Quarterly examines the Bumppo figure as indicating a “unique portrait of American national identity,” a symbol “of the nation’s white, Anglo-Saxon destiny” (1). Jordan further examines Bumppo’s abled-bodiedness in contrast to the disability of his Native American companion Chingachgook, suggesting a “corporeal hierarchy” by which to present the demise of the mythic American Indian as resulting through natural selection or otherwise physical incapabilities rather than the violence of US colonialism (1). In Bumppo there is a twisting of the truth of colonialization to serve to reinforce Western sovereignty and erase Indigenous history.

Next is the Lone Ranger, that most iconic of masked Old West heroes, whose image as the quintessential cowboy alongside his Native sidekick Tonto remains embedded in the American cultural imagination. He was also the star of a 2013 film of the same name, which was highly controversial at the time due to the fact that the Native sidekick Tonto was portrayed by Johnny Depp, a white man. Examining the name Tonto yields very interesting results: the name means “stupid” or “crazy” in Spanish. Tonto’s tribal affiliation has been always either been left ambiguous or been completely wrong for the location the show was set in. Tonto was also known to use the catchphrase “kemosabe,” a term that means, in the context of the show, “friend.”

The Supreme Court of Canada once ruled on whether or not the term is offensive to Canadian Indigenous people after a Mi’kmaq woman was called “kemosabe” by her boss. It’s been noted that “kemosabe” actually means “idiot” in Apache (Harris 2013), but scholars and fans alike have hardly been able to pinpoint the exact origins of the term as used in the show by the mysterious Indian Tonto.

The last Indian is Robinson Crusoe, protagonist of the novel of the same name by Daniel Defoe, sometimes considered, as note scholars Elisabeth Bekers and others, to be the first novel in English, as well as one of the greatest, described by the author himself and by the protagonist Crusoe as a “history” (McCrum 2013). It literally helped to birth the novel format, that transformation of storytelling from the voice to the page. It is a symbol of literacy. The name is also complex etymologically: in the novel’s first page, the protagonist himself explains, from the first-person, that he was originally named “Robinson Kreutzaner,” but “by the usual corruption of words in England” came to be called Crusoe (Defoe 1). So Robinson Crusoe the name marks a corruption of language and of naming, of how external influence alters a person’s linguistic identification.

Crusoe also has a Native companion, Friday. Crusoe names him so; it is not a name the man gives himself. “I let him know his name should be Friday” narrates Crusoe, later noting that he “likewise taught him to say Master; and then let him know that was to be my name” (Defoe n.p.). This is rather problematic, in that the identity of this Indigenous man is not only erased entirely but never provided at all, and it is only the name given to him that marks his personhood, and his position subservient to the white Crusoe.

All four of the characters from whom the Old Indians get their names are fictional white figures who had “Indian” protagonists: Ishmael had Queequeg, Hawkeye had Chingachgook, the Lone Ranger had Tonto, Crusoe had Friday.

On page 172, Lionel references his boss, Bursum, an allusion to Holm O. Bursum, who was senator from New Mexico from 1921 to 1925. In the early 1920s, Bursum wrote a bill, the Bursum Bill, to give ownership of Pueblo lands in New Mexico to non-Native people (New Mexico Museum of Art). That the character’s full name is Buffalo Bill Bursum further solidifies the allusion to the Bursum Bill.

Lionel means “young lion,” derived from Latin. It is not Indigenous – although his last name, Red Dog, is. There is an interesting albeit small point to make here about lions – the Biblical Revelation tells of the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” (Rev. 5:5), who is Jesus Christ – C.S. Lewis in fact took inspiration from this Lion of Judah to create his Aslan character in The Chronicles of Narnia, who famously represents Christ. Another Biblical allusion, however far-fetched, or even unintentional on the author’s part, it may be.

Lionel is also the name of a knight of the Round Table in Arthurian legend, Sir Lionel, who in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is named as Lancelot’s nephew. There is also Camelot, Lionel’s mother, an obvious allusion to that most famous of castles, Arthur’s court and the seat of the knights of the round table. Though Malory was not the first to record the adventures of the knights of Camelot, his literary Le Morte d’Arthur is often considered another candidate, alongside Robinson Crusoe, as the first novel ever written in the English language. Again we have an allusion to the power of literacy and the recording of historical and not-so-historical events through paper and word – Robinson Crusoe is written as a real travelogue, and many medieval histories record Arthur as a real figure. Where do we draw the boundary between what is real and what is not? Does our Western culture place greater authoritative power on the written word over orality? In these allusions – as well as in the novel’s general examinations of Biblical narrative – King is asking the reader to confront notions of literacy and text. He is creating a dichotomy, or lack thereof, between oral and textual forms of storytelling and recording. In the Western world, it seems, literacy prevails – with such groundbreaking works as Malory’s chronicling of Camelot, Daniel Defoe’s adventure story, and the Bible itself.

On page 175, Alberta reminisces on a childhood memory of seeing “cows artificially inseminated,” noting how it felt “mechanical” (King 175). Later, she parses through the words: “Cows. Cows. Horses. Cows. Horses. Cows. Cows” (King 175). Interestingly, neither cows nor horses are indigenous to North America. Instead, they were brought to the New World by European conquerors (McTavish et. al 2013). To take the allusory and symbolic connections of Green Grass, Running Water to their absolute limit, cows and horses were “artificially inseminated” into the New World. They were products of colonialism.

On page 179, Alberta learns she is a “blue priority” patient (179) at the clinic. Blue is a recurring symbolic colour: Sergent Cereno calls one of the escaped Old Indians “Mr. Blue (King 52), and as Flick explains in her reading notes, the fourth of the novel’s headings in the Cherokee syllabary translates as “North/blue” (Flick 143). Flick further notes that in the Medicine Lodge, north is old age (143). Thus blue, perhaps, comes to represent aging. It is clear that Alberta’s “blue” patient status indicates that she is getting older – the woman from the clinic notes that “younger women get higher priority,” and Alberta waits months for any progress towards getting an opening.

Later, on page 180, Charlie is described as flipping “through the channels, never watching any program for very long,” “except for the Westerns” (King 181). Earlier, on page 177, Albert scrolls through channel after channel, finding “nothing” to watch until “before she knew it, she was back to the Western” (King 177). The cultural image of the Western is vital to understanding King’s novel. Many refer to it as the genre through which the “central myth of the United States” is written (White 1). It is a film and literary genre through which the cultural legacy of the United States has been shaped and re-shaped through a colonialist lens of manifest destiny and the figure of the cowboy or outlaw. Indeed, the Lone Ranger and Hawkeye are both examples of Western figures, powerful white men through whom the West is conquered, Indigenous lands brought under the subjugation of America. And it seems King’s characters can never escape the Western – no matter how many channels, how many stories, they go through, they will always return to the myth of America.

The (manipulative) storytelling tradition of the Western grows in importance on page 182, when readers are told of the movies, of “Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, Polly Hantos, Sammy Hearne, Johnny Cabot, Henry Cortez, C.B. Cologne, Barry Zannos” (King 182). Each name is allusory. Sally Jo Weyha as I have previously analyzed in another blog post refers to Sacagawea, the young Shoshone woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their expedition through America, whose name is commonly mispronounced, as notes historian Peter Kastor, as Sa-ka-jew-WAY-uh, because the name was spelled Sacajawea in William Clark’s manuscript journals. A better pronunciation, as explained by professor Gary Moulton, is sah-kah-gah-wee-ah, with a hard “G.” The culturally ubiquitous mispronunciation of Sacajawea is a succinct example of the colonial appropriation and manipulation of Indigeneity – the identity of this Native Shoshone woman shaped and re-shaped through decades of American cultural myth. Other illusions here include Frankie Drake to English explorer Sir Francis Drake, Polly Hantos to the famous Native American woman, and Henry Cortez to conquistador Hernan Cortes. Pocahontas is another interesting figure to examine – her life, too, has been mythicized, and she is such a dominant (Western, misrepresented) symbol of Native Americanness that the name itself, as we saw when Trump famously used it to refer to Senator Elizabeth Warren, has become derogatorily associated with a mockery of Indigeneity. Just as with what I earlier mentioned as the problematic use of the term “kemosabe” to refer to Indigenous people, the term Pocahontas has become a derogatory nickname. The self-identities of Indigenous individuals are erased, replaced by references to a select, few, colonially-curated images of the “Indian.”

It is interesting that the names that allude to Native figures – Sally Jo Weyha and Polly Hantos – are strange misspellings of the original names, forcing the reader to engage in acts of mispronunciation, and in doing so identify these figures through their colonialist framings. However, the allusions to colonial figures – Frankie Drake, Henry Cortez – are not misspellings, only slight alterations or diminutives of the original names. These figures of the legacy of Western settler-colonialism are not mispronounced and/or misidentified – for they were able to formulate their own stories. As fellow classmate Victoria Ranea pointed out in a comment on my previous blog post, the allusory “Louie, Ray, Al” (King 334) is a distortion of oft-maligned Metis figure Louis Riel, while a name like “Sue Moodie” (King 156) is a simple reference to Susannah Moodie without signification alteration. That Native names are altered while colonial names are not is a rather hidden means by which King explores the delineation of Native identity and Idengenity through colonialist Western hegemony. Victoria analyzed this phenomenon through an examination of the photographic works of Edward S. Curtis, whose rather voyeuristic depictions of Native Americans and his role in the perpetuation of the myth of the “vanishing Indian” speaks to the overwhelming dominance of settler-colonialism in shaping and re-shaping Indigenous identity, history, and culture.

All the characters – Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, and others – are described as “fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (King 182), speaking to the problematic portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood and on television. Scholar Martin Berny for Angles examines the “misrepresentation of Native Americans in cinema” as furthering “an irreconcilable enemy image upon which the American self is constructed,” with Hollywood continuously recycling “the dual stereotype of the noble Indian and the bloodthirsty savage” (1). Here, as with the names of the four Indians, we see King’s confrontation with (mis)representations of Indigeneity and the figure of the “Indian.” Just like the lives of figures like Sacagawea and Pocahontas have been appropriated and manipulated to serve the narrative and legacy of Western colonialism, so too did novels like Ishmael’s Moby-Dick and Robinson Crusoe, as well as shows like The Lone Ranger and literary series like Natty Bumppo’s Leatherstocking Tales, portray wildly curated images of Native Americans as the noble savage or a mythic, submissive figure of pre-civilization.

Works Cited

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Berny, Martin. “The Hollywood Indian Stereotype: The Cinematic Othering and Assimilation of Native Americans at the Turn of the 20^th Century.” Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, vol. 10, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/angles/331.

The Bible. New International Version, BibleGateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/.

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“C.S. Lewis Letter Testifies Narnia’s Lion as Christ.” Christian Today, 7 Dec. 2005, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/c.s.lewis.letter.testifies.narnia.lion.as.christ/4724.htm.

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Kastor, Peter. “Listen to Why You’re Probably Pronouncing Sacagawea Wrong.” St. Louis Public Radio, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2014-04-28/listen-to-why-youre-probably-pronouncing-sacagawea-wrong.

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