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?
To begin with, I was a bit confused with the whole narrative of the story, but as I read Blanca Chester’s article “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” the narrative became clearer. The narrator indirectly narrates to the story to the reader, as the narrator tells the story to primarily the coyote. As the unknown narrator begins to explain the escape of four Native American elders from a mental institution who are named Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye, these four characters are connected to a female of first nation origin. As Chester’s point out, “King connects Robinson’s Okanagan Coyote with stories from the Blackfoot of Alberta, and the traditions of Thought Woman (Pueblo), First Woman (Navajo), Old Woman (Blackfoot, Dunne-za), and Changing Woman (Navajo)” (45). My first impression of these characters was to show the gender bending that the trickster’s ability is able to do. An occurrence in other texts we have read so far this semester. Another interpretation of the Indian men in the novel, or women was to show the cycle of life. As mentioned before, each of the four Indian men connects to a female of first nation origin. Each women represented a time period of life, as they represented a woman from birth, to childhood, to adult and then to elder. As Chester states “the conversation between these narratives in Green Grass, Running Water is framed with no real beginning, no middle, and no end—it is a continuous cycle that is always beginning again, as the world itself is constantly being re-created, through story” (46). These characters show the oral tradition and common matrix of cultural knowledge that first nation groups tell. As Chester states “King draws from oral tradition to incorporate aspects of Native storytelling into a highly contextualized and literate novel. A substantial source of King’s reworking of oral storytelling performance within the context of “high” literature, I suggest, originates in the stories of Harry Robinson” (47). The place of the four Indian men in the story were to show the significance of the oral tradition and first nation tradition of storytelling.
Works Cited
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.