Monthly Archives: April 2014

Question #3
What are the major differences or similarities between the ethos of the creation story you are familiar with and the story King tells in The Truth About Stories ?

I do not come from a religious background, and therefore, I do not have a creation story that I am extremely familiar with. However, I was raised by western parents and my mother’s family was Catholic, so I am familiar with the general story of Genesis.

I have never been a fan of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, as a women, I found the story to be quite offensive. Eve is the one who is ‘tempted’ by the servant. It is Eve who ‘tempts’ Adam. Although both Adam and Eve are punished, the story seems to place a far greater amount of blame on Eve than on Adam. Eve’s punishment, is, to me, the most offensive aspect of the story. She is punished by always having to experience pain in childbirth, and that is why, according to Genesis, all women must go through pain in labour. I am not trying to gloss over how painful childbirth is for all women, but I have a problem with thinking about it as a punishment for some sin that the first women committed. I think there are more positive ways to view childbirth.

Secondly, the story makes me uneasy because it condemns curiosity and disobedience. While sometimes curiosity can “kill the cat,” I object to the story because its message is that Adam and Eve should have been simple, obedient subjects to god and followed all of his rules. In my opinion, it is not necessarily a bad thing for people to question authority. If none of us did this, we could end up in a nightmarish world; such as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Comparing The Earth Diver to Genesis

I really enjoyed King’s story of Charm in “The Earth Diver.” I am going to compare some similarities between this story and Genesis below:

• While Charm, like Eve, is curious, even nosey, the consequences of Charms curiosity are not nearly as dire as those of Eve. King does say that too much curiosity may not be a good thing, but Charm’s curiosity results in the creation of our beautiful world.

• Charm, like Eve, has a craving for a certain kind of food. Eve wants the apple, Charm wants the “red fern foot,” because she is pregnant. However, while Eve’s reaching for the apple causes the damnation of all humanity for all eternity, Charm’s digging for the red fern foot merely causes her to fall out of the other side of her world and land on Earth. Her craving essentially allows for the discovery of the our world, rather than for the appearance of all evil, as in genesis.

• King’s story does not seem to have a sexist element to it. The two twins that Charm gives birth to may, at first, seem to associate all that is good in the world to the right handed male Twin and all that is dark or complicated to the left handed female Twin. “The right handed Twin created roses. The left handed Twin put thorns on the stems” (King 20). However, King then tells us that “the right handed twin created women, the left handed twin created men” (King 20). Men, therefore, fall under the same category as darkness and thorns. However, it was the male twin that created light and roses. Essentially, King’s narrative does not attribute more good qualities to men or to women, things are balanced out. In addition, the left handed Twin does not come across as evil, she merely thinks that the world is “much more exciting” (King 19) when she messes it up a little bit.

• The main difference between the two stories, as King points out, is that in Genesis there is a “particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies—God, man, animals, plants—that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in the Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations—Charm, the Twins, animals, humans—that celebrate equality and balance” (King 23).

King states that, “contained within creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist” ( King 10). I found it very interesting to study the Native creation story, because I enjoyed it so much more than that of Genesis. Even though I come from a western back ground, I sympathize and respect the Native ideals that “celebrate equality and balance” far more than the hierarchical and patriarchal law driven world view that pervades in Genesis. I enjoyed “The Earth Diver” so much that I am going to adopt it as my new favourite creation story.

WORKS CITED

“Adam and Eve.” Wikipedia. N.p, n.d. 5th April 2014.

GreatBritishTrailers. “Nineteen Eighty-Four Official Trailer.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 29th April 2012. Web. 4th April 2014.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough: Anansi Press. 2003. Print.

I would like to begin with a summary of the events that take place within the pages that were assigned to me.

Summary
“Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life” and his first mistake was getting his tonsils out (King 30). These pages explain how Lionel, at the age of 8, was interested in getting his tonsils removed as an excuse to skip school. When he came down with a bad sore throat, Lionel was inclined to encourage the idea of having his tonsils removed. His mother takes him first to see Martha Old Crow, one of the local “doctors of choice” (King 31). However, Martha suggests that Lionel go see Dr. Loomis, the western doctor who came into town once a week, because no one had gone to see him last week. Dr. Loomis suggests that Lionel’s tonsils may need to be removed, while several people, including Charlie Looking Bear, watch. Charlie makes fun of the doctor. However, Lionel’s plan goes downhill when Dr. Loomis tells Lionel’s mother that Lionel could do the operation over the summer and therefore not have to miss any school. They take some time to consider, but as Lionel’s throat does not improve, he and his mother head to Calgary for the operation. Lionel is taken to the children’s hospital. His mother is staying at his aunt Jean’s house. A tall, blonde woman enters Lionel’s room, and asks if he is the lucky young man who is going to go on an airplane ride. Lionel, “liked playing these kinds of games” (King 34) and says yes. Lionel is flown out to Edmonton. Page 34 ends with Lionel being told that he is going to have a heart operation. Obviously there has been a terrible mistake.

Analysis
While several characters appear in this section, I am most interested in the critique that I believe that King is giving of the western medical profession. Therefore, I am going to focus my analysis on the doctors that appear in this section.

Dr. Loomis
• “Dr. Loomis was a skinny old man with a huge pile of white hair and eyes that looked as though they would pop out of his head. His tongue was inordinately long, and as he talked, he would run it around his face, catching the sides of his mouth and the bottom of his chin” (King 31).

• According to Flick, he is “an private joke” (Flick 146).

• When I googled Dr. Loomis, I found a number of hits relating to “Dr. Samuel Loomis” a character in the Halloween film series. I am not familiar with the series, but apparently Dr. Loomis is one of the primary protagonists who fights against serial killer Michael Myers.

• According to Wikipedia, Dr. Loomis’s name is a reference to the character Sam Loomis in the novel and film “Pyscho.” Sam Loomis was the boyfriend of Mary Crane, the young woman who has the misfortune, in the story, to stay at the Bates motel and subsequently be killed while in the shower. Sam Loomis helps to catch Mary’s killer, the ‘psycho’ Bates.

• When I googled “Loomis” the first thing that appeared was a link to Loomis Express a Canadian courier service. Just to double check that this connection was relevant, I checked how long Loomis Express has been in business for. According to their website, they have been around since 1905. The first thing I saw when I visited their homepage was a tagline that reads “Whatever your needs, Loomis delivers.” This struck me as extremely hilarious when considered in connection to what happens as a result of Dr. Loomis’s advice to go to Calgary and remove Lionel’s tonsils in King’s story, but somehow, oddly, it fit. Dr. Loomis is extremely sure of himself. He assures Lionel’s mother that her son is, “in the best of hands” and brags, “I studied in Toronto, you know” (King 31).

Martha Old Crow
• “A medicine woman, the “doctor of choice” for people on the Reserve. She also appears in King’s Medicine River” (Flick 146)

• The crow, in Native American tradition, is a spirit associated with magic and life mysteries. According to the “Spirit Animals and Animal Totems” website that I found, here are some of the meanings associated with crows:
-Life magic; mystery of creation
-Destiny, personal transformation, alchemy
-Intelligence
-Higher perspective
-Being fearless, audacious
-Flexibility, adaptability
-Trickster, manipulative, mischevious

• The allusions to magic and alchemy fit very well because we know that Martha is a medicine woman.

• Martha is not just a crow, she is an ‘old’ crow; and this suggests wisdom.

Jesse Many Guns
• The other “doctor of choice” (King 31).

• Perhaps an illusion to Jesse James
-Jesse James was an outlaw (1847-1882) and became a legendary symbol of defying authority in the wild west.
-The only connection that I can make here is that Jesse Many Guns’ name perhaps represents a disregard for western authority.

Critique of western medicine and westerners in general
The events that take place between p.31 and p.34 seem, to me, to be a critique of western medicine, and westerners in general. Dr. Loomis, a western outsider, is only given the opportunity to tend to Lionel because Martha Old Crow feels sorry for him. She suggest that Lionel go see him, because no one else has. “No one comes to see him last week. Maybe his feelings are hurt, that one” (King 31).

Here, we seem to have a modern account of a colonial event. A westerner enters the Native’s environment, thinks he knows better, tries to force his ways upon them and, ultimately, is made a fool of. Perhaps Dr. Loomis is not personally to responsible for the fiasco that takes place between pages 31 and 34, but everything that he represents, the degree from Toronto that he is so proud of, is undermined when the medical profession proceeds to make an unbelievable mess of what should have been a perfectly simple situation. It seems like most of the people in the Native community know better than to trust doctors like Loomis, for no one goes to see them, preferring Martha and Jesse, the “doctors of choice” (King 31). Norma criticizes Lionel’s mother for buying into western medicine. “Can’t believe my own sister let them do that to you. Got no more sense than a hubcap” (King 31).

WORKS CITED

“Bear Spirit Animal.” Spirit Animals & Totems. N.p., n.d. Web. 5th April 2014.

“Crow Spirit Animal.” Spirit Animals & Totems. N.p., n.d. Web. 5th April 2014.

“Jesse James.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, n.d. Web 5th April 2014.

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

Loomis Express. Loomis Express. Web. 4th April 2014.

“Sam Loomis.” Psycho Wikia. N.p, n.d. Web. 5th April, 2014.

Question #5

Robinson’s Influence on King

King uses a variety of narrative structures. He weaves between a style similar to Robinson, as in the scenes with Coyote. Dog/ God and the narrator and a more generic style, when discussing, Norma, Lionel and the other characters. The scenes involving Hawkeye, The Lone Ranger, Ishmael and Robinson Crusoe fall somewhere in between. They are real people, but they are also able to interact with Cayote. The narrative structure for these four characters seems to flit between realistic and unrealistic. The contrasting narrative styles; native versus more generically Caucasian, seem, to me, to reinforce the struggle between native and white people in Canada that is apparent throughout King’s story. As Professor Paterson stated in lesson 3:2, ” In many ways, Green Grass Running Water is a novel about different story-telling traditions, which in turn reflect different, and sometimes conflicting worldviews.”

The beginning of King’s novel is extremely similar to Robinson in style. In fact, given that both are discussing Coyote, I often forgot, when I first started the novel, that I was reading King and not Robinson. What I found to be the most similar at the beginning of King’s novel was his attempt to give his story the same ritualistic feel as Robinson’s by applying many of the same techniques that Robinson uses to encourage an oral understanding of the material.

For example, King, like Robinson, writes sentences that are, technically, grammatically incomplete. “So, that Coyote is dreaming and pretty soon, one of those dreams gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise” (King 1). “Makes a lot of noise” requires the pronoun “it” at the beginning of the sentence in order for the sentence to be complete. Similarly, in Robinson, “And they wanted to get closer. They wanted to know what that was. Looks like a person” (Robinson 64). Again, “it” is required in order to complete the sentence “looks like a person.” The fragmented sentences make the stories less formal, and also allow for the easy movement between the past and present tenses. When the narrators, of either story, say “makes a lot of noise” or “looks like a person,” I envision the narrator saying these things from the centre of the action of the story. It is as if the narrator is now observing the scene and commenting that [it] “looks like a person.” The fact that these two fragments are not complete sentences does not matter because they are meant to be envisioned orally. We often speak in fragmented, incomplete sentences.

Once Green Grass and Running Water moves past the preface, King distinguishes himself from Robinson. I found King’s narrative voice for Lionel, Alberta Frank and the other characters to be more recognizable because it coincided with most of the literature I have been exposed to. For example, the scene between Lionel and Norma. “”Norma began pulling pieces of carpet out of her purse and placing them on her lap. She stuck the larger pieces on the dashboard. ‘I like the green, too’” (King 7). I personally found this to be a lot less confusing, perhaps because I am used to, and therefore more comfortable with, reading novels that follow this mold.

This does not mean that I do not like Robinson’s style, and the moments when King employs it. On the contrary, I found Robinson, and the sections of King’s novel that are similar to it, in varying degrees, to be a refreshing challenge. However, there were often moments that I had absolutely no idea of what was happening, and as a literature student hoping to achieve a mastery of the material, this made me uncomfortable.

Coyote and God: Some Similarities and Differences Between Robinson and King

God
In Robinson, God’s angel commands Coyote to make a deal with the King of England, and Coyote agrees. God has authority, he is not a laughable figure.
God gave Coyote the power to make the King believe there were lots of Indians with him, ready to attack England if the king did not agree to Coyote’s terms. “That’s the power that God give him to come to see the king. If there’s anything that happens like that, they can use his power because God want ‘em to, whatever Coyote says, it can be that way” (Robinson 72).

In King, God is immediately made fun of. Coyote jokes that God has everything backwards, and therefore is “Dog”. Flick points out that, God/ Dog is “a contrary, and a play on words and names. A dog (Canis familiaris) is, of course, a “lesser” form of coyote (Canislatranis)—and a god is a backward kind of dog. Or as Robin Ridington suggests, God is a contrary from a dog’s point of view” (Flick 143). In King’s story, God “turns out to be the loud-voiced God of the Old Testament” (Flick 143). The God in King is far less likeable and respectable than the God in Robinson.

Coyote
Coyote, in Robinson, is the hero of the story. In King, Coyote functions largely as a spectator to the action, rather than a partaker in it, although he does interact with the four native American elders. Coyote is not on speaking terms with any of the other characters in the novel, apart from the narrator, although Lionel does see him, a strange looking dancing dog.

For me, one result of these many differences in the representation of Coyote and God was that is that in King, I questioned, and scrutinized God/ Dog far more than I did in Robinson. In Robinson, God still seems to be an authority above Coyote, but in King, God/ Dog is below Coyote, for Coyote himself created him as a dream.

WORKS CITED

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.”Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. April 4th 2013.

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

Paterson, Erika. ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres. University of British Columbia, 2013. Web. 4th April. 2014.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

Question #1

I began by reading the story to myself, and found this to be a very strange experience. I was in the library at the time, and it was a little bit embarrassing because I kept mumbling the words to myself. I did not even realize I was doing this at first, until a friend pointed it out to me. I then read the story to a friend, and this felt a lot more natural. For one thing, the story often begins sentences with the word “and.” While it is possible to do this in written speech, it is not very common and feels odd to read; as it is technically incorrect grammatically. Beginning sentences with the word “and” is far more natural and common when speaking orally; so what felt unnatural and often jerky to read to myself, flowed far better when I read the story out loud.

Another aspect that pushed the story towards an oral rather than written structure was the many sentences that seemed fragmented when simply read to oneself. For example “The boat supposed to go very fast. Special. And they want them to get closer” (Robinson 65). In a written story-telling tone, these words would probably be written as something more like, “the boat was supposed to go very fast. It was special.” However, that type of narrative voice distances the reader from the action of the story and is therefore less engaging than the one used by Robinson. Robinson’s voice makes it seem as though the ones telling and listening to the story are experiencing it as the story unfolds. This is furthered by the fact that although the story takes place in the past, the narrator often uses the present tense. This makes it more active and I felt like a performer when I read it out loud.

In addition, sentences such as “And the cook, they run and open the door. And they see this man. Jump. Kinda scared” (Robinson 68), when read to myself, felt fragmented and odd. They seemed, to me, to beg for some kind of facial or bodily gestures to emphasize meaning. The “jump” part feels like it needs to be said with an actual jump. Indeed, when I read the story out loud, I found myself making dramatic gestures when I read these parts, without planning to do so ahead of time.

Finally, the story contains a lot of repetition; “God sent the Angel to Coyote. Sent the Angel” (Robinson 66). This gives it a ritualistic quality. I found it somewhat uncomfortable to try and read these parts to myself, but when read aloud, they encourage the speaker and the listener to really participate in a kind of story-telling ritual.

WORKS CITED
Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.