Month: July 2014

Alright, then. Now to hyper-text Green Grass, Running Water. I’ve been assigned pages 64-76, and cannot wait to be done with this. So let’s go!

 

We begin with Alberta considering her options for conceiving a child without need for marriage. She makes what looks like a failed attempt to find a one-night only liaison. This section isn’t exactly rich in terms of references, but I did feel for Alberta’s plight. It sucks to psyche yourself up for something and not be able to go through with it, what with the feeling of uselessness for not being capable of carrying out a simple plan. I felt for her; this was a good moment to just empathize with the character, to build an emotional connection.

 

After this, we check in with First Woman, enjoying a lovely feast in her Garden of Eden expy with Ahdamn. Suddenly, “GOD” (in all capitals) appears to break up the party. He tells First Woman that she is essentially trespassing on his property and eating his food; “this is my my world and this is my garden” (68). He takes special care to mention how his big, red apples are being eaten, reminiscent to the story I learned growing up in a Catholic household, the one about Genesis and Adam and Eve being kicked out of the garden for eating a single bite of an apple. That old thing. GOD’s insistence on there being Christian rules and the way he imposes them on First Woman forms part of a pattern in the novel where Christian rules are invoked to restrict Indians in some way. First Woman also tells GOD that he acts as though he has no relations (69); I mention this to help track the instances of minding one’s relations being emphasized in the text. Rather than fully slip into the role of Eve, First Woman is seen to just pack up and leave the garden of her own will, fed up with GOD and his stinginess. GOD says he’s kicking her out, but it’s something of an “I dumped you first” situation.

 

Together with Ahdamn, First Woman then stumbles into a reference to The Lone Ranger, marking the first instance where she uses the iconic character as a disguise. She introduces Ahdamn as the Ranger’s sidekick, Tonto. Notably, the rangers comment on how it is a “stupid” name; tonto translates to stupid in Spanish (71). They also toss out the names of other faithful Indian sidekicks/outlaws in popular culture: Little Beaver, Chingachgook, and Blue Duck. Having evaded trouble with rangers with her clever disguise, First Woman meets some soldiers who arrest her for “being Indian” (72), a scene that repeats itself in further stories.

 

After this, there is a conversation between Dr. Joe Hovaugh and Sgt. Cereno. The scene begins with Dr. Hovaugh reminiscing about the elm trees that died in his garden due to a blight, and how their being replaced with weak new trees left him “inexplicable remorse and guilt” (73). I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into a simple bit of text, but the mention that the dead trees had been there almost as long as the garden, and that they died of illness reminded me of the demise of many Native Americans through exposure from European diseases, which was sometimes strategically engineered by the European colonists themselves. His guilt over it makes me think of Dr. Hovaugh as something of a remorseful, white liberal who can feel it in his heart to feel bad for the sordid affairs his people have engineered in the past, but not exactly do much in terms of bringing about reconciliation.

 

Also, I giggled at his secretary being named Mary. It’s a common name, but with a man whose name sounds like “Jehovah” if you sound it out…

 

Pop culture references are rather dry in the conversation between Dr. Hovaugh and Sgt. Cereno, but it is full of small references to the treatment of Native Americans in modern times. Though not exactly related to Native Americans per see, it also brought to my mind the prevalence of guns among modern American people, with Sgt. Cereno pointing out his regulatory arms and Dr. Hovaugh casually mentioning that his father also owned a firearm. It might also be significant considering who is involved in the conversation that we often credit Europeans for bringing firearms to the North American continent, which they would trade with the Native population. The scene concludes with the Sergeant asking why the Four Old Indians were locked up in the hospital in the first place; Dr. Hovaugh says it was the government’s idea, suggesting that there is no real cause as far as the Indians’ behaviour is concerned. The government corralling Native American people for no particular reason… gosh, does this remind anyone else of anything?

 

Works Cited

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

 

 

Wow, all that catching up went so well! So timely and efficient! I was truly on a roll, it was such a sight to behold. My grandchildren will hear about how productive I was.

 

Lies. So many lies.

 

Today, we’re going to talk about the Four Old Indians. Everything about Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water is still fresh in my mind, which may not be how we were meant to examine it, but when you fail at doing work as much as I do there’s not much time for rereads and sober reflection. To start, though, my initial reaction to the characters was… uhm… well, I feel like I just decided to roll with what the novel decided to reveal about them. I was thinking, upon first encountering the Four Old Indians, like someone well versed in the structure of a novel and character (or trying to) and asking questions like, why are these men (and I did make the assumption that they were male right off the bat) trapped in a hospital? What is their story? Though I did like how pleasant they seemed, how they seemed to be rolling through life enjoying it as much as possible. “We’re going to fix the world,” they say, cheerily and matter-of-factly. Whatever the symbolism in giving Lionel, who wanted to be John Wayne as a child, a cowboy-esque jacket for his birthday, they did it so good-naturedly it was almost cute.

 

Now that I’ve finished the book, I have the feeling that these particular characters spent the better part of the narrative actively telling their story, as strange as the stories coming from them might seem if you don’t just accept that they might not follow the laws of human logic as characters. It’s fiction, they’re allowed to be a little strange. In any case, the first thing these characters are shown to do is calmly struggle to find a way to begin the novel, allowing for four attempts if necessary. I may be wrong, but I interpreted the “I” in the narration interacting with Coyote to change depending on the section of the novel; each of the Four Indians have a chance to tell stories, and I assumed the “I” changed depending on who was telling the story in a given section. I may have lost track of a major player here, but that was my understanding. And it helps me in seeing the characters as, above all, connected to stories. From the storytelling circle they form with Coyote, to their infiltrating of Western films and rearranging their narratives, the Four Old Indians create and belong to stories. Dr. Hovaugh speculates on the Indians’ involvement in history, the way their disappearances coincide with major historical disasters; this coupled with the way they proudly boast that they’re out to fix the world marks them as agents not only in the context of the stories they tell, but in history as it exists in the novel itself.

 

As for their identities, I feel it is all but outright stated in bright, bold letters that the Four Indians are, if not goddesses as Chester says, some sort of supernatural, higher beings taking corporal form. I would actually put my money on them being First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman and Old Woman; each of their stories have an autobiographical tinge, and each of the woman take on the names used by the Four Old Indians which suggests a link. Their age is often put into question, with Dr. Hovaugh stating that they were already old when they arrived (King 96). There is also the question of their gender; their files suggest that they are men, and somehow, as I mentioned before, I immediately assumed they were men, yet Babo says they were women (53). In other parts of the novel, their sex is not defined, so it’s not impossible to believe her. If, however, I go with the theory that they are the goddesses in their respective stories, women who took on white, male names their occupying this kind of ambiguous gender space is fitting. They are tough to pin down, as much as people like Dr. Hovaugh agonize over trying. They are imprisoned, but apparently come and go as they choose. They’re not so much people as a force of nature, being associated with large earthquakes, and likely having a hand in the destruction of the dam and the flood associated with it at the end of the novel.

 

In short, my understanding of the Four Old Indians’ place in the novel is… they more or less direct the course, as well as provide a mystery in regards to their identity.

 

 

Works Cited

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

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC. At 21… I can’t quite finish this reference properly, but let’s just say she made a lot of judgement errors that led to a very, very unwieldy sleep schedule. So where has Hannia been for three weeks while the course went on without her? Doing battle with her circadian rhythm, basically. Darlings, at one point I was sleeping during the day, and I’m not even a party animal. When you can’t stay awake long enough to do the required reading every time you make an attempt, you gotta prioritize making a change, especially when you also have a 9 a.m Biology class to contend with. Add a bit of mental constipation and… well… I’ll let Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes vocalize it for me. Still haven’t fixed it, but I actually find myself feeling awake and alive for once, so I’m going to press on and write.

 

Anyway, let’s face off against Northrop Frye. I say it this way because I, personally, feel like I’ve been doing battle with this post for a week and am trying to place the blame somewhere that isn’t on me and my terrible decisions. Babble aside, let’s talk about Duncan Campbell Scott and Frye’s writing. Without swords.

 

In searching for the answers to why Scott’s involvement in the destruction of Indigenous culture is not relevant to Frye’s insight on the duality of his work, I found a rather interesting remark: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions” (Frye 235). In order to concern oneself with the well-being of a group of people, an important step is to see them as human beings. If I am interpreting this correctly, Indigenous people were more akin to a genre convention or trope than breathing human beings to Scott and his contemporaries in literature. The duality in his writing, then, may have little to do with the people involved, as the people are not considered as such. The “starving squaw” is not based upon a flesh and blood woman, but rather an archetype in literature, much like I might use the trickster fairy in my personal writings.

 

Frye only needed to reflect on the contrasting images in the literature itself, as that was all that was presented to him. As rich as the analysis would be taking into account how there is a duality in Scott’s opinions on the Indigenous people’s place according to the Dominion, Scott was not writing about them, but rather the idea of the Indigenous people. I find Frye’s comment on how the Canadian writer tends to form his expression “from what he has read, not from what he has experience” (234) quite pertinent to this idea of how Scott actually treats the Indigenous people in his writing. He may have an idea of how to write about them that originates not so much from the work he does with them, but from the way the mythological Indian appear in other literary works.

 

It may seem, then, that rather than build off of the existing mythology of the Indigenous people, Canadian literature as described by Frye swallowed them up into itself. Although there was much to work with, colonial writers deigned to use them more as the “sun-gods and the like” that populate mythology. In essence, rather than contributing to Canadian literary mythology, the Indigenous people simply became a part of it. I wish I could find where to look for the precise place where I found these remarks, and I suspect they’re peppered all over Tumblr, but I have read in places where young Native Americans discuss their people’s treatment in the modern world, commenting on how their image is that of a dead people, of a group that exists only in the past and maybe Disney’s Pocahontas. It can be all too easy to forget that for all that Indigenous culture was deeply harmed, for all that Indigenous people, including entire groups, were eliminated in many cases, they are not a dead people that only populate the land of fiction.

 

Works Cited

Charles, RuPaul. “Supermodel (Of the World).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Apr.  27, 2012. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

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

Higgins, Jenny. “Disappearance of the Beothuk.” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage. Memorial University of Newfoundland, n.d. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

Medley, Bill and Jennifer Warnes. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Feb.  24, 2014. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.