My assigned section (pages 78-90 in my edition) was relatively sparsely sprinkled with allusions to popular culture or myth, and so most of what I’ve done here is simply look deeper into lines or words that interested me, or that I lacked knowledge of.

“School’s expensive. You got money saved up?”

“The band will probably help me out.” (King 80)

This refers to the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP). I’ve spoken with many who seem to think, Like Bill Bursum, that this is “free money,” as though a Native student can Waltz onto campus with no financial obligation to the institution. These are grants that must be applied for that may not cover all costs, as a certain amount of money is allocated to each band per year. As Lionel finds out, not all applicants are guaranteed this funding.

“whites don’t want to hire Indians unless the government makes them” (King 81)

I couldn’t find much on government subsidized benefits to employers who hired Native employees. It seems that the government only has a wage subsidy for an employer in the housing industry hiring Native youth.  Apparently, The Northwest Territories implemented an affirmative action policy around a decade ago, but have faced criticisms (and legal action) regarding the prioritization of “Indigenous Aboriginal Persons” (those who are from N.W.T.) over “Indigenous Non-Aboriginal Persons” (Status Natives who come from elsewhere in Canada). Of course, this policy only applied to applicants for government jobs and was relatively limited.  Certainly, the government is not making anybody hire anyone else, but it seems like they could be doing more in the way of encouragement.

“Smart move, John Wayne.” (King 83)

John Wayne runs through this novel as the emblem of white, male antagonism towards Natives. Film is never really discussed in a positive light here, and John Wayne (and later, Richard Widmark) is the poster boy for the subjugation of Natives on film. Flick mentions that Lionel’s desire to be John Wayne as a child “signals his denial of ‘Indianness'” (147). Depictions of Native peoples on film may have improved in the decades since Wayne stopped acting, but even after the pleas of some of cinema’s titans for more equitable treatment, Hollywood’s struggle for a more sensitive treatment of these issues continues. (Side Note: a movie that does a remarkable job in the portrayal of Native peoples is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), which inverts the negative tropes perpetuated by old Hollywood, which King criticizes in GGRW).

Bill Bursum (85)- referred to here with the prefix “Buffalo.” Just as his namesake is”an exploiter of Indians for entertainments in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show” (Flick 148), Bursum is only interested in hiring Lionel for the prospective business he could bring in from the reserve. He even forgets Charlie’s last name (Bursum says “Looking Back” (King 80)) who had been his employee for a number of years.

Duplessis International Associates- Flick says “Duplessis invokes both duplicity and the political corruption of the Duplessis régime in Québec (1936-39; 1944-59)” (151). Beyond this, anything with a French name suggests a sort of nobility or high class distinction, and if anyone has class aspirations here, it’s Charlie. The irony here is Charlie warning Lionel about Bill’s exploitative behaviour. Bill is almost a caricature of a slimeball salesman, so the reader should expect this type of behaviour from him but when Charlie is fired by Duplessis after Eli’s court case is finished as they no longer need a token “Indian” on their side, the reader sees that this is a systemic issue, and it goes all the way to the top.

“Amos slid his pickup down the reserve roads” (King 87)

This is something the reader could pass by relatively easily and not give a second thought; King sure doesn’t spend much time talking about road conditions on the reserves but it is important to know that beyond Amos’ drunken motor skills, infrastructure (including things like road conditions) is generally seen to be substandard on Canadian reserves. This does not apply to every reservation, but it is a nationwide problem. You’ll notice that Amos knocks over the outhouse and this implies that they do not have indoor plumbing.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 140-175. Web. 26 Jun. 2015.

“Housing Internship Initiative for First Nations and Inuit Youth.” Canada Business Network . Government of Canada. 24 Jun 2015. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. 1993. P. S. Toronto: HarperPerennial-HaperCollins, 2007. Print.

“N.W.T. sued over affirmative action policy.” CBC News North. CBC. 23 Jun. 2011. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Native American actors quit Adam Sandler movie over Adam Sandler jokes.” The AV Club. Onion Inc. 23 Apr. 2-15. Web. 10 Jul 2015.

Oscars. “Marlon Brando’s Oscar Win for ‘The Godfather’.” Youtube. Youtube. 2 Oct 2008. Web. 10 Jul. 2015.

“Policy 14.03: Affirmative Action.” Northwest Territories. Northwest Territories. 28 Sept. 2006. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Post Secondary Student Support Program.” Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. Government of Canada. 28 May 2013. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

“Shacks and slop pails: infrastructure crisis on native reserves.” CBC News Canada. CBC. 26 Nov. 2011. Web. 9 Jul. 2015.

1. In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.

Why do you think this is so?

The challenging part of answering this question is narrowing it down. King himself says, by starting with Creation stories, he can “drag” oral Creation myth “through Christianity, through Western literature and Western history” (70). He wants to create a sort of breeding ground for the cultural intersections that are of particular interest to this class. My view is perhaps more facile. Near the novel’s outset, Norma shows a profoundly uninterested Lionel some carpet samples: she says, “You make a mistake with carpet, and you got to live with it for a long time” (King 7), a sentiment that echoes King’s Massey lecture (“once a story is told it can never be taken back”). Stories furnish us with the luxury of going back to crucial moments in time, the points where history diverges into things that happened and a mass of unrealized potential (ex. Lionel’s three mistakes, Dr. Hovaugh’s dates). The Transformer stories that are influential to Green Grass, Running Water’s technique and content can theorize potential alternative histories. Of course, if a catastrophe were resultant from an incalculable mix of agents and reagents, who is to say that one or two subtle reversals of outcome would not produce the same final result. The only way to be sure the course would change, would be to start from the beginning and do it right.

The novel’s temporality is fluid, not beholden to any strict chronology. Frequently, King presents the reader with sections of interwoven prose, juxtaposing a character’s present temporality and one of several years prior. The effect is to give the reader a greater understanding of motivations; we come to understand Alberta, Lionel, Latisha, Charlie, and Eli as (beyond complex characters) projections of their past mistakes, for better or for worse. Clearly, the past is not something King wants us to disregard. Often times it feels as though moments described in the narrative present are mere digressions, and the recollected scenes comprise the main narrative; the present is subordinate to the past.

Lionel’s similarities to Eli give him a window into his own potential future; he has the opportunity to see what he likes and dislikes about Eli and consciously emulate or deviate from his way of life. “Hope you took notes” says Norma to Lionel shortly after Eli’s death in the earthquake (King 421), but this is a message to all of us. Though we may not have Coyote’s ability to move through time like salmon through a river, we can learn from the lives of others.

Beyond this, thanks to help from Jane Flick’s compendium of allusions made in the novel, we see that King borrows names from all eras of human history- both fictional and not. These names bring baggage with them and once again allow the reader to see the resonance of an individual’s actions down through the generations. Clifford Sifton, for example, “a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population” and Laurier’s Superintendent of Indian affairs (1896) interacts with the namesake of Elijah Harper, who helped block the 1990 Meech Lake Accord (Flick 150). Outcomes of events are the result of present agents bumping up against historical barriers, and by starting from the very outset of the world King is free to embody these historical barriers in characters who exist in the narrative present, like Sifton.

The novel ends with the potential of regeneration and new beginnings; Alberta is pregnant, the cabin is to be rebuilt. “Norma stuck her stick in the earth. ‘We’ll start here,’ she said. ‘So we can see the sun in the morning.’” (King 424). This stick in the dirt is the physical manifestation of one of those points in time that King is so obsessed with. This is a new beginning, and it seems as though all of the characters will do their best to ensure that this is a point the Four Indians will NOT have to revisit.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 140-175. Web. 26 Jun. 2015.

Gzowski, Peter. “Peter Gzowski Interviews Thomas King on Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 65-76. Web. 3 Jul. 2015.

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