My section covers four narratives – a scene from the Dead Dog Café during which we meet Latisha’s estranged husband, Eli Stands Alone talking to (or more accurately, mostly being talked at by) Clifford Sifton, Changing Woman meeting and then fending off Noah, and a short scene of Charlie Looking Bear checking in to a hotel and the beginning of a history of his father, Portland Looking Bear.
In the interest of going deeper rather than broader, I’m only going to pick a few of the references/allusions to look at.
Jeanette, Nelson, Rosemarie de Flor and Bruce. These are American diners at Latisha’s Dead Dog Café, a tourist trap that serves food [falsely] billed as dog meat to tourists looking for an ‘authentic’ Indian meal. [As Flick notes, also possibly an allusion to Nietzche’s claim that “God is dead” (149), seeing as how that (contrary) God/dog could easily have been on the menu]. And just as the Café itself refers to negative stereotypes held of indigenous people (that they ate dog), the four Americans also refer to stereotypical representations of indigenous people. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy appeared in the 1936 musical Rose-Marie, playing the title character (Rose-Marie de Flor) and RCMP Sergeant Bruce, respectively.
This website also details the sordid love affair between the actors off-screen, which I think King is subtly hinting at in Jeanette’s remarks about Nelson.
A study by Dominque Brégent-Heald discusses the film’s relationship with the tourism industry and the creation of an image palatable to a burgeoning tourism in North America obsessed with authenticity. But as the author points out, “notwithstanding the inauthenticity, Marie de Flor’s…interactions with quasi-authentic Indians serve an important diegetic function. Contact with the Other enabled the protagonists’ personal transformations…Native peoples not only attracted tourists, but also furthered the process through which Anglo-Americans/Euro-Canadians invented their regional/national identity” (Brégent-Heald, 63). ‘They’ eat dogs, ‘we’ don’t eat dogs.
Nelson mentions that he had a dog named Tecumseh, “after the Indian chief (King, 132). Nelson, who pretends to be a RCMP officer who pretends to be one among the Indians yet is more officially a conqueror, displays his knowledge of ‘Indian things’ by pointing out to Latisha that his dog was named after an Indian chief. He then pretends to “sing” like his dog Tecumseh, though Rosemarie steps out of character and informs her real-life lover that his dog wasn’t singing, but howling.
I’m not completely sure why Latisha “was beginning to like [Jeanette]” (King, 133). The actor, far more so than the character, is complicit in responsible for perpetuating stereotypes. Latisha is doing the same thing, to provide for her family; but it is her culture, her stories [true or not, it doesn’t really matter] that she is perpetuating. So I don’t buy the “two strong women doing what they have to, meeting in the middle” explanation.
George Morningstar. This is Latisha’s husband, modelled after US General George Custer, nicknamed “Son of the Morningstar” by indigenous people of the Plains. Custer was almost thrown out of the army for dereliction of duty, but the need created by the Civil War gave him reprieve. He distinguished himself during the Civil War, and was later sent to the Plains to fight the Cheyenne, LaKota, and Arapaho where he misjudged their prowess and disobeyed his orders, marching too quickly and too far, until he was overrun by indigenous forces. Despite his mediocre military career and leading one of the worst US military fiascos, his cult of personality was created in large part by his wife, Elizabeth Custer. George Morningstar gave Latisha a copy of The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet and philosopher, which Flick describes as “phony philosophy” (152). A fitting gift from a ‘phony’ military master, statesman and civilized gentleman.
The role of Custer’s wife is significantly different than Latisha’s. Whereas Elizabeth wrote letters cultivating Custer’s cult of personality, Latisha quickly ignored George’s letters (and certainly doesn’t work for the sake of George’s image). This is another example of King taking a well-known story and creating a contrary/parallel one, in which the main character is not only different (an indigenous woman) but who acts contrary to his story (Custer’s, among others’).
Eli Stands Alone. At his mother’s cabin, below Western Canada’s version of that Big Project in Quebec (referring to the James Bay Project, part of which was the Grande Baleine Dam), Clifford Sifton talks to (at) Eli Stands Alone. As Flick notes, Clifford Sifton was an “aggressive promoter of settlement in the West through the Prairie West Movement, and a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population;” he was minister responsible for Indian Affairs, and, like his fictive doppelganger, had a difficult time hearing what people were saying (150).
Eli Stands Alone, as has been noted many times, is an obvious reference to Elijah Harper, who singlehandedly stopped the Brian Mulroney’s Meech Lake Accord (to bring secure Quebec’s signature on the 1982 Constitution Act) in 1990 by remaining the lone oppositional vote to ascension in the Manitoba Legislature. However, the way Elijah Harper defeated Meech Lake is most important. First, Elijah Harper never cast a vote against the Accord, he voted against allowing the Manitoba Legislature to introduce a motion to ratify the Accord for debate (Levine); that is, he refused to talk about it, he kept it off the ledger. Second, when Harper refused to allow the motion to be discussed, that did not kill Meech Lake; it set in motion the defeat, which was completed later when Newfoundland refused to allow a vote on the Accord; that is, Harper cracked the Accord, placed the stress on it (leaving Newfoundland to nudge it over). [In delightful irony, the kind you only read in stories, Meech Lake Accord architect Brian Mulroney was described as “livid that a technicality could derail his prized accord,” one that would essentially, officially, create Canada. Mulroney also blamed the defeat on Harper’s stupidity,” to which Harper replied “When he says I’m stupid, he calls our people stupid. We’re not stupid. We’re the First Nations people. We’re the very people who welcomed his ancestors to this country and he didn’t want to recognize us in the Constitution” (Levine)].
Just as Elijah won’t allow discussion of the Accord, Eli doesn’t overtly oppose the dam, he essentially doesn’t oppose the dam – instead, he simply says he isn’t leaving. He changes the story. Instead of talking about the implications of the dam, he talks about the implications of his home. At the same time, Eli, later on, doesn’t tell Lionel what to do, he shows him something important; his presence at the Sun Dance creates the crack/stress, and George only has to nudge Lionel before something tumbles.
At the same time, Eli also suggests Elijah, a prophet of the Israelites, miracle-worker, and raiser of the dead (raiser of the lifeless Lionel?), who accented to Heaven seemingly undead (they never found Eli’s body, did they?) in a whirlwind (that probably looked a lot like a cascade of water). Elijah in Hebrew means “my god is Yahweh”, which, if memory of my first year religious studies course serves me well, was the name of the Israelite’s god. The name Yahweh was often translated to Jehovah by King James-era Christians. So this very much puts Eli Stands Alone in opposition with Dr. Joe Hovaugh. Eli, then, is that Hovaugh.
I think there’s a dissertation to be written on the relationship between Eli Stands Alone and the prophet Elijah, claimed or mentioned in some form or derivative in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha’i. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or resources to do that here…
Brégent-Heald, Dominque. “Primitive Encounters: Film and Tourism in the North American West.” The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 47.
Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999), p. 140.
King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Levine, Allan. “Native leader Elijah Harper helped scuttle Meech Lake.” The Globe and Mail. n.p. 21 May 2013. Web. 22 March 2014.
Mac/Eddy Club. “Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy Homepage.” n.p. 1996-2014. Web. 23 March 2014.
No Author. “Indigenous people in MGM’s Rose-Marie (1936).” YouTube. n.p. 13 March 2009. Web. 22 March 2014.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “George Armstrong Custer.” n.p. 2001. Web. 23 March 2014.