For this week’s blog post, my task is to explore the allusions, names, and subtext of pages 60 – 69 in Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. I’ll begin with a quick summary of the plot during this segment of the novel to orient my discussion of the text’s details below.

From pages 60 – 64, we hear about the aftermath of Lionel’s arrest in Green River, Wyoming, for being associated with members of the American Indian Movement, including a first jail stint for disturbing the peace, his return to the hotel in Salt Lake City, a second jail stint for leaving the hotel without paying the bill, and his inglorious return to Blossom, unemployed and with a criminal record. Next, from pages 65 – 67, we hear about Alberta’s failed attempt to execute option three on her list of ways to get pregnant, namely pick up a handsome stranger at a bar. Lastly, on pages 68 and 69, we return to the story of First Woman as it is told to Coyote, just as First Woman decides to leave the garden after GOD jumps in and starts making a brouhaha.

The notes below are organized in order of their appearance in the text.

Duncan Scott

This is Lionel’s boss at the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs (D.I.A.). We now call this the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. But Duncan Scott was a real head of the D.I.A. from 1913 – 1932, where he was an adamant supporter of educating First Nations children (he made elementary education compulsory for these children) and strongly supported the religious residential school model. First Nations children were often left in the lurch by this system after elementary school, unable to continue to higher education due to limited availability but also dislocated from their family and ancestral traditions. The residential school system was fraught with problems as well as outright abuse. Scott is also known as a Confederation Poet, a distinction given to four male poets of that era. His appearance as Lionel’s boss and subsequent abandonment of Lionel after he gets into trouble down south highlight the historical lack of genuine care for and understanding of First Nations people by the Department of Indian Affairs.

Tom and Gerry, Salt Lake City hotel employees

Tom and Jerry is a popular Warner Brothers children’s cartoon involving Tom the cat chasing Jerry the mouse. It was first established in the 1940s and has generated controversy over its depiction of African-American people, including portraying characters in blackface and as “black mammy” stereotypes. The multiple references to blond white men in the hotel staff suggest racist overtones, lending support to this connection.

Chip and Dale, Salt Lake City police officers

The combined names of this pair could be a subtle reference to the Las Vegas Chippendales, a popular male erotic dance company founded in 1979. The company performs across North America and worldwide. King just finished describing the hotel employees as young, blond, and attractive men, so this is a somewhat plausible connection. Chippendale is also a brand of furniture, but that connection didn’t seem to fit here.

George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, as imagined by an artist of his time (BBC Bitesize).

Lionel looks closely at a painting depicting this battle in the hotel lobby, where Custer, a somewhat incompetent American military officer, and all his men were outnumbered and killed by Native American warriors in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Their deaths were used in government propaganda to rally white Americans against the warriors and led to an increase in armed conflict with Native Americans (the Indian Wars), as well as increased assimilation efforts by the American government (BBC Bitesize).

The Shagganappi

This is the name of the Calgary lounge Alberta scopes out for attracting a potential anonymous father for her child. She doesn’t end up going inside, though. The Shagganappi is also a book of short stories by E. Pauline Johnson, a woman of English-Mohawk ancestry who performed her poetry in front of white North American and European audiences during the late 1800s. She actually had two costumes, a First Nations mishmash for the first half of her performances and an English one for the second half (Landau). At one point in her career, she recited her poetry at the same event as Duncan Scott. She died in her 50s from breast cancer and is buried in Stanley Park (Mobbs).

Emily Pauline Johnson (1861 – 1913), an English-Mohawk Canadian poet and performance artist. We meet her in GGRW at the Dead Dog Cafe and also are reminded of her publications when Alberta heads for the Shagganappi lounge, The Shagganappi being the title of one of Johnson’s short story collections. Image from Landau.

Works Cited:

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162 1999: 140 – 172. Web. 22 February 2014.

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

Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development homepage. Government of Canada, 6 March 2014. 16 March 2014.

belkiss2. “Tom and Jerry Mammy Two Shoes …” Youtube. 16 March 2014.

Chippendales homepage. Chippendales 2012. Web. 16 March 2014.

“The Battle of the Little Bighorn 1876 and the end of Native American way of life.” BBC Bitesize, BBC, 2014. 16 March 2014.

Landau, Emily. “Double Vision.” Walrus July/August 2012. Web. 16 March 2014.

Johnson, E. Pauline. The Shagganappi. Project Gutenberg, 2004. Web. 16 March 2014.

Mobbs, Leslie. “E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), 1861 – 1913.” AuthentiCity, 7 March 2013. Web. 16 March 2014.

Margery Fee and Jane Flick consider something they call “Coyote Pedagogy” in their essay on the subversively educational experience of reading Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water. What they mean by this phrase is the astonishing density of popular, historical, literary and First Nations-specific allusions that King packs into the text, as well as their unusual reliance on being spoken aloud to be revealed. King makes it a requirement for any reader with even a moderate interest in understanding what is really happening in the text to search outside of it for necessary background knowledge. But here I will explore how Coyote himself (I say “him” because of a lack of gender-neutral alternative) is the one learning in Green Grass Running Water.

King’s Coyote makes a pretty good student, engaged and always full of questions. In fact, Coyote doesn’t leave many narrative stones unturned as he listens to the teacher(s) who are explaining the stories of creation to him. He dives happily in to these stories and asks for repetition when required, although he is chided for “sitting on [his] ears” at times (King 100). At times, Coyote is a bundle of impulses with a keen eye for opportunity, be it of the fried chicken variety (“sometimes [my tongue] looks like a chicken”) (69) or vacations to Florida (100). He isn’t the quickest study with these stories, however, as following each of them, he makes some silly mistake in interpretation. He misinterprets the beginning of the story as the end, a happy ending with a clearly sub-optimal one, the location of the story, and finally the existence of multiple Coyotes beyond himself (you’d think he could at least pick up on the last point, considering that he had already heard of another Coyote, Old Coyote, in one of the stories). So maybe he doesn’t quite qualify as a top student with respect to learning stories.

We can compare the scholastic aptitude of Coyote with his fellow student, GOD. Coyote has highly active dreams; one of those “sad noise”-making Coyote Dreams jumps out of its proper place in Coyote’s mind, turning out to be a (self-styled) GOD (1). Although GOD joins Coyote in learning the creation stories, GOD doesn’t make a great student; he is a tad self-righteous about his way of understanding things, from the abominations suggested by talking trees (41) to his insistence on sticking with all those rules about who can eat or touch or say what in that garden (40). The alternative stories proposed by the four old Indians get to be too much for GOD, who jumps into the story he and Coyote are learning in order to set it to rights, never to spring out again. So much for GOD’s studentship!

So Coyote may not be the best student in terms of keeping creation facts straight in his head, but he does a pretty fine job of putting some of the principles of storytelling he learns into drastic action. From earthquakes and thunderstorms to surprise pregnancies, he more or less has the creation of dramatic narratives down pat, unlike other Coyotes out there. More subtly, he encourages a radically different viewpoint of the role of First Nations people in comparison with mainstream culture in his glee at the John Wayne role reversal scene in Bursum’s Entertainment Barn, and in his prankster attitude towards those who remain entrenched in a colonial viewpoint (Bursum and Sifton). Maybe this is Coyote’s lesson: we can all be distracted animals, but if we focus effort on our actions, we might end up with something meaningful in our hands. Telling the stories afterwards is a task that we can reserve for more experienced folks, who are better able to contextualize a particular story within a global framework.

I recently found this poem excerpt, Calgary, by P. K. Page, and include it here because it offers another perspective on education in Coyote’s prairies, and because I enjoyed it!

Calgary. The twenties. Cold, and the sweet melt of chinooks. A musical weather. World rippling and running. World watery with flutes. And woodwinds. The wonder of water in that icy world. The magic of melt. And the grief of it. Tears— heart’s hurt? heart’s help? This was the wilderness: western Canada. Tomahawk country—teepees, coyotes, cayuses and lariats. The land that Ontario looked down its nose at. Nevertheless we thought it civilized. Civilized? Semi. Remittance men, ranchers—friends of my family— public school failures, penniless outcasts, bigoted bachelors with British accents. But in my classroom, Canadian voices— hard r’s and flat a’s, a prairie language —were teaching me tolerance, telling me something. This vocal chasm divided my childhood. Talking across it, a tightrope talker corrected at home, corrected in classrooms: wawteh, wadder—the wryness of words!

Works Cited:

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

Marsh, James. “James Bay Project.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 31 January 2011. Web. 12 March 2014.

Munroe, Randall. “Engineering Hubris.” xkcd. 12 March 2014.

Page, P. K. “Calgary.” The Walrus. The Walrus Foundation, March 2014. Web. 12 March 2014.

Canada is often described as a multicultural nation, by which we mean that the unique colours of many cultures are preserved in a carefully stitched quilt of peaceful communities.

But to put it another way, in the words of Northrop Frye, we are a nation with a “garrison mentality” (Frye 227). At times, we have bracketed ourselves in exclusive, strictly ordered societies in order to protect ourselves from mysterious and terrifying external forces. These forces may once have been connected to the extremes of Canada’s natural environment, but historically as well as presently, we also fear the economic, moral, or creative powers of others who are somehow different from us. In the present day, we might consider the garrison mentality working at the level of the individual more than the community: where do we each draw lines between the acceptable and familiar and the chaotic and upsetting in our own minds? Do we garrison ourselves from certain experiences, thoughts, or emotions?

The story of Manitoba’s Louis Riel is one example of a battle between garrisons, both literal and figurative. Both the inability of certain groups to see past the fears and assumptions made about others and the huge economic disparity between the interested parties in the conflict fueled the process of rebellion.

In the 1850s, the area forming present-day Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba contained a mixture of societies, each distinct in culture, language, religion, and economic power. Ontario generally had a Protestant, English-speaking society with relatively expansive economic privilege, Quebec’s residents spoke French, practiced Catholicism and had moderate economic privilege, while Manitoba exhibited a more diverse culture with an accompanying range of economic privileges (Brown, Stanley np). Manitoba at this time was not a province but simply a parcel of land owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which was then interested in exploiting the land’s resources (furs and timber) (Dunn Rupert np). The profits from these activities fell primarily into the hands of English Protestant executives, who, while ensuring that rules were obeyed by stationing plenty of company representatives and law enforcement personnel in the forts and settlements of the regions, did not live in Manitoba or recognize its unique, diverse culture. This special culture was born from the intersection of First Nations and French-Canadian societies in fur-trapping communities along Manitoba’s waterways (Dunn Metis np). These people, the Metis, spoke French and maybe a First Nations language or two, besides being Catholics with strong ties to Quebec (Dunn Metis np). They also farmed HBC lands and trapped furs, which were intended to be sold exclusively to the HBC under a legally enforced monopoly (Dunn Rupert np). There are stories of some flexibility in this legislation, however, as described in a family story told by Louis Riel’s great-grand niece. As the century progressed, more and more English settlers moved to Manitoba to farm on the riverfront, at times displacing Metis farmers who had to resettle on less desirable land (Flanagan 30 – 31). Simultaneously, the HBC gradually withdrew from the fur-trading side of business and moved on to dealing with the division and sale of its lands (Flanagan 30). A trans-continental railway was also in the works to connect the region to the more eastern Canada (Marsh np). Change was afoot in the Red River settlements, and many people wished to speak their mind about what was happening to their homes and livelihoods (Flanagan 30 – 31).

Enter the Metis leader Louis Riel. Born in Manitoba, educated in Montreal, visitor and eventual citizen of the US, poet, and devout Catholic, he offered several solutions to the government of Canada that addressed the concerns of his people, who felt their needs were unrepresented by the far-away federal government (Flanagan 34). Some successful solutions included the incorporation of Manitoba as an official province along with getting Manitoban representation in Canada’s Parliament (if only two seats), as well as the creation of a carefully structured, hybrid provisional government for the region (Flanagan 39, 34). The hybrid nature of the government mandated equal numbers of English- and French-speaking Manitobans. Less successful in the long term were Riel’s detention of certain riotous English settlers, culminating in the trial and execution of one particularly obnoxious individual, Thomas Scott, after he was involved in the assault of a Metis man (Flanagan 33). This forced Riel to leave Canada and give up his elected Parliament position due to Canadian charges he faced (Flanagan 35). But overall, Riel’s approach to governance for Manitoba was positively received by the Metis and even by many of the English settlers.

Sir John A. Macdonald had other ideas for Manitoba, however. Anxious to avoid “another Quebec,” a society garrisoned by language, religion and culture from English Canada and therefore difficult to persuade during election season, Macdonald wanted to empower the English half of Manitoban society at the expense of the Metis (Brown 136). In response to English Canadian protests in Ontario over the death of Thomas Scott, he even denied the Metis various requests for resurveying of lands and money, actions he knew would incite armed rebellion in the region (Brown 136). And since Manitoba was by then officially a part of Canada, he was not worried that the Metis would go to the Americans for military assistance (Brown 136). Finally, he wanted to exercise Canada’s new railway muscles. Without the need to send soldiers west immediately, investors, taxpayers, and Parliament were not willing to spend the huge sum required to complete the transcontinental line (Marsh np). For Macdonald, the Northwest Rebellion was perfectly timed to drive completion of his pet railway project as well as pacify Ontarian voters. The message of Riel and his provisional government on the subject of self-determination as Metis people, ability to control their lands from a shorter distance than Ottawa, and willingness to participate in the democratic process were ignored as their small-scale armed rebellion was quickly crushed by Canadian soldiers (Beal np).

Given this historical background, we can now discuss the role of the Metis as a founding partner in Canadian culture. Their status as people of mixed indigenous and French-Canadian background was quite unique in Canada at the time and perhaps contributed to Riel’s ability to unite the English and Metis people of the Red River valley into one government. However, English Canadians living east of Manitoba were not interested in such cultural quilting projects. Their privilege extended deep into Canadian government and economic power, as they were given priority access to land resources as well as controlling the majority of Parliament (Stanley np). They were not interested in a dilution of their power. The First Nations people in Ontario and to a lesser extent Manitoba had already been stripped of their lands and much of their negotiating power, and the English Canadian population, under the leadership of Macdonald as well as Alexander Mackenzie, saw the economic vulnerability of the Metis population at the time of the rebellion as a chance to reduce their power closer to the level of First Nations people. In this they were successful, quashing the rebellion and imposing the will of Parliament on the Metis while stripping them of their leader, Riel (Beal np). But not only was a stranglehold on economic power important to English Canadians. Culturally and morally, they firmly believed themselves to be in the superior position, and this was further impetus to assert their domination over the “half-breeds” of Manitoba (Brown 135). Coleman also describes this as a domination of the supposedly superior “White spirit,” that highlighted economic gains and entrepreneurial success as the ultimate goals of civilized society (Coleman 12). Perhaps even Riel’s personal cultural quilt, one including patches of strong, mystic Catholic faith, gifts for leadership and reconciliation, poetry, and the ability to traverse multiple languages, threatened English Canadian expectations of “a British model of civility,” characterized by much less diversity and much more conformity to established cultural templates (Coleman 5). We see this quilt personified by the appearance of Louie, Ray, and Al as separate individuals in Green Grass, Running Water (King 334).

The episode of Louis Riel shows an incredible contrast between a genuine effort to reconcile and empower multiple stakeholders in the Red River valley, through Riel’s creation of a bi-representational government (note that we still do not see the First Nations people involved) and the monopolizing English Canadian effort to destroy it. Riel’s side of the situation has only been publicly recognized and made a part of official history since Canada’s centennial celebrations, when various efforts including the creation of a Louis Riel opera offered his perspective on Manitoba’s history. The stitching of Riel’s story into Canadian history offers a contrasting Canadian ideology beyond the factual implications of his life and accomplishments.

Aside: One highly entertaining story of Riel’s life is presented in Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. It’s a great intro to some of the history surrounding Riel’s life as well as the major political factors at play in Canada during his time.

Excerpt from Chester Brown’s graphic biography of Louis Riel: the eve of the North-West Rebellion (Brown).

Works Cited

Beal, Bob, and Rod Macleod. “North-West Rebellion.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 02 February 2006. Web. 14 April 2014.

Brown, Chester. Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2003. Print.

Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print.

Dunn, William, and Linda West. “The Metis.” Canada: A Country by Consent. Ottawa: Artistic Productions Limited, 2011. Web. 14 April 2014.

Dunn, William, and Linda West. “Rupert’s Land.” Canada: A Country by Consent. Ottawa: Artistic Productions Limited, 2011. Web. 14 April 2014.

Flanagan, Thomas. Louis ‘David’ Riel: ‘Prophet of the New World’, Revised Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Web. UBC Library. 14 April 2014.

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

kavpro. “Quilt of Belonging.” Youtube. Youtube, August 2009. 1 March 2014.

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

Marsh, James. “Railway History.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 25 March 2009. Web. 14 April 2014.

Stanley, George F.G. “Louis Riel.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 04 April 2013. Web. 14 April 2014.

Teillet, Jean. “Bragging Rights.” The Walrus. The Walrus Foundation, November 2010. Web. 1 March 2014.

Turgeon, Bernard. “Bernard Turgeon – Louis Riel.” Youtube. Youtube, January 2013. 1 March 2014.