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.