I have always loved reading out loud. I like being read to and hearing stories told. But I especially love speaking the words myself. When I read I am often hearing the words spoken in my mind or reading aloud under my breath to myself. For me this also connects to loves of singing and poetry. I think words are amazing and I think voices are uniquely powerful. 

Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water calls to be read loud. As discussed in previous posts, King is inspired by Harry Robinson’s oral syntax and often writes in a conversational or spoken manner, encouraging the reader to speak the text. Included in this effort to encourage his readers to speak, King’s novel is filled with allusions that can best be understood by being spoken. They’re basically puns!

Dr. Joe Hovaugh
Joe Hovaugh is an allusion to Jehovah. If, like me, you have very little religious knowledge, Jehovah is God’s true name in Jewish and Christian scripture. An English translation of the Hebrew word for God, Jehovah is revealed to be the name of God in The Bible. When we first meet Dr. Hovaugh, he sits behind his massive desk admiring his garden. This is the first of many connections to the Garden of Eden. Dr. Hovaugh represents a godlike figure in a number of ways throughout this novel. He is the head of the hospital where the four Indians are meant to be captive and he is tasked with tracking them down. He would, however, rather have their death certificates signed and be done with the matter. Quite a godlike action to decree that someone is dead without any proof. Marlene Goldman’s article Mapping and Dreaming, Native Resistance in Green Grass, Running Water also draws a likeness between Hovaugh’s massive wooden desk and the Tree of Knowledge. Cutting down the Tree of Knowledge to create what Hovaugh calls a “rare example of colonial woodcraft” (King, 11) creates a sense that colonialism has led to the destruction of knowledge. 

Sally Jo Weyha
Sally Jo Weyha is an allusion to Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman born around 1788 who was a guide and an interpreter for the Lewis and Clark expedition from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest (1804-1806). 

[Image from Native-Land.ca where you can explore Indigenous territories, treaties and languages worldwide.]

Sacagawea was kidnapped by an enemy tribe early in her life and later became the property of (or was married to, depending on which text you read) French-Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau. Charbonneau was hired on to the Lewis and Clark expedition and Sacagawea accompanied (while six months pregnant and later with an infant). She is said to have been an integral part of the expedition and is held in high esteem in history books. History.com declares her one of the most memorialized women in the United States, and describes her impact as follows: “Her skills as a translator were invaluable, as was her intimate knowledge of some difficult terrain. Perhaps most significant was her calming presence on both the expeditioners and the Native Americans they encountered, who might have otherwise been hostile to the strangers.” In Green Grass, Running Water, Sally Jo Weyha is mentioned along with a number of other oral allusion names including Polly Hontas (Pocahontas) as Hollywood actors of various ethnicities (“Mexicans, Italians, Greeks, along with a few Indians, some Asians, and whites” (King, 93)) who are trying to make it in westerns and are stuck playing Indians every time. Sacagawea and Pocahontas both represent Indigenous people who are renowned in colonial history as helpers to white people. Their stories have been curated and morphed into fairy-tale-like narratives with a palatable Indigenous heroine, with mythical connections to the land and, as mentioned above, a ‘calming presence’. It is this stereotype of indigeneity that is working in Hollywood in King’s novel. If King feels that he is “not the Indian you had in mind”, Sally Jo Weyha likely is the Indian you had in mind.   

Ahdamn
Although Ahdamn’s allusion to Adam from The Book of Genesis is quite obvious, King sends an interesting message through Ahdamn’s contrasting character traits. Unlike Adam, Ahdamn is not first in the garden. It is First Women’s garden and Ahdamn lives there without a clear origin. “That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn. I don’t know where he comes from. Things like that happen, you know” (King, 23). Right away, Ahdamn is not the central character and First Woman is surely not created from one of his ribs. Ahdamn loses more credibility in King’s story by his inability to complete the godlike task of claiming and naming things correctly. Pronouncing Ahdamn’s name when reading out loud I found two interesting things. The first was that when I first pronounced Ahdamn like Ah-dam (as opposed to Adam like A-dum), Ahdamn sounds like a dam. There is, perhaps, a connection here to later stories of the Grand Baleen Dam being the ruin of homes and communities. Another connection is the phrase ah, damn. Not only does this phrase connect Ahdamn/Adam to the damning and exile from the Garden of Eden, traditionally seen as Eve’s fault, but is perhaps a phrase to be uttered upon exile. Or, in Green Grass, Running Water, upon Ahdamn’s introduction into the story. Ah, damn.

Reading aloud
What I found stood out to me most when reading aloud was that I caught the flow and repetition within the novel more clearly. For instance, characters from one story line answering questions asked by characters in another storyline and the repetition of phrases throughout the novel. “Where did that water come from” mentioned in my previous post is an example of this overlapping.

I think King pushes his reader toward reading aloud in order to honour storytelling traditions and to encourage the reader to become the teller and the listener – another cyclical aspect of King’s writing. I also think that reading aloud forces us to grapple with what we do not know. When reading silently it is easy to skim or skip, even without meaning to. I read aloud to my students often and I am shocked sometimes to find names or words in texts I know well, that I’m actually not sure how to pronounce. When reading to ourselves we do not stop to investigate and we do not fumble. Reading aloud asks the reader/speaker to encounter that which they do not understand. The Cherokee words at the start of the novel are a great example of this. They are simple enough to skim past: Oh, another language. Let’s move on.  But reading aloud we have to acknowledge that we do not know and are more likely to explore and research to find out. In addition when reading aloud we actually hold the words in our mouths and speak them into the world. “Higayv:ligé:i.” Hee..gay…vlee…giy…? No matter how fumbled or hesitant, the words exist when we speak them. They are words in the world, not just ideas of words. 

————————————————————————————————–

Works Cited

Goldman, Marlene. Mapping and Dreaming: Native Resistance in Green Grass, Running Water. Canadian Literature, 161-162, Summer/Autumn, 1999, 18-41. https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/canlit161-162-MappingGoldman.pdf. Accessed March 19, 2021.

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

King, Thomas. “I’m not the Indian You had in Mind.” National Screen Institute, 2007,  http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2012/03/im-not-the-indian-you-had-in-mind/. Accessed March 19, 2021.

Native Land. Native Land Digital, 2021. https://native-land.ca/. Accessed March 19, 2021.

Potter, Teresa and Brandman, Mariana.  “Sacagawea”.  National Women’s History Museum, 2021. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sacagaweaAccessed March 19, 2021.

“Sacagawea”. HISTORY.COM, February 9, 2021, https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea. Accessed March 19, 2021.

“Who is Jehovah?” Jehovah’s Witnesses. https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/who-is-jehovah/. Accessed March 19, 2021.