Q: Narratives assume, in Blanca Chester’s words, “a common matrix of cultural knowledge.” The Four Old Indians are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which excludes many non-First Nations. What were your first questions about and impressions of these characters? How have you come to understand their place in the novel.
I believe the Four Indians of Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water exist as the mythological, literary, and cultural boundary between First Nations’ and Western people’s traditions. The four figures carry the names of well-known Western “heroes:” Hawkeye, referring to a white frontier hero who knew “Indian ways” that appeared in television, film, and novels; Lone Ranger, connecting the Indian to the popular western hero; Robinson Crusoe, the economical protagonist that “writes lists” of Daniel Defoe’s castaway novel, sometimes known as the first English novel; and Ishmael, the survivor of Melville’s Moby Dick who lives by “staying afloat on Queequg’s coffin” (King 293, Jane Flick 141-2). The characters Western names span the English literary tradition from Crusoe to Ishmael to Hawkeye to Lone Ranger, each offering a way to understand the Western protagonist.
These Western protagonist archetypes often come into conflict with the natives whether it be Crusoe “adopting” Friday as his servant, Ishmael coming to terms with and befriending the cannibal Queequg, Hawkeye mimicking “Indian ways,” or the Lone Ranger being a survivor of an Indian raid and by definition of his existence in opposition to them. King dons his Four Indians with these rich literary backgrounds through the simple act of naming, demonstrating the power of preconceptions, a power he likely hopes to reign in with his book. What surprises the reader is the Four Indians’ resistance to any kind of identity, including their name.
“Ms. Jones said that the Indians are women” replies a confused Cereno when he hears Dr Hovaugh describe them as men (King 75). King creates resistance to identity through gender ambiguity in this simple example, but throughout the pages of GGRW the Four Indians are constantly in flux, appearing within movies, within narratives, and within the creation story narrative that seemingly exists within and without the “real world” narratives. The Four Indians weave the creation stories of GGRW while also being a physical part of the world they’re creating. Their physical presence is subject to physical constraints and its not. One is reminded of “Not ants, but ants” when thinking of the Four Indians as they escape the hospital, gender, and their own names (Chamberlin 133).
On the First Nations side we might find the Four Indians referring to the Four Indian Kings. These kings were Iroquois chieftains that visited London on request of Queen Anne and “even saw a Shakespearean play (MacBeth) at the Haymarket Theatre (Sypniewska para 3 ). These kings or chiefs held official power in their own communities and had celebrity power in Western England. They were painted by Jan Verelst and sent homewards with Christian missionaries and a new fort and chapel commissioned by the Queen.
The Four Indians exist at the limit of the divide between Western and First Nation culture, offering either side a way to perceive the other. King cleverly includes the reader on this perception opportunity with his literary naming and contortion of preconceptions. Sergeant Cereno, Dr Hovaugh, Lionel, and others all are exposed to the conundrum of the Four Indians as they cannot quite make sense of their identities, purposes, or relation to them respectively. While peering at the Four Indians the characters of GGRW must come to terms with themselves. The Four Indians gift Lionel with a leather jacket that fulfills his fantasy of looking “like John Wayne” (King 318). Like Lionel, King lulls his characters and readers into a false sense of cultural knowledge with his Four Indians and then reverts it with their perplexing identities and actions, offering his characters and readers a way to think about both cultures simultaneously.
Work Cited:
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada, 2004.
Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. Nov 15/2016.
King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
Sypniewska, Margaret Knight. “The Four Indian Kings.” Indigenous Americans Their Genealogy History and Heraldry. Web. Nov 15/2016.