PAGES 293 – 303, 2007 Edition

I argue that this section in Green Grass, Running Water (shortened to “GGRW” hereafter) works as the climax of King’s story with the focus on the conflicting claims of land titles and “uncivilized stories” of colonialism (Paterson).  Its significance also includes serving as not only a site of intensive intersections where orature and literature, literature and history, imagination and reality meet (Paterson), but a symbol of the departure from the colonial narratives.  Based on the discovery of the in-text allusions to some of the most prominent historical, literary, and mythological figures in the racial history of North America (Paterson), I am going to explore in this blog the connections between the four old Indians and other characters, including the inter-connections among those characters appearing in page 293-303. In particular, I will look at how Robinson Crusoe as a Western literary figure relate to other characters such as the Thought woman and Coyote as Native mythological symbols, in a story told by the Robinson Crusoe as one of the four old Indian characters. It might lead to the understanding of the ways in which “King tells stories that absorb and transform the narratives of Western literature, religion, history, colonialism…in order to “fix things””(Paterson); or precisely, to fix the Indigenous issues in North America through enabling narrative decolonization and thus achieve racial balance.

The connections among the four old Indians

The characters of the four Indians seem to share a considerable number of commonalities. First of all, they all represent fictional figures in well-received narratives of Western literature (Ishmael & Robinson Crusoe) and pop culture (the Lone Ranger & Hawkeye). For example, the character of Robinson Crusoe, as one of the FOUR Indians, comes from a novel which is arguably based on a Scottish castaway who lived for FOUR years on the pacific island, and recognised as one of the FOUR greatest in English literature (Wikipedia contributors). Moreover, these four Western literary symbols happen to be all white male characters displaying stereotypical White attributes. Take Robinson Crusoe for example: this character demonstrates a whole range of White or Anglo-Saxon spirits e.g. “the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity”, which is evident in his colonial attempts to “replicate his society on the island” “through the use of European technology, agriculture and even a rudimentary political hierarchy” (Wikipedia contributors). In the context of GGRW, the white Britishness such as economic individualism, enterprising spirits and religious didacticism that the character Robinson Crusoe represents seems to allude to the Scottish Loyalists who in English Canada played leading roles in business, politics, religion and education (Coleman 5).       

The connections between the four old Indians and the Natives

The archetypes of those four old Indians in GGRW are known to have companions of Native origins, i.e. the Lone ranger with Tonto, Ishmael with Queequeg, Robinson Crusoe with Friday and Hawkeye with Chingachgook. There is no exception here that the characterisation of those Western literary characters always favors them over the Native figures who can only play sidekicks roles to assist the White male protagonists. However, King manages to play with these Western cultural symbols and twist them into Aboriginal female characters. As a result, the privileged positions that Whiteness and the white patriarchal ideologies occupies are remarkably challenged.   

The inter-connections among Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael and the Natives

It seems that Ishmael and Robinson Crusoe as literary figures share plenty of similarities, which are employed in GGRW to counter colonial narratives. For example, in the original work, both of them run into shipwreck and come to be kind of social outcasts, a reference to the marginalised status of the Indigenous peoples in the society. The storyline that Robinson Crusoe survives the shipwreck and ends up in an island with THREE animals might be used as a satire by King against the historical racist statement that judged the Indigenous peoples as “unorganized societies..roaming from place to place like beasts of the field” (Chamberlin 10). They both turn out to be the only survivor of the marine accidents, a mockery to the historical and racist statements that suggest the Indian is a “dying” or “vanishing” race.  Ishmael and Robinson Crusoe both have encounters with Native characters who are assumed to be cannibals. The only difference is Ishmael has got saved because of his Indian shipmate while Robinson Crusoe saves Friday. In order to ridicule these storylines, King mocks Robinson Crusoe’s incivility through his dialogue with his fellow Indian characters in GGRW and Coyote’s dialogue with the story-teller. For example, while indicating the Western Robinson Crusoe’s Britishness, characterised by civility, by having him to say “..you can’t make any rude noises” (332), “..that wouldn’t be polite” (358) and “[w]asn’t Coyote going to do that (“offer an apology”) ?” (430), King has Coyote to jest in a typically British way that Robinson Crusoe is actually naked and thus “embarrassing” (294). The distance between the deserted island that Robinson Crusoe gets stuck in and the civil societies is illustrated by one of his anticipating lines “[i]n that car?” (King 106) and the other ones by Coyote saying “[h]e doesn’t have a car…[t]hat’s a bad point…he doesn’t have a television, either” (King 294). King also makes it explicit that it is Robinson Crusoe that needs to be rescued by pointing out his anticipation for rescue through some lines e.g. “[h]ow long do we have to wait?” (49) and “[w]e were better off standing” (106). In addition to the mockery against the Western literary metaphor, the rebellious aspects of the Native figures e.g. Queequeg and Friday, demonstrate King’s aims and techniques in narratives decolonization.

The inter-connections among the two Robinson Crusoe characters, Thought woman and Coyote

The Biblical aspects of the character name of Ishmael, the Puritan Christian characteristics of Robinson Crusoe and their shared shipwreck experience all indicate their representation of Christianity in GGRW that leads to their seeking of spirituality in a wilderness. This is in part that reason that it is Robinson Crusoe who tells of the story of THOUGHT Woman. The other reason might be his shipwreck experience closely associated with the water imagery that plays a critical role in both the Native worldviews and GGRW. The “reasonable” decision that Thought Woman makes, with “[a]ll things considered” (King 295), and that she would rather be floating than stay with Robinson Crusoe, embodying an Indigenous departure from the colonial narratives.

The ways that King parallels the Western Robinson Crusoe with his Native character counterpart in GGRW are very interesting. For example, the Native Robinson Crusoe acts as if a didactic Christian God, ordering his fellow Natives to “listen” up (King 15), coaching Coyote “[t]hat’s not the right dance at all” (King 274), concerning that the Native Lone Ranger claims himself “omniscient” (King 49). This resonates to the Western Robinson Crusoe who complains that “it has been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and protest” (King 294), a reference to the assimilation of the Indigenous peoples in history. 

The interactions between the four Old Indians, particularly Robinson Crusoe, and Coyote seem to have determined who is the Creator of the world. As a representation of an enlightened European Christian in the original work, the Native Robinson Crusoe in GGRW raises the question “[w]hat about the light” (9) and then suggests that “[m]aybe Coyote can turn on the light” (230) with a further acknowledgement “I believe he did (turn on the light)” (233). This suggests that a Christian admits that it is Coyote who creates the light instead of the Christian God. The Creator status of Coyote is reaffirmed by the Native Lone Ranger, who tells the first and First stories in GGRW, who makes it explicit that they “won’t” (King293) and “didn’t want to” (king 357) START without Coyote.    

Having undermined the supremacy of White civility, Christianity that Robinson Crusoe represents, King also use the inter-connections among the four old Indians and Thought Woman to dismisses the land claims that the European settler-colonists made in history. The storyline that Thought Women hits an island before she encounters Robinson Crusoe implies that there is going to be a clash of land claims await. Here Robinson Crusoe on the island symbols the “Scottish orphan” or homeless European immigrants to the Native lands establishing the nationhood of Canada characterized by the “fictive ethnicity” (Coleman 6). In order to counter the colonial narratives that describes Canada as a deserted land before the arrivals of the European settlers, King plays with the fictionality of the novel Robinson Crusoe, which is credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre (Wikipedia contributors), and implies that the believability of the colonial narratives is questionable. For example, King embarrasses Robinson Crusoe’s bad memory by having his fellow Indians to keep reminding him how bad his memory is (9, 234), having him to remind himself “[w]e don’t want to forget that” (302) and boast his memory “[y]ou remember the last time you did that?” (416). King also set him up in mistaking Canada (22) for the tropical island (357) he has been to (22, 357)—another excellent and amusing example of Robinson Crusoe’s bad memory or he is just making up stories. The story told by Robinson Crusoe about himself surviving the shipwreck and the island life is implied as fictional, ironically, through his own lines saying “you can’t Tell it all by yourself” (King 14) and “you’ll be able to TELL your children and grandchildren about this” (King 387). The narrative technique that has Robinson Crusoe to tell his story in GGRW further reinforces the mythical aspects of the colonial discourse. In order to urge the younger generation of the Indigenous peoples not to forget the false land claims by the settler-colonists, King has the four Indians to give Lionel the George Custer’s jacket as a birthday gift (382). The Robinson Crusoe’s line “[w]e let Lionel borrow it for a while” seems to allude to the problematic aspects of the land treaties between the European settlers and the Natives. The joke around Robinson Crusoe’s red shirt, alluding to the Native skin color, appears to be not only a reference to the Native character he plays in GGRW but a mockery of the European settler-colonists’ effort in “indigenizing” themselves with the purpose of legitimizing their claims for land titles.  

Works Cited:

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. AA. Knopf. Toronto. 2003. Print.

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

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto:  Harper Collins, 2007. Print.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.3″. ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Sept 2016. University of British Columbia Blogs. 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-3/lesson-3-3/>

ASSIGNMENT 3:5

2. Coyote Pedagogy is a term sometimes used to describe King’s writing strategies (Margery Fee and Jane Flick). Discuss your understanding of the role of Coyote in the novel.

In Green Grass, Running Water (shortened to “GGRW” hereafter), the Coyote figure serves as one of the literary devices for the author to carry out counter-narratives to the dominant colonial narratives and as a result pave the way towards narrative decolonization while asserting the Indigenous presence e.g. the Native worldviews.  

Coyote is a cultural symbol from the ”First Nations/Native American tales, an especially important personage in the mythology of traditional oral literature of Native North America; one of the First People” (Flick 143). Given the fact that Coyote often appears in Indigenous stories as a Transformer or Creator-of-the-world figure, such a character is employed in GGRW  as a vehicle to intervene and change the privileged status of Western literature, religion, history, colonialism, and the marginalised status of the Native traditions. In this sense, Coyote is not only a Native representation in this story but a revolutionary symbol of literary transformer of the colonial discourse. In the Native context featuring a transformative Coyote, King aims to revise narratives that affirm colonial dominance and redefine the histories articulated and defined for many centuries almost exclusively European/European North American authors (Cox 220).

As the Native God figure, Coyote distinguishes itself from the powerful and authoritative Western Creators with its unique attributes: they could be brave or cowardly, conservative or innovative, wise or stupid (Flick 143). The comic aspects of the Coyote figure is often related to the Trickster figures in Western literature who are known for turning things upside down and shaking up reality (“Lesson 3.2”). Given the Native identity as a powerful transformer and Western Tricksters quality of Coyote, it serves in King’s work as a subversive, Native humour dynamics to resist and destabilize the influence of colonial literary discourse. According to Flick and Margery, GGRW is full of jokes that fool around with “the Bible, literary canons” (134). The oral and amusing nature of the Coyote character, who plays a central role in those in-jokes, effectively decontextualizes and disables the Western written stories, making it “a Coyote’s story” and consequently facilitating the revisions and subversions of the invader’s discourses (Flick and Margery 136).

Given Coyote’s Native, transformative, subversive and oral characteristics, it also serves as a mediator between the Native and Western cultures, as well as the story-teller and the audience. More precisely, the character Coyote could work as a “pedagogical” catalyst that bridges the cultural gaps for the audience, facilitating their understanding of the author’s intensions, and thus engage them into the Native spirituality. According to Paterson, those readers who are familiar with Western literary traditions might find themselves encountering many cultural and subtle allusions to historical events and characters and symbols that may be foreign to them on their first time reading of GGRW (“Lesson 3.2”). In order to unpack the cultural cruxes across the novel, Flick and Margery suggest that one has to be prepared to “cross the political border between the two countries, the disciplinary borders between English literature, Native Studies, and Anthropology, the literary border between Canadian and American literature” (132). One of the most important borders is the one between “white ignorance and red knowledge” (Flick and Margery 132), which is a hard to cross especially for the Euro-North Americans as they are often inadequately informed of the Native culture as well as the colonial history. In this sense, the Western audience is likely to get bewildered with “a whole series of posed but unanswered questions” (Flick and Margery 131) throughout the book. Despite the potential issues of readers’ comprehension, the author seems to be intended to “entice, even trick the audience into” working out the meaning as well as the pleasure of a whole range of wit, pun and allusions for themselves (Flick and Margery 132). In this case, Coyote can be “useful” to serving as a dynamic “pedagogical” agent to enlighten the Western readers with Native knowledge that is required for them to not only “get” the text but gain breakthrough perspectives on colonial discourse about the settler-colonist history. The funny character is also there to help the audience to “pay attention” to the Native verbal art that might look alien to them and “listen” to the story-teller as another major Native representation in GGRW.

The significant roles that Coyote plays as a subversive Transformer as well as a pedagogical mediator are manifested in the beginning of GGRW which sees King revising the stories concerning origin and cultural identification. King starts his novel with a beginning story involving the waters, a shared cultural signifier for both Western and Native culture, and the Christian God and Coyote the Native God. In the European Genesis, it is the omnipotent God who creates everything including the waters. However, in King’s story, the Western God is created by Coyote’s Native dream—here King’s playing with the Western symbols and assumptions begins! In contrast to the colonial discourse in which both Christianity and the White settler-colonists occupied the powerful and privileged positions, the encounter of the two Gods in King’s narratives seems to make the Christian God think of himself “a little god” despite his ambition of being in charge of the world and being “a big god” (King 2). Whereas the Christian God is depicted as a noisy and angry character who is concerned about his losing control over the waters, Coyote as the Native God seems cool with what the Christian God thinks is “all wrong” about the natural waters (King 1). What Coyote wants is simply to discipline the Christian God, who behaves like a child with bad temper, so that he could go back to sleep—an amusing counter-narrative to the colonial canonical literature which argued that the “childlike” Native people needed to be “ordered” and “civilised”. The Trickster characteristics of Coyote are also reflected in his tricking the naïve Christian God into thinking himself as smart as a dog while joking with the Native story-teller that the Christian God “doesn’t look like a dog at all” (King 2)—the dialogic aspect of this story is also a subtle attack on the “Christian monologues” (King 21). This joke, along with Coyote’s comments such as “[t]hat Dog Dream has everything backward” or “[t]his dog has no manners”, confronts the colonial narratives where the settler-colonists with White supremacy undermined the Native culture as “primitive”, “uncivilised” and “backward” (Coleman 12). With the comically subversive revisions of the Biblical story centering Coyote, the European culture and colonial history conveyed in written literature is subsumed into an Indigenous framework of oral traditions (Flick and Margery 136), disrupting the discursive structures of the Western canonization of colonial narration. The character of Coyote also helps to “verbally” and effectively communicate the Native cultural knowledge such as the Indigenous respectful notions about the natural forces; it not only makes the Indigenous voice heard but challenges the audience to reflect on the Western and Native culture critically. The pedagogical role that Coyote plays might also be able to guide the readers of GGRW through the processing of the enormous cultural and historical allusions interwoven across the book.

Works Cited:

Flick, Jane, and Margery Fee. “Coyote Pedagogy”. Canadian Literature161/162 (1999). Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature161/162 (1999). Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto:  Harper Collins, 2007. Print.

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

Cox, James H. “’All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something’: Thomas King’s Revisions of Narratives of Domination and Conquest in Green Grass, Running Water”. American Indian Quarterly (2000). Web. 04 Nov. 2016.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.2”. ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Sept 2016. University of British Columbia Blogs. 2016. Web. 5 Nov. 2016. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-3/lesson-3-2/

ASSIGNMENT 3:2

1.For this blog assignment, I would like you to outline the reasons why colonial authorities could not conceive of accepting the Metis as a third founding nation.

One of the major reasons that Indigenous groups were not accepted by an English Canada as a legitimate nation-founding force is due to the exclusive nature of the European settler-colonists’ ideology of Whiteness civility that framed the negotiations for the confederation. The concept of civility is characterised by “the temporal notion of civilization as progress that was central to the idea of modernity and the colonial mission with the moral-ethical concept of a (relatively) peaceful order” (Coleman 10). It is suggested that Colonial-era Europeans tended to believe that there was one path to civilization and social development (Coleman 12).  In the sense of such social evolution theories, the European culture was deemed “ahead” on the single timeline of civilization and thus “higher” than the Indigenous culture which were “delayed” or “backward” (Coleman 12). As Coleman pointed out, the colonial racial hierarchy “is clearly evident in the early legislation imposed upon Aboriginal people in Canada, such as the Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes (1857), the Civilization and Enfranchisement Act (1859), and the Indian Act (1876), which collectively viewed Aboriginal people as ‘uncivilized human beings whose cultures were decidedly inferior to British culture’” (13). While suggesting that the culture of “these others” at “the stages of primitiveness” could be civilized by the European civility which was “well advanced on the scale of modernity”, the European settler-colonists denied the Indigenous people’s access to something as civil as the “liberal democratic politics” as asserting that Indigenous people could not understand civility as an ideal form of government (Coleman 12). In this sense, the Matis’s claims for collective right were dismissed by the notion of the superiority of the bounded White civility which was legitimized as the foundational ideology of the emerging English Canada as a nation, as the Indigenous people were not considered as full members of the civil collective.  

In addition to “the history of White supremacy and colonial racism that are fundamental to the establishment of Canada as a nation” (Coleman 10), the other major reason that the Metis was excluded from English Canadian governmentality is the purpose of the settler-colonists to securing the privileges they occupied on the Native resources e.g. the land titles. What happened was the Indigenous claim included the inherent rights of prior-presence and they attempted to make it to the Constitution. This would have protected the Indigenous legitimacy of the Native land titles while clashing with the colonial interests. With the disregard of pre-contact history, the settlers underwent a process of “indigenization”, representing themselves as already the Native people of the Canadian soil and thus asserting their priority to latecomers or new immigrants. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the colonists claimed superiority to Aboriginals based on White civility (Coleman 16). With their “indigenous” as well as “civilized” status, the settler-invaders legitimized their dispossession of Aboriginals from their traditional land while the Indigenous presence in this land was denied and their claims for sovereignty were “legally” supressed.

The denial of the Indigenous representation in Canadian Federal Government in the late 19^th century is also due to the absence of Indigenous voice in the forging of the “imagined community” of Canada promoted mainly by writing schemes. Given the concepts of nationalism are established by a nation representing the collective narratives across times “as if they formed a natural community”, Coleman argues that “what has come to known as English Canada is and has been…a project of literacy (5). Given the European written traditions, Canadian nationalism, characterised by the English Canada’s fictive ethnicity of White civility, was constructed and reconstructed through settler writing. As a result,  White civility were naturalized as the norm for English Canadian cultural identity and  the normative concept of English Canadianness came to be established (Coleman 5). The collective awareness of White English Canadianness was reinforced by the canonization of settler literature. From the lens of settler-colonists, the “official symbolic history of Canada is a history of settlement” and according to this Loyalist version of history, “Canada was once a wilderness-wild, uncultivated, largely empty-until Europeans arrived and carved out a society.” (Coleman 29) This way of telling Canada’s story not only differed from the Indigenous historical oral accounts but misled people to “forget” the Indigenous prior-presence as well as the pre-contact history. However, such settler-colonial subjectivity as well as the privileged status of Whiteness was reaffirmed anyway through the narrative project of forming National consciousness enabled by the colonial literary productivity and print capitalism (Coleman 16). In contrast, the Indigenous cultural groups were marginalized in Canadian society due to their insistence on the story-telling traditions over the textual narrations and as a result a lack of literary representation in the National narratives. In fact, the emergence of the imagined collectivity called Canada involved not only a literary project but a racial project. There were numerous writings at the time when the Metis negotiated to be one of the founding nations of Canada that suggested the “Indians” were “incompatible with the national project of building a British-based civility”(Coleman 22). Moreover, the Natives were also considered in the then popular writings as a “vanishing race” that was doomed in the single timeline of civilizations (Coleman 29).  As a result of the colonial racism as well as the normative ideas of White superiority that was to secure settler-colonists’ privileges, which were legitimized by a literary project that was fundamental to cultivate the awareness of Nationalism, the Metis ended up failing to negotiate the sharing of political power of the emerging Federal Government of Canada.  

Works Cited:

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