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/