- 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?
At first I was confused by the Old Indians. I wondered how they can both be telling a Creation story while also standing beside a highway and talking about being hungry. There seemed to be two separate narratives that were fragmented and interrupted by other stories. I wondered if the Old Indians where the same as the characters telling the story at the beginning of the novel. These two narratives also gave me the impression that they existed within two different realms. The first storytelling one left me with the impression that they were talking within a spiritual realm, or perhaps in a dream. The second set of narratives seemed to work within the real world also inhabited by Lionel, Charlie, Eli, and Alberta. These two realms seem to operate in parallel with one another.
As I read the novel, I began to see the Old Indians as a fusing of Native and non-Native worldviews. It struck me as peculiar that they had anti-Native names – that is, names associated with popular culture figures that represented Western elements that undermined and crippled the Native way of life. Yet the Old Indians were, at least to my mind, depicted as Natives in how they spoke and were treated by the other characters in the novel.
Their quest to fix the world led me to see them as bridging between myth and reality, and imagination and truth. My cynical side was snickering along with Lionel, expecting the Old Indians to prove ineffectual and fail to fix the world. They seemed naive and even delusional. After all, what chance do they have against a reality that has crushed and destroyed Natives for so long? My optimistic side, on the other hand, expected they would play a role in resolving at least one of the conflicts faced by the character inhabiting the real world. Wouldn’t it be great if the Old Indians really did now some power over the gears of reality? Maybe they have a monkey wrench up their sleeve after all.
Reading Blanca Chester’s ‘Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel’ deepened my view that the Old Natives serve as a fission between two worlds. She argues convincingly that King has created a syncretic narrative to show the power that stories have to impact the real world. She unpacks the “there is no truth only stories” idea that the narrator says to Coyote in Green Grass, by claiming that stories have the power to create multiple realities. By fusing together seemingly incommensurable elements, King has created a world that is very different from any of its aggregate elements. He has created a world qua emergent property from its constituent parts.
Chester interpreted King as making weak metaphysical claims about the interconnectedness between language and reality. Our experiences of reality provide the raw materials for our stories. Conversely, the stories we tell shape and mold the realities from which we experience. In this sense, we construct our own reality. However, I wouldn’t go so far as interpreting this as being a uniquely Native way of knowing since this is perfectly compatible with Western scientific ways of understand the interplay between language and experience.
In contrast, a strong metaphysical claim is to take the power the Old Indian have on constructing reality as literal and attributing this as essential to a Native way of knowing. In the story, the Old Native provided a bridge between storytelling and imagination, and real actual event and states of affairs. In the storytelling realm they tell and retell Creation stories, and in the realm or reality, they talk about fixing the world. This implies that their power to fix the world comes from telling stories which become true in the real world. For example, they tell of a new ending to the Western movie with John Wayne killing all the Indians which causes that new ending to happen.
I’m not sure how to interpret this story-reality fusion and what stance a Native way of knowing takes on this. How do take this claim by Armstrong that Chester uses:
“In the Okanagan language, perception of the way reality occurs is very different from that solicited by the English language. Reality is very much like a story: it is easily changeable and transformative with each speaker” (57).
In what sense is reality changeable and transformative?
Similarly, in what sense does a Native view understand language as retaining “the power to influence and construct multiple realities” (58)?
Works Cited
Chester Blanca. “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.
King, T. (2007). Green grass, running water. Toronto: HarperPerennial Canada.