Describe how King uses the cyclical paradigm (recurring example) of the Medicine Wheel (and a little help from Coyote) to teach us to understand, or at least to try to understand the power behind the stories we tell ourselves.

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The Native Americans view the medicine wheel as a pathway to truth, peace, and harmony. These are also three themes Thomas King strings into his novel, Green Grass, Running Water. The medicine wheel is based off of color, direction, and elements. The medicine wheel is an integral part of Native American spirituality and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water

There is no doubt that King wants us to work to get the story. Personally, it took me a good amount of research and help from other scholars to wrap my head around this hugely metaphorical book.  With that in mind – I took something different, than my classmates away from the book. While the words written on the page of the book are the same, my theories and understandings of it will differ from yours. Why is that? Well the story and the narrative are two different things. This book is a narration of Indigenous theories and beliefs.  That being said, after reading some of my classmate’s blogs I have come to see that while everyone may understand the general story but – each of us has our own interpretation. We all read the exact same text, but it has come to give different meanings to all of us, there is a different between a story and a narrative.

It’s essential when it comes to organizing and making sense of narrative and the way people deploy or use them. Stories are pieces that can come and go, change, and morph, but the narrative remains. When the narrative shows great resilience, we have “master narratives,” meaning narratives that have endured the test of time and become deeply embedded in culture. These are the most important narratives in strategic communication. People make use of them all the time. The narrative provided by the medicine wheel in Indigenous teaching allows for the obtaining of knowledge through interpretations of the story.

In many Indigenous cultures, the Medicine Wheel metaphor contains all of the traditional teachings and can therefore be used as a guide on any journey, including the educational process. While there is some variation in its teachings and representations, the underlying web of meaning to Medicine Wheels remains the same: the importance of appreciating and respecting the ongoing interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all things. The medicine wheel is the narrative.

The story, on the other hand, is coupled with our interpretation of what is being said. Stories are important, but not as important as the narrative. Indigenous knowledge is attained by choosing to do what is necessary to obtain multiple perspectives from which to view the world. This in-depth searching for knowledge is what leads to wisdom – becoming aware of the learning through all the senses, requiring the learning to be introduced to the students in multiple modalities – giving multiple ‘stories’.

Keep in mind that oral storytelling is perhaps the earliest method for sharing narratives, we see this practiced throughout aboriginal. During most people’s childhoods, narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity, and values, as especially studied in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples. Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in fiction genre. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate.The structure of Green Grass, Running Water symbolizes a circle like the medicine wheel, Coyote’s voice helps in achieving this. Each part starts the way it ends. On p. 1 it says, “In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.” It also starts with the story of Coyote. On p. 107, the last page in part one, King is back to Coyote and the last two lines read, “In the beginning there was nothing. Just the water.”  The whole book starts with I, Coyote, and the topic of water and the whole book ends with I, Coyote, and water. It also ends literally with water because the damn breaks. The narration is the theory of the medicine wheel – it should not change, it is the theory. The story emphasizes the power of words to each individual who reads them.