The Arbitrary Nature of the Story: Poking Fun at Oral and Written Authority in Thomas King's

The Arbitrary Nature of the Story: Poking Fun at Oral and Written Authority in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water

To speak of post-structuralist theory in conjunction with Native American literatures may seem as odd as serving dog stew with sauce béarnaise. -- Arnold Krupat, "Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature"

In the more realistic plot these same four Indians, now with the names Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye, journey to Blossom and the neighboring Blackfoot reservation looking for things to "fix" (133). The action of this plot consists primarily of the various citizens of Blossom reflecting on their relationships, on their injuries inflicted by Canadian and American government bureaucracy and insensitivity, and on what they perceive to be expected of them as Indians. As the plot progresses, we see the various characters watching a John Wayne western, and the book climaxes with an earthquake, which breaks the dam and kills one of the main characters.

Just as there are two contrasting plots, there are also two contrasting portrayals of narrative technique: an oral and a written. The narrative frame, which is introduced on the very first pages and then interspersed throughout the novel, relies exclusively on dialogue to convey information. The myth plot is also related in this manner, re-creating the oral tradition of "telling" the myth. The story is even interrupted often by Coyote, who gives her opinion about the events and makes changes to the story. In contrast, representations of English/Anglo-American culture within the mythic plot rely heavily on books and acts of writing. The first people the women meet are all figures from the Bible, and of the second people the women meet, three are characters from novels. Whereas the Indian story is told "orally," the English/Anglo-American elements that are incorporated into the myth are fragments of written manifestations of Western religion and culture. Much of the humor of the novel derives from "orally" pointing out errors in the written stories. The narrator informs us, for example, that God did not create the world, that Noah's ark was full of poop, that Moby-Dick was really a black lesbian whale, and that "Nasty" Bumppo was too short to carry his rifle properly. Playing off the fact that the written word is considered more stable than the spoken word and off the Western propensity to believe what we read, the oral narrative strand pokes fun at what becomes the inflexibility of written texts and the superiority of the more plastic oral storytelling technique.

At the core of this contrast are the two opinions, represented by the two opposing hypothetical camps of proponents of oral and written forms of literature, that each kind of narration has the exclusive claim to the ability to convey meaning. Arnold Krupat argues that the truth value attributed to language when a signifier is seen to be correctly, even inherently, linked to a signified is a phenomenon which is unique to cultures which use written forms of information storage. Historically, oral cultures seem to be typically unconcerned with fixed meanings (118). However, he points out that there is a tendency among scholars of Native literatures to hold a "signified-based theory of language,"1 or to assume that meaning is fixed and can be accurately

SHARON M. BAILEY

Thomas King: The Intertextual Coyote (Re)Envisions History

Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water “infiltrates the dominant discourse by appearing to conform with it, but all the while critiquing it” (Horne 225). King masterfully weaves together canonical history, culture, and literature with Native American realities. The result is a multi-voiced novel that subverts Eurocentric ways of thinking. Like Vizenor’s, King’s texts deal with Native Americans who are part of a modern society: They work off the reservation, teach at universities, capitalize on the tourist industry, and confront the exploitation of their culture and heritage. King’s characters examine the constructs of being Indian as they participate in the creation of new stories and new histories.

King’s racial heritage is diverse: Cherokee, German, and Greek. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, and has taught at universities in both the United States and Canada. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the Governor General’s award and the PEN/Josephine Miles award. Green Grass, Running Water braids together the stories of contemporary Blackfoot Indians living on and off a reservation in Alberta, Canada; four mythic Indian women who transcend and transform time and gender; Coyote the trickster; and “I”, an omniscient narrator.

Green Grass examines the roles of Native Americans in today’s culture. Robin Ridington asserts that “[t]he novel is, among other things, King’s reading of North American literature, literary theory, Native American history, and popular culture through the images and genre conventions of American Indian oral tradition” (343), and that the novel is “so multivocal that no single reader can expect to know every reference” (350). One of the effects of a novel where no reader can know every reference is that readers, especially those from the dominant discourse, are unable to master the text: They are de-centered. King achieves carnivalization and heteroglossia in Green Grass by deftly manipulating literary devices such as historiographic metafiction, and intertextuality. He combines those postmodern modes with themes that are central to the Native American worldview: identity and myth.

The first narrative strand, which takes place in “real time,” centers on Lionel Red Dog’s struggle with middle age, career advancement, and his competition with his cousin, Charlie Looking Bear, for Alberta Frank’s affections. Alberta, a professor at the University of Toronto, wants a child much more than she wants either Lionel or Charlie. Charlie, a slick lawyer who defends the conglomerate that built the Grand Baleen Dam on the Blackfoot reserve, struggles with his perceptions of what kind of Indian he is. Lionel’s uncle, Eli Stands Alone, a former English professor, refuses to leave his small cabin in the spillway of the dam and consequently blocks the operation of the dam as well as the use of the lakefront property the dam created. Each of these characters’ stories draws them to the annual Sun Dance on the Blackfoot reservation.

The second narrative strand, which takes place in “mythic time,” revolves around four old Indians who have escaped from a Florida mental institution, Coyote, and a first person narrator. These six mythic characters frame the action of the realistic narrative strand with origin and transformation stories. The four old Indians each take a turn telling the story of their own transformations from archetypal Native American female figures (First woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman) to canonical Western literary characters (Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye). The four old Indians assume that history is fixable, that it isn’t a linear form, but a renewing and fluid curve that can be reshaped by stories. The way the four old Indians go about fixing history is by entering and changing historical, literary, and cultural texts.

First Woman, who leaves the Garden of Eden because she thinks that GOD (a contrary Coyote dream) is a “stingy person” and that there is “no point in having a grouchy GOD for a neighbor” (74), becomes the Lone Ranger when she encounters Rangers on the Western plains, and averts death by “tak[ing] some black cloth out of her purse . . . cut[ting] some holes in [it] . . . [and] put[ting] that black cloth around her head” (75). Changing Woman falls out of the sky world and lands on Noah’s canoe. Noah, a lustful little man eventually leaves her on an Island because she refuses to follow his Christian rules. Changing woman is “rescued” from the island by the captain and crew of the Pequod, who are in search of a great white whale. When soldiers arrest Changing Woman she tells them: “Call me Ishmael” (248). Thought Woman floats off the edge of the world and into the Pearly Gates, which are depicted as an immigration checkpoint. When A.A. Gabriel gives Thought Woman a “[v]irgin verification form,” Thought Woman floats away, first to Robinson Crusoe’s island where he renames her Friday, and then to Florida, where she is apprehended by soldiers. She tells the soldiers: “I’m Robinson Crusoe. . . . I’m in charge” (361). Old Woman first meets a “young man walking on water” as she is floating, but he refuses to accept her help, so she floats away. She meets “Nasty” Bumppo; when Nasty is shot and the soldiers come and arrest Old Woman, they refuse to recognize her name. Finally, after trying various names Old Woman tells them her name is Hawkeye and is taken to FortMarion.

Historiographic Metafiction

Linda Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as a postmodernist device that subverts the authority of history and historical texts. It is the goal of historiographic metafictions to challenge the difference between texts produced as “history” and texts produced as “fiction.” Hutcheon explains that “[h]istoriographic metafiction . . . is overtly and resolutely historical . . . in an ironic and problematic way that acknowledges that history is not the transparent record of any sure “truth” (129). The authenticity of history is at best questionable when read against Native American texts. In an article about Sherman Alexie’s fiction, James Cox asserts that Native American authors “and their characters are involved in a narrative construction or reconstruction of a Native American-identified self that counters a racist historical context and the conquest narratives that are often sustained by the ubiquitous white man’s Indian” (52). In other words, Native American authors and their characters use fiction to breakdown the authenticity of specific histories and the gross misrepresentations of Native Americans that those histories created.

Used as a literary device in Green Grass, historiographic metafiction calls into question the political invention of “Indians,” and their placement within Eurocentric culture. History is often afforded a certain measure of authority because it is based in “facts,” whereas fiction is “made up.” However, as Hutcheon points out, facts do not translate into truths per se. Culturally determined systems of meaning construct facts from the descriptions of events. Because the descriptions of events can differ greatly depending on cultural placement, there must be a “distinction between ‘events’ and ‘facts’” (122). Facts can not be relied on as truths because they are in effect narratives. King astutely points out, “[t]here are no truths . . . [o]nly stories” (432). In essence then, the culturally constructed system of meaning that relates the events (tells the story) is creating the facts (truth). Historiographic metafictions recognize the importance of who is retelling the events and the possibility of multiple truths.

In the past, critics have endeavored to separate history and fiction; however, in the postmodern era their likenesses are being examined:

They have both been seen to derive their force more from verisimilitude than from any objective truth; they are both identified as linguistic constructs, highly conventionalized in their narrative forms, and not at all transparent either in terms of language or structure; and they appear to be equally intertextual, deploying the texts of the past within their own complex textuality. (Hutcheon 105)

If history and fiction are produced in the same manner, as the passage suggests, then some fiction may convey as much truth as history. The division between history and certain kinds of fiction becomes negligible. Multiple histories studded with multiple facts are possible. Novels that are produced as historiographic metafiction force readers to take note of interrelations between fiction and history, and contextualize representations of history in fiction.

Similarly, contemporary Native American texts often challenge historic texts as a means to gain a place in the dominant culture’s history. Cox asserts that for Native American authors “imagining alternatives to the dominant culture’s narratives of conquest . . . is a powerful weapon.” And while “imagining alternative histories might not change the present, . . . conceiving of other possibilities, revisioning a history in which Native Americans write Native Americans back into the landscape, will influence the future” (58). Indeed, historical references in Green Grass are meant to undermine the Eurocentric constructions of history. Throughout the novel King uses names of historical figures to subvert their historical connotations. The names become double coded—intended to mean one thing to white readers and another to Native American readers. In King’s novel, historiographic metafiction often manipulates representations of history in order to reverse the exclusion and debasement of Native American culture. King positions the brutality endured by Native Americans in the forefront, and from that position the likelihood of its being forgotten or hidden diminishes. In “To Know the Difference: Mimicry, Satire, and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water,” Dee Horne states that “King retells and re-presents the settler history of Fort Marion and the imprisonment of the plains tribe, [as] a way of ensuring that this history of oppression not be forgotten" (261). Alberta Frank lectures about the 1874 destruction, containment, and imprisonment of Plains Indians at FortMarion. Moreover, Alberta’s students are historically linked by name to policies and texts that sought to exclude and silence Native Americans:

Henry Dawes was sound asleep at the back of the room, his head wrapped up in his arms. Mary Rowlandson and Elaine Goodale were bent over, their heads locked together. Hannah Duston and John Collier had moved their desks together again, and were virtually in each other’s laps. (King 16)

These names are charged with emotional and racial connotations. Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan poet, wrote a captivity narrative after being captured during King Philip’s war. Henry Dawes, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, sponsored an Act passed by the U.S. Congress to provide for the granting of individual landholdings to Native Americans who would renounce their tribal holdings. Elaine Goodale married Native author Charles Eastman and published her memoirs of her life with the Sioux. John Collier was an American sociologist and public official who as commissioner of Indian Affairs worked to preserve Native American territories and cultures. Hannah Duston was captured by the Abnakis during King William’s War; after her infant child was killed, she killed and scalped ten of her captors before escaping.

Clearly, the reader who has some knowledge of what these names represent would immediately recognize the political tensions their inclusion creates. In “Coyote, Contingency, and Community: Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Postmodern Trickster,” Carlton Smith asserts that “King’s reference to these famous ‘students’ of Indian cultures alludes to the inevitable and disastrous result of objectifying Native American society” (522). This episode in Green Grass seeks to (de)objectify Native American society by repositioning Native American and white histories. King’s use of names invokes historical images that are at odds with their position within the text. In another example of King’s infusing the text with historical reference, vacationing fishermen, Louie (poet), Ray (priest), and Al (politician), evoke the name of Louis Riel, mixedblood leader of the Northwest Rebellion.

Reclamation and re-textualization of history is an important theme in Native American texts. In “Metalanguages” Elaine Jahner explains that the “act of listening to the past” is an essential part of cultural-definition. She claims that since the responses to history are “rooted in one’s own psychological history,” it is especially necessary for Native Americans to learn how to listen to the various voices of the past, especially since their “history has been kidnapped by conquerors” (162). Jahner is stating that since Native Americans have been inaccurately represented—if represented at all—in history, it is especially important for them to examine the way in which history is produced as well as who is producing it. Through examination of the production of history, Native Americans may be able to construct a new history that accurately portrays them. By challenging and changing historical texts, Native American authors can reclaim cultural significance. At the heart of King’s novel is the notion of cultural survival and the idea that the means by which culture will survive is the retelling of history. Stories—histories—must be told again and again until they are gotten right, and while “[e]verybody makes mistakes,” it is “[b]est not to make them with stories” (King 11). King’s inclusion of historical events “suggests that to re-write or re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (Hutcheon 110). In fact, the way King presents the past often “opens it up” to humorous and seemingly good-natured interpretations. For instance, Columbus’ voyage to the “New World,” a bitter piece of the past for Native Americans, is rendered ridiculous when in the novel a Nissan, a Pinto, and a Karmann-Ghia (the Nina, the Pinto, and the Santa Maria) sail across Parliament lake and into the Grand Baleen dam.