( PDF ) Discursive and mediatic battles in thomas kings green grass, running water

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UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL

CARLOS EDUARDO MENEGHETTI SCHOLLES

DISCURSIVE AND MEDIATIC BATTLES IN THOMAS KING'S GREEN GRASS,

RUNNING WATER

Porto Alegre

2010

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CARLOS EDUARDO MENEGHETTI SCHOLLES

DISCURSIVE AND MEDIATIC BATTLES IN THOMAS KING'S GREEN GRASS,

RUNNING WATER

Dissertação de Mestrado em Literaturas de

Língua Inglesa para a obtenção do título de

Mestre em Literatura

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras

Faculdade de Letras

Orientadora: Dra. Rosalia Angelita Neumann Garcia

Porto Alegre

2010

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To Nicole and Gabriel, with love.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to professor Rosalia Garcia for guiding me, once again, through this

winding pathway which is the academic career.

Thanks to CNPq for the scholarship that allowed me to dedicate the necessary effort

of composing this paper.

EPIGRAPH

Why do we ‘read’ other cultures?

What do we see when we do, and why are we interested?

What are we looking for?

Is it the exotic Other [...] ‘the voice of difference likely to bring us what we can’t

have’ and to divert us from the monotony of sameness?

Or is it, rather, a genuine attempt to share knowledge of who we are as human

beings?

Elvira Pulitano

RESUMO

O objetivo desta dissertação é o de investigar as disputas pelo poder subjacentes no

texto literário do autor cherokee/canadense Thomas King, mais especificamente em seu

romance publicado em 1993 intitulado Green Grass, Running Water. Serão destacadas as

estratégias performáticas empregadas na desconstrução de representações opressivas de

nativo-americanos por discursos ocidentais que compõem um complexo campo de batalha

onde vozes em conflito disputam por direitos discursivos nas relações de poder. Se por um

lado temos a tradição epistemológica positivista/cartesiana que trabalha há cinco séculos no

sentido de exercer controle sobre as representações simbólicas dos nativo-americanos, a fim

de que poder executivo e discursivo possa ser exercido sobre eles, por outro lado temos que

Thomas King proporciona ao leitor o acesso a uma estrutura cíclica, não hierarquizada da

narrativa e do epistêmio nativo-americanos. Esta investigação irá apontar os momentos de

conflito entre essas vozes e analisará uma potencial interpretação democrática, de terceira

via para esses encontros aparentemente binários. Espera-se ser possível indicar que Green

Grass, Running Water propicia um privilegiado campo simbólico para que conflitos

culturais e epistemológicos possam ocorrer e ser resolvidos com alguma espécie de

resolução positiva em relação ao aspecto frequentemente belicoso dos engajamentos

nativos e ocidentais.

Para tanto, investigaremos a tradição bíblica e judaico-cristã de hierarquização e

como o processo de nomeação de indivíduos e categorias permite que ocorra uma relação

de dominação. Discutiremos a estrutura organizacional das comunidades, baseando-nos nas

proposições de Zygmunt Bauman, com o intuito de averiguar de que forma o texto literário

lida com questões como o pertencimento a grupos que possuem critérios subjetivos de

aceitação, permitindo-nos responder se tais critérios permitem uma opção de filiação ou se

representam uma demanda coletiva opressiva sobre o indivíduo. Uma análise dos discursos

científicos de verdade também será feita, contrastando-os com a construção mítica coletiva

das narrativas nativo-americanas como construções alternativas de verdade. Finalmente,

teremos um capítulo sobre o poder narrativo da fotografia (mídia presente no romance em

diversos momentos), no qual os usos da câmera serão descritos e analisados em seus

potenciais de malícia e de narração distorcida.

Palavras-chave: literatura nativo-americana, literature canadense, Thomas King,

estudos pós-coloniais.

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to investigate the power struggles underlying the literary

text of Canadian/Cherokee author Thomas King in the novel Green Grass, Running Water,

published in 1993. We will highlight the performative strategies employed in the

deconstruction of oppressive representations of the Native American by Western discursive

and mediatic voices. The novel offers an interweaved narrative of Native and Western

cultural materials that, together, will compose a complex battlefield of contentious voices

that, ultimately, weigh on the balance of power relations to claim discursive rights. On the

one hand, we have the epistemological tradition of a Positivist/Cartesian logic that has been

working for five centuries to hold sway over the symbolic representations of the Native

Americans in order to exert executive and discursive power over them; on the other hand,

Thomas King provides the reader a glimpse of the cyclical, non-hierarchized structure of

Native narrative and episteme. This investigation will point out the moments of conflict

between these two voices and attempt to elaborate on the potential democratic/third-way

interpretation of these seemingly binary encounters. We hope to be able to indicate that

Green Grass, Running Water provides a privileged symbolic battleground for cultural and

epistemological clashes to occur and be settled with some sort of positive resolution to the

long-lasting contentious nature of Native and Western engagements.

In order to accomplish that, we will delve into the biblical and Judeo-Christian

tradition of hierachization and how the process of naming of individuals and categories

allows for domination to occur. We will elaborate on the structural organization of

communities, based on the propositions of Zygmunt Bauman, in order to assess how the

literary text handles issues such as belonging to groups that have subjective criteria for

acceptance, aiming at answering whether these criteria allow for an option of membership

or if they pose as oppressive collective demands over the individual. An analysis of the

scientific discourses of truth will also be provided, contrasting them with the collective

mythmaking of Native American narratives as alternative constructors of truths. Finally, we

will have a chapter on the narrative power of photography (a medium present in the novel

at various moments), in which the uses of the camera are described and analyzed in their

guileful and (mis)narrating potentials.

Keywords: Native American literature, Canadian literature, Thomas King, post-

colonial studies.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 7

1. THE POWER OF NAMING AND ORGANIZING ........................................................ 12

1.1 Biblical Reorganizations ............................................................................................. 13

1.2 Deeper into biblical parodies: God as a would-be storyteller ..................................... 15

1.3 Decolonizing Names ................................................................................................... 21

1.3.1 Tonto and The Lone Ranger ................................................................................ 21

1.3.2 Friday and Robinson Crusoe ................................................................................ 23

1.3.3 The Great Female Black Whale ........................................................................... 28

1.4 The power of renaming and reorganizing ................................................................... 35

2. IDENTITY IN QUESTION: WHO DECIDES WHO IS WHO ...................................... 42

2.1 Panopticon Vs. Synopticon ......................................................................................... 43

2.1.1 Panopticon ........................................................................................................... 44

2.1.2 Synopticon ........................................................................................................... 46

2.2 Postulated communities and shifting identities .......................................................... 48

2.3 The Dead Dog Café and Bill Bursum's Home Entertainment Barn ........................... 59

2.4 Dressing up in values .................................................................................................. 64

3. INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSES ON THE NATIVE ................................................... 70

3.1 The Academia ............................................................................................................. 71

3.2 Scientific and Medical Voices .................................................................................... 77

4. MEDIATIC REPRESENTATIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY ................................................. 87

4.1 The Power of the Camera ........................................................................................... 88

4.2 The Uses of the Camera in Green Grass, Running Water .......................................... 94

4.2.1 Dog du Jour, Houndburgers, Puppy Potporri and other Delicacies ..................... 94

4.2.2 Stray Tourists at the Sun Dance ........................................................................... 97

4.2.3 Hidden Cameras and Sneaky Pictures ............................................................... 100

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ............................................................................................. 105

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 110

INTRODUCTION

Battles rage within the literary text. Conflicts are proposed and settled, sometimes,

without the awareness of the incautious reader. Some texts, naturally, are more prone to

conflicting interpretations than others, especially those we normally label post-colonial.

Native American literary productions that fall into this broad category are no different;

most of them are, I believe, even richer with the presence of multiple voices than their

contemporary texts. This multiplicity of present voices, many theoreticians have argued, is

due to several factors that range from the non-teleological epistemological structure of most

Native American cultures, which are open to a myriad of narrative positions, to the

historical need to, if not fight for space in the literary canon, establish a literary tradition of

its own, which requires either combating already existing power structures, or consciously

ignoring them. In any case, such texts are pregnant with the presence of the Other, be it to

accede to its position or to fight it. It is within this master framework that I propose the

present this work.

I have selected the 1993 novel Green Grass, Running Water, by Native American

(of Cherokee, Greek and German descent) author Thomas King to elaborate on the issues

of how the literary text symbolically handles the presence of mostly conflicting voices and

of how authoritative this text may be in denying the narrative position of the Other to

privilege its own or how democratic it can be by allowing that presence and sharing the

discursive construction. The novel is very rich in conceding to multiple storytellers the

possibility of weaving the tale, and the patchwork of various characters' stories it depicts is

indicative of the diversity of positions I mentioned above. The main issue investigated in

the text will be how a Native American perspective interacts with the Euramerican master

discourse that has been depicting, for the last five centuries, the Indian in such a way as to

hold sway over its representations and over the institutional structures that produce

knowledge and exert power over individuals and their cultural practices. As I see it,

Thomas King's novel subverts and attempts to invert this discourse to try and empower a

Native American perspective as an alternative epistemological view of the world. The

process, however, may not be altogether innocent.

As we look into the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water, we will see that there

is a strongly hybrid locus from which meaning, contestation and hegemony are enacted. I

will raise the question as to how authoritarian this locus can be since, if hybridity is to

undermine a dominant discourse, it must surely replace it for something else. What is it,

then, this something else that installs itself in the place of a previously reigning master

discourse? Is this new power the voice that was formerly dominated and now exacts its

revenge by demolishing its oppressor's voice, in which case the result would be a simple

inversion of the binary pair oppressor/oppressed? Or does this hybrid storytelling help

promote a third path that can encompass multiple worldviews and avoid bellicose

polarizations?

In order to investigate such elements, I will delve into Judeo-Christian and Native

American creation myths. From there I will analyze how the literary text contrasts a highly

hierarchized, positivistic worldview with a non-linear episteme to question truth and

assumptions of truth, especially those regarding commonplace beliefs on Native American

representations. The elaboration on this topic occurs in chapter 1, in which I will refer to

several Western canonic literary texts such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Daniel

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, texts whose main characters are also present in Green Grass,

Running Water, creating an intense intertextuality of Native and Western works. In this

chapter we will see evidence of the appropriation of Native American cultural aspects and

their use by mass media, which have created and have been reproducing a stagnating view

of contemporary individuals and practices. I will attempt to prove that the presentation and

subsequent destruction of the perspectives of these Western works are not undertaken

simply as totalitarian tools for promoting a Native American perspective as predominant,

but to evidence that both Native American and Western discourses are highly intertwined

and can interact to the proposition of a middle term that can be authoritarian at times, but

that works more for the harmony than for the polarization of different epistemologies.

Chapter 2 will deal with the individual's relationship and responsibility towards the

community. Based on Zygmunt Bauman's ideas and concepts on modern group

organization, I propose an investigation on whether communities that do not rely on heavy

top-down monitoring of their members (as modern nation-states do) really allow

individuals to choose to belong or if a light, non-oppressive, lateral system of monitoring

works as well to intensely demand compliance of the few to the norms of the communal

body. Since there is a highly active tribal network in the storyline of Green Grass, Running

Water, we have enough material to elaborate on the implications of the tight definitions of

community that Modernity offered versus the loose category allowed by Post-Modernity

(or, as Bauman puts it, liquid modernity). We will see that the freer the individual is to

choose whether not to belong to a group, the less power that groups has, which triggers a

far-reaching network reaction that works to restrict the individual and suggest that he or she

accedes to the communal will. The tension between community demands and individual

choices raises the question of who/what decides who is a Native American and who is not.

Therefore, I trace a connection with chapter 3, in which I will analyze how institutions such

as the academia deal with Native American representations and how they appropriate these

representations as passive subjects of investigation to exert power over actual living

individuals.

The issue of how the academic discourse appropriates culture for investigative

purposes is quite delicate, since this very piece of work is a sample of how this is done. I, a

white middle-class Brazilian scholar, turned a novel by a Native American/Canadian writer

into an object of speculation to try and afford scientific meaning to its symbolic contents. I

understand that non-neutral positions are natural to the scholarly praxis, and this work is no

exception. I will, though, attempt to accomplish what Arnold Krupat proposed in his Ethno-

criticism, which is to give voice to the Native American, to let it speak through theory and

criticism. I obviously cannot enunciate from a Native locus, which makes this attempt ever

the more challenging, but I will try not to treat my object with that will to power described

further ahead, in chapter 3, so characteristic of those pretensions of universal truth which I

mean to question by writing this paper. Having been born and raised embedded in the

category we call Euramerican episteme, it is exactly its precepts of teleological history,

Cartesian evidencing and positivistic ethics that I intend to put in check by so heavily

relying on post-colonial and minority theorists and critics such as Paula Gunn Allen, Gerald

Vizenor and Arnold Krupat. Hopefully, the completion of this paper will aid the reader and

myself in taking a critical position in regards to those deeply established knowledge

systems, and to see with friendlier eyes systems which are not usual in our academic

practice.

Further investigation into the clash of different discourses in Green Grass, Running

Water will involve the technological narration allowed by photography. Chapter 4 will

delve into the potential narrative power that pictographic images give to the

photographer/storyteller and their implications in the weaving of the story and in the

discursive battle that occurs based on this technology. There are several episodes in the

novel in which photography plays a major symbolic role in combating stereotypes related

to Native Americans, reinforcing them and granting characters power of representation. I

want to point out that whoever has the authority to allow or deny the framing, taking and

developing of pictures bears an extreme narrative advantage over those who are submitted

to this authority, and that whoever transgresses that sovereignty holds even greater

symbolic power. Here, I refer to the practice of employing photography to register an image

of Native Americans as primitive and stuck in the past, practice that has been used,

willingly or not, for more than a century to manifest a view of these individuals that does

not allow them to represent themselves in their cultural particularities without being framed

as savages. The text of Green Grass, Running Water will serve as evidence of the

performatic deconstruction Thomas King enacts in orther to combat and counter those

immobilizing views, thus allowing Natives to have a voice of their own and to regain the

power of self-representation in the literary text.

Before starting the exposition of those ideas, some brief comments on terminology

are necessary. I have so far mentioned three different forms to refer to the peoples who are

the object of this work: Native American, Native and Indian. Different critics use distinct

terms to refer to the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Some are more, some are less

appropriate (again, depending on the critic), but there is no term that is ultimate or that is

not somehow flawed in encompassing these groups. I have chosen Native American (and

sometimes the shorter ‘Native’) because it seems to be the most usual term among the top

scholars on the subject (Native American Literature). I will, therefore, employ this term to

refer to 1) the various tribes and communities present in the territories of the United States

of America and Canada which are either governmentally recognized as Native

American/Indian/aboriginal (depending on the legislation) or who claim to be a formally

established group, e.g. Cherokee, Blackfoot, Chippewa, Cheyenne, etc; 2) the individuals

who are or consider themselves to be members of these groups, such as Thomas King

himself; and 3) the collective array of cultural practices subsumed in the problematic and

controversial category of Pan-Indianism.

Pan-Indianism, primarily a movement of integration and solidarity among tribes and

aboriginal groups of the Americas, can also be taken as a set of practices and beliefs

common to most or many of them – not to one specific group, nor to all of them, but as a

theoretical category that allows academic investigation to handle far encompassing issues.

It is a problematic term because generalizations can sometimes erase cultural particularities

that are key to a specific group, and it is controversial because Pan-Indianism is sometimes

employed in the decharacterization of individuals who can, then, be treated as part of a

homogeneous mass. It is, however, a concept that we have at hand and that must serve for

now.

Therefore, Native American will contrast with Indian so that this last refers to those

commonplace, derogative and/or stereotypical views commonly seen in western movies,

popular jokes and dime novels that depict individuals as savage, primitive, limited,

secondary, prone to be shot and killed at the heroes discretion. I hope to be able to leave it

clear the contrast between the uses of Native American and Indian clear throughout my

writing. Should I fail, let us settle for now that Native American stands as a politically

correct and (as far as possible) neutral term, and Indian as the negative term, representative

of some view of inferiority or oppression.

The path I have chosen to elaborate on the deconstruction, through the pages of

Green Grass, Running Water, of the derogative term Indian begins with some

considerations about the academic and scientific instrument of giving names to investigated

subjects and their subsequent organization and cataloguing under restraining concepts that

can be employed to exert power over material reality. It is to the dynamics of naming and

organizing that I now turn in order to begin my exposition.

1. THE POWER OF NAMING AND ORGANIZING

Naming means leaving a mark. Giving a name is one of the first of many influences

that parents will have over a child, a legacy that will accompany that person for (in most

cases, at least) their whole lives. Names carry meaning, stories, emotional investment.

Though some may choose their offspring's names by flipping randomly the pages of the

phonebook or by raffling and mixing parts of famous people's names, they always tell us

something about that individual's life story. It is part of our identity to try and find out the

origins and ancient meanings of those words people use to refer to us and call us. It is also a

major part of one's identity how fiercely one fights to defend him- or herself against

demeaning distortions and nicknames, for they seem to posit a threat to a cherished part of

ourselves.

This means, therefore, that we can be attacked through a misnomer. Nicknames,

aliases and puns are examples of how a person can employ someone else's name(s) in order

to disrupt and influence that person's position. Ultimately, naming and misnaming mean

exerting power over others.

It is not, however, only through proper names that this power can be exerted. Where

these names fit, in what category they go and how appropriate they sound are also questions

that call for decisions. Who decides is, as I will attempt to demonstrate further on, the one

who is in a superior stance, someone who has classificatory powers and, therefore, has a

large amount of control over others. In short, as Zygmunt Bauman posits, “classify[ing]

consists in the act of inclusion and exclusion”

(BAUMAN, 1999, p. 11). Furthermore, it

means “to give the world a structure: to manipulate its probabilities, to make some events

more likely than some others; to behave as if events were not random, or to limit or

eliminate randomness of events” (BAUMAN, 1999, p. 9). As we are about to see in Green

Grass, Running Water, this ability to say who belongs to a certain group and who does not

demonstrates who holds the discursive power of defining the position of the Other.

The focus here is on the clash between the modern/positivist/Cartesian modes of

classification employed in the domination of Natives and Native discourse, and how

All quotations of Zygmunt Bauman were obtained from the texts in Portuguese. They appear here in English

with my translations, aided by excerpts from Google Books available in <http://books.google.com/books>.

Thomas King performatively counters these processes in order to demonstrate resistance on

the part of the Native towards their aggression. This reassessment of Western mechanisms

of domination begins with one of the bases of Western thought: the Christian myth of

creation.

1.1 Biblical Reorganizations

"And the Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be

alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him."

Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the

field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to

see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called

each living creature, that was its name.

So Adam gave names to all the cattle, to the birds of the air,

and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not

found a helper comparable to him.

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and

he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh

in its place.

Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He

made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

And Adam said:

"This is now bone of my bones

And flesh of my flesh;

She shall be called Woman,

Because she was taken out of Man."" (The Holy Bible,

Genesis, p. 2)

The gift of classification was granted to Adam by the Lord God Himself. Whatever

he named things, thus they were to be called for eternity, vouchsafed by the Almighty. At

least, according to the Judeo-Christian myth of creation. At least, until Thomas King offers

a retelling of the biblical episodes in the Garden of Eden and reassesses Adam's gift for

naming:

"Ahdamn is busy. He is naming everything.

You are a microwave oven, Ahdamn tells the Elk.

Nope, says that Elk. Try again.

You are a garage sale, Ahdamn tells the Bear.

We got to get you some glasses, says the Bear.

You are a telephone book, Ahdamn tells the Cedar Tree.

You're getting closer, says the Cedar Tree.

You are a cheeseburger, Ahdamn tells Old Coyote.

It must be time for lunch, says Old Coyote" (KING, 1993, p. 41).

At many levels, this passage sets the contentions between the Western

epistemological view and the Native perspective King offers us. In the first place, the

humor employed in depicting Adam/Ahdamn works to undermine the all-encompassing,

one-way, male-dominant power described in the biblical passage. The chain of power is

evident, with God granting everything, Adam receiving that power to call 'whatever' he

wants 'whatever' he likes, the animals remaining passive throughout the whole process of

classification, and Woman, at the last moment, being interspersed in between these last two

in importance. This structure is in accordance with the modern knowledge regimes in which

knowledge acquisition/construction is linear and hierarchized, history is progressive and

telos-oriented and the observer dictates, through discursive monopoly, the status of the

other. The fact that, in Green Grass, Running Water, the very name of that once powerful

biblical figure is reduced to a laughable swearword evidences an attack on this

epistemological structure, pointing to an attempt in the storytelling process to question that

authority.

A second aspect of the above-mentioned passage that contends two discursive

points of view is in the very narrative construction of the two stories. In the Bible, narration

occurs monovoicedly, submitted to a single will, harmonious under an organic order. In

King's proposition, authority is shared with the simple distribution of voices: the animals

and the plants talk back. Instead of passively submitting to Ahdamn's classificatory frenzy,

the subjects deny his prerogative and some of them even risk giving advice, in a clear

attempt to disallow him and ridicule his efforts. The plurality of voices talking back to

Ahdamn overwhelms him even in relation to the extension of sentences. He is limited to a

pathetic effort of randomly guessing the names of things ('You are a cheeseburger'), while

the animals and the Cedar Tree become involved in a pleasant and comic game of mocking

('It must be time for lunch, says Old Coyote').

The aspect of guessing instead of naming points to a third element in King's

narrative in which the Western episteme is questioned. In the biblical passage, things

practically come into existence as soon as the master names them and agrees to their level

of importance (or of comparability to him). Theses concepts are at the base of the modern

scientific and historical propositions on the formation of knowledge: things only exist as

long as they have been recognized by a scientific authority and given a category by a

Cartesian process of inclusion and exclusion. Truth is attained at the moment of

classification, in which the essence of the subject is supposed to have been captured. This

truth is adamant, even metaphysical, and any later reconsideration of that subject's status is

automatically attributed to a miscalculation in the previous analysis, and the authority is

shifted to the new one. In other words, this mechanics of thought preaches that things are

not there and we give names to them; they are there because we name them. In Green

Grass, Running Water, however, Ahdamn fails in relating with things around him because

he ignores their capacity for enunciation, treating them as mere objects subject to his will.

The narrative assumes that the animals, for instance, have a complex condition previous to

man's discourse about them. The implications of this consideration strike deeply into

Western logocentric rationale, for in order to access this condition previous to discourse,

one must negotiate meaning instead of attributing it.

One last point that I want to investigate in the passages above is the use of capital

letters in the texts. In the Bible, besides proper names, we have Man, Woman and God's

variations (Lord, He, His, Him, Almighty, etc) in capitals, and the animals are referred to in

lower case. In the novel, on the other hand, Elk, Bear and Old Coyote are promoted to full-

scale, individual statuses by having their names capitalized. This small detail demonstrates

how the literary text unveils the authoritarian status of man in relation to the other beings in

the Christian myth of creation, in contrast with the various Native myths of creation, which

demonstrate a much greater recognition of animals and vegetal matter. We cannot, of

course, generalize all Native American myths, for they are many and extremely diverse in

their specificities. We can, nevertheless, analyze how Thomas King offers us many mythic

elements in the novel. It is to these elements that I now turn.

1.2 Deeper into biblical parodies: God as a would-be storyteller

The oral characteristics of narration in Green Grass, Running Water seem quite

evident. We have, for instance, the colloquial word use of the different narrators (so…; I

says; I can tell you that, etc) and metanarrative passages like 'that's the way it happens in

oral stories, I says' (KING, 1993, p. 391). Though I will not investigate in details here the

aspects of storytelling, at this point it is worth briefly mentioning the basic structure of

narration in the novel. The initial sentences already set the tone of the story: 'So. In the

beginning, there was nothing. Just the water' (KING, 1993, p. 1). This initial storyteller will

remain throughout the book as one of the main narrators. He is only one of them because he

will share the construction of the tale with many others, including the trickster Coyote and

God himself.

Once Coyote and the original narrator are introduced as the ones guiding the

developments of the story, Coyote has a dream; a silly dream, in fact. A silly dream that

wants to be Coyote. Since that silly dream cannot be Coyote, according to Coyote, he

suggests whether that dream would consider being a dog, instead, to which it agrees. That

dream is so silly, though, that it gets everything backwards. Rather than becoming dog, that

backward dream becomes god. At first, it looks like trouble, but it gets worse, for god-

dream does not like being little. It wants to be big, a big god, and it shouts so loud that

Coyote ends up conceding to its wish. Thus it finally becomes G O D (written like this in

the original, with three interspaced capital letters and smaller font).

Thus God the storyteller is created. He joins the tale and starts wreaking havoc

everywhere, to Coyote's enjoyment and the other narrator's demise, since he is telling the

story specifically to try and fix the world, not to bring it more trouble.

The construction of God's character in this particular way gives us a great deal of

information on how to read his importance in the plot. First of all, his creation and, by

extension, all of the Christian world were a mere accident, a moment of thoughtlessness on

the part of Coyote. Second, he has no manners, is bossy and loud and refuses to be talked

back into inexistence. Third, as is very common in Native American storytelling structure,

once a story has been told, it cannot be called back. Coyote narrated God into existence and

he cannot take it back. God's actions, and their consequences, must be fought in the

battlefield: at the moment of telling the story. Thus God the narrator and God the character

will mingle in the plot and fight to impose their order of things onto the world. On the other

hand we will have a plethora of Native characters voicing their points of view and

attempting to resist Christian preaching, offering alternatives to those discourses. The

dynamics of this narrative process allows the reader to visualize different discursive

positions in contention, and that is what we will analyze.

One of the Native characters who helps tell an alternative myth of creation to the

Christian one is, in fact, a fourfold character. First/Changing/Thought/Old Woman appears

in the mythic passages of the novel and enacts scenes with a highly symbolic charge. She (I

will call them all 'she', for they play a similar role and follow one another in the same role)

stars a tale in which she inadvertedly falls off the edge of the world and, after ending up

landing on grandmother Turtle's back, decides that there should be some land around for

people to land on. Thus, together, they collect some mud and put it on grandmother Turtle's

back so that it grows big and beautiful all around. From then on, things will be created on

that earth and around the water that the turtle was swimming in. Everything is harmonious

until Old Coyote suggests: “That is beautiful […] but what we really need is a garden”

(KING, 1993, p. 39). Here two myths of creation are intertwined. In contrast with the

Christian myth, with its male centrality and authoritativeness over everything, the Native

perspective brings a woman as the central creator. This matricentrality is highlighted by

scholar and writer Paula Gunn Allen when she refers to a Keres Pueblo theology:

"Central to Keres theology is the basic idea of the Creatrix as She Who Thinks

rather than She Who Bears, a woman as creation thinker and female thought as

origin of material and nonmaterial reality. In this epistemology, the perception of

female power as confined to maternity is a limit on the power inherent in

femininity. But "she is the supreme Spirit, … both Mother and Father to all

people and to all creatures"" (ALLEN, 1992, p. 15).

This gynocentric proposal of Green Grass, Running Water has several

consequences when contrasted with Western male-centered systems and institutions. For

now, it suffices to say that First Woman ends up in that Garden mentioned by Old Coyote,

and there she has a chance to confront Adam/Ahdamn and God for authority over the

world. After the previously mentioned failure on the part of Ahdamn to classify and,

therefore, hold sway over the inhabitants of the garden, we have an episode in which First

Woman bumps into God:

"I'm G O D, say G O D. And I am almost as good as Coyote.

Funny, says First Woman. You remind me of a dog.

And just so we keep things straight, says that G O D, this is my world and this is

my garden.

Your garden, says First Woman. You must be dreaming. And that one takes a

big bite of those nice red apples.

Don't eat my nice red apples, says that G O D.

I'll just have a little of this chicken, if I may, says Old Coyote.

Your apples! says First Woman, and she gives a nice red apple to Ahdamn.

Yes, says that G O D, and that one waves his hands around. All this stuff is

mine. I made it.

News to me, says First Woman. But there's plenty of good stuff here. We can

share it. You want some fried chicken?" (KING, 1993, p. 72-73).

The two male characters are either bossy or simply passive. First Woman's

willingness to share is contrasted with God's stinginess and self-centeredness. The

reenactment of the biblical episode of the apple and the Fall puts Ahdamn in a secondary,

passive role. The Fall from Paradise, actually, does not occur; it is replaced by something

we might call the Leaving of Paradise, and it goes like this:

"No point in having a grouchy G O D for a neighbor.

And First Woman and Ahdamn leave the garden.

All the animals leave the garden.

[…]

You can't leave my garden, that G O D says to First Woman. You can't leave

because I'm kicking you out" (KING, 1993, p.74)

They leave willingly, with First Woman leading Ahdamn and the animals away

from God's control. Not only does he lose credit for creating the garden, he is devoid of the

privileges of omnipotence and knowledge, since he does not even have the information on

the ownership of the garden. From the passages above we can perceive King's proposals of

depicting the Christian principles in a raw comic perspective and of offering an alternative,

more democratic way of sharing mythic representations on the origins of the world.

According to Allen, this contrast between different creator deities tells much regarding

Western and Native worldviews. She illustrates disparity by referring to yet another Native

myth of creation, a Cheyenne tale, in which Maheo, the All Spirit, creates four things out of

the void – the water, the light, the sky-air and the peoples of the water. From that point on,

he has no more power to make things out of nothing, so he needs the help of the other

creatures to further alter and improve the world. Just like First Woman, Maheo cannot do

everything by himself and has to share responsibility over creating and maintaining the

world. For Allen, he

"[…] has limited power as well as a sense of proportion and respect for the

powers of the creatures. Contrast this spirit with the Judeo-Christian God, who

makes everything and tells everything how it may and may not function if it is to

gain his respect and blessing and whose commandments make no allowance for

change or circumstance. The American Indian universe is based on dynamic

self-esteem, while the Christian universe is based on a sense of separation and

loss. For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process

of ongoing creation makes all things sacred" (ALLEN, 1992, p. 57).

Though I disagree quite strongly with Allen's essentialist view that for all American

Indians all things are sacred, I believe that her position expresses perfectly the tension

underlying the mythic episodes of Green Grass, Running Water. Besides symbolically

countering the discursive apparatuses of domination employed for colonial purposes, i.e.

single-handedly naming and organizing, King's text aims at deconstructing the binary logic

of Eurocentric thought in which creature responds to creator in a one-way process. The

workings of these apparatuses of domination function primarily with a solid definition of

the Other – in this case, the Indian. The symbolic structures described above offer an

assessment on the ways a monolithic image of the Indian was created in order for it have a

single voice: that of a dying Other.

In order for these strategies to work, all ambivalence must be destroyed. The Indian

must be created discursively by a classificatory effort and there must not be any kind of

opening for misinterpretation as to who he is. This monolithic representation is, according

to Bauman, a paramount step in the application of institutional powers over a certain group.

Only once that group's definition has been established and its members identified can

executive power be directed towards controlling and influencing it. Therefore, this logic

must have

“the monotheistic faiths coupled with Manichean, black-and-white world visions

are about the last fortresses of the “mono”: of one truth, one way, one life

formula – of adamant and pugnacious certainty and self-confidence; the last

shelters of seekers of clarity, purity and freedom from doubt and indecision”

(BAUMAN, 2006, p. 147-148).

No ambivalence is allowed in a monotheistic discourse that preaches for organic

truths. In order for it to prevail, absolute order must be maintained, which means that no

possible diversion from the official classification can be discursively accepted. The order of

the day is "'excluding the middle', suppressing or exterminating everything ambiguous,

everything that sits astride the barricade and thus compromises the vital distinction between

inside and outside" (BAUMAN, 1999, p. 33). As we will see further in the chapter

dedicated to mediatic representations of the Indian, indigenous characters have been

depicted in the last centuries as static either/or individuals – either unassimilated dying

savages or assimilated conquered people who lost their connection with the land. No

ambivalence, no middle term, no allowance to Natives such as Paula Gunn Allen or

Thomas King himself (just to name the two mentioned here) who enjoy highly hybridized

positions in the academic as well as in the tribal world. These frontier personifications of

what should fall into static classifications are what undermine the monotheistic beliefs

mentioned by Bauman. If there are a few Natives who do not conform to the prescribed

dying savage or the acculturized assimilated former savage, then there must be a fissure in

the classification of Indian, which would allow for a revision in the construction of identity

for whole communities that have already been defined as a nuisance and are only expected

to perish any time soon.

In Green Grass, Running Water, we can perceive the resistance of this anti-

ambivalence discourse being torn down by a narrative that considers the Judeo-Christian

myth as just one among many possible accounts. The offer of multiple possibilities of

chronicling the world is aligned with Arnold Krupat's view on the intersection of different

points of view. According to him, "no one narrative will do; stories of homogenization and

decline must interact and intersect with stories of invention and emergence, and

equivalently for the world, the text, and the critic" (KRUPAT, 1992, p. 121-122). It is

interesting that Krupat should mention an interaction of narratives occurring at the level of

the text and also for the critic. His proposal of an ethnocritical approach to Native

epistemological thinking encompasses a shift from a Western mode of investigating

Western and Native texts to a Western and Native way of interpreting Western and Native

productions. My concern here is to assess whether Thomas King builds such a democratic

account of the interweaving of cultures or if he ends up silencing a perspective other than a

Native one. In order to do that, we need to further examine the inversions/reassessments

proposed in the book. I will do so by elaborating on King's appropriation of white

characters who were employed in the past to represent domination over Natives.

1.3 Decolonizing Names

We could comment on an array of characters in literature, cinema and music who

represent domination of white male types over Natives. I will focus, however, on some of

those which figure in Green Grass, Running Water and can offer a general view on the

symbolic inversions worked on them. Let us begin with a cowboy story.

1.3.1 Tonto and The Lone Ranger

Six Texas Rangers rode in the sun;

Six men of justice rode into an ambush,

and dead were all but one.

One lone survivor lay on the trail;

Found there by Tonto, the brave Injun Tonto,

he lived to tell the tale.

The epigraph above is part of the opening song for the television series from the 40s

and 50s entitled The Lone Ranger. As the song goes, one ranger survives an attack by evil

outlaws and, thanks to the help of the Injun Tonto, manages to get back on his feet to fight

for justice once again. Together, the self-righteous white cowboy and his Indian sidekick

set off to correct the world by killing all sorts of useless pariahs, from stagecoach robbers to

unyielding savages. The success of the 1936 novel and the television adaptation was such

that more than a dozen sequels exist for the original story and versions were produced in

animation, TV series and, more recently, videogames. In none of them is Tonto more than

an obedient assistant to the cowboy.

The participation of this dynamic duo in Green Grass, Running Water occurs in the

mythic passages in which First/Changing/Thought/Old Woman floats around the universe

interacting with things around her, weaving stories of origin and creation. In one of her

voyages with Ahdamn, she ends up being captured by a group of rangers looking for the

Indians who were supposed to have killed their friends. Once caught, she cuts some holes

in a black piece of cloth and wears it as a mask to simulate the Lone Ranger's disguise

(which today would most certainly remind us of Zorro's mask). Having been fooled by her

dissimulation, the rangers recognize their comrade and offer to kill that companion of hers,

Ahdamn, who is taken for an Indian and is an obvious nuisance. In order to protect him,

First Woman 'disguises' him as her sidekick Tonto:

"[says one of the live rangers,] I'll just shoot this Indian for you.

No, no, says First Woman. That's my Indian friend. He helped save me from the

rangers.

You mean the Indians, don't you? says those rangers.

That's right, says First Woman with the mask on. His name is Tonto.

That's a stupid name, says those rangers. Maybe we should call him Little

Beaver or Chingachgook or Blue Duck.

No, says First Woman, his name is Tonto.

Yes, says Ahdamn, who is holding his knees from banging together, my name is

Tonto.

Okay, says those rangers, but don't say we didn't try to help. And they gallop off,

looking for Indians and buffalo and poor people and other good things to kill"

(KING, 1993, p. 76).

In the excerpt above Ahdamn demonstrates relief for playing the part of the

subaltern companion to the main character. First Woman submits him to personifying the

stereotypical Indian aide, and he must abide and be thankful in order to be saved from death

at the hands of the keepers of law and order. The signification of names here is paramount.

The Indian stereotype is so foolish that even the rangers consider the name Tonto stupid.

This ironic tone in the narrative is intensified by a ranger's gullible understanding of Native

names: his critical proposal is to drop the unsuiting Tonto for a more Indian name like

Little Beaver or Blue Duck.

This situation illustrates the strategy of erasing Native individuality through name

ridiculing. Platitudes regarding animal references work to distance the actual symbolism of,

for instance, beaver and duck and to approximate them with that naturalness inherent, in

Western discourse, to aboriginal peoples. Once an individual has been identified by any

variation of the formula [adjective + any animal] (e.g. Screeching Eagle, Jumping Otter,

Lazy Dog), notwithstanding its positive importance, in this kind of discourse it assumes a

level of negativity. Having been denied the positivity of a name, the fake representation (for

that is everything that remains) is emptied of power and, as Paula Gunn Allen sentences:

"an Indian without a name is powerless indeed" (ALLEN, 1992, p. 142).

The literary inversion enacted by First Woman serves to counter the long-lasting

and formerly unquestioned narrative of Tonto's submission to the white master. She puts

herself in the dominating position and disempowers Ahdamn and the tradition of

oppression he represents. What is yet more ironic is that Ahdamn is obliged to personify

that constructed dying Indian in order to survive.

Having seen how the heroic Lone Ranger and his partner Tonto have the symbolism

of their names reinvented, I now turn to the analysis of another famous fictional character;

this time, a literary one.

1.3.2 Friday and Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is an entrepreneur – a vagabond one at that. Not

the kind that applies his industry in the manufacture of goods or the intricacies of trade, but

one who sets off onto the seas and beyond to seek his fortune. In Defoe's novel, Crusoe is

an explorer, a kind of English conquistador, who ends up on the shores of Brazil and settles

there to raise an estate as a landowner. The story is, naturally, full of adventures and the

overcoming of challenges. The fantastic idea of accidentally washing ashore a new wild

land, full of unknown mysteries and potentialities, and dominating it by bringing it into the

light of civilization permeates the whole novel. In order to do that it is necessary,

obviously, to subjugate some savage.

I say obviously because Robinson Crusoe seems to consider it paramount to

dominate a native in order for his success to be attained. Moreover, he accomplishes it with

an astounding naturality, as if the power of his presence were enough for the domination to

be complete. Let us see how he imagines he will conquer the savage he has spotted:

"I thought in my sleep that he came running into my little thick grove, before my

fortification, to hide himself; and that I, seeing him alone and not perceiving that

the other sought him that way, showed myself to him, and smiling upon him,

encouraged him; that he kneeled down to me, seeming to pray me to assist him;

upon which I showed my ladder, made him go up, and carried him into my cave,

and he became my servant" (DEFOE, 1994, p. 195).

Apparently, nothing could be easier. His simple appearance and gesticulation are

enough to make the savage kneel down and pray to him for assistance. The authoritarian

verbs Robinson Crusoe employs ('made' him go up; 'carried' him into the cave) are also

interesting, for they are not met with the smallest trace of resistance. The reader might, of

course, deduce that it is just a dream, that the conqueror is simply fantasizing about how

easy it would be to accomplish his conquest, which is exactly the impression the narrative

gives. The description of the dream may be interpreted as a fictional technique to leave the

idea in suspension, to let the unveiling of events eventually show whether Crusoe is thus

successful or not. When the time actually comes for him to exert his leadership over the

savage, things turn out to be as easy, as he dreamed, if not easier:

"I began to speak to him and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him

know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life; I called him

so for the memory of the time; I likewise taught him to say "Master," and then

let him know that was to be my name; I likewise taught him to say "yes" and

"no" and to know the meaning of them; I gave him some milk in an earthen pot

and let him see me drink it before and sop my bread in it; and I gave him a cake

of bread to do the like, which he quickly complied with, and made signs that it

was very good for him" (DEFOE, 1994, p. 203).

The docility and passivity of the now named Friday fit perfectly in Crusoe's

expectations of his reaction. Notwithstanding the easy communication established at first,

no effort is made to try and figure out his real name; for, in that case, domination would not

be carried out properly. Crusoe's name is also not given. It remains protected, in his

possession, and the alias 'Master' is produced. All things considered, once the first steps

have been taken in the direction of civilizing the savage, he complies and agrees that it was

good for him.

The beauty and strength of Daniel Defoe's novel are unquestioned. The narrator's

storytelling skills offer a delightful and immersing experience, to the point of credence –

and this is exactly the most dangerous attribute of the representations contained in the

novel. The credibility of the information produced in the story is solicited to the reader

from the beginning, in an editor's disclaimer, disguised as preface:

"The editor believes the thing to be just a history of fact; neither is there any

appearance of fiction in it. And however thinks, because all such things are

disputed, that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion, as to the instruction

of the reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without further

compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication"

(DEFOE, 1994, p. 7).

The contents of the story are presented as fact, to the benefit of the reader and of the

world. Though it is obvious that the preface has a market appeal composition, a common

resource in bibliographical productions, the jeopardy to the representation of Natives is

twofold: the literary/symbolical depiction of Friday is derogatory, and it is presented as

empirically verified reality.

To that representation, Thomas King provides an ironic shift. In Green Grass,

Running Water we have, first of all, a comic denial from the part of the Native (Thought

Woman, this time) to be named by Robinson Crusoe:

"So pretty soon Robinson Crusoe comes walking along and that one looks at

Thought Woman. And he looks at her again. Thank God! says Robinson Crusoe.

It's Friday!

No, says Thought Woman. It's Wednesday" (KING, 1993, p. 325).

She ridicules the immediacy with which the shipwrecked shouts his clamor of

possession over the recently encountered Native. Thought Woman, while denying

discursive voice to a representative of colonization, keeps to herself the prerogative of

naming. She uses this power to play with Crusoe, at first mocking him and, then, inverting

roles of domination. The following excerpt poses a counterpoint to the passage in Daniel

Defoe's novel in which the main character is making lists about the good and bad points of

being shipwrecked alone in a distant island:

"Under the good points, says Robinson Crusoe, the climate is so mild and

pleasant, I do not need clothes.

[…]

Under the bad points, says Robinson Crusoe, as a civilized white man, it has

been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and

protect.

What's the good point? says Thought Woman.

Now, you're here, says Robinson Crusoe.

[…]

Have you got it straight? says Robinson Crusoe.

Sure, says Thought Woman, I'll be Robinson Crusoe. You can be Friday.

But I don't want to be Friday, says Robinson Crusoe.

No point in being Robinson Crusoe all your life, says Thought Woman. It

couldn't be much fun" (KING, 1993, p. 325-326).

What King is accomplishing here is to undermine a tradition denounced by Gerald

Vizenor in which a Western voice unilaterally catalogues and appropriates the Native. For

Vizenor, a fake representation like Friday in Defoe's novel is not more than "an occidental

misnomer, an oversees enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or

communities" (VIZENOR, 1999, p, vii). He builds his theory around the idea that, since

actual colonialism is over, something else, subtler and less palpable, remains that holds

sway over symbolic representations on the Native. This something else would be those

manifest manners, a set of simulations and cultural patterns built at the discursive and

institutional levels to maintain the status quo in regards to the various degrees of

subalternity that aboriginous peoples are subject to in North America. Vizenor also posits

the roles of the artists and thinkers who must be in charge of countering those manifest

manners and denouncing their workings through cultural reappropriations and inversions.

To them he affords the alias of postindian warriors. In his words,

"manifest manners are the simulations of dominance; the notions and misnomers

that are read as the authentic and sustained as representations of Native

American Indians. The postindian warriors are new indications of a narrative

recreation, the simulations that overcome the manifest manners of dominance"

(VIZENOR, 1999, p. 5-6).

In this sense, Thomas King can be declared a postindian warrior, for his work

locates the simulations of dominance, appropriates them and rewrites them with a new

symbolic charge that gives back to the Native the power of self-representation. In the

above-mentioned passages, we can see the manifest manners at work in the depictions of

Tonto and Friday as absences of authentic Native American material and its substitution for

an absence of values and self-determination. By parodying biblical passages, portraying

Ahdamn as a subaltern dying Other in the role of Tonto, and ridiculing Robinson Crusoe's

endeavor to master Friday, the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water is working for the

principles of what Vizenor calls a literature of survivance.

For Vizenor, there is a whole literary tradition of dominance that begins as soon as

the first fictionalizations of the Native were produced. This tradition has established a wide

variety of canonical concepts that serve to (mis)interpret traditional values. Among them is

the notion that oral advances to written literature, in a movement to try and disarticulate the

strengthening and healing powers of stories. Also, the discursive practice of the literatures

of dominance has produced the simulacra of the possible classifications of the Native, as

either the good savage or the dying savage. These elements are the result of an oppressive

practice that can be fought, according to Vizenor, with an opposing strategy, i.e., a

literature of survivance. As he posits,

"survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance, not a mere reaction,

or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance,

tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of

an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy" (VIZENOR, 1999, p.

vii).

In order to subvert the tradition of dominance and offer a variety of literature of

survivance, the literary text first situates the portrayal of the allegorical manifest manners.

In the depiction of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the manifest manners surface in the

simulation of the good savage. The element of subordination is in the tradition of stories

that depict the white man communing with the Native world, absorbing the qualities of

innocence/nakedness/naturalness of the savage and abandoning him to death. The white

man, then, returns to his world, now as a superior character for having incorporated the

good aspects of both universes. This imagery, present in countless dime novels, TV shows,

movies, bureaucratic memos, political speeches, bill propositions and the like, has survived

for centuries and has fed all variations of cultural and political enterprises sentencing the

imminent death of the Native and its inevitability. Green Grass, Running Water challenges,

through Thought Woman, the image of Natives having a functionality in the course of

imperial domination, being doomed to play the roles of aides to the conquerors and then

perishing as soon as their use has expired. Once she has interfered with Crusoe's list

making and name giving, Thought Woman goes back to her business: "All things

considered, says Thought Woman, I'd rather be floating. And she dives into the ocean and

floats away" (KING, 1993, p. 326). The simple fact of turning her back to the shipwrecked

and his tiny part in her story demonstrates that his role is quite minor; she can go on,

leaving him behind, to keep weaving her story in her fashion.

Thus, we have from the analysis of the participations of Robinson Crusoe and

Friday in Green Grass, Running Water that they have their former, traditional

representations reinvented. Thought Woman positions herself in the dominant part of

discourse and symbolically puts Crusoe in the position of minor part in the bigger picture,

which is her lead in the narration of a creation story. In this section we also approached

Gerald Vizenor's theory on manifest manners and the literatures of dominance and

survivance. This theory will aid us in the assessment of yet another influent Western novel

that figures in Thomas King's text investigated here – Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby

Dick.

1.3.3 The Great Female Black Whale

'Call me Ishmael'. This is the opening sentence for Melville's novel Moby Dick,

which features Ishmael, an able-bodied seaman, and the tyrannical captain Ahab of the

whaler Pequod with his monomaniac pursuit of the great whale who sank his last ship and

severed his leg. Ishmael is also the young man who approaches Changing Woman (at this

point she goes by this name) aboard the Pequod in Green Grass, Running Water and

questions her about her name, demanding that she fit in the story:

"Call me Ishamel, says the young man. What's your favorite month?

They're all fine, says Changing Woman.

Oh dear, says the young man, looking through a book. Let's try again. What's

your name?

Changing Woman.

That won't do either, says the young man, and he quickly thumbs through the

book again. Here, he says, poking a page with his finger. Queequeg. I'll call you

Queequeg. This book has a Queequeg in it, and this story is supposed to have a

Queequeg in it, but I've looked all over the ship and there aren't any Queequegs.

I hope you don't mind.

Ishmael is a nice name, says Changing Woman.

But we already have an Ishmael, says Ishamel. And we do so need a Queequeg.

Oh, okay, says Changing Woman" (KING, 1993, p. 218).

In this literary reference we have a major shift from the performative approach

given by King in relation to the previous examples. Here Changing Woman, facing

Ishmael's plea for acquiescence, conforms to the classification given to her according to the

book he is based on to tell his story. The book, of course, is Moby Dick, originally narrated,

in most part, by Ishmael himself. However, Changing Woman's acceptance of being named

Queequeg is by no means a demonstration of conformity or subjugation to the white

narrator. She does, in many levels, resist the symbolic discourse underlying Moby Dick's

composition.

Although many layers of interpretation exist for Melville's story, one of its

backbones is the allegoric struggle of the Eurocentric logic with the forces of nature and the

unknown, the forces that resist human domination. Ahab is the male European conqueror,

obsessed with power and control, who employs all means at his disposal, from

technological to human resources, to satisfy his whims. It does not matter if the cost is his

ship, his leg, the lives of sailors or his own. If there is a power greater than his own (and

greater than the society he represents), it must be broken down and conquered – for the

good of mankind and, of course, himself. The challenge posed by the great white male

whale is the impetus for Ahab to guide the Pequod and its crew to the vast seas in a

metaphoric search for something powerful enough to resist human wits and persistence and,

ultimately, to the defeat of this entity. The point here is not to enter into minute details on

the symbolism of Melville's book, but to investigate the implications of its possible

interpretations in the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water.

First of all, let us return to Changing Woman's acquiescence to being named

Queequeg. It is worth noting that she offers a little resistance before agreeing to the alias,

trying to be amiable with Ishmael and complimenting his name. This slight attempt to

distort the original story, jeopardized by Ishmael's faithfulness to the written text,

demonstrates how Melville's and, by consequence, Western written literature is static.

Changing Woman is experiencing how authoritarian this literature is, and the extent to

which it resists retelling and reinvention. The contrast between the two narrative modes,

written and oral, serves as a reflection on the stagnant aspect of the book text and in face of

the dynamics of the storytelling text. Retellings of written texts could be considered an

exception but, as soon as their story is retold, they are held static again just like the original.

In short, Changing Woman implies that she can take a break from the telling of her

dynamic, updated (and, at any time, updateable) story and participate in the inert, passive

Western tale while it is told step by step as predicted and postulated.

The power of orality indicated here by Changing Woman is expressed by Paula

Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop, where she claims that this narrative tradition "is vital; it

heals itself and the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never

relinquishing its connection to the past. Its adaptability has always been required, as many

generations have experienced" (ALLEN, 1992, p. 45). The healing and adaptive powers of

storytelling described by Allen are offered to Ishmael, who refuses them to privilege the

Western written form, thus letting it enact its predicted course of events. Changing Woman

offers a hybrid narration pattern, while Ishmael denies the possibility and sticks stubbornly

to the book.

A second aspect of the above-mentioned excerpt that points to a questioning of the

narrative of Eurocentric values offered by Moby Dick is in regards to the characterization of

the savage Queequeg. This is how he first figures in Melville text:

'"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the

cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco

ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at

that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the

bed I ran up to him.

"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't harm a

hair of your head."

"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that infernal

harpooneer was a cannibal?"

"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads around town?--

but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here--you sabbee me, I

sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"

"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up

in bed.

"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing

the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and

charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on

the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been

making about, thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has

just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a

sober cannibal than a drunken Christian' (Melville, 2008, p. 38-39).

Though the final part of the quotation seems to indicate a quite sympathetic view of

the cannibal, the details of the description are astonishingly biased by a stereotypical image

of the savage. Queequeg growls, grunts, flourishes his tomahawk in a horrid fashion, poses

as an infernal harpooner peddlin' heads around town and speaks with the characteristic

depreciative Tonto talk (e.g. 'me sabbee plenty'). Nonetheless, the compliments given to

him in the last lines are considerably condescending, in a clear shift from the depiction of

the raging barbarian to the good savage. While allowing herself to be called Queequeg in

Green Grass, Running Water, Changing Woman does so in order to integrate the tale and

tag along the plot. With that strategy, she merges her storytelling ability to that of the

Western novelist and creates the hybrid narrative denied before. Her aim is to undermine

the tale of male conquest and superiority from within, in the character of Queequeg, the

stereotypical simulation of the savage.

Once she joins the account of the hunt for the whale, Changing Woman begins to

interfere in it to suit her thwarting intentions. She finds out the objective of the voyage, i.e.

killing whales, and questions captain Ahab as to the reasons of such an absurd endeavor, to

which he responds: "oil. Perfume, too. There's a big market in dog food, says Ahab. This is

a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don't like"

(KING, 1993, p. 219). Now she has definitely joined the storytelling process, interfering

directly in its progress. After noticing that the captain and his men are looking all over for a

whale to harpoon, she witnesses when they all shout the following line:

"blackwhaleblackwhaleblackwhalesbianblackwhalesbianblackwhale" (KING, 1993, p.

220). The subverting effect of the statement is huge and it disrupts the narrative completely.

Here is what follows the passage:

"Black whale? Yells Ahab. You mean white whale, don't you? Moby-Dick, the

great male white whale?

That's not a white whale, says Changing Woman. That's a female whale and

she's black.

Nonsense, says Ahab. It's Moby-Dick, the great white whale. You're mistaken,

says Changing Woman, I believe that is Moby-Jane, the Great Black Whale"

(KING, 1993, p. 220).

The major shift in belief systems underlying the clash between Moby-Dick's original

text and Changing Woman's experience with a hybrid narration of the same tale is in the

focus, in the first case, on a Eurocentric male-dominant discourse and, in the second one,

on a female-centered discourse. The text of Green Grass, Running Water inverts the

representation of the whale and proposes its characterization as incorporating various traits

of minority groups. Moby-Jane is a female, lesbian and black whale, all qualities

contrasting with Moby-Dick. The focus on a female archetype points to the matrifocality

described by Paula Gunn Allen in her theoretical work. That kind of approach will certainly

raise controversies as to the representations of women in theory. Allen's propositions

contrast in some levels with, for instance, Theresa de Lauretis' claim for the deconstruction

of the essentialising theorization on woman. For de Lauretis, theory must escape from

definitions of an archetypical essence of the female. Allen, on the other hand, insists that

the essence of woman be asserted and become dominant in the social order. For her,

"Some distinguishing features of a woman-centered social system include free

and easy sexuality and wide latitude in personal style. This latitude means that a

diversity of people, including gay males and lesbians, are not denied and are in

fact likely to be accorded honor. Also likely to be prominent in such systems are

nurturing, pacifist, and passive males (as defined by western minds) and self-

defining, assertive, decisive women" (ALLEN, 1992, p. 2).

Allen's position is towards a positivity of the feminine essence, in the place of a

negativity of the derogative aspects attributed by Western societies to that essence, as is the

case of de Lauretis and Julia Kristeva, for instance. I believe it is to that positivity that the

narrative of Green Grass, Running Water points. The narrative of Changing Woman

subverting the white male dominant discourse (through misnaming, mainly) and installing a

black lesbian female as protagonist of a tale is indicative of that. It contrasts diametrally

with what the tale of Moby-Dick represents in the social order, as expressed in Off the

Reservation: "a spiritual system based on dominance, status, exclusion of most members of

the community, pettiness, vengefulness, or jealousy [that] is not likely to yield the

magnificent spiritual benefits that so many seek" (ALLEN, 1998, p. 86). Thus, we have an

opposition of the patriarchal mode of thinking expressed in Melville's novel by what Allen

calls a matrifocal or gynocratic rule in cultural representation. The female Native deity

takes over the course storytelling and makes it predominantly hers. She, therefore, liberates

the once oppressive charge of the Western tale and weaves the patterns of a literature of

survivance.

Here we must raise the question as to whether King's novel allows some room for

the traditional discourse presented in Moby-Dick or if he obliterates it completely. My first

hypothesis is that it does blight that discourse. There seem to be very few elements of the

original voices of Ishmael and Ahab in their depictions in Green Grass, Running Water, for

their participation in the tale works only to bring up some aspects of Eurocentric thinking,

those that are to be dissected and criticized in the native text. They are not granted a voice

of their own; they seem to issue their lines from a unilateral narrative force, one aligned

with Thought Woman's needs for her to enact her subversion. The centralized discourse,

again, turns western representations into passive literary material. Looking back into this

chapter we can see that every single allusion to western referents analyzed have been turned

from main to accessory roles. God, Ahdamn, the Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael

and Ahab all incorporate strategic positions whose fate it is to be performatively

demolished, and their characters are discarded as soon as the subversion of western

principles has been ultimately accomplished. Their participations in the story are

interrupted abruptly and there is no form of follow-up or closure to most of them. Let us

take Ishmael and Ahab as an example. Following the blackwhalesbian episode quoted

above, Thought Woman swims over to Moby-Jane to have a chat with her and, before they

can go on talking, the whale charges towards the Pequod, hits it and it sinks. Then, she

says:

"There […] That should take care of that.

That was very clever of you, says Changing Woman as she watches the ship

sink. What happens to Ahab?

We do that every year, says Moby-Jane. He'll be back. He always comes back"

(KING, 1993, p. 221).

And that is the end of the sailors' participation in the story. The cyclical aspect

referred to by Moby-Jane reinforces the accessory roles of the crew of the Pequod. Having

said that in the following years the whaler and the sailors will be back to be destroyed

again, she leaves it clear that their only use is to serve as an example of the futility of

fighting her and what she represents. They can be persistent, stubborn, but to no avail – the

effort will be utterly useless, over and over again, nullified by the great black lesbian

whale's power.

I offer this episode as a sample of the authoritarian potential of the depiction of

western cultural material in Green Grass, Running Water. My concern here is to weigh

both forces working in the symbolic representations in the novel: one attempting to

deconstruct an oppressive tradition, and another, passive but widely permeating the book,

representative of this tradition. For now, we have seen that King's novel inverts western

productions that depict native material as less valuable, secondary, submissive to the

dominant Eurocentric discourse. In so doing, the literary text brings down that dominating

force and demonstrates how it was built upon a cultural tradition dedicated, knowingly or

not, to portraying the other as subaltern. Furthermore, those performative strategies

depicted in the novel question Judeo-Christian logic and belief and propose alternative

ways of weaving mythic stories of creation and morality.

Some questions, however, arise from this analysis that deserve attention here. Is it

possible for a literary discourse to shatter to pieces a previously hegemonic episteme and

flatten the cultural landscape so that nothing stands above anything else? If an oppressed

tradition arises to install itself as another possible enunciation, to what extent can it allow

that which oppresses it any room to keep enacting its authority? Can there be any room left

at all, or must the Eurocentric models be dislodged to a secondary role in cultural

representations? These are, certainly, not easy questions to answer. I will, therefore, attempt

to elaborate on how those inversions present in Green Grass, Running Water weigh in the

struggle of the forces contending in its lines – those forces that allowed for these questions

to be made.

I want to raise some possibilities before advancing the discussion. It seems that, so

far, I have demonstrated that King's novel destroys western paradigms for the benefit of a

Native perspective. Another possible position in regards to his symbolic inversions is

present in the work of Arnold Davidson, Priscilla Walton and Jennifer Andrews. In their

book Border Crossings: Thomas King's cultural inversions, they approach King's work (all

of his fictional books) in a way that also demonstrates how subversive his writing can be.

They analyze the multi-medial scope of his narratives and constantly praise the ingenious

questionings they propose. For most of their approach, they consider that King's fiction is

considerably democratic in its representations in regards to the clash between western and

Native cultures. They posit that, "although it is difficult for Native culture, as it finds voice

in King's text, to parry the European assaults because it refuses to posit a counternorm to

offset the thrust of the European norm, Native society nonetheless manifests an alternative

ideology" (DAVIDSON, WALTON, ANDREWS, 2003, p. 85). We have the impression

that the manifestation of an alternative ideology can be absolutely exempt of any

aggression towards the questioned ideology. Although I agree King's text provides that

alterna(rra)tive, I do not believe it can be innocent. The excerpts depicting Changing

Woman and Moby-Jane deconstructing Herman Melville's authoritarian novel certainly

affect reader's evaluation of it. I, for instance, have reassessed my personal interrogation of

Moby-Dick after witnessing that deconstruction. The refusal to posit a counternorm, as

expressed above, is suspicious once we take into consideration the aggressive stance an

oppressed discourse must take in order to install itself as an alternative.

All these elements point to the position I want to propose. If a literary enunciation

offers a perspective in which the previously hegemonic discourse is dislodged and

presented as one among many other possibilities, it must, ultimately, recognize the validity

of that discourse in the symbolic playing field. Likewise, if it is to install a different point

of view in relation to a predominant one, it must first combat its predecessor for some

territory from which to enunciate. This interaction is, invariably, aggressive in the interplay

of voices. The result of these considerations is a third alternative of interpretation of the

inversions provided by Green Grass, Running Water. Let us, for a moment, reassess the

appearance in the novel of western referents depicted above in the light of this new

hypothesis.

1.4 The power of renaming and reorganizing

Post-colonial theoretical approaches of literary texts seem to have the tendency of

considering post-colonial productions as democratic in their symbolic representations.

From the excerpts and questions above, however, we can see that, in the case of the

Thomas King's novel analyzed here, it may not be the case. Let us look further into western

cultural material portrayed in the novel.

I want to reassess, for a critical purpose, my position expressed above regarding the

possibility of King's text blighting the voices of western referents pictured in Green Grass,

Running Water. I said that none of the original voices of, for instance, Ishamel, Ahab or

Adam are present in the book. The assertion can prove to be unreal once we take into

consideration the necessary strategies employed in the process of decolonizing a dominant

discourse. If we consider that this is exactly what King's novel is attempting by outlining

such powerful pillars of western thinking as the Bible and one the most canonic literary

texts, we have also to concede that some margin is given for the discourses of those works

to enunciate from the novel we are investigating. I say some margin because, for obvious

reasons, it would be impossible for King to, for instance, reproduce the text of the Bible or

the entire lines of Robinson Crusoe or Moby-Dick in his book. What must be performed,

thus, is what I want to call the summoning of a previous discourse

into the present one so

that both can contend for locus. In the case of Green Grass, Running Water, although the

selection of biblical passages is surely biased by the author's intention of questioning

Judeo-Christian myths and beliefs, and that the excerpts from Defoe's and Melville's novels

were chosen specifically to question the traditional cultural apparatus responsible for false

simulations of the Native, it does not mean that those voices are absent in the novel. The

narrative force is centered on depicting them as flawed, but not utterly silent.

Some samples of how western material is summoned into the novel as part of the

symbolic play of different perspectives will provide a stronger idea of what I just posited.

Since I started with references to the Bible, let us see how biblical views are summoned

into the book. The follow-up of the mythical garden's episode occurs as following:

"Wait a minute, says that God. That's my garden. That's my stuff.

"Don't talk to me", I says. "You better talk to First Woman."

You bet I will, says that God.

[…]

Oh, oh, says First Woman when she sees that God land in her garden. Just when

we were getting things organized" (KING, 1993, p. 42).

The last line is an example of how First Woman summons a Judeo-Christian view

into the story. Although the setting has already been prepared for a comic questioning of

that view, the narrative nonetheless brings up the foundation of the logical-positivist

thinking, alluded to in the Bible, so dear to western societies. The line 'just when we were

getting things organized', added to what we have already seen as Adam/Ahdamn's

classificatory attempts, points the reader to that worldview in which the universe is

logically structured from top to bottom of an ordered hierarchy always already given and

metaphysically immutable. That view implies the potential of the rational organizing efforts

in the creation of order. Therefore, without so much as quoting the Bible, the text of Green

Grass, Running Water is requesting that the reader bring to mind what it represents, what it

stands for in regards to a broad critical understanding of the world. Only once that has been

accomplished can the novel begin to enact its subversive/inverting propositions. If it fails in

summoning the biblical discourse and its symbolic power into the narrative, it cannot

perform any sort of discursive struggle with it. If we consider that the novel succeeds in

offering the attentive reader room for considering the previously hegemonic locus, and

allows him/her to weigh the contending forces, we can also take this interplay as a fairly

democratic performatic procedure. Otherwise, structural interpretations of symbolic value

of the contention would not be valid or even possible. In order to further the analysis of the

clash between a Native perspective and a western positivist one, and to reinforce the ideas

proposed, we must investigate what underlies those lines quoted above.

On the one hand, we have the ordering principle, expressed by references to

ordering and organizing, as elaborated on by Zygmunt Bauman, in Modernidade Líquida:

"'Order', let me explain, means monotony, regularity, repetitiveness and

predictability; we call a setting 'orderly' if and only if some events are

considerably more likely to happen in it than their alternatives, while some other

events are highly unlikely to occur or are altogether out of question. This means

by the same token that someone somewhere (a personal or impersonal Supreme

Being) must interfere with the probabilities, manipulate them and load the dice,

seeing to it that events do not occur at random" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 66).

What Bauman is alluding to here is exactly that logic represented by Ahdamn and

God in Green Grass, Running Water, the logic summoned by indirect reference and which

is indicative of the western episteme. Contrasting with it there is Paula Gunn Allen's

position stating that "absolute order means absolute death. Chaos, on the other hand, means

the enormous vibration of energies; so, the more wilderness, the more something is just

dancing in such a way that it doesn't have a pattern that we can perceive. That's one kind of

balance" (ALLEN, 1998, p. 63). Those are two kinds of balance. Both theoreticians are

exposing contrastive world perspectives, and both of them are present in our novel. What is

paramount here is that we can refer to them, to the presence of those voices by their mere

invocation.

The same reference occurs for the other episodes depicted above. In the passages

related to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, a worldview that is questioned by summoning, not

by direct allusion, is one in which Indians are considered beforehand as outlaws and

evildoers. Here is how this is brought to the story:

"Say, they says, Who killed those dead rangers? Who killed our friends?

Beats me, Says First Woman. Maybe it was Coyote.

[…]

It looks like the work of Indians, says those live rangers. Yes, they all say

together. It looks just like the work of Indians. And those rangers look at First

Woman and Ahdamn.

Definitely Indians, says one of the rangers, and the live rangers point their guns

at First Woman and Ahdamn" (KING, 1993, p. 75).

The rangers are the keepers of order, the representatives of law and justice. They

also bear the concepts and prejudices formed around the Indian by the society they

represent. The passage above alludes to a recurrent form of pre-judgment. If something

'looks just like the work of Indians', it is certainly something bad. Besides, it is quite easy to

find who is to blame – you just have to send some agent of the law (any ranger will do) to

look around and, at the blink of an eye, decide who is more Indian-like. It does not matter

who 'killed those dead rangers'; First Woman and Ahdamn are considered guilty because

they look Indian. If the reader is unaware of this sort of prejudice, the passage above

functions to put it into consideration. Once this has been accomplished, the comic sequence

works to denounce that concept and offer a cathartic moment of reflection. Thus, the voice

of the Lone Ranger and the society it stands for is presented, questioned and put in

perspective.

A similar summoning of western paradigms occurs in the chapters figuring

Robinson Crusoe. This is a sample of how it is performed:

"So Thought Woman floats along and pretty soon she hits an island. Not too

hard. With her head.

Ouch! says that Island. Look where you are going.

Sorry, says Thought Woman. I was just floating.

Say, says that cranky Island, I'll bet you've come to visit Robinson Crusoe, the

famous shipwrecked writer.

Does he write novels? says Thought Woman.

No, says that Island. He writes lists" (KING, 1993, p. 324).

The reference to Crusoe's list making reinforces the above-mentioned comment of

Bauman on the western necessity for order and organization. The confrontation between

order and chaos in Green Grass, Running Water is made possible by the allusion to the

bookkeeping procedures so viscerally rooted in bureaucratic societies. Although the use of

bureaucracy and governmental/official policies for colonial and destructive purposes will

be deeper analyzed in the following chapter, for now it suffices to say that Crusoe's record

keeping expresses the Cartesian logic employed throughout modernity to catalogue all sorts

of experiences. Among them are all those records (filmic, photographic, ethnographic,

literary, etc.) depicting the Indian as a vanishing race. If Native-Americans, as Thomas

King himself posited in his essay 'Godzilla Vs. Post-colonial', "in addition to the usable past

that the concurrence of oral literature and traditional history provide [them] with, [they]

also have an active present marked by cultural tenacity and a viable future which may well

organize itself around major revivals of language, philosophy, and spiritualism" (KING,

1990, p. 4), the vanishing agenda proposed for them is unviable. The contrast between the

oral and the written praxes (so strongly present in the novel we are investigating) alluded to

by King can be analyzed because the discourse of Daniel Defoe's work has been conjured

up in lines, like the ones quoted above, displaying the positivist method of listing and

cataloguing. With Robinson Crusoe's voice present, the subverting work can begin,

demonstrating alternatives to the master narrative he stands for.

The same occurs in the allusions to Moby-Dick and what its discourse represents.

Before Changing Woman can ridicule Ahab and his attempts to seek and destroy the great

whale, the text of Green Grass, Running Water must situate the captain's locus as a killer, a

conqueror of the natural world. In order to do that, King offers references that establish

within the novel the voices of Ishmael and Ahab, where they come from and what their role

is. Again, in one excerpt we can perceive the contention of that discourse with a Native

one:

"says Ahab. It's Moby-Dick, the great white whale.

You're mistaken, says Changing Woman, I believe that is Moby-Jane, the Great

Black Whale.

"She means Moby-Dick," says Coyote. "I read the book. It's Moby-Dick, the

great white whale who destroys the Pequod."

"You haven't been reading your history," I tell Coyote. "It's English colonists

who destroy the Pequots."

But there isn't any Moby-Jane."

Sure there is," I says, "Just look over there. What do you see?"

"Well… I'll be," says Coyote" (KING, 1993, p. 220).

What this passage displays is that there are two allegories, representatives of

different worldviews. Coyote is explicit in referring to an actual book which summons

Moby-Dick's symbolism and installs it within the narrative. The narrator even provides

further reflection on the colonialist aspect of the western novel with a comment on the

sound similarity between Ahab's ship and the Pequot tribe, vanquished by New England

colonists in the 17

century. For the criticism on that colonial aspect to be enacted, the

original discourse present in Melville's novel must be, at least indirectly, allegorically,

there.

Thus, we have that the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water inverts and

subverts western principles, but it also bears in between its lines the symbolic traces of

those principles. As mentioned before, this process can be seen as a simple one-way

destruction of one perspective for the benefit of another; it can also be interpreted, as it

usually is when it comes to a post-colonial theoretical approach, as a leveling procedure of

the cultural playing field in which no perspective, Native or western, is privileged and no

hostile stance is taken towards the Other; or it might be understood as a mixture of both

views.

I do not believe that King's work is authoritarian to the point of denying western

voices any room from which to enunciate. But I also do not think it is absolutely innocent

in its performative demolition of those enunciations. Let us try and see it as a middle term

possibility. Take, for instance, Davidson et al.'s position on King's literary work. They say

that, "by rewriting and resituating these authoritative narratives […] King strategically

inverts traditional binaries, and makes a pointed statement about the adverse impact of this

dominant discourse" (DAVIDSON et al., 2003, p. 93). If in the previous quotation of their

work they were leaning towards the second stance proposed above, in these lines they are

pointing to the first stance, claiming that King 'inverts traditional binaries', situating Native

as the positive pole of the pair Western/Native. I attribute this confusion to a difficulty of

seeing literature of survivance as having any level of authority or aggressiveness. While

they concede that his literature inverts the binary poles (not proposes a supplementary

term), Davidson et al. accredit this inversion to 'making a pointed statement', not

obliterating the previously dominant pole, as is the case when we talk about binaries of any

sort. They, and other critics too, are probably afraid that they will assign to that traditionally

oppressed literature the perverse aspects of a literature of dominance. Can we, therefore,

state that that oppressed voice has some level of authoritativeness while also maintaining its

proposed democratic overview of multiple epistemological possibilities? My hint is that it

can.

In all of the excerpts analyzed above, both from Green Grass, Running Water and

from the various western cultural productions evoked so far, we have seen the alternate

presence of multiple discourses that were, if not diametrically opposite, frequently

contentious and mutually interrogating in their stances towards one another. It certainly

means that, in order for the text to enact any form of subversive tactic, it must first situate

its target, the idea it aims at deconstructing. This is the point in which the oppressed

discourse concedes room for the dominating one to show its face, to manifest its usual

power. Then the interplay can happen, but not without a large amount of conflict and

struggle. The narrative of First/Thought/Changing/Old Woman is not utterly authoritarian,

and neither is it democratic altogether – for one, it allows the presence of the Lone

Ranger's, Robinson Crusoe's and Ahab's voices, and still the narrative sets for her,

beforehand, the grounds on which she will perform her subversion, having been granted

ample advantage in relation to those voices. The conclusion we can reach from this analysis

is that, yes, Thomas King's writing is produced from a border perspective, allowing some

space for conflicting views, but its alleged all-pervasive democratic stance does not stand

when we take into consideration the large amount of aggression towards the other, that

other to the Native that permeates the above-mentioned passages.

Ultimately, if once we had that the discourse bearing the power to name and

organize held utmost sway over representations under its scope, we now have that the

oppressed discourse resituates the axis of power by, first, literarily summoning those voices

which previously bore primacy and, then, renaming and reorganizing their symbolic

structure to its ends, thus proposing a new shape for the power relations implicated.

Additionally, we must concede that this 're-' is not innocent in accomplishing its task, and

that, depending on the reader's position, the process can mean either liberation from

authority or reallocation of primacy.

Following the exposition of the mythic passages in Green Grass, Running Water in

which multiple discourses struggle for space and preeminence in the symbolic battlefield,

let us now turn to another focus in the novel where there is also contention between

perspectives; only this time the struggle is not for discursive power, but for power to define

identity.

2. IDENTITY IN QUESTION: WHO DECIDES WHO IS WHO

Who is an Indian? Who can be an Indian? Who can stop being an Indian? These

questions, although extremely pertinent, are very far from my power to answer. They are,

however, exceptionally relevant to introduce the issue I want to focus on in this chapter.

The question of how to define Indian/Native/Aboriginal has been discussed for the last few

hundred years, and it is not the aim here to attempt to answer it, but to investigate how

these issues manifest themselves in the literary text, how identity is narratively constructed

and who/what holds the power to symbolically give this answer. Again, different and

contrasting perspectives will be given, with the hope to further the discussion on how

literary productions can shed light on these issues even in extra-literary fields, such a

sociology, politics and law, just to name some.

There have been many different ways to define Indian at the governmental level –

some very objective, some quite imprecise; a number of them a little curious, and many

absolutely pernicious. Thomas King, in The Truth About Stories, exposes a series of

different treatments of the definitions of Indian by the governments of the United States and

Canada during the 19

and the 20

centuries. He makes reference to blood quantum laws,

assimilation policies, termination attempts, urbanization movements, Native products

commerce regulation, treaty renegotiation (KING, 2003, p. 121-151); most of them

attempting to reduce Native power, influence and access to resources, and all of them

succeeding in doing exactly that. One example of a particular piece of legislation, the 1876

Indian Act passed by the Canadian congress, ruled that some achievements that could

certainly be considered an individual's personal progress, such as obtaining a university

degree of joining the military forces, immediately disqualified that individual to being an

Indian. In King's words, "get a degree and, poof, you're no longer an Indian. Serve in the

military and, abracadabra, you're no longer an Indian. Become a clergyman or a lawyer

and, presto, no more Indian. Legislative magic" (KING, 2003, p. 132). His criticism to

legislation aiming at ruling the Indian out of existence is explicit, as we can see in the

following excerpt: "[…] legislation, in relation to Native people, has had two basic goals.

One, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence" (KING, 2003, p.

130). Although it is not the aim here to investigate the contents and nuances of legislative

texts, these passages were quoted to illustrate the insertion of these questions in the text of

Green Grass, Running Water. They will be analyzed in the following sections.

The approach of legislative, governmental and academic discourses in the

representations of the Native are manifestations of a dominant perspective exerting power

over individuals subject to its jurisdiction. A whole discursive apparatus on the Native by

the Native, however, is also present in the novel. Characters representative of tribal

customs, beliefs and myths display a wide range of material for interpretation on self-

representation and construction of group identity. These characters will allow us to

delineate the complex network of individual relations that allows them to bind together

postulated communities in face of the apparent impossibility of unitary representations of

these groups. Before proposing an assessment of the official discourses exposed in the

previous paragraph, let us first investigate how this network of identity construction work.

2.1 Panopticon Vs. Synopticon

Freud demonstrated to us that we are not, and never were, in charge of our own

selves. The breakthrough he offered in the understanding of the self is that there is

something beyond our control that determines in large extent our behavior, actions,

thoughts. This internal mechanism, influenced and affected by several external factors, is

always distant from the totalizing grasp of objective analysis, and we may never have the

key to its absolute comprehension. We behave, therefore, based on a sum of nearly infinite

influences to which we can rarely pay homage, so multiple (and most of the times obscure)

they are.

Interpersonal relationships and institutional policing certainly comprise some of

these influences that affect human conventions and help shape social codes and habits.

They, too, work within the individual to determine his/her behavior and beliefs. Although

several models exist that can account for how they function in the social body, here I will

present two of them.

2.1.1 Panopticon

Modern nation-states were formed based on tightly constructed written constitutions

used as reference for the administration of the most varied stances of life, from high-

importance government decisions to, in a downward spiral, the pettiest of every day's

pecuniary exchange. The logic of modern administration implies that institutions exist to

compose and modify the rules to be followed by citizens, to verify if the rules are being

obeyed and by whom, to prescribe punishment to those who escape the norm, and to see

that punishments are accurately applied, to the satisfaction of the normalized majority and

to the benefit of good customs. These institutions, in their turn, request that citizens

recognize their normalization powers and cooperate for the good of the whole system.

Cooperation, however, requires surveillance.

Regulation and control are two of the most important powers of modern nation-

states. A structured and far-reaching system of surveillance is required so that the unity of

the group can be maintained and reinforced. One of these systems is the panopticon.

Zygmunt Bauman, in his works Modernidade Líquida and Vida Líquida, contrasts Thomas

Mathiesen's models of the panopticon and the synopticon apparatuses (this last one will be

explored in the next sub-chapter) to elaborate on modern and post-modern strategies for

attaining social compliance to communal norms. Bauman refers to the panopticon as that

privileged structure (see pictures below) which, rising above the individuals, is meant to

observe, and gives the observers an all-encompassing overview of those being watched.

Picture 1: The 'Vigiâmbulo Caolho' panopticon

Source: http://vigilambulocaolho.blogspot.com/2007/03/o-sr-caolho-ii.html

Picture 2: A modern sample of panopticon

Source: http://www.thinkingshop.com/AIP/ethics/reiman-bentham.htm

The benefits of the structure are, according to Bauman, that "the surveillants' facility

and expediency of movement was the warrant of their domination; the inmates' 'fixedness

to the place' was the most secure and the hardest to break or loosen of the manifold bonds

of their subordination" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 17). Therefore, those responsible for

maintaining compliance, order and the status quo are granted a privileged position in order

to fulfill their policing responsibilities. This privilege, however, provides the observers

some level of limitation. The task performed in the panopticon structure "tied the

'routinizers' to the place within which the objects of time routinization had been confined.

The routinizers were not fully free to move: the option of 'absentee landlord' was,

practically, out of the question" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 17). Thus we have the metaphoric

description of the heavy hand of the modern state in its role as the ultimate stance of

communal unity – a solid power positioned above everything else, responsible for

maintaining order and conformity, but which is static, stuck in place because, if it moves, it

loses its grip on its subjects' bodies.

When we transport the concept to literature and artistic representations, we can

visualize how narrative structures and character depictions may be given within the

boundaries of the panopticon logic. This logic, evidently, has been elaborated and

developed within the limits of western logocentrism, and carries with it the principles of an

Apollonian thought, positivistic and Cartesian in its very base; therefore, when it comes to

something as abstract as artistic products, this approach can be very problematic. It is

possible, for instance, to investigate how the fixing aspect of the panopticon view tries to

hold the Indian and its cultural representations in place, so that it can be easily identified

and controlled. The procedure is rarely explicit – it is manifested in the discourse of a range

of materials, from literary texts to TV advertisements; from children's cartoons to

legislative bills. These products carry a heavily charged content of a fixating representation

of the Indian. They still display the influence of outdated real referents, and through

diligence and observation have kept the indian (with lower case 'i', as Gerald Vizenor uses

it to refer to the discursively fabricated Indian) in the past to facilitate executive actions

towards this thing of yore. Further ahead, I will attempt to demonstrate how this procedure

functions in the text of Green Grass, Running Water, and how a different system, the

synopticon, also operates behind some characters' voices to try and install an alternative

approach to communal unity and identity representations. For that, nonetheless, we have to

present the basic concept of the synopticon and investigate how it relates to the panopticon

in the symbolic structure of the novel.

2.1.2 Synopticon

As I mentioned before, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the procedures of the

panopticon power to those of the synopticon. Borrowed from Thomas Mathiesen, the term

is treated by Bauman as a major shift from the solid modern society to the post-modern

liquid world of the cybernetic era. Where in the first power system we have a heavily

structured apparatus, in which a few individuals watch the majority, used by those on the

top of the pyramid to demand compliance to the norm of those at its base, in the second

system we have that a great many individuals watch a few. The compliance to the norm,

according to Bauman, "tends to be achieved nowadays through temptation enticement and

seduction rather than by coercion – and appears under the disguise of free will, rather than

revealing itself as an external force" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 101). A great number of people

incorporate the duty of policing their neighbors' behavior and silently demanding that they

behave accordingly. The observatory scope needed for performing the tasks is attained, as

Bauman puts it, by the vast access to electronic and mediatic networks that connect

individuals far apart under the same virtual community.

If we are to compare the panopticon and the synopticon structures, some

illustrations on this last one may come in handy. However, while for the former concept we

had a physical structure that could provide a clear visual analogy to it, in the latter concept

there is no such physical metaphor. I provide the reader, therefore, with two pictures I

believe to be somehow representative of the implications and possible visualization of the

synopticon.

Figure 3: Suggestion 1 of synoptic interconnectivity

Source: http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/choreography-trisha-brown.jpg?w=311&h=305

Figure 4: Suggestion 2 of synoptic interconnectivity

Source: http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/images/060807.networks-2.jpg

Bauman proceeds to attribute to these networks many of the interpersonal problems

and social crises of post-modern times. I will, however, focus specifically on the policing

aspect of the system and its workings in the efforts to sustain communities, therefore

employing the concept of the synopticon only partially. This is especially true because I

will propose a slightly different approach of the literary text based on the system. When

Bauman deals with it, he concentrates on the cybernetic structure necessary to allow the

widespread interconnectivity of the synoptic apparatus. I will not deal with the electronic

aspects, but will center on his proposal of a social unity being attained through mutual

individual demands and exchanges. Having briefly exposed the concepts of panopticon and

synopticon, it is time to visualize their workings in the lines of Green Grass, Running

Water and their implications.

2.2 Postulated communities and shifting identities

So far, I have been dealing exclusively with the mythic/magical passages of Green

Grass, Running Water, whose main characters have been First/Thought/Changing/Old

Woman and representatives of western cultures and thought summoned into the story for

symbolic purposes. In this chapter I will deal mainly with the real passages of the novel,

those that depict contemporary life and contemporary Native issues in the United States and

Canada.

Most of the story takes place in Toronto, Blossom, Calgary and Edmonton, in

Canada, although some characters' reminiscences refer to Los Angeles and Hollywood, in

the USA. The plot is so diverse in time, space and character presentation that it utterly

resists summarization. There are dozens of characters, Native and white, who seem to lead

individual stories apart from each other, both in time and space, for most of the novel. They

follow independent paths until the day of the yearly celebration of the Sun Dance, which

most of them are required to attend. Two of the characters who participate in the

celebration are Lionel and Norma, nephew and aunt, on whom I will focus next; the

remaining characters will revolve, in my approach, around them.

Lionel Red Dog, who bears in his very name the indianness the narrative attributes

to him, through the reference to the color red, leaves the reservation early in life to go live

in Toronto. Although he has big plans for his future in the white world, he keeps

postponing any serious decisions and ends up working as a television salesperson at Bill

Bursum's electronics store. On the verge of turning forty years old, Lionel demonstrates

some anxiety as to the direction his life has taken and considers some alternatives for a

change. The possibilities, he decides, are many: proposing marriage to his date Alberta and

dropping his underpaid job to try and get back to college for an academic carrier, like his

uncle Eli Stands Alone did, are his immediate choices. The problem, however, is that

Lionel is stuck in-between worlds, with very few choices up to him. Most of his

possibilities are heavily influenced by other characters and the situation he ended up in.

Alberta does not want marriage, and she certainly does not want to provide for an

underemployed man. Going back to school is no longer an alternative. In the past, the

Blackfoot tribe reservation Lionel belonged to had plenty of money to finance Indian

youths who wished to obtain a college degree, but not anymore. If he wants to enter a

university, he must keep working as a television salesman for much longer to save up some

money and cover the expenses. He has, he realizes, lost his opportunities. This is how he

feels:

"Life, Lionel mused as he felt his chest slide on top of his stomach, had become

embarrassing. His job was embarrassing. His gold blazer was embarrassing.

Norma was right. Alberta wasn't going to marry an embarrassment. […] Happy

birthday. Forty years old. Lionel padded his way to the bathroom. He had gotten

into the habit of not turning the bathroom light on in the mornings. It hurt his

eyes, but mostly he did not want to look at what he had become – middle aged,

overweight, unsuccessful. But today he flicked out a hand like a whip and

snapped the light on. The effect was startling and much worse than he had

imagined" (KING, 1993, p. 263-264).

Although it is quite clear why he feels that way, I would like to point to a detail in

the passage above that may help better understand his state of mind – the fact that 'Norma

was right'. Throughout the whole novel, Norma acts as a kind of collective conscience for

the Blackfoot, giving advice, reproaching inappropriate behavior, suggesting courses of

action, reminding the scattered members of the tribe of their traditions and roles within the

Blackfoot community. She interacts with many different characters, bringing news back

and forth, spreading information, questioning family and tribe members as to their doings

and plans. In one word, Norma represents the norm. She makes it clear again and again that

she expects members to behave in certain ways, and the pressure of her demands is

especially heavy on Lionel. They have several conversations in which Norma demands of

him that he straighten up his life and start behaving in the proper Indian way, to which he

strongly resists. He complains that "everybody wanted to run his life for him, as if he

couldn't do it himself" (KING, 1993, p. 242). It is understandable that he feels this way,

having people coming to him constantly to give advice and guide his actions, and the

pressure he feels comes in many ways – from the white boss he works for and from his

fellow Blackfoot; from direct suggestions to subtle hints; from the panoptic pressure on him

and from the synoptic one. Lionel is obliged to manage this psychical bombardment in

order to settle with himself who he is and what he can do with his life from this point on –

and it is in this personal, internal battle that the search for identity and self-determination

takes place.

First, let us look into how the panoptic structure, represented by Lionel's boss Bill

Bursum, operates to exert pressure over the Native. Bursum is a small entrepreneur in the

electronics business who has employed Native-Americans as salespersons (including

Lionel's cousin, Charlie Looking Bear, who turned out to be a successful lawyer working

for a big corporation) as a means of trying to help them better understand the real workings

of the world and how to succeed in life. He has some peculiar views on the role of work,

such as considering that to "make money [is] the only effective way to keep from going

insane in a changing world" (KING, 1993, p. 210). In order to pass his wisdom on to the

naïve Indians under his supervision, Bursum attempts to imbue them with some basic

Western principles: "Lionel, at Bursum's insistence, had read The Prince, and so had

Charlie Looking Bear for that matter" (KING, 1993, p. 140). The results, however, are not

exactly the ones he expected:

"[…] but Bursum was sure neither of them had understood the central axiom.

Power and control – the essences of effective advertising – were, Bursum had

decided years before, outside the range of Indian imagination, though Charlie

had made great strides in trying to master this fundamental cultural tenet"

(KING, 1993, p. 141).

Noticing the words he uses to refer to Indians and Western cultural tenets, we can

perceive evidence of what I described above as the panoptic discourse. Besides 'power' and

'control', words that are obviously highlighted in the excerpt, there are references to solid

and immobilizing aspects in Bursum's thoughts, such as 'central axiom', 'essences',

'fundamental' and 'tenet'. All of them allude to hard concepts of positivist modernity.

'Central axiom', for instance, is a clear allusion to the ordering pretense of rationalism and

its need to propose a rigid frame of reference around which most concepts will revolve. As

to 'essence' and the remarks on fundaments and tenets, they point to that logic already

investigated in the first chapter that sees objects as the immanent manifestation of

something generic, quintessential and/or metaphysical that has always been there and that

can be reached through method and scientific investigation and classification. In short,

Bursum manifests his wish to instruct the Indians in his doctrine of effectiveness and

technique mastering. In his opinion, the most successful and capable Indian is Charlie,

clearly because he was able to work for a big law corporation that fights against tribal

interests in the courts of law.

Operating in this discursive frame, Bursum is in the position to exert panoptic

pressure over Lionel, manifesting the solidifying and immobilizing forces he represents.

His view on what an Indian is are quite characteristic of that. If, in the passage above, he

considers, in a sort of eugenic fashion, that Indians possess a distinguished range of

imagination (a limited one), in the following lines he even considers Lionel and Charlie as

not being Indians at all:

"And you couldn't call them Indians. You had to remember their tribes, as if that

made any difference, and when some smart college professor did come up with a

really good name like Amerindian, the Indians didn't like it. Even Lionel and

Charlie could get testy every so often, and they weren't really Indians anymore"

(KING, 1993, p. 210).

Bursum's static view on what an Indian is prevents him from seeing his subordinates

as 'real' Native-Americans. His view is similar to the one in which Indians are seen only as

those who live in teepees, wear moccasins and feathers and chant rain and war songs while

dancing semi-naked around a bonfire with their bodies painted in various colors. He refuses

to see a television salesman and a lawyer who drives an expensive sports car as Indians,

and manifests his wish that they could be defined in an inert term such as Amerindian.

Again, we have that panoptic discourse of will to power attempting to fix, to fence up real

individuals in an objective classification academically conceived. It would be, for Bursum

and the logic he represents, much more practical and effective (just to use a word employed

by him above) to deal with those subjects in the terms of Amerindian, and not Blackfoot,

Cherokee, Cheyenne or Anishinaabe. This means that generalizations work for the best

results when it comes to categorizing individuals, while expecting and demanding that they

conform to the definitions and act accordingly.

The narrative pressure exercised over Lionel's position, be it of the dislodged Native

in the white man's world or of the Native who has lost his way and is trying to find it again,

is only part of the symbolic forces operating through his character. With Norma, we have

an alternative narrative power demanding that he take stance. This power, as opposed to the

rigid panopticon, is lighter and comes in a different clothing. It appears between the lines,

in words as well as in actions, and it can hardly be pinpointed at an exact location. If

Bursum's locus can be precisely situated in the Cartesian Eurocentric principles, the

discourse that aunt Norma stands for is widespread and constantly shifting.

The influence she exerts comes mainly from the network of relationships and

responsibilities she maintains. Being in contact with many different members of the

Blackfoot society who live in distinct places, Norma displays a far-reaching scope of

action. Let us trace the narrative path used to empower her speech. First of all, Norma must

set the environment in which she is to operate to demand of Lionel a position in regards to

his nativeness. In order to bring up the topic, when he is driving, she says: "Your uncle

wanted to be a white man. Just like you" (KING, 1993, p. 36). With that, she opens up the

grounds for Lionel to manifest his ideas on identity. His strategy, at first, is of keeping

distance from the issue – he ignores her completely: "Lionel could see the sun and he could

see the road and he could see the steering wheel. Norma was talking to someone. He could

hear her voice. It sounded very warm and very far away" (KING, 1993, p. 36). Warm, but

very far away is how her normalizing voice sounded to him, demonstrating that his

performative strategy is to ignore the subject altogether. Norma, however, does not give up

easily. She brings up the story of her brother Eli Stands Alone, Lionel's uncle, to reiterate

her insinuation. She mentions that Eli, after having left his people to live like a white man,

ended up returning home to where he belonged, making it clear that returning is what saved

him: "Coming to the Sun Dance is what did it. Straightened him right out and he came

home" (KING, 1993, p. 67). The allusion to the traditional ceremony of the Sun Dance

implies that she expects Lionel to rethink his choices and take the same route as Eli did. He

counterattacks by exposing Norma's distortion of the story: " He went back to Toronto. He

went back to Toronto after the Sun Dance. He came home after Granny died. That's all that

happened. And he came home then because he had retired" (KING, 1993, p. 67).

The struggle goes on with Norma insisting that what really mattered is that Eli

finally came back home, but this also does not make any impression on Lionel. What we

are seeing here is Norma trying to situate him in the network of relationships and

responsibilities of their community. She is attempting to imbue him with the thought that

there are "good ways to live a life and not so good ways" (KING, 1993, p. 460), and that

the good way is to live the traditional way close to the community. In order to do that, she

starts composing the interconnectivity pictured in figures 3 and 4 above, linking members

one by one in a web of responsibility. She mentions that he should be more like his sister

Latisha who, in her view, is much more linked to the family and the tribe: "Latisha goes to

see Martha. Ought to pay attention to your sister" (KING, 1993, p. 32). Norma begins

hinting that Lionel should take models of behavior on which to base his decisions and

receive advice, and his sister would present a good model. Again, his reaction is keeping

distance from any deeper conversation that might lead to any decision-making point. He

simply changes the subject.

Norma, then, prepares the next part of her strategy of spreading the synoptic

network. She says: "Listen, nephew, maybe you should talk with Eli or your father, get

yourself straightened out" (KING, 1993, p. 84). While the sentence has no more effect than

the previous attempts of influencing her nephew, it opens up the path for her to link another

member to the web of relationships – later on in the novel, she goes to Eli to activate his

part in it.

By the time she gets to him, Eli is living at his deceased mother's cabin where he is

the only obstacle for the construction of the Great Baleen Dam, a hydropower plant that is

supposed to bring progress to that area belonging to the Blackfoot tribe. In an act of

resistance, Eli refuses to leave the area his mother lived in and where she built the cabin

with her our hands and raised the kids all by herself. Staying in the course where the water

flow was supposed to be after the construction of the dam is a powerful enough act of

preserving the memory and history of the tribe, and Norma intends on rallying Eli to her

cause uniting the Blackfoot. She approaches her brother and raises his awareness as to

Lionel's precarious economic, spiritual and moral situation, raising the issue of his

responsibility in the drama: "He's your nephew. You got responsibilities, you know. Look

at what he's become" (KING, 1993, p. 84). What he's become is, in short, a white man.

Knowing that Eli faced the same questions in his youth, having moved out of the

reservation to get a PhD and teach American Literature at the university, Norma passes on

to him his share of the duty of taking care of Lionel.

The allusion to his responsibilities as an uncle unleashes a chain-reaction of

considerations in Eli's mind that is quite unsettling to him; it is, however, exactly what

Norma seemed to have wanted to accomplish. In the following passage, Eli is remembering

the time when he had just moved into the place he now lives. In this memory scene, brother

and sister are at their mother's cabin, talking about the possibility of his living there

permanently:

Eli could no longer remember what he had in mind when he moved into the

cabin, could remember only the emotion he felt when Sifton told him that they

were going to tear the cabin down.

"Don't have to stay home if you don't want to," said Norma.

"I'm not going to stay."

"Probably don't have all the fancy things here you have in Toronto."

"I just came back to see the place."

"Of course, being as you are the oldest, you can stay as long as you like."

"It's just a visit."

"Everybody should have a home."

"Probably stay a month or two."

"Even old fools."

Looking Back, Eli could see that he had never made a conscious decision to

stay. And looking back, he knew it was the only decision he could have made

(KING, 1993, p. 289-290).

If we take a closer look at the level of definitiveness with which Eli expresses his

past decisions, we can perceive that his choices were, and still seem to be, made by some

force beyond him, even without his recognizance. He could not remember exactly why he

had chosen to stay at his mother's cabin and give sequence to family presence there;

although, looking back, he realizes he did not really decide to stay but, having stayed

anyway, concedes that there was no other option left to him. Now, between these two

moments of considering reminiscences, Eli's thoughts are interspersed with some sort of

unconnected, chaotic dialogue between him and his sister Norma. In it I believe is the key

to understand his seemingly unconscious choices in regards to his responsibilities of

keeping family present in that place.

As we have seen, Norma works as a sort of bond for the Blackfoot community.

Inclusion in it, as can be perceived from the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water, is a

matter that involves several factors, from personal self-recognition as Blackfoot to group

integration; from family relation to the practice of cultural rituals. Though I am not

acquainted with the present requisites for an individual to be considered a Blackfoot (both

from the group itself and from the governmental agencies responsible for the bureaucratic

classifications of Natives), this is not the focus I want to give in the issue of community.

My approach here is to how symbolic depictions in the novel work to form a

communitarian sense for the Natives involved and what forces operate to give unity to it

and to give shape to its representations.

Since we have been employing Zygmunt Bauman's concepts to interpret discourses

on interpersonal relationships, I will also bring up his ideas on community so that we can

better perceive the narrative structures related to it in Green Grass, Running Water. For

him, as expressed in Modernidade Líquida, "communities come in many colours and sizes,

but if plotted on the Weberian axis stretching from "light cloak" to "iron cage", they all

come remarkably close to the first pole" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 194). Reassessing our

theoretical material so far, we can deduce that a homogenizing panoptic structure would be

indicative of a community in the shape of an iron cage. This is the case of most modern

nation-states, which have specific rules, regulations and intense and heavy monitoring of

who belongs to the national community and who is an outsider. Contrasting with them there

are the groups united by mutual acceptance or rejection, interconnectivity and interpersonal

monitoring that comprise a society in the format of a light cloak. These latter associations

must rely on constant activity on the part of members in the sense of watching each other

for purposes of unity. This means that conforming to the collective view is a requisite for

belonging, and the negotiations are regular and never-ending.

Once we transport these concepts to the passages in Green Grass, Running Water

we have been investigating, we can deduce that Norma's actions do not fit into the norms of

the panoptic vigilance on the group. There is no formal institution, legal technicality or

physical restriction to exert influence over individual behavior. Although there are

governmental institutions responsible for the objective identification of Native citizens,

when we look into the novel they are not present in any way that may determine characters'

positions in regards to belonging or not to the Blackfoot tribe. What we actually have is the

intangible web of forces that comprise the synopticon system as defined above. Therefore,

we can now look at the conversation of brother and sister, above, having this concept in

mind.

The dialogue described between Eli Stands Alone's first thought of staying at his

mother's cabin and his realization that he had not decided consciously on the subject points

to the workings of Norma's strategy. The light cloak she expresses in her words ends up

exercising its effect of demanding a position of the individual. In her words, Eli does not

have to stay and carry on the family presence but, him being the oldest, of course, he can

stay; especially since he does not seem to have a home in Toronto, and the cabin would

fulfill that need. Her subterfuge ends up being enough for Eli to be imbued with the sense

of duty of choosing to stay. It is that sense which remains for him in the sequence of his

role in the narrative, as we can see from the following passage:

"What was he supposed to tell Lionel? Happy birthday. That's about all he could

tell him. About all he wanted to tell him. But Norma expected more. In the old

days, an uncle was obligated to counsel his sister's son, tell him how to live a

good life, show him how to be generous, teach him how to be courageous.

"You're a teacher," Norma told him. "So teach"" (KING, 1993, p. 292).

He feels he must fulfill his role in the family, but he is not quite sure how. Norma's

role here, again, is very present. After awakening in him the feeling of duty in relation to

his problematic nephew, she charges once more with the argument she needs him to

employ: "We need the young people to stay home, Eli. Figured you could tell him about

that" (KING, 1993, p. 318). With these sentences, Norma completes the activation of the

network that is about to act over Lionel to demand of him that he take a stance in regards to

the Blackfoot community. Having been torn between two worlds, Lionel does not seem to

be able to handle his life well in either of them. The pressure will come over him in the

sense that he has reached a point where he must make choices, take a position, choose

sides.

Caught in the middle of the two symbolic powers described above, Lionel postpones

his decisions as much as he can. Most of the novel revolves around his trying to build up a

sense of location, trying to figure what side to pick. His allegorical position is, nonetheless,

extremely powerful. Being neither white (as Bill Bursum leaves it clear due to his lack of

adaptability) nor Indian (as he is constantly told in the various moments he is compared

with John Wayne, the famous Indian killer), Lionel is in a strong space of negotiation, in

some sort of indefiniteness that empowers him – he can choose whether to belong or not.

When we take a look at the modern concepts of postulated communities, such those

described by Patrick Imbert and Zygmunt Bauman, we can better understand why Lionel's

situation is so powerful. In Converging Disensus, Imbert elaborates on the idea that the

place of the individual in the collective depends on an active discursive experience of

taking a place, instead of having a place in an organic and natural fashion. For him,

"location is relational, it is based on discursive practices that transform themselves

depending on other discursive practices with which they are in contact" (IMBERT, 2006, p.

17). Adaptability and negotiation are, therefore, paramount for those engaged in the act of

taking their place in the community.

Aligned with that idea, we must take into consideration Bauman's view on

communal life when he says that "all communities are postulated; projects rather than

realities, something that comes after, not before individual choice" (BAUMAN, 2000, p.

194). As projects under construction, communities depend heavily on individual adhesion

to be constructed. Once members have been incorporated, however, while once there were

organic groups that stayed bonded for a long time, now, Bauman shows us, they are no

longer this enduring. We have, therefore, a situation in which the individual has been given

an extraordinary amount of power that may be seen as dangerous. If, on the one hand, the

group can be augmented, expanded, improved by the incorporation of new cells to its ranks,

on the other hand we have that those same individuals might threaten the collective by their

possibility to leave at any time. This identity malleability is what empowers Lionel's

positing in relation to his Blackfoot fellows – he is free to pick sides, while they are already

defined, already located.

We can interpret these structures in two distinct ways. We can see the web

construction of communal identity in Green Grass, Running Water as a complex modern

strategy to attain unity. Seen this way, Norma's efforts are justified by the need of the

Blackfoot to affirm their presence and compose a unified social body that draws strength

from its numbers. Also, her actions may be interpreted as a form of resistance to the

modern institutional powers that have, and still do, oppressed Native-American peoples

along the past five centuries. A communal identity formed by a tight network of

interpersonal relationships might pose as an alternative to the static technocratic structure of

Western nation-states and sciences. If, on the one hand, there are institutional quota and

blood quantum laws to objectively catalogue and segregate human beings, on the other

hand there is a process of self-determination that might work to legitimate an identity

position crafted from the inside, from the very community seeking that determination. In

this sense, the symbolic collective construction we have been analyzing would align with

Bauman's idea of the focus on 'us' as a form of self-protection. He borrows the thought

from Richard Sennet to then question the possible uses of the wish for a collective unity. In

Modernidade Líquida, he mentions that the

[…] fluid modern environment may – and will favour a variety of survival

strategies. "We", as Richard Sennett posits, "is nowadays an act of self-

protection. The desire for community is defensive… To be sure, it is always a

universal law that "we" can be used as a defense against confusion and

dislocation" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 205).

As a form of legitimate self-protection, then, the strategy of tight membership

selection through collective surveillance is a valid course of action. Bauman, however, calls

our attention to the potential danger of this kind of enterprise when it is taken too seriously

or to the extreme. If the selection process is undertaken in a model of exclusion of the unfit

instead of the inclusion of the different, the diverse, there is the risk of the self-

determination act becoming more draconian than democratic, which directs us to the

possible interpretation that the collective demands for individual positioning may be

aggressive and somehow authoritarian.

In Vida Líquida, Bauman, while expressing his thoughts on the post-panoptic power

of the modern states, says that this kind of power can work for inclusion as well as for

exclusion, claiming it is more recurrent and comfortable to act on the latter form. If we look

into the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water with that idea in mind, we may witness

not some sort of welcoming self-determination in the representations of the community

when it demands from an individual that he or she chooses whether to belong or not, but a

process of pre-requisite conformation that, if not met faithfully, will annul the possibility of

acceptance. In this sense, the construction of 'us' poses as an oppressive form of demand,

for the person targeted by the surveillance web must either conform or step away.

Therefore, as Bauman has expressed, "an "inclusive community" would be a contradiction

in terms" (BAUMAN, 2000, p. 198), since inclusion is no longer a matter of being accepted

by the larger group, but a question of negotiating to what extent one should give in to that

group's demands so that acceptance can be granted – unilateral negotiation, in fact, because

after all it is the community which decides on the requisite traits for fitting in, and the

individual's only real choice is to accede or not.

We have, for instance, character depictions that make the selective process

suspicious, due to the apparent lack of criteria for accepting people into the Blackfoot

group. Let us now look into two characters' situations to compare the levels of adaptability

to community demands. We have already looked into Lionel's position; let us, then,

investigate his sister Latisha for a moment to, finally, propose some conclusions on the

either democratic or authoritarian procedures of building communal unity through

interpersonal networking.

2.3 The Dead Dog Café and Bill Bursum's Home Entertainment Barn

I titled this section after the names of two business establishments depicted in Green

Grass, Running Water. The Dead Dog Café is the restaurant where Latisha, Lionel Red

Dog's sister, works, while Bill Bursum's Home Entertainment Barn is the electronics store

where Lionel works. I will use them as evidence to elaborate on the above-mentioned

conflicts regarding the criteria for symbolic membership in the Blackfoot community.

Through the representations of both places, I will attempt to demonstrate these possible

subjective criteria impersonated by Norma and how Lionel handles the psychic pressure of

having to take a place (as posited by Patrick Imbert, above) and what are the implications in

our interpretation of the concept of community.

The Dead Dog Café is a successful business owned and run by Latisha, Norma's

niece. It became famous not because of its good food, but for the tourist trap concept of

allegedly selling dog meat. Some of the dishes served include Dog du Jour, Houndburgers

and Puppy Potpourri, among other which give the impression that the customer is eating a

traditional Blackfoot dish. Though nobody says it is traditional food, obviously, nobody

denies it for the sake of maintaining the fame of the establishment. The strategy, in

Latisha's words, is very simple: ""How about Old Agency Puppy Stew?" said Cynthia. […]

Every day Rita cooked up the same beef stew, and every day Rita or Billy or Cynthia or

Latisha thought up a name for it" (KING, 1993, p. 116). She involves all of her employees

in the task of coming up with stereotypical names for the day's special, every now and then

mocking tourists' capacity for seeing the farce. In her opinion, "it wasn't cheating.

Everybody in town and on the reserve who came to the Dead Dog Café to eat knew that the

special rarely changed, and all the tourists who came through never knew it didn't" (KING,

1993, p. 116). Basically, it is ok if those who know the truth do not care and those who do

not know it never find out. It is not my intention here to discuss the validity of Native-

Americans (or any other minority group) exploring the stereotypes formed about them in a

way that will give something in return. My interest is to analyze the importance of these

actions in the symbolic constructions of identity, both individual and communal.

Although Latisha demonstrates that the farce does not make her content about what

she does, she confesses that the idea, which was not hers, is quite good. She wished she had

thought it up herself:

"Latisha would like to have been able to take all the credit for transforming the

Dead Dog from a nice local establishment with a loyal but small clientele to a

nice local establishment with a loyal but small clientele and a tourist trap. But, in

fact, it had been her auntie's idea.

"Tell them it's dog meat," Norma had said. "Tourists like that kind of stuff""

(KING, 1993, p. 117).

In fact, it had all been Norma's idea from the beginning. Here we have one

incongruity that will have to be assessed later on, the fact the she constantly insists that the

Blackfoot act traditional, but concedes to an international farce (after all, people come from

all over the world to eat there; tourists come from Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Brazil,

England, France, and even Toronto) that mocks Blackfoot culture and reinforces

stereotypes. Norma actually ignores criticism to her position of accepting and defending

Latisha's enterprise. It does not seem to matter to her that the restaurant is a disfavor to

outsiders' comprehension of her tribe. In a conversation with Lionel, she makes that

absolutely clear. First, she expresses her disdain for his present situation: "What you need is

a job." "I've got a job," [says Lionel.] "Selling televisions is not a job for a grown man"

(KING, 1993, p. 59). In order to reinforce her argument that Lionel is not doing anything

good with his life, Norma brings up Latisha's situation as a model of successful

entrepreneurship. Lionel, seeing the opportunity of countering his aunt's attack, focuses on

the lack of traditionalism of his sister's work:

""The Blackfoot didn't eat dog."

"It's for the tourists."

"In the old days, dogs guarded the camp. They made sure we were safe."

"Latisha has time to come out to the reserve and visit us, too. Always helps with

the food for the Sun Dance. Helps out with other things, too."

"Traditional Blackfoot only ate things like elk and moose and buffalo. They

didn't even eat fish."

"Music to my ears to hear you talking traditional, nephew"" (KING, 1993, p. 59-

60).

In their discussion, one of the most important elements at stake is the question of

acting traditional or not. If behaving according to the usual cultural customs of a people is

one of the requisites for belonging, in this case neither Lionel nor Latisha would fulfill it.

That is not, however, what is actually at work here. The argument of tradition is being used

indiscriminately as a means to either counter offensive affirmations or to demand the

address to certain personal issues, not as a pillar for societal institution. If we pay attention

to Norma's arguments, we can perceive that, for her, selling fake dog meat is admissible, as

long as you commit to visiting family, but selling televisions is not, especially if you do not

commit to the community.

All these evidences point to the potential oppressive characteristic of this sort of

network construction of communities. The demands for positioning are constant, and the

individual responsibilities towards the collective can be quite taxing. In Turn to the Native,

Arnold Krupat elaborates on the characteristics of these societies and how they contrast

with Western social formatting. He mentions that, "as Deloria and Lyle make clear,

"traditional Indian society understands itself as a complex of responsibilities and duties", in

contradistinction to "modern" Euramerican societies in which specific rights written into

law stand protectively between the people and the state of government" (KRUPAT, 1996,

p. 13). Since there is no written code of laws, the structuring of society must be attained by

a set of principles carried on with each individual. Furthermore, each one must understand

their places in the group and demand that the others also understand theirs, and there

resides the real issue in our investigation of Green Grass, Running Water. Eli Stands

Alone, for instance, had several doubts as to his role in moving into his deceased mother's

cabin after she passed away, and so does Lionel in his choices of going back to school and

trying to become successful in the Western world he is immersed in, or reassessing his

options and starting to rescue part of the Blackfoot in him. The choices are clearly not easy

ones, and the possibilities of refusing ones role, attributed by others, are at least

problematic.

On this issue, Arnold Krupat evolves his arguments on the structure of Native

societies by invoking examples both of himself and of accounts of tribes other than Native-

American ones. In the chapter 'A Nice Jewish Boy among the Indians', Krupat tells us about

Albert Memmi's impressions on tribal life, quoting the following:

"I discovered tribal life and learned to hate it… This atmosphere of wrangling at

home, the pettiness of our tribal community, its futile arguments and treacherous

or even friendly gossip, … with everybody watched by everyone else, … all of it

certainly contributed a lot to the feeling of being stifled that soon overcame me

at home" (KRUPAT, 1996, p. 97).

There is the feeling expressed by Lionel in the passage above where he complains

that people wanted to run his life for him. This excerpt summarizes the whole oppressive

characteristics of the synoptic network, with everybody watched by everyone else and

friendly gossip employed as means of communication. All of those characteristics are

represented by Norma, and it is to them that Lionel must performatively react if he is to

present any action, either of resistance or of conformation, to the demands of that normative

force.

Having worked for several years for the prejudiced Bill Bursum in what is

considered by many characters a degrading job for a forty-year-old man (as many

characters seem to think), Lionel is the perfect target for the rescue efforts of Norma's

network. He represents the classic Indian who could not go home, trapped in-between

worlds, unable to find his way in a foreign world or to go back to the organic safety of a

postulated community. His job represents much of his degraded situation, and it is through

the depictions of his daily work that we get most of the information of his present issues.

He was employed to substitute his cousin Charlie Looking Bear as the 'Indian salesman' of

the store because Bursum discovered Indians sell more to Indians. Lionel is, therefore,

being used as advertisement material for profit. The ridiculous gold blazer he wears for

work becomes his most distinguishing feature: it is ugly, old-fashioned, and worn out at the

elbows. Summarizing, his life is a total mess.

In order to try and help him get out of his embarrassing situation, a group of four

old Indians will join in an effort of obliging Lionel to finally pick sides in the symbolic play

of belonging we have been investigating. For that, they will join forces with Norma and, in

a sense, will compete with her own efforts of demanding a reaction from him. To make a

long story short, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, Hawkeye and the Lone Ranger, four centenary

mystical elders (whose names could not be more suggestive), offer to fix his life as the

beginning of a bigger plan – a plan of fixing the world. For a modest start, they offer him a

leather jacket as a birthday gift that is supposed to make him feel good about himself.

Though Lionel does not understand how the jacket can make things any better, he agrees to

wear it for a while. This gesture represents an allegorical act of dressing up in his

community role, and I want to point it out as a major symbolic shift in the discourses of

belonging we have been seeing so far. Through the gesture of wearing the elders' jacket we

can reassess many of the concepts proposed so far. I want to propose that idea, in the next

section, as a form of wrapping up the issues on Norma's role (and what she represents) for

group cohesion, on the positive aspects of the synoptic network, and on Lionel's importance

as a model of communal construction through acting on the individual.

2.4 Dressing up in values

The jacket, originally, belongs to George Morningstar, a white American who used

to be married to Latisha but, having abused her physically, disappeared for a long time (the

character of George will be further investigated in chapter 4, in the section on

photography). The symbolism of the jacket can be interpreted in many different ways.

Some critics say it is a reference to General Custer, some say it refers to John Wayne, while

others focus on the meanings it carries for Lionel himself – awkwardness, feeling of

oppression, heaviness. I do not want to enter into speculations on the cross-references the

jacket may point to, but to its effects on the narrative and on the characters. This is how

Lionel feels about it when the four elders give it to him:

""How's the jacket, grandson?" said Ishamel.

Lionel rolled his shoulders around in the jacket. "Look, it's very nice. I mean, I

like leather. And the fringe is … elegant. But I really can't keep it."

"It looks a little tight."

"It looks hot, too," said Robinson Crusoe.

In fact, Lionel felt as if the jacket was suffocating him. Worse, the jacket had

begun to smell. A stale, sweet smell, like old aftershave or rotting fruit" (KING,

1993, p. 421-422).

At first, the jacket does not seem to have had any effect on Lionel. But, as the old

Indians start to suggest possible feelings it might be evoking in him, he starts feeling

different. He goes from dissimulated indifference in relation to it to a gradual realization of

the suffocating power it exerts. Worse, it had begun to bother him, to grow around him in

an unpleasant form. When he is beginning to get acquainted and to become aware of that

presence wrapped around him, Lionel must return the jacket to the elders – and it is only

through that gesture that we can fully comprehend to whole episode involving it.

As I mentioned, the jacket belonged to George Morningstar, who happens to be

back in town and goes visit Latisha at the Sun Dance, the traditional event held every year

to which all the Blackfoot in the novel attend. George is really back because he wants to

take pictures of the ceremony to sell to the printed media, and he tries to do it in disguise,

knowing he is not allowed to do so. When they suspect George is taking pictures, the four

elders call Lionel and hint that he may be able to help. Lionel closes in on George and

demands that he stop taking photographs and hand back the film he has used. This is the

culminating scene of the novel in which all the Blackfoot are present in the same place.

More importantly, the group is able to witness when Lionel advances to the intruder of the

sacred ceremony and forces him to produce the stolen images of his community. The scene

closes with George leaving without the forbidden photographs, but with his jacket back,

and Lionel as a sort of small hero of that episode. With that much said, let us interpret these

happenings.

To the interests of our interpretations here, the jacket stands for the light cloak of

communal responsibility offered to him by the elders, the mythic representatives of the

Blackfoot. The heaviness felt by Lionel is the weight of the individual responsibilities he is

initially unwilling to accept, but that gradually overtakes him as the community closes in to

both demand a position from him and to make it clear that they, too, depend on him. The

oppression he feels in natural, since the task of integrating a larger group and being

responsible for it, acting on behalf of its interests, defending it against offenders from the

outside can be taxing and somewhat frightening. Zygmunt Bauman has expressed this

problematic question, claiming that the distancing of the individual can provide a privileged

observation point from which he can assess the situation of a group, but that engagement is

a necessary act of belonging, once one has decided upon a stance within that group. Lionel,

then, finally decides on a position to take (always remembering Patrick Imbert's idea of the

possibility of one choosing a place to belong) within the Blackfoot. The choice he makes of

holding ground against an outside offender in a way justifies the collective demands

deposited on him. It gives Lionel a role in the communal web of identity; it also sheds light

on Norma's behavior and the workings of the synoptic network in the struggle for group

unit and identity.

Looking at the conclusion of the episode with the jacket allows us to appraise with

more details the concepts I presented in this chapter. This is how the scene closes, after the

exchange of the jacket for the usurping photographic film:

""Well, grandson," said the Lone Ranger, "that's about as much as we can do for

you. How do you feel?"

Lionel jammed his hands into his pockets. "I feel fine."

"Fixing up the world is hard work," Said Ishmael.

"Even fixing up the little things is tough," said Robinson Crusoe.

"Try not to mess up your life again," said Hawkeye" (KING, 1993, p. 428).

Lionel clearly does not understand how his life could have been fixed with such a

simple gesture as standing up for his friends and relatives. After all, his troubles are, he

considers, much more serious than guileful snapshot takers attempting to capture sacred

tribal moments that must be kept within the group. He feels, nonetheless, fine. It is the first

moment in the whole novel (notice that at this point we are on page 428 of 469) that it can

be said he is genuinely expressing some sort of relief from his troubled life. However,

seeing that he is a little confused as to what really changed in his life, the elders offer him

some explanation:

""This is how you help me fix up my life?"

"Pretty exciting, isn't it?" said Ishmael.

"Have I missed something?"

"In the years to come," said Robinson Crusoe, "you'll be able to tell your

children and grandchildren about this."

"You do this a lot?" said Lionel.

"You don't have to thank us, grandson," said Hawkeye" (KING, 1993, p. 428).

In short, what changed is that his actions integrated him to the larger body of the

Blackfoot. He is now part of the tribe's history and of its future – his very yet-to-come

descendents are evoked as a sign that his role in the community has been established and

that now he must abide to it and rely on that for identification, for the building of his

identity as a Native-American of the Blackfoot tribe.

With this idea in mind and looking back at Norma's efforts of spreading the network

of responsibilities to all the possible members of the tribe, we can now deduce that her

focus

was not on demanding that the individuals act traditionally. In fact, tradition is not

what is supposed to bond together a society composed of members living physically far

apart, who have the most varied backgrounds, schooling levels and life objectives.

Tradition might, actually, hinder the process of democratic group integration by limiting the

scope of adhesion through somewhat hardened concepts. This idea has been defended by

theorist Arnold Krupat, in Turn to the Native, when referring to a similar position of

ethnographer Franz Boas, claiming:

"I can't deny that I share [Franz Boas'] view that freedom from "automatic

adhesion[s]" is a good thing, that "tradition" can and often does "shackle," and

that "in-group" moralities that do not find a way to include "all humanity" are

likely to produce […] horrors […]. So far as we may be called on to choose

between Einheit (oneness, unity) and Freiheit (freedom), I would, with Boas,

choose the latter" (KRUPAT, 1996, p. 104).

Freedom of choice over a tradition that shackles. This is the new light I want to shed

over Norma's discourse. What is at stake here is not the static values of past customs, but

the ever-changing, renewing aspect of community dynamics. When Norma expressed, as I

mentioned before, that what the tribe needs is that "the young people stay home", she is

manifesting the need of renewal, of the fresh blood the young generations bring. This

explains why Latisha's deviation from acting traditional is absolutely accepted, because she

manages to find the time to integrate with the tribe, to help her relatives and fellow

Blackfoot, to be a part of the network. Lionel, on the other hand, is judged not simply

because his job is ridiculous, but for the fact that he does not dedicate any attention to those

actions – not until, of course, he finds himself, in the jacket scene, in a situation in which he

can demonstrate cohesion with the interests of the larger group, finally realizing his role in

the bigger picture.

The forces working in the literary text, as we have been seeing in the lines of Green

Grass, Running Water, are representative of contemporary movements taking place at this

very moment in relation to various Native-American communities. Vast criticism has been

produced trying to assess the issues of belonging, identity and self-representation of these

groups – and my proposal of applying the concepts of the synopticon and the panopticon is

just one among many possibilities of looking at these subjects. Through them, I hope it can

be evidenced that there are outside forces working to influence and determine symbolic

representations of the Native, of Native literature and of tribal material. These immobilizing

procedures, discursively manifested through the panoptic power, have been acting upon

cultural representations for centuries now, and their denunciation and deconstruction are, in

my perspective, the main roles of literary productions such as Thomas King's and of the

literary criticism on them.

After all, by now there is no doubt that Native Americans have survived (as opposed

to what many discursive practices have attempted to prove) the acculturating and

disempowering processes employed against them for generations; it is not a matter anymore

of being concerned about Native survival – but survivance, as posited by Gerald Vizenor, is

paramount in the contemporary works of critics and theoreticians, as well as of writers. As

mentioned before in the words of King, through the excerpt of the essay 'Godzilla Vs. Post-

colonial', the 'active present' and the 'viable future' of Native life and culture are the real

concern, and not any actions of recovering or rescuing an organic pre-European-contact

reality. As a privileged forum for allegorical investigations and meanings, the literary text

encompasses these questions in a very vivid and open way through which we can grasp

significations and elaborate solutions. It is also the text that points to critical paths to be

followed, and here our novel is pointing to the elements that can be used to counter, to

annul, to revert those appropriating discourses that hold sway over Native interpretations. I

refer the performative practice that works in a distinct way from the immobilizing power of

the panoptic procedures. Academic, scientific and governmental discourses, among others,

are present in Native literary material depicting the ways tribal societies and the individuals

composing them are oppressed. My attempt at bringing the considerations on the synoptic

network serves as a form of situating one of the possible strategies that can be employed in

the deconstruction task I have been talking about. By means of it, we witness in the voice

of characters such a Norma the search for a non-Cartesian way of representation or, better

still, of self-representation, once we have that a Native discourse is engaging in the

construction of its own identity, of its own locus of enunciation in a liberating effort from

outside forces.

The need for the elaboration of such a locus is due to, evidently, the aggressive

constructions functioning to prevent a Native voice from gaining status and establishment.

These constructions are explored in many levels in King's Green Grass, Running Water –

some of them have already been exposed and examined in chapter 1; others will be

addressed in the following chapters, in which I will attempt to delve into official,

established discourses that exert pressure over concepts such as Native (and the variations

Indian, Aboriginal, Amerindian, First Nations' citizen, etc.). Further evidences of these

discourses will be provided in the sections dedicated to demonstrating how the different

media, from photography to motion picture to literature, depict Native material with the

dominating will of power characteristic of the Eurocentric principles of division and

conquest of allegedly primitive peoples and things. From the exposure of these mediatic

procedures, I will try and uncover the forms of resistance offered by Thomas King's text, as

a way to demonstrate that the novel in question here fights at a multi-medial level the forces

that oppress the Native and maintain the tradition that constructed the Native as a dying

nuisance who, through its resistance, accomplishes nothing more than setting back Western

development and progress. It is to those representations that I now turn.

3. INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSES ON THE NATIVE

Paula Gunn Allen, in Sacred Hoop, says that "Americans divide Indians into two

categories: the noble savage and the howling savage. The noble savage is seen as the

appealing but doomed victim of the inevitable evolution of humanity from primitive to

postindustrial social orders" (ALLEN, 1992, p.4). Allen is very bellicose in her opinions

about established discourses on the Indian, but she is voicing a quite common rhetoric that

has been institutionalized along the past few centuries in regards to Native-American

peoples and individuals. Although she mentions a division made by Americans, what Allen

probably means is a division made by those academic, governmental, scientific approaches

that characterize the Western epistemological thinking already analyzed in chapters 1 and

2, above, and that permeate not only America and the Americans, but the whole Western

world and its cultural products. Allen could have used in the place of Americans, for

instance, Euramerica, as some critics have done before, but this is not actually the point.

The question is that there are official and non-official discourses working to build the

image of the doomed savage who needs help from his state of primitiveness and who needs

to be modernized and brought to the arms of progress, to the comforts and benefits of a

civilized life.

In Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King incorporates many of these elements

and, through the voices of multiple characters, Native and white, questions their validity,

raises readers' awareness of them, employs different strategies aiming at annulling their

negative influence. The procedure used for these purposes involves weaving the narrative,

which is extremely nonlinear, in the patterns characteristic of the discourses the author

wants to question. In academic settings, for instance, King gives his characters some traits

peculiar to the academia, demonstrating that the subversion offered by the literary text

comes from within the parameters that built oppressive enunciations.

Other subversive moments deal with the construction of the hyper-real dying savage

concept, without any referent in the material world, by medical, scientific, governmental

representatives who utter their judgments and sentences based on biological and

segregational arguments that always seem to have political reasons hidden, masqueraded by

utilitarianism and modernity. Also, through the same institutionalized speeches we can

perceive the fabrication of the Native as dangerous to good citizens, to the government and,

finally, to the Natives themselves. One of the powers of King's novel is to deconstruct each

and every one of these oppressive attempts. In the next sections, I will propose readings as

to how this is accomplished, starting with an area well known by King himself, (his being a

university professor) the academia.

3.1 The Academia

In Green Grass, Running Water, there are two Blackfoot who are academics, one

who considers following the career, and a fourth who praises the academic achievements of

one of the first two. There is a whole section taking place at a university class in which

Alberta Frank (a character already mentioned above, whom Lionel wants to marry),

professor of Native history and culture, lectures about a critical historical episode of

conflict between the United States government and several Native-American tribes. In this

section of the novel we can perceive the use of academic language as a means to give more

or less credibility to chronicled events, such as those from history books.

In the excerpt below we can see Alberta talking about the Red River War of 1874 in

which the U.S. government unleashed a military campaign to remove the Comanche,

Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes from the Southern Plains where they lived

to reinforce the reservation system planned to regulate Native land, activities and access to

resources. The results were fierce battles and the eventual imprisonment of many of the

survivors from the conflict. This is how Professor Frank exposes the historical episodes to

her students:

"Alberta Frank leaned on the podium and watched Henry Dawes fall asleep.

"In 1874, the U.S. Army began a campaign of destruction aimed at forcing the

southern Plains tribes onto reservations. The army systematically went from

village to village burning houses, killing horses, and destroying food supplies.

They pursued the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and the Arapaho relentlessly

into one of the worst winters of the decade. Starvation and freezing conditions

finally forced the tribes to surrender"" (KING, 1993, p. 14-15, my highlights).

Although she is reporting a historical fact, there are many subtleties in Alberta's

lecture that alter the listeners' perception of the episode. She is using a very common

narrative strategy to reinforce her own impressions on the subject; through the use of words

like the ones I highlighted in the passage, she is imprinting a reinforced aggressive quality

to the ways of the U.S. Army operations. The subverting logic of the professor's speech can

be made obvious if we test the same passage with a different word choice. Many

possibilities could be tested – I propose the following substitutions: 'destruction' for

'removal'; 'forcing' for 'leading'; 'systematically' for 'occasionally'; 'relentlessly' for

'persistently'; and 'forced' for 'convinced'. There, we now have the same fact, but the

sympathy is redirected to the brave army that rid the region of the non-conformed

troublemakers who resisted being transported to the welfare of the reservation system

prepared for them.

Actually, what Alberta does is to employ the language commonly used to refer to

Natives. Anybody who watches the Indians depicted in Hollywood movies, TV cartoons,

novels of the western category or best-sellers is acquainted with the traditional language

use. The Indians depicted in these media are immediately taken as primitive, limited.

Dealing with them requires that white characters sink to their level in order to interact,

employ simplified language and resort to the usual knowledge the savage has of the

'spiritual world'. The condescending treatment given to white voices when faced with

Indians is exactly what is being criticized in Alberta's lines – there is no condescendence to

the slaughtering army, guided by destructive bureaucrats, employing relentless and

systematic force onto people who did not agree to the system proposed for them, and who

were not listened to in the decision-making process. The academic speech also questions

the potential veracity of historical 'facts', once it is made clear that the narrator can imprint

a misleading tone to the tale, depending on his or her interests.

The forum Alberta speaks in has been traditionally occupied by those who

determine policies, verify facts, and write history. The positions in the academic world have

been, naturally, occupied by scholars aligned with the mainstream storyline, who were

institutionally required to conform to the official narrative, the narrative that justified the

actions of national, patriotic actors such as soldiers, generals and statesmen. Alberta,

however, represents a shift in this logic. She comes from the party whose voice has been

ignored in the historical event narrated above (the Indians did not have any choice or vote

before the military removal action began) and she does not need to pay homage to the

scientific tradition that allowed history to be told that specific way. She is able, in fact, to

use its tools to revert from within some of the possibly misleading ways facts have been

told concerning Native-Americans. This idea is aligned with Michel Foulcault's position

that, since knowledge and power walk hand in hand, once minority groups start claiming

discursive voices in the institutions that generate knowledge, they also generate power

conflicts that open the path for new battlefields in which representation rights are

challenged and potentially redistributed. Before Alberta claims a position in this battlefield,

what the academia offers is either an imperial subject-object relation, with the Native's

voice silent in the binary power construction of us-them, or a condescending, sympathetic

approach of the objectified Native, whose voice is silenced by the artificially crafted them-

us in which 'them' (or Natives) is constructed based on a victimized image, on the

presupposition that they must be symbolically defined in generalized terms that can be

academically contrasted. This appropriation of academic representations is denounced by

Arnold Krupat when he says that

"to perpetuate a well-documented imperial tradition in which Indians, women or

the "colored body" serve as symbols, and symbolically to appropriate such

persons for the purposes of generalizations useful to "us", is to practice a form of

"sympathy" these people might well reject" (KRUPAT, 1992, p. 108).

The narration of the Red River War of 1874 may represent three distinct

appropriations of the same historical fact. Two possibilities are as follows; the third one

comes further ahead: 1) we (the narrators of the story in official history books) tell the story

in which they (the non-conformist savages) had it coming when they decided not to accede

to the U.S. government's sovereign decision of removal; 2) in the procedure described

above by Krupat, we (the narrators of the story in official history books who understand the

offence caused to the 'removed') tell the story in which they (the poor little Indians who

could not see it coming, since they were not really asked to issue an opinion on the removal

act) suffer a major injustice and must now be taken care of with tax discharges, special

gaming rights and free federal boarding schools for the youths. Alberta's narrative,

however, escapes from these storytelling structures while providing a third form of giving

an account of the Red River War. She incorporates the official storyline and its assertive,

definitive tone, not to draw commiseration onto the oppressed Comanche, Kiowa,

Cheyenne and Arapaho, but to symbolically stand ground for her right to narrate a part of

the history involving Native-Americans. Naturally, her depiction of the events causes some

sort of sympathetic reaction over her students, and I am not saying that it should not or it is

wrong that it does. What I specifically want to point to is the importance of Alberta's

position when employing academic tools and forum to mingle her storytelling power with

official history.

The significance of the professor's actions is expressed in Border Crossings, when

Arnold Davidson et. al comment that "the writing of a nation's history – the narration of its

existence through rhetorical forms – becomes an important political and cultural act. Such

records are a tangible reflection of the power of the imagination to create and sustain a

distinct national [or tribal] identity" (p. 125). The account of the Red River War helps to

tell the story of the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho, and national story of the

United States of America. The story reflects efforts from all the parts involved to 'imagine'

their position in that historical period, and Alberta's narration works to partially construct

(or create or sustain) distinct national and tribal identities.

The fact that Professor Alberta Frank employs several academic technologies points

to the privileged power position she finds herself in in which she can better generate a

positive image of the episode narrated. I explain 'positive' further ahead, but before I want

to attend to the subtleties in the novel that indicate her privileged position. She climbs the

university podium to speak, which grants her institutional, scientific and academic

authority. She shows slides as factual evidences of the point she wants to make. Alberta

also uses her prerogative of grading students to force them into focusing on her arguments,

threatening them with possible bad grades in the test. Finally and less evident is the

professor's liberty to deny answering questions she deems unnecessary to address, such as

in the following passage:

""Professor Frank, what was that date?"

"Eighteen seventy-four."

"Who were the tribes again?"

" The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapaho."

"How do you spell Arapaho?"

"Look it up in your book. Now, as the tribes came in, the army […]"" (KING,

1993, p. 14).

Alberta uses her discursive privilege to choose which questions and issues are

important to be addressed and which are not. When the student insists in a normative

technicality, the direction of the lecture is abruptly guided to what really matters for the

storyteller in the podium, the slaughtering of the Native-American tribes. The reason she

denies answering certain questions is because the strategy of reassessment of the circulation

of knowledge and power going on in this academic setting depends on focusing on a

positive agenda of asserting a different sort of truth. She assumes the academic place not

deny any part of history or of the traditional discourse employed to depict the Native as a

non-conformist nuisance. Alberta is not at the podium to say no to any previously

established oppressive narrative practice. The strategy is not of negativity, but of

reformulated positivity. After all, as Michel Foucault posits in Microfísica do Poder,

"If power were only repressive, if it did nothing more than to say "no", do you

really think that it would be obeyed? What gives power its effect, its acceptance,

is simply that it not only has weight as a force that says "no", but it really puts

itself across, it produces things, it induces pleasure, it forms knowledge, it

produces discourses" (FOUCALT, 2004, p. 8).

Several Native scholars and artists have employed before the tactics of denial –

denial of Western interpretative keys, of Eurocentric literary conceptions, of Judeo-

Christian mythical structuring of the universe. I do not want to question the validity or the

effects of the projects of refusing epistemological material utilized in the processes of

obliteration of Native voices. I do want to indicate that Alberta's strategy is quite different

and ensues a distinguished system of power relations. She incorporates Foucault's idea that

for power to be accepted and maintained it must be productive, creative, positive, and not

necessarily destructive, oppressive, negative. The implications of the affirmative aspect of

the professor's narrative are at the core of the generative force of knowledge referred to by

Foucault. Also in Microfísica do Poder, he claims that the role of the intellectual is not to

combat prevalent ideologies, but to try and institute a new politics of truth (FOUCAULT,

2004, p. 14). This truth, according to him, is attained through circular systems of power that

produce and support knowledge which, in its turn, feeds back such power in a continuous

retrofeeding spiral. Alberta's speech, thus, empowers her to enact this form of subversion to

The translation of this excerpt is mine.

the mainstream story told along the century following the Red River War. That kind of

performance is what Edward Said calls a productive power, in the place of a unilaterally

inhibiting one (SAID, 2003, p. 14). In Orientalism, he posits that "knowledge gives power,

power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of

information and control" (SAID, 2003, p. 36). This means that Alberta is using a system

usually employed for the domination of the representations of the Native, only she does so

in order to make her academic position count to weigh in the scale of power relations. She

uses her privileged status to generate knowledge that will eventually feed her power back

by forming intellectuals aligned with her storytelling and not the official one.

In order to give her speech academic credibility, Alberta also uses language that

leaves open the reliability of history textbooks. This is how her class goes on after the

passage presented before:

"Now, as the tribes came in, the army separated out certain individuals who were

considered to be dangerous. Some were troublemakers in the eyes of the army.

Some were thought to have been involved in raids. Others were simply leaders

opposed to the reservation system.

The army identified seventy-two such individuals, and when the rest of the

people were sent to reservations, these Indians were chained to wagons and

taken to Fort Sill in what is now Oklahoma. There they were put on a train and

sent to Florida" (KING, 1993, p. 15, my highlights).

If before we had that the narrative shifted listeners' identification from a potential

sympathy for the U.S. Army to the slaughtered tribes, here we have a shift from what could

have been the description of a bureaucratic procedure of removing prisoners to a suspicious

process of judgment, prejudice, simplification and brutality. Alberta is masterfully playing

the game of the colonizer, manipulating information, twisting language for the purpose of

strengthening her stance, inverting the logic of history textbooks that constructed a

narrative of immobilization of ideas about Native-Americans.

The official chronicles she is combating are those that Edward Said described in

Orientalism. In this study he denounced a whole set of discursive practices that worked for

centuries to construct a hyper-real representation of what an oriental is. The representation,

eventually, substituted the material reality it originally referred to for a metaphysical,

organic image of monolithic culture, history and geography. In Said's words, these

discursive practices represent "[…] a positive twist: since one cannot ontologically

obliterate the Orient […], one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it,

improve it, radically alter it" (SAID, 2003, p. 95). In the analysis I am proposing here, we

can perfectly substitute Orient, in the quote, for Native. This way we can allude to the fact

that, since Native-Americans could not be obliterated, vanquished, completely suppressed,

they could be captured, treated, described improved, radically altered – or, at least, their

hyper-real simulations could. That is the kind of practice Alberta's storytelling denounces

and attempts to deconstruct. The highlights I chose for the excerpt above of the text of

Green Grass, Running Water demonstrate how her choice of words functions for that

subverting purpose. Once those words were employed to represent the lack of trust we can

have in history textbooks, the second paragraph of the excerpt is narrated with a greater

level of certainty, since what is certain (according to that specific part) is exactly the brutal

way in which the action of removal was undertaken.

Although the academic setting is where Professor Alberta Frank enacted her

alternative, subversive storytelling, there are other scenarios in which that can be done. A

clinic, a hospital or any other health institution is also prone to the discursive hyper-real

representations that can influence power relations and exert pressure over depictions of the

Native. It is to the passages in Green Grass, Running Water that portray medical

institutional views on the characterization of the Native that I now turn, in an attempt to

demonstrate how Thomas King's text appropriates ongoing generalizations and stereotypes

and how we can find evidences of a literary construction that attempts to undo the stagnant

representations these views offer.

3.2 Scientific and Medical Voices

The physician Joseph Hovaugh figures in the sections of the novel in which the four

Indian elders, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, Hawkeye and the Lone Ranger, are either

imprisoned in the doctor's hospital or on the road, roaming the world while trying to fix it.

Dr. Hovaugh seems to me to be the greatest victim of the performative deconstruction

enacted by Thomas King's text. I say victim because he seems to be perfectly aware that

there is something awkward going on with the world, and that he will soon be involved and

play a part in the episodes to come.

Dr. Hovaugh is depicted as quite arrogant, impersonal and bossy. He sometimes

rephrases his requests so that they sound more authoritative (soon after having said "I shall

probably need John, Mary", he corrects the sentence by saying, shortly after realizing he

had made a polite request, "Find me John" (KING, 1993, p. 14). His arrogance manifests

when he needs cooperation from other people but, instead of resorting to diplomacy, he

simply blurts "I'm a doctor" (KING, 1993, p. 447) and expects to get whatever he wants

because of that. These are the most obvious traits of the character, but there are some

subtleties that can allow us a deeper comprehension of him and of the analogy I want to

make of his figure with the medical and scientific fields we can say he represents. At a

broad level, Dr. Hovaugh's speech can be seen as representative of the scientific discourses,

especially those of the biological and medical areas, that deal with objective descriptions

and treatments of human beings. Through his words the reader can distinctly perceive the

authoritative aspect usually attributed to exact sciences and the implicit will of truth they

carry in their systematic, logical, mathematical methods. In Green Grass, Running Water,

this sort of authoritative language operates to depict Natives in those simulations, so

frequent in mass media productions and popular belief, of dying people and of eugenically

categorized primitives.

The stereotypical image of the Native is explicitly referred to at specific passages of

the novel. One of them expresses that "Indians run fast. Indians can endure pain. Indians

have quick reflexes. Indians don't talk much. Indians have good eyesight. Indians have

agile bodies. These are all Indian gifts, says Nasty Bumppo

" (KING, 1993, p. 434). This

particular passage has a comic tone to it and poses as a strategy of ridiculing the stereotype

of the Indian as having a special connection with nature, at once incorporating animal traits,

such as keen senses and dexterity, and acting as an unsocial, secluded being. The ridiculing

process is enhanced by the contrast of Indian gifts with those of the white people: "Whites

are patient. Whites are spiritual. Whites are cognitive. Whites are philosophical. Whites are

sophisticated. Whites are sensitive. These are all white gifts, says Nasty Bumppo" (KING,

1993, p. 434). In this section of the novel, the character of Nathaniel Bumppo, a.k.a. Nasty

Bumppo, is teaching Old Woman about the hierarchical relationship between whites and

A caricature of Natty Bumppo, protagonist frontiersman of James Fenimore Cooper's tale The Deerslayer,

or the First Warpath, from 1841, who plays the civilized white man among the scalp-taking savages.

Indians and about what kinds of positive attributes these latter have that can justify his

being friends to one of them. Indian gifts are, after all, inferior but useful if you are white

and have an Indian friend whom you can use should you need any of those abilities.

The passages above refer to a tradition of converting popular impressions into

common knowledge and using them to hierarchically structure communities and their

members. This tradition, when introduced in scientific terms and proved with empirical

evidence, can be used for the most varied forms of aggression. It is to that aggression that I

want to point to when referring to Dr. Joseph Hovaugh's voice as the representative of

institutional views on what is portrayed as an inferior dying race.

The narrative construction of Natives as imminently vanishing due to their

primitiveness occurs gradually and indirectly in the words of Hovaugh. Being in charge of

the hospital where the four elders are being held (the reason, though, is not specified in the

novel), he is frustrated when the extremely old Indians not only do not die, but escape the

health institution and disappear without leaving any traces. This is the first blow on the

solid normative power of science: they inexplicably vanish from a locked room and ignore

the restraining authority of the expert doctor. Angry at the outcome of the episode, Dr.

Hovaugh summons Dr. John Eliot (whose position is also not specified, but who is

probably the coroner) and requests that he sign the death certificates for the elders so that

he can have a formal document proving they really died. In face of Eliot's refusal to sign

any certificates without having dead bodies to assure him the Indians are not coming back,

Dr. Hovaugh demands acquiescence with the following words: "Sign the certificates, John.

You've been expecting them to die for years. You said yourself they couldn't live much

longer" (KING, 1993, p. 48). Both doctors are discussing with the implicit understanding

that what is left for the Indians to perish is that time pass. 'They', in the excerpt, does not

necessarily correspond to the four elders; 'they' can be seen as referring to each and all of

the First Nations of the Americas. If we interpret it that way, we will have an allusion to the

whole subtext of the novel, that which is in the very title of the book – 'green grass, running

water' implying the negotiated duration of the treaties signed between Native-American

tribes and the national governments of the United States and Canada. It is often said that

these documents were signed to last for as long as the grass is green and the waters run,

particularly because the American and Canadian authorities who endorsed them were

absolutely sure Natives would not survive long enough to claim their part of the deal. It can

also be affirmed with certainty that, in order to assure the disappearance of the Native

parties that could demand the fulfillment of those contracts, hostile action was taken on the

part of the national governments.

The conversation between the two doctors offers the reader more evidence of the

offensive tradition in relation to Natives. The dialogue reproduced above continues in the

sense of trying to find a way of, if not materially, at least legally making sure the elders

were killed:

""[…] They should have died… a long time ago."

"If you believe the stories."

"If you believe the stories. But they haven't, and I can't sign a death certificate

until they do die."

"They're dead," said Dr. Hovaugh. "I can feel it. All four of them. We just need

the certificates. Heart attack, cancer, old age. I don't care. Be creative"" (KING,

1993, p. 48-49).

The idea that the Natives should have died already permeates in great measure

historical, cultural and theoretical discussions going on even today. From the theories and

criticism I have already exposed above we can perceive that the idea is very present. The

very need for Gerald Vizenor to coin a term such as survivance, in contrast with survival, is

indicative that the subject must be addressed, and addressed epistemologically more then

physically. I have also quoted Thomas King's essay 'Godzilla Vs. Post-colonial' with the

passage where he mentions the active present and the viable future of Native-American

tribal communities, also in an attempt to focus on the aspect of continuance and not of

survival, as it was necessary to do in the past.

The evidences that there is an underlying presence of the issue of survival is

scattered throughout the lines of Green Grass, Running Water. For instance, when Charlie

Looking Bear is signing up for a car rental, the clerk who attends him offers several

advertisement materials containing the tourist options for the town of Blossom. One piece

of advertisement indicates as attractive sites the "old Indian ruins and the remains of

dinosaurs just to the north of town and a real Indian reserve to the west" (KING, 1993, p.

164). What is worth noticing in this passage is that whatever it is that 'Indian ruins' stand

for, it is placed side by side in importance with 'the remains of dinosaurs' as a tourist

attraction, in an obvious enough insinuation that Indians are as extinct as the reptiles who

lived 65 million years ago. Furthermore, the advertisement alludes to a 'real Indian reserve'.

I see the use of 'real' as possibly having two meanings: either there are unreal (or fake or

fraudulent) Indian reservations somewhere, or to find a genuine, concrete, real reservation

is a true accomplishment worthy of note. Either way, this sort of propaganda bears between

its lines the very issue of survival and of the multifaceted constructions of the perishing

Native.

Crafted that way, the representation of the Native in advertisement follows the same

pattern as the one described above inspired by biological science; both allude to an idea of

the Native, a discursive simulation that does not allow, as Edward Said referred to in

Orientalism, the possibility of resistance on the part of the group represented (p. 7), the

Native, in this case (again, while Said is talking about the Orient, I am borrowing his ideas

and using them in regards to Native-Americans). If this construction functions at the

narrative level, it is only natural that the most effective way of fighting them is in the same

battlefield. The frustration suffered by Dr. Joseph Hovaugh that the narrative of Green

Grass, Running Water portrays points to a potential interpretation of King's text as an

attempt to combat these hostile representations and counterattack their effects.

Although Dr. Hovaugh does not interact with any of the Blackfoot along the story

(the contact he had with the elders is taken to have been before the beginning of the

narration), his character ends up incorporating many of the elements we can identify as

Thomas King's operation of dismounting the workings of the forces described above. The

way we can identity this operation is through the doctor's frustrated attempts to regain

control over the Indians and their destinies. In his first appearance, Hovaugh is described as

being unsettled because of the rootedness and permanency of things around him. The

depiction of his feelings only seems to be relevant to the story if we relate them to the

elders and the possibility that their actions are having an effect upon the doctor. This is how

the reader has access to an analogy of his distress with rooted and permanent things: "Dr.

Hovaugh turned away from the window. Perhaps he should move the desk out and get

another that didn't seem so rooted and permanent" (KING, 1993, p. 14). The desk he is

referring to is a massive piece of wood carved in a colonial style. The significance of the

episode resides in the fact that he sits by his desk for some time, every day, and each day

for a longer period, staring at the hospital's yard in full bloom; full of life, fruit, colors and

scents – and of greens (KING, 1993, p. 13). At this point of the novel the reader already has

some clues as to the symbolism of the color green through the constant repetition of the

word, either alone or as a prefix of suffix of other words. Throughout the book, the word

'green' appears thirty-nine times, and in a single paragraph depicting Dr. Hovaugh's

impressions of the yard we have words such as 'evergreens', lilacs 'greening' up nicely and

swans swimming in the 'blue-green' pond. Yet, these are only clues for the reader – until the

doctor comes up with a more direct reference to the unsettling life that surrounds him: "It's

spring again. Garden looks good, uh? Everything's green. Everything's alive" (KING, 1993,

p. 14).

This reference to green as representing blossoming, life, cyclic renewal in the words

of the spokesman of the scientific oppression of the Native is exactly what is being

announced in this chapter of the novel and that will be enacted at its end. From this point

on, after the doctor has realized that as long as the grass is green the elders will resist his

institutional attempts at locking and controlling them, he departs on a journey in a final,

desperate endeavor to locate the four escapees and recapture them. His quest will involve

his capacities for logical deduction, calculation and a slight dose of irrational creed that the

elders may represent something mythical, magical and powerful enough to revolutionize

the world he believes he knows all too well. Since the morning the elders disappeared, the

world in which everything is in place, ordered, controlled begins to look strange to him.

That massive desk that can be seen to represent the permanence of what was believed to be

dying (or who was believed to be dying) starts to disturb him, to emanate something

disruptive: "Dr. Hovaugh seemed to shrink behind the desk as though it were growing,

slowly and imperceptibly enveloping the man" (KING, 1993, p. 14). This presence

oppresses him, reminding him of his impotence to order and control the everlasting force

the four elders represent. Notwithstanding his efforts to lock them or see that they are dead,

the Indians are free to roam the world and, in Dr. John Eliot's very words, "[…] they'll be

back. They always come back" (KING, 1993, p. 47).

Dr. Hovaugh's journey in search for the Indians acquires a modern epic aspect when

he drafts Babo Jones, an African-American who works in the same hospital, as side-kick to

help him figure out what role they are to play in the elders' scheme to fix the world. The

descriptions of his journey appear, throughout the novel, interspersed between the more

than a hundred chapters/sub-chapters dedicated to the several other characters. In the end,

although there are not more than a couple dozen sections focusing on him, these sections

manage to reach the very end of the narrative. This sort of narrative strategy gives the

reader the impression that Hovaugh's quest attains an epic length, culminating in a

grandiose episode. This grandiosity is comparable, as I will explore further on, to the

majestic failure of Eurocentric epistemology and positivistic progress to get rid of the

Native in its wake of modernization and science.

Dr. Hovaugh's progress in his quest is quite erratic, and his logical attempts at

finding a reliable path appear to be utterly useless. His Cartesian rationale seems even

pathetic and desperate in King's depiction. This is a sample of how he tries and finds his

way after the elders:

"Dr. Hovaugh sat in his hotel room in a sea of maps and brochures and travel

guides. The book was lying open on top of the pile, and he hummed to himself

as he consulted the book and then a map, the book and then a brochure, the book

and then a travel guide. […] All the while, he plotted occurrences and

probabilities and directions and deviations on a pad of graph paper, turning the

chart as he went, literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogic.

Slowly and with great self-assurance, Dr. Hovaugh took out a purple marker and

drew a deliberate circle around Parliament Lake" (KING, 1993, p. 430).

The feeling of desperation is latent in this passage. The repetition of 'and' eleven

times gives a frenetic flow to the doctor's actions as he looks from one item to the other,

does this and that at the same time. We also have a clear reference to instruments of

measurement and description, of objectification and calculation, which indicate the use of

those procedures of organization and control I exposed in chapters 1 and 2. All these

elements, added to some esoteric interpretations of graphs and charts, mount up to compose

the tone of Dr. Hovaugh's quest for logical answers to a seemingly supernatural occurrence,

namely the vanishing of the Indians and the discovery of evidence that they might be

several hundred years old. The narrative is about to reach the point in which the rational

and scientific proposal of the doctor's character fails to make sense of the mythic

significance of the events occurring around the elders. If Dr. Hovaugh succeeds in reaching

the spot where the apotheosis of the novel is going to take place, he is absolutely impotent

to do anything but watch the unfolding of events, in an analogy, as I see it, to the incapacity

of Eurocentric logic to apprehend Native-American mythic material and its importance for

the continuance not only of tribal communities but of life itself. I am referring here to the

ultimate symbolism of water in the novel, the very episode that closes Dr. Hovaugh's

participation in the plot.

As mentioned before, the Great Baleen Dam is built in Blackfoot land after the

promise of bringing progress to the tribe by paying tributes in the form of taxes. However,

since Eli Stands Alone refuses to leave his family's cabin that stands right in the middle of

where the water flow would be should the dam be operational, nobody is profiting from the

situation. There are several references along the novel of the dam being harmful to the land

and its surroundings. It might even be destructive enough to kill the river and destroy life

around it. Its full significance is, however, that it prevents water from running. As I

mentioned before in regards to the 'running water' of the title of the novel, the symbolism of

water flowing forever is representative of the permanence and continuance of Native-

American tribal communities against the long-lasting process of extermination they have

been suffering along the past five centuries. The dam can be said, therefore, to represent the

strangulation of the fluidity of water, the interruption of the ancient running of the river, the

breach of the many contracts valid for as long as the grass is green and the waters run –

ultimately, the victory of those who signed the treaties certain that Natives would

eventually disappear.

The narrative destruction of the symbolism of the dam and of Dr. Hovaugh's

fruitless journey to try and impede Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, Hawkeye and the Lone

Ranger from fixing the world is weaved in a pattern that defies explanation. What matters

for the analysis we are carrying out here is that, along the novel, three cars vanish into thin

air with only a puddle of water remaining in their places. These cars, a Pinto, a Nissan and

a Karmann-Guia (one of them is Dr. Hovaugh's), are a subtle phonetic reference to

Christopher Columbus' ships, the Pinto, Nina and Santa Maria, in which he sailed to

'discover' America. These vehicles end up, as the doctor approaches the Great Baleen Dam,

floating along the leveed river and smashing the solid concrete walls that have been

preventing the water from running its natural course. The dam is finally destroyed and the

river resumes its flow.

Thus we come to the closure of Dr. Joseph Hovaugh's quest, with some elements

still needing an analysis. He set off to try and figure out the meaning of the four elders'

voyages in time and space and their invariable return. He does so by employing

instrumental and Cartesian logic to gradually discover that these procedures will not give

him any answers. He finally reaches the spot where he was supposed to find these answers,

but, in their place, finds himself simply witnessing a mythic episode in which the world is

set right by powers beyond his comprehension and, by extension, beyond the

comprehension of the traditional Eurocentric logic that objectively created the image of the

Native as the dying Other. Thomas King's novel offers a conclusion for Christopher

Columbus' enterprise that brought to the Americas what Leslie Marmon Silko described in

her work Ceremony as some sort of overseas curse, when referring to the Europeans' arrival

as a misguided, mistold story weaved by a witch. If in Silko's story, once whites have been

created and brought to the world by some kind of evil narrative, the harmful effects they

bring must be painstakingly endured and combated, in King's Green Grass, Running Water

there is a literary performative response to the offense originated in the discovery of the

New World. The images of the three Columbus' ships are exactly the tools that finally

destroy the solid structure built to prevent and control the flow of water. It is those exact

tools that, once destroyed themselves, will set the world right: "Below, in the valley, the

water rolled on as it had for eternity" (KING, 1993, p. 455).

The tone of continuance at the end of the novel also works to eliminate the

discursive constructions on the dying Native that permeate the story from the beginning.

Looking at the several references of things ending well and of a potential good future, we

can interpret the novel's outcome as refusing (among other elements) to recognize voices

such as Dr. Joseph Hovaugh's and Bill Bursum's, voices that attempt to unilaterally,

authoritatively hold sway over symbolic and scientific representations of the Native and to,

through them, exert power that is often, if not always, used in detriment of those

individuals who have their self-representation denied by these very practices. A suitable

evidence of this denial is subtly demonstrated in the passage in which he is about to take a

bus to the dam and manifests his wish to arrive early and "[…] to get good seats. […] At

the front. So we can see everything" (KING, 1993, p. 441). The doctor's intention to see

everything, a wish only paralleled to scientific teleological propositions of all-

encompassing knowledge through objective investigation, cataloguing, rationalization and

instrumentalization, utterly fails him; it grants him, though, a very good front seat where he

can watch the mythic destruction of a Western instrumental symbol of progress by Western

symbols of domination and oppression.

Green Grass Running Water offers further material we can investigate in order to

understand Thomas King's deconstruction of oppressive Western symbols through the very

tools that allowed this oppression to take place. I refer to the various mediatic elements

contained in the novel that have been traditionally employed in the construction of images

on the Native. In the following and final chapter, I will analyze how King's text subverts

mediatic representations to empower the narrative of the novel in yet another level.

4. MEDIATIC REPRESENTATIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY

Several media help compose the narrative of Green Grass, Running Water. From

the previous chapters we have seen that intense literary interchange occurs between the

novel and several canonic works. We have also seen that filmic references are brought into

the story, especially those of John Wayne and the Lone Ranger and Tonto, in order to

summon into it the mass culture elements, regarding Native Americans, Thomas King

proposes to criticize and reassess. Another medium that plays a significant part in the novel

is the focus of this last chapter: photography.

Thomas King himself has had experiences with photography. He has undertaken a

photographic project he called Medicine River Photographic Expedition, which he

colorfully describes in The Truth About Stories. King compares this enterprise with Edward

Sheriff Curtis' own project, around 1900, of photographing Native Americans before they

perished entirely. King, however, does not propose to register a vanishing way of life, but

to offer a perspective into the lives of contemporary, live Indians. I say a perspective over

activity. According to him, "what the camera allows you to do is to invent, to create. That's

really what photographs are. Not records of moments, but rather imaginative acts" (KING,

2003, p. 43). As imaginative an act, the crafting of a photograph naturally depends heavily

on the photographer's intentions. Being aware of that, King refers to Curtis' process of

authenticating pictures of Indians:

"I know that Curtis paid Indians to shave away any facial hair. I know he talked

them into wearing wigs. I know that he would provide one tribe of Indians with

clothing from another tribe because the clothing looked more "Indian". So his

photographs would look authentic" (KING, 2003, p. 36).

Therefore, King acknowledges that the use of the camera implies a great

responsibility and has immense power of representation. These aspects were incorporated

in the Narrative of Green Grass, Running Water and will be analyzed further on in this

chapter.

Another display of King's awareness of the camera's potential and his willingness to

include it in storytelling is his previous novel, Medicine River, which also contains as a

central element the power of photography, mainly that of community healing through the

unification of the elements contained in a single shot. For that, the photographer Will Horse

Capture, after returning to the community he formerly belonged to, engages in a series of

relationships that question identity issues, putting in check his ideas on belonging to that

community. Will's experience with photography is employed in Green Grass, Running

Water in the episode in which Latisha commissions fake pictures for her restaurant menu.

The power and the potential of the photographic enterprise as a discursive practice must

first be addressed before we can elaborate on its specific uses by the characters in King's

novel and its possible implications. The power of the camera is, therefore, the central topic

of this next section.

4.1 The Power of the Camera

On a visit to the Louvre Museum more than ten years ago, my father was told that

taking pictures was forbidden while inside the building. Considering that he had traveled

dozen of hours and waited for a couple more in line just to get to one of the most famous

museums in the world, he thought it would be too great a waste not to record his passage by

that place. When there was no one looking, he drew his camera and took a couple of shots

before the museum police came and made him leave. I am not sure if people are allowed to

use cameras nowadays, but the 'stolen' pictures are to this day in a family album of trip

mementos as proof of the forbidden act.

***

Once, I was on vacation in Chile and there was this llama whelp beside its owner,

who was charging a few dollars for the privilege of allowing tourists to take pictures with

the beast. While I paid so that my wife could pose with the cute little animal, some other

tourists sneaked up behind her and took several shots with their cameras. They rushed away

when the owner of the animal chased after them to charge the money. It was too late; they

had already crossed the street and were far out of reach of the angry businessman. The

tourist guide said that he, every now and then, took his wife with him so that she could take

care of the llama while he chased after smart tourists who took the photographs and walked

away without paying.

***

When I was calling real estate brokers to advertise my apartment for sale, there was

this one time in which they came in a group of four to evaluate market price and select

angles to photograph the rooms that would appear in the website and be available for

possible buyers to see. At that same time, I had my Persian cat's fur trimmed so that it

would not suffer so much from the heat of the summer, as its fur was long and heavy. The

brokers, at the sight of the odd creature with a big furry head and slender, scraggy body that

ended with a fluffy tail, immediately stopped doing their work to photograph each and

every angle of the bizarre creature. It took some minutes before I lost my patience and

angrily ordered them around to finish the business and leave. To this day I do not know

what became of the pictures. They never appeared on the brokers' website as an

advertisement of my apartment.

***

I mentioned these three little stories from my personal life (I have many more that

involve picture-taking) as an introduction, an illustration of the aspects involved in the

photographic enterprise. These stories comprise issues such as photographic rights,

business and pecuniary rules, guile, breach of decorum, premeditation, invasion and

offense, individual rights, stealing, etc. Although they are quite prosaic in nature, all three

examples I bring here end in a negative tone, with either somebody angry, offended or

deceived. As we are about to see, the employment of the camera is very often considered to

be aggressive and intrusive. Though it may not be always so in every situation, the

moments in which photography plays a major role in King's novel can be said to be mostly

negative or aggressive in nature. Therefore before entering the specificities of how

photography operates in the text of Green Grass, Running Water, I want to elaborate some

ideas on the general aspects of this art form.

"There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera", Susan Sontag says in

her On Photography (1990, p. 7). This aggression seems to be implicit in the very

vocabulary employed in this art form: shot, mug shot, picturesque, shutter, negatives, to

shoot, to frame, to capture all seem to be nouns and verbs that indicate some sort of offense,

invasion or violation. My father broke a museum rule that could send him to jail, the

tourists in Chile robbed the llama's owner of his work earnings, and the brokers invaded my

privacy by registering private images of my deformed pet – all of this with a simple click of

the camera. This simplicity in picture taking seems to me to be one of its most powerful

aspects. When you suddenly realize someone if photographing something, it has already

been done. But why is it that a moment recorded without consent can be so bothersome and

invasive? I will heavily rely on Sontag's work to try and offer some elaboration on that

question before inspecting its impact on King's novel.

One of the most important aspects of photographing is objectification. Any

occurrence, object or situation captured becomes an object that can be owned, possessed,

taken, lost – in short, symbolic moments become subject to mercantile rules and the laws of

property and can, therefore, be treated as products. This idea can be easily illustrated by any

of the above-mentioned stories. Although the museums claim that constant flashes may

eventually damage the works of art displayed, preventing visitors from 'acquiring' paintings

and sculptures works to preserve the exclusivity of the collection, therefore maintaining and

prolonging its value as an attraction. The llama story is even more evident, since the

product the man was selling was exactly the image of the beautiful exotic animal.

Acquiring the image without paying means (at least as far as the salesman is concerned)

stealing a product. The same occurs with the apartment pictures. After realizing the sale, I

could still live in it for a couple of months before having to hand the keys to the new owner.

In this period, the images were still on the internet, available for anyone to check the

registered mess of my living room; but what really bothered me was that, without any

updates on the website, my sold apartment was still for sale, at public disposal and

universal accessibility, and the calls kept coming in to negotiate a visual product I no longer

possessed.

Naturally, not every picture taken is meant for commercial purposes. Most, I

believe, are meant for personal, small-scale consumption, which is the case of travel

mementoes and the record of animal and plant life. Even these, however, exert different

sorts of power depending on the context they are being employed. As Sontag suggests, the

same image will have different interpretations and purposes if it is displayed "on a contact

sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine,

in a general news magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall" (SONTAG, 1990, p. 106).

Let us take, as an example, the picture of a Cherokee ceremonial spear. In a galley, it would

probably be considered as an artistic picture; in a political demonstration, perhaps it could

be taken as the symbol of a group or of a certain demand; in a police file, it could be the

evidence of a murder weapon, etc. What Sontag proposes is that none of those places of

exposition are capable of revealing the contents of a photograph, but that the content is

given based on the use of that medium. She reminds us of photographer Ansel Adams' urge

"that we stop saying we "take" pictures and always say we "make" one" (SONTAG, 1990,

p. 123).

The confection of the contents of a picture may be undertaken at many different

moments, not only at the moment of shooting. The choices range from the time before the

event (planning what equipment to use, at what time (thus choosing the lighting) and what

object to target), to the actual shot (choosing angle and shutter speed, for instance), and

finally to the development (with the potential digital alterations) and display or

consumption (at the place that is supposed to frame the image). Notwithstanding the

choices made, Sontag claims that every single act of photographing is invasive, for "in

deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers

are always imposing standards on their subjects" (1990, p. 6). Furthermore, these choices

grant the photographer the power to modify people, "to violate them, by seeing them as

they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns

people into objects that can be symbolically possessed" (SONTAG, 1990, p.14). Possession

of people and moments and subsequent classification of those objects – this is what I want

to propose the photographic enterprise to be about. Once the object has been appropriated,

all the consequences mentioned in chapter 1 about classification are manifested by the

simple effort of naming a photograph or an event, which affords extra power to the

photographer.

This aspect is also approached by Gerald Vizenor in relation to the photographing of

Native American experiences. In Manifest Manners, Vizenor elaborates on the employment

of the camera as a narrative tool to reinforce Native American disappearance. He claims

that

"the camera captures others, not the experiences of the photographer; the

presence of the other is discovered in a single shot, the material reduction of a

pose, the vanishing pose, and then reinvented once more in a collection of

pictures. The simulation of a tribe in photographs" (VIZENOR, 1999, p. 129).

Besides the discrepancy in the views of both theoreticians in regards to the actual

role of the photographer (while for Susan Sontag the capturer means to hold sway over the

thing captured, for Vizenor this act is accomplished notwithstanding any will behind the

camera), their positions coincide in proposing that photography has as much narrative

potential (if not more) as writing. This potential, both claim, can be used, among other

things, to reinforce the presence of the object portrayed or to deny its presence by allowing

the picture to be the real referent, more real than the object. Such distortions fit perfectly,

when it comes to Native American portrayals, with Vizenor's concept of manifest manners,

when he posits that framed images and representations of tribal material can work to distort

the presence of the object depicted. Using again the ceremonial spear mentioned above,

both the actual spear, if displayed in a museum, or its picture, at, for instance, an art gallery,

might be taken as a historical record of the past or of a cultural practice worth saving due to

its disappearance. The same would most certainly be true even if the spear were actually

still used in religious practices – the frame of the object would provide it a meaning that

would surpass the real referent.

So that this comment does not pose as mere speculation of what something might be

considered, I provide a personal example that substitutes the spear for a doll. When I was

about to visit Texas in 2003, my friend asked me to purchase a Hopi Kachina Doll, which

she said was very common there. After a great deal of effort, I finally managed to find one,

at the Texas University Museum. Actually, there were many of them protected within glass

cases and several pictures of different varieties of wood carved dolls of the Hopi tribe.

However, there were none to be purchased, so I came home with pictures of dolls and

pictures of pictures of dolls. Only later I found out those works of art could be bought from

street vendors or through the internet. The fact that they were museum pieces made me

believe they could not be sold at the museum (information corroborated by the lady at the

gift shop) and were only to be found on a craftsman cabin of a Hopi member. The framing

of the dolls in the museum is what framed my view of them – they were displayed in the

same section of war hatchets, hunting bows, arrow heads, ragged fur shorts, feather

furnishings, tepee samples, dream catchers, fishing spears, weaved baskets. Most of these

objects were described as having been collected decades earlier, and were arranged in the

section as to indicate they were from the past. In short, historical tools, religious symbols

and modern woodcarving art were displayed together as if forming some sort of unity of

representation, of a monolithic past accessed through the glass cases and pictures at the

visitors' disposal.

The fact that all those pieces were classified under the same category (that of a far

past) was made possible through the employment (deliberate or not) of some cataloguing

tactics. First, the material was selected to represent customs and cultures already

disappeared; or, through manifest manners, material that could pass as disappeared.

Although Hopi Kachina Dolls are modern artistic products that are also used as income

means for several artists, they can pass as long gone pieces of craftsmanship when sided

with war hatchets and fishing spears. This strategy stands for the reinvention through a

collection of images mentioned in the quote of Vizenor's, above.

The second tactic involved in the misleading museum classification of images (here,

I refer to images as either photographs or case-framed displays) is that of naming. This

procedure, described by Susan Sontag in On Photography, functions to restrict viewers'

perception of the object to a certain pre-decided limit, stipulated by those in charge of the

selection of images. According to her,

"though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing,

it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an

event. There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the

event itself has been named and characterized. And it is never photographic

evidence which can construct – more properly, identify – events; the

contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event"

(SONTAG, 1990, p. 18-19).

In the museum display analyzed here, the naming of the photographs and cases

involves not only titling them, but also dating them (as part of the title). A spear titled

"hunting instrument, 1854" frames viewers' perception of it in an immensely diverse form

from a title such as "festive ornament, 2003", even if the spear is more than a hundred years

old and now used as an accessory for a costume. The first example offers a view of a

practice that is no longer part of most Native American communities; although some still

practice hunting, the object displayed that way is indicative of a long gone custom, whereas

the second example points to the positivity of a present that might represent a celebration,

or simply art. This versatility in the categorization of objects corroborates the power

attributed to the camera by Sontag and Vizenor, and indicates that the picture-taker and the

expositor have a privileged power to influence, restrict and distort whatever it is that is

targeted by the camera.

It is based on these aspects of photography that I now turn to the exploration of how

they function in the text of Green Grass, Running Water. The focus here is on three

different episodes: one in which Native American characters employ photography to

exploit the misleading stereotype of dog eating to fool tourists: and a second in which a

white character attempts to sneak into the Sun Dance to reveal ceremonial practices to the

great public; and a third one in which Native Americans and whites fight for the right over

a photographic film, thus demonstrating a certain power in the camera that no side is

willing to part with.

4.2 The Uses of the Camera in Green Grass, Running Water

4.2.1 Dog du Jour, Houndburgers, Puppy Potporri and other Delicacies

As previously mentioned, Latisha owns the restaurant called Dead Dog Café. Over

the years, she has transformed the place from, in her words, 'a nice local establishment with

a loyal but small clientele to a nice local establishment with a loyal but small clientele and

a tourist trap' (KING, 1993, p. 117). Her strategy is to inform the customers and spread the

information that the menu at the Dead Dog is full of traditional Indian dishes whose main

ingredient is dog meat. Thus, she composed the menu to feature such itens as Dog du Jour,

Houndburgers, Puppy Potpourry, Hot Dogs, Saint Bernard Swiss Melts, with Doggy Doos

and Deep-Fried Puppy Whatnots for appetizers' (KING, 1993, p. 117). Since the printed

menu might not be enough to convince tourists of the veracity of the traditional ingredient

(some tourists even question its legality), Latisha resorts to a truth-fabrication technology:

the camera.

She uses the same strategy employed by explorers and hunters who, having found a

long lost ruin or having shot down a thousand-pound buffalo, cannot prove their feats by

simply telling people the have done so; unable to take their boon along they capture the

image of the accomplishment and are free to abandon it and carry forever the proof of the

deed. For the Dead Dog Café, Latisha orders some shots by a local Native American, Will

Horse Capture, which can serve as evidence of the use of such a traditional food that is

now available for the consumption of the larger public. This is how she commissions and

uses the pictures:

'She got Will Horse Capture over in Medicine River to make up a bunch of

photographs like those you see in the hunting and fishing magazines where a

couple of white guys are standing over an elephant or holding up a lion's head or

stretching out a long stringer of fish or hoisting a brace of ducks in each hand.

Only in these photographs, it was Indians and dogs. Latisha's favorite was a

photograph of four Indians on their buffalo runners chasing down a herd of

Great Danes.

Latisha had some of the better photographs made into postcards that she sold

along with the menus' (KING, 1993, p. 117).

Literally employing the verb mentioned on the quote above on Adams, the pictures

for the menu are not 'taken' but 'made'. Although Adams probably meant that even by

taking a picture we are fabricating its content, Latisha and Will go a step further – they

validate with artificial evidences an artificial belief on an artificial past of Native American

peoples that has been taken as truth by commonplace, stereotypical knowledge: the belief

that Indians eat dogs. This enterprise is quite surprising in a text that aims at deconstructing

pernicious stereotypes towards Native Americans. The characters seem to be reinforcing a

belief that can only be defined as manifest manners, such as posited by Gerald Vizenor.

However, the conclusion may not be that simple.

As mentioned above, Thomas King is considerably aware of the power of the

camera, having expressed his disapproval of its use in ways that back up manifest manners

practices such as Edward Sheriff Curtis' project of registering Native Americans. What the

narrative of Green Grass, Running Water appears to be accomplishing is the inversion of

the practical purposes of artificial poses for pictures. According to King's description of

Curtis' work in The Truth About Stories, this latter would request Native Americans to 'act

Indian' for the camera so that the resulting images could appear to be credible, real,

legitimate even if, at the same time, they held the pictoric representation of those

individuals stuck in time. Like museum pieces, images such as Curtis' play a major role in

maintaining the stereotype of the Native American as savage and stuck in the past. Latisha's

and Will's performatic fraud with the dog pictures may be seen at first glance to be doing

exactly the same. There is, however, a significant difference in their strategy.

While Curtis appropriates Native American material to fabricate his collection of

immobilizing manifest manners, Latisha's collection does not. When commissioning fake

dog hunt pictures she is actually appropriating Western material and converting it into an

active present that brings benefits to present Native Americans such as herself and her

employees. I say 'Western' because the stereotypical belief in dog meat dishes is already

commonplace and, since she does not employ her resources in altering this belief, she

profits from it. Therefore, Latisha's tourist trap does not aim at fighting against the false

creations of images through manifest manners strategies, but to confiscate those images

built along the centuries and enact her own discursive mischief. This process is certainly

not innocent. In order for it to be accomplished, Latisha must ignore her role in reinforcing

negative stereotypes and focus in the practicality the strategy contains, i.e., using already

existing discourses and, by usurping them and making them her own, transforming them

into practical and symbolic power. The cost is evident: even those tourists who venture into

the Dead Dog Café and question the veracity of the menu have their opinion influenced

towards believing it, which results in the perpetuation of a fabricated belief.

On the other hand, as mentioned Latisha claims the right to incorporate into her

discourse an artificially constructed fact and, from there, enact some sort of counter-

manifest manners, of usurpation of the Other's episteme in order to establish her own truth,

from her particular locus. This power enables her to invert the discursive practice

underlying negative stereotypical representations of the Native American, thus installing

her voice as subversively predominant over Western cultural creations such as the dog-

eating Indian. Ultimately, Latisha is able to accomplish this inversion at the cost of

incautious tourists from "Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, Brazil, England, France, Toronto

[…], [e]verybody [that] comes to the Dead Dog" (KING, 1993, p. 59). Her discourse can be

said to be, therefore, bellicose towards those Western epistemological practices she

confiscates in order to enact her subversion.

From the analysis above, although it appears that the narrative of Green Grass,

Running Water only displays Native American appropriation of oppressive cultural material

over an opposite logic, there occurs an episode in which White tourists are allowed to sneak

away from a Sun Dance in possession of negatives of the event. The offensive potential of

this act and the importance given to the stealing of images of the ceremony is the focus of

the next section.

4.2.2 Stray Tourists at the Sun Dance

Eli Stands Alone is one of the characters of the novel whose maturity and

psychological complexity evolve greatly from beginning to end of the narrative, and this

takes place by several passages of reminiscences and nostalgic remembrances of his life as

a young adult and situations in which he learned valuable lessons about himself and the

Blackfoot. One of these reminiscences describes one of the several Sun Dances Eli attended

when he was young in which the importance of photography is highlighted and seriously

considered.

Eli remembers an episode in which a group of stray tourists stumbled upon the site

of the Sun Dance and, from a distance, called the attention of the performers and

participants of the event. A man from Michigan, on vacation with his family, stops by the

road, climbs his car and begins taking pictures of the dance. Once he realizes what is going

on, Eli, then just a fourteen-year-old boy, calls his relatives to handle the situation. They

gather around the car and demand that the film be returned. Taken aback by the extreme

importance afforded to the pictures, the man realizes they must be valuable and decides not

to return them. After some negotiation and a couple of threats, Eli's uncle, Orville, manages

to convince the man to give him the undeveloped film with the promise of mailing him any

pictures that were really his, but none of the Sun Dance. A heavy tension is present in the

whole episode, and threats of violence come from both sides. While the man starts the

engine and leaves clear his intention of running over anyone who tries to prevent him from

leaving with the film, Orville's brother Leroy grabs his rifle and raises it above his head as a

sign of his serious intentions. The escalation ceases with the man handing over a film from

his camera with the comment that "there are some very important pictures in that roll"

(KING, 1993, p. 154), to which Orville, in his turn, answers that "yes, there are" (KING,

1993, p. 154).

While for the Michigan tourist the importance of the roll meant that he cherished its

value for the importance attributed to it by the Sun Dance goers, for Orville and for the

people who crowded around the car to demand the right of keeping the images of the

ceremony to themselves the film had the standing of a threat. The risk of allowing the

pictures to be developed by an outsider and used as he pleases is due to those same reasons

elaborated above. The 'narrator' of the images would possess too great a power of

(mis)representation of the meanings and symbolisms of the dance. Not that witnessing the

dance is forbidden to outsiders – the episode starts with a consideration on the presence of

tourists:

"Every year or so, a tourist would wander into the camp. Sometimes they were

invited. Other times they just saw the camp from the road and were curious.

Most of the time they were friendly, and no one seemed to mind them.

Occasionally there was trouble" (KING, 1993, p. 151).

Watching the Sun Dance is not the issue; what really matters is who has the

narrative power over its meanings. There are plenty of references along the novel of

misinterpretations of the ceremony. Even Eli's white wife, Karen, utters a commonplace

offensive comment on the ceremony – when attending one she says: "it's like going back in

time, Eli. It's incredible" (KING, 1993, p. 228). It is incredible because, for Karen, the

teepees, the painting and the drums are like visions of the past, a privileged insight on a

disappeared culture, not a current practice of contemporary individuals celebrating a ritual

that is not static, but ever shifting, always evolving and being adapted by community

members who choose to be involved with it. Therefore, the right to keep the practice of the

Sun Dance from being misrepresented by outsiders, especially through the employment of

photographic 'proof', is the real issue in this episode.

This right is corroborated by theoreticians such as Arnold Krupat and Paula Gunn

Allen. For Krupat, for instance, denying uncontrolled access to ritual knowledge is a

legitimate exercise of sovereignty. When elaborating on the question of ceremonial versus

written cultural manifestations, he posits that

"in the case of ritual and ceremonial knowledge, "culture" is not […] written;

nor is it produced. Rather, it is transmitted. Although traditional culture does not

remain static, the changes in it and the circulation of it are so organized as to

remain relatively fixed. To wrench such knowledge from its prescribed

transmissional circuits, thus opening it to the unlimited circulation of produced

knowledge, is a violation of trust and property, and actions to prevent such

violation constitute legitimate exercises of sovereignty" (KRUPAT, 1996, p. 23).

The violation of trust and property mentioned by Krupat is exactly what

photographing the Sun Dance represents, to the extent of the little stories I told previously

in this chapter – photographing may be equivalent to stealing and invading. The narrative

of Green Grass, Running Water brings up this issue and described the tension enacted from

an attempt of foreign appropriation of ritual knowledge. At this point, the story allows this

knowledge to be stolen and there is no clue as to its use by the tourist. I mentioned the man

returned a film from his camera, not that this film was the one which really contained the

pictures from the Sun Dance. Here is what follows the development of the film:

"The film was blank. The picture at the photo store told Leroy that it had never

been used. Orville wrote the man, but the letter came back a month later marked

"Address Unknown." Leroy had copied down the man's license number. He

called the RCMP and explained what had happened, but there was little they

could do about it, they said. The man hadn't broken any laws" (KING, 1993, p.

157).

The episode concludes with a tone of hopelessness; there is no outside authority to

retrieve the stolen images and there is no knowing what use they were put to. This episode

seems to contrast with Latisha's photographic work to fool tourists. While then she

managed to trick outsiders into believing her farce, here the Blackfoot end up frustrated by

the Michigan tourist's deceit and are symbolically denied the possibility of maintaining

narrative power over the Sun Dance to themselves. Both situations are left unfinished in the

storyline, open to speculations, as are many of the sections of the novel, mostly composed

of a patchwork of interweaved stories.

100

The next and last sample of photography as a major element in the novel offers yet

again a conflicting scene in which two opposed forces attempt to keep to themselves the

technology for narrating a contemporary enactment of the Sun Dance. If the previous two

episodes seemed to balance the score of the discursive battles underlying the story, this last

one will settle the outcome to one of the sides.

4.2.3 Hidden Cameras and Sneaky Pictures

I have already mentioned previously in this chapter that the use of the camera and

the immobilization of images can be seen as an aggressive and invasive action. Taking

pictures can, however, be even more hostile should the photographers attempt to hide his

activity. In this last episode analyzed, we have the situation of a sneaky endeavor of

registering forbidden images.

George Mornigstar, Latisha's ex-husband, shows up after a couple of years after

having abandoned her to raise their three children by herself saying that he misses them.

Actually, what he really wants is to use his privileged access to the Sun Dance due to his

marriage with Latisha, having already participated of the ceremony before. Since he now

works as a photojournalist for a magazine called "New Age" (in which people are "crazy

about Indians" (KING, 1993, p. 419)), he considers it to be a potential good report the

covering of a Sun Dance in a way never done before. He turns up during the event and

approaches Latisha in a very intimate way and, after having been turned away, he contents

himself with just laying near the camp to watch the dances and other activities. George

settles on the grass and positions his suitcase beside him in which there is a hidden camera

operated by a disguised mechanism. Once people at the event realize what is going on, the

conflict begins. Before entering the argument subsequent to the discovery of the sneaky

camera, let us try and elaborate on the symbolic importance of George Morningstar's

attempt to steal the images from the event and the ultimate denial of his doing so.

From his first appearances in the story, George openly addresses questions such as

Indianness and Whiteness, Americanness and Canadianness, always polarizing to the

extreme his opinions and definitions of these terms. His strong positions bear a high level

of prejudice and overt generalization, but they work to insert in the narrative already

101

established opinions on those topics. However, I will not focus on George's commonplace

beliefs, but on the underlying discourse his voice represents. The whole novel contains

reference after reference of the importance of movement, of evolvement, of non-linear

progress, as we have seen in the episodes in which First/Thought/Changing/Old Woman

figures. Her extreme mobility and immunity to stagnation are samples of the need for

change and adaptation. Still, some representations of Native Americans suggest that they

have gotten stuck at a certain point in the past, and it is those same representations that are

used to depict them as museum pieces, savages, inhabitants of the past. George focuses on

the seemingly outdated practices of the Blackfoot to characterize their culture as stagnant

and disappearing. At a certain point he says that "things that stand still, die" (KING, 1993,

p. 213). Although his comment is perfectly aligned with the underlying discourse of Green

Grass, Running Water, he ends up working to try and immobilize a Blackfoot ceremony,

namely the Sun Dance, and attempts to depict it as picturesque and exotic. For that he

employs, naturally, the camera.

George's use of the camera works for the purpose of fabricating an artificial past.

This ability of the photographer is suggested by Susan Sontag in the following way: "the

photograph offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural

genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character

of a landscape, to make nature suggestive – suggestive of the past" (SONTAG, 1990, p.

80). His intention is to portray the event as a proof of the Native American attachment to a

disappearing past that no longer has a place in modern society (several times he mentions

that the twentieth first century is not a time for such practices to still exist). George fails to

see any significance of the Sun Dance that may serve for 'modern' Native Americans, and

points his camera in such a way as to narrate it partially through images that are selective

enough not to give a global idea of the ceremony. It is not enough for him to depict 'real

Indians'; he needs Sun Dance material to narrate the Other with little or no resistance from

the Other's part. The sneaky shots were meant for the painted dancers, not for men in suits

and driving SUVs, not for businesswomen or his own Native ex-wife. These are not good

enough for his report. He needs 'authentic' Indians, authentic in Edward Sheriff Curtis'

fashion.

102

The lively gathering of the Blackfoot is what George's pictures attempt to ignore.

Here is how the event is described to Eli Stands Alone's eyes:

"Smoke was rising from the teepees. There would be the horses moving on the

prairies and the camp dogs nested beneath the wagons and the cars and the

trucks, waiting for the day to begin. And the children. All the sounds and smells,

all the mysteries and the imaginings that he had left behind" (KING, 1993, p.

226).

The verbs 'rising' and 'moving' help setting the lively tone of the passage. The

children and the beauty of the landscape point to the renovation aligned with tradition that

the ceremony represents. None of these elements would be present in George's pictures had

he been allowed to take them. Since the camera is hidden in a case, any pictures taken

would have had an aspect of guile, slyness and dissimulation. Furthermore, they would be

focused specifically on framing those elements George wants to present as exotic and old-

fashioned. He would be employing the selective ability of the camera to fit his narrative

purpose. According to Susan Sontag, this ability of the camera is what enables the

photographer to "catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look

abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it"

(SONTAG, 1990, p. 34). The SUVs parked just outside the Sun Dance and the everyday

clothes of the goers would probably not be included in George's film, for he deems them

too 'normal' and 'modern', and would not be fitting to his narrative. He prefers oddity to

chase, frame, develop and title in such a way that can be interesting to his public

pecuniarily useful.

George, however, ends up never taking the pictures. At this point of the novel, as

mentioned before, several of the loose stories converge and many characters who did not

seem to have any connection gather at the same location. George has been mentioned

before, in chapter 2, in the episode in which Lionel wakes to his communal responsibility,

and he does that exactly by denying George the possibility of taking pictures and

potentially misnarrating the Sun Dance. While Eli Stands Alone snatches the case

containing the camera, Lionel physically struggles with George to buy time so that the film

canister can be removed and the negatives destroyed. The intruder's reaction when his

camera is taken reveals his real beliefs in regards to Native American practices. He insults

103

them and calls the ceremony a useless outdated thing. Here is how the conflict ends, with

George offending the Sun Dance:

""You can't believe this shit!" George shouted after Eli. "This is ice age crap!"

Lionel moved forward, and George fell back several steps.

"Probably time to go," said Lionel.

"Come on," said George, "Come on! It's the twentieth century. Nobody cares

about your little powwow. A bunch of old people and drunks sitting around in

tents in the middle of nowhere. Nobody cares about any of this."

"Go away, George," said Latisha. "Just go away."

"You're a joke!" George's lips were wet with spit. "You all act like this is

important, like it's going to change your lives. Christ, you guys are born stupid

and you die stupid."" (KING, 1993, p. 427).

Thus, George reveals his real intent in trying to photograph the Sun Dance: to depict

it in the way manifest manners have been doing in many different media, as a primitive,

barbaric religious ritual, which the narrative makes clear it is not. The most important

aspect of the whole episode seems to be that George is denied to possibility of manifesting

his voice, of narrating his view. The question may be raised as to the possible authoritarian

implication of the text of Green Grass, Running Water negating a white North American,

representative of the Western discourse on primitive versus civilized, the technical power to

display an outsider's position in regards to the event. The previous two photographic

episodes seemed to have demonstrated opposing narrative forces working to install their

view as privileged. George's powerlessness to express his photographic storytelling settles

the score – the Native American perspective remains as predominant over the outsider's.

The contrast with the Michigan tourist's success in escaping with the precious images of the

Sun Dance seems to reinforce George's failure. The first attempt at acquiring the images

and taking them outside of the circle of the Blackfoot succeeded, but the declared intention

of selectively narrating the Dance as negative was vehemently thwarted.

Therefore, although it may appear that Thomas King's story authoritatively rejects

an outsider's point of view, it is in fact performatively enacting the right posited by Arnold

Krupat of denying foreign appropriation of ritual knowledge. There are many references

along the novel that outsiders are not unwelcome at the Blackfoot celebration, but the

transgression of taking pictures when one is specifically told not to is not tolerated. Far

from undemocratic, this denial suggests a legitimate performative procedure to try and

counter historical distortions through manifest manners.

104

Evidence of the symbolic inversion Thomas King's text proposes on the narrative of

Native American cultural practices is the tone of liveliness and renewal with which the

description of the Sun Dance ends. I close this chapter with the excerpt from Green Grass,

Running Water following Eli's, Lionel's and Latisha's ordeal in facing the invasion of their

symbolic space, and the cyclic analogy it contains: "In a while, the dancers would return to

the center lodge and the families would go back to their teepees and tents. And in the

morning, when the sun came out of the east, it would begin again" (KING, 1993, p. 429).

105

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

I have mentioned before that some literary texts contain the perspectives of multiple

voices, of multiple worldviews, some contentious and some harmonic in the story they tell

us. In the pages above, I have attempted to investigate how this multiplicity of discourses

works in the pages of Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water to question established

paradigms, propose new views and, potentially, offer some sort of democratic, far-

encompassing alternative to narrative structures that pose as totalizing powers. I cannot,

however, claim to have given a solution to the question of whether a formerly oppressed

voice, by confiscating and employing the oppressor's techniques and using them as its own,

falls into the same totalitarian position of placing itself above the previously dominant

voice. Although I have sought to consider Western and Native American perspectives as

equivalently important, it would be naïve to consider my exposition to have been neutral or

to have reached a balance in the symbolic battles of opposite sides, of opposite points of

view.

What I hope to have succeeded in proving is that a text representative of that locus

which has suffered the oppression of a dominant one can and must resort to discursive tools

that will allow it to claim to itself the power for self-representation and for independence

from whatever forces are attempting to deny this right. By this I mean that the Native

American literary text should not only offer symbolic representations of the particular

epistemological views on the various tribes and groups, but also to incorporate the same

discursive apparatuses and strategies that Western texts have disposed and use them as

leverage in their frequent cultural clash.

Although legitimate, these incorporative procedures are not necessarily (and in

many cases, not at all) innocent in the sense that they can also work for totalitarian

purposes such as labeling every Western narrative practice as bad and/or total and all

Native ones as good and/or democratic. Such claims, astonishingly common among Native

American scholars, seem to be as wrong as those which preached for the extermination of

Natives due to the allegation of their inferiority. An inversion of the binary

oppressor/oppressed to result in something like Native/Western is a simplistic movement

that, in my perspective, demonstrates the unwillingness of struggling for a positivity of the

106

former to, instead, preach for a negativity of the latter, which results in the total

construction that everything Western must be denied as useless. Such discursive

constructions are as draconian as the scientific totalitarian voices described in chapter 3,

and function by positioning themselves above all other discourses for their universality.

They propose that the universal man is superior to the absolute man because he can claim to

have analyzed both/all sides and discovered the middle ground, the true path. The result is,

however, as absolute as any other.

How, then, should we look into these bellicose appropriations of Western cultural

material by Native American narratives? I have conceded so far that, in what concerns the

text of Green Grass, Running Water, appropriations work to focus attentions on the

Western oppressive practices and to demolish them. This is done, however, not to

unilaterally invalidate the Other's episteme, but to disarticulate the oppressive patterns it

contains. As examples we have the episodes heavily charged with scientific practices in

chapter 3 and the photographic narrations in chapter 4. It is not a question of claiming that

science should not employ Cartesian methods of evidencing or that it must not target Native

American practices as objects of investigation; it is also not the issue of forbidding

pictographic narratives of ritual knowledge. What is really at stake in the symbolic

deconstructions enacted by Thomas King is that these discursive apparatuses must not be

allowed to misnarrate Native material.

One might ask at this point who decides how fitting a narrative is and how

inappropriate it is. This question is so complex that it evades my power to answer here (it is

comparable to the issues of who should regulate the media or restrict freedom). What I can

propose, nonetheless, is that no discursive practice which does not listen to its objects'

perspectives and offers them a chance at participating in the narrative will do. My view is

that, by incorporating so many Western cultural and epistemological elements in the lines

of Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King has achieved some sort of positivity of the

encounter between cultures in contention without necessarily denying fundamental

discursive rights. In the case of the character George Morningstar with his guileful attempts

at misnarration, the denial by the narrative of voicing his perspective, although apparently

authoritarian at first, points to the prerogative of preserving ceremonial integrity, not to

altogether shutting off any form of external perspective. The same occurs with the

107

mythological storylines of creation offered by the Bible and the female Native character.

The biblical logic is denied to the point of allowing for the questioning of the repressive

aspects it can be said to contain in regards to their use for colonial purposes. Further

meanings and implications from the Christian text remain untouched and unexamined by

King's text, for they do not concern the underlying symbolic battles the novel's text aims at

deconstructing.

Furthermore, Native American displays of resistance, although recurrently

denounced for being overtly victimist, have been intensely engaged in disassembling the

tradition that has categorized the Indian as a Platonic essence, with extremely delineated

form and meaning. King's work, besides its literary poignancy and beauty, manages to

further the cause of a dynamic and renewed approach on contemporary Native American

issues. Since present Native concerns still include a broader recognition by various social

actors, it seems natural that some sort of clash with mainstream, established, canonic

powers occurs. Because of that, it appears that those appropriations of naming and

structuring procedures depicted in chapters 1 and 2 are epistemologically and politically

valid. The confiscation of the symbolic power of naming, although somewhat contentious

towards biblical and Western paradigms, poses as a rightful enterprise once we take into

account that, besides striking back at a tradition of domination and suppression, it allows

for the long sought for self-determination the aboriginal peoples of the Americas have been

coveting.

The same is true to the performative resistance offered by the literary text towards

those immobilizing powers described under the panopticon and synopticon sections above.

Since Green Grass, Running Water has been produced within the very superstructure it

endeavors to question and sometimes annul, it sounds fairly pertinent to point to the

apparent paradox of this endeavor. However, the issue of functioning within a structure in

order to question it can be posed to account for any contradictions here. Thomas King

extrapolates the boundaries of tribal oral traditional, cyclical and member-oriented in

nature, to provide a sample of tribal material exposed to the large public and highly

interweaved and interconnected with Western material to propose a negotiation of usually

diverging epistemes. Had he limited the scope of the narrative by writing in, let us say,

Cherokee instead of English, the negotiation would have also been restricted to the point in

108

which not contention would have been possible, since that language does not reach those

social and cultural actors that might be influenced to perceive Native American issues in a

different, more receptive way. Therefore, the enactment of symbolic appropriation and

questioning performed by Green Grass, Running Water, as described under chapter 2,

poses not only as a powerful tool in the battle for self-representation, but also as a dutiful

enterprise of an artist, Thomas King, who has reached the position that allows such

questions to be proposed.

I hope to be able to foster the discussion on the role of writers and literary works

and their importance in showing paths for the approach of controversial issues related to

material reality and contemporary individuals. It is not a question of pondering if the

literary praxis has the responsibility of accounting for social and political concerns, but

whether we, as readers, interpreters and critics, can and/or should engage in such

considerations. My view is that we should, since, as posited by Edward Said, the very locus

conquered by minority voices in mainstream structures is the potential force that will allow

a cyclic relation of power/knowledge to be established, thus providing such voices with the

means and arms to balance relations that have been historically uneven. I believe there is no

such thing as a neutral or apolitical artistic production; Green Grass, Running Water is no

exception. One could propose a purely technical or stylistic approach to the novel, and I am

quite certain it would be a very productive enterprise. However, by ignoring such aspects as

the role of naming in the domination of representations, the implications of community

demands over individuals, the historical practices of scientific voices on the creation of

truth(s), and the mediatic influence over the narration of peoples' cultures, it is my belief

that we would be missing major elements of Thomas King's production, which refer to

direct implications on material reality.

Summing up, I see those material implications as paramount not only in the lines of

Green Grass, Running Water, or in King's works, or in Native American literature in

general, but in artistic productions of any kind. I attempt, as a reader open to paradigmatic

changes when confronted with the Other and with the diverse, to try and see what

contributions (besides the noble role of Literature (with capital 'l') of humanizing and

teaching through abstraction and beauty) a specific piece of art can bring to the discussions

of such contemporary issues as identity boundaries, belonging, self-definition, propositions

109

of truth and so on. This paper is, I sincerely hope, an example of how academic

investigation can be undertaken in that fashion – not to the diminishment of literary quality

through the path of political implications, but to the enhancement of our humanistic

practice via far-encompassing investigative procedures.

110

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