Green Grass, Running Water

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3, Lionel, Alberta, and Charlie Summary

Pages 240-244, 253-260, 279-286, 292-294, 297-315, and 320-328

While having breakfast at the hotel’s coffee shop, Charlie notices four Indigenous elders sitting at one of the tables. As he gets up to use the nearby payphone, they smile, wave, and greet him by his name. When he heads back into the coffee shop to figure out how he knows them, they are gone. Charlie soon realizes the red Pinto he had rented is missing. He calls the rental company, and they inform him that they don’t even have a record of him renting a car from them—the one he was supposed to take was still there that morning. Charlie decides to get a taxi to go see Lionel and Bill Bursum at the store, knowing that Alberta will also show up there at some point.

Lionel wakes on the morning of his 40th birthday and feels embarrassed about what his life has become. He resolves to make changes and that this will be his final year working as a TV salesman. He also decides to visit his parents at the Sun Dance. Instead of driving to work, he opts to walk to kickstart his new life. On the way, he runs through the conversations he will have with his boss about quitting, with Eli about going back to school, and with Alberta about having a baby and starting his new life with her. The walk is longer than he anticipates, and it starts to storm before he gets to the store. Once he arrives, he thinks he sees a yellow dog dancing in the rain. Lionel is soaking wet by the time he finally gets inside, but before he can dry himself off, Bill ushers him to the front of the store to help some customers. Lionel realizes they are the four elders from the coffee shop and that his uncle Eli is there as well. They all wish him a happy birthday. The elders tell him they have a present for him, and Eli explains he is looking for a new radio. Bill takes the elders to look at his TV map display while Eli attempts to talk to Lionel about his plans. Charlie arrives at the store and interrupts their conversation, and shortly after, Bill calls everyone to gather around “The Map” to watch an old Western.

Alberta wakes and has an indulgent shower. At first, she considers going to have breakfast at the Dead Dog Cafe to see Latisha, before meeting Lionel at work. However, she feels exhausted and nauseous, so she goes back to bed instead. When she can’t sleep, she heads down to the coffee shop for breakfast, where she watches an old man and a black woman at another table. At one point she overhears them talking about the “Indians” being close by. In the parking lot, the puddle that she parked near last night is still there, but her car is gone. After reporting her car has been stolen to the police, Alberta stands outside the station watching the rain, thinking about how much of a disaster the weekend has become; she blames Lionel. The officer that was helping her offers to give her a ride back to the Lodge, and Alberta breaks into tears when they start talking about children. After the talk, the officer drops her off at the Dead Dog Cafe.

In a flashback, Alberta and her family attempt to cross the border into the United States. However, the border official flags them down and asks them to come inside. After questioning them about alcohol, cigarettes, and animal parts, the official confiscates the outfits in which the family was planning to dance, and Amos spends a few nights in jail. When the outfits are returned weeks later, they have been stepped on and destroyed.

Part 3, The Escaped Elders Summary

Pages 232, 234-240, 275-279, 302, 305-306, 315-320, 325

Robinson Crusoe takes over as narrator. In the hotel parking lot in Blossom, the Lone Ranger shouts, “Good Morning,” and the sun begins to rise. The escaped elders assume it must have been Coyote turning on the lights. Later, outside of Bill Bursum’s Home Entertainment Barn, the Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, and Robinson Crusoe watch Ishmael dance in a small circle. Coyote sees them and joins in, doing the wrong dance and causing a storm. Inside the store, after wishing Lionel a happy birthday, the escaped elders are taken to see the TV map display that Bill Bursum has created at the back of the store. “The Map,” as Bill refers to it, is a wall-sized display of TVs arranged to look like a map of North America intended to bring customers into the store. Before Bill can show them “the best Western ever made” (305), they give Lionel his birthday present: an old leather jacket with leather fringe.

Once the film starts, the elders recognize the film as one they’ve fixed before. However, it quickly becomes apparent it needs fixing again—it is a typical Western in which the Indigenous people are surrounded and going to all be killed by the white soldiers. They start singing, and the white cavalry suddenly disappears from the screen. As the Indigenous warriors take out the remaining white soldiers—whose shots all miss their mark—before the credits roll.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hovaugh and Babo cross the border into Canada. Dr. Hovaugh tells Babo to let him do the talking at the border crossing, but she ignores him. As they watch the sunrise, the light begins to grow brighter, and they believe they see Coyote. They arrive at the Blossom Lodge just as a storm is starting, and Dr. Hovaugh is convinced this is where the escaped elders are staying. They go to check in, but Babo leaves their bags in the car. The next morning, Dr. Hovaugh begins to feel homesick as he looks over the pattern of the elders’ previous escapes. Babo is growing bored with the trip and wants to see the sights—it is the main reason she agreed to come, knowing the escaped elders would eventually return regardless of what she and Dr. Hovaugh do. When they go to the car, it is gone.

Part 3, Creation Stories Summary

Pages 232-234, 271-275, 294-297, 328-330

Thought Woman goes for a morning walk to the river. She decides she wants to go for a swim and asks the river if it is warm. The river replies that it is, but when she gets in, it is actually very cold. The river tells her it is warmer in the middle, so Thought Woman swims out to the middle. It is warmer, and she falls asleep. She starts floating down the river, until she eventually falls off the edge of the world into the sky. From there, she falls into the ocean and floats for a long time.

Eventually she floats ashore and is met by a short man with a briefcase named A. A. Gabriel. He asks her a series of questions and fills out forms. He assumes Thought Woman is the Christian Mary, but when she realizes he expects her to have a baby, she gets back in the ocean. After floating around for a little longer, she bumps into another island. This one is inhabited by a man named Robinson Crusoe, a famous shipwrecked writer of lists. Robinson Crusoe calls Thought Woman Friday and starts telling her about the pros and cons lists he has been writing. She quickly tires of it and jumps back into the ocean. After floating around even more, this time she ends up in Florida and is arrested by soldiers and sent to Fort Marion.

Part 3, Eli and the Dam Summary

Pages 260-267, 287-292

Eli is awoken by a giant flood light being turned on at the dam. Despite the annoyance, he takes some satisfaction from knowing that they are doing it because he is stopping them from using the finished dam. As he contemplates his own life and considers that despite his academic career, he has now become what he has always been: an Indigenous person. After getting up, he sees a note on the fridge reminding him that it is Lionel’s birthday: Norma has been urging him to talk to Lionel about getting his life in order. Eli is unsure of what he could even say but decides he will at least take Lionel out for lunch. He drives through the increasingly severe storm to surprise Lionel at work, still thinking about his identity and the tension he has always felt about leaving the reserve. When he arrives at the store, he sees four figures standing outside the door, and a scraggly looking dog dashing around, chasing its tail as if it was trying to dance. Inside the store, Eli tries to talk to Lionel about his plans, but Lionel is more interested in selling him a radio. Bill Bursum eventually calls them over to watch a Western on his giant wall of TVs.

After returning to Toronto with Karen, she immediately makes plans to go back to the Sun Dance the following year. Eli is reluctant because he doesn’t like being reminded of all the people he grew up with and seeing what they’ve become. Karen is disappointed when they don’t go back. Eventually, she asks if he is embarrassed about something, but he doesn’t reply.

Part 3, Latisha Summary

Pages 244-253

Latisha, still exhausted, is woken by her daughter in the morning because she has a dirty diaper. The breakfast table is as chaotic as the dinner table the night before, and Latisha has to force herself to remain calm as the children get ready for school.

In a series of flashbacks, George is depicted as being capricious and unreliable. He constantly has new ideas about what he wants to do with his life but never sticks with anything. Eventually he leaves Latisha and the children, claiming he will be back after he finds himself. He sends romantic letters every week, and Latisha reads them at first but eventually stops.

Part 3 Analysis

One throughline connecting many of the different plots in this part of the text is a focus on borders and boundaries. Some of these boundaries are figurative, like the social expectation that Alberta must have a husband to have a baby, or who gets to be the hero in a Western film. Others are literal borders, like the border between the United States and Canada. In both cases, these borders and boundaries are about categorization, control, and order. Dr. Hovaugh and Babo cross the United States-Canada border with relative ease though the border official’s prejudice is evident: He assumes that Babo must be Hovaugh’s property (because she is Black) and completely ignores her when she talks to him.

During the crossing, Babo remains the most perceptive character in the novel, noting that the flagpole on the Canadian side leans slightly left while the American one leans slightly right—likely referring to the general political leanings of each country. King contrasts this piece of perception with a moment of genuine ignorance, however, as Babo also notes “a large picture of a woman in a formal with a tiara” (237). To anyone from the commonwealth, this is quite obviously a picture of the Queen; but Babo is crossing a border into a cultural context with which she is unfamiliar, so the Queen is simply just another woman. King uses this to illustrate how context-bound understanding a culture can be—to see something decontextualized is the same as not seeing it at all, yet this is how many white people experience Indigenous culture.

Hovaugh’s ease at the border is contrasted with the difficult experience Alberta’s family had years prior. Amos, Alberta’s father, is immediately stereotyped and given a hard time. He is asked about cigarettes and alcohol, and the family has their traditional outfits confiscated, preventing them from dancing. On the one hand, the two border experiences suggest that borders are not equally permeable for everyone; on the other, it reveals the way the creation of borders can interfere with cultural traditions that long predate them. King explores this theme further in his short story “Borders” (1993), in which a Blackfoot woman is denied entry into the United States when she refuses to declare her citizenship as Canadian or American because she is from the “Blackfoot side.”

The revelation that Lionel grew up wanting to be John Wayne provides an important piece of context about why his life has turned out the way it has. It also provides King an avenue to explore the relationship between cultural representation in mass media and authentic identity. For Lionel, the only heroes available to him in media while he was growing up were white, Indigenous-killing heroes, like John Wayne. This begins to explain why Lionel has no core sense of identity and feels so directionless in life: Through his prolonged exposure to the discriminatory stereotypes of these films, Lionel has internalized the way he is seen by and depicted in Western culture.

Lionel implicitly knows he cannot be John Wayne because he is not white, which ultimately means he has not only distanced himself from his actual cultural roots but has attempted to build an identity around something as flimsy as the cheap John Wayne ring he gets from a cereal box. This has led to a kind of emotional paralysis in his life where he is incapable of making decisions that will lead to positive change and instead continues to work for Bursum (who has also internalized the hierarchies of Western film) and has no problem taking advantage of the Indigenous community. This is partly what makes the escaped elders’ “fixing” the Western film at Bursum’s such a subversive act: It upends the usual hierarchy and allows Lionel and Charlie to finally see a hero on screen that looks like them. It also leaves Bursum fuming because he can no longer use the film to validate his sense of superiority.

Up until this point, what the escaped elders mean when they say they intend to fix the world has remained nebulous. In Part 3, it becomes clearer: On the one hand, they cross paths with people and put them where they need to be, and on the other hand, they show up where Indigenous peoples are being erased or their ways no longer seem to exist in balance. Over the course of the text, the elders do several things to steer Lionel, Alberta, and Charlie—all of whom are directionless in their own ways—to the places they need to be to have revelations about their lives and move them forward. For example, Alberta and Charlie both lose their cars, which ends up changing their plans: It causes Charlie to end up at Bursum’s so that he witnesses the fixed Western movie, and it causes Alberta not to visit Lionel at Bursum’s so that she instead runs into him at the Sun Dance, when they are both in a better place. These small nudges are not separate from the elders’ larger mission to restore balance, however, as the lost cars end up playing a crucial role in the destruction of the dam. Conversely, when they fix the film, it provides more direction for Lionel and Charlie, further pushing them toward the realizations they need to set their lives in order.