59 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas KingGreen Grass, Running Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Indigenous Identity in Contemporary North America
One of King’s primary goals in Green Grass, Running Water is exploring the nature of Indigenous identity in contemporary North America. This requires navigating a history of cultural trauma and continued colonial oppression, balancing cultural traditions with modern society, and constantly being subjected to North American attitudes that are at best indifferent but often hostile toward their very existence.
That the novel is centered on the construction of a dam on what is supposed to be treaty-protected land recalls past wrongdoings and is a signal that they continue to happen. Sifton and Bursum make their feelings on treaty rights clear: They were “only made […] for convenience”, and “no one signs contracts forever” (142, 270). In the eyes of people like Sifton and Bursum (and the Canadian Government), Indigenous peoples should just take the money they’re offered and get over it. However, the (likely false) promise of financial gain is a temporary solution to a problem that the government created in the first place and comes at the cost of not just the land but the Indigenous way of life.
There are not many jobs on the reserve, which places many people in a bind: There is pressure to stay on the reserve to preserve one’s culture and way of life, while at the same time, people like Eli, Lionel, and Charlie feel they need to leave to get a university education and find better employment opportunities. Making things even more complicated is the feeling that “whites don’t want to hire Indians unless the government makes them” (82-83), or as is the case for Lionel and Charlie, when it is profitable to exploit them.
Bursum hires Lionel because it helps him bring in other customers from the reserve, and Charlie is hired by Duplessis because he is Blackfoot, like Eli, and they like the positive PR that he provides as they attempt to negotiate a deal around the dam. However, Lionel hasn’t been given a raise in all the years he has worked for Bursum, and Charlie is fired the moment the dam bursts and they do not need him anymore. This demonstrates that leaving the reserve can be something of a trap, as Lionel and Charlie are still always kept at a distance by white culture and reminded that they don’t really belong.
Finally, the novel’s Indigenous characters endure constant exposure to varying degrees of racism and harmful stereotyping. There is hardly an interaction between white and Indigenous characters that does not contain some form of overt racism or microaggression. Sifton and Bursum provide constant examples. They share the idea that Lionel and Eli “aren’t real Indians” because they drive cars, watch television, or work at the university (142). However, they’re not the only ones. Even Karen, who loves Eli, remarks how the Sun Dance is like “it’s right out of a movie” and “going back in time” (210). These biased notions, including the idea that the treaties are a thing of the past, all work to suggest that Indigenous traditions are irrelevant in modern society.
On top of this are the pervasive negative stereotypes perpetuated by mass media. Nearly all of the characters in Green Grass, Running Water end up watching the Western despite the fact many of them have little interest in it (suggesting the ubiquity and pervasiveness of mass media). The film itself is standard Western fair, with the Indigenous people being killed at the end by John Wayne. This hierarchy is internalized by the likes of Bursum, who believes that Indigenous people cannot understand power and control, while Lionel spends his life idolizing John Wayne—a character who actively kills people that look like Lionel in every film. All these factors combine to create a web of trauma, social disadvantage, and continued colonial oppression that the characters of Green Grass, Running Water must navigate as they figure out what it means to be Indigenous in the modern Western (and colonial) world.
The Consequences of Western and Indigenous Cultural Conflict
Green Grass, Running Water is a novel about the consequences of Indigenous and Western cultures coming into contact. The conflict arises because Western culture is often monologic, authoritative, and closed: It sees its version of truth and reality as the only legitimate version, superior to all others. As a result, over time, Indigenous culture has become subordinated in North America and is often perceived entirely through the warped lens of Western culture. This is exemplified in the text by the inclusion of a generic Western film that all the characters are exposed to at one point or another.
The representation of Indigenous culture in the film does not reflect reality. Instead, it is clearly an exoticized Hollywood creation (illustrated by in the backstory in which Charlie’s father loses out on roles to non-Indigenous actors because he won’t wear a fake nose) that perpetuates racist stereotypes. Nonetheless, this representation informs how most of the white characters in the novel view and understand Indigeneity. King gives Western culture this same treatment, dragging Christianity and the Western literary canon through the critical mill of Indigenous culture. The resulting stories bring humor and a new perspective to understanding Christian creation stories and the classics of Western literature. Overturning the white-Indigenous power hierarchy highlights the way that many Western stories are used as tools of colonial domination.
An example of this is King’s version of the Christian creation story in Part 1. The Christian God becomes an authoritative, rule-obsessed capitalist who believes that everything in the garden is his private property. The presence of First Woman provides King with a foil for God’s greediness and a way to contrast white and Indigenous worldviews. When God gets upset that First Woman and Ahdamn are eating what he perceives as his property, First Woman tells him off for “acting as if [he has] no relations” (69). Indigenous North Americans use the phrase “All My Relations” to express their worldview about the interconnectedness of all creation, and here, it is a counterpoint to God’s self-centered values.
These conflicting worldviews can then be seen in the novel’s realist plot as well, as the central conflict in the text is over the construction of the Baleen dam on treaty-protected land. Part of this conflict stems from the dispute over the value the treaties hold. Sifton’s comment to Eli that the “[g]overnment only made [the treaties] for convenience” because they didn’t think “there would still be Indians kicking around in the twentieth century” (142) makes the colonial perspective clear: The treaties were a kind of business contract, and one that was not even made in good faith. This falls in line with the wider colonial worldview that land and natural resources can be privately owned and exploited for profit. This idea stands in stark contrast to the Indigenous view that the land belongs to everyone and should be used responsibly because all creation is interconnected. The conflicting worldviews are also evident in the fact that Duplessis, the law firm representing the dam, believes they can solve the problem by throwing money at it, while the Indigenous community in Blossom is more concerned about the ecological and cultural impact the dam will have.
King explores all these issues in a novel that is itself a site of cultural tension, as he uses a written form—the novel—to emulate Indigenous oral storytelling. By bringing the two forms together, King finds a way to accurately represent Indigenous perspectives in a non-Indigenous form while also bringing traditional Indigenous stories into a contemporary context.
Storytelling as Colonial Resistance
At its core, Green Grass, Running Water is a novel about storytelling. It is interested in everything from creation myths to pulpy Westerns because King understands that storytelling is fundamentally how human beings make sense of the world. Narratives are a way to organize, understand, and remember our experiences and the overwhelming amounts of known and unknown information we have to process at a given moment. This gives stories a lot of power.
Toward the end of the text, King’s reveals his central thesis: “There are no truths, […] Only stories” (392). What he is suggesting is that because of our reliance on stories to make sense of the world, stories have the potential to be reality-shaping. This means that stories have the ability to be transformative and liberating but also controlling and oppressive. Part of King’s project is to illustrate how certain kinds of stories—like the linear, monologic stories he critiques—have been used as a tool for colonial domination while at the same time providing an alternative model of storytelling that resists those pitfalls.
King’s main answer to this is structuring the novel in way that emulates oral storytelling. The story is presented to the reader as an unnamed narrator telling a story to Coyote, who often interjects with comments or questions about the story as he listens. This works to make the storytelling feel like a communal act rather than an individual one. However, there is another level of plurality to the narration on top of this: The narrator is retelling a story that they have heard from the escaped elders, who take turns narrating in the four parts of the book. Moreover, each of those four parts contains a creation story that follows a very similar structure, each one beginning and ending in almost the same way. The result of all these choices is that one voice, perspective, or version of events never becomes dominant or authoritative. Like oral stories, which can easily change and incorporate new elements and experiences with each retelling, King’s novel achieves the sense that the world it depicts is constantly in the process of being created.
Another method King uses to resist colonial monologues is making the novel highly intertextual by using references and allusions to other works. Nearly every name in Green Grass, Running Water is an allusion to a real historical or literary figure. Each one of King’s creation stories plays in the space of different biblical and literary stories. The names of events, phrases, clothes, and cars all allude to things outside of Green Grass, Running Water. These references and allusions are a constant reminder that this text exists in conversation with other texts and that it was written in an existing social, cultural, and historical context.
Finally, King makes frequent use of satire and comedy. The humor in Green Grass, Running Water is subversive because it constantly tears down authority figures. For example, King takes a figure like God and renders him as stingy and petulant to make broader criticisms about the some of the values propagated by Christianity. Understanding much of King’s humor requires specific historical or cultural knowledge, and, like the abundant references, the humor forces readers to learn about and better understand the issues the text is exploring.
One of the simpler examples of this occurs when Changing Woman encounters Ahab and Moby Jane, the great black whale. Like Ahab, Coyote has difficulty seeing Moby Jane. To follow this section, the reader needs some knowledge of the novel Moby Dick and the notion that women and people of color have historically not been recognized the same way that straight, white men have been throughout Western history. The joke goes one level deeper though because the narrator responds to Coyote that “[he] hasn’t been reading [his] history […] It’s the English colonists who destroy the Pequots” (203). To understand this play on words, the reader needs to know that the Pequots are an Indigenous tribe that was nearly wiped from history by English colonists—suggesting that the reason Ahab may not be able to recognize the “otherness” of Moby Jane is because of Western colonialism’s propensity to eradicate difference.
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