Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: The 1960’s to the 1980’s

Locale: Blossom, Alberta, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Lionel Red Dog, a Blackfoot Indian
• Charlie Looking Bear, Lionel’s cousin
• Alberta Frank, a professor, lover of Lionel and Charlie
• Norma, Charlie’s mother, Lionel’s aunt
• Eli Stands Alone, Norma’s brother
• Karen, Eli’s deceased wife
• Bill Bursum, Lionel’s employer, Charlie’s former employer
• Latisha, Lionel’s sister, owner of the Dead Dog Café
• Coyote, a trickster
• Robinson Crusoe,
• Ishmael,
• The Lone Ranger, and
• Hawkeye, escapees from a mental hospital
• Dr. Hovaugh, a doctor in a mental hospital
• Babo, a worker in a mental hospital

The Novel

In Green Grass, Running Water, the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. The novel opens and closes with short sections devoted to Coyote, the trickster, who accounts for many of the book’s inexplicable incidents.

The story then turns briefly to four characters—Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael, the Lone Ranger, and Hawkeye—all presumably Blackfoot Indians who have escaped from the mental institution in which they were confined. Their mission, with the help of Coyote, is to fix the world. These five add considerable humor to the story, but they may leave some readers baffled initially, both because it is not always clear where reality ends and fantasy begins with them and because they overstep linear time lines.

These characters present various creation stories drawn from Greek, Christian, and Native American mythologies. King’s Ahdamn-First Woman story is the Adam and Eve story in contemporary garb; the first two humans on earth eat both fried chicken and the Edenic apple. Young Man Walking On Water (King’s version of Christ) articulates King’s beliefs about the conflict between the Indian culture and the dominant white culture—a major reason for his having written this novel— when he proffers his interpretation of Christian rules: “the first rule is that no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me.”

The essence of Green Grass, Running Water is that a know-it-all white culture has intruded insensitively—sometimes dangerously, usually stupidly—upon the folkways of Native American cultures, which have conserved a land and a way of life by means that make environmental sense. These folkways are misunderstood and disrespected by those in nominal power, who refuse to observe long-standing treaties. Such people do not respect native festivals such as the Sun Dance, which they try to photograph—behavior that is an insult to the Indians.

On the fantastic level, Coyote helps the Blackfoot by using his trickster powers to thwart much of what the white people wish to do in order to, in their terms, advance civilization. Coyote and the escapees from the mental institution collaborate on fixing the world.

Two major structural challenges faced King in Green Grass, Running Water. First, he needed to mix mythology with reality, a quintessential ingredient in his revisionist history of his subjects. He achieved this end by using the Coyote trickster and his cronies to handle the mythic content of the novel; in so doing, the author infused the book with considerable humor. Second, he had to find a way to interweave eight interrelated yet individual stories.

King approaches this structural task by writing in short segments, sometimes a few lines, sometimes three or four pages, occasionally, but rarely, longer. Within the longer, more linear segments, King successfully experiments with a device that provides readers with necessary background. A segment may begin in the here and now, but the second paragraph will be a reflection on some past event; the third will continue the presentation of the here and now, the fourth will take up the presentation of the past event, and so forth to the end of the segment.

King handles this complicated structure deftly; reading these segments is neither confusing nor annoying. King frequently ends his paragraphs with cliffhanger sentences. One hates to leave a here and now paragraph and retreat to the past, but a few lines later, the here and now takes over again. This style provides King’s narrative with a unique forward momentum.

Two major story lines dominate King’s novel: Alberta’s desire to become pregnant and Eli’s struggle to keep the government from taking his mother’s property. Nearly everything else in the novel stems from these two basic lines of development. When King departs from one story line to move into another, readers remain oriented, because each story line is connected to one or both of the main stories King is developing. Although five or six segments may be interposed between two elements of one of King’s main narrative threads, it is never difficult to pick up that thread when King resumes telling that part of the story.

Two events bring the novel to its resolution. First, Alberta gets her wish. She becomes pregnant, but by neither Lionel nor Charlie. Then, an earthquake hits the area around Blossom, destroying the dam that Eli has been fighting and, in the process, returning the tribal waterway to its rightful owners and drowning Eli. Both events are Coyote’s doing. The trickster has prevailed.

The Characters

The central figure in Green Grass, Running Water is Lionel Red Dog, who as a youth had a promising future that, through a series of misadventures not of his own doing, was foreclosed to him. During a trip to Salt Lake City to read a professional paper for a colleague in the Department of Indian Affairs, which employed him, Lionel was unwittingly drawn into an Indian activist group, and he landed in jail.

When he returned to Blossom, he was fired. His conviction made it difficult for him to get another job. Finally, Bill Bursum, the white owner of a local store, offered to hire Lionel to replace his cousin Charlie, who had left Bill’s employ to attend law school. Twenty years later, Lionel is still at work in the store; he is Bill’s best salesman, but he has never had a salary increase. Bill Bursum’s story is closely connected to Lionel’s.

The same is true of Charlie’s story. Charlie, having completed law school, is a Porsche-driving success, employed by Duplessis International Associates, the construction firm commissioned to dam a tribal river. When the dam is finally destroyed, Duplessis, no longer needing its token Indian, fires Charlie.

Alberta Frank is a college professor in Calgary who, realizing that her biological clock is running down, wants desperately to have a baby but has no desire to have a husband. She engages in simultaneous affairs with Charlie and Lionel, and her story is intricately tied to theirs.

Norma is Lionel and Latisha’s aunt and Eli Stands Alone’s sister. Latisha, owner of the Dead Dog Café, is a successful businessperson who was married to George Morningstar, a good-looking, immature, unsuccessful white man from Ohio, who has left his wife and children.

Eli left the reservation some thirty years earlier to attend the University of Toronto. He married Karen, a white woman, and has spent his life teaching literature at the university. He and Karen returned to Blossom once before their marriage and attended the Sun Dance. Karen always wanted to attend another Sun Dance, but more than two decades later, recovering from cancer, she is killed in an automobile accident, never having been able to realize her wish.

Eli, learning through Norma of his mother’s death some weeks after its occurrence, returns to Blossom to find that the tribal river has been dammed and that a power plant is about to be put into operation. He retires and becomes a man with a mission. When the dam is opened, the house that Eli and Norma’s mother built with her own hands will be washed away. Eli exercises every legal remedy available to prevent the dam from becoming operative. He defies the government agency and Duplessis International Associates that have built the dam.

Clifford Sifton, who works for the builders of the dam, comes daily to ask Eli officially to leave. Eli daily refuses, also officially. He and Sifton become friends. Eli gives Sifton coffee; Sifton brings Eli books. Because of Eli’s stubbornness, people, including Bill Bursum, who have bought property on what will be the lakefront created by the dam are kept from developing that property.

Straddling the line between the real and the fantastic are Dr. Hovaugh, a psychiatrist at a mental hospital, and Babo, who works in the hospital. Four of their patients have escaped. These four are delusional, and their association with Coyote brings out the mythical elements in the story.

Critical Context

Green Grass, Running Water was written at a time when considerable attention was being paid to Native American history. Advances in knowledge have resulted in considerable revisions of American history, which had largely been written from the perspective of a white establishment dominated by people with Western European outlooks.

The Columbus quincentenary in 1992 became, rather than a celebration of the discovery of the New World, a year of strident questioning. People asked such questions as, “How does one discover a world that has already been settled for centuries and that has a culture in many ways as advanced as that in Europe?” The Inca, the Aztec, and the Mayan Indians were exceptionally advanced in mathematics and such related areas of physics as astronomy. In the fields of art and architecture, these cultures had produced works of great sophistication.

Another prominent Native American novelist, Gerald Vizenor, addressed such questions in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990) and The Heirs of Columbus (1991); he, like King, emphasized the trickster tradition. King is artistically dependent on this tradition in Green Grass, Running Water, using it to bring about the dual resolution of his novel.

King addresses a number of compelling social concerns in this novel. He presents independent, self-possessed women quite capable of functioning productively without men. Alberta Frank and Latisha Morningstar are prototypical modern women. They are too busy to march in parades or burn bras in public protests, but they forge ahead as contributing members of society, with minds of their own. They have no qualms about defying convention. They fit well into the context of women’s liberation.

King is also concerned with the contemporary problem of the flight of young Native Americans to cities. He seems even more concerned, however, about what happens to someone like Lionel, who remains in Blossom in a dead-end job, accepting his fate all too willingly even though he has for two decades harbored vague, at times unrealistic, plans for continuing his education.

Bibliography

Berner, Robert L. “World Literature in Review: Native American.” World Literature Today 67 (Autumn, 1993): 869. A short but interesting analysis of the satiric and mythic complexities of Green Grass, Running Water. Affirms the novel as “a permanent addition to the corpus of American Indian literature which will serve as a benchmark in the history of that subject.”

Blair, Elizabeth. “Setting the Story Straight.” World and I 8 (June, 1993): 284-295. Blair offers a brief comparison of King’s Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water. She presents an intriguing analysis of various components of the narrative, including the historical, mythic, and religious elements.

Eder, Richard. “Indian Spirits at Large in the World Today.” Newsday (March 25, 1993): 66. Eder gives a brief overview of the plot of Green Grass, Running Water and highlights important events. His analysis of the mythic aspects of the story is helpful but not comprehensive.

Low, Denise. Review of Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King. American Indian Quarterly 18 (Winter, 1994): 104-106. Low discusses the four characters who launch the “cosmic farce” characterizing the story line of Green Grass, Running Water. She concludes that although King’s humor can be gently scathing concerning the relationship between Native Americans and Europeans, its ultimate message is hopeful.

McManus, James. “Has Red Dog Gone White?” The New York Times Book Review 98 (July 25, 1993): 21. McManus comments on King’s control of the diverse stories developed in Green Grass, Running Water. He calls the book “ambitious and funny” but criticizes King for spending too much time developing some of the book’s less interesting characters.

Turbide, Diane. “A Literary Trickster: Thomas King Conjures Up Comic Worlds.” Maclean’s 106 (May 3, 1993): 43-44. Turbide explores the trickster aspect of the novel, focusing on the cultural and religious conflicts between American Indian and Christian viewpoints.