LINDA RODENBURG AND ROBYN ANDERSON

    According to the editors of Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, culture can be defined as "a network of representations—texts, images, talk, codes of behaviour, and the narrative structures organizing these—which shape every aspect of social life" (Frow and Morris viii).  Through historical ethnographic representations of indigeneity, this network has been compressed, reducing indigenous cultural realities to static, romanticized textualizations.  In contrast, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water challenges many of the assumptions that arise out of past cultural (mis)interpretations of Native Canadian peoples.  Considering this text as an alternative site for cultural study exposes representations of culture and allows access to an indigenous-centered space.

           
    Within this textual space, King uses tricksterish strategies—and trickster figures—to rewrite both religious and literary canonical works, as well as to subvert stereotypical images of Native Canadian peoples perpetuated by popular culture. King accomplishes his unique (re)visioning of cultural identity through presenting a complex network of stories that resist the reductive representations of the past, and replaces them with interwoven narratives that better reflect the complexity of contemporary Native Canadian realities.

    Edward Said argues that there are two indivisible foundations of imperial authority: knowledge and power.  As a result of these foundations, colonial authority dictated—and often continues to dictate—that dominant cultures were entitled to the act of defining the physical and metaphorical spaces of others.  As a result, the culture of the ‘other’ becomes knowable as a set of "values, beliefs, knowledge and customs that exist in a timeless and unchangeable vacuum outside of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and colonialism" (Razack 58).  Indigenous cultures in particular have been subject to what Arjun Appardurai identifies as "metonymic freezing", a process of representational essentializing in which a limited—and limiting—number of characteristics stand in for individual experience (Clifford 24).  King himself addresses this issue in this text when he rewrites Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Natty Bumppo—Nasty Bumppo, Post-Colonial Wilderness Guide and Outfitter—attempts to (re)name Old Woman "Chingachgook" and assign her a certain set of gifts due to her ‘Native-ness.’ Nasty Bumppo insists,

Indians can 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 … 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.

So, says Old Woman.  "Whites are superior, and Indians are inferior.
Exactly right, says Nasty Bumppo. Any questions? (434-35)

Of course, Old Woman—as a Native character limited by Nasty’s colonial point of view—is forbidden active questioning.  Instead, the Post-colonial Wilderness Guide and Outfitter attempts to shoot Old Woman when he discovers that she is not willing to be his friend, Chingachgook.  Ironically, Nasty ends up shooting himself and dying.  Old Woman, in contrast, goes on to escape from the political prison at Fort Marion, live for hundreds of years, and become part of a foursome of Native trickster figures who spend their time ‘fixing the world.’

This scene is one of many in Green Grass, Running Water in which King demonstrates how writing, as a process of cultural production, promotes the destruction of limiting stereotypes and the active creation of what Chandra Mohanty identifies as "oppositional analytic and cultural spaces" (qtd in hooks 21).  King’s dual role of creator/destroyer echoes that of a traditional Canadian Native trickster figure. In Canadian Native mythologies, the trickster is a figure of transformation who brings about change, beneficial or catastrophic, depending on what animals or situations s/he encounters. The trickster is given human characteristics but usually takes the form of a particular animal, most often a raven, hare, coyote, or spider, depending on the tribe from which the trickster originates (Caroll 113).

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