Another example of King’s revolutionary power occurs at the beginning of his novel, where the origin of the all-powerful, Judeo-Christian God is challenged. God is reduced to a "contrary", "silly … Coyote dream", whose status is only grudgingly improved through his tenacity and obnoxious insistence on being viewed as a "big god" rather than a "little one":
I am god, says that Dog Dream.
"Isn’t that cute," says Coyote. "That Dog Dream is a contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward."
But why am I a little god? shouts that god.
"Not so loud," says Coyote. "You’re hurting my ears."
I don’t want to be a little god, says that god. I want to be a big god!
"What a noise," says Coyote. "This dog has no manners."
Big one!
"Okay, okay", says Coyote. "Just stop shouting."
There, says that GOD. That’s better. (2-3)
By relegating God to the status of a disobedient dream, King challenges the existence of such a God and implies that Judeo-Christianity is not a reality but an illusion. Through recreating and renaming the pivotal figures of Christianity, King seizes the authoritative role of members of the Euro-Canadian establishment who have tricked and attempted to assimilate, and thus recreate, Native individuals since the advent of colonisation.
King, as trickster, reverses the conventional binary constructions that dictate the white European is the authority while the Native is Other. King states in his introduction to the critical text The Native in Literature that "the dissipated savage, the barbarous savage, and the heroic savage—should be familiar to any contemporary reader, for they represent the full but limited range of Indian characters in literature" (8). The one component that all three archetypes have in common is the word "savage". According to King, such characters are restricted to the position of savage, the only variation being whether they are classified as debauched, uncivilised, or courageous. This extremely restricted list of literary options for Native characters has supported and promoted the perception of Native peoples as caricatures.
King actively engages with caricature in this novel’s examinations of the genres of the Western movie and the related Western novel. Eli, a retired Native professor of English Literature from the University of Toronto, has an ironic attraction to the Western novel, a work characterized by covers featuring "a beautiful blond woman, her hands raised in surrender, watching horrified as a fearsome Indian with a lance rode her down" (177). These novels are described by his partner’s white father as "sleazy little cowboy and Indian shoot-’em-ups" (185) and are filled with stereotyped dialogue:
"Tomorrow is a good day to die," said Iron Eyes, his arms folded across his chest, etc., etc., etc.
Eli flipped ahead, trying to outdistance the "glistenings" and the "tremblings" and the "good-day-to-dyings."
Flip, flip, flip. (224)
Despite his hope that the novel will be different to the clichéd Westerns he has read in the past, he finds himself continually confronted with a seemingly endless stream of stereotypes.
The stereotypes inherent in these novels encourage people to view Native individuals in a certain way. This is exemplified when Eli becomes the incarnation of the "Mystic Warrior", an Indian chief in a clichéd Western novel, for his partner, Karen. She is fascinated by Eli’s exoticism and uses him to tokenistically experience Blackfoot culture from which he himself feels alienated at the time. When they arrive at the Sun Dance she observes, "It’s like it’s right out of a movie" (227). She judges it against representations of ‘Indianness’ that she has witnessed in popular culture. She integrates the constructions of Indians found in books and movies created by dominant white culture with the limited experience of Blackfoot culture that she has gleaned from Eli to create a warped perception of what it means to be a Native individual in contemporary Canada. Her inability to persuade Eli to reconnect with his roots and to return to the Sun Dance, indicates clearly that this type of cultural voyeurism does not support the creation of a space facilitating understanding of Native peoples by anyone and instead, supports the centring of cultural knowledge around metonymically frozen concepts of Native reality.