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Setting the Story Straight
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21923 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,962 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth Blair
Elizabeth Blair has written numerous essays on American
Indian literature. She teaches literature and creative
writing at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota.
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Thomas King is a versatile writer. He has written a children's book about Coyote, the Native American trickster/creator figure and a fine first novel called Medicine River. In addition, he is the editor of a book of essays about the Native American in literature and an anthology of Canadian native fiction. In his new book, Green Grass, Running Water, King combines his interest in native myth, the Indian in literature, and contemporary fictional narrative to create a blockbuster novel that is brainy, hilarious, and clever without losing its deep humanity.
Noted as a fiction writer of promise even before the release of Medicine River, King has published numerous short stories in literary periodicals. Born and bred in California, he is of German, Greek, and Cherokee extraction. So far, he has chosen to write about the Cree and Blackfoot tribes of southern Alberta, using the knowledge he gained while a professor of native studies at the University of Lethbridge.
Medicine River tells the story of Will, a university-educated photographer who returns to a small town near the reserve where his Blackfoot mother, Rose Horse Capture, was born. In the novel, Harlan Bigbear, a gregarious, in-your-face, surrogate uncle, assumes the task of inducting the passive Will into the life tribe. Banished from the reserve because his mother married a white man who has long since left them, Will gradually mends his broken past by embracing his culture and community and by creating a new if unorthodox family. Though the outlines of this plot are the familiar stuff of twentieth-century native fiction, Medicine River is distinguished by its quiet, controlled prose, its breath-and-blood characters, and its terse, teasing brand of Indian humor.
Green Grass, Running Water is, by an account, more ambitious, more innovative, and more successful. Offering us characters full of compassion, foibles, and piss 'n' vinegar, it also mounts a biting critique of Judeo-Christian tradition, Euro-American history, and Euro-American literature. The good news is that King accomplishes this not by polemic but by counterstory. The bad news is that the novel's thorough grounding in native tradition and in Canadian and American historical events concerning the North American Indian may cause some readers to feel like outsiders.
History of the world, native style
But perhaps this is part of the point King is making in Green Grass, Running Water. The book addresses the fact that the
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