Analysis Of Green Grass Running Water By Thomas King

Oral culture as a method for retaining Aboriginal identity and rejecting assimilation through Thomas King’s “Green Grass Running Water”.

Colonialism had a great effect on this history of Canada’s First Nation people. For Canada’s first known settlers, this relationship has push Aboriginals away and created a power struggle that has made their lives much more difficult. There is a low opportunity for education, many economic problems, high incarceration and removal of land. Through Christianity and political power, Canada’s aboriginals have shifted from being the First Nation citizen’s to becoming the marginalized ethnic group. There is a clear inequality and discrimination Aboriginals face as they are not being upheld to their contribution

In Jovana Petrović’s “Ethnic identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water” she talks about the difficulties that King tries to educate his reader on when it comes to the Indigenous identity, “King portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the US and Canada to define their identity given the historically long rift between their native heritage and the white culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship. King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their position in both and usually not belonging to either. Through the use of intertextuality, metafiction and symbolism King creates a voice for the

Traditionally, this is a method used for preserving history, lands, traditions, and maintain a connection to their identity. King uses arbitrary language in Green Grass Running Water, to express the creation of the world through Aboriginals, demonstrating that the meaning is not fixed but created. We go through three different perspective of the creation of the world with a connecting narrator. In Sharon M. Bailey’s academic journal, “The Arbitrary Nature of the Story: Poking Fun at Oral and Written Authority…” she analyzes the value between these two-different narrative portrayal’s, “Playing off the fact that the written word is considered more stable than the spoken word and off the Western propensity to believe what we read, the oral narrative strand pokes fun at what becomes the inflexibility of written texts and the superiority of the more plastic oral storytelling technique” (Bailey 43). The storytelling of the creation of the world is repeated four times, all through different perspectives. The use of repetition here implies that the Natives perspective is excluded from history because not only is it repeated and changed throughout time, each tribe has their representation on how history has occurred. However, the only history that is acknowledged is the one through traditional written