Green Grass, Running Water Themes

Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water focuses on several Indian characters and how their lives change due to encounters with white American culture. Lionel, for example, is a character who feels caught between trying to embrace his Indian identity and trying to fit in with white culture. On the one hand, characters like his aunt Norma accuse Lionel of trying to be white by moving out of the small town of Blossom and taking…

Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water draws on the Indian oral literary tradition, demonstrating the power of storytelling. It begins with the narrator and Coyote (a variation on the trickster figure from traditional Indian stories) debating how to tell a creation story that blends both Indian traditions and Judeo-Christian beliefs about creation. From there, the story weaves together different plot threads, with Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye each presenting themselves…

As the title suggests, Green Grass, Running Water is in part a novel about humanity’s relationship with nature. The novel begins and ends with the image of a world full of nothing but water, and water in particular plays a role throughout the narrative in demonstrating nature’s power. Each of the four parts of the novel contains a plotline about a woman (First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old…