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MODERNIZING THE "INDIAN": LITERARY CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE NATIVE IN SELECTED NOVELS BY THOMAS KING
- University of Ottawa Press
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Thomas Rudell MODERNIZING THE "INDIAN": LITERARY CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE NATIVE IN SELECTED NOVELS BY THOMAS KING Boy, hard to keep track of this world. You know, in Germany I told the story about how Coyote went over to the west coast to get some fire because he was cold. Good thing he went travelling in the olden days before he needed a credit card. —LionelJames in Medicine River, 172 Ifwetakethe reports byEuropean explorers to the present territory ofCanada, written in the i6th century, as the beginning of written Canadian Literature, this makes for a literary history of about four centuries, give or take a few years. The Native inhabitants of Canada have alwaysbeen an integral part of this literary history: it is obvious that they were one of the main objects of the explorers' reports; it is also obvious that the "newly discovered" people quicklybecame a topic for Canadian poetry and prose, and also for Canadian everyday culture. While these literary constructions of the Native were subject to a few changes over the centuries, it was not before the second half 246 of the 20th century that a fundamental change of the image of the Native in Canadian literature took place. This is due to the fact that during this period more and more Native people began to pursue careersin literature, thus offering a new, mostly contrastive, perspective to the literary constructions of the Native by non-Native authors (Petrone 1990,136). One of the most prominent members of the group of contemporary North American Native authors is Thomas King (Cherokee), whose four published novels are not only bestsellers but also highly acclaimed study objects for literature critics and theorists. This article deals with the question of how Thomas King in his works modernizes the literary "Indian." There are two aspects to the "modern Natives" in Kings novels and short stories: his protagonists are modern in that they are different from most earlier literary constructions of the Native in Canadian literature, and they are modern in that they have modern, socially accepted lifestyles, which are comparable to those of non-Native people, but still distinct enough. Due to his biographical background (King's father was Cherokee, his mother is Greek, and he grew up in California; he currently lives and works in Canada and holds Canadian and United States citizenship) King has a strong interest in the "idea of Indianness." As he states in an interview with Jace Weaver, "I don't want people to get the mistaken idea that I'm an 'authentic Indian/ or that they're getting the kind of Indian that they'd like to have .... One of the questions that's important to ask is 'Who is an Indian? How do we get the idea of Indianness?'" (Weaver 1993,56). Indeed, King has made clear on several occasions that he does not really believe in a concept of "Indianness." In an interview withJeffrey Canton he has called that a "fluid construct which we make up as we go along" (Canton 1994, 2). In the same interview, King said that, although he is half Cherokee, he identifies more with the Alberta Blackfoot than with the Cherokee, because he lived in a Blackfoot community for about ten years (Canton 1994, 3). When we look at King's biography, as told in The Truth about Stories, there are several instances in which the difference between non-Native expectations of what a ("real") Indian is (or is supposed to be) collide with reality. This makes for amusing anecdotes: the German cook on the tramp steamer 247 HUMOROUS RESTORIFICATIONS [100.25.40.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:00 GMT) THOMAS RUDELL on which young Thomas Kingemigratesto New Zealandwho claimsto know about "real Indians" becausehe has read the works of KarlMay; the immigration official in New Zealand confusing North American Indians with East Indians, and so on. Finally King gets a job as a photojournalist in Australia: "I got the job, in part because I was an American and an Indian—the exotic combination being too much for folks to resist" (King 2003,51). Yetthese are more than mere biographical anecdotes—they all play into the.question of "real Indians"and, for that matter,"modern Indians." Thehumorous situations only occurbecause the cook, the official, and the newspaper staff cannot cope with the idea that there are "real" Indians still around in the 19605, looking pretty much like everybody else, and applying for modern jobs. In order to demonstrate the...