SOURCE: Bailey, Sharon M. “The Arbitrary Nature of the Story: Poking Fun at Oral and Written Authority in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water.” World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 43-52.

In the following essay, Bailey analyzes how King approaches the subject of oral and written authority in Green Grass, Running Water.

To speak of post-structuralist theory in conjunction with Native American literatures may seem as odd as serving dog stew with sauce béarnaise.

—Arnold Krupat, “Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature”

In Green Grass, Running Water a narrator and the trickster Coyote preside over two loosely interwoven plots: one based on the myth of the creation of the world, and one based on the quasi-realistic events on and near a Canadian Blackfoot reservation. In the myth plot the creation story is retold four times, once each by four different Indian women: First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old...