Dances with coyote

Abstract

"Clearing a Conversational Critical Voice —So. You know that book by Thomas King I told you I was going to read? —One Good Story, That One? —Yeah, that’s the one. — Such a great title! —Well, it sure is an appropriately tricky one. Made me expect a novel, not ten stories. And they don’t all add up to one larger story, either. There are pretty different versions of reality alongside one another in the various stories. —What do you mean exactly? Like in Green Grass, Running Water? —Like that only more so, because King adds science fiction to the mix in one story about petrified Indians being abducted by blue space coyotes. —Not green? —No, guess they’re not native to Mars! Some of the stories are realistic but others add mythic dimensions to the realism in a kind of augmented reality. Early on, King introduces Old Coyote, then lets him make tracks all over the pages. Sometimes that book sounds like a Native oral storyteller talking, and other times... well, it sounds more like a book. Guess that’s a lot like Native people nowadays. They don’t all talk the same way either. And lots of Native writers are using so-called Red Englishes. —Yeah, like Cree poet Louise Halfe using Creenglish in her “Pope” poems—but she also writes in more standard English. —Right, and Maria Campbell’s Stories of the Road Allowance People are all in the village English of her father’s generation, plus the book gives you a sense of interaction between storyteller and audience. King gives you that, too, but in a different way. More thematically than stylistically, though, at least in this book. And, one of the best things in Wagamese’s"