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Woven Narratives / "Green Grass, Running Water"
This woven piece, crafted from yarn and rags, illustrates the complexity of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. The legend identifies each material used and the plotline, formal feature, or cultural narrative it represents. I depicted each chapter by weaving with the corresponding materials, braiding them together for chapters with multiple elements, beginning at the loom’s centre. I initially expected a clear visual representation of the novel’s structure to emerge. Instead, the materials blend together, reflecting how King’s storytelling becomes increasingly interconnected the closer you look. Creating this piece helped me engage with the text in an embodied way, translating my reading experience into a physical exploration of its intricate combination of elements. Through this process, I developed a deeper appreciation for King’s layered storytelling, which intertwines Indigenous and settler experiences. Rather than obtaining an objective, singular understanding of the novel’s form, this craft object reveals its rich, interwoven complexity. ELISSA FRIELINK ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King’s most canonical work, is widely regarded as a Canadian classic, praised for its storytelling and cultural significance (Archibald-Barber 142). First published in Canada in 1993, the novel was quickly embraced by academics internationally and is still taught in many universities (142). The novel’s intricate structure challenges readers, yet students respond positively to the text, as I did when I first read it in a Canadian Literature course (141). I created my craft object, Woven Narratives, by combining weaving and rag rugging as data visualization tools to help me understand Green Grass’s intricate form. King employs Indigenous oral storytelling to incorporate intersecting plotlines, telling an elaborate story that challenges dominant literary conventions. The novel’s structure and King’s numerous references to Indigenous and settler cultures contribute to the novel's complexity. My piece explores and visually represents this intricate structure. The legend shows the materials I chose to represent plotlines, formal features, and cultural narratives. I depicted each chapter by weaving with the representative materials of that chapter and braided materials for chapters that combined plotlines, the frame narrative, or cultural narratives. I wove chapter after chapter until the whole novel was represented. The process helped me explore embodied learning as a pedagogical approach to literary studies. Before weaving, I created a digital key, categorizing each chapter according to the elements I wanted to represent. I cross-referenced the key with the physical novel while weaving, revealing elements I had initially missed. This iterative process deepened my understanding of the frame narrative, which I represented with thin white yarn. The frame narrative opens the novel with the unnamed narrator saying, “So. In the beginning there was nothing. Just the water” (1). Coyote appears and comments on the water, and the narrator responds, saying, “[h]ere’s how it happened” (3). The frame narrative introduces the story’s central question: where does the water come from? This question is answered in the mythic realm when the narrator and Coyote travel through blended Indigenous and Biblical creation stories involving water, and in the realist realm through a narrative involving multiple characters’ plotlines that unite due to a flood. King depicts an “oral storytelling event” where the novel’s narratives are framed by the narrator telling Coyote a story (Hulan and Warley 126). While I recognized the beginning and end of the frame narrative in my initial reading, weaving it into my piece clarified its formal role throughout the novel. Blanca Schorcht discusses King’s “interfusional” style that “transforms the oral into written forms” through repetition and a circular narrative structure (204). The frame narrative reappears in repetitions I initially missed. In Part One, Lionel and Norma pick up the Four Indigenous Elders who escape from a psychiatric hospital. Lionel gets out of the car and finds himself in an ankle-deep puddle (97). Other characters also encounter mysterious puddles and repeat the question: “Where did the water come from?” (98). I wove these repeated questions into my piece with thin white yarn that was easily lost amongst thicker yarn and rags. King brings the realist plotlines back to the frame narrative by reiterating the central question, reminding the reader of the oral storytelling unfolding between the narrator and Coyote. Losing sight of the white yarn in my rag-weaving, I realized how easy it was to lose the frame narrative when I read quickly, consuming the plot rather than contemplating King’s multilayered storytelling. Weaving encouraged me to slow my reading and find the frame narrative within layered stories through material reflection. I found countless other references to the frame narrative that I initially missed until I sat with the text in an embodied way. Part One concludes with the narrator repeating, “[i]n the beginning there was nothing. Just the water,” circling back to the frame narrative. King ends each section this way, revisiting the beginning and starting a new creation story, reflecting the cyclical nature of oral storytelling. The circle is completed in the novel’s conclusion when Coyote remarks on the water resulting from the flood, and the narrator responds, “[h]ere’s how it happened,” suggesting the start of another story (431). By weaving the frame narrative into other material, I reflected on what I read in an embodied, tactile way that helped me understand King’s repetition that creates circular narratives, depicting an oral storytelling event. I originally planned on illustrating the presence of the Hollywood Western in my piece as a cultural narrative, similar to Indigenous and Biblical creation stories. The Western is a book and movie genre that tells stereotypical stories about conflicts between cowboys and Indigenous peoples. I refrained from including the Western as a cultural narrative in my piece because I was unsure if I could fit another material into the loom. As I wove characters' plotlines in the realist realm, I realized the significance of the Western genre for both thematic and formal reasons. Characters like Eli and Lionel read and watch Westerns that perpetuate harmful stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as savage, prehistoric, and destined for extinction. Rather than alluding to these stories, King explicitly tells them. In a fragmented sequence over multiple chapters, King tells Eli’s story while describing the plot of a Western novel he reads, exposing its stereotypes and their effect on his identity. King's portrayal of the Western genre illustrates the dangers that arise when certain stories become popularized and are “granted authority over other stories in terms of its worldview,” which can have “long-term, often destructive effects” on representation and identity (McGill 4). The Western genre becomes an important part of the novel’s plot when the Elders enter a Western movie and the narrative so that the Indigenous group defeats the cowboys (322). Characters in the realist realm watch and are confused by the subversion of conventional Western plots. King’s incorporation and rewriting of Westerns depict his belief “that people should aim to improve narratives by retelling them” (McGill 251). King indicates that cultural narratives, while impactful, are not fixed. His playful manipulation of Westerns thematically challenges stereotypes and adds complexity to his portrayal of Indigenous identity, while making the Western part of the novel’s plot. My choice to omit this element shows the impossibility of my goal to understand the depth of the novel’s structure and represent it to the viewer within the confines of my loom. I initially envisioned my final product as a form of data visualization, resembling an orderly weaving piece that would clearly depict each chapter and its contents. I expected my piece to explicate the form of Green Grass and then communicate it to the viewer through clear visual patterns. However, my actual product resembles a rag rug–a practical, economic object that emerged in 18th- and 19th-century Britain from reused “bits and pieces” and “torn scraps of things” (Steedman 262, 272). Carolyn Steedman notes that historians often romanticize rag rugs, imbuing them with symbolic meaning that contrasts with their utilitarian origins among the working-class poor (277). While my craft object did not arise from utility, my assemblage of varied, textured materials mirrors the ragged aesthetic of rag rugging. The blending of these materials reveals the extent of the novel’s interconnected complexity, which I thought was more knowable and less complex than it actually is. Like historians' romanticization of the rag rug, the meaning I wanted to project onto my piece differed from its actual meaning—an illustration of the novel’s intricacy and demonstration of the need to personally engage with King’s storytelling to understand the novel’s structure. In “Against Mastery: Teaching Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water,” Robert McGill reflects on the dangers of asserting mastery over the novel by seeking a totalized understanding of its form and intertextual allusions in educational settings (249). My attempt to objectively understand and represent the novel’s form through data visualization mirrors such efforts at mastery. Green Grass exemplifies the pedagogy of Indigenous storytelling, which resists “orthodox conclusions” and fixed meanings (253). The stories invite listeners to engage deeply and draw their own conclusions that may differ from the storyteller’s intended message (253). While I anticipated achieving clarity through tactile creation, rag weaving further revealed the novel’s complexities to me as I physically interweaved the narratives onto my loom. King’s work illustrates that different narratives can co-exist while resisting assimilation into each other. King does not create one objective master narrative, but rather a complex story supporting many perspectives and interpretations. After crafting my piece, I still had unanswered questions, showing that deep engagement with Indigenous literature is more valuable than seeking a single, objective interpretation. The value of Woven Narratives lies in my process of making it, and I recognize its limitations in communicating knowledge that is meant to be personally experienced through King’s storytelling. Rag-weaving allowed me to engage with Green Grass in an embodied way, experiencing the interconnection of the novel’s stories by weaving them into my piece. While I deepened my understanding of the frame narrative, I did not fully grasp or communicate the novel’s overall structure through data visualization. Instead, my process enriched my appreciation of King’s interweaving of stories into a whole, complex narrative. Like King’s storytelling, my object resists objective interpretation. I hope it will encourage viewers to seek their own interpretations of the text, reading not just for the written narrative but to engage deeply with King’s storytelling.