SOURCE: "Has Red Dog Gone White?" in The New York Times Book Review, July 25, 1993, p. 21.

McManus is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and educator. In the following mixed review of Green Grass, Running Water, he examines the novel's structure.

"As long as the grass is green and the waters run" is a phrase indicating perpetuity in 18th- and 19th-century treaties that ceded Indian land to the Governments of the United States and Canada. The Cherokee writer Thomas King uses the phrase in his second novel, Green Grass, Running Water, to underscore contemporary skepticism and rage about documents signed under duress several generations ago.

Even the hapless Blackfoot, Lionel Red Dog, a television and stereo salesman who is the novel's central character, can recognize the malignant, if unintended, irony:

It was a nice phrase, all right. But it didn't mean anything…. Every Indian on the reserve knew...