SOURCE: "'Tell Our Own Stories': Politics and the Fiction of Thomas King," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 30, No. 2, Autumn, 1990, pp. 77-84.

In the essay below, Walton applies semiotic theory to Medicine River, viewing the novel as a postmodern, metadiscursive text that attempts to create "a presence for natives, in order to combat their status as Other."

Margery Fee, in her essay "Romantic Nationalism and the Image of Native People in Contemporary English-Canadian Literature" [The Native in Literature, edited by Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy, 1987], argues that English-Canadian literature has required representations of the native to forge and to strengthen its sense of cultural identity. This is why, she suggests, the figure of the native assumes such prominence in these texts, and why the native cannot be erased from them. She contends that

it is difficult to kill off the literary Indian for good … he...