SOURCE: Smith, Carlton. “Coyote, Contingency, and Community: Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water and Postmodern Trickster.” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 3 (summer 1998): 515-34.

In the following essay, Smith explores the role of Coyote as a postmodern trickster in Green Grass, Running Water.

[T]rickster stories point to the way ordinary, conventional reality is an illusory construction produced out of a particular univocal interpretation of phenomena appearing as signs. This deeper wisdom about the linguisticality of our constructed world and the illusoriness of that construction is where trickster stories open onto the sacred.

—Anne Doueihi, “Inhabiting the Space Between Discourse and Story in Trickster Narratives,” in Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms

Among the numerous chimerical developments to occur in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1993), perhaps the most telling occurs as the four old Indians at the center of the novel alter the outcome of the allegedly famous...