SOURCE: Linton, Patricia. “‘And Here's How It Happened’: Trickster Discourse in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water.” Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 1 (spring 1999): 212-34.

In the following essay, Linton asserts that Green Grass, Running Water acts as an intersection between historical and contemporary references and Native American and Euro-American cultures.

Louis Owens has observed that contemporary Native American writers are often members of a literate elite, “possessing as they do a consistently high level of education […] and mastery of English, a fact that certainly adds complexity to the overarching question of cultural identity” (7). Their familiarity with different kinds of privileged discourse is reflected, and sometimes placed in question, in their fiction. Indeed, a distinctive feature of some contemporary Native novels is the persona of the scholar-narrator, a narrator who addresses a range of historical and aesthetic issues and whose scope of cultural knowledge—encompassing both the arcane and the...