SOURCE: Ridington, Robin. “Happy Trails to You: Contexted Discourse and Indian Removals in Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water.” Canadian Literature 167 (winter 2000): 89-107.

In the following essay, Ridington offers an evaluation of the hidden discourse in Truth and Bright Water.

Border Crossings

In a paper called “Coyote Pedagogy: Knowing Where the Borders Are in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water,” Margery Fee and Jane Flick point out that, “There is no reader of this novel, except perhaps Thomas King, who is not outside some of its networks of cultural knowledge” (131). Fortunately, they point out, “every reader is also inside at least one network and can therefore work by analogy to cross borders into others” (131). King's third novel, Truth & Bright Water, challenges the reader's abilities at border crossing. Within a narrative set in the present and written in the present tense, King has embedded, and then exhumed, a wealth...