SOURCE: Berner, Robert L. Review of Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King. World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (autumn 1993): 869.

In the following review, Berner offers a positive assessment of Green Grass, Running Water, calling it “a permanent addition to the corpus of American Indian literature which will serve as a benchmark in the history of that subject.”

We must regard the publication of Green Grass, Running Water as a major event, an important American novel which combines with remarkable ingenuity an impressive variety of narrative skills, a keen satiric sense, and a wide knowledge of traditional American Indian cultures, setting a standard for the future as the first major Indian novel which is unabashedly comic in its intentions.

The novel's subject—more or less—is the collapse of an Alberta dam which has flooded ancestral Blackfoot lands. Eli, who has led a white man's existence professing English in Toronto...