Green Grass Running Water Analysis

This paper will explore depictions of marriage in Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water and how rejections of hierarchal male-female relationships, specifically by female characters, parallel and aide rejections of cultural oppression of First Nations, establishing a new basis for equality. King’s female characters remove themselves from positions of subservience, maintaining the autonomy and equality also hoped for but oft denied in First Nation’s relations with colonizing forces. Particularly, Alberta and Latisha each experience relationships easily interpreted as representations of colonialist domination and reject traditional gendered expectations to meet their individual goals, drawing parallels to King’s revision of the accepted narrative of colonial oppression. The behaviour of King’s female characters when faced with such roles demonstrate the intimate relationship between deconstructions of sexism and colonialism, and the desire for a future in which colonialist cultural supremacy has been replaced with community and respect for identity. Despite tradition defining these roles as inseparable, the character of Alberta Frank simultaneously desires to be a mother, a creative and powerful role, while seeking to avoid the loss of autonomy she feels is implied in marriage. When weighing her options regarding how to conceive Alberta considers marrying either Charlie or Lionel …show more content…
Her success in running the Dead Dog Café, a restaurant run by a native woman that not only parodies inaccurate and obscene First Nations stereotypes, but profits off of them, suggests that it is in the cultural awareness and capability of individuals that oppressive structures can be