11 - “Have I Got Stories—” and “Coyote Was There”: Thomas King's Use of Trickster Figures and the Transformation of Traditional Materials

Summary

Thomas King's engagement with trickster figures, Coyote in particular, has long roots. In his 1986 dissertation “Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Literature, and Contemporary Native Writers” King wrote: “If there is a need to understand a culture, and one can only hear a single story that the culture tells about itself, that story should probably be a creation story” (King 1986, 69), and of course Coyote was there at the beginning of things. In his anthology of contemporary Canadian Native literature in English, All My Relations, he depicts the trickster as “an important figure for Native writers for it allows us to create a particular kind of world in which the Judeo-Christian concern with good and evil and order and disorder is replaced with the more Native concern for balance and harmony” (King 1990b, xiii). In his collection of short stories, One Good Story, That One (1993) Coyote appears in the title story in a Native version of the biblical story of the Garden; multiple blue Coyotes transport rock-hard Indians to a space ship in “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta”; Coyote disastrously “fixes” the world in “The One About Coyote Going West”; and Coyote tries unsuccessfully to play ball with Columbus in “A Coyote Columbus Story.” Coyote is also central to King's major work Green Grass, Running Water, which opens and closes with Coyote's presence when the world began: “So. In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water. Coyote was there …” (1993a, 1).