3 - “Turtles All the Way Down”: Literary and Cultural Criticism, Coyote Style

Summary

I really am very much a North American critic and a North American writer, and I don't know that that's going to change to any great degree because, quite frankly, I have almost stopped reading critical texts and I just concentrate on the writing itself.

—Thomas King, interview with Margery Fee and Sneja Gunew

I first encountered Thomas King at a conference he organized at the University of Lethbridge in 1985, the year his supervisory committee judged his PhD thesis to be “satisfactory.” The conference, “The Native in Literature,” was a lively gathering of First Nations scholars, creative artists, and assorted critics. Stories emanating from the ladies' washrooms extolled the conference organizer's good looks and charisma. “This man may be a professor of Native Studies at a Canadian university,” I thought, “but he's also a wily and beguiling coyote.” Conference participants included critics Terry Goldie, Katherine Shanley (then Vangen), Jarold Ramsey, and Barbara Godard, and filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. The conference was different from any other I had attended, and although I was not a contributor, I recorded many of the presentations on cassette tape to take back to my students in a First Nations ethnography course at UBC.

The idea of organizing a conference on the Native in literature—and the resulting volume of essays, coedited with Helen Hoy and Cheryl Calver—grew out of King's PhD thesis, “Inventing the Indian: White Images, Oral Native Literature, and Contemporary Native Writers” (1986). Indeed, much of his later work can also be traced to themes developed there.