[In the following excerpt, Andrews evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Truth and Bright Water.]

In an essay titled “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” published in 1990, Thomas King proposed some alternative categories for discussing Native literature, ones that do not rely on the arrival of European settlers in the New World to mark the beginning of a distinctive literary tradition. Among the terms he offers to describe Native texts, King includes “associational” literature, which he uses to label the work of contemporary Native writers who depict Native communities. Rather than focusing on a non-Native society or the conflicts between Natives and non-Natives, these texts present the “daily intricacies and activities of Native life.” According to King, those who write associational literature usually reject the “climaxes and resolutions” that are valued by non-Natives. Instead, they emphasize the interactions of the community without necessarily creating conventional models of the hero or villain; the plot line tends to be flat and to resist formulaic kinds of closure.

In Truth & Bright Water, King clearly reasserts himself as an author of associational literature, creating a picture of a community that is forceful in its critique of nationalist politics and, at the same time, less interested in overturning the foundations of white, Western culture. Truth & Bright Water is a quieter text. Yet King retains elements of the cross-border humour evident in his earlier works. For example, the title refers to the two towns that are at the centre of the narrative: Truth, located on the American side of the border, and Bright Water, situated in Canada. With this framework in place, King explores questions of identity, history, and memory from a distinctly Native perspective.

Truth & Bright Water is narrated by a young boy, aptly named Tecumseh, who spends his summer working for Monroe Swimmer, a locally born Native artist who comes back to the Prairies after gaining an international reputation for his ability to restore paintings. At the same time, Tecumseh is trying to solve a mystery that he and his friend Lum have witnessed at the river that divides Canada from the United States. One night, they watch a woman plunge over a cliff into the waters below, only to disappear from view and, shortly after, they discover a skull that they presume was hers. Meanwhile, Tecumseh aids Monroe in his attempts to restore a lost Native past by literally painting a Methodist church in Truth out of existence and by scattering iron buffalo sculptures across the Prairies. His efforts become part of the puzzle that the boys try to solve, a mystery that involves racial and sexual crossings as well as the symbolic return of the bones of Native children to the reserve—children whose skeletons have been relegated to obscurity in museum drawers by white anthropologists. This conflict with white cultural values is explicitly framed by the day-to-day activities of the Native community, and the narrative unfolds without the “ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature.” Although the mystery that opens the story is solved, many other questions posed by Tecumseh remain unanswered. For example, the concluding scene is notably open-ended. Tecumseh finds his mother trimming a vase of flowers from a mysterious admirer, and when he asks her about the source of the flowers, she remains silent; Tecumseh never learns the admirer's identity.

Even King's intertextual references to the Hollywood icon, Marilyn Monroe, are placed within a Native context and read through Native eyes. Lucy Rabbit, a fixture in the local community, is obsessed with Monroe and dyes her dark hair blond, a gesture that leaves her with flaming orange locks. Tecumseh and Lum assume that Lucy is trying to pass as white but, as they soon find out, their presumptions are wrong. Lucy tells them that rather than bleaching her hair to look white, she thinks that Marilyn Monroe was Native and feared the discovery of this secret by the press and the public. Thus, Lucy explains, she dyes her own locks to show the dead movie star “that bleaching your hair doesn't change a thing.” This performative aspect of King's text is mirrored and reconfigured through Monroe Swimmer's own use of blonde wigs and other disguises, which comically contests the presumption that Natives—on both sides of the border—really just want to be white.