SOURCE: "'Tell Our Own Stories': Politics and the Fiction of Thomas King," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 30, No. 2, Autumn, 1990, pp. 77-84.

[In the essay below, Walton applies semiotic theory to Medicine River, viewing the novel as a postmodern, metadiscursive text that attempts to create "a presence for natives, in order to combat their status as Other."]

Margery Fee, in her essay "Romantic Nationalism and the Image of Native People in Contemporary English-Canadian Literature" [The Native in Literature, edited by Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy, 1987], argues that English-Canadian literature has required representations of the native to forge and to strengthen its sense of cultural identity. This is why, she suggests, the figure of the native assumes such prominence in these texts, and why the native cannot be erased from them. She contends that

it is difficult to kill off the literary Indian for good … he appears to metamorphose into the land, rather than die, as if to be available when needed. One explanation for his stubborn immortality here may be that many of the techniques that might kill him off … come from cultures where nationalism is not an issue, not because nationalism has been transcended, but because it is an unthreatened fact…. Marginal cultures can rarely afford to be cynical about nationalism: we are afraid that if we don't believe in Indians, we will have to become Americans.

Fee's argument is important, for it foregrounds the ways in which cultural identities have been established. As she implies, one culture is often defined through its difference from an/Other; cultural presence is generated through the construction of an absence upon which it relies for its definition. Because the positive can only be present/ed in opposition to its negative, this has meant that, in practice, the dominant culture has required a sub-group to delineate itself; it acquires its positive attributes through its difference from its constructed Other. The Other occupies the space of that which the dominant culture is not. John Sekora and Houston A. Baker, Jr. discuss the result of this logic and draw attention to its oppressive impetus [in their "Written Off: Narratives, Master Texts, and Afro-American Writing from 1760–1945," in Black American Prose Theory, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, 1984]:

racism in America was undoubtedly satisfying, consolidating as it was dividing. It readily accommodated, even encouraged, belief in a historical division of humankind into a virtuous 'we' standing against a deformed 'they.' In a psychological sense it proved—more conveniently than empirical evidence could ever hope to do—the existence of lower, corrupted, imperfect humanity, whether called slave or black or insane or savage. With slaves constituted as the Other, masters found means to speak the unspeakable and thereby to constitute themselves. They had found, that is, a powerful measure of self-worth and self-definition.

Sekora and Baker assert that blacks, in particular, signified the lower, corrupted nature through which white American culture defined itself as superior, civilized, etc. Canada, which has attempted to establish itself through the same means, has likewise been involved in marginalizing racial minorities. In Canada's case, as Fee contends, the Other has been located in the native, who has been used to solidify the white English-Canadian identity.

Terry Goldie, in Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, discusses those attributes that have been associated with the native Other, and which constitute what he calls the "semiotic field of the indigene." He suggests that "[t]he commodities—sex, violence, orality, mysticism, the prehistoric—can be seen as part of a circular economy within and without the semiotic field of the indigene." These become those things which the native Other "is," and which the English Canadian "is not." As a result, the native has no singular presence within this discourse, for s/he functions only as Other, necessary to that signifying system, but denied a presence within it. Native presence is an absence which highlights the white cultural norm because it is different. The native is both a part of the signifying system, and forever excluded from it.

Thomas King's recent novel, Medicine River, tries to forge a presence for natives in order to combat their status as Other. The way in which he does this, however, constitutes a political dynamic quite different from that used to establish English-Canadian identity. Medicine River is a text that provides a Native perspective on native culture, and, as such, it is a text that I approach from outside its textual discourse. As a white English-Canadian woman, I speak to the novel from within the culture it seeks to decentre. This places me in an awkward position, for, while this is not an effort to appropriate the text, nor an attempt to make it conform to my cultural expectations, this is, at least to a certain extent, what I am in the process of doing, for my subjectivity informs my reading. I am not trying to totalize Medicine River, however, since I perceive, within it, a signifying impetus in opposition to the exclusionary impetus so favoured by white Western society. I believe King breaks with the idea that in order to delineate culture, one must, necessarily, cast another as Other. In Medicine River, a positive Native presence is generated through its difference from the negative attributes that the native has been made to signify within English-Canadian discourse.

Medicine River is a metadiscursive text, in that, rather than trying to refer to a "reality" outside of language, it refers to a discourse constructed about the native. It is a discourse about discourse, and, as such, it foregrounds the constructedness of the semiotic field of the indigene. That the protagonist, Will, is a photographer is in keeping with this idea, since the photographic process self-reflexively mirrors the text's signifying procedure. Photography generates an image from a negative, a negative which is reversed to project the desired picture. Similarly, in order to project its image, Medicine River plays upon and reverses the negative semiotic field of the indigene, with its connotations of drunkenness, violence, dishonesty, and mysticism, nature, nostalgia. By constructing a presence upon the absence of the native Other, the text avoids prioritizing native culture over other cultures. It therefore also avoids positing a new centre, a centre which would necessitate the construction of new margins. King's text rejects the culturally exclusive endeavour that has marginalized the native as Other, and privileges instead an inclusive and collective process that does not rest upon cultural superiority/inferiority.

Because violence is the trait most commonly associated with the native Other, it is violence that receives most attention in Medicine River. Indeed, the violence draws readers into the text by playing upon and inverting their expectations. The episodes of violence turn out to be more rumour than "fact," rumours that arise and are granted credence because of the discourse that has been constructed about the native, a discourse which informs readers' expectations about the text. In this way, the reader is implicated in the construction of the native Other, as is Will, the native protagonist.

When David Plume is arrested for shooting Ray Little Buffalo, the Medicine River Herald carries a story which Will summarizes for readers: "Ray Little Buffalo had been shot in the stomach. He was found in Chinook Park by the river. David had been arrested and held for questioning." The indigene is found guilty by that voice of white authority—the newspaper—which contributes to the myth of the violent and explosive native. Will's expectations (and the reader's) are raised and seemingly confirmed when Harlen Bigbear, the character who is the focal point of the text, expands upon the rumour:

Ray and three of his friends caught David behind the American Hotel and beat him up. "Damn, Will," Harlen told me, "after they beat him up, Ray took that jacket. Ray's a lot bigger than David, and when he tried to put the jacket on, you know, just to tease David, he ripped it." According to Harlen, David jumped back up and started swinging again, and Ray beat on him some more. After it was over, David went into the American to wash the blood off and then went to his apartment and got his deer rifle. He found Ray down by the river drinking and throwing rocks at the empty bottles.

That Will and, presumably, the reader do not question the story is evidence of the power and the pervasiveness of the semiotic field of the indigene. But as they accept the story, the text implicates them in proliferating cultural stereotypes. Harlen, the one character who is in doubt about the "truth" of the story, discovers:

"David found him [Ray] and started shooting at him. But he missed. When he ran out of bullets, he went home."

"Who shot Ray?"

"Ray wasn't shot. The papers sort of got that mixed up. When David started shooting, Ray tried to get out of the way, but he slipped and fell on the bottle he had in his pocket. Cut his stomach pretty bad. At first, everybody thought Ray had been shot, but he was just cut and drunk."

The apparent tragedy is turned into a black comedy, and the violence in the scene is diffused. It is, however, still present in the text, and thus Medicine River exemplifies what Linda Hutcheon has called the "postmodern paradox," since what the text questions and inverts is, at the same time, restated and reiterated. Violence is reiterated within the narrative, but it is reiterated with a "critical difference," a difference that emphasizes not the violence of the native, but the expectations of violence that Will and the reader bring to their respective texts.

When incidents of violence are not inverted, they are juxtaposed with comparable incidents of white violence. This may appear to be a rather simplistic means of signifying the similarities, rather than the differences between the two cultures, but I think that there is more complicated issue tackled here. Had the text merely posited violence in relation to native characters, because signification relies on absence, this would have suggested there was a lack of violence elsewhere. This, in turn, could be used to support the construct of the violent native and the civilized white. As it is, both cultures are depicted side by side—with no dominant cultural presence and no unstressed cultural absence. The unstressed absent presence, again, is located in the semiotic field of the indigene, which informs readers' expectations of the text. Will very matter-of-factly discusses wife-beating on the reserve: "Jake beat up on January. It was no secret…. Betty down at the hospital said that January was a regular in the emergency ward. Betty told January to file charges but she never did." While this may be in accord with what certain readers "have always known to be true" about natives, they are immediately confronted with another instance of wife-beating. The reserve incident recalls Will's childhood memories of his neighbor, Mrs. Oswald, whom he found

sitting in a chair by the window. She had a towel pressed against her face, and it was covered with blood. There was blood all down her dress, and her face was bruised and swollen. Her left arm lay on the arm of the chair at a funny angle. My mother looked at Mrs. Oswald for a long time, and then she called an ambulance.

Because the complicity of the two cultures is foregrounded, one culture is not prioritized at the expense of an/Other.

Just as the text confronts the issue of native violence, it also confronts the issue of native alcoholism. Will hears a rumour that is circulating around Medicine River: "'Floyd says Harlen's drinking again. Saw him at the American the other afternoon. Looked pretty bad, Floyd said. Heard him in the bathroom throwing up.'" Will does not question the rumour, but goes to Harlen to help him deal with his "problem." In keeping with his expectations and, presumably, the reader's, he finds Harlen "lying on the bed in just his undershirt and shorts. There was a bucket next to the bed. He looked awful." Alcoholism is present here, but with a "critical difference," for Will's understanding of the situation is parodied when Bertha Morley drops by and asks:

"How's he doing?"

"Still pretty drunk…."

"Drunk?"

"Don't know what started it. Bud Prettywoman said Harlen just started drinking. Didn't know why. You got any idea?…."

"Harlen's not drunk, Will. He's just got the flu. You had it yet?"

"Flu?"

"Everybody's getting it. Harlen got it Friday. It was my birthday. We went to the American for lunch. He was pretty sick then, but you know Harlen. Spent most of lunch in the bathroom."

Will, like the reader, is again caught within the dictates of the semiotic field of the indigene, but what he encounters in Medicine River undercuts his expectations. The drunken Indian, here, is a sick Indian, and Will and the reader are again implicated in the re-construction of that semiotic field.

The semiotic field of the indigene signifies more than just violence and alcoholism, however, and the image of the native as mystical, romantic figure is also subverted, for it is just as confining and stereotypical as the figure of the violent, drunken native. Medicine River plays upon what Goldie has observed as the peculiar situation in which the contemporary native is caught: "The indigene of today continues to be a deviant, the drunk and prostitute … but loses the metaphysical resonance of the Other. The present indigene is deindigenized, no longer valid, so the focus of indigenization must be the 'real' indigenes, the resonances of the past." What is "real" for a native is what has gone before. The native of the present has no presence. Medicine River recalls this idea when Harlen discusses a television program with Will: "'Saw Will Sampson on television. It was a movie about him being a sheriff. That's what he said all the time. Hey-uh. He's a real Indian, too….' 'Hey-uh,' said Harlen, loud enough for the cooks in the kitchen to hear, and he began to laugh, too. The two of us sat there laughing." Metadiscursively, King's representations of natives laugh at the representations of natives in the media, and the text draws a distinction between the two. The constructed native of the past shares little in common with King's representations of the native of the present. Yet the native King depicts is rarely, if ever, represented on white-dominated television, which prefers the romanticized view of the native of the past that it has constructed.

In keeping with this idea, Lionel James, a native elder, travels all over the world to tell stories:

"You know, sometimes I tell stories about today, about some of the people on the reserve right now…. But those people in Germany and Japan and France and Ottawa don't want to hear those stories. They want to hear stories about how Indians used to be. I got some real good stories, funny ones, about how things are now, but those people say, no, tell us about the olden days. So I do."

Lionel is not allowed to tell his own stories, but must repeat the stories of the past, stories tinged with nostalgic associations of native and nature, and, in effect, stories that confirm his white audience's perception of native culture, a culture that belongs to and exists only in the past.

If the image of the native exists only in the past, this places natives of the present in a precarious position, since they have no present. Indeed, the fatherless Will spends a great deal of time attempting to forge a past for himself:

Sometimes I'd sit in my apartment and try to think up new professions for my father. And then I'd tell myself to quit fooling around. I'd laugh at myself, shake my head in disgust, promise that I'd stop the whole stupid business. What if I got caught? What if someone back home heard about my father being a rich opal miner in Australia?

Will requires a past in order to forge his identity. He is constructing stories, just as white culture has constructed stories, that will afford him the view of himself and his father that he prefers: "Most of all, I liked to point out, he loved his family, and I was always getting postcards and letters with pictures of him standing against some famous place or helping women and children take sacks of rice off the backs of trucks."

That Will continuously associates his father with photographs is interesting, since photography mirrors his effort to control and to fix the "reality" he is constructing through postcards and pictures. As Hutcheon suggests, photography is a curious medium, for it comprises an effort to control and to possess, to confine and to frame. She observes that "the camera records and justifies, yet it also imprisons, arrests, and thus falsifies the fleeting moment. Taking pictures is a way of both certifying and refusing experience, both a submission to reality and an assault on it."

Will's pictures, in keeping with Hutcheon's suggestion, both capture reality and assault it, for his initial endeavour is exclusive. He is attempting to frame what has gone before in order to make it conform to his preferred vision of it. This is very similar to the white endeavour to construct a presence by confining natives to its preferred vision of them. This process is dangerous, as the text has pointed out, for it restricts what is perceived to a single, constructed, confining interpretation. The text has continually undercut this means of forging presence, by pointing up its constructedness in relation to the native, and therefore it also subverts Will's endeavour, an endeavour that he ultimately abandons. Harlen notes that the photograph of Will and his nuclear family is a frozen representation: "'You and James look like someone sprayed you up and down with starch.' 'That's the way they used to take pictures.' 'Nobody smiling, huh?'" This photograph is lifeless; it mirrors Will's desire to fix and reify the past. The text, however, privileges non-restrictive, non-individualizing efforts. Arnold Krupat argues that the native experience is a collective experience, and this is emphasized in the chapter that focuses on photography.

The photograph of Will's nuclear family is juxtaposed with the collective photograph of Joyce Blue Horn's extended family. This family extends to virtually everyone:

As soon as Harlen explained, in detail, just what a time-delay device was, everyone insisted that I had to be in the picture, too. Floyd's granny even got up and moved her chair over, so I'd have a place to sit.

While Will's nuclear family has been fixed in the picture that confines them, the collective photograph works against efforts to control it:

Then, too, the group refused to stay in place. After every picture, the kids wandered off among their parents and relatives and friends, and the adults floated back and forth, no one holding their positions. I had to keep moving the camera as the group swayed from one side to the other. Only the grandparents remained in place as the ocean of relations flowed around them.

The photograph of Will's nuclear family is left on the kitchen wall, "until the paper began to curl up and the colours started to fade." But if the image fades, then it ceases to be fixed within the boundaries of the picture. In turn, the collective photograph influences Will's reading of his nuclear family's photograph, since the expression on Will's mother's face can only be deciphered metadiscursively. Will first perceives "her face set, her eyes flat," but his reading is later informed by the collective photograph in which Floyd's granny wears the same expression: she "was sitting in her lawn chair next to me looking right at the camera with the same flat expression that my mother had, as though she could see something farther on and out of sight." Floyd's granny, like Will's mother, is looking beyond the frame in which she is caught, and is refusing, therefore, to be confined within it. The photograph looks outward, not inward. The collective photograph, the photograph that swells beyond its frame, self-reflectively mirrors the text's inclusive impetus, for the margins become indistinguishable from the centre and hence obliterate a centre, since there are no demarcations that would allow it to emerge. The photograph spills outward and includes all, for just as Will, the photographer, is included within the photograph he is taking, so readers are included within the text they are reading. Readers play an active part in this novel, for they visualize the photographs in the text. These photographs exist only in language, and come to life only through readers' interaction with the printed page.

Readers can be included in various ways, however. They can act as the camera, and try to fix and to control the collective photograph by freezing it in a singular interpretation. Or they can be included in the collective photograph like Will, who learns that one cannot control or fix a collective experience, for this would be to restrict others' participation in the project. To insist on one's own identity, be it cultural or individual, is to re-create an Other as the absence of what the self connotes. The collective photograph erases individuality, and therefore, erases a centre. If it has no centre, it has no margins, and, thus, the picture spills out of its frame because it is an inclusive, not an exclusive endeavour.

The text concludes with Will embarking on a "long walk in the snow." He walks off the page, leaving it undisturbed like the snow. In so doing, however, he suggests that there may be a different way in which to write that page. The political dynamic of Medicine River may not offer a hard and fast alternative to the traditional means of instilling presence by constructing an Other through which its identity is forged. But, in refusing to posit a centre, it offers a new way of thinking that may allow us to write the page in such a way that we can tell our own stories without silencing all of the Other stories. Like Floyd's granny, this text too looks to "something farther on and out of sight." The snow, after all, constitutes the page that is blank, the page with no centre and no margins, the page that is yet to be written.