SOURCE: An interview in paragraph, Vol. 16, No. 1, Summer, 1994, pp. 2-6.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in November 1993, King discusses various aspects of his writing and his Canadian, American, and Native identities.]

[Canton]: One of the themes that surfaces over and over again in your fiction is the question of identity: "What does it mean to be Indian? What does it mean to be Canadian?" Why do you think you keep coming back to those questions?

[King]: It's not a question that concerns me all that much personally, but it is an important question in my fiction. Because it's question that other people always ask. Readers demand an answer to it, and it's part of that demand for authenticity within the world in which we live. It's the question that Native people have to put up with. And it's a whip that we get beaten with—"Are you a good enough Indian to speak as an Indian?"

For Native people, identity comes from community, and it varies from community to community. I wouldn't define myself as an Indian in the same way that someone living on a reserve would. That whole idea of "Indian" becomes, in part, a construct. It's fluid. We make it up as we go along.

Some people don't see me as an Indian at all. I live in the city; I don't speak a Native language; I've never spent any large amount of time living on a reserve. But I'm not concerned with how people perceive me from the outside. I'm concerned with what I know and feel about myself. And for many Native people and groups, that's the identifying characteristic. We identify ourselves—and this may sound self-serving and solipsistic—and that's what counts.

And the community in which we exist defines us. Tomson Highway is a Native person because he is a part of that more traditional community he comes from, but also because he's part of the Native arts community here in Toronto, and we recognize and understand him as that.

In the story "Borders," in One Good Story, That One, the mother has never identified herself as anything other than Blackfoot—that's all she understands herself as—and it's the outside world that is unwilling and unable to see her as that.

For Eli, in Green Grass, Running Water, coming back to the reserve, he realizes that although he's been away for a long time, his place within that community is still there. But it's a changed place. It's not the same place that his sister Norma occupies.

That's one of the important issues in Green Grass, Running Water. Lionel learns that he doesn't have to question whether he's living up to what a "good" Indian is because he sells televisions. Nor is Charlie necessarily a better Indian because he's successful lawyer. I see your fiction breaking down some of those stereotypes from the inside as well as the outside.

I wanted to make sure that people understood that Eli and Charlie and Lionel and Portland are all Native people doing various things with their lives. I wanted to emphasize that the range of "Indian" is not as narrow as many people try to make it.

In Green Grass, Running Water, you have Portland going down to Hollywood because he wants to be an actor and work in "B" westerns. And he winds up succeeding. He went after what he wanted to be and he's done it. We do people who don't conform a disservice. Portland didn't have to go to Hollywood to be defined as an Indian.

Eli is an Indian and Charlie is an Indian and Lionel and Portland are Indians. The variety is infinite, and we'll continue to reconstruct that definition of what an Indian is. As times change, those constructions change.

Now, what remains the same is that firm base that we have in places—even if sometimes the places aren't our own to begin with. I'm [a] Cherokee from Oklahoma, but I don't think of Oklahoma as home. If I think of any place as home it's the Alberta prairies, where I spent ten years with the Blackfoot people. I'm not Blackfoot, but that feels like the place I want to go back to.

And you've explored those prairies in both your novels and in several of your short stories.

Don't ask me why. I hate the wind. It's so dry that your skin cracks open like a lizard in the sun. It's conservative. A lot of redneck activity goes on out there. I have no idea why I find it as intriguing as I do. Partly it's the people—the Blackfoot people in particular—but also the landscape. It's magnificent, and it draws my imagination. Whether it draws me back there, I don't know. But whenever I start to see a landscape in my imagination, that's the landscape I see.

You're a Canadian citizen and define yourself as a Canadian writer, but your most recent fiction seems to be more pan-Indian in its scope.

Consciously so, too. I can't really write about the reservation experience, but I can write about the experience that contemporary Indians have in trying to manage living in the more contemporary world while maintaining a relationship with that more traditional world—without even trying to define what those worlds are.

There are issues—not universal—that are important to take a look at. Authenticity is one, for me. Identity, in a very general sense, is one. And the issue of borders. I hold Canadian citizenship and think of myself as a Canadian writer because that's all I write about. At the same time, I hold U.S. citizenship, too. I can flop back and forth across the border like a big fish.

The novel that I'm working on now is set on the border. Two towns: one on either side of the border; one Indian, one white. It should be interesting to see how I play that out and how I make it work. There's a bridge in this novel that got half-finished and then they stopped. You can't get across unless you walk. And it's pretty dangerous to walk, but it's one of the few ways you can get across, back and forth, to these towns. They're separated by a river called the Shield.

The other issue that I can play with is that border between men and women.

In many ways, the women in your fiction are so much more intelligent than the men. In Green Grass, Running Water, I think of Norma and Latisha and Alberta. And the four old Indians who wander through the contemporary landscape were originally women who have taken on male identities …

… but may still be women. They're just dressed up as men.

It's not so much that the women are smarter than the men. Eli is quite intelligent, and so is Charlie, though he might be a bit of a sleaze. Lionel is just a little lost. My sense is that within society as a whole, men are simply more privileged and with that privilege comes a certain laziness.

The women in my books don't take things for granted. They work pretty hard to get what they want and have to make specific decisions to make their lives come together. For Alberta, the question isn't is she going to have a child—she damn well knows she's going to have one. Norma is like so many Indian women on the reserve who knew how a life should be lived and weren't afraid to tell you.

Lionel has had a pretty easy go of it and he hasn't made anything out of it. It's more a question of privilege and the effect that privilege has on you.

Do you feel you have a responsibility to accurately portray the Native community in your fiction?

That sense of responsibility is very important. As a Native writer—if you imagine yourself as that—there are certain responsibilities that you come away with. Within my fiction, there are things that I feel I can do and things I feel I can't do. Not because I'm forbidden to do them, but responsibility tells me I should not.

For instance, I don't think that I need stay away from some of the problems that Native communities face—alcoholism, drug abuse, child abuse—but I do have a responsibility not to make those such a part of my fiction that I give the impression to the reader that this is what drives Native communities. I'm very much concerned about that. It's my responsibility to make my readers understand what makes Native communities strong.

It doesn't serve the community to constantly have it held up for ridicule because of those problems. Those problems exist within non-Native society too.

In Green Grass, Running Water, there is a scene at the Sun Dance. I know that the Blackfoot don't allow cameras at the Sun Dance, and that includes the kind of camera that fiction turns on the event. You won't see any description of the Sun Dance itself, although you are there at the Sun Dance grounds. What you see is the communal milling around. I don't talk about how the men are dressed, or how they move, or the drum. All that's left to the imagination. And that's very purposely done. As a writer and as a non-Blackfoot, I don't feel that I have any business describing that.

One of the most rewarding aspects of your fiction is the way you explore the Native traditions of storytelling. How much of what is in Green Grass, Running Water is the result of research?

That's hard to say. I hate doing research. I do damned little. But when I was a graduate student working on my Ph.D., I did a section of my dissertation on oral stories. I did a lot of reading.

The other part is just in talking—not about oral stories or oral literature—but just talking to people. Every so often, somebody will say something, or they'll tell a story.

Harry Robinson was an influence. The oral work that he put into written English became very important to me as I went through Green Grass, Running Water.

What I learned from storytelling—from oral stories—was that those stories help to create a fantastic universe in which anything can happen. You're free to create that as you will. Which is freeing in the same way that I imagine magic realism and surrealism are freeing.

Oral stories taught me a little bit about repetition and the kind of cadences that you can create in a written piece of work that you normally only think of as associated with poetry. They taught me technical aspects of writing—not so much giving me the stories themselves.

Although sometimes the relationships that appear within the stories—those were key. How are those relationships established? How are they pushed forward through the story? Is there an adversarial relationship between the major elements and the major characters? Are there regular climaxes in those oral stories that you see in contemporary European-North American literature? And the answer to some of those questions is "no."

Green Grass, Running Water in many ways becomes a very flat book. It comes up to a particular level and tries to maintain itself at that level all the way through. It's not the climaxes of the novel that are important, it's what the characters do. They don't have to do big things—it's the little movements that tickle me. And I love puns. Talking to storytellers and to Native people in general has taught me the value of a good pun. Like the Nissan, the Pinto and the Karmann-Ghia.

Or Dr. Joe Hovaugh. Or the host of celebrities who pass through the Dead Dog Café. You have a lot of fun with those characters.

I picked those characters quite carefully—Jeanette Mac-Donald and Nelson Eddy, E. Pauline Johnson. And in addition to their power as entities within history, within film and literature, they also blur the line between reality and fiction and between what we think of as history and just gossip—between Indian and non-Indian. I love doing that—putting the reader on the skids. Especially if I can get them to go along with it.

Coyote plays a significant part in Green Grass, Running Water. Was it difficult to bring this traditional Native character into your novel?

The Coyote in Green Grass, Running Water is not a full-blown Coyote. My friend and fellow-writer Gerald Vizenor was disappointed by the Coyote I created in my novel, because it seemed a shadow of the real Coyote. Vizenor works with Coyote, and Vizenor's Coyote is much more complex than my Coyote.

What I needed in this particular novel was a sacred clown. Someone who could point out the fallacies in situations and arguments and who made sure that nothing stayed done. Whatever you tried to do, that particular figure would take apart. My Coyote wants to see the world in a slight state of turmoil.

In what way doesn't your Coyote go far enough?

There is a real range to Coyote—everything from benevolence to malevolence. Coyote is always in a state of flux. He has these huge appetites—sexual appetites, appetites for doing good and for doing bad—an entire range that I don't cover.

I use Coyote as a sacred clown, as a part of the chorus, if you will, and, in some ways, as a creator. But I use him within narrow lines, as a reaction to what's happening in the fiction. That was all I wanted to use Coyote for.

I don't think I'll write about Coyote again. One of the things I like about fiction is that you're not obligated to go back to the same topic time after time. Green Grass, Running Water is different from Medicine River, and the next novel will be different from Green Grass, Running Water. I don't think I'll ever do a novel like Green Grass, Running Water again.

I'm particularly interested in how you use humour in Green Grass, Running Water. It certainly has a double edge.

There's a great danger to humour. In general, people think of comedy as being not serious. I don't think this was true two hundred years ago. I'm thinking of Restoration comedy, Shakespeare, the European models, without even getting into the Native models.

If you write humorous material, or if you write comedy, the great danger is that they will not take you seriously. I think of myself as a dead serious writer. Comedy is simply my strategy. I don't want to whack somebody over the head, because I don't think that accomplishes much at all.

There's a fine line to comedy. You have to be funny enough to get them laughing so they really don't feel how hard you hit them. And the best kind of comedy is where you start off laughing and end up crying, because you realize just what is happening halfway through the emotion. If I can accomplish that, then I succeed as a storyteller.

But I think this is tied up with the way we read. There are so many distractions. Unless you make the effort to sit down with everything else off and nothing going on in the house, you don't come away being as good a reader as you might be.

I think the number of good readers is probably limited. Whenever I get on a plane, for example, I never see somebody reading Cormac McCarthy or even Margaret Atwood. Normally, I see people reading Tom Clancy, or something that you can buzz through because you know nothing is going to happen in the narrative. Nothing's going to happen in the construction and the syntax of the sentence. You're not going to find yourself saying, "What a turn of phrase!"

For me, that's what fine fiction is about. It's in the sentence. It lies at the heart of syntax. I think most serious writers are very much concerned about what each one of those sentences do. How they work within an almost stanza-like construction. That's what I go for.

Poetry may be an economical way of creating these wonderful effects, but good fiction is not far behind it. It's a quality that you try to strive for in fiction. Poe said that poetry should aspire to the quality of music. The same holds true for the fiction that I do.