Refusing to Listen and Listening to Refusal: Dialogue, Healing, and Rupture in Green Grass, Running Water

• Published in: Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies
• Main Author: Diabo, Gage Karahkwi:io
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de Huelva 2019
• Subjects: First Nations Literature; reconciliation; dialogue; Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: http://www.uhu.es/publicaciones/ojs/index.php/CanadaBeyond/article/view/3607; https://doi.org/10.33776/candb.v8i1.3607

In Red Skin, White Masks Glen Sean Coulthard speaks to the asymmetries that plague state-driven attempts at enforcing recognition, reciprocity, and reconciliation with First Peoples communities in post-TRC Canada. Although the exigency of achieving a mutually-beneficial, reciprocal form of communication between settler-state and First Peoples has grown especially visible in our present moment, the mechanics of listening and speaking both within and between communities have in fact long been a pivotal concern in First Peoples’ fiction.This project investigates the functions of dialogue in Greek-Cherokee novelist Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water With attention to King’s unique style of writing non-dialogues between characters, as well as the structural role that dialogue plays in his writing more broadly, my analysis shows how the act of refusing to listen becomes a means for transforming and generating new conversations across different (typically intercommunal) power dynamics.