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

Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo

doi:10.33776/candb.v8i1.3607

Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo University of British Columbia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6307-5614

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33776/candb.v8i1.3607

Keywords:

First Nations Literature, reconciliation, dialogue

Abstract

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.

Supporting Agencies

FRQSC, SSHRC, Concordia University, University of British Columbia

Author Biography

Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo, University of British Columbia

Graduate Student (PhD-level)

Department of English Language and Literatures

University of British Columbia

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