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

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. Submitted: