Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

First Woman's garden.  That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn.  I don't know where he comes from.  Things like that happen, you know.

So there is that garden.  And there is First Woman and Ahdamn.  And everything is perfect.  And everything is beautiful.  And everything is boring.

So First Woman goes walking around with her head in the clouds, looking in the sky for things that are bent and need fixing.  So she doesn't see that tree.  So they bump into each other.

Pardon me, says that Tree, maybe you would like something to eat.

That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree.  Apples fall out.  Melons fall out.  Bananas fall out.  Hot dogs.  Fry bread, corn, potatoes.  Pizza.  Extra-crispy fried chicken.

Thank you, says First Woman, and she picks up all that food and brings it back to Ahdamn.

Four elderly Indians--like, hundreds of years old elderly--disappear from a hospital somewhere in the middle west of the United States.  They're on their way, it seems, to Alberta, where a cast of characters converges on the reserve town of Blossom: Lionel, a 40-year old man whose dreams had long been shattered by a series of anti-Native misfortunes; Charlie, grappling with his father's abandoning him to play stereotypical Indians in Hollywood; Alberta (yes, I know), who loves Lionel and Charlie but can't imagine either of them giving her the child she desires; Eli, Lionel's uncle, who has returned from a comfortable life in Toronto to reside in his mother's shack, preventing it from being destroyed by an already-built dam.  These characters are all Blackfoot Pikuni, Indians living out their lives with an uneasy relationship to their own Indian-ness.  The four elderly Houdinis bring them together to "fix" some small part of the world, meaning both the problem of the dam and the problems of these characters.

Along with this narrative, King gives four versions of Native creation myths.  Each features a different first-woman figure--First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman--each of whom is associated with one of the elderly Indians, who seem to be telling these stories along with the trickster Coyote.  These stories are satirical and syncretic; they pull together not only different indigenous traditions but also the Bible, Moby Dick, westerns, and other Anglo cultural staples.  (This may explain why the old men are named Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye.)  These stories are often clever and funny, riffing broadly on the allusions they mash together, and they are meant to represent an indigenous worldview imagining its own relationship to the land and community in the midst of interference from settler colonialism.

Green Grass, Running Water zips along so breathlessly that you almost miss the cleverness of the way the four old men bridge the real world and the mythical or legendary one.  It also enables you to miss the thinness of the "real" story, and how it struggles to come together in a way that feels satisfactory or complete.  The best of these stories belongs to Lionel, whose pratfalls and misfortunes seem like a slapstick version of an Erdrich character--I particularly liked the detail that, as a teenager, Lionel accidentally got put on a plane to Toronto by a hospital nurse thinking he was supposed to have a heart transplant rather than a tonsillectomy.  (Although the error was fixed in time, his "heart trouble" prevents him from finding meaningful employment!)  It's the right kind of humor: broad and genial but also somehow sharp and funny, and the novel could have used more of it.  I found that the tone of the creation stories, which feature Coyote endlessly quipping like Kimmy Gibbler, ultimately wore thin, and that the "real" narrative didn't supply enough to balance it out.