Indigenous Wormholes: Reading Plural Sovereignties in Works by Thomas King

Abstract

In this chapter, I analyze two of Thomas King’s novels, Medicine River and Truth & Bright Water as offering different—yet equally critical— responses to nationalist modes of representation. Effacing complex cultural geographies of indigenous life in the interests of assimilation, Anglo-European nationalism has required the attribution of a given literary “identity” to otherwise very diverse Native and tribal communities straddling a multiplicity of sovereignties, languages, and subjectivities. Both novels, alongside King’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey Lectures, The Truth about Stories, consistently reject these bounding discourses and offer the everyday reality of plural sovereignties as the cogent indigenous rebuttal to them.

I guess I’m supposed to say that I believe in the line that exists between the U.S. and Canada, but for me it’s an imaginary line. It’s a line from somebody else’s imagination; it’s not my imagination. It divided people like the Mohawk into Canadian Mohawks and U.S. Mohawks. They’re the same people. It divided the Blackfoot who live in Browning from the Blackfoot who live at Standoff, for example. So the line is a political line, that border line. It wasn’t there before the Europeans came.

—Thomas King