48 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas KingTruth and Bright Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The Blackfoot Confederacy
Content Warning: This section references colonial trauma and genocide.
Many of the characters in Truth & Bright Water are members of the Blackfoot Confederacy, a political alliance of Indigenous and First Nations people who have historically lived in the northern Great Plains of western North America. Prior to European colonization, the Blackfoot were a nomadic people who used bison not only as a food source but also for clothing, tools, and fuel. The skins of the buffalo were crucial for the creation of tipis (sometimes referred to as “lodges” in Truth & Bright Water). Through the mid- and late-1800s, the Blackfoot signed treaties with the US and Canadian governments forcing them onto reservations. During this same period, the Blackfoot faced existential changes as the buffalo supply dwindled—caused, in large part, by the US government’s efforts to hunt the buffalo to extinction and thus force the Blackfoot to stay on their reservations.
The loss of their most stable food source, coupled with exposure to unfamiliar diseases, caused mass death among the Blackfoot. In the midst of this, the US government took extreme measures to attempt to assimilate the Blackfoot and annihilate their connection to their traditions. Blackfoot children were sent to residential schools and were forbidden from speaking their parents’ language, traditional ceremonies of worship and celebration were outlawed, and land allotment laws were passed to break up communally-held tribal lands. These practices persisted into the early 20th century.
Through the rest of the 20th century, the Blackfoot made many efforts to preserve their culture in the face of this forced relocation. In 1994, the Blackfoot Council adopted Pikuni as the official language. One of the primary events allowing for the practice, teaching, and celebration of Blackfoot culture is North American Indian Days (NAID), a four-day festival in the second week of July. Held in Browning, Montana, the event draws Blackfoot from both the US and Canada; Truth & Bright Water refers to the festival as “Indian Days.” NAID features dancing, games, and sporting events and is open to the general public. This latter point bears on the novel’s exploration of The Search for an “Authentic” Indigenous Identity, as King depicts characters like Elvin and Franklin commodifying their identity for the white colonial gaze. The choice to import buffalo for festival-goers to hunt is particularly loaded given the relationship between the animals’ near-extinction and the Blackfoot’s forced relocation; what Franklin presents as a quintessential marker of Indigenous identity is also tightly intertwined with attempts to erase that identity.
Literary Context: The Bildungsroman
The bildungsroman (from the German for “education novel”) is a literary genre about a protagonist’s process of coming-of-age. Traditionally, the protagonist of the bildungsroman is a naive young person who leaves home in search of experience and the answers to questions they have about life and growing up. The arc of the novel usually sees the protagonist gaining maturity slowly and through various tribulations. The bildungsroman often features a character who experiences some type of fundamental loss that causes them to reevaluate their perception of themselves and of their society. Change and growth are central themes of the bildungsroman. The genre centers and prioritizes realization, reevaluation, and eventual acceptance/rejection of norms as core character arcs. Typically, the novel ends with the protagonist being accepted in the social structures they sought to understand.
Truth & Bright Water features many of the hallmarks of the bildungsroman, but there are also many ways in which King plays with and even defies the genre’s conventions. Tecumseh’s efforts to understand himself within the broader context of his culture and community are integral parts of the bildungsroman, here complicated by colonialism’s legacy of alienation. The novel’s interest in Navigating Toxic Masculinity also lends itself to the coming-of-age narrative; as an adolescent, Tecumseh must confront the various ways in which his society constructs masculinity and decide which—if any—he can embody. However, this theme also points to the ways in which Truth & Bright Water departs from the bildungsroman plot. Where a more typical bildungsroman would end with (or at least gesture toward) the protagonist’s marriage, Tecumseh’s apparent love interest drops out of the narrative with little fanfare. Besides hinting that Tecumseh may be less bound by societal expectations—e.g., of heterosexual marriage—than many of the men around him, this truncated romantic arc exemplifies King’s preference for the oblique and unresolved.
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