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.
Symbols & Motifs
Buffalo
Content Warning: This section refers to colonial trauma.
Buffalo are one of the novel’s most central and complex symbols, as evidenced by the fact that buffalo appear on the cover of nearly every edition of this novel. As animals that were native to the area but, as Elvin explains, “got a good look at Whites” and “took off” (91), the buffalo represent a sense of Indigenous identity that was annihilated by the arrival of white settler-colonizers. They are thus key to the novel’s exploration of The Search for an “Authentic” Indigenous Identity.
There are two sets of buffalo in the novel: the real, live buffalo that Franklin brings in as a tourist attraction, and the fake buffalo that Monroe erects as part of his restoration project. King juxtaposes these sets of buffalo to create a nuanced commentary on reclamation and authenticity. While Tecumseh helps Monroe set up the fake buffalo, he comments that there are real buffalo waiting for the tourists in Bright Water. Monroe responds that “Realism will only take you so far” (198). This critique of the importance of what is “real” and what is not raises questions about the purpose and meaning of the buffalo that Franklin has brought in. These buffalo are literally real, but they are being used to make money off of white tourists who seek an “authentic” Indigenous experience—an experience of an imagined past that is accessible to neither the tourists nor the Indigenous community itself, having been destroyed by settler-colonialism. Franklin’s buffalo, despite being real, represent a deeply inauthentic vision of Indigenous culture seen through the lens of white colonial desire. Monroe’s buffalo, by contrast, are part of his attempt to erase colonial artifacts in Bright Water. Even though the animals themselves are not literally real, they represent an authentic attempt to connect with a lost history.
The Church
Tecumseh’s narration gives abundant detail about the history of the church in Bright Water. The church was erected by Methodists as “a mission to the Indians” and then passed between various Christian denominations before eventually being abandoned (1). The narration describes the church’s steeple as angled in such a way that it looks “as if a thick spike has been driven through the church itself and hammered into the prairies” (1). This description immediately associates the church with a violence that marks the land itself; it also evokes the idea that the church, and the colonial Christian history that comes with it, is irrevocably and forcibly affixed to Bright Water.
Monroe returns to Bright Water intending to paint the church such that it becomes indistinguishable from the land around it. This “restoration” of the church even includes erecting fake buffalo and creating a vision of the landscape as it was before the arrival of Christian missionaries. This project is a careful erasure of the damaging colonial history that the church represents—an erasure that is simultaneously an act of reconnecting with a history that was forcibly taken away. Monroe takes this one step further when, at the end of the novel, he removes everything that was inside the church and gifts the contents to anyone who will take them. This project of erasure thereby becomes a project of reclamation. The church is the novel’s most potent symbol of how the reclamation of history can materially benefit Indigenous communities.
Unfinished Conversations
Many of the conversations that Tecumseh has with adults in the novel go unfinished or are characterized by absences of information. Tecumseh recalls a conversation with his father before his parents’ separation, when he asked his father why he was spending so much time in the garage. His father didn’t directly respond to that question, instead asking, “Breakfast ready yet?” (113), and then misdirecting again when Tecumseh tried to resume his line of questioning. These types of conversations are common throughout the novel and do multiple layers of thematic work.
On the one hand, these conversations capture a type of frustration that characterizes childhood—the frustration of wanting to be included in more mature topics but being deemed too young for inclusion. The fact that Tecumseh never outwardly expresses frustration and instead looks for the answers to his questions in other places speaks to his maturity and to his level-headed, inquisitive mindset.
However, these unfinished conversations, many of which happen between Tecumseh and Elvin, also exemplify a stunted masculinity that resorts to silences because it is incapable of more nuanced and more effective expression. Elvin consistently avoids topics that make him uncomfortable or call his effectiveness as a man/father into question. By contrast, Monroe’s conversations with Tecumseh—though odd at times—are much more natural and much more open to questioning from Tecumseh. These unfinished conversations are a motif that showcases the contrast between Elvin and Monroe’s different approaches to masculinity and depicts Tecumseh’s efforts at Navigating Toxic Masculinity.
The Skull
Besides instigating the novel’s central mystery, the skull Tecumseh and Lum find is a multilayered symbol of identity and loss. Where the head is conventionally a seat of individuality—the face, the mind, etc.—a head stripped to its bones is deindividuated; it could be virtually anyone. The skull therefore evokes the mysteries surrounding Tecumseh and Lum’s personal and cultural identities, which the boys are alienated from in various ways. Lum, for example, associates the skull with his mother, though he does not believe it to have been hers. Instead, he speculates that she might have been the one who jumped off the bridge and later asks the skull if it knows where their mother is; one of the few things the boys know about the skull is that it likely belonged to a child, and Lum sees himself in its apparent abandonment.
However, this interpretation of the skull as a symbol of estrangement proves completely at odds with the reality: Monroe throws the skull in the river not to cast it aside but to bring it “home.” King even hints at the skull’s identity, suggesting its history may not be as irrevocably lost as it appears. The red ribbon looped through the skull’s eye sockets implies a connection to Rebecca, who gives Tecumseh a red ribbon and who, as a Cherokee girl, fits Tecumseh’s grandmother’s intuition that the skull came from somewhere far away. Her subsequent disappearance implies that the return of her skull to Indigenous land—if not her own land—allows her to find peace, and this displaced form of return exemplifies the novel’s broader message about the possibility of recovering or recreating Indigenous identity.
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