With wry humor and imaginative acuity, noted writer Gerald Vizenor offers compelling glimpses of modern Native American life and the different ways that Native Americans and whites interact, fight, and resolve their conflicts. The elusive borderland between white and Native American cultures is further complicated by exchanges of money, services, language, and skills that make up what Vizenor calls the ?new fur trade.? When Native Americans resist dominance, they fight back incisively and creatively with humor in the strategic word wars of survivance over victimry. ø Vizenor illuminates the troubling encounters and distant reaches of this modernist fur trade through his creative narratives. Especially memorable is the reincarnation of General George Custer as the head of Native American programs and the mystifying play of words between charity agencies and Native Americans. Several of Vizenor?s stories focus on a so-called urban reservation, Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. In the last section Vizenor recalls his experiences and observations while reporting on the murder trial of a young Native American student, Thomas White Hawk, in South Dakota.
Gerald Vizenor was a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune when he discovered that his direct ancestors were the editor and publisher of The Progress, the first Native newspaper on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Vizenor, inspired by the kinship of nineteenth century Native journalists, has pursued a similar sense of resistance in his reportage, editorial essays, and literary art. Vizenor reveals in Native Liberty the political, poetic, visionary, and ironic insights of personal identity and narratives of cultural sovereignty. He examines singular acts of resistance, natural reason, literary practices, and other strategies of survivance that evade and subvert the terminal notions of tragedy and victimry. Native Liberty nurtures survivance and creates a sense of cultural and historical presence. Vizenor, a renowned Anishinaabe literary scholar and artist, writes in a direct narrative style that integrates personal experiences with original presentations, comparative interpretations, and critiques of legal issues and historical situations.
Centered on the volatile issue of the repatriation of Native American skeletal remains, Chancers follows a group of student Solar Dancers who set out to resurrect native remains housed in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Possessed by the demonic wiindigoo, a mythic monster, the Solar Dancers, in a gruesome ritual, sacrifice faculty and administrators associated with the collection and storage of native remains. The Dancers replace stored native skulls with those of the academics, and the resurrected natives become the Chancers. The Round Dancers, humane and erotic trickster figures, are natural opponents of the morbid Solar Dancers. The war between the two groups comes to a comic conclusion at a graduation ceremony attended by Pocahontas; Phoebe Hearst; Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist; Ishi, the native who actually lived and worked in the university museum; and many Chancers.
Inventive, provocative, and ultimately affirmative, The Trickster of Liberty has become a classic in the repertoire of celebrated author Gerald Vizenor. A series of related stories, the novel follows the lives of seven mixedblood trickster siblings who began their lives on a reservation in northern Minnesota. Behaving in unpredictable ways, these siblings defy any attempt to fit them within stereotypical notions of the Indian.
Gerald Vizenor's Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native creativity. With erudite and sweeping virtuosity, Vizenor examines how ethnographers and others converted the inherent confidence of native stories into uneasy sentiments of victimry. He explores the connection between Native Americans and Jews through gossip theory and strategies of cultural survivance, and between natural motion and ordinary practices of survivance. Other topics include the unique element of native liberty inherent in artistic milieus; the genre of visionary narratives of resistance; and the notions of historical absence, cultural nihilism, and victimry. Native Provenance is a tour de force of Native American cultural criticism ranging widely across the terrains of the artistic, literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interpreting native stories. Native Provenance is rife with poignant and original observations and is essential reading for anyone interested in Native American cultures and literature.
Native sovereignty, Gerald Vizenor contends, is not possessed but expressed. It emerges not from practicing vengeful and exclusionary policies and politics, or by simple recourse to territoriality, but by turning to Native transmotion, the forces and processes of creativity and imagination lying at the heart of Native world-views and actions. Overturning long-held scholarly and popular assumptions, Vizenor offers a vigorous examination of tragic cultures and victimry.
In this anthology, eighteen scholars discuss the themes and practices of survivance in literature, examining the legacy of Vizenor's original insights and exploring the manifestations of survivance in a variety of contexts. Contributors interpret and compare the original writings of William Apess, Eric Gansworth, Louis Owens, Carter Revard, Gerald Vizenor, and Velma Wallis, among others.
Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities-the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals-fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor’s central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominate culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.
The reluctance of the Catholic Church to punish pedophile priests is dramatized in this modern fable of sin, sacrifice, and survivance in a Native American mission in Minnesota.
Gerald Vizenor counters the cultural notions of dominance, false representations, and simulations of absence, and, by documents, experience, and theories, secures a narrative presence of Native Americans.
Postindian Conversations is the first collection of in-depth interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today. These lively conversations with the preeminent novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book also casts new light on his sometimes controversial ideas about contemporary Native identity, politics, economics, scholarship, and literature. Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American Studies and Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the American Book Award-winner Griever: An American Monkey King in China. A. Robert Lee is a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo. His books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America. His edited works include Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader.
The classic autobiography of the famous Indigenous writer and critic Gerald Vizenor The classic memoir by one of the most celebrated Indigenous writers of the modern era, Interior Landscapes offers an unforgettable glimpse of the life and world of Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor writes about his experiences as a tribal mixedblood in the new world of simulations; the themes in his autobiographical stories are lost memories and a "remembrance past the barriers." The chapters open with natural harmonies and the premier union of the Anishinaabe families of the crane and the first white fur traders. The author bares his fosterage, his ambitions, his contentions with institutions and imposed histories; his encounters as a community advocate, journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, university teacher, critic, and novelist. Vizenor celebrates chance, or "trickster signatures" and communal metaphors in these pages: he was hired to teach social sciences at Lake Forest College, his first experience as a teacher, because the head of the department admired his haiku poems; he toured the armorial emblems at Maxim's de Beijingwhen it opened on October 1, 1983, in the People's Republic of China; he wrote about the suicide of Dane White and the murderer Thomas White Hawk; he rescued his dreams from the skinwalkers at the Clyde Kluckhohn house in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and, as an editorial writer, he followed the American Indian Movement from Custer to Rapid City, from Calico Hall on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Teasing, revealing, and irresistible, Interior Landscapes charts the fascinating life of a brilliant Anishinaabe writer. The new edition contains a wealth of new photographs and information on the journey of Gerald Vizenor. Gerald Vizenor, a member of the White Earth Anishinaabeg, is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His many books include Fugitive Poses, Manifest Manners, Hiroshima Bugi, and Survivance. He is the editor of the series Native Traces (SUNY) and Native Storiers (Nebraska). "The Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor is at once a brilliant and evasive trickster figure. . . He is perhaps the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century." -- N. Scott Momaday "Instead of trying to walk the thin, often invisible line between art and politics, history and future, Vizenor dances on both sides, knowing all too well that in our time politics can become myth and vice versa."--San Francisco Review of Books
A strange, fascinating novel set in Japan follows the efforts of a dissident who his determined to trash the safe, accepted notions of Hiroshima history and sets out on an epic journey to do just that by creating his own calendar, among other acts of defiance. (General Fiction)
Weaving together strands of myth, memory, legend, and history, Bear Island lyrically conveys a historical event that has been forgotten not only by the majority culture but also by some Anishinaabe people - bringing back to light a key moment in Minnesota's history with clarity of vision and emotional resonance."--BOOK JACKET.
The best stories create traditions, and this novel by celebrated Native American writer Gerald Vizenor is a marvelous conjunction of trickster stories and literary ingenuity. Chair of Tears is funny, fierce, ironic, and deadly serious, a sendup of sacred poses, cultural pretensions, and familiar places from reservations to universities. The novel begins with generous stories about Captain Eighty, his young wife, the poker-playing genius named Quiver, and their children and grandchildren who live on a rustic houseboat. Captain Shammer, an extraordinary grandson reared on the houseboat and with no formal education, is appointed the chairman of a troubled Department of Native American Indian Studies at a prominent university. Shammer is a natural enterpriser and ironic showman in the tradition of trickster stories. He arrives at the first faculty meeting dressed in the uniform of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Native students celebrate his conversion of the department into an academic poker parlor and casino, and a panic radio station. The most sensational enterprise is the training of service mongrels to detect the absence of irony. An irresistible novel of original ideas, Chair of Tears gets to the heart of questions about identity politics, multiculturalism, pedantry, and timely virtues.
Almost Ashore is a selection of new imagistic poems, crucial scenes and nurtured sentiments of survivance, and a section of original haiku poems. Many of the selected poems are situated in woodland landscapes, treelines and shorelines, a natural sense of presence, and concentrate by chance, image and irony on the experiences of Native American Indians. The haiku scenes are similar to the images and tease of nature in Anishinaabe dreams songs. Once, worlds apart in time and place, these imagistic practices are the mythic connections of natural reason and aesthetic survivance in Almost Ashore.
Bearheart, Gerald Vizenors first novel, overturns OC terminal creedsOCO and violence in a decadent material culture. American civilization has collapsed and Proude Cedarfair, his wife, Rosina, and a bizarre collection of disciples, are forced on a pilgrimage when government agents descend on the reservation to claim their sacred cedar trees for fuel. The tribal pilgrims reverse the sentiments of Manifest Destiny and travel south through the ruins of a white world that ran out of gas.
A novel which turns cultural aggression on its head as the Native American heirs of Christopher Columbus, himself descended from early Mayan explorers, create a fantastic tribal nation.
In this book of essays, Vizenor presents a stark but vital view of reservation life in the early 1970s, a collection that Studies in American Indian Literatures called "memorable portraits of real people who defied yet finally were overcome by the dominant society." Focusing on the people of the northern reservations, particularly the White Earth Reservation where he grew up, Vizenor puts a human face on those desperate and politically charged times that saw frequent government intervention and the emergence of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In his trademark style, Vizenor juxtaposes these snapshots of contemporary life against images and dream sequences from Anishinabe folktales and ceremonies.
In the wild outback of the White Earth Chippewa reservation, a family of tricksters--liberation figures from Native American literature--rebels against convention, establishes ingenious business enterprises, and tells trickster stories far and wide
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