Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity : The Gerald Vizenor Continuum 9781138211759, 9781315452210

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Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity

According to Kimberly Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor is “the most prolific Native American writer of the twentieth century,” and Christopher Teuton rightfully calls him “one of the most innovative and brilliant American Indian writers today.” With more than forty books of fiction, poetry, life writing, essays, and criticism, his impact on literary and cultural theory, and specifically on Indigenous Studies, has been unparalleled. This volume brings together some of the most distinguished experts on Vizenor’s work from Europe and the United States. Original contributions by Gerald Vizenor himself, as well as by Kimberly M. Blaeser, A. Robert Lee, Kathryn W. Shanley, David L. Moore, Chris LaLonde, Alexandra Ganser, Cathy Covell Waegner, Sabine N. Meyer, Kristina Baudemann, and Billy J. Stratton provide fresh perspectives on theoretical concepts such as trickster discourse, postindian survivance, totemic associations, Native presence, artistic irony, and transmotion, and explore his lasting literary impact from Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart to his most recent novels and collections of poetry, Shrouds of White Earth, Chair of Tears, Blue Ravens, and Favor of Crows. The thematic sections focus on “‘Truth Games’: Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics”; “‘Chance Connections’: Memory, Land, and Language”; and “‘The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions’: History and Futurity,” documenting that Vizenor’s achievements are sociocultural and political as much they are literary in effect. With their emphasis on transdisciplinary, transnational research, the critical analyses, close readings, and theoretical outlooks collected here contextualize Gerald Vizenor’s work within different literary traditions and firmly place him within the American canon. Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Flensburg, Germany. Alexandra Hauke is a university assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of English and American Studies in Vienna.

Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives Series editors: Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz and Sabine N. Meyer

Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives features scholarly work exploring both indigenous perspectives that are explicitly transnational and transnational perspectives on indigenous topics. As such, it is committed to fostering and presenting high-quality research in the area of Indigenous Studies, addressing historical and contemporary political, social, economic, and cultural issues concerning the indigenous peoples of North and South America, Europe, Australasia, and the larger Pacific region. The series is thus not limited to one particular methodological approach, but looks at the highly dynamic and growing field of Indigenous Studies that is of central interest for a range of different disciplines. Members of the series’ advisory board include Chadwick Allen (Ohio State University); Philip J. Deloria (University of Michigan); Christian Feest (em., Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt); Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-Sen University). The series considers contributions from a wide range of areas in the field of Indigenous Studies. These include but are not limited to: • • • • • • • • •

Indigenous literatures, film, performance, music and visual arts Indigenous peoples and the law, settler imperialism, rights and human rights Indigenous histories, politics, knowledges and religion Representations of indigenous peoples in non-indigenous cultural productions Indigenous peoples and the museum Indigenous languages Gender/Queer Indigenous Studies Transnational flows of indigenous ideas and cultures Methodological issues in Indigenous Studies

1 Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies Native North America in (Trans)Motion Edited by Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz, and Sabine N. Meyer 2 Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity The Gerald Vizenor Continuum Edited by Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke

Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity The Gerald Vizenor Continuum

Edited by Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN: 978-1-138-21175-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-45221-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

BIRGIT DÄWES AND ALEXANDRA HAUKE

1 Expeditions in France: Native American Indians in the First World War

8

GERALD VIZENOR

SECTION 1

“Truth Games”: Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics

17

2 Gerald Vizenor: Transnational Trickster of Theory

19

ALEXANDRA GANSER

3 Universal Peculiarities in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Shrouds of White Earth

34

KATHRYN W. SHANLEY

4 Jiibayag Ashegiiwe: Revenants, Gerald Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon

47

CHRIS LALONDE

5 The Late Mr. Vizenor: Recent Storying A. ROBERT LEE

63

vi Contents SECTION 2

“Chance Connections”: Memory, Land, and Language 6 Vizenor and the Power of Transitive Memories

73 75

KIMBERLY M. BLAESER

7 The Ground of Memory: Vizenor, Land, Language

90

DAVID L. MOORE

8 Gerald Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog: (De-)Framing, Memory, and the Totemic in Favor of Crows and Blue Ravens

102

CATHY COVELL WAEGNER

SECTION 3

“The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions”: History and Futurity 9 From Domestic Dependency to Native Cultural Sovereignty: A Legal Reading of Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears

117

119

SABINE N. MEYER

10 “Nothing More Than the Chance of Remembrance”: Gerald Vizenor and the Motion of Natural Reason in the Presence of War

135

BILLY J. STRATTON

11 Ecstatic Vision, Blue Ravens, Wild Dreams: The Urgency of the Future in Gerald Vizenor’s Art

145

KRISTINA BAUDEMANN

Contributors Index

157 163

Acknowledgments

This volume emerged from a conference at the University of Vienna in 2014, which was organized in honor of both Gerald Vizenor’s 80th birthday and the publication of his historical novel Blue Ravens that same year. From the preparations for this gathering to the final manuscript, many an effort was required in matters of organization, financing, and the overcoming of various “manifest manners.” These efforts were shared and shouldered by many, and we wish to express our sincere gratitude to a number of people and organizations who have helped us to see this little raven of a project leave its nest. We profoundly thank the City of Vienna, its Department of Cultural Affairs, the Lord Mayor’s office, the Vienna Convention Bureau, and the Vienna Business Agency’s Expat Center, as well as the Austrian Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration, and Foreign Affairs, the Austrian Research Foundation, and the University of Vienna—especially our Vice Rector, Prof. Dr. Heinz Faßmann; the International Office; the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies and our Dean, Prof. Dr. Matthias Meyer; and the Department of English, with our then Head of Department, Prof. Dr. Barbara Seidlhofer, for their generous support. We owe a major debt of gratitude to the Embassy of Canada (particularly H.E., Ambassador Mark Bailey; Councilors Paul Williams and Jonathan Sauvé; Roswitha Mayer and Jolanda Kampa) and the Embassy of the United States of America (especially H.E., Ambassador Alexa Wesner; Counselors for Public Affairs Jan Krč, Robert Greenan, and Kellee Farmer; as well as Mag. Karin Schmid-Gerlich and Harald Lembacher) for their continuing kindness and generosity in supporting our academic ventures, far beyond this conference and its proceedings. We would also like to thank Bruce Alfred from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation in British Columbia, as well as Ronja Ketterer, Stephanie Adam, Linda Dreier, Johanna France, Petra Ladinigg, Yvonne Thumpser, Julia Veits, and Sophie Wolf; our colleagues, Dr. Michael Draxlbauer, Dr. Alexandra Ganser, Nicole Poppenhagen; our contributors; and all conference presenters. Not least, without the unfailing expertise of Monika Fahrnberger and Kristina Baudemann and their critical eye for detail, this manuscript would still be “cabbage and turnips,” as a German saying goes.

viii Acknowledgments Gerald Vizenor writes in Interior Landscapes that “stories are a better past than merit badges” (60). Without his stories, none of the following chapters would have been written, and since he’d refuse any merit badge, we will simply continue to cherish and celebrate the words of one of the greatest storiers of our time. Thank you, Gerald. Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke Flensburg and Vienna, October 2016

Introduction Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke

In Gerald Vizenor’s 2012 campus novel Chair of Tears, a new chairman is put in charge of the bleak and unproductive Department of Native American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Captain “Carbon Six” Shammer is a true trickster: having never “applied, auditioned, or petitioned for the position” (23), he finds particular pleasure in his own definition of the new job. He walks around on campus disguised as other faculty members; he decides to remove all senior faculty from their offices by termination policy, and he arrives at the first faculty meeting in the uniform of General George Armstrong Custer. Shammer posed at the threshold of the spacious conference room, saluted the faculty, and then, at parade rest, he waited for the inevitable countercries of vengeance, but the faculty, mostly former chairmen, and several graduate students, were stupefied, overcome by the ironic military resurrection, and [. . .] hailed the general with cavalry hoots, howls, and horsey laughter. Captain Shammer had arrived by mimicry. (24) As readers will recognize, mimicry is a good survival strategy in any departmental meeting, but Captain Shammer has to face particular challenges. His department’s library is in a desolate condition: its resources have been either stolen or borrowed indefinitely by faculty and students “by some obscure sense of entitlement and right of discovery” (36). Thus it happens that only empty shelves remain, with the exception of five books that no one would touch: “Hanta Yo: An American Saga by Ruth Beebe Hill; predictably an unread copy of Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America by Kenneth Lincoln; a broken copy of The Primal Mind: Vision and Reality in Indian America by Jamake Highwater; a coffee-stained copy of Earthdivers by Gerald Vizenor; and an appropriately defaced copy of The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter” (36). In contrast to these shelfwarmers, there is a successful media empire on campus named Denivance Press, which denies any manuscripts for publication. Owned and managed by a certain Roberta Lee Royalty, this press instead publishes blank books that only contain titles,

2 Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke including, among others, Native Wind in the Willows: An Anthology of Literary Sniffs and Whiffs, edited by Almost Robert Lee, and Deborah Madsen’s famous No One Can Not Understand Gerald Vizenor (cf. 106). These books—echoing A. Robert Lee’s seminal essay collection Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor (2000) and Deborah Madsen’s monograph Understanding Gerald Vizenor (2009)—aptly illustrate a trademark of Vizenor’s writing that, according to Helmbrecht Breinig, has often been underrated: “Gerald Vizenor is less esteemed for his satire than for other qualities of his work: his humor, his postmodern play with language and ideas, his outspoken advocacy for the socially underprivileged, and his innovative use of Native American traditions” (86). His name and academia are linked in more ways than the satirical one described above, of course, yet Chair of Tears may serve as a much better introduction to the work of Gerald Vizenor than any attempt at summarizing a literary life that is impossible to summarize. In fact, for anyone involved in either Native American Studies or contemporary American literature, Gerald Vizenor needs no introduction. He is, without doubt, among the most distinguished, widely recognized, and best-known contemporary Native writers, philosophers, and researchers. Nearly 15 years ago, Wolfgang Hochbruck already labeled Vizenor “one of the most prolific authors of Native American ancestry in the United States” and added that “[h]e is also one of the most inventive, constantly trying to leave the most-traveled roads” (278). Kimberly Blaeser, who wrote the first comprehensive monograph study of his work (Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition [1996]), notes that “Vizenor has indeed created a place for his work in the canon of Native American literature” (200), Osage scholar Robert Warrior calls him “the most innovative and theoretically sophisticated contemporary Native author” (181), and Deborah Madsen and A. Robert Lee see him “at the very forefront of Native writing: novelist, autobiographer, poet, dramatist, and an essayist and cultural critic of rare and radical boldness” (1). Not only does Gerald Vizenor’s work cover a broad range of genres— from haiku poetry to screenplay, and from investigative journalism to constitutional writing—but his theoretical work ranks as the most frequently cited in the research landscape of Indigenous Studies to this day. As a writer, professor, and Director of Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, he has initiated, shaped, and strengthened the discipline of Native American Studies like no one else in North America, introducing and successfully establishing methodologies and concepts such as “trickster discourse,” the “postindian,” “survivance,” and “literary transmotion.” Among his best-known novels are Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978/1990), Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986), The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Hotline Healers (1997), Chancers (2000), Father Meme (2008), Shrouds of White Earth (2010), and most recently, Blue Ravens (2014). The impact of his work—“a heteroglottal kaleidoscope

Introduction 3 of voices and tones” (Hochbruck 276)—cannot be overstated: Especially in light of what Canadian Studies scholar Hartmut Lutz famously terms “Indianthusiasm,” a fascination, particularly widespread in Europe, with all things Native North American (14), Gerald Vizenor’s work importantly counterbalances stereotypical notions of ‘Indian’ life. His novels dismantle common clichés and deconstruct colonial discourses of superiority, but never without an appropriate dose of humor and diplomacy. “No other writer or thinker,” Deborah Madsen and A. Robert Lee write, “has been more indefatigable, more willing to take the imaginative chance, in the effort to contest all fixed ideas about Native Americans. It is Vizenor who extends to us the greatest trickster challenge, the greatest play of wit and literary invention, to highlight the creative resilience of Native life in the Americas and far beyond” (9). His many teaching and lecturing engagements across Europe, Asia, and the Americas over the past decade testify to this role as one of the most visible ambassadors of intercultural dialogue and mutual respect, promoting reconciliation and respect across national borderlines as well as boundaries of cultural and religious difference. In addition to his academic and literary achievements, it is thus no surprise that Vizenor has always been firmly committed to political and social justice. Between 2009 and 2012 he served as the principal author of the White Earth Constitution, the first Indigenous democratic constitution, in Minnesota. This constitution effectively ended, on the White Earth Reservation, the policy of defining tribal identity by blood quantum—a highly controversial policy initiated by the United States government, which has had lasting influence over Native American politics. In this groundbreaking constitutional reform, the White Earth Nation has been provided with a legal basis that enacts Anishinaabe values, creates an effective governance structure based on the separation of powers, and places central emphasis on sovereignty and self-determination. Gerald Vizenor’s legacy has been widely recognized and acclaimed: next to an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Macalester College, and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, he has been honored with an Honorary Literary Award from the San Francisco Public Library, a PEN Excellence Award, two American Book Awards, the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He is certainly known around the globe, and at the same time, as Kimberly Blaeser notes, Vizenor’s texts pose a number of challenges to readers, educators, and students, since “never in his work does Vizenor allow his readers to find complete fulfillment within the text itself. Instead he demands their involvement in the search for truth, for meaning; he demands their involvement in experience, in life. His writing sends out a call for imaginative recreation of our reality [. . .]” (12). As both a further acknowledgement of this lifetime achievement and an engagement with the readerly challenges of his more recent texts, this volume

4 Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke brings together some of the most prominent experts in Vizenorian studies to cast new light on his more recent work and to engage transnationally and from new points of view with fundamental concepts such as “trickster discourse,” “storying,” “natural reason,” and “transmotion.” The outline of this book rests on what we perceive as three significant axes of contemporary Indigenous Studies: the transnational dimensions of trickster poetics, the unabated importance of land and memory for twenty-first-century Native identity, and the engagement of temporality as a helical structure connecting tradition and futurity. Following a keynote chapter by Gerald Vizenor himself, the ten contributions from the United States, Japan, Germany, and Austria provide both an introduction to Vizenor’s oeuvre and detailed theoretical and practical engagements with his more recent fiction and poetry. Opening the volume, Gerald Vizenor’s essay recounts the stories behind Blue Ravens, a historical novel about two Anishinaabe soldiers fighting in the U.S. Army in World War I, which gives a voice to a previously silenced or unnoticed part of military history. It tells the story of Basile and Aloysius Beaulieu, who leave the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to fight in France, and who return to Europe after the war, countering the traumata of their experience with trickster humor, irony, and transcultural modes of survivance. In his essay, Vizenor highlights the intricate ties of the fictional characters to his own family, and traces the reverberations of the Indigenous war experience in European and American art, as “[t]he breakdown of political and aesthetic credibility turned many survivors of the war into extremists, allegorists, and creative storiers,” and “Jazz, Dance, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism generated avant-garde art, music, literature, an exuberance of cultural conversions, singular experiences, and exotic traces of remembrance.” The first analytical part of the book (“Truth Games”: Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics) is opened by Alexandra Ganser’s theoretical panorama “Gerald Vizenor: Transnational Trickster of Theory.” This essay shows that Vizenor’s merging of tribal epistemologies and European theories of the postmodern transform him into a transnational trickster theorist who brings Native voices to a global audience and who uses the trickster as a source of energy to constantly re-create Native presence and critique “Indian” simulations. Applying this trickster ambivalence to practical contexts, Kathryn W. Shanley builds on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to negotiate what she calls universal peculiarities, i.e., the sameness and difference—or sameness in difference—in humans. Her essay shows how Vizenor uses trickster tropes to negotiate his political agenda as well as the connection between the universal and the peculiar in order to liberate the mind and write against victimry throughout his work, particularly in The Heirs of Columbus and Shrouds of White Earth. According to Chris LaLonde, Vizenor’s words paint images of the Anishinaabe homeland and worldview, which dictates that “where there are ghosts, there is possibility.”

Introduction 5 In this sense, LaLonde draws attention to the fact that the haunting presence of Native revenants reminds us not to disregard the marginalized Other in our attempt to walk into a safe future. Closing this first section, A. Robert Lee centers on Vizenor’s most recent novels (Father Meme, Shrouds of White Earth, Chair of Tears, and Blue Ravens) to discuss the author’s strategy of “storying,” i.e., his continuous efforts in preserving Native life and deconstructing terminal creeds through his words and neologisms. As such, Lee pays tribute to Vizenor’s outstanding opus and his incomparable gift to create and write across genres. The second thematic part, “Chance Connections”: Memory, Land, and Language, is anchored in the central coordinate of memory as a driving force of Vizenor’s oeuvre. This part begins with Kimberly M. Blaeser’s tribute to the transformational and transmotional power of Vizenor’s work— his landscape of liberty. By re-membering the imaginative histories Vizenor creates as a storier, she teases out a sense of presence and survivance in the historical, political, cultural, and literary legacies that are Vizenor’s “narrative giveaway.” Approaching memory from a bridge between quantum mechanics and philosophy, David L. Moore suggests that through blurring the lines and breaking down the borders between categories—between memory, mind, language, and land—Vizenor creates one aesthetic and interconnected whole in which everything matters. Vizenor’s use of neologisms as such re-work our consciousness, our understanding of matter and mind, and make us remember the ground and practice of presence. Finally, in a comparative analysis of Vizenor’s Blue Ravens (2014) and Favor of Crows (2014), Cathy Covell Waegner praises Vizenor’s ability to create cultural memory through his innovative narrative discourse. She frames the significance of the verbal and the visual, of nature, totemic creatures, and a sense of motion in his art to show that even if Vizenor writes across different genres, he continues to add to a dynamic whole. The third section, “The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions”: History and Futurity, is dedicated to the temporal and political bridges between historical experience and futurity. Moving back to the traumatic impact of Indian Removal in the 1830s, Sabine N. Meyer offers a legal reading of Chair of Tears to show that Vizenor’s artistic efforts enforce cultural sovereignty and work as practices of Native survival and resistance against the U.S. government and federal agencies, proving that Vizenor’s agenda is not only artistic but also political. In the next chapter, Billy J. Stratton’s analysis of Blue Ravens shows us Vizenor’s ways of overcoming the tragedies of war, the residues of colonialism, and the shadows of victimry: his characters find solace in the (re)telling of (war) stories and in artistic expression, thereby creating memories that exist beyond the page in a way of real Native presence. To round off the volume, Kristina Baudemann outlines Indigenous envisionings of the future in her original engagement with Vizenor’s Bearheart, The Heirs

6 Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke of Columbus, and Blue Ravens. She uses the concept of Native slipstream thinking to prove the significance of the future in Vizenor’s “Indigenous science fiction” and to show that (Native) reality is multilayered and multidirectional, a cosmos in which past, present, and future constitute a non-linear, timeless whole. All contributions to this volume testify to the multiple colors, fabrics, and patterns in Gerald Vizenor’s oeuvre. In line with the focus on visual arts in Shrouds of White Earth and Blue Ravens, and given the ritualistically repetitive patterns of signifiers in almost all of his texts, it is tempting to think of Gerald Vizenor’s work as a tapestry—these giant fabrics in textile art that were used since the late Middle Ages to signify political authority, epic history, and immeasurable wealth, as they decorated the walls of castle ballrooms or hallways. In the interwoven threads of these complex formats of visual narrative, the fine threads of wool or silk disappear into the larger design, becoming invisible in a rich treasury of colors and symbolic emblems that visualize scenarios of origin, of historical power struggle, or of metaphysical interaction. We usually recognize recurrent patterns and colors, leitmotifs and decorative repetitions—as in the Bayeux Tapestry’s border designs that frame the Battle of Hastings. In the same way, Gerald Vizenor’s textile texts are populated by reappearing characters (from Almost Browne to Dogroy Beaulieu), by humans and animals in what he calls “totemic associations” (Native Liberty 6), and by recurrent themes of the terminal creeds of colonialism, of resistance and postindian survivance, as well as by the colored shades of humor and irony. In his narrative tapestry, the semantic threads merge into larger images, and in the grammatical processes of repetition and revision they are transformed into something simultaneously larger and more complex than merely the material sum of its parts. And in contrast to the tapestries of aristocratic Europe, Vizenor’s art is translucent—its codes are pluralistic and polysemous, and the interwoven threads of the tapestry are flickering, virtual, elusive, able to disappear and re-emerge in ever new readerly constellations—but never without a political agenda. “The stories that heal,” Gerald Vizenor writes in Blue Ravens, “must have an origin, a mark or notice, and a native sense of natural motion and presence. A story must create a new sense of presence with every new version of the story” (193). These new stories are essential, and in Vizenor’s case, they form a continuum in the mathematical sense of the word: a set of at least two elements such that between any two of them there is a third element, never allowing for any single line of signification or meaning. We hope that this volume fulfills at least two purposes adequately, with many third ones emerging from in between: to celebrate one of the most prolific contemporary American writers, a seminally reliable authority in the field of interdisciplinary research and an unsurpassed academic advisor and teacher, and to provide access to the Vizenor continuum for beginners as much as for readers already well familiar with concepts of survivance and Native presence.

Introduction 7

Bibliography Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. Print. Breinig, Helmbrecht. “Satirical Ambivalence and Vizenor’s Bearheart.” Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and A. Robert Lee. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010. 86–103. Print. Hochbruck, Wolfgang. “Breaking Away: The Novels of Gerald Vizenor.” World Literature Today 66 (1992): 272–78. Print. Lee, A. Robert, ed. Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 2000. Print. Lutz, Hartmut. Contemporary Achievements: Contextualizing Canadian Aboriginal Literatures. Augsburg: Wißner, 2015. Print. Madsen, Deborah, ed. The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. Print. ———. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Print. ———, and A. Robert Lee. “Introduction.” Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and A. Robert Lee. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010. 1–9. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Blue Ravens. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Chair of Tears. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Print. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. Warrior, Robert Allen. “Review of Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, by Kimberly Blaeser.” World Literature Today 72.1 (Winter 1998): 181. Print.

1

Expeditions in France Native American Indians in the First World War Gerald Vizenor

Arthur Elm enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces from Oneida, Wisconsin, and served with a machine gun company in the Thirty-Second Infantry Division. He was wounded in the chest at Cierges, France, and recovered with blood transfusions. “After this, I didn’t know what I was. I was a mixture of Indian, Irish, and Swede,” he told the photographer and author Joseph Dixon (qtd. in Krouse 3). Arthur told ironic stories in spite of his wounds, situational blood, and empire wars, and he was sensible about service in the military. “It ain’t a bad life. Some guys kick about it, but I don’t see if they are true Americans why they kick. Army life has got to be hard. You can’t make heaven out of it” (qtd. in Krouse 4). Arthur returned at the end of the war and “a guy on the boat called out, ‘Who wants to re-enlist?’ He meant it as an insult to the Army. I felt it was a pretty dirty remark. He didn’t appreciate the kind of country he is living in, or the kind of country we have been fighting for” (qtd. in Krouse 5). John Clement Beaulieu, my great uncle, served in an engineer regiment with the American Expeditionary Forces in France. He constructed roads and bridges under enemy fire, and forty years later he told me stories about the lovely women he got to know during the Great War. Otto Dix, an expressionist painter, was a soldier in a machine gun unit in the German Army. He received an Iron Cross for bravery and later created “unforgiving art” of the First World War (Smith). His portrayals of war were “hideous, freakish scenes of human misery and disfigured faces,” noted Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Otto Dix, in contrast to my great uncle John Clement Beaulieu and Arthur Elm, scarcely told stories of romance, and certainly did not create ironic stories of France. “Armistice Signed, End of the War! Berlin Seized by Revolutionists; New Chancellor Begs for Order; Ousted Kaiser Flees to Holland” was the huge banner headline of The New York Times on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. The Treaty of Versailles and the revolutions in Germany and Russia deposed two empire unions and gave rise to political extremism, nationalism, and communism, such as the Bolsheviks, the Nazi Party, and the National Fascist Party in Italy.

Expeditions in France 9 The breakdown of political and aesthetic credibility turned many survivors of the war into extremists, allegorists, and creative storiers. Jazz, Dance, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism generated avant-garde art, music, literature, an exuberance of cultural conversions, singular experiences, and exotic traces of remembrance. Modris Eksteins observed in “Memory and the Great War” that “André Breton, the surrealist, spoke of the ‘crisis of the object.’ But, as the ideas of Sigmund Freud suggested, there was a ‘crisis of the subject’ too. Psychoanalytic theory had a special importance in the search for a new reality” (312). The Native Anishinaabe have endured three empire world wars, the first of which was in the late eighteenth century in North America. “The Ojibways figured in almost every battle which was fought during these bloody wars, on the side of the French against the British,” wrote William Warren in the History of the Ojibway Nation (194). The Anishinaabe viewed with sorrow the “final delivery of the Northwestern French forts into the hands of the conquering British” (195). The cultural bonds “which had been so long riveting between the French and Ojibways were not so easily to be broken” (195). Warren was Anishinaabe and published the first reliable history of Natives in the late nineteenth century. Blue Ravens, my historical novel, is the first published narrative about Native American Indians, mostly my relatives from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, who served in the American Expeditionary Forces. Ignatius Vizenor and his younger brother Lawrence were at home on the White Earth Reservation that Sunday morning, June 28, 1914, when a slight twenty-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on a narrow street in Sarajevo. That obscure assassination carried out some five thousand miles away was the symbolic start of the First World War, a chance moment of political violence that caused a deadly chain reaction and implicated empires, monarchies, autocratic and egalitarian states, entire continents, the colonial world, and no less the Anishinaabe of the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. The “Great War marked a break in Europe’s history,” declared Margaret MacMillan in The War that Ended Peace. “Before 1914, Europe for all its problems had hope that the world was becoming a better place and that human civilization was advancing. After 1918 that faith was no longer possible for Europeans. As they looked back at their lost world before the war, they could feel only a sense of loss and waste” (640). John Clement Beaulieu, William Hole in the Day, Ignatius and Lawrence Vizenor, Allen Trotterchaud, Robert Fairbanks, Louis Swan, John Martin Squirrel, and forty other young Anishinaabe men in Becker County on the White Earth Reservation served in the American Expeditionary Forces. Citizens of the White Earth Reservation read some of the gruesome stories of the war, the Lusitania torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915, the Battle of Passchendaele and the Somme, and other curious place names in

10 Gerald Vizenor The Tomahawk, an independent weekly newspaper published by Augustus Hudon Beaulieu.1 General John Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, lost more than twenty-six thousand “dead in little more than a month” in the October 1918 offensive at Meuse-Argonne in France, “a carnage far worse than the Civil War battles at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor put together” (Reynolds 35). Pershing was fortunate that the “death toll never sank in at home, unlike in Britain after the Somme, thanks to a combination of tight military censorship, embedded reporters who maintained an ‘enthusiastic silence’ about the body count,” and “frontpage speculations about the impending armistice” (Reynolds 35).2 Private Ignatius Vizenor served in the Thirtieth Infantry Division, and his brother Corporal Lawrence Vizenor served in the Thirty-Third Infantry Division. Ignatius was killed in action on October 8, 1918, at Montbréhain, France, on the very same day that his brother Lawrence Vizenor received the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in combat at Bois de Fays (Nelson 4).3 Private Charles Beaupré, a close friend from the White Earth Reservation, was also killed in action on October 8, 1918, at Saint-Quentin, France. An airplane pilot noted in his diaries that the weather that fateful day was murky, and a cold misty rain covered the devastated countryside. I visited the same sites of combat at Bony, Montbréhain, Saint-Quentin, and Bois de Fays on October 8, 2011.4 On the same day of the month almost a hundred years later, the weather was the same, cold and murky, but the landscape was rich, green, and with bright yellow tracks of rapeseed flowers. The traces of bodies and shattered bones of thousands of soldiers were forever harrowed into that gorgeous landscape. Memories of that wicked empire war remained at every turn, crossroad, river, mound, and in the many military cemeteries. Basile Beaulieu observed in Blue Ravens that “[t]here were more American Ford ambulances on the road than motor cars on the entire White Earth Reservation” (117). The wounded were on ships at sea, and the dead soldiers, pieces of young bodies, shattered bones, were buried in the earth, some by tillage of mince and morsel, and others by name and poignant ceremonies at military cemeteries. The larger human remains were tagged by religious order, covered and stacked on trucks. The earth would return once more to mustard and sugar beets, and rivers would carry forever the bloody scent of these ancient scenes of war out to the sea. (111) Representative Julius Kahn of California introduced a resolution shortly after the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, that “called for the immediate organization of ‘ten or more regiments of Indian cavalry as part of the military forces of the United States, to be known as the North American Indian

Expeditions in France 11 Cavalry,’” wrote Thomas Britten in American Indians in World War I (38). The proposed legislation of an “Indian Cavalry” was actually considered by several representatives, and two other measures to segregate soldiers were introduced by Representative Charles Carter of Oklahoma and Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania.5 The “Red Progressives,” or the Society of American Indians, and the Indian Rights Association resisted the initiatives to segregate soldiers. The Society argued in favor of integrated units and pointed out that “segregated units encouraged the maintenance of racial stereotypes, undermined Indian progress, and gave Native Americans an inferior social status” (Britten 44). Arthur Parker and Gertrude Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, were prominent members of the Society of American Indians, and they “strongly favored the participation of American Indians in the European conflict as a way to demonstrate American Indian patriotism” (Camurat). The Secretary of War and several senior military officers ruled against the segregation of Native American Indians in the military.6 Wassaja, or Carlos Montezuma, the distinguished Yavapai medical doctor, declared that Natives had been mistreated by the government and should not be forced to enlist and fight for the United States. Montezuma argued that the government had no “legitimate authority to require that they perform military service” (Dennis 66). Matthew Dennis pointed out in Red, White, and Blue Letter Day, “Native people served not only in uniform but in striking numbers on the home front as well, with service in the Red Cross and heavy investment in Liberty Bonds” (66). Native American Indians invested more than eight million dollars in several initial issues of Liberty Bonds. By the end of the war, “Native Americans had purchased over 25 million dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds, a per capita investment of about 75 dollars” wrote Thomas Britten in American Indians in World War I (133). Native American soldiers were selected as combat scouts more often than others, and served as code talkers, but were not segregated as a federal or military policy. The Choctaw, Lakota, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Chippewa, Anishinaabe, Oneida, and other Native languages were used to deliver secure military messages by telephone. The Germans were not able to translate the structure, syntax, and metaphors of oral languages. The French had more access to telephone systems in communities. Russell Barsh pointed out in “American Indians in the Great War” that the “War Department estimated that 17,313 Indians registered for the draft and 6,509, representing roughly 13 percent of all adult Indian men, were inducted. This did not include voluntary enlistment.” The Indian Office estimated that “at least half of all Indians who served were volunteers. Total Indian participation was therefore probably 20 to 30 percent of adult Indian men,” compared to 15 percent of all adult American men who served in the war (277).

12 Gerald Vizenor Barsh estimated that at “least 5 percent of all Indian servicemen died in action, compared to 1 percent for the American Expeditionary Forces as a whole” (278). About eight percent of the Anishinaabe soldiers from Becker County on the White Earth Reservation were killed in action or died from combat wounds. Britten cited the high number of casualties and estimated that selected “Indian people suffered even higher casualty rates. The Pawnees, for example, lost 14 percent of their soldiers, and the various Sioux people lost an average of 10 percent. Given their often perilous duties as scouts, snipers, and messengers, the high casualty rate among Native Americans is not surprising” (82). Only citizens were required by law to register for the draft. Natives “demanded that if the federal government declared they were citizens and thus subject to the draft, they should also be enfranchised” (Britten 54). The Bureau of Indian Affairs dithered on the distinction of citizenship and then deviously “turned the entire matter over to the draft boards,” observed Thomas Britten. “Because they were designed to be flexible and to respond to local needs, the draft boards operated with considerable autonomy” (54). The Becker County Draft Board on the White Earth Reservation carried out the necessary requirements of the Selective Service Act, the registration of eligible men in the entire county. The total draft “registration for the United States was 23,456,021. Minnesota registered 533,717, and 4,494 of these were from Becker County” (Nelson 1). Nearly 15 percent, or 651 men of the total number registered for the draft in Becker County were selected for military service. A total of 1,254 men were either drafted or volunteered in Becker County. Fifty-four soldiers in the entire county, or about four percent, died in service (Nelson 1). That number was four times greater than the number of soldiers who died in the entire American Expeditionary Forces. A total of forty-eight Anishinaabe soldiers were drafted or volunteered as residents of Becker County on the White Earth Reservation. Four reservation soldiers, or about eight percent of those who served, died in action in France. Private William Hole in the Day was born on the White Earth Reservation. He first served in the United States Navy during the Spanish American War, and then in the North Dakota National Guard on the Mexican Border. Hole in the Day enlisted in Canada and served in the First Central Ontario Regiment in France. He was poisoned in a gas attack and died on June 4, 1919, at the Canadian General Hospital in Montreal (Nelson 13). Private Ignatius Vizenor was born on the White Earth Reservation. He entered service on February 25, 1918, and served in the One Hundred and Eighteenth Infantry Regiment attached to the British Expeditionary Forces in France. He was killed in action on October 8, 1918, near Montbréhain, France. Private Charles Beaupré was born on the White Earth Reservation and entered military service on April 22, 1917. He served in the American Tank

Expeditions in France 13 Corps and was killed in action on October 8, 1918, in Saint-Quentin, France (cf. Nelson 13). Private Fred Casebeer, son of Joseph Casebeer of the White Earth Reservation, served in the One Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, was wounded in action, and died on September 30, 1918. Fred Casebeer was buried with more than fourteen thousand other infantry soldiers in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery (cf. Nelson 13). The Hindenburg Line was the “greatest challenge” for the soldiers in the Thirtieth Infantry Division (Yockelson 190). Private Vizenor was surely aware that the “casualties were high” in the first offensive. Mitchell Yockelson noted in Borrowed Soldiers that “Americans and their allies did not realize [. . .] that the new attack” early in October, 1918 “would mark the beginning of the end of the war” (190). The Thirtieth Infantry Division was ordered by the commanders of the British Expeditionary Forces on Tuesday, October 8, to attack and secure an area north of Montbréhain and east of Saint-Quentin, a critical military position in the Hundred Days Offensive. The artillery bombardments had weakened the enemy, but in turns the military strategies were savage and catastrophic to the ordinary way of life in the countryside. The war started with empires, horse parades, and manly military traditions and ended with havoc, enormous tanks and cannons, and new commune cultures of women without men. The infantry regiment advanced with artillery and heavy tank support early that cold rainy morning, Tuesday, October 8, 1918, sixty-two days into the Hundred Days Offense. Ignatius was shot in the chest by an enemy machine gun. He caught his breath, collapsed, and died slowly on a cold and muddy ridge near a new series of trenches east of Montbréhain. Corporal Lawrence Vizenor, Thirty-Third Infantry Division, learned in situations of severe hunger to savor singe, or monkey meat, molasses, holey bread; and pinard, red country wine, which were standard reserve rations for soldiers in the French Army. Corporal Vizenor had already survived combat with the Germans at Château-Thierry, the Second Battle of the Marne, and the Battle of Saint-Mihiel prior to his courageous service in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Robert Ferrell provided in America’s Deadliest Battle an account of rations for weary soldiers in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. “Food came up, molasses and French bread with big holes; the molasses trickled on their hands and into their beards, where it mixed with whatever else was there. Dysentery affected everyone, and lack of sleep made them bleary-eyed” (91). Corporal Vizenor advanced with a platoon of infantry soldiers into the wooded and hilly area of Bois de Fays. “German snipers and machine gunners received no quarter as the doughboys slashed forward through the Bois de Fays,” wrote Edward Lengel in To Conquer Hell (200). The patrol encountered intense fire from an enemy machine gun emplacement in the forest. Three soldiers turned back and found cover in a trench.

14 Gerald Vizenor Lawrence and the officer in charge of the patrol, and one other soldier, continued to advance on the enemy positions. The officer was wounded in the chest. Corporal Vizenor disabled the machine gun and then carried the officer to a medical aid station. Corporal Lawrence Vizenor was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on October 8, 1918, for extraordinary courage and heroism at Bois de Fays in the Argonne Forest. Nature was hushed, and the shadows of the entire countryside were scenes of wicked rage, bloody, muddy and mutilated bodies stacked for collection at the side of the roads. The elation of the armistice was rightly overcome by the undeniable memories of slaughter, separation, and the inevitable sense of suspicion and vengeance. Basile Beaulieu wrote, “[t]he eternal rats tracked down the last dead soldiers and civilians on armistice to scratch out an eye and chew a tender ear or cold hairy jowl. The native forests and fields would bear forever the blood, brain, and cracked bones in every season of the fruit trees and cultivated sugar beets” (141). “Most soldiers returned to small towns and cities,” wrote Basile Beaulieu in Blue Ravens. Corporal Lawrence Vizenor and other soldiers “returned to a federal occupation on the [White Earth] reservation. Our return to the reservation was neither peace nor the end of the war. The native sense of chance and presence on the reservation had always been a casualty of the civil war on native liberty” (170).

Notes 1. The Progress became The Tomahawk, and the number of pages increased with syndicated patent insides of national and international news. For a wider discussion of the independent newspapers on the White Earth Reservation, see “Native Liberty” in Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance 35–56. 2. Reynolds compared only the dead soldiers, not the actual casualties, which would include the dead, wounded, and missing. The total number of United States and Confederate States dead soldiers in the Civil War battles of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, and Cold Harbor was at least seventeen thousand, compared to the twenty-six thousand men killed in action at Meuse-Argonne in October 1918. The Civil War casualties—dead, wounded, and missing—at the four battle sites mentioned were more than a hundred and ten thousand. Reynolds did not include the German dead in the battle of Meuse-Argonne. 3. In An Honor Roll: Containing a Pictorial Record of the Men and Women from Becker County, Nelson compiled and published biographic notes about soldiers and nurses who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Detroit, the original name of the city and township, was changed to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, on September 7, 1926. 4. Joëlle and Nicolas Rostkowski, owners of the Galerie Orenda in Paris, France, traveled with me and retired Justice Gary Strankman to Saint-Quentin, Montbréhain, and Bois de Fays, the actual locations where Ignatius Vizenor and Lawrence Vizenor engaged in combat in October 1918.

Expeditions in France 15 5. Reference to Congress, House, Bill to Raise Ten or More Regiments of Indian Cavalry, 65th Congress, 1st Session, House Resolution 3970, Congressional Record, volume 55, April 30, 1917. 6. President Wilson, General John Pershing, and Newton Baker, Secretary of War, accommodated the stipulations of southern state racists and the specious notion of “separate but equal” as a policy of segregated military units for African Americans, or the Buffalo Soldiers, in the American Expeditionary Forces in France.

Bibliography Barsh, Russell Lawrence. “American Indians in the Great War.” Ethnohistory 38.3 (Summer 1991): 276–303. Print. Britten, Thomas A. American Indians in World War I. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1977. Print. Camurat, Diane. “The American Indian in the Great War: Real and Imagined.” MA thesis. Institut Charles V, University of Paris VII, 1993. Web. 15 Feb. 2014. . Dennis, Matthew. Red, White, and Blue Letter Day. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005. Print. Eksteins, Modris. “Memory and the Great War.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War. Ed. Hew Strachan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 305–17. Print. Ferrell, Robert H. America’s Deadliest Battle. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2012. Print. Krouse, Susan Applegate. North American Indians in the Great War. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. Print. Lengel, Edward G. To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918. The Epic Battle that Ended the First World War. New York: Holt, 2008. MacMillan, Margaret. The War that Ended Peace. New York: Random House, 2013. Print. Nelson, Daniel. An Honor Role: Containing a Pictorial Record of the Men and Women from Becker County. Detroit, MN: D. Nelson, 1920. Hathi Trust Digital Library. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. . Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Print. Smith, Roberta. “Always Outrageous, Frequently Disturbing.” New York Times. 11 Mar. 2010. Web. 13 Feb. 2014. . Vizenor, Gerald. Blue Ravens. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. Warren, William. History of the Ojibway Nation. Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1885. Print. Yockelson, Mitchell. Borrowed Soldiers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2008. Print.

Section 1

“Truth Games” Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics

2

Gerald Vizenor Transnational Trickster of Theory Alexandra Ganser

The transnational turn in American studies has led to a number of new readings of Native American texts and cultural practices, transcending those limits of interpretation that are bound to a national paradigm, which has projected the limitations of the nation-state onto Native American cultures from the very beginnings of U.S. history to today.1 In the context of Native American studies, the transnational perspective has also transgressed territorial boundaries besides that of the (colonial) nation state, including inquiries into the trans-tribal, cosmopolitan, and global dimensions of Indigenous cultures. Multidirectional processes of cultural exchange and concerns beyond territorial borders are articulated in a plethora of contemporary Native American texts. Gerald Vizenor’s work, both fictional and non-fictional, is exemplary in teasing out the tensions between the local and trans-local dimensions of Native cultures as well as those between a politics of anti-colonial repudiation of dominant, non-Native, hegemonic forms and the embrace of strategies of appropriation. This essay focuses on Vizenor’s specific version of a postmodern, transnational Indigenism as it explores his creative interactions with European critical theory—especially Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum and Euro-American writings on the trickster as archetype—as a form of ‘theorizing back’ to dominant theories that are themselves heavily influenced by their encounter with America. Vizenor is talking back to both French deconstructivism and trickster theorists: his acts of theoretical appropriation and adaptation in a Native American context to a certain extent also unmask the Westerncentricity of the theoretical texts he draws on. From a meta-theoretical perspective, then, Vizenor’s writings disturb European-American criticism from the vantage point of American Indian (post)coloniality and cultural difference, questioning traditional intellectual discourse, rationalist universalisms, and elitist academic language while offering an “alterNative” version of postmodern theory. In the following, I examine Vizenor’s idiosyncratic narrative theoretizations of a distinctly Native American concept of postmodernism—in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s understanding of the term as an historical condition2—expressed through his ideas on the postindian, on indian simulations and Native survivance, and on what he calls trickster

20 Alexandra Ganser hermeneutics. Vizenor’s universe of intellectual thought, as his interest in European and especially French theorists of the postmodern exemplifies, has been deeply influenced by transnational intellectual exchanges that he has opened up for a dialogue with Native American issues of social identity, cultural practice, and aesthetics. Thus I concentrate on two themes: first, I will read Vizenor’s critique of indian simulations as a Native commentary on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, and second, I will explore how Vizenor utilizes the trickster-trope and trickster theory—in itself an appropriation of native cultures by Western anthropology—as a source of energy that constantly disrupts the dominant simulations of Native America.

Indian Simulations One of the many European theorists Vizenor calls upon is French semiotician Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), whose diagnosis of postmodernity as an age of simulation and simulacra (of semiotic phenomena lacking any real reference that have come to dominate contemporary regimes of perception) has widely influenced postmodern theory building. When Simulacres et simulation appeared in France in 1981, it marked Baudrillard’s turn to the theoretization of postmodernity, moving away from his earlier Marxist model of economic determinism in cultural production without discarding Marxist notions (such as commodification) altogether. The simulacrum, as Baudrillard defines it, is a copy without an original, and simulation “is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1).3 Simulation refers to the “question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” and is a matter of “imperialism” as “present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation” (2). It has nothing to do with mere pretense, which is a surface phenomenon of imitation of a preceding reality that is not eradicated by the act of pretending; instead, simulation “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (3) by engendering, preceding, and intercepting reality. Vizenor often quotes Baudrillard’s example of a simulated illness that produces symptoms and thus cannot be reduced to a mere pretending, which leaves the reality principle intact and only masks the difference (e.g., Manners 13). It is no coincidence that already in the first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard undermines his basic concept of simulated hyperreality by invoking the field of ethnology as a practice of substituting the real with the simulation: “In order for ethnology to live, its object must die,” he argues, as “science live[s] on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of its object” (7). The “Indian” in fact becomes Baudrillard’s “model of simulation”: The Indian thus returns to the ghetto, in the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible

Transnational Trickster of Theory 21 Indians from before ethnology. This model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the “brute” reality of these Indians it has entirely reinvented—Savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being Savages [. . .]. Of course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself has become pure simulation. (8) In the following, Baudrillard extends his diagnosis to “all”: “We are all [. . .] Indians who have again become what they were—simulacral Indians who at last proclaim the universal truth of ethnology. We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology” (8). The subject of postmodernity exists under the violation of the traditional contract of representation in the West, i.e., the assumption that there is a reality both beyond representation and foundational to it. In the postmodern reversal that has done away with the transcendental signifier (“God” or other “grands récits” in Lyotard’s terminology), representation is foundational for (hyper-) reality (cf. Baudrillard 5). Here Vizenor’s take on Baudrillard’s theory of simulation can be read as a first instance of de-centering the Western contract of representation and its development into postmodernity, for the indian has never existed as real, long before postmodernity, in the Western logocentric and visual system of representation. Ever since the arrival of Columbus in the “New World,” the indian has existed only under the murderous regime of simulation—let us just think of Columbus’s first letter from the “New World” and its tales of noble and ignoble savagery, guided by the letter’s intention to secure further financing from the Spanish crown. It is with this letter that ethnography, the “colonial invention of the indian” (Vizenor and Lee, Conversations 84) in America, truly starts. As Vizenor states: The indian is the invention, and indian cultures are simulations, that is, the ethnographic construction of a model that replaces the real in most academic references. Natives are the real, the ironies of the real, and an unnameable sense of presence, but simulations are the absence, and so the indian is an absence, not a presence. You see, indians are simulations of the discoverable other [.  .  .]. That is to say, the simulations of the other have no real origin, no original reference, and there is no real place on this continent that bears the meaning of that name. (Conversations 85) In other words, “[t]he Indian was an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation; the word has no referent in tribal languages or cultures” (Manners 11). Colonization and discovery are defined implicitly here as symbolic possession, as the power to simulate an Other and thus to attempt

22 Alexandra Ganser total semiotic control by the colonizer over the colonized (cf. also Madsen, Vizenor 30). Although Baudrillard also frequently invokes the genocidal beginnings of colonization in America in both symbolic and physical respects, this invocation has more to do with the French semiotician’s exceptionalist view of the U.S. as both the world’s most hyperreal society and “the only remaining primitive society” (America 7) than with a questioning of a linear, hegemonic Western history of epistemology that would have to be fundamentally rewritten through the lens of (post)colonialism. Vizenor is thus less concerned with a faithful rendering of Baudrillard’s argumentation but instead produces a cultural translation of his insights meaningful for the Native American context. This process becomes even more fruitful when Vizenor locates pockets of resistance in Baudrillard’s theory and invests them with trickster energies. In this context, Vizenor harks back to another theoretical point Baudrillard makes in his conception of simulation. Baudrillard mentions “the vengeance of the dead” (9) as the force that will always disrupt controlling simulations with traces of the (symbolically or materially) dead: “science can’t help but die contaminated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror. It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth” (9). This idea is shared by Vizenor’s faith in postindian simulations. The postindian, like Baudrillard’s “dead,” uses a subjectivity that signifies no reality but is a mere simulacrum, playing with dominant simulations and “manifest manners” ascribed to the indian by the Western regime of representation. S/he represents4 “resistance and survival, native survivance beyond tragedy, victimry, and the simulations of the ‘indian.’ The postindian at once exposes the lack of substance that is constitutive of the stereotype (like Baudrillard’s postmodern copy without an original) but at the same time suggests something of what it is that is missing” (Madsen, Vizenor 35). By disturbing the “hyperrealities of neo-colonial consumerism” (Vizenor, “Introduction” 3) that have prepared indian simulations for ready consumption by the West—Wild-West shows, Edward Curtis’s photography, western movies—the postindian continues a long tradition of semiotic intervention by Native Americans: Natives have resisted empires, negotiated treaties, and, as diplomatic strategies, embraced the simulations of absence to secure the chance of a decisive presence in national literature, history, and canonry. Native resistance to dominance is an undeniable trace of presence, but even these memories of survivance in a constitutional democracy are cast as narratives of absence and victimry. (Vizenor, Fugitive 23) The spirit of the trickster is evoked here, securing a resistant, “decisive presence” to counter “simulations of absence” such as the indian.5 Vizenor calls his project one dedicated to ironic simulations and countersimulations

Transnational Trickster of Theory 23 (cf. Vizenor and Lee, Conversations 83), as there is no contending with the simulation but on the level of simulation itself: [M]ost natives are wiser to the simulations. The point is that we are long past the colonial invention of the indian. We come after the invention, and we are the postindians. [. . .] Natives, of course, use simulations too, but for reasons of liberation rather than dominance [. . .]. The postindian stands for an active, ironic resistance to dominance, and the good energy of native survivance. (Conversations 84–85) Contradicting the simulations of Natives is the simulation by Natives, Vizenor seems to imply here. For him, then, as Amy Elias points out, what Natives have always done and must do is perform a “reverse striptease” (88) in which the (post)colonial subject sheds the costume and garb of imperial indian simulation. In other words, the postindian signifies the return of the repressed, the return of the vanishing Indian as an uncanny specter of empire, or, in the Derridean terms Vizenor also invokes time and again, as a trace of suppressed cultural difference.6 The central Derridean concept for Vizenor’s adaptation of Baudrillard’s simulation theory is that of the simultaneity of absence and presence in the sign, which, generated in a system of linguistic differences, has to suppress its Others in order to achieve identity but also bears traces of the Others because they fulfill a constitutive function for the sign’s identity. The colonial Other has traditionally filled a similar absence in Western discourses and is repressed in the construction, for example, of national or imperial identity. But the Other, like the other sign, continues to haunt the West because the boundaries between self and other, identity and alterity, are arbitrary, constructed, and contested. Vizenor sees simulation Indians as the sign for an absence of the colonial Other, the Native American, who nevertheless is a continuing presence in the Americas—hence his turn to countersimulations, which pay attention to presence as integral for survivance. His postindian warriors are “warriors of simulation” (not against simulation): “The postindian warriors and the missionaries of manifest manners are both responsible for simulations. [. . .] The warriors of simulation are entitled to tease the absence of remembrance in the ruins of representation [. . .]” (Manners 13). The goal is thus not to achieve any full or authentic Native presence, which, as Derrida has taught us, is impossible, but to delve into the “ruins of representation” that Baudrillard diagnoses in his work and to creatively, critically intervene in the constructions on the site: “The postindian is the absence of the invention, and the end of representation in literature; the closure of that evasive melancholy of dominance [in the simulation of manifest manners]. [. . .] The counteractions of postindian warriors are the simulations of survivance” (Manners 11–12).7 The most important aesthetic strategy of the postindian warriors of simulation is probably their tricksters, which also

24 Alexandra Ganser leads Vizenor to an appropriation and re-evaluation of trickster theory as it is grounded in ethnology, anthropology, and folklore studies.

Trickster Hermeneutics8 In his theoretical narratives, Vizenor has developed the concept of trickster hermeneutics as a disturbance of traditional intellectual and scholarly discourses through the energies set free by cultural difference and moments of transdifference.9 He has drawn on the trickster as an agency—not always in the figural form, but also as a certain form of energy or spirit produced by a distinct aesthetic or social practice—that transcends and potentially connects cultures, a liminal, transgressive figure of the thresholds between various worlds, as well as a mythical embodiment of cultural, ontological, gendered, and other ambiguities, of doublings and exchange, of formal fluidity and the paradoxical. Trickster hermeneutics emphasize the openness of the hermeneutic circle and the polysemic nature of the sign, sublimated yet never fully vanquished in a structured system of linguistic difference. In an interview with Dallas Miller, Gerald Vizenor comments on his Wittgensteinian and Derridean understanding of language: Language certainly is a game. It’s more than that, of course. It’s less than that too. But it is a game, a form of play. It’s serious. What’s so delightful about language is that you don’t have to make it mean what it means. How boring if it only means what it means. (91) Thus Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics refuses logocentrism and the focus on rationality and closure that has been at the center of Western (and hence colonial) thought, and it views the playful re-negotiation of tradition and the intended use of contradiction as tools for overcoming what he calls “victimry”: the prison-house of simulation-indians as the dominant cultural script through which the first settlers of America are still perceived in the U.S. and beyond,10 and with which they have always had to come to terms in order to create “survivance,” Vizenor’s term for a cultural presence that exceeds mere survival and endurance.11 For Vizenor, the trickster is a figuration of self-empowerment of marginalized cultures that questions dominant discourses (in anthropology, philosophy, literature, politics and the law, the arts, and popular culture) and draws our attention to the absences and gaps in the dominant systems of representation and knowledge. In Vizenor’s fictional work this process is present both on the level of character (e.g., via plural hybrid identities, as in the novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles) and on the level of narrative (e.g. the ironic re-valuation and appropriation of colonial grands récits in The Heirs of Columbus). The trickster, a mythical element in non-written narratives of various cultures (cf. Otto and Ballinger), is a figure that transgresses the borders between

Transnational Trickster of Theory 25 identity and alterity, the sacred and the profane, the linguistic-aesthetic, and the social-political. As a mythical embodiment of ambiguity, ambivalence, and of all that which is not finally explicable and understandable, the trickster, always changing identity and form (s/he has no ontological gender, for instance; cf. Rosier-Smith 5 and 21–22) is potentially both reproductive and productive, both generative and destructive, both stabilizing and destabilizing. In all its cultural forms, the trickster has a fundamental function in a cultural system: that of border negotiations (cf. Spinks, “Trickster” 3). “Trickster disrupts. This disruption is normal. It is part of what we know is there. Making trouble—messing up the order—is part of the order,” Elizabeth Ammons introduces a collection of essays, recurring on earlier arguments by Paula Gunn Allen or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (vii).12 However, Ammons continues, tricksterism is in any case a “positive way of negotiating multiple cultural systems” (xi) in that trickster strategies and narratives bring together conflicting world views and value systems and thereby create new forms of identity that are “turbulent, shape-changing, contradictory, ‘bad,’ culturally central, liminal, powerful, power-interrogating” (xi)—located in a border space of continuing re-invention of the self, and by extension of territory, of cultural identity, of the nation. The ambiguity of trickster-figures such as Hermes, Coyote, Br’er Rabbit, the Chinese Monkey King, or the German Till Eulenspiegel is at the center of interest for many scholars. Franchot Ballinger has detected in the classical structuralist texts on the trickster by Paul Radin and Claude Lévi-Strauss a stark dualism that locates the figure of the trickster always between two poles and explains its ambiguity by arguing that the elements of both poles (such as good/evil) are united in it, brought into friction and re-balanced (cf. Ballinger 30–31). Ballinger, like Vizenor, counters these structuralist, logocentric models in the attempt to conceptualize the trickster as polyvalent: If Trickster seems to mediate between two poles only, if he seems a bundle of dualities, these appearances may be a consequence of our own misfiring perceptions. [. . .] [I]t might be best to forget our customary use of ambiguity as something with two or more meanings which [. . .] must be resolved or ‘mediated’ somehow. For Trickster there can never be resolution [.  .  .]. Like a subatomic particle, Trickster never allows final definition of time, place and character. He never settles or shapes himself so as to allow closure, either fictional or moral. (31) With Ballinger, the trickster appears not as a mediator of bipolarity, but as a figuration that reflects back onto society the inherent polyvalency of reality, especially in cultural texts (which Ballinger limits to written literature); ambigere, from the Latin “to wander around, meander,” already points to the figuration’s mobile quality (cf. Ballinger 32). If we bring Ballinger’s arguments to the issue of the trickster as an (inter-)cultural mediator, what

26 Alexandra Ganser becomes clear is that the trickster plays less the role of a mediator between cultural difference than that of the hermeneutic agent who is always already inter- and intra-culturally active, mirroring to each cultural system its instability and infiniteness. Only after this trickster-generated insight, we could spin the thought further, can there be a chance of cultural communication and openness vis-á-vis the Other—which is hence no longer radically different, as it is always already part of the self. Thus the trickster functions as a skeptic of cultural categorization per se and demonstrates the artificial, arbitrary categoriality that cultural systems and social orders are based on (cf. Campbell Reesman xvii). In its function, the trickster figure may well be a universal cultural archetype—a presumption made in the psychological studies of C. G. Jung and ethnographic folklore studies that have dominated the focus of trickster studies for a long time. Critics today agree for the most part that the study of tricksters cannot dispense with their culturally specific contexts (cf. Ammons xii, Campbell Reesman xii). In general, the analysis of trickster figures in the humanities has shifted from ethnology and anthropology toward semiotics and cultural theory—discourses that question the positivistic assumptions of earlier studies also for reasons of an epistemological critique of science. Definitions like the one to be found in Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend of 1950, stating that trickster stories were told “chiefly for amusement” or that the trickster figure can only be found in “primitive” (1124) societies, as Jung also asserted (206–07), sound highly naive and simplistic and are no longer accepted by cultural critics and theorists, also for lack of a sensibility for cultural difference and specificity. In addition, trickster theory has turned from the figural dimension toward the epistemological. The critical questioning of the epistemological basis of dominant traditions of Western thought and writing is also at the center of Vizenor’s works, texts that produce an “alterNative” version of academic and fictional writing by implicitly and explicitly critiquing rationalism and by a persiflage of elitist language. Simultaneously, they acknowledge theoretical insights from fields like philosophy, psychology, literary studies, history, linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnology. For Vizenor, trickster hermeneutics combine traditional cultural studies issues such as representation, stereotyping and exoticism, self and Other, and identity and alterity with Indigenous strategies of understanding the world, including the playful, shifty, even treacherous aspects of trickster discourse. Vizenor’s use of the trickster motif is aimed at finding a way out of binary and hierarchical constructions of meaning and discursive order; Vizenor re-interprets poststructuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial elements (relating to hybridization, pastiche, simulation, and ambiguity) and thus produces an open, often partially unstructured, fluid stream of theory-narrative, as is evident, for instance, in his essay “Trickster Discourse.” Academically trained readers of an essay in a collection like Narrative Chance—at least those not yet familiar with Vizenor’s style and work—will expect a clarification and

Transnational Trickster of Theory 27 theorization of the concept, an expectation that Vizenor sustains and nourishes throughout the entire essay and at the same time repeatedly frustrates. Only towards the end does it become clear that the essay does not explain trickster discourse but enacts it in language games and unexpected changes of register: The trickster is [. . .] a comic healer and liberator in literature; the whole figuration that ties the unconscious to social experiences. The trickster sign is communal, an erotic shimmer in oral traditions; the narrative voices are holotropes in a discourse. In this discourse the signified becomes a comic chance [. . .]. (Vizenor, “Discourse” 188) As a figuration, tricksterism generates the cultural Other; it is located in-between unconscious, precultural structures (a reference to C. G. Jung’s influential treaty “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure”), and the socio-cultural environment, both the “erotic shimmer” and “holotrope” (i.e., “whole figuration,” Vizenor, “Introduction” 7) of various narrative voices pervading a discourse in which the signified retains, and actively uses, an element of playful chance. With reference to basic insights from (post)structural linguistics, Vizenor calls the trickster a “semiotic sign” and distinguishes his concept from the trickster figure as a mere character in the narratives of various cultures, as well as from ethnographic and folkloristic definitions based on, and thus restricted to, outsider observation and thick description, hence also his repudiation of any final definition of trickster discourse.13 Time and again Vizenor repeats—with only few variations—that the trickster is a “communal sign, a comic holotrope and a discourse; not a real person or a tragic metaphor in an isolated monologue” (“Trickster” 196) like the trickster we encounter in this kind of academic research: “[. . .] the trickster is a comic holotrope in narrative voices, not a model or a tragic figuration in isolation” (189). Trickster is thus not to be understood as one isolated element in mythical structures or social science models (cf. 190); rather, s/he “summons agonistic imagination in a comic holotrope to a discourse on the revolution in semiotic signs” (193) and is “not a presence or a real person but a semiotic sign in a language game, in a comic narrative that denies presence” (204). In this “theoretical” text by Vizenor, trickster discourse has destructive and simultaneously healing or liberating effects and is able to leave cultural orders functionally intact while opening them up at the same time. Vizenor’s concept is grounded in linguistic and aesthetic thought—hence his interest in hermeneutics, language theory, or Derridean différance (cf. Schmidt 68). Vizenor calls the trickster-sign a “comic sign that ‘wanders’ in universal signification” (“Trickster” 206); following Derrida, he highlights the non-finiteness of meaning in the system of signs. The missing link between tricksterism and hermeneutics can also be found, as Jeanne Campbell Reesman explains, in the Greek trickster figure

28 Alexandra Ganser of Hermes. As a protector of roads and pathways, of travel and travelers, his realm in Greek mythology is that of the transitory, but he is also the god of language, of sleep and dreams (cf. Campbell Reesman xviii). Doty calls Hermes not a “deity of the singular heroic act, but of the marginal and plural subjectivities of tradition breakers, and metaphor makers” (50). Hermes thus becomes a “messenger-hermeneut” (Campbell Reesman xix) whose scavenging and thievish, creative use of language emphasizes the centrality of play as a vital force: “If Hermes models a hermeneutic, it is an openended finding of new meanings that may change interpretive force from one context to another; the values of a way-god must necessarily be flexible and adaptive” (Doty 62–63).14 At this point it also becomes evident that trickster hermeneutics raises the demands on the reader, who is assigned a fundamental, active role in the construction of meaning; cultural flexibility and sensibility as well as the will to transgress semiotic borders are preconditioned. Vizenor’s version of such a hermeneutics, as he explains in an interview, is nevertheless a specifically Indigenous North American one: I’m trying to develop a theoretical idea that includes this startling interpretation, that the interpretation of Native American literature is different than the interpretation of other literature. Or, to put it another way, to expand the ideas of interpretation that give Native American literature a difference that is difficult to find in other literature. In addition to the things I just mentioned, a different world view of chance, coincidence and change, trickster narratives, which is part of transformation, a kind of interpretation as well as a story, sort of commenting on as you tell the story and other things. But I’m trying to play these out as a difference that makes a difference. (qtd. in Miller 78) The most important difference between the respective narrative systems of Indigenous and non-Indigenous literatures that Vizenor mentions is that of the communal experience through oral narratives (cf. Vizenor qtd. in Miller 78); yet he seems to counter his own thought when he recognizes in the comic elements of trickster narratives a connecting line to Western forms of narrative (cf. Vizenor qtd. in Miller 80) and thus questions his own assumption of a rather essentialist difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous literatures. What is added to the (post)colonial context of Indigenous American forms of literary tricksterism is the dimension of self-empowerment, which can preclude positivist, closed interpretations. As an antidote to being fixed in writing all too rapidly, to being translated into strange, dominant systems of knowledge and meaning, trickster discourse can be established as an alterNative practice of writing and reading that opposes these fixations; in one of his numerous semantic games Vizenor calls such antidotes strategies of “survivance”—more than mere survival and endurance, these represent strategies of active empowerment, countering the vortex of victimhood. In

Transnational Trickster of Theory 29 this way, he builds on semantic invention, catachresis, the mix of metaphors, or the exchanging of single letters in order to generate new levels of meaning and to upset and disturb potentially oppressive familiar forms (cf. Schmidt 67). He calls that subversion of oppressive linguistic regimes of representation “socioacupuncture,” “the application of semantic pressure on those places that are sensitive to the absurd nature of racial and national categorization” (Madsen, Vizenor 27).

Conclusion In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Gerald Vizenor summarizes the connecting points between simulation and the trickster as follows: Trickster hermeneutics is the interpretation of simulations in the literature of survivance, the ironies of descent and racialism, transmutation, third gender, and themes of transformation in oral tribal stories and written narratives. [. . .] Trickster stories are the postindian simulations of tribal survivance. [. . .] Trickster hermeneutics is access to trickster stories, and the shimmer of a tribal presence in simulations; this new course of tribal interpretation arises from the postindian turns in literature, the reach of tribal shadows, postmodern conditions of translation, the traces of deconstruction, and the theories of representation and simulation. Trickster hermeneutics is survivance, not closure, and the discernment of tragic wisdom in tribal experiences. (15) Trickster energy works on all these levels: on the level of the simulation itself, which should not be abandoned to the dominant, treacherous simulations of indianness but has to be appropriated by postindian warriors of survivance; on the level of the narrative through trickster stories that play linguistic and aesthetic games of signification in the ruins of representation; and on the level of interpretation in the age of postmodernity. As I have discussed in this essay, Vizenor has utilized a number of Euro-American thinkers to generate his theoretical, postcolonial pastiche, a construct that turns logocentric and Eurocentric theorizing on its head without discarding it as imperialist fantasy. This hybrid theorizing-back to the alleged centers of philosophy and (literary) scholarship is an important and successful strategy not only to deconstruct dichotomous center-margin or colonizer-colonized conceptions, but also to secure attention, in Anglo-America and Europe, to Native American thought and cultural expression. As Deborah Madsen states: “Contemporary critical theory, particularly [. . .] the poststructuralist school of thought, is used by Vizenor not to display some putative deconstructive allegiance on his part; on the contrary, critical theory serves the interests of bringing tribal epistemologies to a contemporary readership” (Vizenor 23).

30 Alexandra Ganser To this day, Gerald Vizenor has never tired of touring and lecturing, and of breaking new ground for intellectual dialogue, for a fruitful and continuing exchange that aims at a broader reception of Native American voices on a global, transnational scale, and at an evaluation of their insights in the broader context of a world divided by global iniquities, such as those between (former) colonizers of the so-called first world and the (formerly) colonized “third.” Thus I would go further than Madsen and claim, in conclusion, that Vizenor as a transnational trickster theorist does not stop at the borders of “tribal epistemology.” He develops a cultural theory of the—not only (post)colonial—commodified subaltern in a postmodern age of simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality, which relegates its Others, usually as object surfaces, to its commodity markets, service industries, and political margins, leaving colonized subjectivity under constant erasure. In this scenario, Vizenor embodies the trickster energies it takes to re-install agency and presence for colonized subjects.

Notes 1. Most recently, Deborah Madsen has edited a collection of transnational readings of Native American literature that discuss the tensions between Indigenous essentialism as a political strategy and anti-essentialist critique of Indigeneity (Madsen, Native Authenticity). 2. On Vizenor’s understanding of postmodernism, cf. his introduction to Narrative Chance, as well as Madsen, Vizenor 22–30, and Pulitano 145–86, among others. 3. A second point of reference for Vizenor’s usage of the terminology of the hyperreal is Umberto Eco (esp. Travels in Hyperreality). Cf. also Elias 87–88. 4. For a discussion of “manifest manners” as simulation and pastiche, cf. Yu. 5. For a postmodern reading of trickster discourse, cf. esp. Jahner’s insightful essay “Trickster Discourse and Postmodern Strategies.” 6. On Vizenor’s use of Derridean ideas and concepts, cf. also Jahner, “Allies,” and Pulitano 145–86. 7. Vizenor frequently evokes the melancholy and nostalgia that characterize the simulation indian and his/her manifest manners. He defines the term nostalgia as an important source of simulations via Baudrillard’s dictum that nostalgia “assumes its full meaning” when “the real is no longer what is used to be” (qtd. in Manners 25). 8. An earlier version of this section has been published in German as part of an article co-authored with Christina Judith Hein and Karin Höpker (“Trickster Hermeneutics als alterNative Schreib- und Lesepraxis: Gerald Vizenors Harold of Orange und Louis Owens Bone Game”). I would like to thank Christina and Karin for their useful suggestions and criticism. 9. For a reading of Vizenor’s work through the lens of transdifference—the ruptures in meaning produced by tensions arising from multiple difference constructions simultaneously at work and by the moments in which such constructions become temporarily unstable—cf. Breinig. 10. Cf. the example of the photography of Edward Curtis, which has become iconic in the visual representation of Native Americans both in the U.S. and in Europe and which Vizenor has repeatedly discussed (most recently in Native Liberty 191–205). 11. Survivance is French for relic and English for survival or right of succession, but Vizenor redefines the term through adding the level of presence, in the Derridean sense, as resistance. For a detailed discussion, cf. Breinig, “Survivance” 38.

Transnational Trickster of Theory 31 12. The references are to Paula Gunn Allen’s essay “‘Border Studies’: The Intersection of Gender and Color” (1992) and Henry Louis Gates’s classic The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988). 13. This linguistic-semiotic perspective is emulated by W. C. Spinks, who defines the trickster as an “undifferentiated sign” at the borders of cultural processes of signifying and signification and thus as a potential generator of new signs: inherently Spinks here implies the possibility of such new signs and their potential to transcend and translate culture. With reference to Charles Sanders Peirce, Spinks argues for calling the process of semiosis itself “trickster” (cf. 176). 14. In the context of poststructural philosophy, Michel Serres has probably dealt most extensively with the Hermes figure; cf. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy in two volumes (1983; cf. also Sheehan, “Studies”). Just as well, Derrida’s seminal lecture/essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” comes to mind in this context.

Bibliography Allen, Paula Gunn. “‘Border Studies’: The Intersection of Gender and Color.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: MLA, 1992. 303–19. Print. Ammons, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective. Ed. E. Ammons and Annette White-Parks. Hanover: UP of New England, 1994. xii–xiii. Print. Ballinger, Franchot. “Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster.” MELUS 17.1 (1992): 21–38. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. America. 1986. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988. Print. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print. Breinig, Helmbrecht. “Native Survivance in the Americas: Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 39–59. Print. ———. “Transdifference in the Work of Gerald Vizenor.” Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies. Ed. Deborah Madsen. New York: SUNY P, 2010. 123–32. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1966. 278–94. Print. Doty, William G. “A Lifetime of Trouble-Making: Hermes as Trickster.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Ed. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. 46–65. Print. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Print. Elias, Amy J. “Holding Word Mongers on a Lunge Line: The Postmodernist Writings of Gerald Vizenor and Ishmael Reed.” Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 2000. 85–108. Print. Ganser, Alexandra, Christina Judith Hein, and Karin Höpker. “Trickster Hermeneutics als alterNative Schreib- und Lesepraxis: Gerald Vizenors Harold of Orange und Louis Owens Bone Game.” Kulturhermeneutik: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Umgang mit Kultureller Differenz. Ed. Christoph Ernst, Walter Sparn, and Hedwig Wagner. Munich: Fink, 2008. 159–86. Print.

32 Alexandra Ganser Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Jahner, Elaine. “Allies in the Word Wars: Vizenor’s Uses of Contemporary Critical Theory.” SAIL 9.2 (Spring 1985): 64–69. Print. ———. “Trickster Discourse and Postmodern Strategies.” Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 2000. 38–56. Print. Jung, Carl G. “On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure.” 1956. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Ed. Paul Radin. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. 195–211. Print. Leach, Maria, ed. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Vol. 2. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1950. Print. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies. New York: SUNY P, 2010. Print. ———. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Print. Miller, Dallas. “Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” SAIL 7.1 (Spring 1995): 77–96. Print. Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print. Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. Reesman, Jeanne C. “Introduction.” Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. ix–xxix. Print. Rosier-Smith, Jeanne. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print. Schmidt, Kerstin. “Subverting the Dominant Paradigm: Gerald Vizenor’s Trickster Discourse.” SAIL 7.1 (Spring 1995): 65–75. Print. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. Print. Sheehan, Donald. “On Archaic Studies: Hermes and Hermeneutics.” Arche: Notes and Papers on Archaic Studies 2 (1978): 5–16. Print. Spinks, W. C. Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster: A Dagger of the Mind. London: MacMillan, 1991. Print. ———. “Trickster: Cultural Boundaries and Semiosis.” The American Journal of Semiotics 14.1–4 (Winter 1997): 3–7. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 1–24. Print. ———. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. 1993. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. ———, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. Print. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print.

Transnational Trickster of Theory 33 ———. “A Postmodern Introduction.” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 1–12. Print. ———, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print. ———. “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games.” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 187–211. Print. ———, and A. Robert Lee. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. Yu, Ying Wen. “Playing Indian: Manifest Manners, Simulation, and Pastiche.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 89–102. Print.

3

Universal Peculiarities in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Shrouds of White Earth Kathryn W. Shanley

Since World War II and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a debate has ensued regarding whether or not human rights can, indeed, be declared universal. To many people, this question might seem moot, but to others, attempting to answer it proves deeply conflictual and political, not to mention rife with epistemological and ontological concerns. Perhaps understanding the history of the inception of the Declaration might help to explain the fundamental disagreement. The Commission on Human Rights, which was formed to draft the Declaration in 1947, was headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; she was a woman known for her commitment to social justice. The commission consisted of eighteen members, and they had been chosen “from various political, cultural and religious backgrounds” (UDHR, “History”). Of the fifty U.N. representatives voting on December 10, 1948, eight members abstained, none voted against it, and the rest were for it. Mrs. Roosevelt characterized the debate on the commission as one robustly reflecting members’ differing cultural perspectives. Her colorful remarks delineate the positions taken around the nature of human experience as coming from widely varied cultural points of view. Dr. Chang [China] was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality. The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr. Humphrey [Canada] would have to be eclectic in his approach. His remark, though addressed to Dr. Humphrey, was really directed at Dr. Malik [Lebanon], from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Dr. Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr. Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism! (UDHR, “History”) Dr. Chang’s phrase, “more than one kind of ultimate reality,” is worth pondering. Can there be many “ultimates” when it comes to “reality”? What

Universal Peculiarities 35 we so take for granted nowadays in our evocation of the idea of “human rights” is fraught with a contentious history around terms that are difficult, if not impossible, to define. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration, after all, along the order of a manifesto; it is not law, even though laws were and are destined to flow from it. While most people would seem to accept the principle of respecting human rights, the devil resides in the details. According to noted scholar of international law, Louis Henkin, challenges to the idea of universal human rights have come “from several perspectives. The idea has had an uphill struggle for political and philosophical acceptance. The strongest challenge has been to claims of cultural universality” (12 [emphasis added]). The term “ultimate,” as it is used to describe “reality,” and Henkin’s use of “cultural universality” provide a segue into what I call “universal peculiarities,” humans’ paradoxical and coterminous sameness and difference, perhaps sameness in difference. Although much of Gerald Vizenor’s writing might lend itself to analysis in relation to such ideas, my focus will be on two novels, The Heirs of Columbus (1991) and Shrouds of White Earth (2010). Vizenor’s well-known trickster troping locates his work within a dynamic flow—at times a swirl—of ideas around concepts such as “ultimate” and “reality,” “culture” and “universality.” The politic at the core of Vizenor’s work, I would argue, lobbies for a liberation of human spirit both through language play—a standard understanding in Vizenor criticism— and through deconstructing categories of “human” and “animal.” Deborah Madsen describes Vizenor’s imperatives well when she writes: [O]ld words cannot express an original view of the world. Vizenor cannot use a language of colonial dominance and submission in order to articulate his view of social justice; he cannot deploy the mythology of European “discovery” and American “expansion” to describe the legacy of genocide that has devastated tribal communities [. . .] and he cannot articulate his vision of the future as “survivance” (his term for resistant survival of tribal people) with a language of victimry. (1) Victimry especially must be avoided, since little illumination stems from it as a pre-occupation; in fact, victimry quickly functions as a trope of emotional leprosy, making persons afflicted with it creatures to be avoided at all costs. Hence, Vizenor must and does create a vocabulary “both original and originary” (Madsen 1), through which to fashion new worlds of possibility rather than entrapment. One such move, for example, occurs with Vizenor’s use of the word and image “stone,” as David L. Moore notes in “Moon Vines Among the Ruins”: “Against dominant ideas of Indianness in the abstract ‘burden of conceptual references,’ the substance of stones gives ‘postindian consciousness’ and ‘natural reason’ a protective bench on which to rest. [. . .] The stones are

36 Kathryn W. Shanley silent only as a ‘human silence of shadows’ that eludes noisy historicism” (116). Silence becomes an active presence, making stones as light-weight as wind, speech on the fly away. What Vizenor does to and with stones fits with tribal belief in stones carrying deep histories and the ability to speak. Vine Deloria, Jr. describes the tribal beliefs about the power of stones well in The World We Used to Live In. “Almost every tribe had its own understanding of the important role stones play in the physical/spiritual universe” (149). He notes how the famous folklorist, Frances Densmore “talked with four elders, including Old Buffalo and Used-as-a-Shield, who lived at Standing Rock, about the manner in which the men possessing them performed healings” (Deloria 158). Fittingly then, the narrator of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus tells us, “[t]he stones heal and remember the blue radiance of creation and resurrections” (13). Stone Columbus, the crossblood descendant of Christopher Columbus, represents transformative possibility and a balance principle, for we are also told that “Naanabozho [the Trickster] was the first human born in the world, and the second born, his brother, was a stone” (5). Resurrected three times, Stone Columbus even carries the potential to overcome death. Stones thus become peculiar in Vizenor’s novel, as “peculiar” connotes both “unusual” and “belonging exclusively to” something—they have a shimmering essence inherent in them that not all people see and a voice not all can hear. As Vizenor also states, based on ethnographic accounts, a particular stone “is regarded [by tribal peoples] as the most perfect form of life, since it has a physical integrity in itself and needs no other forms of relationships” (154). Thus the new incarnation of Columbus, Stone Columbus, can be seen to symbolize a fundamental tribal centeredness, both a particularity or peculiarity and an ultimate reality. In the consideration of universal peculiarities and ultimate realities, then, “ultimate” as an adjective can mean “last,” “furthest or farthest,” something ending a process or series; it can also mean the “highest, not subsidiary,” or “basic, fundamental.” The word may even carry the meaning “final.” Hence, Dr. Chang’s phrase, “more than one kind of ultimate reality,” speaks of peculiarities as a kind of universality—perhaps a way to say that our bounded consciousnesses take shape in seemingly incommensurable ways and participate in permeability as play or liberation. Individuality resides in details of identity, however fleeting and mutable. Yet we live for recognition of our shared and shareable realities—harmlessly and playfully swapping participant-observer roles. Perhaps that is what Gerald Vizenor sometimes means by “masturbation,” mutual or solitary. It is a kind of disinterested but engaged recognition, not to be confused with voyeurism. Vizenor’s term “artistic tease” from Shrouds of White Earth also comes to mind (110), which involves physical sensation rather than visual representation (by contract, a voyeur would compulsively repeat the action tied to the visual representation). Creativity through the senses not teleology seems to be the sexuality in Vizenor’s tease.

Universal Peculiarities 37 Healing, in Vizenor’s peculiarities of creativity, stands in contrast to victimry, a term that echoes the word “mimicry,” an imitation of the oppressor rather than a liberation unto oneself. Rather than passing historical trauma along to the next generation, in other words, people who have suffered settler colonialist and other forms of oppression need to transform their suffering through creating new sensual selves, for survivance connotes a healthy embrace of the body.

Intergenerational Trauma and Regeneration through Artistic Tease Healing constitutes a major theme in Vizenor’s work. Although written decades apart, the two novels take up a two-part theme: the first part, how to heal from the intergenerational traumas of history, personal and communal; and the second, how to resist recreating bad, even falsely incomplete, histories—emotive realities and simulated re-enactments—that prevent healing. Put another way, numbing narratives merely afford palliative relief, not genuine healing. The phenomenon commonly referred to as “the boarding school experience” serves as a trope for something bigger than the particularities of the experience itself. In any given decade or place, and among geographically specific peoples, the circumstances Native American children experienced and endured vary widely. To avoid re-inscribing victimry does not serve anyone well, especially if in doing so, we take away the agency and survivance of those children, yet the history should not be erased either. Often subsuming people’s experience into a “universal” idea of connectedness perpetuates the social injustice, when—ironically—the radical otherness of some peoples is the very thing used as an excuse for labels that dehumanize. With claims to “universality,” all inquiry begins with assumptions about the nature of the world, how we define “human being,” and what the place of human beings is in the world. Even if we (as a global community) were to agree on the nature of the world, what it means to be human, and what humans have to do with the rest of creation, we clearly do not agree on how to place value on what we deem to be most essential, what must be recognized, respected, and protected, such that those values can be inscribed into law. As Henkin reminds us, “universal political and even legal acceptance does not guarantee universal respect for human rights” (13). He goes further to illuminate the back-and-forth discursive struggles for dominance in referring to the general acceptance that has grown for and against the UDHR. He writes: Many will see such acceptance as rhetoric or even hypocrisy. I have been sometimes tempted to offer two cheers for hypocrisy in human rights. Two cheers—though not three—recognize that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue”; it is important that the concept of

38 Kathryn W. Shanley human rights is the virtue to which vice has to pay homage in our time. Acceptance, even hypocritical acceptance, is a commitment in principle to which one can be held accountable. Hypocrisy requires concealment that can be uncovered. (13) Human rights are so foregrounded in discourse today that even those who do not believe in them have to pretend they do. I would offer a third cheer: a cheer for the animals, who do not think in terms of virtue or vice at all, but who instead think most poignantly in the sights, senses, and sounds of particularity. And a fourth cheer for sex as the vibrant core of universality. Vizenor’s work brings animals and sex centrally into his rights discourse, at the same time as in some ways he unravels rights discourse all together. Dogroy Beaulieu, the exiled narrator of Shrouds of White Earth, perhaps expresses that ambiguity best when he says of his painting, “[t]hat sense of native chance and irony, however, is more than a portrayal, as you know, my artistic derision is doubled and reversed by the actual article that protects the ironic expression of artists in the Constitution of the White Earth Nation” (109). The philosophy of the legal framework, the Constitution, contains its own means of unraveling it. The letter of law, often seen as a discourse opposite to the trickster trope, does figure into the equation of the redefinition of reality, but as the language of the White Earth Constitution attests, it need not be viewed in binary terms. On the one hand, laws matter in that they put liberating and life-affirming ideas in motion, in circulation; on the other hand, they are nothing without imagination to enliven and complicate their best intentions. How laws are ultimately lived should shape and reshape them. Laws like theories and like constitutions function best as low-flying planes, but not as crop dusters. What laws do in the larger organism called “culture” is set in the terms of discussion, but they are no substitute for healers. Taking three aspects of the legal framework of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, I seek to tease out the trickster implications of universals in Vizenor’s work and to add a storier world of peculiarities. I hope to show how the interplay between the universal and the peculiar can make for healing through transmotion.

Rights (and Wrongs) for Humans and All Their Relations The Preamble to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world [. . .]” (UDHR, “Full Text”). What if—when we talk about “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all the human family” that is supposed to be “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”—what if we are talking about humans as

Universal Peculiarities 39 animals/animals as human? In other words, what if “human” constitutes a false or, at best, limited category? What if the “ultimate” realities of tribal peoples require recognition of the animal peoples? How can we even use such a phrase without evoking the infantilizing discourse that turns Indigenous philosophies into unsophisticated literatures designed for children? How do we speak of such things and not speak in the clichés of colonial discourses? Gerald Vizenor’s mongrel animal world imaginatively locates or points a way out of such clichés, but reading Vizenor requires hard work. His work is difficult for a reason, though, as difficult as deciphering a mongrel’s heritages. Legitimating all heritages as Vizenor’s gesture to make mongrels central, not peripheral to society, disrupts colonizers’ centers. Principally, I would argue, he designs things so that readers are forced to suspend their realities (judgments) and give themselves over to a new world—for one thing, to rattle their privileged sense of themselves as speakers and readers of English. Speakers of English often believe falsely that contemporary tribal worldviews are accessible, or can be fully known, since they are spoken of and in English—metalanguage and language merged. This is a colonizer’s trick to own or claim to own both the voice and the commentator on the voice. Furthermore, many readers seem to believe that their good intentions and right sympathies will save them. Instead, Vizenor unravels readerly privilege. Mongrel worldview creates keen observers and celebrants. As Caliban, the mongrel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for whom Vizenor has written a tribal voice, says in Shrouds of White Earth, “[m]ongrels created the best humans, we had their crossblood wild bounce in our blood, but we never imagined that on two feet the beasts would lose their humor and memories, and turn against those who hauled them from the muck” (16). Rather than superior to all other sentient life forms, humans are the arrogant late-comers to the party of earth’s creation. Animal human and human animal characters appear throughout Vizenor’s novels, ever since Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978). Transom de Bear, the transitional human animal in The Heirs of Columbus, works his magic to steal Columbus’s remains, indeed, to steal the crime. The second chapter of Shrouds of White Earth begins, “[t]he Gallery of Irony Dogs is now located in the former First Church of Christ Scientist” (41), a clever juxtaposition of Indigenous and Western epistemologies, which thus also begins Dogroy Beaulieu’s stories of his artwork, his life’s work, his shrouds. He tells us: I was born, the second time, in the face of a mongrel. My first image of the world, after water and sky, was a grateful bluish black mongrel with white paws, named Miinan or Blueberry, not because of color, but because she ate wild blueberries. Miinan imitated my mother and ate too many blueberries in the bush, so she presented me to that mongrel at birth. The present was to the mongrel, not to me. (60)

40 Kathryn W. Shanley To be “born in the face” of another signifies fundamental recognition, imprinting. For that “other” to be a dog person reverses or opens wide the idea of dog/human companionship in a non-dominant mode. Most crucially, as Lappet Tulip Browne, with “bears and the mightiness of wind” in her blood, tells us in the Bone Courts chapter, “[t]he colonists brought wilderness with them and planted their fears in the woodland, and once here their tragic virtues were unloaded with shame, the unnatural consequences of the loss of personal visions on the landscape of primal realities, cruelties of individualism in the church, and the loneliness of civilization” (80). When we read Browne’s enumeration of Westerners’ “tragic virtues” as referring to the agonistic Christian separation into individuals where persons can only find their way back from “sin” through an equally isolated redemption of self, the question arises as to whether rights discourse fits into Western paradigms that are not suited to tribal peoples. Jill Steans (quoting Kimberly Hutchings) asks that question about whether women’s human rights have a place in the Western discourse on human rights, when “human rights claims are frequently presented as a core part of a Western liberal philosophical tradition that ‘relies on a binary logic in which the feminine has been denigrated as the “other” of (masculine) reason’” (21). She answers the question she has posed by saying that “the meaning of human rights is by no means exclusively legal, nor does it rely primarily on the courts” (21). As a tool used in advocating for the silenced and oppressed on a global stage, human rights discourse is only as good and effective as the entities wielding it. Hence, rights discourse like trickster discourse can open “new possibilities for seeing the world,” as Madsen notes of Vizenor’s use of trickster, “and transforming it [the world] through compassion, of finding a way to reconstruct our discursive relations so we can live with greater fairness and justice” (37). It is the language of idealism rooted in realism. Settler colonialism brings the wrong kind of shame, not what visionquesting means in connecting the individual to his or her community. I relate the shame of which Lappet speaks to the treatment of wildlife in Montana and to the author’s warning that the “fur trade can consume our blood, shadows, and sacred stories” (Heirs 47). The fur trade of today deceptively masquerades as wildlife management. For example, policymakers have created a “bison problem” much like “the Indian problem” of old. Those tracking the slaughter of bison inform us that “[t]he wild bison of the Yellowstone region are America’s last continuously wild populations.” Since 1985, “[n]early 7,200 wild bison have been eliminated from America’s last wild population” (Native News). Defining and confining the “wild” has been a matter of tremendous controversy over the past couple of decades and always gets framed through a certain settler-colonialist math. Bison’s blood, shadows, and sacred stories are not recognized. The debate over the fate of the “genetically pure” bison often takes shape around the question: should the bison be allowed to roam free? For example, the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Office (FWP) has set a goal of 3,500 for the number of bison it wants to

Universal Peculiarities 41 maintain in Yellowstone National Park; the current bison population in the park is 4,900. In pursuit of grazing land, bison move past the boundaries of the park onto private land. The problem from the standpoint of ranchers near the park is that if bison cannot be contained within the park, they might contaminate cattle with brucellosis, a wasting disease that elk can carry and transfer to cattle. Even though there is no scientific evidence that bison have ever transferred brucellosis, ranchers object to bison being free, because bison might cause damage to ranchers’ property; therefore, ranchers want assurances that someone will reimburse them for damages. A similar argument is made for shooting wolves, the other “wild” species whose existence seems theoretically to “threaten” settler colonialist life. Bison slaughter takes place through a lottery every year—a gambling metaphor with which Vizenor could make much fun. The plain option to stop the slaughter involves finding homes for the bison, wards such as they are. Since bison proliferate at a rate of 9 percent per year, a permanent plan needs to be put into place. Ted Turner, who owns a 10,000-acre ranch in Montana, south of Bozeman, took in 86 bison with the stipulation that he be allowed to keep 75 percent of the offspring, a number to which many objected. But when the tribes from the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Reservations put together a plan to take small herds, the rhetoric heated up. It was as though “wild Indians” were being allowed to “roam” again. Both reservations now have herds in careful quarantine, but new legal suits are filed every month as the controversy continues to rage, including suits to determine who has jurisdiction over the “wild bison,” whether they are livestock or wildlife (Native News). For the past nine years, the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes have sought a co-management plan with Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) of the National Bison Range—a park established in the first decades of the twentieth century on reservation land with tribal monies and which is home to about 500 less “genetically pure” bison (cf. Saha and Hill-Hart). Over forty environmental organizations opposed the Tribes’ being granted a co-management contract. One of the objections voiced was that the Tribes would force their religion on non-Natives. When the plan for the Tribes to co-manage the bison range was given a trial run, many of the FWP employees who did not quit outright sabotaged the effort (180). The Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes have not gotten a contract since 2008, though their record in taking over federal environmental programs is exemplary. Robin Saha and Jennifer Hill-Hart conclude: “Yet the process [of the Tribes attempting rightly to co-manage the National Bison Range] in many respects has not been fair, and [. . .] many aspects of co-management of the NBR did not adhere well to the UNDRIP [United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] and appeared to be clear violations of Indigenous rights” (179). Clearly, the world needs more judges and similar wildlife managers to “enter the shadow realities of tribal consciousness” (Heirs 84) as Judge Lord

42 Kathryn W. Shanley does in the Bone Courts in The Heirs of Columbus, in order to understand the bison point of view and shift away from dominance discourses. In the Bone Courts, we encounter a witness who can speak to the issue of animal humans, Memphis the Panther. She seems to intuit that her animal power can easily be misinterpreted as too “feminine” in the Great Chain of Being to speak truth to power, yet she has confidence in being an animal. “She laid both black paws on the rail, purred in the witness chair, and waited for the judge to see that she was a panther. She was born to crouch, but she worried that such natural poses would be seen as servile in a courtroom” (70). Later we are told, “[t]he judge heard a woman in the witness chair; the heirs saw a panther” (70). Memphis explains her ontological perspectives to the judge: “No, evolution is a highbred delusion, we were created by a trickster mongrel who disguised the outside of creatures with skin and hair, beaks and ears, but we are animals on hold with interior visions” (70). Her description fits with ideas of universality inasmuch as a truth claim is being made for the possibility of seeing the “panther” instead of the human-appearing witness, a claim that does not, however, erase difference, and in this particular courtroom, the peculiar universals matter if a crime is to be established.

Rights (and Rites) in Signatures of Survivance The Declaration goes on to say: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts [. . .] freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people” (UDHR, “Full Text”). Is it possible to talk about remedies for the kinds of “contempt for human rights” spoken of above without detailing the ironies of colonial history? The Heirs of Columbus turns the American national narrative about itself on its head, by absorbing Columbus into Mayan bloodlines instead of repudiating him, by floating tribal worlds outside national boundaries, and by symbolically instilling compassion and sex at the core of the healing enterprise. Moreover, gentle humor resides in Vizenor’s carnival of reversals when Jesus comes to the tribal world as a mute child in need of a manicure in Heirs and as a figure who both heals and folds the healing genetic patterns in place. The gentle Jesus is saved by and then belongs to tribal people. Vizenor writes: “The Blessed Virgin Mary imagined the child she conceived in a burst of blues, so our annunciation could be the same, clonal imagination and parthenogenesis, or the ecstasies of wild dance” (148). The predominant image motif around the color blue signals the sacred power of healing in ways that force readers to embark on a “cross-blood-cultural” journey, equal to “discovering” a new land. Blue becomes a universal through the depiction of sexual power, the “burst” of blue that affords the Virgin Mary the orgasm the Christian mythology denies her. In Shrouds of White Earth, Native art and arts of transmotion fold the narrator’s transformative vision into a larger history. “Freedom of speech and

Universal Peculiarities 43 belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people” in the Universal Declaration, but it took the drafting of articles to detail freedom of artistic and political expression. Dogroy Beaulieu’s triptych, which depicts “blue, white, and green cranes, neck to neck, with huge bright blue human eyes, and the orange feet of children” (Shrouds 115) poignantly captures the evil transformation brought on by the slaughter of hunters with “gnarled” hands and “decomposed” faces (115). The artist speaks to his old friend of the romanticism the two of them learned about in the university, and he says, “I declare with you that straightforward, heartfelt sense of freedom, and for natives, continental liberty, and that is the emotive experience that creates light” (118–19). Emotions in human animals and animal humans create light through morphic resonance between and among entities—those affinities and moments of recognition that weave us together by threads of commonality. Beaulieu explains that “[m]y portrayals are sensations not representations” (116).

Rights (and Lefts): To Engender Worth The Declaration tells us that “the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” (UDHR, “Full Text”). What if we do not look at the world through a “gender” lens? What happens if, instead of proliferating letters such as LGBTQ to describe a basic yet profoundly mysterious human life force, we start over without prudery or domination? Vizenor, it seems, would have us start over with a respect for self-love that includes masturbation and sex that are not teleologically focused. More than biological identity or need, sexuality in Vizenor’s work links to imagination and liberty. In Shrouds, the narrator tells us about one of the seven women who share his studio home with him. “Emily of Praise, by the way, masturbates by choice and with an extraordinary sense of avian adventure” (55). Through his characterization of her, he defines masturbation—at least the kind in which she is engaged—as a sensual ecstasy. “Many, many nights we have waited for the natural whirs of an erotic swan and other sounds, and together, by feathers and fingers, we whisper a shared sensation on the magical flight overnight, and easily alight in the perfect cadence of an orgasm” (55). Some would argue that before the intrusion of Christianity upon Indigenous people of Native North America, gender roles were most often viewed as part of natural cycles and processes. Certainly the extant record of alternative gender identities in the early contact period leaves no doubt about the existence of alternative worldviews among Indigenous people regarding the multiple and expressive possibilities around human eroticism, sexuality, and adaptive social roles. Lillian Ackerman and Laura Klein, in their introduction to Women and Power in Native North America, assert that gender

44 Kathryn W. Shanley is not ideologically tied to biology as it is in Western European cultures, but rather is connected to spiritual power (12–16). Will Roscoe, in Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, identifies at least 134 tribal groups with alternative genders—third and fourth—in the extant literature (223–47). What if Indian Country recognized the value more of soothing its internally colonialized wounds that manifest as homophobia and would begin healing from missionary trauma and theft, perhaps the biggest theft of all? Academia also seems to stand back from truly engaging topics related to alternative ways of looking at Indigenous sexualities, genders, and transforming roles. Looking through the indexes of many books published on Vizenor’s work, for instance, one finds that none of them had indexed the words, “masturbation” and “sex,” even though any decent concordance would identify significantly repeated words. Similar omissions occur, for example, when it comes to teaching about the rapes in James Welch’s Fools Crow. Vizenor portrays robust sexuality and gender expression in a way few other writers do. In addition to the abundance of cross-dressers and other transitive personages sprinkled throughout Vizenor’s narratives, masturbators go about their business unabashedly. In Heirs, an important aspect of rewriting Columbus involves healing—his healing—of a strange and debilitating sexual disease. “That night [Columbus] abandoned the curve of his pain in her hands and thighs and entered her maw to become a woman, a bear, a hand talker. Her penis was hidden and blue, and his hair burned blue, the best stories in his blood. Samana vanished overnight in the New World” (40). His recovery, however, does not last long. “Cruel and bitter ironies abound in the missions of wealth and Old World civilizations. Overnight his discoveries reduced tribal cultures to the status of slaves; at the same time the stories in his blood were liberated by a tribal hand talker” (41). Meanwhile Samana conceives a child, a girl, and the heirs of Columbus gain power in the New World. Dogroy, the narrator of Shrouds, tells us of his liberation, how, though less dramatic than Columbus’s, it happens through Cimone and their “moans in the cove, and how the sound of our orgasms mingled with the recorded voices of the animated documentary on native sacrifice” (143).

Conclusion: Lost in Translation Vizenor consistently gestures toward a “real” place outside of language where a vibrant yet forever moving truth resides. Through the character of the laser shaman, he speaks: “‘Our realities are shadows, a trace of the real that stimulates sound and simulation of touch, but our moccasins are better worn than told to show the heart of tribal realities,’ said the laser shaman. ‘The realities that were stolen by cold reason and manifest manners’” (Heirs 84). Without evoking nostalgic traditions of bygone times, since tradition signifies stagnancy to Vizenor, he offers the adage that “moccasins are

Universal Peculiarities 45 better worn than told,” in the communal centers where living critique keeps things real, or, as some might say, “where the rubber meets the road.” In terms of human rights discourse, according to Héctor Gros Espiell, “cultural diversity and particularities, which are real and enriching, can never alter the essence of the idea of the universality of human rights or the concept [. . .] that human beings, as a consequence of their dignity, possess rights that must be recognized, promoted, guaranteed and protected by both national and international law” (533). Add animals and animal dignity to the equation as well as sexuality and gender diversity—then the real conversation can begin. Throughout Native American communities, Native people carry names handed down through story, names that shimmer with the unabashed belief in connectedness through shared histories, reciprocity with human and non-human entities, honor, and chance. Such names can have a real and, at the same time, unreal quality to them. Names meant to honor people within communities can be emotionally evocative to insiders at the same time as outsiders to Native languages and experiences find humor in them. Vizenor restores the exoticism to Native naming and epistemologies in a respectful way that requires creative thinking on the part of readers. For example, it is hard not to feel moved when Felipa Flowers, a character who goes off to find the human remains of Pocahontas, is murdered at Gravesend in The Heirs of Columbus. I cried. How real she had become to me. Empathy and imagination connect these examples. I picture a person whom I had never seen before but have imagined in my head—she is real to me in an odd and inexplicable way. The peculiarities in Vizenor’s two novels unite us through a universal compassion, “the dignity which is inherent in the human personality” (Espiell 532). Finally, Vizenor’s fictional worlds build from a compelling gentleness and strength in the wild tease of dignity in difference. Declaring rights is only the starting point of respecting inherent dignity, animal and human. The universal is best defined through our imagined and realized peculiarities, and through narrative chance. The stakes are high—both in terms of the fate of animal humans and human animals and in terms of the vibrant earth as we know it. As Vizenor writes, “[t]he tribe is a game, the children are a game, but evil and fear are chances, and nothing in the world is more real than the moccasin game. [. . .] This is your last chance to save the game and the real” (Heirs 21). Oral traditions live through keeping it real.

Bibliography Ackerman, Lillian A., and Laura F. Klein. Women and Power in Native North America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2000. Print. Bourke, Joanna. What It Means to Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013. Print. Deloria, Vine, Jr. The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2006. Print.

46 Kathryn W. Shanley Espiell, Héctor Gros. “Universality of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity.” International Social Science Journal 50 (1998): 525–34. Print. Henkin, Louis. “The Universality of the Concept of Human Rights.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 506 (Nov. 1989): 10–16. JSTOR. Web. 8 June 2014. Hutchings, Kimberly. “Speaking and Hearing Habermasian Discourse Ethics, Feminism and IR.” Review of International Studies 31.1 (2005): 158. Print. Madsen, Deborah. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Chapel Hill: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Print. ———, and A. Robert Lee. Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010. Print. Moore, David L. “Moon Vines among the Ruins: Vizenor’s Poetics of Native Presence.” Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Deborah Madsen and A. Robert Lee. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010. 106–28. Print. Native News Online Staff. “Yellowstone Begins 2014 Wild Bison Slaughter.” NativeNewsOnline.Net. Native News Online, 22 Feb. 2014. Web. 1 April 2014. . Newman, Saul. Reappraising the Political: Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. 9–24. Print. Roscoe, Will. The Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Print. Saha, Robin, and Jennifer Hill-Hart. “Federal-Tribal Comanagement of the National Bison Range.” Mapping Indigenous Presence: North Scandinavian and North American Perspectives. Ed. Kathryn W. Shanley and Bjorg Evjen. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2015. 143–88. Print. Steans, Jill. “Debating Women’s Human Rights as a Universal Feminist Project: Defending Women’s Human Rights as a Political Tool.” Review of International Studies 33.1 (Jan. 1997): 11–27. Print. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Full Text.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations, n.d. Web. 8 June 2014. . “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, History of the Document.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations, n.d. Web. 8 June 2014. Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Rpt. of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St. Paul, MN: Truck P, 1978. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. ———. Shrouds of White Earth. Albany: SUNY P, 2010. Print. ———, and Jill Doerfler. The White Earth Nation: Ratifications of a Native Democratic Constitution. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print. Welch, James. Fools Crow. 1986. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

4

Jiibayag Ashegiiwe Revenants, Gerald Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon1 Chris LaLonde

Let us begin with a speculation, or rather, a series of speculations—one concerning revenants, concerning Gerald Vizenor, concerning writing. There are ghosts everywhere. It makes sense, does it not, for from the beginning Vizenor’s texts remind us of the dead. The last photograph in The People Named the Chippewa (1984), taken by Vizenor himself, is of a handful of Anishinaabe grave houses on a Leech Lake reservation wooded plot, early winter. That same year, Matsushima presents us with two winter haiku: grave birds toast the new names in stone perched on plastic flowers and corner diner near the railroad depot graves closed for repairs. (Vizenor) Earlier still, the final scene in 1972’s The Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People draws in on two gravediggers filling the hole containing the casket of John KaKa Geesick after the interment rites. Still earlier, a haiku from Raising the Moon Vines (1964, republished 1999): birch leaves brighten the grave markers in the cold rain. (Vizenor) Still, shovelfuls of cold winter dirt, photographs, and, especially, haiku, a form that for Vizenor accentuates “the importance of what is not there” (Raising the Moon Vines, Introduction), are perhaps not properly the haunts of haunts. Not to worry, everywhere there are ghosts. Don’t be afraid. Let us conjure them, together.

48 Chris LaLonde Vizenor’s texts return the dead to us. For instance, in Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade (1978), we read that Thomas White Hawk puts pen to paper and records a dream he had, while in the Vermillion, South Dakota jail, of his dead parents appearing to him in a dream. They “floated” toward him out of a fog and, once by his bunk, they seemed to be “hovering” above the floor and the objects in his cell. He could see the sink beneath the bottom of his mother’s garment (136–37). There are Tatari, the spirits of vengeance (16, 25), and Atomu ghosts (96) in Hiroshima Bugi (2003). There, Ronin writes that “the dead were resurrected in museums, in the wretched name of peace” (78). Blue puppets and their puppeteers, first encountered in Corsica, haunt Christopher Columbus in The Heirs of Columbus (1991). Truthfully now, do not be afraid. Vizenor’s texts apprehend specters even as they conjure them: case in point, the rendering in Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (2006) of 3rd Infantry men and journalists holed up in Bugonaygeshig’s cabin on the shores of Leech Lake through a cold October night in 1898: [. . .] wounded soldiers newspaper storiers side by side overnight in a dark cabin haunted by natives sound of sacred rattles zhiishiigwan (78) Yes, the terrified soldiers and reporters fear the Pillagers outside in the darkness. As revenants, though, as ghosts, the Pillagers are revealed in Bear Island to be a haunting presence to the pinned-down men because they are linked to the past and the future. In Specters of Marx (1993, 1994), Jacques Derrida attends to the revenant in response, initially, to the call of a 1992 international multidisciplinary conference entitled “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective.” In answer to the question of Marxism’s condition and direction, its present and its future, Derrida follows the lead offered in the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto (1848): “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism” (Marx and Engels 8). Already named in 1848, yet still to come, at least in the hopes of Marx, Engels, and the Communist League, communism is at once a haunting return in the present of something from the past and the haunting specter in the present of a promised, not-yet-realized future. Thus, for Derrida, both past and future can “only be for ghosts” (Specters of Marx 37), for the former is what engenders them and the latter must be open and available to and for their return.2

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 49 In its final section, a scant five stanzas after revealing soldiers and reporters are haunted by Natives, Bear Island takes pains to add the thoughts and actions of some of the soldiers. Vizenor paraphrases an account of the battle written by Private George Wicker and published in 1899. There Wicker acknowledges that the Natives were only defending their ever-shrinking homeland and diminishing rights and that not only did other soldiers share with Wicker a recognition of this painful reality, so too were they loathe to fire on the Pillagers. In short, then, the Natives are haunting because they bear with them past wrongs and injustices. The suffering and loss remains unaddressed, at best, and the haunting will continue until they are taken into account and the wrongs have been righted. Earlier, Bear Island voices the “cultural separations / at sand creek” (Bear Island 31), where 220 Cheyenne were massacred in 1864, and Wounded Knee, where close to 300 Miniconjou Sioux were massacred in December 1890, as prime examples of the “wonted genocide,” “missions of genocide,” and “prairie genocide” (Bear Island 16, 30, 32) practiced against the Natives of North America. The militia at Sand Creek “wasted forever / the stars and stripes” (Bear Island 31), emptied forever the nation’s symbol of union and freedom with its actions, and agents of the nation, both before and ever after, “bear the cruelty of american creation” (Bear Island 35). This holds, the poem reminds us, for the Indian agent in Walker and the soldiers at Sugar Point. At the same time, in Bear Island the haunting Natives presage what is in store for Wicker and at least some of his compatriots. They steal sacred items from the cabin—eagle feathers, mide drums, birchbark scrolls—after the Pillagers leave the field of battle victorious. Given the centrality of the drum, the scrolls, and the Midewewin society to Anishinaabe culture and lifeways, the thefts are especially horrific crimes. It is no wonder, then, that the acts of Wicker and others are characterized as “absolute savagery” (Bear Island 88), and what is stolen is labeled “accursed booty” (Bear Island 87). A generation later and a continent away, the Beaulieu brothers steal behind enemy lines in France in an attempt to gather information on machine gun placements and capture enemy soldiers. Basile blackens his face and hands for camouflage while Aloysius paints blue bands and black and rouge circles on his face. Although Basile makes clear that his brother’s face paint is “more aesthetic than menace, a comic mask, but not the war paint of a traditional native ceremony” (Blue Ravens 129), his visage and a bloody knife so scare 17 German soldiers that they surrender without a fight for fear they will certainly be scalped if they resist (Blue Ravens 131). Later, the narrative makes clear that the surrender of four separate groups of German soldiers is due to the “Indien” that lurks in their imagination: that is, “the enemy was haunted by the fear of being scalped” (Blue Ravens 233, 232). Cursed by their actions to be haunted by Natives, the soldiers cringe at the sound of sacred rattles. For the reader, though, there is nothing to be afraid of here; there is something to be aware of. My examples of returning dead in Vizenor’s texts, the specters that are his gift, share with Bear

50 Chris LaLonde Island’s haunting Natives a connection to sound. The chattering of the blue puppets touched Columbus’s bones (The Heirs of Columbus 30) when first heard, and it resonated deep inside him then and each subsequent time he heard what is later described as the “haunting sound of blue puppets” (The Heirs of Columbus 99) that Felipa Flowers also hears when she talks with Pellegrine Treves in London at a royal masque held to honor Pocahontas’s memory. In Hiroshima Bugi, the dead resurrected by Japan and the West to take their place in museums and stand in silent testimony to a politics of victimry are countered by the daily ghost parade where, if one listens closely, one “can hear the undertone, the hints of their sudden, lost breath in the rain” (Hiroshima Bugi 78). One hears, that is, what the narrative of victimry would silence; one hears the last breath drawn, the secession of breath. In an early morning in France near the Visle river, “Aloysius shouted, a wild curse, and rushed the enemy” (Blue Ravens 131). And before the ghosts of his parents emerge out of a fog in his dream, Thomas White Hawk writes of hearing sound: “At first, in the dream I heard a soft sound, something like wind blowing but someone talking in the distance. The voices were barely discernible from the constant winds. Then my father and mother appeared” (Wordarrows 136). Sound, breath, voice, voices: singly and together they announce the specters’ return. They announce the haunting return of the Native. In White Hawk’s written account of his dream, singular becomes plural; in the space between two sentences on the page, a person speaking some distance from Thomas White Hawk is transformed into voices talking. The voices could be White Hawk’s parents talking with each other about their son, obviously, although that does not account for the single voice, so we need to give another listen; an opening speculation: there, barely discernible, one can hear first Vizenor and then, in conversation, Vizenor and Derrida. That conversation centers on writing and orality, on absence and presence. Vizenor inscribes the conversation in Fugitive Poses. There, he quotes Derrida across multiple texts on the matter of différance, on writing and the book, and on voice. Vizenor teases from Derrida an articulation of the nature of the spoken word and of oral stories, lighting, for instance, on Derrida’s statement in Speech and Phenomena that “[m]y words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me, [. . .] seem not to fall outside me, outside my breath” (qtd. in Fugitive Poses 63). Speech and oral stories sound a note of presence, then: in Vizenor’s words, “[t]he sound of stories in the ear is a sure sense of our presence, and the other traces of that nature are survivance” (Fugitive Poses 63). “Listen,” Vizenor writes, never one to mince words, “our presence is a native trace in the book” (Fugitive Poses 63). In Specters of Marx, Derrida holds that the appeal of Marcellus in Hamlet for a scholar (Horatio) to speak to the ghost remains open and vital, and he imagines one day, centuries later, a “scholar” (Specters 12) would appear “capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 51 non-life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility. Better (or worse) he would know how to address himself to spirits” (Specters 12). Enter Vizenor. Appealing to the aural, addressing Derrida, addressing us, Vizenor, as that scholar, as that artist, tells us that voice, natural sound, and movement articulate Native presence in the book. Small wonder, then, that the first voice Thomas White Hawk hears in his dreaming dream is characterized as a “soft sound” (Wordarrows 136) carried by and melded with the wind. Small wonder, too, that in Fugitive Poses the conversation with Derrida—part of an “essay” that Vizenor characterizes as “a tease of theories, a critique of certainties and testimonies as second nature in the literature of survivance” (Fugitive Poses 63)—is followed by a turn to the Ghost Dance as an example of survivance. The dead and the absent return, so Wovoka’s vision foretells, and with that return comes “a sacred restitution of presence” (Fugitive Poses 65), followed by revitalization and renewal.3 The specific invocation of the revenant, the return of the dead, in Shrouds of White Earth (2010) accentuates movement and in doing so highlights transmotion, “that sense of native motion and an active presence” (Fugitive Poses 15). Dogroy Beaulieu, a White Earth Anishinaabe visual artist, is banished from the reservation by the tradition fascists who can neither fathom nor tolerate irony and who cling to “mundane scenes of absence” (Shrouds 34). Beaulieu’s shrouds, upon which appear the “faint traces of natural motion and bird flight” (Shrouds 8) after they have covered for some months the broken bodies of birds and animals killed on the reservation, are too much for the tradition fascists to bear. Early on, Dogroy tells his writer friend what the narrative would have the reader recognize: “You know, the executioners, otherwise the tradition fascists, should be wary of my revenant creatures” (Shrouds 5) because they are bound to return as telling reminders of all the tradition fascists have and would kill and bury. The specters demand their attention and address. They demand ours, as well. The shrouds haunt the tradition fascists, the museums in which they are exhibited, and the galleries where they are displayed for sale. These are telling haunts. Museums have all too often opted for the indian artist whose work can be easily characterized as primitive, for that work hews to what Dogroy labels “the romance of the primitive as a representation of native reality” (Shrouds 17). That is, they want art that denies presence. Galleries, in turn, position the indian and their art as commodity, which is to say, as “bankable simulation[s]” (Manifest Manners 11) upon which they speculate. In each case, what the revenant would have tribal leaders, curators, patrons, gallery owners, and customers recognize is how, despite the “ravaged and ruined” (Shrouds 8) bodies of the birds and animals, despite the fact that those beings have been “sacrificed and crucified” (Shrouds 10), the trace of flight, of motion, still remains, can still be conjured forth in and through visual and written art, and with it what remains, as well, is Native survivance. Vizenor asserts in The Trickster of Liberty (1988) that the writer “cedes the landscape” that is the written text “to the reader and then dies” (xi).

52 Chris LaLonde Listening closely and following his lead, then, a second speculation concerning the revenant, Vizenor, and writing: the first voice that Thomas White Hawk hears in his dream, a voice that we become privy to when we read the text, is Vizenor’s. As revenant, Vizenor the author returns that we might recognize the primacy of voice, the spoken word, oral stories, oral tradition. Carried by and melding with the wind, the voice of the specter invites us to recognize the deep connection between Vizenor’s art and the natural world. Vizenor articulates this connection most pointedly in his remarks on haiku and his writing. In the introduction to Favor of Crows (2014), he writes that “the imagistic scenes of haiku were neither exotic nor obscure to me,” (xi) for haiku, which in the introduction to Raising the Moon Vines (n. pag.) he tells us was his “start as a writer,” is born of “that sense of nature in the word. [. . .] Nature, in my experience, is tricky, a constant tease, and even the most common Native traces of the seasons are situations of chance and scenes of impermanence” (Vizenor). In the spirit of Vizenor, then, and Kimberly Blaeser, this Vienna zephyr Basho wades in the shallows words born on the wind (Vizenor, Cranes Arise) Like Dogroy Beaulieu, Almost Browne is an artist of images. He appears throughout Vizenor’s body of work, including Chair of Tears (2012), his humorous critique of the academy, university politics, Native Studies programs, and Native literary nationalists. There, we read that Almost is banished from the reservation by the tradition fascists who, as the ruling of the tribal judge makes clear, hold “that the laser shaman was not a traditional guiding light” (Chair 90). The face of Columbus that Almost projects rising above the treeline and over the mission pond cemetery on the reservation before being banished haunts some on the reservation (Chair 90), and his projections of Native warriors and large animals roaming the interstates, although “evidence of native creative and ironic expressions” (Chair 93) get him into trouble off the reservation later, to be sure. That said, while teaching at the University of Minnesota, it is his projection of John Berryman, “a haunting and ghostly laser image of the poet and professor” (Chair 93), that is most unsettling to the senior faculty. Indeed, his colleagues attempt to censure the students in Almost’s seminar following the projection they consider a “desecration” of Berryman (Chair 93). The faculty are also disturbed when Captain Shammer, the newly appointed head of the Department of Native American Indian Studies, wears a mask of Berryman around campus and at lunch at the faculty club. There is deep and exquisite irony in the text’s turn to American poet John Berryman, of course, for Vizenor early on and throughout his writing career, no matter the genre, has invoked Anishinaabe dream songs, their connection

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 53 to the Anishinaabe worldview, and their importance to the People. In the introduction to Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (1993, rev. ed.), Vizenor begins by telling the reader that “[t]he dream songs were the signatures of personal and communal woodland identities” (3). The dream songs are “imagistic visions of motion and [. . .] a personal tease of nature” (Favor of Crows xiv) that, like haiku for Vizenor, are born of and articulate presence. They give voice to and are exemplars of survivance. The narrative suggests that both the senior Native faculty in the department and the non-Native faculty from across the university are troubled by the representations of Berryman. What is it about Berryman’s return as a revenant that is so haunting to Native and non-Native faculty? It cannot be either the laser projection or the masks, that is to say it cannot simply be the fact that they are representations, for neither other projections nor other masks are described as haunting. There is something about Berryman. The easy, obvious, answer, perhaps, is that the projection and mask are ghostly images because what they reveal strikes a bit too close to home for the faculty: they are unsettled by the suicide of a fellow faculty member, are not keen to face either that which remains undone or the discomforting truth that what one has done and plans to do may not be enough to keep open the future. More must be said, however, given that in Berryman’s case what remains undone at the time of his jump from the Washington Avenue Bridge was a collection of essays and stories entitled The Freedom of the Poet, to be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. According to Robert Giroux, a contract was sent to Berryman early in 1971 for a project the two men had been discussing since 1968 and for which Berryman crafted a Table of Contents no later than early 1970. Berryman misplaced the contracts, apparently, so they had to be sent again. Most of the pieces that were to become The Freedom of the Poet, 29 of 37, had already been published. Of those eight new, or at least unpublished, six were found shortly after Berryman’s death. Of two, no trace was found in the search of Berryman’s papers: one was on Job, with the title “Man and the Lord.” The other was entitled “Africa.” In his biography of Berryman, Paul Mariani notes that twenty years earlier, Berryman delivered a lecture at the University of Vermont on American fiction at mid-century that he entitled “Africa.” According to Mariani, Berryman held that, in light of American culture and society grown increasingly complex, “many second-rate American novelists had resorted to dealing with no society at all, and a number had turned to Africa as they dimly understood it” (238). That dim understanding imagined Africa as “an idealized and exotic place” (Mariani 238). We do not know if “Africa” in the proposed Table of Contents referred to the 1951 lecture or to a new essay, of course, but what we do know is that when John Berryman waved to pedestrians crossing the bridge and then leapt, what remains undone, if you will, are an essay on a foundational text in the foundational religious text of the West and an essay on

54 Chris LaLonde either a continent decidedly not the West or on the treatment by American novelists of that continent, an essay for which Giroux had only a cryptic note from Berryman: “cf ‘Olive Schreiner Foaming at the Mouth’” (vii). The note could point to either possibility for “Africa” to be sure, but no matter which, its reference to Schreiner carries with it the disturbing depiction of South Africa’s Indigenous people offered in The Story of an African Farm (1883). Scholars note that while Schreiner’s first novel is marked by a certain feminist sensibility and awareness and critique of patriarchy’s positioning of women, it nevertheless hews to Western ideologies of race. Early in the novel, for instance, we read that the “kaffer servants” on the farm were not present at Sunday religious services because “Tant Sannie held they were descended from apes and needed no salvation” (85), and late in the text a young boy is described as a “small naked nigger” (Schreiner 226) and an animal. Schreiner’s novel can also be read as indicative of the impulse in colonial discourse to empty the land being colonized of any Indigenous population understood to be human, there being little attention in the text paid to the Indigenous population of South Africa.4 A third speculation, then: it is not the suicide itself that is haunting; rather, Berryman returns to haunt the academy and the reader because what remains undone, what remains to be done, is an engagement, in writing, with place, the example here is Africa, and with people, the example here the Indigenous peoples of the continent, that are positioned and identified by the West as other—exotic or otherwise.

Enter Derrida, following Vizenor Robert Young has argued that it makes sense to situate post-structuralism’s origins not in the student and labor-fueled tumult of May 1968 but instead in north Africa and the Algerian war of independence. In Young’s reading, post-structuralism is a response to colonialism, and deconstruction is nothing less than an “insurrection” (Postcolonialism 412) against the West and its ways of knowing and being in the world. Alina Sajed contends that “deconstruction (at least the kind that is associated with Derrida, Cixous, and Lyotard) emerged out of an anti-colonial stance, as a project of displacement and subversion of the category of ‘the West’ in the context of the Algerian War against French colonialism” (151–52). Although I find problematic her further claim that the work of the three theorists named ends up remaining inside the “boundaries of Western discourse” (149), the understanding that she shares with others concerning north Africa’s importance to post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and the link between the two illuminates another reason why it makes sense that Vizenor’s texts would take the measure of Derrida’s thought and, in recognizable Vizenorian fashion, deploy Derrida as a character. Chance, one of the women of the Creature Arts living with Dogroy first at his reservation studio “on a natural mound near the Wild Rice River” (Chair 16) and later near the Irony Dogs Gallery in Minneapolis after Beaulieu is

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 55 banished from White Earth, trains mongrel dogs to sense the absence of irony and to signal that absence with dancing and barking. Derrida, a white mongrel with black paws, is especially sensitive to the absence of irony. In describing the mongrel, may we say mixedblood, as related to the Sloughi and the pied noir of the aporia seminars he attends with the narrator, the narrative explicitly sounds the philosopher’s link to Algeria and thus to the intersection of critiques of Western epistemology and difference. In identifying that Derrida, the irony dog, is considered a faculty member of the Department of Native American Indian Studies (Chair 69), Vizenor’s text indicates that bringing together deconstruction and Native ways of knowing does not necessarily result in aporia. Quite the contrary, for both recognize the key role chance plays in the world. Irony dogs us, but one need not worry, one need not be afraid, for that is a very good thing. Not properly an irony dog, Virga dogs Ronin in Hiroshima Bugi; when she first appears she maintains an escape distance, circles him, follows him, “tracks him at a distance” (Hiroshima Bugi 75). Even after she grows accustomed to Ronin and begins to run ahead of him and Miko, Virga looks back to make certain she does not lose them. A teaser from first to last, Ronin describes the mongrel as “my eternal shadow, a tricky trace of my motion and natural reason” (Hiroshima Bugi 55). As such, the dog, who is the most loyal of the Peace Park roamers, is linked to fundamental elements of the Anishinaabe worldview. In the origin story of the Anishinaabe, Gitche Manitou has a vision of the earth and the universe. Reflecting on what he has seen, Gitche Manitou recognizes that the world is marked by cycles and the dynamic interplay of change and constancy (Johnston 11–12). This understanding of the world, an understanding linked to an understanding of nature, of the cycles of both flora and fauna, is the ground upon which the Anishinaabe have apprehended and lived with the world. Motion, in turn, resonates with the seasonal round of the people, a cycle of movement born of an understanding of place and the seasons. Virga is also linked to irony because of her name, a word that describes rain that falls but does not reach the ground. Virga is in the Peace Park every morning, ready to greet the specters of the incinerated children when they return for the haunting ghost parade at 8:15 (Hiroshima Bugi 55). Fittingly, she stands on a photograph of Emperor Hirohito, for the ghosts of the children haunt the Emperor then and the Emperor now, Japan, and, indeed, the world (Hiroshima Bugi 150). What is telling though is the narrative’s description of a photograph that is stomped on and mutilated (Hiroshima Bugi 46, 128) as “creased” (Hiroshima Bugi 55). Disturbed by the ravaged images, Richie, the ultra-nationalist pretending to be a journalist in order to get close to Ronin and see if he can be enlisted in their cause, tries to “mend the creases in the picture” (Hiroshima Bugi 128). A crease is a contact zone, a liminal both-and, neither-nor space where presencing is possible. It is, that is, the place for specters, for revenants, so it is telling that Ritchie would try to remove the creases and apropos that Virga would stand on them as she awaits the return of the ghosts.

56 Chris LaLonde In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor proclaims that the “native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty” (15). Speaking in the broadest possible terms, the crease of representation—be the representation visual, aural, oral, or written—is what makes possible the specter’s return. What is more, the narrative’s description of Virga as a “mongrel healer” (Hiroshima Bugi 106), whose movements and touch elicit laughter from the children at the Peace Park, at the very least suggests that artistic creations cannot only be a haunt for ghosts, they can be a site where healing becomes possible. We need to be careful here, as we try to make sense of the conjuring before us, given that a criticism leveled against Derrida and deconstruction is that the latter “is seen to be [too] overly preoccupied with textuality and language to tell us anything significant about the concrete mechanisms of colonial oppression” (Sajed 145). When Vizenor invokes Derrida and deconstruction, however, at least as part of an articulation of haunting presences, his texts voice both an attention to textuality and language and an understanding of the “concrete mechanisms” used by the majority culture as part of the attempt to position the Native as indian in a narrative of victimry. The latter is made painfully clear by the haunting presence of Marleen American Horse in Shrouds of White Earth. Originally from the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, land set aside for the Three Affiliated Tribes, American Horse was part of the roughly 80 percent of Natives forced to relocate by the construction of the Garrison Dam and the resulting lake. She moves to the Twin Cities with her belongings in a paper bag, marries an abusive white man with whom she has three children, and eventually turns to alcohol in response to the abuse. This leads to more abuse, more alcohol, and finally the loss of her children to social services. Evicted and down to her last dime, Marleen American Horse turns to Beaulieu’s friend for help, at the time an advocate for Natives in the Twin Cities, and together the three of them listen as agency after agency concocts excuse after excuse for why they cannot help her. Shrouds of White Earth would have the reader see that “the absence of services is a strategy that encourages stories of victimry, and, at the same time, disregards the stories of presence and Native survivance” (99–100). The alibis of the agencies are met with necessary humor, a certain survival strategy, and throughout what the narrative terms the “moral crimes” (Shrouds 100) Marleen American Horse is made to suffer, her sense of presence and survivance never waver. She will not be positioned in or resort to a narrative of victimry. The “story” of their inability to return Marleen American Horse’s children to their mother “haunts” Dogroy “more than any other” (Shrouds 100–101). A fourth speculation, then: that story must be equally haunting to us. It is a story about the abuse of power on the part of the “welfare fascists” (Shrouds 102), of a lack of the legal authority needed to extract the children from the State, and of a damning separation. Cleaved from their mother by the State, Marleen American Horse’s children are cut off from the “native sense of presence” (Shrouds 100) provided by their mother and, one imagines, earlier

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 57 generations. Mark my words, the separation flows from the deracination suffered when the Garrison dam went online, their homeland was flooded, and American Horse and others “lost their house[s] and sense of native presence to the United States Army Corps of Engineers” (Shrouds 100). Together, then, the Nation and the State collaborate to deny Native presence both past and present. If they have their way, that denial would extend, unbroken, into the future. The specter of Marleen American Horse returns—to Vizenor, his characters, and us—so that the dominant culture and the Nation might not, must not, have its way. Thanks to the Nation, Marleen American Horse cannot return to the place that is her home. In writing, though, Vizenor brings her story home to us. What is more, writing brings Vizenor home: hence the title of this essay. The homeland is a place where healing is possible. Exposed by radiation first at Hiroshima and later at the Yucca Flats nuclear test site in Nevada, Nightbreaker Browne is stricken with cancer twenty years later. He returns home, builds a cabin just off the reservation at the Mississippi river headwaters, and there recovers “by meditation, native medicine, and the annual stories of survivance at the headwaters” (Hiroshima Bugi 18). The location is telling not so much because it reveals an attempt to re-claim an origin, laying claim to an origin being a desire of the West, but because it articulates the simple, important truth that place and stories, together, are the source of healing. What holds for Nightbreaker Browne in Hiroshima Bugi holds too for Basile Beaulieu in Blue Ravens (2014). Basile and his brother Aloysius go to the shores of Bad Boy Lake after arriving home to White Earth from their time in the Great War; there they practice the traditional seasonal round of the Anishinaabe in order to make the transition from military to civilian life (Blue Ravens 179). Basile remains haunted by the nightly “conjured stench of bodies and the ruins of war” (Blue Ravens 191). Misaabe, their friend and healer, tells a story of a blue fly that lived with him through a winter and survived by, as it were, paying attention to context and knowing her place: she does not land on food or the noses of the mongrel healers living with Misaabe. The healer then tells Basile to imagine a story where he names and then saves a fly. The simple connection to the natural world articulated in the healing story and then realized by Basile as he saves a fly trapped in a spider web keep the memories of the war and the toll it exacted on human life, animal and plant life, and the world from returning to haunt, because “the stories that heal must have an origin, a mark or notice, and a native sense of natural motion and presence” (Blue Ravens 193). In this case the origin is White Earth itself. Of course, the narrator of Blue Ravens tells us that, after the War and occupation, “the reservation would never be enough” for Basile and his brother “to cope with the world or to envision the new and wild cosmopolitan world” to be found at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis (Blue Ravens 197). However, Basile makes clear that the shortcoming is not due to the place but to politicians with “no sense of tradition, no sense of chance,

58 Chris LaLonde memorable stories, or irony” (Blue Ravens 197). Indeed, while White Earth Reservation is “a political treaty homeland” (Blue Ravens 217) suffering both from politicians and a small-minded Indian agent appointed to the position with neither past contact with nor present interest in Natives and their concerns (Blue Ravens 58), it nevertheless is a “familiar landscape, [. . .] a place of totemic traces, Native traditions, and memories of the fur trade that transcended the contempt of outsiders and federal agents” (Blue Ravens 217). In Dead Voices (1992), we learn the wanaki game is used “to remember stories and to meditate” (28). Wordies are not ones to play the game, because they have lost their stories and meditate at the wrong time, if at all (Dead Voices 63). Stone created the wanaki game as part of his effort to outwit his trickster brother Naanabozho and ensure that he “is always present where life would be in the wanaki game” (Dead Voices 29). The word itself, wanaki, places a telling emphasis on place, for it means “to live somewhere in peace, a chance at peace” (Dead Voices 17). Any chance at peace, then, is rooted both in the play, possibility, and indeterminacy necessarily a part of any game and in a place accentuating connections. That Vizenor’s texts are attuned to connections that make up the Anishinaabe homeland is apparent in both poetry and prose. The short line he likes to work with does not prohibit an articulation of the diverse landscape of the Anishinaabe. “White Earth” opens with a three-line stanza that highlights different tree species and habitats while accentuating motion and connection: “october sunrise / shimmers in the birch / and cottonwoods” (Almost Ashore 10). If sunrise is a moment of arrival, then one can imagine that with an October sunrise Vizenor begins an articulation of arrival quite different from Columbus’s arrival to the New World. Contra Columbus and all that came in his wake, Vizenor’s text would have us arrive at an understanding both of the history of White Earth and of the connections that make up both place and people. Similarly, the opening stanza of Bear Island’s “Overture” section reveals a sense of place with its recognition of two different forest types, aspen-birch and red pine-white pine, and situates the Anishinaabe within that landscape (Bear Island 13). Dogroy Beaulieu’s description of missing his studio near the banks of the Wild Rice river on the White Earth Reservation also reveals a sense of place: “I crave the natural sounds of the Wild Rice river at Beaulieu, as you can imagine, morning light in the birch, birds in the great oaks, summer wind in the aspen, and the fusion of abstract music on the mound” (Shrouds 42). Here, in the western portion of White Earth, different forest types predominate along with prairie, but what remains consistent across Vizenor’s rendering of a north-central Minnesota landscape is that the complex combination of flora, fauna, topography, streams, rivers, and lakes together offer “natural beats / of chance and liberty” (Bear Island 14) if only we are attuned to them. Still, no surprise, here too there are ghosts. “Camp Grounds” phrases the area just east of White Earth, west of Leech Lake, and south of Red Lake as

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 59 “the precious / tourist triangle” (Almost Ashore 70); this is a land peppered with resorts, lake homes, state parks, and forests, and, hard upon the triangle, camp grounds affiliated with particular religious denominations. The last, “betray the birch / white pine / beaver dams / native memory” (Almost Ashore 70) in the name of God and the Church. Here, then, Vizenor’s verse makes clear the connection between Anishinaabeg and place, on the one hand, and that the “righteous armies” (Almost Ashore 70) wrong both the People and the place in the name of community, fellowship, and worship, on the other. The tree species are telling, of course, for birch has long been a critical component of Anishinaabe material and symbolic culture while white pine was the prized species of the logging industry as it swept west through the upper Midwest. The beaver dams, natural constructions, stand in contradistinction to the manmade dams that mean the rivers coursing through the reservations “rise black / and dammed” (Almost Ashore 71) thanks to progress. As “electronic church bells” chime in Dead Voices, a trickster crow reminds narrator and reader that it is not simply the reservation rivers that are poisoned: “‘The great river runs past the cities like a sewer, and the wordies hear nothing but dead voices at the university’” (132). “Native ghosts” rise to “torment campers” (Almost Ashore 71) during late-night swims. The tease of the ghosts would have the tourists apprehend what has happened, what the West, be it embodied in the agents of the fur trade, the timber industry, or the church, has done to the Anishinaabe and north-central Minnesota. The poem holds out little if any hope for the tourists it describes, closing by revealing that the haunted campers return from their swim “with stories / of demons” (Almost Ashore 71). The campers cannot move past the figure of the indian, in this case the savage in league with the devil, and until they do, the waters will remain dead (Almost Ashore 71), and the Native revenants will continue to haunt. The fourth person, the grammatical construction that, in stressing context, is rooted in an Anishinaabe understanding of the world, has never haunted Dogroy Beaulieu or his friend Gerald Vizenor (Shrouds 136). I dare say, my final speculation, that Basho does not haunt Vizenor any more than he haunts Blaeser, say, who uses Vizenor’s words in “Where Vizenor Soaked his Feet,” or me, who follows her lead and does the same. “Basho wades in the shallows” is the second line of a Vizenor haiku “located” at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, the body of water from which the Mississippi River, the great river, flows. Vizenor takes the poem’s third line as the title for the 1999 volume of haiku in which it is found: “cranes arise” (Cranes Arise). A second haiku master, Issa, is there too at Lake Itasca in a poem that sounds a teasing, tricky note: “tricky frogs / croak a haiku in the marsh / skinny issa” (Cranes Arise). The third headwaters haiku in the volume highlights how Vizenor’s art makes the unseen visible: “moccasin flowers / blossoms in the moist shadows / out of sight” (Cranes Arise). While not haunted by the fourth person, Dogroy and his friend are “haunted by the separation from an essential sense of native presence”

60 Chris LaLonde (Shrouds 136). Here’s the thing we would do well to bear in mind: where there are ghosts, there is possibility. In Vizenor’s corpus, revenants appear to remind us that we must attend to, and pay attention to, the marginalized, to all identified and positioned as Other—and here I mean humans, other-than-human persons, and the natural world. Blue Ravens explicitly yokes the death of the Native, in this case Private Ignatius Vizenor, and the destruction of the natural world in its description of the forests “creased by savagery, and shattered from constant artillery explosions” (Blue Ravens 135) within which Basile and Aloysius bivouac just days after their cousin is killed on October 8, 1918. The description is chilling: “The hornbeam, oak, and beech were broken, turned awry and slanted in grotesque war scenes” (Blue Ravens 135) that call to mind the images of Egon Schiele. The ghosts of the allied dead emerge from the crease created by the destruction of the French countryside, “haunt[ing] the memories and stories of war veterans on the reservation,” and off, and the relatives of those killed (Blue Ravens 138). The fact that there is little hope for the campers in “Camp Ground” does not mean there is little hope for us. Mind you, in order to avoid any “idealisation of the marginalized” (Sajed 141) that can result if a turn to deconstruction does not include attention to context, a turn Vizenor’s texts encourage in order that we might better apprehend the specters haunting them, one needs with Vizenor to attend closely to place, language, and worldview. Hence my title. Ghosts return, as does Vizenor, and in and with his writing he returns and returns us to particulars of the place that is the homeland of the Anishinaabe. That said, and this is no speculation, we need to be terrified of the future facing us if we fail to heed the ghosts Vizenor conjures for us.5

Notes 1. I do not speak Anishinaabemowin. I am very grateful to Anton Treuer for his help and guidance with the Anishinaabemowin in my title. Still, any errors in the use of Anishinaabemowin in the text are mine and mine alone. In English, the title reads Ghosts (or alternatively, spirits) return (or alternatively, go back): Revenants, Gerald Vizenor, the writing brings him (or one) home. 2. The 2012 special issue of Derrida Today devoted both to ghosts in Derrida’s work and the application of his writing on ghosts, and his philosophy more generally, to a range of texts and contexts is testament to the ways in which Derrida and his thought haunt the academy, or at least ought to. 3. It bears remarking that in 1992 Vizenor phrased Native American literature as a “literary ghost” dance after noting that Natives turned to English, the language of the colonizers, in order to communicate their support to Wovoka and the movement his vision initiated. Thus, “English has been the language of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, and the written domination of tribal cultures; at the same time, this mother tongue of neocolonialism has been a language of liberation for some people” (Vizenor, “Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance”). One can also benefit from Ulla Haselstein, “Ghost Dance Literature: On Recent Debates in Native American Literary Criticism” (2007).

Revenants, Vizenor, Odazhe-Giiwenigon 61 4. Critical assessments of The Story of an African Farm, especially regarding its position on race and on colonialism, have been varied, to say the least. Useful overviews of the criticism can be found, for instance, in Bart Moore-Gilbert, “Plotting the South African Colonial Unconscious: Subaltern Studies and Literary Criticism” (2003), Jed Esty, “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe” (2007), and Itala Vivan, “Geography, Literature, and the African Territory: Some Observations on the Western Map and the Representation of Territory in the South African Literary Imagination” (2000). 5. Vizenor knows and would have us know that Natives are resilient and resourceful; Blaeser reminds us in “Where Vizenor Soaked His Feet” that “survivance [is] your legacy / [. . .] Liberation, imagination / healing story medicine / in your deep bass voice” (Absentee Indians 92). Blue Ravens also sounds a note of the resiliency of the natural world when, after describing a landscape ravaged by war, Basile writes that “the few tattered leaves that remained on the trees were brilliant, the glorious banner of nature not nations” (135). Still, the natural world can withstand only so much.

Bibliography Allen, Graham, and David Couglan. “Preface: Where Ghosts Live.” Where Ghosts Live. Spec. issue of Derrida Today 5.2 (2012): 143–45. Print. Berryman, John. The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly. Absentee Indians and Other Poems. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2002. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Esty, Jed. “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe.” Victorian Studies (Spring 2007): 407–30. Print. Haselstein, Ulla. “Ghost Dance Literature: On Recent Debates in Native American Literary Criticism.” JFKI-Newsletter 7. JFK Institute for North American Studies, April 2007. Web. 3 June 2014. < http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/information/newsletter/ 07/jfki_essay.html>. Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1976. Print. Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990. Print. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. London: Dyer Press, 2010. Print. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. “Plotting the South African Colonial Unconscious: Subaltern Studies and Literary Criticism.” African Identities 1.1 (2003): 37–52. Print. Sajed, Alina. “The Post Always Rings Twice? The Algerian War, Poststructuralism and the Postcolonial in IR Theory.” Review of International Studies 38.1 (2012): 141–63. Print. Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. London: Chapman and Hall, 1883. Print. Vivan, Itala. “Geography, Literature, and the African Territory: Some Observations on the Western May and the Representation of Territory in the South African Literary Imagination.” Research in African Literatures 31.2 (Summer 2000): 49–70. Print.

62 Chris LaLonde Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore. Cambridge: Salt Press, 2006. Print. ———. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. ———. Blue Ravens. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Chair of Tears. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print. ———. Cranes Arise. Minneapolis: Nodin P, 1999. Print. ———. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Print. ———. The Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People. 1972. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000. Print. ———. Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. 1993. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. ———. Matsushima: Pine Islands. Minneapolis: Nodin P, 1984. Print. ———. “Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance.” World Literature Today 66.2 (Spring 1992): 223–27. Web. 5 May 2014. ———. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. ———. Raising the Moon Vines. Minneapolis: Nodin P, 1964, 1999. Print. ———. Shrouds of White Earth. Albany: SUNY P, 2010. Print. ———. Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. New Edition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Print. ———. The Trickster of Liberty: Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Print. ———. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978. Print. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Blackwell, 2001. Print. ———. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

5

The Late Mr. Vizenor Recent Storying A. Robert Lee

Any notion of a slow-down in Gerald Vizenor’s literary rate of production would be almost ludicrously off-base. His imagination remains not only un-dimmed but, quite as equally, un-de-accelerated, and nowhere more so than in his fiction. The four latest novels that give confirmation, Father Meme (2008), Shrouds of White Earth (2010), Chair of Tears (2012), and Blue Ravens (2014), do so by extending his bandwidths of invention, not to say contrariety. It has been one thing to celebrate Vizenor’s postindian ethos, his longtime insistence on Native presence over absence and after-image. It is another to alight on his performative virtuosity, that which has led him to speak also of stepping across fixed categories of novel and short story, not to say the discursive essay, and opt for what he terms storying. “Late Mr. Vizenor,” of course, is not to offer some species of hopelessly premature obituary or, indeed, literary necromancy. Rather it calls attention to how his recent works yet further hone his long established reflexive repertoire, the fashioning of voice, the different mirrors and folds of plotline. If the case holds that to an extent every writer creates his or her own genre, so, in Vizenor’s writing, that applies with emphasis. He has been the very bane of booksellers and library catalogers, not to mention critics bent upon category or, on not a few occasions, too earnest thesis-writers. Even webpage managers at Amazon and Google have not had the easiest of times. It has long been Vizenor writ to raise his pen against “terminal creeds,” the deflation of—in lower case and uncapitalized—the indian.1 Equally, and to shared purpose, that resolve has elicited storying to match, the refusal to house his fiction in any one received mode. The literary cross-borderer or gamester was there from the outset, whether in the essay-story format of Wordarrows (1978), Earthdivers (1981), Crossbloods (1990), and Landfill Meditation (1991), the reworked Anishinaabe tribal stories of Summer in the Spring (1965), the eclectic postindian anatomies of Manifest Manners (1993) and Fugitive Poses (1998), or the twenty-nine gapped “myths and metaphors” as he designates them in the subtitle of his landmark “crossblood autobiography” (Vizenor and Lee 57) Interior Landscapes (1990). For sure the same impetus runs through his formidable variorum of fiction, from Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), with its kabuki-like tribal pilgrimage across a dystopian America as equally

64 A. Robert Lee out of moral compass as petroleum, to Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), with its double-track authorial narration and centering in the world’s first atomic city and postwar nuclear terror-peace (cf. Lee, Multicultural 223–27; Lee, “Gerald Vizenor”). Storying, and with it storier, in these respects, does across-the-board service. For good reason it has joined the company of Vizenor’s other working neologisms, notably survivance, shadow distance, transmotion, postindian, and of late, cosmoprimitive. Each of these terms, along with others, has entered the lexicon of much Native discourse, theory especially, in tribute to the will to un-seam not only stereotype but fixities of co-optive language from Red Indian to Vanishing American. In taking on his most recent fiction the point is not to indulge some mere formalist account; rather, it is to explore storying as a poetics, a modus operandi, in his recognition of Native life as continuance, ever and wholly enactive. *** Father Meme (2008), given over to sexual abuse by the reservation priest title-figure (Meme or Father Conan Whitty) and his monk-lover (Brother Roger Placid Chrisp or Swayback), could easily have risked too ready or at least too intrusive an outrage at pedophilia. It is a tribute to the novella’s success that Vizenor nowhere gives in to sermon. The picturing of Native boyhood, and its exposure to the flesh-compelled Meme in all his vicious, not to say baroque sexuality, and right through to the fourteen revenge torments eventually visited upon him, is kept at just the right distance. Told in the persona of an ex-altar boy, now an adult journalist-author, to a visiting French woman lawyer first at the Mayagi Ashandiwin Restaurant and then at his Anishinaabe reservation cottage, its sheen of apparent, but altogether ironic, good manners plays perfectly against the brute predation at the heart of the story. This I-you relationship masks what is in effect a memorial soliloquy posed as colloquy. It is little wonder the narrator designates himself an “interior storier” (38; cf. Lee, “Storier”). If, then, the story unfolds a dark-matter diary of pleasure and pain, it does so through storying calculated to un-intrude even as it captures the villainy embodied in Meme and Chrisp. Genre assumes an almost delicious hybridity. Does not Father Meme hover as novel, novella, memoir, cautionary tale, murder story or mystery, and to be sure, confession? Do not seams of truth-to-history effortlessly make their entry, whether the Pillager clan-US military Sugar Point War 1898 which Vizenor made into his verse narrative Bear Island (2006), or the case-instance of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, Mexican priest-founder of the Legionaries of Christ and a serial abuser of seminarians and children, or the Dakota Sioux boy-truant Dane White whose jailhouse suicide and then funeral Vizenor invokes with fierce lyricism, or the backdrop of Anishinaabe-French fur trader encounter? Political allusions to Minnesota luminaries like Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy add supporting texture. But it is the storying, the careful modulations of tone and contrast from Gregorian chant at nearby Saint John’s

The Late Mr. Vizenor: Recent Storying 65 Abbey to the death’s head fish-house and ice drowning of Meme, that assure due narrative balance overall. “Please excuse my intrusion, madame, but are you by chance dining alone tonight?” (1) opens the text. That same courtesy of voice will persist through to the narrator’s conclusion: “The altar boys, ma chère madame, sacrificed much more than the wicked priest that winter night at Wiindigoo Lake” (120). The greater the sedulous politeness (“you bear my intrusive manner with humor” [4]; “Your toast, à votre santé, is very generous” [48]), the greater the contrast with the groping and abuse. The exquisite listing of both Native and French cuisine and accompanying wines does shared duty: the one kind of consumption for quite the other. Civilized rhetoric and politesse, Châteauneuf du Pape and snowshoe hare (Vizenor’s fiction rarely resists a good menu), play against boy-child abuse, priestly masturbation, would-be ravage, and the trauma it sponsors. With Meme’s demise in the wake of the upside down Stations of the Cross, his teeth bared, nose bleeding, naked, aroused, the gourmanderie turns hellish. In the orchestration of this storying Vizenor manages a narrative duly balanced, the voice of disclosure tactically at odds with the perverse gratification and willfully wronged bodies it relates. It is an accomplishment which invites due and full recognition, a show of singular working powers. *** Shrouds of White Earth takes the form of another story-monologue posing as a colloquy. Ostensibly the invitation is to hear Douglas Roy Beaulieu, Dogroy, banished from the reservation for his wholly un-literal and extravagantly bold-colored images of sacrificed animals (a series he entitles “Totemic Shrouds”) and for his Goya-esque portraits of casino and other tribal politicians. The auditor, and implicitly his co-speaker, is none other than a White Earth literary storier with a shared upbringing in early meanstreets and cheap-food Minneapolis. That includes the Band Box Diner, a major Native gathering-place and eatery, and Hello Dolly’s, demolished to make way for public housing. They both serve as touchstones, parts of the citied “Indian” world beyond the reservation where stories have also been remembered and dispensed (see also Fixico). It falls to Dogroy to give notice of the ambition they both share: I create traces of totemic creatures, paint visionary characters in magical flight, native scenes in the bright colors of survivance, and you create the same scenes by the tease of words and irony. We both have a place in the sun of art and literature, and a place name, but our situations, as artists of irony, are always uncertain with the tradition fascists of the White Earth Nation. (5) Between them, if that does justice, they fashion a story of what best, and indeed what worst, “represents” both Anishinaabe and the wider circuits of

66 A. Robert Lee Native life. Each is his own species of visionary storier, the one a maker of visual art, the other of word. Given the considerable hinterland of playfield in Vizenor’s prior fiction, this calls up a round of footfalls, his not un-typical reflexive take on reflexivity. As Dogroy, in spite of the relevant articles of the White Earth Constitution of which Vizenor was in actuality the principal writer, is sent packing by Tradition Fascists as the would-be arbiters of which kind of image passes muster as “Indian,” he will summon a dazzling counter-gallery of visual artists to his cause. These painter-magicians, Native and otherwise, cover a widest ambit, be it the Anishinaabe George Morrison and David Bradley, the Russian-Jewish Marc Chagall, the German expressionist Otto Dix, the Colombian figure-painter Fernando Botero, or the great Japanese woodblock virtuosi of shunga (or erotic art) and ukiyo-e (art of the floating world). The attack on Dogroy’s satiric shroud-art and cartooning, and the killing of his cat Moses, bespeak provincialism, dire revenge. Vizenor is as much given to waylay narrow reservation-mandated literalism as he is to end kitsch romance-Indian representation. Dogroy so finds his resolve in “a circle of visionary creatures forever in magical flight over the White Earth Nation” (3), “abstract cosmoprimitive art” (17), “imagic liberty” (67), and the pledge to counter “crimes against creatures and native imagination” (150). The returns are many, a contemporary fable as to all top-down political or dogmatic prescriptions of what art, and especially Native art—artifact or word—should or should not be, a fable as cagily pitched in its telling as committed to the need for “magical flight.” The latter aesthetic is taken from the Chagall of “lumière-liberté.” Art, whatever its genre or provenance, for Dogroy, as for his literary fellow and co-worker and bibber in “visionary creations” (130), thereby earns its keep only by its qualities of illumination. His belief he formulates as “[m]y portrayals are sensations not representations” (116). Fighting talk, for sure, but this also offers an adroitly inlaid near-manifesto as to the kind of narrative on offer. Told in four sequences, Shrouds of White Earth affords a full Vizenor menu, be it species genocide (Dogroy, even after banishment, continues to create “burial houses for sacrificed and crucified birds and animals” [10]), masturbation (“an act of erotic imagination” [28]), the status of casinos (“the utmost secular situation” [75]), and the vexed issues of authenticity and plagiarism in all Native and indeed other styles of representation. Dogroy deliberately, extravagantly, re-paints canonical paintings—notably Rubens and the Italian classics, lives with a woman-cat troupe, apostrophizes “creature citizens” (150), and pursues a trajectory that connects White Earth to Paris’s Musée du Quai Branley. The true geographical Lake Itasca, in turn, is linked to the enticingly named Gallery of Irony Dogs. Louise Erdrich for good reason speaks of Vizenor’s verve in terms as shrewd as they are admiring: Nobody but Gerald Vizenor could write the words “cosmoprimitive casino series,” or “mongrel driving schools,” or describe the Band Box

The Late Mr. Vizenor: Recent Storying 67 Diner and capture with such skewed energy what it means to be an Indian, an Anishinaabe, a human being on and off the White Earth Reservation here in Minnesota. Shrouds of White Earth is another wildly laudable work by our master ironist. A meditation on Native art, Marc Chagall, George Morrison, The Gallery of Irony Dogs, and too much else to mention [. . .] I am thankful for Visioner, I mean Vizenor. (Birchbark Blog) Under the novel’s story-fashioning, bad faith, corruption of spirit, narrowed down rules-of-the-road art, be it on the reservation or in the wider world, is simply not to be allowed countenance. Nor is it to allow for dogmatic prescriptions as to Native authenticity, be it of identity or creativity. The ethos at hand, as Vizenor clearly believes, is to eschew all prescriptive rules as to what and what not a Native storier should write, be it the subject identity or nation, history or place. In his own work that has meant a soaringly baroque and ironic signature. It takes Vizenor’s virtuosity, the one composite story told as though an overlap of two voices, the genial, fierce, colors of invention, to bring home the point with quite so brimming a dispatch. *** Chair of Tears, twelve story-filaments centered in a Lake Itasca’s houseboat Native dynasty and extending to the University of Minnesota’s Department of Native American Indian Studies, might almost be thought of as a moebius strip. Stories loop around, then segue into, each other, their trajectories full of things recognizably close to actual yet wrapped in a sheen of the fantastical. An early pointer lies in the observation “Our family was forever bound by teases and stories” (11). The point might take on self-referring force given the lineage that descends from Captain Eighty, patriarch of the lake clan, and his fifty years younger poker-queen wife Quiver Beaulieu. The plethora of offspring smack of magic genealogy, uncle-aunt branches, and on down to the grandson-narrator and his principal cousins, Dogroy Beaulieu, banished Chagallian artist, and Captain Carbon Six Shammer, would-be houseboat helmsman, who will assume center-stage at the university. From the opening page onwards there can be little doubt of further playfield text, further Vizenor storying. Storying is built into the Eighty clan’s very nomenclature, a thesaurus of narrative within each invented nickname: true surnames, especially if they involve the federal agent Sepia Face, never actually receive mention. The ramshackle “nuptial houseboat” (2) sails under the name The Red Lust. Captain Eighty and Captain Carbon Six Shammer are named for the elements, respectively 80, the atomic number for Mercury or Hg, and Carbon, atomic number 6. The five first offspring, true to Quiver’s on-board poker genius, take their names from playing hands, Two Pairs, Straight, Full House for the girls, High Card and Flush for the boys—the latter, the narrator’s father, in true Anishinaabe tradition a woodworker. This “marvelous

68 A. Robert Lee houseboat family” (9) in and of themselves comes beset with storier and storying. Quiver has married “a native storier who roamed in the bush, a curious trickster of discrete grace and mercy” (2). His various designations of “storier of survivance” (3), “lusty storier” (9), and “mighty storier” (15) all underline his role as Homeric, preserver and fabler, whether of Anishinaabe origin myth or Mississippi headwater monk sex with animals. The generation of mongrels that sail with Eighty each bear suitably baroque story-monikers, in turn Pope Pius, Moby Jean, Monte, Big Wig, Tender, Mustard, and Appetizer. One could be forgiven for thinking this is an about-face roster from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A further colony of dogs, trained by Chance, a nearby member of the Women of Creature Arts, function as “irony mongrels,” their role to “sense pretense and anxiety” (16). These names also come story-laden as Lévi-Strauss, Turnip, Nixon, and above all Derrida, the “pied noir of the seminars” (20) at the university. Storying takes on characteristic accent, and targeting, in the supposed further training of these dogs: Lévi-Strauss and one or two of the other advanced irony mongrels could in most instances sense the distinction between the un-intended irony of Henry Kissinger, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, or the New York Times, and the notable absence of irony in serious comments by Sigmund Freud, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, and Joseph Alois Ratzinger—or Pope Benedict, a citizen of the Vatican. (18) The appointment of Captain Shammer, sumptuously without academic qualification, brought into the university by the faux-liberal entrepreneurial Dean Slash and Burn, to the Chair of Native American Indian Studies, and mis-identified by some of the grey-dead faculty as Chaplain Shammer, could hardly not lead into anything but comic-serious masquerade. Shammer’s ascendancy to the so-called Chair of Tears (“more irony than victimry” [30]) with its echo of historic relocation of the tribes, might almost be an update of the Feast of Fools. Certainly Shammer savvily creates a world turned upside down for a faculty that has “deserted storiers [and] disregarded the emotive sentiments of native presence” (24). Like Melville’s shipboard masquerader in The Confidence-Man, Shammer is given to costume and transformation. He turns up dressed as Custer (“Captain Shammer had arrived by mimicry” [24]), wears Native and Hollywood masks—among others, those of “Jay Silverheels, Sacheen Leatherfeather, Jamake Highwater, and Jimmie Durham” (51), and issues a slew of edicts (“radical schemes and teases, political roundabouts” [33]). His conversion of faculty offices into casino stations offers another hall of mirrors (“The Full House Casino slot machines pictured Sitting Bull, Geronimo, White Cloud, Chief Joseph, Little Cloud, and just a faint shroud of Crazy

The Late Mr. Vizenor: Recent Storying 69 Horse” [47]). It is little wonder that Shammer is dubbed a “windward storier” (46), a “tricky storier” (68). Shammer’s department reign does not stop there, however. His introduction of the lack-of-irony sniffing mongrel dogs as “shaman healers” to “attend lectures and bark at the absence of irony” (68) does service to undermine cliché, the one or another fixed version of Native life. That includes a Vizenor riff on skin-dunking as a send-up of Native authenticity by skin-hue. He demands confessional Last Lectures, displays holographic laser histories, and establishes Panic Hole radio broadcasts and Denivance Press with its guarantee of instant rejection and publication of signed blank books. Finally, and once again to the point, he tenders out the department at auction (“lock, stock, barrel, skin dunk, casino, and signature blank books” [129]) to have it bought by “the Earthdivers, an association of native storiers” (138). Who more apt? If there can be no doubt of Vizenorian irony, campus and stereotype targets teased and skewered, there can equally be no doubt of yet another rarest venture into his ways of postindian storying. *** Anishinaabe storier. Hartford insurance executive, and at the same time, modernist versifier who made his debut with Harmonium in 1923: Gerald Vizenor and Wallace Stevens might not be a pairing that immediately jumps into mind. Given this latest Vizenor novel, with its early twentieth-century setting (the subtitling calls it a “historical novel”) and emphasis upon how the painter’s coloring and storyteller’s flight gives new possession to ground-zero reality, it would be far from out of order. If Blue Ravens can be said to have any one overall end in view, and view is the operative word, it has to be that visionary powers of creativity are always best called upon to unsettle, and so outflank or transcend, quite all static or either-or prescriptions of “things as they are.” Vizenor storying, it would be fair to say, was ever so. As the novel has Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu and Basile Hudon Beaulieu, Native brother-twins (though with a twist) and respectively visual artist and writer, embark upon their rite of passage from White Earth to the Europe of World War I, it unfolds a world and its era at once one of quite sumptuous artistic break-through and yet brutal historical fracture (“the bloody rage of war” [127]). This is to situate the two artist-enlistees, and their Beaulieu-Vizenor dynasty, within a changing but ingeniously linked serial of time and place: Minnesota’s turn of the century Chippewa-Ojibway reservation, wartime gas and trench France as American Expeditionary Forces enter the Great War in 1917–18, and the Europe of transition from belle époque to the 1920s of modernism and Paris. The upshot amounts to hugely ambitious storying, a magic-real tribute to Native presence, in actuality and art, and within a historic trans-Atlantic, or indeed Red Atlantic, spectrum of war and peace.

70 A. Robert Lee “Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu created marvelous blue ravens that stormy summer” reads the opening sentence (1). It sets up figuration for the whole novel. Aloysius will paint huge, magnificent ravens in Chagall-blue across settings both American and European. Each is totemic, abstract, as though by this avian fantasticality to give new imagining to nothing less than Native and non-Native world alike. A later age has Christo wrap buildings and cliffs, Banksy fashion anonymous street graphics, or Jean-Michel Basquiat line-draw his pictograms. But the Aloysius of Vizenor’s text paints his ravens as though, virtually, irreally, they have the call to appearance everywhere, whether Twin Cities-Saskatchewan Soo Line rail carriage or Seine River bridge, whether Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre or the Marne and Vesle battlefields. Only in part will they transfer from outside world to inside gallery. These birds, along with the stories composed by Basile, act as art hieroglyphs fully in their own right. But they also provide filters through which to understand life-affirming liberty, and virtuosity, even as the U.S. denies citizenship and its rights to Native populations until 1924, and Europe turns into a killing field in the contest for the one or another political ascendancy. Their blueness summons a vast expressive hinterland that includes lapis lazuli, woad, indigo dye, religious stained window, Chinese porcelain, Hokusai woodblock, through to the Blue Period and later canvases of Picasso, Matisse, and the recurrent name of Marc Chagall (“Chagall painted blue dreams, lovers, angels, violinists, donkeys, cities, and circus scenes” [2]). The effect is exhilarating, a historic novel full, even unsparing, in circumstantial detail, but at the same time imagist tapestry. Vizenor pitches his date-for-date novel to work in parallel with the 24-chapter Odyssey, with actual citations from Homer’s epic. But in having Basile write Aloysius, and their shared odyssean journey, he equally uses his own style of one narrator for two in a manner to recall Dead Voices, Hiroshima Bugi and the ex-journalist to lawyer tactic of Father Meme. The White Earth scenes assemble a vintage cast, beginning with extended family (“great storiers” [12]). The father, Honoré Hudon Beaulieu, is both “singer and woodland storier” (5). The mother, Margaret Beaulieu, “remembers the scent and stories of maple syrup” (5). Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, wiseacre and mentor, take his place as “cunning and ambitious uncle” (2). Fellow White Earth denizens, besides assorted other Beaulieu-Vizenors who serve in the military, number the trickster-savvy trader Odysseus Walker, the healer Missabe, the generous John Leecy of the Leecy Hotel, Patch Zhimagaanish the valiant railwayman-trumpeter, Father Aloysius Hermeneutz the Benedictine, and almost inevitably, a round of Vizenor mongrel dogs. Their world, and the international world beyond, is carried in the White Earth journal, The Progress, later The Tomahawk, both to be sold at Ogema Station near the reservation but also in Minneapolis and even across the Atlantic. In France, fact again overlaps with fiction, not unlike E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975). Not only do the brothers face combat as painted scouts (“the

The Late Mr. Vizenor: Recent Storying 71 war was surreal, faces, forests, and enemies”[130]), get captured, escape, and learn first-hand the Hindenburg Line and battles like Montbréhain; they remember benign heroines like Frances Gulick, the YMCA nurse and welfare worker, and Anna Coleman Ladd, Massachusetts sculptress and pioneer of prosthetic masks for impaired soldiers. Survivors, survivancers, and their plunge into Paris as modernist fiefdom after the 1918 Armistice again elides history and art (“Paris meant more to us than a luminous tourist destination [. . .] The city had become our vision of art and literature, and a chance of recognition as native artists” [144]). Aloysius can continue to paint his ravens fantastically upon the Place de la Concorde, Notre Dame, Gare de l’Est, and the Bastille. His “Thirty Six Views of the Eiffel Tower” will again echo Hokusai. He does so, however, as together with Basile, he reads the wholly actual Apollinaire; meets Chagall himself; comes face to face with the likes of Modigliani, the cubist Marie Vassilieff, Blaise Cendrars, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and Gertrude Stein; and displays with great Jewish gallerists like Nathan Crémieux and Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. The expatriate years they take in France, the returns and re-returns both to White Earth and Paris, their part in Native and French banquet gatherings (with yet more Vizenor menus) lead on to a surge of new ravens from Aloysius and stories from Basile. Blue Ravens so works its way to a moment of active rest, Aloysius’s un-diminishing pigments of blue and Basile’s regimes of story—not to mention sharing his body with Maria. Vizenor’s bravura serves both a vision of art’s gift of life in the face of death and at the same time his storier’s commitment to Native signature of and for the world. A sequel is under way. It would be hard to imagine any drop of orchestration in the storying.

Note 1. “My pen was raised to terminal creeds” (Vizenor, Interior Landscapes 235).

Bibliography Erdrich, Louise. “Unconquered.” Birchbark Blog. Birchbark Books, 17 Nov. 2010. Web. 17 July 2014. < http://birchbarkbooks.com/blog/tag/Ojibwe/>. Fixico, Donald. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2000. Print. Lee, A. Robert. “Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Gamester.” A Companion to TwentiethCentury United States Fiction. Ed. David Seed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 505–13. Print. ———. Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Literature. Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh P, 2003. Print. ———. “Storier: Gerald Vizenor’s Father Meme.” Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Deborah Madsen and A. Robert Lee. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2010. 12–29. Print. Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man. New York: Dix & Edwards, 1857. Print.

72 A. Robert Lee Stevens, Wallace. Harmonium. New York: Knopf, 1913. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2006. Print. ———. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Rpt. of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. 1978. Print. ———. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. ———. Blue Ravens: Historical Novel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Chair of Tears. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print. ———. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Print. ———. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981. Print. ———. Father Meme. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2008. Print. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. 1993. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. ———. Shrouds of White Earth. Albany: SUNY P, 2010. Print. ———. Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories. Minneapolis: Nodin P, 1965. Print. ———. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978. Print. ———, and A. Robert Lee. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print.

Section 2

“Chance Connections” Memory, Land, and Language

6

Vizenor and the Power of Transitive Memories Kimberly M. Blaeser

Scholars have described Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor’s various forays into life writing as “serial autobiography,” “autocritical,” “life studies,” and even, “elegiac reflections.”1 Vizenor himself has characterized his work in this vein many times, perhaps most memorably in his essay, “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” in which he describes his work as “a mixedblood autobiographical causerie and a narrative on the slow death of a common red squirrel,” and—speaking of himself in the third person—explains, “Gerald Vizenor believes that autobiographies are imaginative histories; a remembrance past the barriers; wild pastimes over the pronouns” (101). The stated and enacted intentions in the broadly conceived acts of re-membering in Vizenor’s writing inevitably involve liberation and survivance, or, as the opening epigraph to this essay notes: remembrance is a “landscape of liberty.” Crucial to creating this “landscape of liberty” in the “imaginative histories” of our lives are interconnections made across the constructed borders of language and belief systems. The power of transitive memories comes partly through vitality and continuance. We exist and discover our reality through acts of “storying” our relatedness, incorporating the multifaceted butterfly-eyeness of our being. The accounts of “self” in Vizenor’s work incorporate tribal myth, history, natural reason, genealogy, spirit, and the simple experience of the daily. They create what he describes as “a sense of presence, a native self, a teasable self in names, relations, and native contingencies.” That sense of self, claims Vizenor, is “not an essence, or immanence, but the mien of stories” (Fugitive Poses 20). The mien—the manner, character, expression, or aura—of stories.

Rabbit Light A memory. I am perhaps eight, and my brother and I bring home a waaboozoons, a baby waabooz or bunny, one that has been injured by a BB gun. We keep it in a bird cage and nurse it. I fall in love with waaboozoog. Though we set this one free when it has recovered, we end up with pet waaboozoog the next season. I remember taking my companion down to the clover, a

76 Kimberly M. Blaeser little ribbon leash around his neck. We stretch out together there in the cool, damp green of summer. He nibbles. I read. He teaches me to freeze stare and to twitch my nose. I let loose his ribbon, but he stays. Perhaps in that year or those following, I hear the story of the mythic Waaboozoo, known as White Tail, who is brother to Naanabozho. Basil Johnston’s telling of the story, recalls the boy’s particular quirks—his tendency to stop, stand almost trance-like as he listened to the sounds of the birds and other animals. The stories, too, tell of Waaboozoo’s desire to talk to the Manidog, his reverence for the caves, canyons, and other sacred places, and of his dream visions that brought the people the dewe’igan and the bibigwan, the drum and flute, and the visions that lead to chanting and dancing (The Manitous 42–45). Johnston writes, “[i]n combining chanting and drumming, Waub-oozoo created music, in composing lyrics, he created poetry” (45). Johnston describes it as “spiritual” poetry. White Tail should, according to Johnston, “be credited with bequeathing music, dream quests, and chanting petitions [. . .], and for making a regard for the supernatural a part of everyday life” (49). Because I was a quirky listening child, both the actual waabooz and the storied one appealed to me. I bonded with both. And in intervening years, I have assembled a host of waabooz encounters—some zany, some soothing. Because I still find waaboozoog fascinating, I’d like to tell them all. The stories of the garden rabbits at my parents’ house, rabbits on the campus grounds at Notre Dame during exams, waabooz wearing pajamas, waaboozoog scaring Maurice Kenny, the enormous BWCA jack rabbit who came out to the rock ledge each sunrise, the waboozoons I carried in my skirt to rescue it from a hungry crow. And so on. But the significance of this memory-telling is to underscore the vital continuance—the connections or transitive nature of memory, the “tease of story,” the transmotion that links myth, natural reason, experience, story, and imagination to become an act of survivance.2 I could not now extract any one of my rabbit experiences from the others, none exists separately from the idea of wabooz or Waaboozoo. Thus they illustrate the associative nature of experience. Taken together, the many waboozoog of my experience and story fill my memory and create a sense of potentiality, a tease of the actual, or sometimes a feeling of sacred presence; the continuance of story subtly inspires my survivance. In the first poem I wrote after my son was born, these lines: tiny newborn cries in my dream that wakens here in half-dark room rabbit light falls across your bed between your sleep and mine between my old worn life and this new dream

The Power of Transitive Memories 77 I stand half afraid of both (“motherbirth,” Absentee Indians 71) Rabbit light. In 1995, when my mother was battling breast cancer, I wrote: Now I shall count the years like rabbits. Cottontails flashing zigzag white trail through barren woods. Longlegs, jackrabbit, hind-stepping high and quiet into hiding. And those brown rabbits who sit quietly before me hoping I do not see. Those white winter furs twitching so slightly with rabbit breath. Waabooz Spirit. I hold each sign a blessing. And now I shall treasure as vision each brown season each white. And maybe the seventh year will come with life as plentiful as rabbits. (“March 1005: Seeking Remission,” Absentee Indians 47) Somehow in the story milieu of my life, Waaboozoog has become a touchstone. Waaboozoog linked to birth, linked to loss—linked somehow to spirit. I share this sketch of linkages because my experience of Anishinaabeg reality seems to align with Vizenor’s understanding of what he has called “the distinctive literary aesthetic of natural reason and survivance inspired by native stories” (Native Liberty 6). We become the stories we tell. They circle round us. They inhabit us. We become the people and places of our past. Our identity levitates from story. Looped together—memory, story, being. And from this centering—survival. Waaboozoo’s character was quiet

78 Kimberly M. Blaeser attentiveness, his legacy music and spiritual poetry. The thread of that telling filters like rabbit light into my life. How can I explain this? Vizenor has claimed, “[t]heories of survivance are elusive and imprecise.” However, the “practices of survivance,” he says, “are obvious and unmistakable in native stories” (Native Liberty 1). Anishinaabe scholar and language teacher, Margaret Noodin, has underscored “the Anishinaabe tradition of studying ideas across time and dimension, creating cycles of ideas instead of chronologies” (Bawaajimo 27). This notion of accrued inheritance, building filiation and affiliation through story—ideas I have explored elsewhere— seems a helpful way of understanding the vital motion of literary survivance. Indeed, Noodin has described Anishinaabe literature as “memory in motion” and characterized storytelling as “the lyric image of a nation connected by memory to space” (“Dibaajomoyaang” 175). My own lived story practices seem woven through with this “memory in motion,” this connection of memory to space—with the power of what Vizenor calls “transitive memory.”3 I see similar linkages in the writings of Anishinaabeg authors Gordon Henry, Molly McGlennen, Armand Ruffo, Linda LeGarde Grover and, of course, in the work of Gerald Vizenor.4

Hybridity, Liminality, and Genealogy The particular alchemy of memory in the theoretical and creative work of Vizenor also involves complicated connective acts: the imaginative linking of personages, historical events, and stories, as well as the construction of moments “past the barriers” or outside conventional notions of time. As Elvira Pulitano notes, “[h]is crossblood remembrances take the form of differing discourses, pronouns, and voices, and [. . .] they remain ultimately and inevitably untamed” (143). In what follows, I look at both the philosophical grounding Vizenor finds in Anishinaabe teaching for his understanding of memory as transitive being and at moments in his “untamed” poetry, fiction, and personal stories in which he enacts that understanding. In works like Fugitive Poses, Hiroshima Bugi, Interior Landscapes, or Native Liberty, Vizenor’s remembered stories refuse to adhere to a single stroke of the pen or the clock; stories of crows, squirrels, tricksters, ancestors, and cultural confrontations transform into new versions of themselves materializing in other places and eras. Specific memories also often stubbornly refuse to “mean” in his accounts, but instead remain a “tease” or a storier’s tentative harmony. Analogous to Anishinaabe visual arts and dream songs, the recollected stories—these assembled fragments of lives told and retold—resist existence as documents and move constantly beyond the edges of representation, become rather a “shimmer of memory.”5 Katja Sarkowsky, for example, has noted the way that Vizenor uses the character Ronin’s stories in Hiroshima Bugi to “counter dominant narratives about [. . .] history and national memory” (105) and to present “an investigation into hybridity, liminality, and genealogy” (106). She investigates Vizenor’s strategy of using “different, incompatible perspectives” to

The Power of Transitive Memories 79 ultimately “demand the reader’s tolerance of fundamental ambiguity” (104). Ideas of liminality and ambiguity, indeed the performance of the same, have always seemed fundamental in Vizenor’s work. From his early accounts of the mixedblood “oshki Anishinaabe” to his unpredictable trickster personae such as Clement Beaulieu, Griever, Proude Cedarfair, and Harold Sinseer, to the narrative re-imaginings of historical figures, his work has situated liminal figures in shifting states of story being. In The Heirs of Columbus, for example, the Christopher Columbus he stories is a mixedblood Mayan and the carrier of the “genetic signature of survivance” needed by the Native “heirs” for healing (132). These reversals of expected representation loosen the historical latch on the figure of Columbus. Although purportedly posited as a liminal figure, crossing from one world to another, Columbus has really become historical caricature. But in Vizenor’s wildly imaginative version of the story, Columbus is granted a vitality and ambiguity. The “truth” of his story, Vizenor implies, might not be determined merely by distinction between fact and fiction. In one scene, the date of an encounter between Columbus and a tribal woman named Samana is first identified as October 28, 1492 and then as October 29, 1492. When the discrepancy is flagged, heir Stone Columbus explains, “Columbus is ever on the move in our stories” (11). The shifting, ambiguous reality presented by Vizenor in Heirs humanizes Columbus, reducing his status as either hero or Indigenous enemy number one, and thereby, lessens the destructive power of the enshrined figure. Of equal importance in Vizenor’s telling of Columbus is the suggestion of genealogical connection and the active “discovery” or “claiming” of connectedness. There is a re-making of memory at work in the story, and the story, whether imagined or factual, still has effect. Indeed, within Heirs itself there is a claim for the significance of story as a vehicle for comprehending experience. Accounts of Louis Riel (who also appears as a character in the novel) are identified as “sacred stories, true or not,” (165) and Vizenor writes, “Whether the heirs believe their stories is not the point, because no culture would last long under the believer test; the point is humor has political significance” (166). Story humor reaches beyond fact and belief, and in a transitive gesture achieves a liberating connection. This transitive gesture of connection plays out yet more clearly in Vizenor’s writing about the historical figure Ishi. Ishi, the last of the Yahi Indians, who lived out his life in a museum, Ishi of Ishi in Two Worlds fame, makes appearances in Vizenor’s essays, drama, fiction, poetry, and in his autobiography. Clearly occupying a cultural and historical liminal space—of “two worlds” and two eras—Ishi also moves from the pages of written documents, from an imagined figure, into Vizenor’s memory and into his day-to-day reality. In Lockean memory theory, if we can remember some experience, we then in fact had that experience. Add to that understanding N. Scott Momaday’s ideas about the power of “imagination” and “memory in the blood,” and Vizenor’s own oft-repeated notion of “stories in the blood,” and his transitive leap of memory in regards to Ishi becomes

80 Kimberly M. Blaeser a simple expressed and enacted extension, an experience of the power of transitive memory. In Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, Vizenor offers a moving and revealing account of his many years of involvement with the memory or perhaps the figure of Ishi. He recounts his first discovery of the story of Ishi and his determined crusade to persuade the University of California, Berkeley, to honor Ishi’s contributions to the institution. But Vizenor does not merely champion the story and legacy of Ishi, he “re-members” him: Ishi, more than any other native outside my family, is a presence in my creative memory. I admire his courage, humor, patience, the irony of his service in a museum, and his sense of survivance. He is my virtual relation, an honorable elder of native memory. (28) In fact, Vizenor counts Ishi as among those who “created by nature a visionary scene of liberty” (29). But the visionary liberation only comes about through the storied connection, and, Vizenor implies, this has a transeunt effect in which “a mental act [like memory] caus[es] effects outside of the mind” (Collins Dictionary). In Postindian Conversations, Vizenor describes the process and effect this way: “I am a storier, and my stories enfold the creation of a voice, a time, and a place that is always in motion, or visionary transmotion. And the stories create me” (61). Note the reciprocity—creating story, and thus created by story—the transmotion of relationship.

Spirit Memory In the work of Vizenor, where nothing remains static, memory too performs— as literary process and as a mixedblood tool of survivance. From the “visual memories” of haiku to the “transitive memories” of autobiographical stories, active memory or re-membering becomes linked to the sovereignty of what Vizenor has called “transmotion.” “Remembrance,” he claims in “Crows Written on the Poplars,” “is a natural current that breaks with the spring tides; the curious imagine a sensual undine on the wash” (103). Remembrance as a natural energy, a current, alive, perhaps even fierce like the motion of spring tides. And able to inspire an “undine”—the word itself bursts with possibility—an alchemy, a fairy-tale novella, a water nymph. In any case, the connotations suggest the “active sense of presence” Vizenor underscores as crucial to Native memory and story (Native Liberty 1, and elsewhere). In Native Liberty, he writes, “Natives by communal stories, memory, and potentiality create a sense of presence not an inscribed absence” (3). Again, note the active transforming—creation of one thing from another. In the above quoted comments about Ishi, Vizenor claims the “storier of exile” created “a visionary scene of liberty,” and in characterizing his

The Power of Transitive Memories 81 own stories he notes their “visionary transmotion.” Both of these phrases, in using the word “visionary,” connote an elevated or spiritual reality, and transitive memory as used in Vizenor’s writing, incorporates this sense of vision or spirit. Indeed, I believe the Anishinaabeg concept of “spirit memory” plays a role in his understanding. In the Anishinaabe language, minjimendan and minjimenim are transitive verbs meaning “to keep in the mind, to remember.” Manidoo mijimendamowin is “spirit memory,” and although not specifically named by Vizenor in his writing, the idea seems inherent in the philosophical aesthetic of his texts. In Fugitive Poses, for example, he links the idea of transmotion with manidoo or spirit. Referring to manidoo, he writes, “The wider sense of the word is spiritual motion, or transmotion, an active spiritual presence” (16).6 As often happens in unraveling definitions and lingual relationships in Vizenor’s writing, I have followed an interesting trail that begins with this mention of transmotion as “spiritual motion or an active spiritual presence,” moves on to his claim that “[t]he connotations of transmotion are creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance,” and finally, tracks his definition of “Native sovenance” as “that sense of presence in remembrance, that trace of creation and natural reason in stories” (15). Pulling these claims together, sovenance, the “presence in remembrance” can then be understood as “transmotion,” as “spiritual motion or an active spiritual presence.” Or perhaps, it can be understood as what some Anishinaabeg elders refer to as manidoo mijimendamowin, “spirit memory.” This concept, like “visionary,” seems to play a key role in the storied performances of re-membering found throughout his canon of works. In the Vizenor canon, we frequently encounter an active quality to memory—a motion, transmotion, or spiritual motion of memory or re-membering. Hence, the term “transitive memory,” suggesting as it does connection and relationship. A transitive verb, of course, links to a direct object, but the more intriguing definition involves a series of linkages. The actual language from Webster’s dictionary offers this as one definition: “being or relating to a relation with the property that if the relation holds between a first element and a second and between the second element and a third, it holds between the first and third elements .” I have tracked exactly this kind of leaping relationality in earlier readings of Vizenor’s work, most notably in “Wild Rice Rights: Gerald Vizenor and an Affiliation of Story.” I see a similarity between transitive memory and ideas of filiation and affiliation, as well as a similarity between transitive memory and Vizenor’s notion of “a dialogic circle” of story. Also similar are my ideas of “a telescopic ring of relations” and “a literary seven-generations sensibility or gesture” (“Wild Rice Rights” 246). My focus in that discussion is on Vizenor’s serial re-membering and re-telling of the Charles Aubid story and its extension into contemporary scenes, where it remains pertinent in new circumstances. Vizenor wrote the original wild rice regulation story in 1968 and returned to it several times in oral or written accounts over the years, continually

82 Kimberly M. Blaeser teasing his understanding of the events. Thirty years after the first newspaper story, he extended and expanded the scope in his discussion “Hearsay Sovereignty” in Fugitive Poses. As I note elsewhere, he links several story moments—his memory of the courthouse scene, Aubid’s memory of Old John Squirrel, Old John Squirrel’s recollection of earlier ancestors’ words, mythic ideas of Trickster and fool’s oats, the Anishinaabe’s 300-year-old tradition of wild rice harvesting, the establishment of an 1855 treaty, and so on. This telescopic ring of relationships extends and contracts as we view and re-view the relationships, our own vision shifting to discover past, contemporary, and even future significance(s). The re-membering involved in Vizenor’s various works resists a static account, resists the illusion of closure. “I write to creation, not closure,” he claims in Native Liberty (6). We can read these retro-stories as indeed involving the ideas of, gestures toward, or performance of filiation and affiliation—as the inheritance of and self-conscious extension of our story relationships into and across new circumstances and new generations as I have pointed out in the past. Similarly, Julie Cruikshank discovered such was the impetus and intention of one of her Yukon women informants, Angela Sidney, who declared: “I have tried to live my life right—just like a story” (20). These acknowledgements and extensions of stories also stand as examples of the enactment of transmotion or transitive memory—as proof of vital presence and continuance in remembrance, as sovenance. Throughout the Vizenor canon, there are a few key scenes, memories to which he returns, moments or events he re-remembers, from which he continues to tease new meaning. Some of these are moments that have in crucial ways marked him or his history. Some, indeed, he calls “transformational.” Among these are his discovery of the White Earth Newspaper The Progress, his encounter with the Native woman in the vomit-stained shirt who sang a moving honor song, the Thomas James White Hawk murder case, the Dane Michael White hanging case, his discovery of haiku in Japan, his father’s move to the city and subsequent unsolved murder, his AIM (American Indian Movement) encounters, and, of course, his killing of a red squirrel. Similarly, there are historical or mythic stories like that of the aforementioned Ishi or that of the Evil Gambler that also endure in this imagination and which undergo a series of incarnations in his writing. In his recent publications, Vizenor has spoken more straightforwardly about his career process and has movingly given voice to his understanding of his own motives, noting a sense of a literary and storied inheritance. In Native Liberty, when writing about his discovery of The Progress, for example, he writes: “I was transformed, inspired, and excited by a great and lasting source of a native literary presence and survivance” (36). Prior to this work, Vizenor had several times told the story of the newspaper published by his ancestors at White Earth, even quoting from the testimony given by his relative, Clement Hudon Beaulieu, when the right to publish the paper had been challenged.7 He has also frequently employed the name Clement

The Power of Transitive Memories 83 Beaulieu in his fiction. But in Native Liberty, he tells the story of his own first encounter with the history of the newspaper, re-members himself as a graduate student doing research, who by chance is directed by a kind librarian to The Progress. The find, of course, has provided significant material over the years for Vizenor’s work, but the true significance lies in the influence the discovery has had on his vocation. Telling of the encounter, Vizenor writes, “I slowly, almost reverently, turned the fragile pages of the newspaper and read news stories, editorials, and notes by and about my distant relatives” (Native Liberty 36). “Reading the newspaper that afternoon at the Minnesota Historical Society,” he claims, “was truly transformational, a moment that lasts in my stories and memory” (37). “The Progress,” he says, “has forever been in my imagination and sense of native liberty” (36). And he notes that reading the work “provided a privy trace of assurance to consider a career as a writer” (36). In reading the statement of the editors of The Progress, Vizenor admits, “I [. . .] imagined my presence as a writer for the newspaper” (39). Through story, memory, and imagination, Vizenor forges a link with his ancestral family and tribal history. The power of transitive memory allows him to experience a sense of the circumstances of his forbears. “I easily return by imagination to that singular time and place on the reservation,” he writes (41). But more than simply imaginatively understanding their experience, Vizenor uses the understanding to forge his own sense of self and literary purpose: “My relatives were there, writers, too, and we shared the same general issues of resistance and survivance,” he claims. “I looked around the reference room that afternoon for someone to convince that The Progress was absolutely revolutionary” (42). Because of his encounter with The Progress and the unwillingness of his professor to accept his research assignment on the newspaper, Vizenor left graduate school. “Obviously,” he writes, “it was time for me to become a journalist. The Progress provided a sense of higher civilization” (37). The original The Progress was dedicated to “A Higher Civilization: The Maintenance of Law and Order” and it was to this phrase young Vizenor alluded (40). We know from Vizenor’s subsequent literary production that the moment of transformation he identifies, his first awareness of this literary legacy, also provided inspiration for his own writing of the kind of revolutionary works he recognized in The Progress. The story link and visionary influence illustrated in this scenario seems to fit the notion of manidoo mijimendamowin or “spirit memory.” In correspondence I undertook with Margaret Noodin about spirit memory, she offered this characterization of the idea: “When I think of what I know of spirit memory I think of memories of survival carried across many generations” and suggested the phrase “survival thoughts” as another translation. This seems to exactly characterize Vizenor’s encounter with The Progress— survival thoughts carried across many generations. The transmotion or active linkage illustrated here becomes even more apparent in considering the cover of the recent volume of The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a

84 Kimberly M. Blaeser Native Democratic Constitution (co-authored by Vizenor), as it contains an image of volume one, number one of The Progress. The rewriting of the White Earth Reservation Constitution is, of course, analogous to the publication of The Progress—an act of literary sovereignty and a revolutionary gesture made in the interest of Native liberty and survivance. The use of a photo of The Progress masthead and partial page signals the authors’ awareness of the “same general issues of resistance and survivance” that fuel both acts, in other words, the legacy, the continuance involved.

Crane Clans In addition to the political, historical, and literary legacies I have already discussed, Vizenor’s concept of transitive memory incorporates Anishinaabe clan associations and the story legacy of clan relatives. Vizenor has often written of or alluded to his descendancy from the crane clan and the significance of that inheritance and responsibility. The linkage to traditional orators stems from the native-centered imagination of ajijaak, the crane, whose “rolling voice” carries far. “The echo makers” among his relatives included Augustus, Clement, and Theodore, publishers of the aforementioned The Progress. They also included his grandmother, Alice Marie Beaulieu, wife of Henry Beaulieu.8 Alice was a woman who Vizenor credited with beginning a new “narrative giveaway” in the city. “She created a homeland in the memories of native humor, a cultural tease of survivance,” he writes in Native Liberty (22). Vizenor sees her as “a storier,” part of a tradition of “native authors who actuated a literary giveaway in their stories, a narrative deconstruction of cultural dominance” (23). The transitive reach of storiers moves across and between generations. Vizenor lists, “William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Louis Owens, Thomas King, Kimberly Blaeser, Gordon Henry, Diane Glancy, and many other natives” (23). Just as Alice “teased lonesome memories” and “told curative stories in an ironic native giveaway,” Vizenor sees story as transitive legacy. He writes of the literary potlatch in which, as in the traditional potlatch, there is “the distribution of wealth” and then the repayment, the giving back, by a “new potlatch more generous than the first” (22–23). The “unnamable presence in stories” is a part of the giveaway and “the native author must bear the eternal nature of the unnamable [. . .] and create a sense of presence in stories” (24).9 Again a reciprocity implying a practice of the transitive. In Vizenor’s own writing, the sense of presence he creates despite the literal absence of his father demonstrates the complex motion and reach of storied memory. Vizenor’s father was a mixedblood Anishinaabe who came to the city, worked as a painter, and was killed in an unsolved urban crime when Vizenor was eighteen months old. Clement Vizenor finds his

The Power of Transitive Memories 85 way into Gerald Vizenor’s poetry, autobiography, fiction, and scholarly essays, and often his life is reimaged through the myth of the Evil Gambler. We can see one example of the complex interweaving, the multi-transitive re-memberings that inform Vizenor’s literary works through a brief tracing of the allusive intertextuality of passages involving his father, the crane clan, and Anishinaabe dream songs. The opening of Vizenor’s autobiographical work Interior Landscapes re-members his father, putting him in the context of the Anishinaabe crane clan, characterizes the significance of the crane orator legacy, makes mention of William Warren’s comments on the “people of the crane,” relates the story of crane leader Keeshkemun, and affiliates himself, too, with his father’s narrative and with “the soul of the crane” when he writes: “One generation later the soul of the crane recurs in imagination; our reversion, our interior landscapes,” and “[w]e are crossbloods, or mixedbloods now, and we are heron and crane totems in the wild cities” (3, 4). That literal construction of hybrid, liminal, genealogical inheritance Vizenor supplements with literary transmotion. Among the oft quoted phrases about ajiijak and the Anishinaabe crane clan we find the identity markers “passweweg” or “echo makers,” the description of the bird’s “far sounding cry beyond the orbit of human vision,” and the imperative spoken by Keeshkemun, “[y]ou must seek me in the clouds.” (Interior Landscapes 5, Summer in the Spring 9, et passim). Among Vizenor’s reexpressions of Anishinaabe dream songs, we also find this lyric: “with a large bird / above me / I am walking / in the sky” (Summer in the Spring 35). Among Vizenor’s haiku is one pondering the lost father: “With the moon / my young father comes to mind / walking the clouds” (Empty Swings n.pag.). The imaginative alignment of the mythic clan figure of the crane, the historical Keeshkemun, and Vizenor’s father through imagery, is the act of transitive relations I described before (a to b, b to c, a to c). A host of similar overlapping moments fill Vizenor’s work. When we add to these simple textual similarities the contextual background—Keeshkemun’s political diplomacy, the visionary origin of the dream songs, the literal absence of Vizenor’s father, etc.—the transitive implications multiply. The significance of Clement Vizenor’s story for Gerald Vizenor, the power of the transitive memories, cannot be overstated. “I create stories of survivance in his name” states Vizenor in Native Liberty (31). He writes on behalf of his father. Through the power of transitive memories, through transmotion or spirit memory, the experiences of one person or era become transformed through another. “My father writes by my hand in memory,” claims Vizenor, “his native blood and breath, my book, and my rest” (33). That memory— his all. In Native Liberty Vizenor includes this quote from Edmond Jabès’s The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversions: “The act of writing defies all distance. Is it not every writer’s ambition to raise the fleeting—the profane— to the level of the lasting, the sacred?” (32). Speaking about the murder of his father and referring back to the quote, Gerald Vizenor claims: “My stories of survivance dare and defy that distance” (32). The solid reality of the

86 Kimberly M. Blaeser memory of his lost relatives comes across most clearly when he claims “my first literary audience is their presence in memory” (33). Through the power of spirit memory, a sacred presence has shimmered in Vizenor’s imagination, tangible enough to inspire a lifetime of writing. The range of associative memories, the imagined presence within his many works is rich and seeming encyclopedic. Basho. Camus. George Morrison. Naanabozho. William Warren. Bishop Baraga. Edward Curtis. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Thomas James White Hawk. The crane clan. The Evil Gambler. Stone Trickster. These “stories in his blood,” the philosophical and literary linkages, reach across time and distance to add complex imagistic and allusive layers to each work he has turned out since his chancey and fateful turn to a literary career. Meanwhile, I re-member a young rabbit-loving graduate student, a Francis C. Allen fellow at the Newberry Library, sitting in a carrel when Bob Black, then editor of the American Indian Quarterly showed up and passed to her a book, The Everlasting Sky by Gerald Robert Vizenor. It was a gathering of stories of “oshki Anishinaabe,” Native relatives carried across time through story. Finding a family name—Antell—in print, finding “a homeland” filled with “memories of native humor” and “a cultural tease of survivance,” surprised and delighted me. “Transformational” and “absolutely revolutionary,” the book changed the trajectory of my work. Through the power of transitive memories the author invited me into a postmodern potlatch, his narrative giveaway.

Notes 1. “Serial Autobiography” is from Krupat, “Trickster’s Lives: The Autobiographies of Gerald Vizenor.” Many scholars use autocritical or auto-criticism in discussing Vizenor’s life writing. For example, Elvira Pulitano entitles one essay on his work “Chances of Survivance: Gerald Vizenor’s Autocritical Auto/biographies.” An early work by Vizenor himself no doubt inspired the characterization “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” (I Tell You Now 99). Linda Helstern devotes an essay in The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor to “Vizenor’s Life Studies” (80–97). Krupat uses the phrase “elegiac reflections” in “Vizenor’s Elegies on a Red Squirrel” (The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor 187). 2. The idea of the “tease of story” appears throughout Vizenor’s work. In Postindian Conversations, for example, he states, “My stories tease a native presence at the treeline, at the shoreline, and that tease is similar to the meaning of the word rive, an edge, a shore, but not, of course, in the sense of margin or separation” (141). 3. Vizenor first uses this phrase in “Crows Written on the Poplars,” claiming, “The mixedblood autobiographer is a word hunter in transitive memories, not an academic chauffeur in the right lane to opposition” (106). 4. See, for example: Henry, The Failure of Certain Charms; McGlennen, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits; Ruffo, At Geronimo’s Grave; and LeGarde Grover’s poems in Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone. The linkages between memory, place, and story permeate these works. In “Birth of the Sacred,” Ruffo describes “this telling” as “a collective journey,” and writes: “as the story is more / than itself / a guide to

The Power of Transitive Memories 87

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

remembering” (19). In his “Postscript,” we find phrases like, “I find myself following you on a map written on my tongue” (107). “Shimmer” used as both verb and noun appears repeatedly throughout Vizenor’s work. He uses it to imply a particular quality, for example, when he writes of the trickster as an “erotic shimmer” (The Trickster of Liberty x) and of the “shimmer of survivance” in “trickster hermeneutics of liberation” (Manifest Manners 66). Likewise, when he writes of “literary animals”: “The animals in native narratives must tease creation and mediate the memories of that divine shimmer at the treeline” (Fugitive Poses 143). There is motion or transmotion implied. He also uses the literal imagery of shimmering such as when he writes of the dragonfly in Bear Island: “dragonflies / break at sunrise / first shimmer / in the eyes” (21), or the moon in a haiku from Matsushima: “march moon / shimmers down the sidewalk / snail crossing” (n.pag.). But perhaps the closest use of the word to the understanding I explore here comes in his comments on the work of Anishinaabe artist George Morrison. “Morrison,” Vizenor writes, “created virtual analogies of landscapes in the ‘endless space’ of his large vertical expressionistic paintings, and in horizon lines, the shimmer of nature and memory” (“George Morrison: Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist”). Vizenor offers further discussion of manidoo throughout Fugitive Poses. Among the other helpful comments is this statement: “The manidoo is a trace of presence, consciousness, and native identities in stories” (40). Vizenor has written several times about the seizure of the newspaper by federal agents because of its “revolutionary” nature. See, for example, The People Named the Chippewa (78–94), which includes a summary of the events, a reprint of excerpts from the court proceedings that took place, and Vizenor’s interpretive comments. Among the publications in which Vizenor discusses the crane clan as his totem and quotes from the tribal history and cultural context offered by William Warren is Interior Landscapes (see especially 3–7). For example, Vizenor writes, “The people of the crane are ‘noted as possessing naturally a loud, ringing voice, and are the acknowledged orators of the tribe,’ wrote William Warren” (4). Given Vizenor’s use of epigraphs from Samuel Beckett in his work, note here a likely allusion to that author’s 1953 novel The Unnamable, which, of course, centers partly around the idea of construction of reality through language, through narrative.

Bibliography Blaeser, Kimberly. Absentee Indians and Other Poems. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. Print. ———, ed. Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Bemidji, MN: Loonfeather P, 2006. Print. ———. “Wild Rice Rights: Gerald Vizenor and an Affiliation of Story.” Centering Anishinaabeg Stories: Understanding the World through Stories. Ed. Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2013. 237–57. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. Print. Helstern, Linda. “Vizenor’s Life Studies: Revisioning Survivance in Almost Ashore.” The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. Deborah Madsen. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. 80–97. Print.

88 Kimberly M. Blaeser Henry, Gordon. The Failure of Certain Charms and Other Disparate Signs of Life. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007. Print. Johnston, Basil. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. Print. Kroeber, Theodore. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Print. Krupat, Arnold. “Trickster’s Lives: The Autobiographies of Gerald Vizenor.” Modern Language Association Convention. Royal York Hotel, Toronto. 1993. Presentation. ———. “Vizenor’s Elegies on a Red Squirrel.” The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. Deborah Madsen. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. 184–95. Print. McGlennen, Molly. Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2010. Print. Noodin, Margaret. Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2014. Print. ———. “Megwa Baabaamiiaayaayaang Dibaajomoyaang. Anishinaabe Literature as Memory in Motion.” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Ed. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 175–84. Print. ———. Message to Kimberly Blaeser. 16 June 2014. E-mail. Pulitano, Elvira. “Chances of Survivance: Gerald Vizenor’s Autocritical Auto/ biographies.” Profils Américains. Vol. 20. Ed. Simone Pellerin. Montpéllier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2008. 125–46. Print. Ruffo, Armand. At Geronimo’s Grave. Regina, UK: Coteau Books, 2001. Print. Sarkowsky, Katja. “Gaps, Immediacy, and the Deconstruction of Epistemological Categories. The Impact of Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry on His Prose.” The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. Deborah Madsen. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. 98–112. Print. “Transeunt.” CollinsDictionary.com. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. Web. 11 June 2015. . “Transitive.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2015. Web. 17 June 2014. . Vizenor, Gerald. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 99–109. Print. ———. Empty Swings. Minneapolis: Nodin, 1967. Print. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. “George Morrison: Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist.” The American Indian Quarterly 30.3–4 (Summer/Fall 2006): 646–60. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Automu 57. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. Literary Chance: Essays on Native American Survivance. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2007. Print. ———. Manifest Manners. Narratives on Postindian Survivance. 1993. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print.

The Power of Transitive Memories 89 ———. Matsushima: Haiku. Minneapolis: Nodin P, 1984. Print. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. ———. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. ———, ed. Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. New Edition. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series 6. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Print. ———. The Trickster of Liberty. Native Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2005. Print. ———, and A. Robert Lee. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print. Warren, William. History of the Ojibway People. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society P, 1984. Print.

7

The Ground of Memory Vizenor, Land, Language David L. Moore

The weave of memory and matter is a map into the enchantments of Gerald Vizenor’s uses of language. Image, imagination, and memory work in his words to unique effect. To set Vizenor’s or any writer’s texts in the context of memory may at first seem obvious. Yet of course drawing attention to the air we breathe together is ultimately the purpose of much art and analysis. As art may defamiliarize the familiar, so may theory do the difficult work of articulating the obvious: “Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural” (Culler 15). Newton codified gravity, but once the theory seems clear, then the questions proliferate. Quantum mechanics upset classical Newtonian mechanics, even as both remain relatively valid, apparently telling different stories. Probing memory itself conjures questions of matter and mind, of energy and consciousness, of time and space. Especially through recent studies in redefining material dynamics of mind, and the mental dynamics of matter, we may reread Vizenor’s words as recasting fundamental structures of subjective and objective experience. Categories break down that would separate language and land, memory and ground, and we may see through these theories some of the aesthetic and ethic in Vizenor’s art. The very value of survivance in Vizenor’s world becomes embodied in the tribal shadows of his words. Further, I suggest that the critical and “autocritical” discipline of Vizenor’s tropes, the fine analytical edge beneath his figurative neologisms, owes its focus partly to his keen attention to this imbrication of meaning in a layering of language and land. “Imagination is a presence; our being in a sound, a word; noise, ownership, and delusions remain” (Vizenor, “Crows” 101). Language matters because the abstract and the concrete are so interwoven that aesthetics are ethics and ethics are aesthetics, and an artist pays attention to that interplay with every keystroke. Memory is the mongrel of matter and mind. If consciousness remains so present and encompassing that it is elusive and ineffable, or at least indefinable, memory is the presence of consciousness retained from experience. Theorists and scientists of consciousness such as Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, authors of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, use the term “experience” to register that complex of awareness that moves

The Ground of Memory 91 through or experiences time and space, “experiencing” things and thoughts. In this discourse bridging physics and philosophy, consciousness becomes a term for the awareness inherent to “experience.” If there is no such consciousness, there is no such experience. A century of physicists has analyzed mathematically this complexity of inner and outer, mind and matter, in the very processes of scientific observation. Further, the record of that experience in consciousness is memory itself. Neurophysiology is trying gradually to fill in the biochemical gaps between consciousness, experience, and memory. For reading Vizenor, these terms translate into memory as the conscious trace of experience. Memory is a mark of the experience inside—and as we shall see—perhaps outside the experiencer. It simultaneously registers the matter at hand and the mind to which that hand matters. And what if the mind is elsewhere than that hand and that body? Not what if mind is disembodied, but what if it resides in and between all bodies? Before we consider questions about mind as a field, let me clarify some perspective on matter as alive, as these two concepts weave together. I am referring here to a renewed definition of “vibrant matter” in terms from quantum physics and feminist theory via Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Stacy Alaimo. Alaimo explains, “[t]he material turn in feminist theory casts matter as, variously, material-semiotic, inter-corporeal, performative, agential, even literate” (244). Such a re-view of matter, where it registers relationality and agency, would acknowledge different forms of consciousness as, for instance, various wavelengths of interaction in mineral, vegetable, animal, and human, all partaking in mind as a network or field rather than a subjective locus in a human brain. Mind becomes a system rather than a single thinker. Consciousness in matter does matter overtly in Vizenor’s verbal world. It is a value behind his memorable statement, “Radio is real, television is not,” that celebrates the link between imagination and consciousness (Heirs). He addresses it more explicitly, where “the nation was divided over the sentience of hemlock and their stories” (Heirs). As “Stone and the scientists reached an agreement” in The Heirs of Columbus, “the scientists insisted that the hemlock stories must demonstrate an audible sound of pleasure, emotion, or evidence of consciousness.” In their civil debate with the skeptical scientists, the “tribal healers” are “astonished that the obvious was doubtable.” The obvious presence of consciousness in the more-than-human world is not doubtable to an Indigenous view, and the scientists eventually concede that the hemlock is a “sentient tree” when it “whispered a recipe for coarse sweet bread made from her inner bark” (Heirs). Whatever consciousness may ultimately be, memory is the mirror of consciousness. If as ancient linguists conceived, consciousness is “thinking together,” i.e., the awareness that exists in relationship, in movement, in juxtaposition, in the existential realities of interconnection, then memory is the record, the mirror, the further discursive loop of those interconnections that are consciousness. Imagination, further, might be direct experience of

92 David L. Moore the energy itself, and memory might be that energy reflected through consciousness. We have a nexus of interconnection and consciousness, of matter and mind. This is one way to think about such things—yet we must note the ultimately unnecessary binaries so necessary to such analysis. Matter, memory, consciousness, and mind might not be distinguishable at all. A vital complexity, rather than discrete reductions, is indeed the point. Vizenor registers this complex of memory as the matter and mirror of consciousness in a number of ways in his texts. He is explicit about this matter, for example, in his recent Blue Ravens (2014), in his earlier The Heirs of Columbus (1991), in a yet earlier piece, “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” (1987), and elsewhere in his prolific body of work. “The Mississippi River,” he writes, “rushed with great energy and memory over Saint Anthony Falls and created a spectacular spirit world of mist and light around the many flour and lumber mills near the Milwaukee Road Depot” (Blue Ravens). While the imagery correlates the infusion of matter and mind, he articulates directly the linkage of “energy and memory.” The infusion of one in the other operates as a given in the narrative, an ecology of tangible yet subtle vitalities. It would be inaccurate to reduce such aesthetics to a “setting,” for the environment here participates in creating a “spectacular spirit world” as real and active as “the Milwaukee Road Depot.” The ground, the water, the mist, the depot, and the iron rails all participate in the plot as they welcome the human characters here. Similarly, “[s]tones hold our tribal words and the past in silence, in the same way that we listen to stories in the blood and hold our past in memories,” as Carp Radio explains in The Heirs of Columbus. Like any good trickster whose work is to bend and blur boundaries, s/he here weaves “silence” with “listen” and “stones” with “blood.” Memories move in matter. Indeed, the role of the trickster storyteller here is to listen to memories in matter and to translate them for others, as explained of another trickster: “Truman shouts at stones to summon memories. She learned to shout as a child, practiced as a lover and mother; however, she was slow to learn silence in the best stories. She hears stories in the blood and then she shouts them into the world” (Heirs). The reversals proliferate deconstructively, where silence holds stories, and stories hold silence; where stones and blood hold stories as well. Such mysteries are common, as with another trickster, Binn Columbus: The stones and trees reveal their memories and the secrets of the tribes; she listened to trees, water, and containers. The water mentions the weather, and the boxes hold the best secrets. She hears treasures in cardboard and secrets in cedar chests; she hears words in piano benches, closets, even in pockets [and in] the abandoned bodies of automobiles. Binn remembers marvelous stories from common trash on the reservation. (Heirs)

The Ground of Memory 93 This notion of memory as a complex of material consciousness resonates with Vizenor’s pervasive use of the term “presence.” He applies the term in many contexts, simultaneously political and existential. For example, in his essay “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” he writes, “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion” (1). And in Blue Ravens, he contrasts the Catholic priest, “constrained by holy black and white,” with the shimmering ravens’ blues as “totemic and a rush of presence.” Such uses of the term “presence” trace that discursive loop which memory registers as consciousness, where presence is always in reciprocity and interconnection. Consciousness seems to be the dynamism of such systems of relation, of presences. Rather than agency or “free will,” consciousness becomes the process of reciprocity itself. I will not in this essay—or any other—pretend to define consciousness, but here I will trace a distinction in consciousness studies that bears on Vizenor’s representations. Locating consciousness systemically rather than individually seems to make all the difference. As the philosopher David Chalmers writes, “Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain” (qtd. in Rosenblum and Kuttner). Lacking the means to get inside of what seems to be inside of us all, yet which we all seem to be inside of, physicists and philosophers draw from each other’s disciplines to map various narratives of consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner approach the “quantum enigma,” or the “measurement problem,” in quantum mechanics where “physical reality is created by observation.” Such an observer phenomenon remains ineluctable. This logic leads to a speculation of the presence of consciousness that does the creating, “the awareness that appears to affect physical reality” (Rosenblum and Kuttner). Along with the separate Heisenberg uncertainty principle, such notions have confronted physics for nearly a century, “[a]t the boundary where solid physics peters out,” according to Rosenblum and Kuttner, though they boldly insist that “‘consciousness’ as roughly equivalent to ‘awareness,’ or perhaps the feeling of awareness [. . .] certainly includes the perception of free will” (172). They proceed through mental gymnastics to cite experiments in neurophysiology and psychology to finally admit, “[t]hough it is hard to fit free will into a scientific worldview, we cannot ourselves, with any seriousness, doubt it” (174). Their insistence on free will, I suggest, is a cultural symptom of problematic individualism as a filter on the theory—the observer changing or creating the matter. Perhaps their quandary derives from a Western worldview: where identity as a locus of consciousness is misrepresented as individual. Indeed, David Abram and others pose a picture of consciousness as not located in the individual brain, but, again, rather as a field. Whether this is “panpsyche” or “animism” or “quantum physics” does not need to be defined in order to imagine analytically a presence of awareness that permeates Vizenor’s “spirit world of mist and light.”

94 David L. Moore Similarly, Abram writes of a basic enigma at the heart of every ostensible “object” in a way that entangles consciousness with physical complexity. This description invokes a physical vibrancy that is a locus of interconnected consciousness: Despite our inherited conceptions, sensible things are not fixed and finished objects able to be fathomed all at once. Their incomplete quality opens them to the influence of other things, ensuring that each entity— earthworm, musk ox, thundercloud, cactus flower—is held within an interdependent lattice of relationships, a matrix of exchanges and reciprocities that is not settled within itself but remains fluid and adaptable, able to respond to perturbations from afar, yielding a biosphere that is not, finally, a clutch of determinate mechanisms but a living sphere, breathing. (Becoming Animal 300) Abram makes such a world visible through his conversations with “traditional peoples for whom all things are potentially alive—of Indigenous cultures that assume some degree of spontaneity and sentience in every aspect of the perceivable terrain” (Becoming Animal 42–43). Drawing on his studies of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Abram clarifies “a participatory mode of perception,” which yields “a complexly nuanced and many-layered approach to the world” (43)—again a simultaneously conscious and concrete experience of creation. Again resonant with Vizenor’s use of “presence,” a register of consciousness thus emerges when one thing is present in relation to any other thing— and where things exist, de facto, in relation to other things. This larger phenomenon of reciprocal presence and animate consciousness may be one reason that consciousness is so hard to define—because it is everywhere. Derrida’s critique of a metaphysics of presence does not actually dismiss such a phenomenon; it merely relegates presence, like “excess,” to the ineffable and therefore to practical irrelevance, much as Zeno’s Paradox relegates theory to impractical abstraction. Suzan Zahrt Murphy draws on theoretical physics of Fritjof Capra to explain consciousness and animism as “processes of self-organization” (41). Material systems seen through quantum physics and chaos theory tend to self-organize in mathematically measurable and predictable ways. Indeed consciousness orders this clarification and these formulations. Self-organization of systems is the relational dynamic, the tendency of systems to order and reorder themselves through change. “I am” means “I am in relation to you.” In the context of vibrant, sentient matter organizing itself, we may reconsider the trickster energy of boundary crossing as a constant “rage for order” or “rage for re-order,” always seeking further organizational potentials—hence animate or conscious or compassionate connections. Here we may emphasize that memory marks the ordering of consciousness.

The Ground of Memory 95 Abram contrasts such reciprocal identities in Indigenous cultures against oppositional constructs in European worldviews. He describes an intellectual history of Western retreats from Copernican clarity, where the astronomer dislocated the Aristotelian image of the cosmos of “ordered spheres enveloping the earth, cradling this world in their grand embrace” (Becoming Animal 155). Indeed, according to Abram, this Copernican expansion triggered the opposing logic of a psychological and cultural insularity: We can hardly imagine the visceral disorientation and sheer vertigo precipitated by that shift, as first the spheres holding the planets and then the outermost sphere of fixed stars abruptly dissolved into a boundless depth. Europeans soon found themselves adrift in a limitless space, a pure outside. Only in the wake of this dramatic disorientation, and the attendant loss of a collective interior, did there arise the modern conception of a mind as a wholly private interior, and hence of each person as an automated, isolated individual. (Becoming Animal 155) Perhaps this isolation was most clearly articulated and celebrated in the sixteenth century by Descartes and his proclamation, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Whether or not he saw such an experience in the reductive dualistic terms later ascribed to him, “Descartes’ resolute philosophical dualism,” according to Abram, “neatly formalized a split between the mental and material domains that had long been implicit in European thought” (Becoming Animal 103). Eventually dualities tilt into hierarchies, where capitalistic structures were described centuries later by Marx in the alienation of labor. Commodified labor isolates each member of the fetishized system of exploitation. Further, as the modern capitalist project is coterminous with the development of colonialism, both require alienation and exploitation to proceed. In this context, I suggest that the Euro-American notion of interior mind is a reactionary defense against not only the Copernican cosmic infinitude, but also against Columbus’s discovery of colonial otherness (155). The history of conquest was driven by, even as it fueled and reified, a perceived interior consciousness that could divide the world into self and other, subject and object. Abram registers an alternative way of perceiving, but Rosenblum and Kuttner complicate their own enigma of consciousness by perpetuating Descartes’ mind as what Abram describes as a “wholly private interior” (Becoming Animal 155). In Abram we may see in relief the significance of another view, where mind is a field of relations, not the purview of any singular brain pan. Instead, “you and the rock are not related as a mental ‘subject’ to a material ‘object,’ but rather as one kind of dynamism to another kind of dynamism—as two different ways of being animate, two very different ways of being earth” (Becoming Animal 56). Rather than isolated identities, “[e]ach thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against

96 David L. Moore other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions [. . .]” (49). Reciprocity emerges as the very structure of perception and of consciousness. “Since we are not the sole bearers of consciousness, we are no longer on top of things, with the crippling responsibility that that entails. We’re now accomplices in a vast and steadily unfolding mystery, and our actions have resonance only to the extent that they are awake to the other agencies around us [. . .]” (Becoming Animal 131–32). Mind itself is reciprocally participatory as “a luminous quality of the earth” (132). To be “grounded” means to be in tune over time with the mind of a place. Vizenor’s ground of memory is that reciprocal attunement to spatial perception, but he is wary of the tendency that is evident in Abram’s tone, to romanticize reciprocity. In “Crows Written on the Poplars,” Vizenor even criticizes the tendency as he edits himself. “When I opened my eyes, after a short rest,  the birds were singing and the squirrels were eating without fear and jumping from tree to tree. I was jumping with them but against them as the hunter” (105). Immediately, Vizenor reflects back on his early draft, commenting that he only “pretends to be an arboreal animal, a romantic weakness” (105). Where the hunt may stand in for full-bodied Vizenor’s engagement with Indigeneity, here he is honestly, and realistically, imaginative. If Vizenor’s imaginative dynamic does not exactly match Abram’s luminous reciprocity of the earth’s mind, this difference is appropriate for an elusive trickster. Indeed, this distinction from Abram’s tone suggests a liminal space in language where we might understand more clearly both the theory of memory and Vizenor’s practice. As we read in “Crows Written on the Poplars,” his autobiographical persona is honest in his “transitive confessional” about being “neither a hunter nor a tribal witness to the hunt” (105). Rather than the grounded, Indigenous identity that derives from experience and endurance “measured in heart, muscles, livers, hides, horns, shared on the trail. My survival is mythic, an imaginative transition, an intellectual predation, deconstructed now in masks and metaphors at the water holes in autobiographies” (105). The work of his survival is in language: “the compassion he expresses for the lives of animals arises from imagination and literature” (105). Perhaps he is midway between the waves of Abram’s field of mind and the “free will” of atomized individuality that Rosenblum and Kuttner posit among the quantum leaps of consciousness. Indeed, Vizenor explicitly recognizes the modern individuality inherent in his own autobiographical writing task, where he quotes George Gusdorf’s “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Gusdorf’s observations resonate with Abram’s critique of the European “modern conception of a mind as a wholly private interior” (Becoming Animal 155): This conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization. Through most of human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others, and is still less

The Ground of Memory 97 against others, but very much with others in an interdependent existence that asserts its rhythms everywhere in the community. (Gusdorf qtd. in Vizenor, “Crows” 107) By emphasizing, indeed, insisting on his own singularity, Vizenor affirms his role, not unlike Walt Whitman contemplating birds in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” as a poet of mortality, to tell “stories about squirrels and compassionate tricksters” (Vizenor, “Crows” 105–106), to sing of death in life: “he remembers their death and absolves an instance of his own separation in the world” (106). Because of his own separation once as an “overbearing hunter,” he writes for “mythic redemptions” (106) of that very separation, thus reaffirming the conscious connections without romance, by a trickster sleight of discursive hand. In Vizenor’s treatment of this matter of memory and consciousness, we may trace a particularly Indigenous cultural attention to memory, a practice that sees memory as part of a larger universe some Native writers have called “animate.” Memory is perhaps a universal term that may act as a cross-cultural gateway to that Indigenous world view of an animate presence in matter. Indeed, Vizenor’s use of the term “presence” evokes this view of the world as animate (here in contrast to the culture of settler colonialism): “Honoré, our father, said the [“dopey” government] agent had no sense of natural reason or presence” (Blue Ravens). This coupling with “natural reason” registers that consciousness in “presence.” Similarly, Vizenor writes of a storyteller in Blue Ravens in ways that affirm these theories of consciousness as reciprocity in material space, as in these formulations linking presence with position and direction: Odysseus told stories that created an instant sense of presence and position [.  .  .] and sometimes he would pause and gesture with his huge shoulders and hands. These gestures of direction created the actual and heartfelt scenes in the world of stories. Natives have always told stories with a sense of presence and direction, the natural scenes of a cultural opera. The trader was native by his stories. Vizenor even resonates with Abram’s assertion that books are animate. “As nonhuman animals, plants, and even ‘inanimate’ rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the ‘inert’ letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone” (Spell 131). Vizenor writes in Blue Ravens of the young brothers’ enthusiasm for reading in similar terms: “In that curious hush and silence of the library the books were a native sense of presence, our presence, and the spirits of the books were revived by our casual touch. Every book waited in silence to become a totem, a voice, and a new story.” An animate world of non-supernatural and unsentimental spirits is evoked by the positioning of these presences in every direction.

98 David L. Moore In such a world, one pays attention. So many animate voices require respect. One must look in all directions, above, below, before, behind. Thus, walking backwards into the future, a related concept with global mythic expression (for example, Maori, Hopi, or ancient Syrian), is an Indigenous recognition and respect for the presence of ancestors in the memory, in history, in culture. Ultimately that presence lies in the living ground, where Abram locates the density of the past. Vizenor’s recurring theme of “heirs” and “heirship” both invokes and performs this ancient value, as in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and The Heirs of Columbus, focusing memory as inheritance, as genealogy, as the ground of family and nation. This dynamic of consciousness in memory and matter constitutes the vein that Vizenor opened in launching trickster discourse. He found that energetic flow between order and re-ordering, perpetually shifting back and forth in what is essentially the cycle of life and death, i.e., the children of the people, and the wiindigo monster who would eat them—but who cannot destroy its own food source or its own role in the cycle. Hence the prolific output of Vizenor’s tricksters, who are always replaying, mapping, expressing themselves on the energy of that cycle. By that self-organizing principle (of Capra’s consciousness), perhaps by that “morphogenetic field,” “causative formation,” or “morphic resonance” (in Rupert Sheldrake’s terms) that shapes matter, every word is a microcosm of the macrocosm, a signifier in and of a discursive system. Vizenor’s neologisms especially are filled with this presence of a re-ordering consciousness, pointing to that larger process and presence of ordering consciousness in language itself. Thus his “socioacupuncture” (e.g., The Trickster of Liberty 44) opens the door to a presence of healing energies in literary expression. Or “panic holes” (e.g., The Heirs of Columbus) offer the ground’s—the earth’s—seemingly infinite potency to absorb human pain. (Though the trickster shamans challenge even that power: “Stone has said that ‘this is a marvelous world of tricksters, no panic holes are deep enough to hold my rage” [Heirs]). Or of course “survivance,” through its linguistic linkages, liberates generations from the oppressive binaries of colonial history’s “terminal creeds.” These words do that work of reordering the world. Each sentence, imbued with this internal process of self-organization of the trickster’s trick, the principle of de-centering and re-organizing, is a stem cell from which the entire discursive project may duplicate and radiate. With each part containing the whole, each part remembers it all. This is a structural poetics by which trickster language/ discourse embodies memory. Further, we may interpret as well as analyze that poetic energy, hermeneutically interpreting, remembering a message that likewise repeats and reorders itself in every word. We read how Vizenor reminds the reader of the land, the basis of the language, and of the law of tribal sovereignty. We thus remember the presence of the ground and the ground of presence. Ground is memory in at least four ways, each swirling in panic holes that absorb the spiritual, psychological, cultural, political, and legal dimensions

The Ground of Memory 99 of such dynamics. Vizenor’s panic holes and other tropes show how memory is woven with the ground as an equation of memory and matter to evoke the sense of presence and consciousness in matter, an animate universe speaking its stories. Here are four aspects of memory as the mark of consciousness in matter: 1) as mortality; 2) as vibrant materiality; 3) as posterity, heirship, successorship; 4) as mystery. The dynamic of ground remembering mortality absorbs the material reality of ancestors. As Crazy Horse is said to have put it: “my land is where my dead lie buried.” As Riel puts it in The Heirs of Columbus, “it is no accident that the burial ground of the heirs is named the House of Life.” “The House of Life is on the descent to the headwaters, the burial ground for the lost and lonesome bones that were liberated by the heirs from museums.” The dynamic of vibrant materiality in the ground takes us through Einstein’s relativity theory equating mass and energy, to Stacy Alaimo’s and others’ articulation of energy itself as consciousness and agency. As in Blue Ravens, “[b]lues were the origin of the earth and stories of creative energy. The mountains emerged from the blue sea and became that singular trace of blue creation and the hues of a sunrise.” The dynamic of ground as remembering posterity is the genealogical application of mortality, where death is not a terminal creed but one part of a cycle of the generations. As they inhabit the ground of the headwaters, the peripatetic trope of heirs itself evokes the active rather than passive relationality between posterity and ancestry, where healing is generational. Thus even Columbus “the explorer has become a trickster healer in the stories told by his tribal heirs at the headwaters of the great river” (Heirs). Ground as mind is an ecosystem, a space that circulates life and death across time. The dynamic of ground as mystery playfully upsets all these attempts to define the indefinable, or as Lee Hays of the Weavers used to say, “to unscrew the inscrutable.” Such mystery is not static, but a “natural tease,” as here in Blue Ravens: “We learned to trust our own creative sight [and the stories in the wild thrust of peyote visions] that night, to trust the natural tease of bright colors, dreams, totems, and the touch of native mysteries.” Thus mystery touches; it does not depart. It interweaves with posterity, materiality, and mortality to make visible a conscious memory in the ground. For final examples of these four aspects of presence in ground as memory in Vizenor’s discourse, we can look to the three-sentence Preamble to the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, ratified in 2009, of which Vizenor was the principal writer. The Constitution resonates with the activist values of community that compel so much of Native American literature in general and Vizenor’s work in particular. As a particularly Vizenorian touch, even in this preamble there is an insistence on triple punning and neologistics: where the nominal and predicate forms of “constitution” and “constitute” echo—i.e., mirror the presence of—the Constitution itself, as both text and context. The dimensions of that pun could trigger an entire symposium.

100 David L. Moore Preamble The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the successors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native constitution of families, totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty. We the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order to secure an inherent and essential sovereignty, to promote traditions of liberty, justice, and peace, and reserve common resources, and to ensure the inalienable rights of native governance for our posterity, do constitute, ordain, and establish this Constitution of the White Earth Nation. (Vizenor and Doerfler) Some of these Vizenorian terms, now codified legally, connect to those four aspects of memory. This is the language of the law of tribal sovereignty, celebrated by the ground’s memory. 1. As mortality, the land absorbs the material reality of the people. Thus “White Earth Nation” itself—“more than metes and bounds” (Heirs)— is that span of ground of an ancestry. Mortality resides in this paragraph as a negative presence within the enduring dynamics of “families,” “survivance,” “reciprocal,” and “inalienable.” 2. As vibrant materiality, the presence of tribal energies operates here in the term “create”; “humor”; “inherent and essential”; “great tradition”; “totemic”; “courage”; “ordain, and establish”; and “native.” 3. As posterity, heirship, and successorship, the Preamble affirms such ground in “successors of a great tradition,” “reciprocal altruism,” and “survivance” itself. 4. As mystery, the ground of memory speaks again in such terms as “totemic,” “create stories,” and “spiritual inspiration.” The Preamble thus maps the positions and directions of the people’s lives on the ground. That is the self-organizing work of consciousness. In a larger context of Indian-white relations, self-governance derives here from a political recognition of the animate agency of consciousness. These four directions of memory in matter converge in another passage from The Heirs of Columbus: “Samana was a hand talker from the stone tavern and the headwaters of the great river. The mariner was touched and transmuted by her blue radiance; his memories turned to bone and stone in the New World.” Columbus’s European abstractions are healed by grounding in Indigenous understanding of matter and mind in a cyclic mortal frame. Memory lives and heals in what it is made of, living bone and living stone. Thus the very question of memory in Vizenor is itself a question of mortality. The stories become various forms of eulogy. By wrestling with death,

The Ground of Memory 101 Vizenor’s project makes the expression of memory itself alive, material, passionate, intense. His language does that. By grounding language, Vizenor’s texts probe memory and trick mortality.

Bibliography Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010. Print. ———. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Random House, 1996. Print. Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms. Ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. 237–64. Print. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Murphy, Suzanne Zahrt. “Quantum Physics and Good Old Indian Wisdom.” Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe. Ed. Marijo Moore and Trace A. DeMeyer. Candler, NC: Renegade Planets Publishing, 2013. 37–51. Print. Rosenblum, Bruce, and Fred Kuttner. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. Second Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Kindle file. Sheldrake, Rupert. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation. Rochester, VT: Park Street P, 2009. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 1–23. Print. ———. Blue Ravens: Historical Novel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Kindle file. ———. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 99–109. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. First Kindle Edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2013. Kindle file. ———. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1988. Print. ———, and Jill Doerfler, eds. The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Kindle file.

8

Gerald Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog (De-)Framing, Memory, and the Totemic in Favor of Crows and Blue Ravens Cathy Covell Waegner

Gerald Vizenor’s dazzling canon of published works includes a broad spectrum of genres. His first haiku collection, Two Wings the Butterfly, was published in 1962, followed in subsequent decades by groundbreaking novels, influential theory works, engagé journalistic texts, innovative forms of autobiography involving poems, essays, and prose—to mention just a sampling. His two recent book-length publications of February 2014, a poetry collection called Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku and a novel titled Blue Ravens: Historical Novel, appear at first glance to be disparate projects: a collection of delicate haiku with a learned introduction focusing on Japanese masters, and a historical novel with devastating scenes of World War I combat and protagonists who join the “Lost Generation.” The two works speak to each other in complex ways, however, starting with the totemic birds in the titles and the arresting cover graphics by Indigenous artist Rick Bartow. Vizenor’s personal journey as a post-World War II army recruit from his White Earth home territory to the west—indeed so far west that he ended up across the Pacific in the Far East of Japan—radically diverges from, yet also parallels his relatives’ earlier path from the reservation to the east, as soldiers across the Atlantic to the battlefields of World War I France. In Japan, Vizenor discovered the transience and timelessness of haiku poetry, and in France, the two protagonists, the Beaulieu brothers, become artists of word and color in the burgeoning Modernist movement. I offer here an experimental intertextual reading of these two books, which can serve to demonstrate both the unique achievement of each work and the symbiotic intertwining of the collected haiku with Vizenor’s recent visionary novel. My discussion is divided into seven sections: after comparing the titles and the cover art, I turn to cultural memory in the two works, then consider them in connection with discursive framing theory, as well as the synthesis of the visual and the verbal. The contrasts in the perspectives on nature, from ‘snapshot’ ephemerality to wartime wasteland, provide key strategies in Vizenor’s two works. I conclude with a contemplation of what I call Gerald Vizenor’s chanted discourse, with its “sense of motion and ceremony” (Blue Ravens 126).

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 103

Radiant Crows and “Blue-As-Presence” Ravens: Titles Crows and ravens are closely related members of the corvid family (Latin: corvus), common birds on nearly all continents. In a fascinating study called In the Company of Crows and Ravens, Marzluff and Angell convincingly show the cultural coevolution between corvids and humans, beings that “share similar traits and social strategies,” resulting in these birds’ “extraordinary success amid a world of change” (xv), a world that, we can add, includes the survivance of Indigenous peoples. Corvids are embedded in Western and Eastern mythology, art, and literature,1 and numerous Indigenous peoples, from North America to Australia, embody them profoundly in their traditions and spirituality. The corpus of Vizenor’s works is laced throughout with countless allusions to corvids, from the beginning pages of his first novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, published in 1978 (“[we were] crows in the cedar” viii), through his 1987 essay called “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” and poems collected in Almost Ashore (2006) such as “Crow Nests,” to his 2003 novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, in which complex links and contrasts between Japanese/Ainu and Anishinaabe cultures are demonstrated by—among many other images, animals, and lifeways—ravens, the “tricky imperial ravens” in Japan and the “raucous ravens perched in the cottonwoods” (7) on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. In an essay written in 2006 titled “Native American Literature, Introduction,” Gerald Vizenor tells us with gleeful commendation that “ravens and crows are native tricksters, a union of pushy, avian mongrels, trust breakers, thieves, and healers,” and that he totemically affiliates with them as his “relatives.” In Vizenor’s 2014 books, a further dimension of corvids is emphasized or “comes to light,” as it were: their radiance takes on manifold connotations.2 birch leaves bear the radiance of the sunset favor of crows (FoC 29) In this signature haiku of Favor of Crows, included in the “spring scenes” section, the evanescent radiance suggests the crow’s natural synergy with its perch on the birch branches and the diurnal rhythm of sunrise/sunset. The final line could mean both that the crows favor their evening roost on the glowing branches and that the sunset-colored birch leaves “favor” or resemble the crows with their feathery sheen.3 A haiku in the “autumn scenes” section provides a transition through the shininess of “blue ravens” to Vizenor’s Blue Ravens novel: blue ravens glimmer in the cottonwoods twilight hues (FoC 70)

104 Cathy Covell Waegner In this poem the shimmering ravens either reflect the gloaming lighting or, if we consider the setting of the poem to be daytime rather than evening, “glimmer” with rainbow radiance from their perches in the cottonwood trees. As Vizenor insists in his novel, corvids are not simply black but bluely luminescent. The narrator’s brother Aloysius paints visions of abstract ravens, which the narrator Basile calls at various times “glorious,” “celestial,” even “ethereal.” In a combination of lyrical haiku language and key Vizenor lexis, including “presence,” “ironic,” and “tease,” we are told why Aloysius paints all of his ravens in shades of natural blue: Black was an absence, austere and tragic. The blues were totemic and a rush of presence. [. . .] Ravens are blue, the lush sheen of blues in a rainbow, and the transparent blues that shimmer on a spider web in the morning rain. Blues are ironic, the tease of natural light. The night is blue not black. (2) The subtitle of the book, Historical Novel, shows the shift from the haiku poems that are multiply anchored in time, space, and cultural tradition, to the specific and representative experiences of Vizenor’s relatives in World War I. Aloysius must adapt his art to the war conditions: “he blued the bloody and desolate battlefields” (2).

Crow-People: Cover Art On the cover of Favor of Crows, Rick Bartow’s colorful “pastel on paper” artwork called “Crow’s Mortality Tale” implies a human/crow fusion. The crow’s beak amalgamates with the human face against a skull-like background shape. The crow-man’s wing feathers recall a hand, one of Bartow’s trademark visual tropes. In the haiku poems in the volume, crows and ravens have attributes that could also be applied to humans, such as “cocky,” “tricky,” “bold,” “mighty,” “noisy,” and “raucous,” and in those haiku they “parade,” “march,” “bounce,” “circle,” and even “hopscotch,” yet they lack personification as a subjective first-person “I.” Thus Bartow’s fusion seems appropriate: it implies an Indigenous animistic stance that rejects a “human above animal” hierarchy and a Western privileging of individual subjectivity. mighty crows bounce over the great river slippery stones (FoC 31) This haiku might imply that “crow-ness”—even if it humorously “bounces”— is much better suited to crossing the wide water than are clumsy human

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 105 strides on wet rocks. The “Mortality Tale” of Bartow’s painting could be imagined in the slipping off of the stones into the rushing river if the strategic bouncing of the crow, a powerful totemic figure in Anishinaabe dream songs, is overruled by awkward human motion. The touches of red and the black outlines that we see in Bartow’s cover for Favor of Crows gradually appear in Aloysius’s paintings of blue ravens as this protagonist develops his art—after encounters with the Japanese master painter Yamada Baske, a historical personage—in which he always depicts his visions of Raven, a creator and trickster of Indigenous oral tradition. Bartow’s cover art for the novel is titled “Raven’s Dream.” Again we see a fusion of the avian and the human with hand-shaped wingtips. The more intensive blue, green, and orange colors of this painting in comparison to the cover of Favor of Crows with its paler yellow and grayish-blue, however, and the grotesque expression on the visage facing the viewer in “Raven’s Dream,” not to speak of the red noose-shape to the right, allow it to forecast the brutal combat of World War I and the facially mutilated war veterans with their prosthetic masks who figure so prominently in the last chapters of the novel.

“Totemic Animism”: Cultural Memory, Old and New The deep common source of the two journeys I described in my opening paragraph, Gerald Vizenor’s to the west and the Beaulieu brothers’ to the east, and the art they produce, is the rich Anishinaabe culture and its cultural memory, its modes of animism, its dream songs, its inherited and ever-changing stories, to name but a few elements. “Cosmototemic” is a term Vizenor uses in Blue Ravens and elsewhere to describe the voices of visionary Native artists not heard by most curators of Native art in museums (Blue Ravens 166).4 In a number of publications, Vizenor has also taken a strong stand on the importance of a non-human-centered, cosmototemic weltanschauung for the Native writer: “My idea of a native literary aesthetic is a tricky, totemic union of animals, birds, humans and others” (“Native American Literature”). We will see later that “others” includes material such as “granite” (cf. Blue Ravens 209). Throughout his work, Vizenor has shown deep respect for ancient Anishinaabe “dream songs” in which the speaker can identify totemistically with an animal, as in this line: “Crow is my name.”5 Nonetheless, Vizenor can also playfully banter with the dream song genre. In a haiku from Favor of Crows, discarded bird’s nests are transformed by snow into something beautiful, worthy of admiration, and perhaps a promise of future bird generations: scruffy bird nests covered overnight with snow dream songs (101)

106 Cathy Covell Waegner Yet the summer birds’ songs remain only a “dream” in the snowy winter. The haiku-scene observer hints not only at the seasonal cycle of birth, decay, and rebirth, but, cheekily, also at nature’s and the dream singer’s disguising of “scruffiness.” In Blue Ravens, Vizenor breaks down anthropologists’ vexed division between the totemic (spiritual kinship and even identification with an animal) and the animistic (belief that, like humans, non-human entities have a spiritual essence)6 with his narrator’s presentation of Aloysius’s artistic achievement. Aloysius has what Basile describes as a “vision” in Minneapolis and paints blue ravens on the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River: The abstract blue ravens were present in the granite of the bridge, and in the natural motion of curves, contours, blue roman beaks, claws, and mighty eyes, an artistic grace of totemic stature. My brother had awakened with a great vision that would forever change the world of native art. [. . .] [T]he new abstract and impressionistic blue ravens emerged, were revealed, and came out of material and nature. The blue ravens were the transformations of stone, water, and machines, an incredible totemic animism. (209, emphasis added) We would be misreading the novel, I think, were we not to join Basile in venerating Aloysius’s creative experience. But perhaps we are allowed to smile when Basile uses similar imagery to depict the interesting and interested Paris bookshop owner, the legendary Adrienne Monnier, important in the Modernist scene as a co-translator of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Basile tells us that “her blue eyes were totemic, ready to touch the obscure” (154). Even Aloysius teases his brother about his attraction to the Circe-like bookstore owner (154). After all, Basile is reading The Odyssey during this furlough-trip to Paris.

Flying Out of Frames: Discursive Framing Theory I see ways in which an intertextual reading of the two works at hand can be encouraged by recent discussion of discursive framing. Developing a broad, process-oriented theory of rhetoric, which includes artistic production, Richard Andrews assesses framing as “the engine and principal operation device of rhetoric in the twenty-first century. It makes rhetoric happen” (99). Framing involves the constant positioning or contextualizing within the linguistic, social, and pragmatic parameters of the communicative exchange. For literature, this could include the contexts of genre, socio-historical or literary era, language register, and kinds of audience participation. The interaction of the repertoires of the text/author with those of the reader is enabled or enhanced by the discursive framing.7 In framing his poems within the established genre of the haiku, for example, Vizenor

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 107 is asking the reader of Favor of Crows to draw on an understanding of the traditional Japanese form and themes—but he is also instrumentalizing the frames of the Anishinaabe dream song and imagist poetry, among others. In Blue Ravens, Vizenor specifically includes the texts of dream songs and imagist poems, thus activating those frames. But in both Favor of Crows and Blue Ravens, this framing takes on further complex genre and idio-discursive functions. A transitory haiku scene, arising in nature, is captured, as in a snapshot, and thus framed for the reader to attempt to imagine the perception or significance that the author, through his sensitive “camera eye,” imaginatively experienced. The powerful slipperiness of the imagination at both ends of the process, however, makes this act of communication difficult and rich for both rhetor and recipient. The frame of the haiku scene is thus far from containing and reductive—on the contrary. In Blue Ravens the intra-textual framing in connection with Aloysius’s pictures is often literal and concrete: he is painting on pieces of paper (or on cheeks and hands) or carving images on wooden pendants. But Gerald Vizenor accomplishes the narrative and rhetorical feat of de-framing many of Aloysius’s images. The young artist’s act of creating the images is generally (first) described as if he were a guerilla urban artist painting large engagé murals on building walls or more fantastically in the air above buildings.8 At Gateway Park during the brothers’ first trip to Minneapolis, for instance, Aloysius “painted several abstract ravens over the pavilion, one enormous blue beak above the arcade” (29). He also painted “blue ravens in every display window” (32), as well as “a huge blue raven, our great new totem of honor and adventure, in one of the turret bay windows of the library” (36). Landing in France years later, Aloysius “painted a huge blue raven on the Navy dock as the ship was guided to the Penfeld River and Le Port Militaire” (108), and as part of the occupying force in Germany, he “painted several enormous blue ravens over the dark fortress and over the bridges on the Rhine River” (143). Even if newsprint or watercolor paper is mentioned later, the initial impression is that the totemic blue ravens are free from a narrowly confining frame and expand to fill the geographical space available. Both the haiku poet and Aloysius as a Native visual artist are able to move beyond or to transgress the conventions of the frame to make new, expressive, and insightful connections.9 The expansion from a frame is also brilliantly realized in Vizenor’s novel when the whole narrative can be viewed—or at least the Künstlerroman strand of it relating to Basile’s development into an author—as unfolding from an epiphanic tableau early in the novel. The two brothers are disappointed to see conventional art, specifically a posed picture of Irish setters, in a gallery window in Minneapolis, when suddenly the boys become part of an urban haiku scene and relate this in oral stories: Our faces were reflected in the gallery window, and at that very moment a yellow streetcar passed through the scene of our reflection, a throwback

108 Cathy Covell Waegner to abstraction and native stories. The muted aristocratic setters mingled with passengers on the streetcar. That scene became the most distinctive story of our two days in the city. We told many versions of that story to our relatives. The Irish setters, native faces, and the slow motion of the streetcar that afternoon became a chance union of abstract creation. (43) This moment is referenced again on page 171, when the brothers, as unemployed veterans in 1919 who have returned from the occupied countries of France, then Germany, to “a federal occupation on the reservation” (170), decide that they must eventually leave White Earth; Basile commits himself to his calling as a writer: I watched the reflection of my face on the train window [as the train left the Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis], the ethereal motion of my eyes in the trees and meadows, and was reminded of that moment outside the art gallery ten years earlier when the setters and our faces in the window moved with other faces on the streetcar. I considered the creation of my stories in motion, a great literature of motion, but not on the reservation. (171) The captured but dynamic, haiku-like moment when the boys see a way to transform a conventional view through the reflected and incongruous palimpsest of “Irish setters, native faces, and the slow motion of the streetcar” expands to encompass their personal and novelistic development into Native artists. John Purdy has suggested that Vizenor’s novels could be read as “150-page haiku prose” (222); this could certainly be a fruitful approach to Blue Ravens.10

Creative Doppelgängers: Synthesis of Visual and Verbal A haiku poem paints a memorable, fleeting image in words, as in this one from “winter scenes”: shiny ravens bounce in the heavy snow shadow dance (112) The chiaroscuro picture of a flock of black birds, presumably pecking for food buried in the deep white snow, depicted as dancing shadows, encodes motion, which is perhaps saved from being a desperate “Totentanz” by the ravens’ healthy attribute of “shiny” and, again, the slightly slapstick movement of bouncing. In the novel Blue Ravens, Vizenor has his narrator

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 109 Basile undertake a more distanced task of describing painted artworks in words. He even takes this ekphrasis a symbiotic step or two farther by having Basile write his literary texts based on his brother’s paintings, and viceversa: Aloysius paints versions of Basile’s stories. Basile and Aloysius are creative doppelgängers—the words of the writer and the images created by the painter interact with and inspire each other. It is tempting to see them totemically as the raucous crow and the silent raven. The final chapter revolves around the climactic example of this symbiosis, when Basile gives his first public reading of his published stories, along with the great exhibition of Aloysius’s new series of large paintings titled “Les Mutilés de Guerre” (“The Mutilated of War”). The reader is offered two paragraphs of what (s)he assumes is narrative recounting and historical meditation: The wounded soldiers gathered overnight in ghostly camps on the bloody shores of the zone rouge tributaries to warn the successors and to search for the strays. The sunrise and seasons were diverted by the war, and the rivers became the steady stream of death. Broken bodies, shards of mighty country bones, and the tow of unnamed heads, hands, and bloated shoulders in uniform ran ashore in the heavy rain. The rivers nurtured no secure memories of the dead soldiers, only fragments afloat with thousands of other reflections. Yet the faces of warriors looked back forever with a natural radiance. The Somme, Meuse, Marne, Aisne, Oise, and Seine River have carried for many generations the blue bones of soldiers out to the stormy sea. (266) The phrase “blue bones” provides a clue, however, that Basile is describing one of Aloysius’s paintings, and indeed he is, one in which “blue ravens were the solemn prefects of the mutilés de guerre on the River Seine” (266). But when Basile reads his texts to the gallery audience later in the chapter, concluding with what he calls his “imagistic poem” (278), it turns out to be nearly this very text we have just seen but with the line breaks of a poem: [. . .] The early sunrise broken stream of bodies shards of country bones crushed cheeks noses sheared bloated hands and shoulders come ashore in uniform [. . .] (280) Has Aloysius read Basile’s text before painting his artwork? Is Basile describing—both in this poem and in the novel itself—Aloysius’s view of

110 Cathy Covell Waegner the postwar refuse, which inspired him to create his painting? As a creative team, the two brothers transpose with agility from word to pictorial image and vice-versa, mutually reinforcing the strong images and narrative movement in the synthesis of their visual and verbal art.

Nature Strategies: ‘Snapshot’ Ephemerality vs. Wartime Wasteland As the preceding text samples have shown, the ‘snapshot’ ephemerality of the haiku nature scenes in Favor of Crows is distortedly echoed in the destruction of nature recorded in the Blue Ravens narrator’s lyrically grotesque descriptions of war damage to the French countryside. Vizenor presages the transmutation from nature in season (and his changing place in it) to wasteland in his preface to Favor of Crows: I first read haiku as evocative memories of the motion of seasons, and yet the scenes, the perceptive, emotive moments, connections, and associations, were ironic traces of my own transience and impermanence in nature. Haiku created a sense of presence, and, at the same time, reminded me of a nature that was already wounded, desecrated, removed, and an absence in many places on the earth. (xv) In the following haiku from “winter scenes” in Favor of Crows, we see the birds finding new uses for the emblems of human mortality as the jays sip water drops from the names carved in tombstones. The graves are “warm”— warm from the winter sun? Or perhaps recent burials? blue jays drink from the watery names warm gravestones (107) Basile notes that victims of the war included most of the regional bird population, although tough corvids returned: “[F]ew birds survived the war. The poison gas and constant bombardments were devastating to natural flight and the ordinary songs of the seasons. Later we saw more cocky northern ravens, the grands corbeaux, than any other bird” (130). Aloysius pays homage to this when he paints countless blue ravens into his pictures of war trauma with its carnage and fractured body parts. The masked ravens in many of the paintings both reinforce battlefield trauma and point to ways of overcoming it, recalling the artful prosthetic masks of the injured veterans, and hark back, through Basile’s narration, to the medieval raven masks of the doctors during the Great Plague, with protective herbs in the masks’ beaks. Aloysius’s individualistic warpaint, “wide

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 111 bands of blue with black and rouge circles” (129), serves as a shielding mask in the war theater. Indeed, the peaceable brothers wend their way through the wartime wasteland with bravery and survival tricksterism. Before looking at their tactics, I offer an avian glance at clever birds from Favor of Crows who are also faced with a type of wasteland scenario, an old and non-functioning windmill: tricky crows spread their wings on a windmill locked with rust (54) They have discovered a secure perch for wing-spreading and preening on what would normally be moving blades, or possibly, for the observer, it appears as if they use their wings to substitute for the disabled blades. In Blue Ravens Sergeant Sorek forces the brothers into a clever instrumentalization of stereotypical Indian roles: the sergeant, who might have watched the earliest films in the emerging Western genre, “was not romantic but he was convinced that stealth was in our blood, a native trait and natural sense of direction even on a dark and rainy night in a strange place” (121), and, in a kind of double finesse, the brothers’ strategies even fulfill this stereotype. They use assumed Native skills of establishing oneness with nature to detect alien movements, and they locomote like animals: “Aloysius lowered his head and moved in the smart spirit of an animal, sudden leaps, lurches, and slithers on his belly. [. . .] Native hunters moved in the same way” (130–31). Aloysius carefully applies warpaint, which ironically becomes a “comic mask” (129) with the shapes and colors of a Chagall work, as we have seen. Ferociously wielding his pocket knife, the gentle painter Aloysius exploits the stereotype of the savage Native warrior to overcome, capture, and, during mission after mission, even kill German soldiers frozen into fear by the anticipation of being scalped. The brothers are extraordinarily successful scouts after their first mission in which they were captured by two even cleverer Oneida scouts from a different squadron. In later missions Aloysius paints “blue wing feathers of abstract ravens” on his fellow scouts’ cheeks, creating the “illusion of a face in flight” (129); the painted tattoos become tokens of victory over violence in the surreal war, blue being the “color of peace, courage, and liberty” (129). Aloysius also draws vertical blue stripes on his cheeks for the homecoming banquet on the reservation, and at an exhibition of his works in Paris the mutilés de guerre paint ravens on their cheeks to show their appreciation of the outstanding painter. He has earned his scout nickname of “Blueblood” (126) in more ways than one. It should not be forgotten that Aloysius is a foundling, a “stray” (passim), abandoned at the entrance to the reservation the same day Basile was born; perhaps he is not even of Native paternity. The deliberate uncertainty serves as a constant reminder of the constructedness of strategies to impose or

112 Cathy Covell Waegner forge identity, and conversely reinforces the reader’s astonishment at the “soul brothers’” closeness and mutual support.

“Sense of Motion and Ceremony”: Gerald Vizenor’s “Chanted Discourse” The two works at hand are profoundly informed by Vizenor’s influential semiotics of Native discourse. His semantically and culturally negative phrasings such as “victimry,” “terminal creed,” “manifest manners,” and “fugitive poses” are balanced by the positively connotated ones, including “native liberty,” “natural reason,” “survivance,” “presence,” “irony,” and “tease.” I will consider here one term which has, as far as I know, not yet been discussed in the secondary literature: sway. flights of starlings curve and shimmer wing to wing sunset sway (FoC 70) The arcs flown by the flock of luminescent starlings create calligraphic curves in the gloaming sky and its evening wind currents. In Blue Ravens such curves counter the rigidity of straight lines and ideologies: “The blue ravens were marvelous creations that late summer, the visionary images of peace, sway, irony, and, of course, a native sense of presence in the pitch and atrocities of war” (126). Here they were painted in the back of a lurching truck on the rough military roads; however, the “sway” of the blue raven pictures is more than simply physical: “[Back in Minneapolis, Aloysius] painted magnificent blue ravens with a natural aesthetic sway” (205). I venture to maintain that in Blue Ravens Gerald Vizenor has “swayed” his style, making it appropriate for this historical and imaginatively broad family-autobiographical work embedded in the zeitgeist of an international generation overshadowed by war and rejuvenated by new directions in art and literature. His discourse in this book is thus somewhat different from that of his previous works, although the individual features and his individualistic voice can certainly be found in earlier novels, stories, and other types of writings in his extensive canon.11 In Blue Ravens, he frequently re-starts his narrative, soberly giving us information we have already heard, in some cases numerous times before. This can be considered a characteristic of oral recounting, with certain extended phrases repeated to encourage memorability, but it also reflects Basile’s reiterations of influences and insights important from the perspectives of his White Earth community and his close bond with his “twin” brother, his comrade in art and war. Importantly, the re-starts, often with revised emphases, underscore the youths’ shaping of new forms without discarding the valuable originary ones.12 The litany of names of the soldiers who have fallen in the war takes on rhetorical power, the accumulation of names alone standing as a critique of the senseless, destructive ludic of war.13

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 113 The recitation of the list of contaminated rivers, of destroyed villages, burns them into the recipient’s consciousness. The anaphora of re-echoed beginnings of sentences contributes to a striking and extremely effective impersonalization of discourse, a solemnness that Vizenor’s novel shares with haiku impulses. Although, as we have seen, Vizenor permits flashes of humor in both genres, we seldom see Basile’s feelings and thoughts as direct responses to events; the ostensible objectivity or impersonality of the first-person narrator conveys emotional reactions, however, with his judgments, approvals, and critiques transmitted mainly through an accumulative code of phrases during the course of the novel. The concrete features of those abstract blue ravens are enumerated like mantras, lending the ravens a vivid visual ontology in the reader’s imagination. I suggest that we call Vizenor’s narrative language in this novel chanted discourse. The association of “chant” with oral Indigenous productions is not coincidental and ties in with the totemic thrusts in the novel. This term implies the application of a strategy that moves beyond the expected effect of events and actions on characters’ emotions, which places characters and readers directly and inextricably into larger historical events and movements. It is an expansive yet somber style which, like the blue raven images, when painted with the new shimmering blues gleaned from the legendary French woad plant, “create[s] a sense of motion and ceremony” (126 [emphasis added]). Gerald Vizenor’s accomplishment in forging (yet another) innovative narrative discourse while maintaining his distinctive voice is indeed an achievement deserving special recognition. In the introduction to Favor of Crows, Gerald Vizenor emphasizes the importance of cultural and aesthetic memory: “Many anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals, birds, and other totemic creatures in experience, visions, and in memory. The same can be said about haiku scenes, that the visions of nature are the perceptions and traces of memory” (xi). He also movingly tells his readers what value the haiku have for him personally: “I may never know if my haiku are right by nature, only that the scenes are my best memories” (xv). The personal, cultural, and visionary memories encoded in the intertextuality of his two latest books find their place in the reader’s repertoire of “best memories” as well. We also remember that Gerald Vizenor described himself quite early in his career as a totemic fighter: “I am part crow, part dragonfly, part squirrel, part bear. I kick the sides of boxes out. I will not be pinned down. I am flying home in words and myths” (“Gerald Vizenor” 168). His personal de-framing, his freeing himself from “boxes” or pigeonholes in word and myth, is re-embodied in his most recent books, in the swaying crows and the soaring blue ravens.

Notes 1. These multifarious traditions range in Western tradition from the crow figures in Aesop’s fables through the obligatory (now wing-clipped) ravens in the Tower of London to Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “Nevermore”-quoting raven. To give an Eastern example from the ancient Japanese haiku tradition, in the seventeenth century the master Bashō wrote a corvid haiku, which is presented in the

114 Cathy Covell Waegner

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3.

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6. 7.

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artistic 2010 book The British Museum Haiku Animals: “usually hateful / yet the crow too / in this dawn snow” (14). Bashō’s classical haiku poem is illustrated with a silk painting by Koson Ohara (1877–1945) titled “Crow on Snowy Willow Branch” (Pilbeam 15). A recent “reinscription” of the crow as a Native totem can be found in Blaeser, et al, “Crow Commons: An Exposition of Virtual Exchanges,” an experiment in academic-creative discourse. Other similar birds appear in the Favor of Crows haiku poems: gray juncos, redwing blackbirds, grackles, starlings, and other birds species are rampant as well: wrens, mockingbirds, woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, kites (birds of prey), sparrows, (blue) herons, golden eagles, doves, robins, loons, hummingbirds, cardinals, meadowlarks, cattle birds, plovers, cedar waxwings, (evening) grosbeaks, warblers, blue jays, pigeons, and “birds” in general. Kimberly Blaeser thoroughly presents the intricacies of haiku form and the ways Vizenor employed them up to the time of her book publication in 1996, see especially chapter 4 of her book. Essays on Vizenor’s haiku are available online as part of Wesleyan UP’s book promotion at http://favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu/ haiku/. Madsen (2009) insightfully discusses Vizenor’s interlacing of haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs (64). Several contributions in Understanding Gerald Vizenor excellently develop ideas about the interstices between Vizenor’s poetry and prose. See, for example, Vizenor’s essay titled “Native Cosmototemic Art” in Hill, Hopkins, and Lalonde. A video of Vizenor’s address during the “Sakahàn” exhibition’s opening symposium on May 17, 2013 can be viewed online at http:// www.gallery.ca/sakahan/en/50.htm. This quotation appears in White Earth member Henry Selkirk’s reworking of an Anishinaabe dream song, probably in the first decade of the twentieth century, the time when the protagonists of Blue Ravens were growing up on the reservation. Selkirk’s poem, called “Song of the Crows,” is one of the epigraphs of Favor of Crows: “The first to come / I am called / Among the birds. / I bring the rain / Crow is my name.” A variation of the “Crow is my name” dream song is contained in the Preface to Favor of Crows (xxiii), and the dream song is also sung by Patch in Blue Ravens 24. Vizenor offers the following reading in his preface to Favor of Crows: “This anishinaabe dream song is about the arrival of spring and the crows, a natural transmotion of the seasons. The singer has taken the name of the crow, the favor of the crow, and teases a shamanic, visionary voice of nature. The crow, or aandeg, is a sign of wisdom, maybe even a trace of tragic wisdom” (xxiii). Anthropologist Philippe Descola’s widely cited distinction between totemism and animism based on a “physicality”/“interiority” dualism is presumably countered by Vizenor’s approach. Andrews does not explicitly point out this interaction between the repertoires of text and reader, which was developed as early as Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978), but, in my opinion, takes on new currency in recent framing theory. A. Robert Lee describes astutely this phenomenon of Aloysius’s ravens inhabiting outside space: “A later age has Christo wrap buildings and cliffs, Banksy fashion anonymous street graphics, or Jean-Michel Basquiat line-draw his pictograms. But the Aloysius of Vizenor’s text paints his ravens as though, virtually, irreally, they have the call to appearance everywhere, whether Twin Cities–Saskatchewan Soo Line rail carriage or Seine River bridge, whether Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre or the Marne and Vesle battlefields. Only in part will they transfer from outside-world to inside-gallery” (“Flight Times” 92). It should be explicitly pointed out that Aloysius’s ravens can express his perceptions, critiques, and emotions. For instance, at Stone Arch Bridge over the

Vizenor’s Shimmering Birds in Dialog 115

10.

11.

12.

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Mississippi River, he “painted a row of three blue ravens perched on the bridge with enormous wings raised to wave away the poison coal-fire smoke and hush the strange whine, clack, and other machine sounds along the river” (28). When the troopship first lands in Brittany and he sees the war wounded, Aloysius “was moved to tears and turned away to draw blue ravens in waves of torment” (108). In this interview, Gerald Vizenor responds to Purdy’s suggestion with praise of Kimberly Blaeser’s insights into the importance of haiku for his novels (222). Deborah Madsen supports Purdy’s suggestion, cf. Understanding Gerald Vizenor 118. An early online review by Karl Helicher points out some features of Vizenor’s narrative, which Helicher calls “Native American traditions”: “The author skillfully employs Native American traditions, including trickster tales, irony, nonlinear time, and a sense of presence in which the past, present, and future are fused” (Foreword Reviews). What I am calling “chanted discourse” in Blue Ravens emphasizes different components. Kimberly Blaeser deals thoroughly with the many ways Vizenor’s writing segues with orality in his individualistic style: “We even find, for example, Vizenor’s own special brand of formulaic diction, repetitive phrases, and epithets (used in oral cultures to aid in memory and for amplification)” (31). In a new, moving essay entitled “Empire Treason: White Earth and the Great War,” which links passages from Blue Ravens to historical citations, Vizenor experimentally uses his narrator Basile Hudon Beaulieu as a historical source. The “impersonality” of Basile’s reports is counterbalanced by Vizenor’s own first-person voice describing his viewing of the battlefields of France.

Bibliography Andrews, Richard. A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric. New York: London: Routledge, 2014. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. 1996. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2012. Print. ———, Jane Haladay, Gordon Henry Jr., Molly McGlennen, and Jesse Peters. “Crow Commons: An Exposition of Virtual Exchanges.” Mediating Indianness. Ed. Cathy Covell Waegner. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2015. 281–308. Print. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. 2005. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013. Print. Helicher, Karl. “Blue Ravens.” Foreword Reviews. 27 Feb. 2014. Web. 15 Jan. 2015. . Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Print. Lee, A. Robert. “Flight Times in Gerald Vizenor’s Blue Ravens: White Earth Mediating History.” Mediating Indianness. Ed. Cathy Covell Waegner. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2015. 91–94. Print. Lynch, Tom. “To Honor Impermanence: The Haiku and Other Poems of Gerald Vizenor.” Loosening the Seams: The Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 2000. 203–24. Print. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. Print. ———. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Print.

116 Cathy Covell Waegner Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell. In the Company of Crows and Ravens. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Print. Pilbeam, Mavis, ed. The British Museum Haiku Animals. London: The British Museum P, 2010. Print. Purdy, John, and Blake Hausman, “The Future of Print Narratives and Comic Holotropes: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” American Indian Quarterly 29 (Winter/ Spring 2005): 212–25. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore. Earthwork Series. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006. Print. ———. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Rpt. of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. 1978. Print. ———. Blue Ravens: Historical Novel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 99–110. Print. ———. “Empire Treasons: White Earth and the Great War.” Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor. A Reader’s Companion. Wesleyan UP, n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2015. . ———. Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. “Gerald Vizenor, Ojibway/Chippewa Writer.” This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts. Ed. Jane B. Katz. Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1980. 163–8. Print. ———. “Haiku Scenes: An Introduction.” Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. ix–xxxv. Print. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. 2003. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Print. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. “Native American Literature, Introduction.” Ken Lopez Bookseller. Ken Lopez Bookseller, 2006. Web. 15 Jan. 2015. . ———. “Native Cosmototemic Art.” Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art. Ed. Greg A. Hill, Candice Hopkins, and Christine Lalonde. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013. 42–52. Print. Waegner, Cathy Covell, ed. Mediating Indianness. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2015. Print.

Section 3

“The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions” History and Futurity

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From Domestic Dependency to Native Cultural Sovereignty A Legal Reading of Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears Sabine N. Meyer

Introduction Due to its recent publication date, Gerald Vizenor’s 2012 campus novel Chair of Tears has not yet received much scholarly attention. The first scholarly contribution, a review by Maria Orban, concludes with the following words: Outlandish and playful, a combination of destruction and reverence (sometimes hard to tell apart), with humor and ambiguity the only constants, combining elements of irony, sarcasm, parody, comedy, satire, farce, and self-deprecating humor, this novel defies literary categorization. It is versatile, whimsical, uncomfortable, challenging, exploding in references and allusions; it’s Vizenor at his best. (244) This is an apt summary of the challenging fictional journey on which Vizenor takes the reader in Chair of Tears. The novel revolves around Captain Shammer, who, despite his utter lack of formal education, is appointed chairman of the Department of Native American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota due to the failure of all previous chairs. Throughout the novel, we follow Shammer’s various attempts to decolonize the department. At first, he removes the faculty from their private offices to the conference room by means of a treaty termination notice. He then converts the department into an academic poker parlor and a casino, initiates Native shouting competitions, and introduces irony dogs, who attend the lectures. The new chair turns one of the former faculty offices into a Skin Dunk Center, in which the department faculty can have their skins darkened in order to improve their chances in academic politics. He also establishes the practice of Last Lectures, in which Native lecturers reveal themselves to be poseurs and fakers, and invites a laser hologram artist to teach the students laser art. After having the Denivance Press, a publisher of blank books by Native authors, move into one of the faculty offices, Shammer posts the department for sale at a silent auction, with the Earthdivers, an association of Native storiers, becoming its new owners.

120 Sabine N. Meyer While Orban’s and Deborah L. Madsen’s subsequent review offer a variety of ways of how to approach Chair of Tears, they do not mention the novel’s interwovenness with the legal debates that took place in the context of the removal of Southeastern tribes to Indian territory in the late 1830s and that have continued to influence Native American lives up to the present day. In my contribution, I would like to take up the challenge of unraveling some of the legal dimensions of Chair of Tears. Its critical engagement with the legal contours of tribal reservation lands and its postmodern play with the politics of removal lay bare the novel’s deeply political agenda and invite us to understand it as a literary reflection on Native sovereignty. My reading thus goes against Craig Womack’s 2008 indictment of Vizenor’s oeuvre. In light of his view that “Native literature, and Native criticism by Native authors, is part of sovereignty,” Womack doubts the “relevance of an inaccessible prose style toward intervening in the real world, where every year Native people face issues of land loss, threats to jurisdiction, new calls from redneck politicians for the federal government to end the trust relationship with tribes, and so on” (Red on Red 14; “Single Decade” 72). Rather than avoiding “real-world” issues, Chair of Tears, like many others of Vizenor’s novels, tackles the precariousness of the legal spaces Native Americans occupy in the United States and exposes their ongoing colonial domination. Native American political sovereignty as conceptualized by federal Indian law, the novel seems to argue, is a tainted concept as it has originated in an American political and legal system that places Native Americans in a state of dependence and stagnation. Rather than evoking readerly despair, Chair of Tears, through the use of satire, foregrounds a different form of sovereignty, something akin to what Rebecca Tsosie has called “cultural sovereignty,” that is, “the internal construction of sovereignty through Native peoples themselves” (“Introduction” 1). Native artistic expression, storytelling, mimicry, irony, and humor are presented by Vizenor as being at the heart of such cultural sovereignty and thus as practices of Native survival and resistance to the overriding sovereignty of the United States.

The Legal Geographies of Indian Country: Of Treaties, Reservations, and a “Houseboat of Native Liberty” Rather than instantly introducing the reader to its protagonist Captain Shammer and his ingenuous and extremely funny efforts to decolonize the University of Minnesota’s Native American Indian Studies Department, Chair of Tears dedicates a whole chapter to tracing the Captain’s ancestral lineage.1 The unnamed narrator, Shammer’s cousin, outlines his and Shammer’s descent from “a houseboat of native liberty” roaming through Lake Itasca in Minnesota (Vizenor 4).2 What then follows on the novel’s next pages is a mapping of and intense engagement with the legal geographies of Indian Country largely constructed on the basis of the Marshall trilogy, the three U.S. Supreme Court rulings issued in the context of the

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 121 Cherokee removal. While in his 1832 decision Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall emphasized Indian nations to be “distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the soil from time immemorial” (Worcester, 31 US 519), a year earlier, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall had characterized Native American tribes as “domestic dependent nations.” They were, according to the Chief Justice, “completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States,” and “[t]heir relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian” (Cherokee Nation, 30 US 2). The guardianship theory—also buttressed by the Constitution’s Commerce Clause—“provide[d] Congress with an almost omnipotent control” over Native Americans (Deloria and Lytle, American Indians 40). Thus, in his rulings, as Charles F. Wilkinson has stated, “Marshall conceived a model that can be described broadly as calling for largely autonomous tribal governments subject to an overriding federal authority but essentially free of state control” (24). “[T]he sovereignty exercised by Indian tribes is anything but consistent with the modular model of nation-state sovereignty” (Biolsi 245). It is rather, as T. Alexander Aleinikoff has phrased it, a “semblance of sovereignty” in the shadow of U.S. plenary power. In its representation of Native tribal lands, Vizenor’s Chair of Tears hones in on the absence—rather than the semblance—of sovereignty. Throughout the novel, the narrator speaks of “treaty reservations” and emphasizes that Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation was established through the removal of Native families by federal treaty (9, 15). Chair of Tears presents treaties— hailed by many Native American writers across the centuries as embodiments of Native sovereignty and self-determination3—as “ironic narratives” and “documents of dominance” (61). According to the novel, they are the cankerous outgrowth of a colonial legal system based on highly asymmetrical power relations, the opposite of sovereignty, and strategies of colonial harassment. In nineteenth-century legal jargon, “reservation” literally meant a piece of land granted to individual Native Americans in fee simple and was heralded by the American government as a bulwark of Native rights and self-determination (e.g., Perdue 232). In Chair of Tears, by contrast, the reservation, just like the treaties that led to its emergence, is depicted as a tainted product of imperial domination and an outpost of colonial surveillance and control. It is a locus of “domestic dependence” in the sense of Cherokee v. Georgia rather than one of “political independence,” as Marshall envisioned it in Worcester v. Georgia. The novel’s critical stance toward treaty reservations comes to the fore most conspicuously when the narrator characterizes the township of Beaulieu as the “pale of the reservation” (11), thus alluding to the “Pale of Settlement,” an outgrowth of anti-Semitic Russian imperial politics between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. By establishing the Jewish Pale of Settlement, a clearly demarcated area between the Baltic and Black Seas, the Russian government sought to contain Jews and to prevent them

122 Sabine N. Meyer from integrating into Russian society in order to curb economic competition from Jewish commercial enterprises. The Jewish Pale of Settlement was not only a geographical area with clear boundaries but also a legal entity regulated by repressive laws that did not apply to the Russian Empire as a whole. By juxtaposing Native treaty reservations with the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the novel throws into sharp relief the repressive federal laws that have dominated reservation life. While the Jewish Pale of Settlement had ceased to exist during World War I, U.S. interference in tribal reservation life through repressive laws was still in full swing during the narrator’s childhood (“Pale of Settlement, Jewish” n. pag.).4 Chair of Tears does not hesitate to specify why the reservation constitutes the absence of sovereignty: Federal agents were the most notorious abusers of natural reason and the ordinary rights of animals and birds. The agents scorned the stories and visions of hereditary flight, maligned the sovereignty of treaty citizens and the continental liberty of our native ancestors by declarations of civil war, and by the cruel calculations of birth counts, blood rights, and cultural termination. The stories and sentiments of family traces and the natural currents of our presence were turned to cold blood and racial fractions by federal separatists. (2) Natural reason, as David J. Carlson has recently attempted to define, “is essentially a form of dialectical thinking, the kind of thinking that Vizenor seems to believe characterizes traditional tribal consciousness and the trickster discourse that re-expresses it today” (18). Through their adherence to the premises of a formal logic, which seeks to come up with fixed definitions, federal agents curtailed Native traditions and customs. They established structures that served—as Philip J. Deloria has phrased it—to contain Native Americans, to deprive them of their mobility, and to realize “the colonial dream of fixity, control, visibility, productivity, and, most important, docility” (26). As the quote indicates, the federal agents’ political power and their intrusion into tribal affairs were so intense that even the rights of animals were abused. While the text does not elaborate on this further, environmental destruction through resource exploitation on reservation lands immediately comes to mind, which has affected humans and animals alike. Besides impairing Native rights, federal agents also violated “the continental liberty of our native ancestors” (2). There is an interesting intertextual reference here. The phrase “continental liberty” also appears in the preamble of the recently adopted Constitution of the White Earth Nation, the principal writer of which was Gerald Vizenor: The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the successors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native constitution of families,

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 123 totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty. (“Constitution of the White Earth Nation”) In a September issue of The Anishinaabeg Today, continental liberty is explained as follows: CONTINENTAL LIBERTY Continental refers to the continent of North American [sic], and native liberty refers to the natural freedoms and rights of natives before contact by Europeans. Natives had established extensive and active trade routes throughout the continent and hemisphere. Trade routes, and other associations of native communities required a sophisticated sense of rights, travel, trade, and native liberty. (“Constitution of the White Earth Nation: Definition of Selected Words”) The phrase “continental liberty” seems to be at the core of a Native discourse of rights that Vizenor’s novel as well as the Constitution of the White Earth Nation foreground. Native sovereignty was not a product of the contact zone and did not emerge in the context of treaties and other imperial legal documents but originated in the pre-contact era and manifested itself through the Native Americans’ mobility and motion across the continent and their “sophisticated sense of rights.” Vizenor here alludes to what has become known as “inherent sovereignty,” that is, the unbroken chain of existence of Indigenous peoples whose origin is both ancient and predates the conquest of the New World. “Inherent sovereignty,” as Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie have argued, “is not dependent upon any grant, gift or acknowledgement by the federal government” (196). Unlike the tribal sovereignty outlined by federal Indian law, which is subject to the supremacy of the federal government, inherent sovereignty, as Coffey and Tsosie understand it, must be defined, asserted, and protected by Native Americans themselves (196; cf. also Tsosie, “Introduction” 2). According to Coffey and Tsosie, inherent sovereignty “should embody cultural sovereignty: that is, the effort of Indian nations and Indian people to exercise their own norms and values in structuring their collective futures.” “Cultural Sovereignty is inherent in every sense of that word” (196). It is inextricably linked to Indigenous self-determination, rather than self-government. Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle define Native self-government as “those forms of government that the federal government deems acceptable and legitimate exercises of political power and that are recognizable by the executive and legislative branches” (Nations Within 18). Native self-determination, by contrast, exists independently from the federal government and “requires the perpetuation of customs, beliefs, and practices whose origin can be traced to precontact times” (Nations Within 19).

124 Sabine N. Meyer It is Native self-determination, the independence from federally imposed structures, that the novel appears to encourage. The houseboat called “Red Lust” from which the narrator and Captain Shammer have descended needs to be read as a trope of “continental liberty” and as the epitome of self-determination. “[C]onstructed of timber waste, scraps of milled lumber, rusted oil drums, and a manual makeshift paddle wheel from the blades of a windmill” and thus of the waste so-called civilization had left behind (2), the Red Lust resisted the legal and political order superimposed upon by that very civilization. By roaming “just outside the treaty boundary to escape the capricious authority of federal agents and sleazy reservation politicians” (2), the boat posed a provocation to federal authorities under whose noses it aimlessly moved around. The aimless movements of the houseboat—a “home without a dock” (8)—went against the grain of the U.S. policy of Native containment. By reenacting the unrestricted movements of Native Americans before contact, the boat and its inhabitants defied the physical and legal geographies of Indian Country established by the colonizer, rendered the containment of reservation spaces incomplete and undid the propertization of Native lands. As the narrator explains: “The federal agents considered us marginal and outside the treaties and pale of reservation, uncounted, a reversal of civilization” (11). The houseboat crew, as this passage suggests, evaded the formal logic of the federal agents (they were uncounted) and, by being nomadic rather than sedentary, reversed the U.S. policy of civilization. Chair of Tears portrays Native motion—a constant movement across physical and legal boundaries—as an expression of Native cultural sovereignty and survivance. Long before the emergence of casinos on reservation lands, the houseboat members engaged in “unreserved” games (1)—and here unreserved can mean both “unregulated” and “outside the reservation.” Playing games, which is deeply rooted in the traditions of many tribes, thwarted the federal agents’ attempts at “cultural termination” (2) and was hence an act of Native cultural sovereignty. Not surprisingly, Quiver, the narrator’s grandmother and most talented player, “envisioned a great armada of houseboats, a native navy of wild poker games, a prophetic scheme some fifty years before casinos were launched on treaty reservations” (9). This armada was not merely to challenge U.S. federal authority, but it was also to shatter the apathy prevalent on the reservation. Many inhabitants did not dare to cross the boundaries of the reservation any more, a condition the federal agents called “Removal Agoraphobia” (12), signifying the absence of a Native sense of motion and thus of cultural sovereignty and self-determination.

Re-Envisioning Academia as a Stronghold of Continental Liberty: The Chair of Tears and His Mimicry of Colonial Policies After thus acquainting the reader with the legal geographies of the White Earth Reservation and Captain Shammer’s ancestral background of Native

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 125 resistance, the novel’s second chapter turns to the present and engages with the Captain’s controversial measures as “trickster chairman” of the Native American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota (33). His efforts to decolonize the department need to be read as a continuation of his grandparents’ defiance of and resistance to the legal authority of the United States and her overriding sovereignty. The novel conceptualizes the Department of Native American Indian Studies in similar terms as the reservation in the preceding chapter. Just as the reservation was run by federal agents and sleazy reservation politicians, the Department is under the authority of Dean Colin Defender, with the telling nickname of Slash and Burn,5 who threatens to severely reduce the university’s annual funds to the department. Prior to Shammer’s arrival, it was run by six chairmen, all of whom were “honored and decorated as learned, rational, theory haughty academics” (24, cf. 26). They had failed as chairmen, however, because, as the novel claims, “[t]hey had deserted stories, practices of natural reason, and survivance, and disregarded the very emotive sentiments of a native presence” (24). All of them agents of the American educational system, they had ignored Native norms and values and thus condoned, if not created, the very same conditions in the department as federal agents had created on tribal lands. Vizenor even creates a link between the establishment of the reservation and the founding of the Department of Native American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota: The Minnesota Historical Society published the History of the Ojibway People by William Warren in 1855, more than a decade before the federal treaty that established the White Earth Reservation, and more than a century before the University of Minnesota set in motion the Department of Native American Indian Studies. (37) On the one hand, the quotation links the Department of Native American Indian Studies to multiracial William Whipple Warren’s historiographical containment of his tribe’s oral history within the Western archive of knowledge and to the containment of Native peoples through the establishment of the White Earth Reservation. Consequently, the founding of the Department of Native American Indian Studies needs to be read as yet another act of containment: the containment of Native cultures within the confines of Western academia. On the other hand, the passage highlights that in all three cases of Native containment, the agency does not rest with the Natives but with Western educational institutions and the federal government. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that throughout the novel, the Department of Native American Indian Studies is characterized not as an institution geared toward the responsible collection and dissemination of knowledge about Native cultures. It is rather portrayed as an educational facility implemented by the state government to control the production and distribution of that very

126 Sabine N. Meyer knowledge and to purge itself of colonial guilt. What might initially look like an anti-imperial gesture actually bespeaks cultural dominance and control. To re-introduce natural reason into the departmental structures and policies, Shammer resorts to the removal policy of the Jackson administration, which, in the 1830s, simply terminated older treaty rights and implemented removal by law. Through a “birch bark edict of removal,” reminiscent of the Indian Removal Act, Shammer “terminated faculty treaty rights to occupy private offices in the department” (40, 35). The faculty was obligated to move and create a commons, an active sense of presence, an actual active communal presence, not a native absence, and to share the space of the departmental conference room, one huge office for the entire faculty. Privacy was a sentiment of separatism. The former faculty offices were designated as the exclusive centers of native communal activities, clearly a natural native conversion and radical transformation of separatism, conspiracies, fantasies of privacy, and nostalgia. (40–41) How to interpret this academic removal? Shammer, characterized as “an innate scholar of natural reason from the headwaters” (25), mimics the United States’ imperial policy of removal for two reasons. On the one hand, his parodic adoption of colonial policies in the academic sphere mocks these very policies and thereby “locates a crack in the colonial dominance” (Ashcroft et al. 125). On the other hand, through his removal policy Shammer intends to awaken Native American staff members, all “heritage poachers and whingy militants,” from their apathetic slumber and to shatter the “politics of atonement and victimry” prevalent in the department (27, 29). In the novel, the Native faculty members are portrayed as quietly enjoying “the privileges of tenure and the expectation of treaty rights to private offices” offered to them by the state government (36). The terms “tenure” and “private” in the context of removal clearly evoke the policy’s legal subtext. Removal became only possible because Chief Justice John Marshall, in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), had conceived of Native Americans as occupants rather than owners of the land (Johnson, 21 US 574). Removal as such implied the forceful transformation of land commonly owned by Native Americans into private property. Native faculty members’ happy acceptance of tenure and privately held offices can be read as their acquiescence to practices of colonial dominance and the imposition of non-Native values. This acquiescence is fostered, as the narrator has it, “by some obscure sense of entitlement and right of discovery” (36). Just as the colonial powers felt entitled to “steal” Native lands by right of discovery, Native faculty members feel entitled to steal books from the library and to accept the amenities offered to them by the state. Like the reservation in the first chapter, the department is

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 127 characterized as a place of apathy and stagnation, as the opposite of Native resistance and motion. Rather than being agents of their own destiny and generating their own Native futures from within, the Native staff confine themselves to revenging their ancestors’ land loss through petty acts of theft and a quiet enjoyment of privileges awarded to them by Minnesota’s educational system. Just like the aimless movements of the Red Lust, Shammer’s removal policy functions as a reversal of colonial civilization efforts: by transforming Western notions of privacy and separatism back into Native communal sentiments, he intends to replace stories of victimry by those of survivance. As the narrator informs the reader: Shammer’s “cosmoprimitive visions and postindian revisions became the source [of] a new academic fur trade [sic], swift, decisive, and resolute” (34). I would read the “new academic fur trade” as a post-contact version of the pre-contact trade and trade routes Vizenor considers embodiments of continental liberty. Shammer’s measures can thus be conceptualized as an attempt to shatter the Native faculty’s state of acquiescence and dependency, and to create from within a self-determined Native academic community with a “sophisticated sense of rights [. . .] and native liberty” (“Constitution of the White Earth Nation: Definition of Selected Words”). The satiric nature of Shammer’s removal policy becomes blatantly visible when he has Native faculty members re-enact the Trail of Tears (hence his designation as Chair of Tears). Captain Shammer delivered the treaty termination notice that removed the faculty from private offices to the conference room one early morning in late autumn. The fragile color of the leaves shivered in the bright sunlight and reflected on the dead river. The faculty was anxious, a common trait on the entire campus, slow and moody, gloomy, a rather solemn procession of native scholars in the throes of an authentic academic removal, but the obvious declarations of resistance were only tentative. (38–39) By having them re-enact this highly traumatic episode in Native American history, Shammer puts the faculty members’ victimry on display: rather than offering outright resistance, they grudgingly accept their fate, merely faking tears and posting “arcane messages about native treaty rights and sovereignty” on their office doors (40, cf. 30). In a department in which victimry, nostalgia, and melancholia reign supreme, however, such emphasis on treaty rights and sovereignty has long become empty rhetoric. Moreover, according to the novel’s logic, the tribal sovereignty achieved by resorting to treaty discourse is inevitably as tainted as the legal system from which these treaties sprang. The communal activities introduced by Shammer serve to transform the Native faculty and student body. The William Warren Memorial Library,

128 Sabine N. Meyer constructed to commemorate and celebrate the author’s successful assimilation into Anglo-American society,6 is converted into a casino, in which faculty and students embrace all kinds of traditional Native games, “songs, shams, teases, feigns, ironic stories” (49). From an institution hailing Native assimilation into Anglo-American culture, the library turns into a stronghold of Native traditions, values, and cultural distinctiveness. By narratively linking the faculty’s participation in traditional Native gaming practices to Quiver’s resistance to the reservation’s federal agents by means of poker games, the novel portrays the Full House Casino as a continuation of the Native liberty celebrated on the Red Lust (53). And Quiver is present on campus. While outwitting the faculty in the same way she had outwitted the federal agents earlier, Quiver teaches Native students the tease and feigns necessary to decide games in one’s favor (56). Her activities do not fail to impact faculty members. By the end of the term, they ceased their “wearisome protests”: “Straightaway over chance and a hand of cards the faculty renounced the sentiments of academic treaty rights of privacy, and instead celebrated survivance” (49). Under Quiver’s able guidance, the Department of Native American Indian Studies turns into a stronghold of Native cultural sovereignty. Out of the seven activities taking place in each of the vacated offices, the postindian holograms by laser artist Almost Browne connect Shammer’s renewal efforts most conspicuously to the aimless motions of the Red Lust and its undoing of imperial geographies. Having only been “almost born on the reservation” (89), Browne does not suffer from the “Removal Agoraphobia” preventing so many reservation residents from crossing the colonially imposed boundaries. He is rather a “laser migrant” (89), who, by migrating from reservation to reservation to perform his art, resists the federal containment of Natives. His laser portrayals of Natives, animals, non-Native politicians, and historical figures from America’s colonial past appear above reservation and non-reservation lands and all kinds of public spaces, such as cities, parks, and interstates, and, due to their ethereal nature, defy all neocolonial attempts to control the movement of Natives as well as their cultural and intellectual output. Browne’s own and his projections’ permanent movement across, and disregard of, physical and legally demarcated spaces need to be read as a modern-day version of the Indian outbreaks during the first years of reservation management that Philip Deloria elaborates on in Indians in Unexpected Places. Such outbreaks, he argues, were “pocket[s] of stubbornness in the midst of the sweep of the American empire” (21). They were attempts to escape the containment policy of the U.S. government agencies and the “spatial, economic, political, social, and military restrictions placed on them [the Natives] by the reservation regime” (21). Browne’s art even conjures up some of these very outbreaks. A case in point is the hologram of Hole in the Day that he projects over Fort Snelling, a military post on the western heights of the Mississippi established in 1819 in order to protect the American fur trade. The land on which the post

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 129 was erected, the novel emphasizes, “had been stolen from the Anishinaabe and Dakota” (96).7 The Ojibwe Hole in the Day’s refusal to testify in an Anglo-American bootlegging trial and his subsequent escape led to what would soon be termed a Native “outbreak”—the Battle of Sugar Point in Minnesota in 1898 between several Ojibwe and American soldiers (Matsen 270; 275). Similar to the Red Lust’s restless movements, Browne’s projection of a laser warrior, “roamed night after night” over the fort, “on former government property” (96). Through his projection of Hole in the Day, Browne seeks to stir a discussion of colonial land-taking and Indigenous dispossession and to convince state and federal governments to return this strip of land to the Natives (96). By portraying Hole in the Day, Browne links the former’s historical resistance to colonial authorities to his own artistic questioning of the colonial past and the mechanisms that put into place, and continue to stabilize, the colonial order. Chair of Tears thus celebrates Browne’s art as a weapon against the curtailment of self-determination imposed upon Native Americans by the United States. It is an expression of Native cultural sovereignty from within the Native community. Not surprisingly, Browne’s laser holograms lead to anxieties, public panic, and disturbances both on and off the reservation (91). The tribal judge banishes him from the White Earth Reservation, arguing that his art was not traditional. The contrasting reactions of the American legal authorities and the police reveal how much Native Americans’ “reality is contingent upon that of the exterior society” (Coffey and Tsosie 209). The police in several cities, in league with the state and federal prosecutors, try to stop Browne by seizing his lasers and by accusing him of various misdemeanors, most notably domestic terrorism (90–91). Both presiding judges in the state and federal courts, by contrast, refuse to read Bowne’s art as domestic terrorism. They, instead, acquit the artist, celebrating the laser as “a native pen, a light brush in the wild night” (92) and the laser artist “as a native with ancient rights to create or hunt at night” (93). The laser warriors, the judges hold, are “native creative and ironic expressions” and “new creations, an instance of communal rights, continental liberty, and without a nightly doubt free expression under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” (92, 93). While the U.S. state and federal courts—unpredictably—are supportive of native liberty, romanticize the holograms as a way to civilize the “wild” night sky, and read them as an expression of Indigenous rights, the tribal judge suppresses Native creative expression and motion on the reservation for lack of traditionalism. Chair of Tears thus portrays the reservation as a place even less conducive to Native creative expression than off-reservation spaces due to overly simplistic notions of tradition and cultural authenticity.8 Shammer’s creative entrepreneurial efforts manage to free the department from federal grants and thereby, for the first time in its history, create an atmosphere of intellectual independence, Native agency, and Native self-determination (94). Nevertheless, the Chair of Tears decides to sell the

130 Sabine N. Meyer department “to the most intriguing bidder” at a silent auction (27). This intended sale can be read as Shammer’s second act of mimicry. Here the chairman proceeds to sell something that is technically not alienable: an academic department. This practice evokes and thereby mocks the colonial alienation of Native lands, which, according to Native worldviews, had been in Native possession from time immemorial, a gift from God, passed down from generation to generation (see, for instance, the Cherokee Memorial of Dec. 18, 1829 qtd. in Krupat 170–73). To highlight the link between the sale of the department and imperial practices of land taking, Vizenor has Shammer wear various presidential masks and present peace medals at the auction of the department (31). The department is eventually sold to the Earthdivers, “an association of native storiers” (138), who venture to change academic practices at the university significantly. The Earthdivers declared that higher education was creaky, overburdened with academic trivia, torrents of theory, crude ideologies, leisure nationalism, and farcical rituals in medieval gowns. Native tricksters and healers once created a new earth, a turtle island of survivance, and now all faculty, students, and deans must become academic earthdivers. The notion that history is a more significant narrative than native stories and literature must be overturned at the university. (132) Earlier in the novel, the narrator mentions that Captain Eighty, Shammer’s grandfather and the captain of the houseboat of Native liberty, was an earthdiver, a native storier of natural reason and refused to live on a treaty reservation. My grandfather never compromised his sense of survivance and continental liberty, and he would never curry favor with political toadies or the patronage of reservation politicians. Resistance to the government and federal agencies on the reservation had become an aesthetic practice. (57) The Earthdivers, the new owners of the department, plan to operate in the tradition of the Native nautical family on the houseboat, who, through  their aimless movements, defied the authority of U.S. federal agents; who, through their use of natural reason, questioned the formal logic of U.S. federal Indian law; and who celebrated their sense of survivance, continental liberty, and cultural sovereignty. The new student generation at the Native American Indian Studies Department will be educated along these lines. By being trained in Native practices of resistance, the Earthdivers reason, students will escape the colonially imposed confines of Indianness and become postindian warriors and earthdivers themselves. They will value continental liberty and Native stories and literature more highly than

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 131 supposedly futile academic pursuits and act out resistance to neocolonial practices and cultural dominance through their engagement with literature and art. Vizenor’s novel defies closure. It ends with the announcement of the Earthdivers’s newly won ownership of the department. Whether their plans for the department—their celebration of continental liberty and Native artistic practices—are a step toward Native cultural sovereignty and self-determination is left open.

Conclusion The activities of the nautical family on the houseboat, the painfully funny efforts of Captain Shammer at the University of Minnesota, as well as the postindian holograms by Almost Browne suggest that in Native America, “resistance to the government and federal agencies [.  .  .] had become an aesthetic practice” (57). Aesthetic practices as cited in the novel were particularly relevant on the White Earth Reservation, which Vizenor portrays in Chair of Tears as the epitome of stagnation and federal dependence and as the opposite of creative artistic expression. Before the arrival of Shammer, the Native American Indian Studies Department of the University of Minnesota is very similar to the White Earth Reservation. Dependent on federal money and housing, with faculty enjoying their victim status and the comfort zone the university offers to them, the department is characterized as a space of nostalgia and melancholia and thus as the absence of Native liberty, self-determination, natural reason, and survivance. While Chair of Tears certainly offers both a detailed analysis and critique of the (neo)colonial structures that continue to shape Native lives and abuse Native liberties, it also focuses on the Indigenous reactions to and engagement with these very structures. Vizenor criticizes the victim-talk and the acting out of Indianness—a role assigned to Natives in the neocolonial game—and time and again highlights the significance of irony, mimicry, humor, and resistance through Native creative ventures and stories, both fictionally and metafictionally. Storytelling, as the textual excerpt from Warren’s History of the Ojibway People prefacing Chair of Tears signals and as the novel consistently argues, is always an act of agency, of asserting control over one’s own culture. Exerting such control over tribal culture is itself an exercise of cultural sovereignty, which the novel playfully posits as a viable alternative to the tribal political sovereignty deriving from a U.S. American legal system that continues to view Native nations as domestic dependent and as having forsaken part of their inherent sovereignty. Native rights, the novel suggests, need to be traced back to their pre-contact roots, and the Indigenous rights discourse needs to be disentangled from the language and structures of colonialism. Instead of a sense of nostalgia and melancholia, the novel endorses Native self-determination, natural reason, and the celebration of survivance. Chair of Tears can thus be understood as a literary reflection on the contours of Native sovereignty and self-determination. Through its postmodern

132 Sabine N. Meyer aesthetic repertoire, it intervenes in interdisciplinary scholarly discussions about the limits of tribal political sovereignty as constructed by federal Indian law and the need of Native Americans to construct a culturally-based sovereignty from within the tribes.9 Chair of Tears thus demonstrates that there is no division, but rather a synergy, between Vizenor’s aesthetics and his politics (cf. Carlson 14). Nor can we, as Carlson has done in a recent contribution, easily differentiate between Vizenor’s legal and literary writing (34). My legal reading of Chair of Tears attests to the presence of the law in Vizenor’s belletristic works. The law, as my analysis has shown, is an “indispensable but obscured text and context to an understanding of U.S. Native American oral and written expression” (Cheyfitz 8). Through its defiance of closure, the novel inspires the reader to imagine possible ways of how Native cultural sovereignty could be realized and implemented in Native America. Native literature, such as Chair of Tears, might be a starting point for such an endeavor. Thus, Vizenor has the narrator tell the reader that “Quiver, our grandmother, was the reader on the houseboat, and she inspired me to discover a sense of liberty in every word and sentence of a book” (100). According to Vizenor, the reader of Chair of Tears, too, needs to discover the novel’s sense of Native liberty in order to develop an alternative vision of Native sovereignty.

Notes 1. Vizenor’s 1981 short story “The Chair of Tears” does not place Captain Shammer’s project of reorganizing the Native American Indian Studies Department within a family genealogy of protest and resistance spanning three centuries. It is therefore less complex, lacking the overtly political dimensions of the later novel. 2. References to Chair of Tears will be by page numbers only. 3. For an analysis of the reception of treaties in nineteenth-century Cherokee writings and for further elaborations on the significance of treaties in Native American culture, cf. Meyer. 4. According to the novel, Quiver’s poker games took place “some fifty years before casinos were launched on treaty reservations” (9). As Native casinos opened in Minnesota in the 1980s, the novel’s first chapter is set in the 1930s. 5. Slash-and-burn designates a technique of cutting and burning of trees and plants in the forests to create fields for subsistence agriculture. 6. The rhetoric of assimilation in Warren’s work comes particularly to the fore in the preface, in which he emphasizes his belonging to the “American people” rather than to the “red man,” which he considered to be vanishing in the face of an overly powerful civilization (Warren 24). In his analysis of the book, Matt Hooley pays attention to the text’s meandering between anticolonialism and assimilation (Hooley 77, 92). 7. In fact, the land was not quite stolen from the Dakota. In this first land cession treaty in Minnesota’s history, the United States—while being granted the right to establish posts on a tract between the Minnesota and St. Peter rivers and St. Anthony Falls—paid the Dakota $2,000 in the form of “gifts” and guaranteed them continued use rights. However, as U.S. Army lieutenant Zebulon Pike readily admitted in 1805, this sum was ridiculously low for such an extensive area of land (Wingerd 77, 82).

A Legal Reading of Chair of Tears 133 8. Chair of Tears also engages in discussions about the notions of tradition and cultural authenticity in Native and non-Native communities. Captain Eighty, for instance, creates what Vizenor calls “postindian traditional scrolls,” which are acquired by museums as “authentic traditions.” These phrases raise numerous questions about the dynamic nature of tradition and its relation to notions of cultural authenticity (6). For a similar discussion of tradition in the novel, cf. 26. 9. For an outline of this discussion, cf. Tsosie, “Reclaiming Native Stories” 308.

Bibliography Aleinikoff, T. Alexander. Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Biolsi, Thomas. “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle.” American Ethnologist 32.2 (2005): 239–59. Print. Carlson, David J. “Trickster Hermeneutics and the Postindian Reader: Gerald Vizenor’s Constitutional Praxis.” SAIL 23.4 (2011): 13–47. JSTOR. Web. 5 May 2014. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. 30 U.S. 1. Supreme Court of the United States. 1831. Supreme Court Collection. Legal Information Inst., Cornell U Law School, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2012. . Cheyfitz, Eric. “The (Post)Colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S. American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law.” The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945. Ed. Eric Cheyfitz. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. 3–124. Print. Coffey, Wallace, and Rebecca Tsosie. “Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of Indian Nations.” Stanford Law & Policy Review 12.2 (2001): 191–221. Print. “Constitution of the White Earth Nation.” University of Minnesota at Duluth. American Indian Studies Department, 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2016. “Constitution of the White Earth Nation: Definitions of Selected Words.” The Anishinaabeg Today. White Earth Nation, 2 Sept. 2009: 19. Web. 5 June 2014. . Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: Kansas UP, 2006. Print. Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983. Print. ———. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. Print. Hooley, Matt. “The Autoethnography of William Whipple Warren.” Wicazo Sa Review 27.2 (2012): 75–98. Project Muse. Web. 25 Aug. 2014. Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh. 21 U.S. 543. Supreme Court of the United States. 1823. Supreme Court Collection. Legal Information Inst., Cornell U Law School, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2012. . Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print. Madsen, Deborah L. “Review of Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor.” SAIL 26.2 (2014): 101–4. Project Muse. Web. 28 Aug. 2014.

134 Sabine N. Meyer Matsen, William E. “The Battle of Sugar Point: A Re-Examination.” Minnesota History 50.7 (1987): 269–75. Print. Meyer, Sabine N. “In the Shadow of the Marshall Court: Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Conceptualizations of the Law.” Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion. Ed. Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz, and Sabine N. Meyer. Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives 1. New York: Routledge, 2015. 148–71. Print. Orban, Maria. “Review of Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37.2 (2013): 242–44. Project Muse. Web. 5 May 2014. “Pale of Settlement, Jewish.” Britannica Student Encyclopedia. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014. Web. 5 June 2014. . Perdue, Theda, ed. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. Print. Tsosie, Rebecca. “Introduction: Symposium on Cultural Sovereignty.” Arizona State Law Journal 34 (2002): 1–14. Social Sciences Research Network. Web. 1 Sept. 2014. ———. “Reclaiming Native Stories: An Essay on Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Rights.” Arizona State Law Journal 34 (2002): 299–359. Social Sciences Research Network. Web. 1 Sept. 2014. Vizenor, Gerald. Chair of Tears: A Novel. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. Print. ———. “Chair of Tears.” Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives of Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981. 3–29. Print. Warren, William W. History of the Ojibways, Based upon Traditions and Oral Statements. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1885. Print. Wilkinson, Charles F. American Indians, Time, and the Law. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print. Wingerd, Mary Lethert. North Country: The Making of Minnesota. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print. ———. “A Single Decade: Book-Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997.” Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective. Ed. Craig S. Womack et al. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2008. 3–104. Print. Worcester v. Georgia. 31 U.S. 515. Supreme Court of the United States. 1832. Supreme Court Collection. Legal Information Inst., Cornell U Law School, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2012. .

10 “Nothing More Than the Chance of Remembrance” Gerald Vizenor and the Motion of Natural Reason in the Presence of War Billy J. Stratton From the publication of Gerald Vizenor’s earliest haikus and journalistic writing, to imagistic flights of poetic clarity and his interrogations of moribund bureaucracies as teased ironies in a new fur trade, one can discern the seeds of his now fully germinated ideas of native motion and natural reason. In novels such as Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (1978), The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) and his most recent, Blue Ravens (2014), these “vizionary” terms have provided a distinctive and effective means of making sense of the folly and horror of war. In Hiroshima Bugi and Blue Ravens, readers encounter native characters that address the absurdities of war and the legacy of colonialism with a keen sense of irony to create what Vizenor terms a “visionary sense of native presence” (Blue Ravens 3). Touchstones of natural reason and survivance are given presence in the trickster hermeneutics of Ronin Browne, who disrupts the “simulations of peace” at Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome, while the visionary stories and cosmototemic art of Basile and Aloysius Beaulieu dance in word and image to create a new historical memory that bridges the divide between White Earth and World War I Europe. In both novels, Vizenor extends the synergetic critical/creative project that forms the basis of his extensive body of work whereby native people repudiate the fugitive poses perpetuated by the literature of dominance and nostalgic victimry to assert an active native presence by a resistance that is carried in the motion of “memories, stories of totemic creation, shamanic visions, burial markers, medicine pictures, the hunt, love, war, and songs of a virtual [native] cartography” (Fugitive Poses 170). “The Atomic Bomb Dome is my Rashomon,” declares Ronin Ainoko Browne, narrator and trickster of liberty in Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (1). Drawing comparisons between the city gate of Kyoto, made famous in Japanese literature and film in the works of Nobumitsu Kanze, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Akira Kurosawa, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Vizenor reveals unexpected sites of irony and farce inherent to an intellectualized engagement with the horrors of war. Created at ground zero on the “remains of the first nuclear war,” Ronin gives life to a sense of visionary transmotion out of the ironic tease of literary sources, sacred stories, and cosmototemic associations (1). In Hiroshima Bugi, Ronin’s experiences are informed by

136 Billy J. Stratton references to and chance associations with the woven presences of historical figures and characters such as Akutagawa, Sadako Sasaki, Toshiro Mifune, Ranald MacDonald, and Lafcadio Hearn; a “tribe of water tricksters” known as nanazu; and various mongrels (27), ravens, orphans, and “hafu” people “of two cultures” (35). These figures, in addition to Ronin’s father and mother, are Sergeant Orion Browne, known also as Nightbreaker, and the sensuous bugi dancer, Okichi. This cast of characters and their intersecting stories are made all the more evocative by the juxtaposition of Ronin’s narrative with and through Handy Fairbank’s metafictional framing of Ronin’s story, which gives substance to the purported creation of the book, Hiroshima Bugi, itself. The combination of these characters, and many others, produce an abiding sense of transmotion and active presence against the shadows of tragedy and victimry. Vizenor defines transmotion in Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence as “that sense of native motion and an active presence,” as “sui generis sovereignty,” inherent to creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance that is survivance (15). Extending this notion into the world of his fiction, the vitality and capacity for irony, humor and the tease, form “the creases of transmotion and sovereignty” in Hiroshima Bugi (Fugitive 15). As the primary setting for the story, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial is ironically presented as “a diorama of victimry to promote peace” (3). An orphan left alone by his deceased mother and absent father, who never knew he was born, Ronin hovers in situ at the memorial where he experiences the visitation of the “shadows of dead children” who “gather in a ghost parade. The children of incineration, and the white bones of an empire war, arise in a nuclear kabuki theater” (1, 2). The kabuki theater and the subsequent bugi dance that Ronin conjures into existence function to expose—through the tilt of the trickster tease—the so-called peace monument, and the history that it renders silent, as little more than “a pathetic romance, a precious token to honor the state memory of a culpable emperor” (18). The manner of Vizenor’s ironic critique of hegemonic representation is reminiscent of the referential meaning of the word indian as mere “simulation” that he elaborates on in Fugitive Poses (15). In his innovative challenge of the manifest manners of colonialist historiography, Vizenor reinscribes indian as an interchangeable concept for “a derivative noun that means absence,” which is drawn into focus throughout his work: “The indian is a simulation, the absence of natives; the indian transposes the real, and the simulation of the real has no referent, memories, or native stories” (15). The deconstruction of this empty signifier is the vehicle by which Vizenor clears the way for the assertion of “Native sovenance,” which conveys “that sense of presence in remembrance, that trace of creation and natural reason in native stories” (15). Taken together, Vizenor’s critical and creative work operate as a dynamic circuit of complementarity, which both initiates and demonstrates the transmotion of native stories of survivance as “an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (15).

Natural Reason in the Presence of War 137 In a similar vein, the Atomic Bomb Dome itself, that ironically radioactive memorial to peace complete with a “diorama of aesthetic victimry” with “the simulations, figures in the atomu ruins” (Hiroshima Bugi 119), marks the conspicuous absence of nuclear war, its attendant horrors, and the memories that are expunged in exchange for the sham of security and peace. As Ronin asserts, invoking the operant binary oppositions brought to bear and overturned in the praxis of native survivance, “the idea of peace is untrue by nature, a common counterfeit of nations, but the most treacherous peace is based on nuclear victimry” (16). Assuming the role of an “official tour guide in the museum,” Ronin transforms the peace museum into a stage for the ironic re-enactment of Duras and Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour in which the central question of Hiroshima Bugi is posited: “what is remembrance, and how do we resist forgetting?” (120). Readers are haunted by the refrain that typifies the monuments of simulated peace, “you saw nothing at Hiroshima,” which provides an impetus for Ronin’s efforts to “overturn the persuasive dioramas of fakers of peace” (120). Carrying his intervention to its conclusion, Ronin displays a banner in an act of renaming the Peace Memorial Museum to that of the film, which the visiting tourists take as “a proper name for the new museum. That, of course, because the name of the movie, and the obscure, erotic touch of two lovers was much more memorable than the abstract and deceptive notions of peace” (134). Assertions of native liberty and natural reason such as these not only illustrate the dubious status of dominant ideologies, the “catchwords of the peacemongerers” (121), but also the profound difficulties in overcoming systems of conventional and/or prevailing ways of seeing and thinking. It is within this matrix of power relations and societal constructs that Vizenor’s work is most potent, while at the same time demonstrating the necessity of forging what he terms in one of his recent presentations titled “Literary Transmotion: Totemic Motion and Cultural Survivance” as “an apparent resistance to the crafty ideologies of nationalism, the cultural simulations of ethnographic models, and the pushy liens of gossip theory” (1). Such ideas account for the necessity of not only an incisive critique of the simulations of dominance through natural reason, but also the spectacular amalgamation of kabuki theater, samurai signatures, trickster and creation stories of transmotion, intertextuality, and literary citationality, which Ronin and Handy undertake in their efforts to both deconstruct trite dogmas and stale classifications to create living stories that are always undergoing change and growth. As a crossblood person residing at the intersecting coordinates of opposing imperial cultures, Ronin traverses the physical and epistemological ruins of total war, which Elaine Scarry, writing in The Body in Pain, identifies as forming “the essential structure of war” (63). According to Scarry’s calculus of trauma, “its juxtaposition of the extreme facts of body and voice, resides in the relation between its own largest parts, the relation between the collective casualties that occur within war, and the verbal

138 Billy J. Stratton issues (freedom, national sovereignty, the right to disputed ground, the extra-territorial authority of a particular ideology) that stand outside war” (63). The experience of both psychic and bodily trauma, and the difficulty of representing these effects with sensitivity and precision, form the motivation of Ronin’s uncompromising assertion of presence that is exemplified through his various interventions against the cynical and pathological simulations of peace and victimry. Foremost among these are the “simulated miniature dome constructed inside the Peace Memorial Museum” and the “pathetic” peace column on which were mounted metal plates with hundreds of “plaintive peace letters” (10). These imitations and absolute fakes represent an absent presence interred within a simulation of psychic destruction and displayed as an exhibit that provokes Ronin to take up his role as a postindian storier of survivance. In describing his vital moment of revelation, the narrator observes, “Ronin declared war on the simulations of peace” because “these letters do not represent peace, but passive, pathetic apologies for the absence of nuclear weapons” (10, 11). In the narrative frame and historical context in which the novel is constructed, Ronin is reported to have told the author of the book: “Peace is not a column of mundane letters to heads of state. The peace museums and souvenir counters only weaken the stories of nuclear survivance” (11). Recalling the infamous reaction of Robert Oppenheimer following the Trinity atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Ronin mocks this event as one defined by the absence of irony, writing in his journal that “he was time, memory, and death, the destroyer of the pretense of nuclear peace” (24). It bears noting that this event also figures prominently in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and gives substance to the terrifying story of destruction, death, and suffering that is called into being during “a contest in dark things” by a mysterious witch in Betonie’s story (133). Such examples highlight Dominick LaCapra’s warning in Writing History, Writing Trauma, to avoid the “strong temptation” of viewing and then privileging different traumatic events apart from others, which works to “collapse the distinction and to arrive at a conception of the event’s absolute uniqueness or even epiphanous, sublime, or sacral quality” (80). The peace memorials in Hiroshima Bugi seem to function in precisely this manner; at the same time they efface the ugliness of “empire war” and have little to do with ensuring peace. Instead they act as a cynical antidote to human anxieties about mortality and as “founding traumas—traumas that paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity” (Writing History 23). Such is an identity born and defined by the force of tragedy and victimry, of course. The letter left by Ronin at the end of the novel encapsulates these ideas precisely: “Death, morning vision. Master said, We are separated from sense of presence because, fear of death. Consider instance, nuclear wounds, morning, fear of death vanishes. Samurai warrior never shamed by fear, death” (198).

Natural Reason in the Presence of War 139 Similarly, in Blue Ravens, the Great War is “not the war that we had imagined” but is instead reinscribed as “a war provoked by an empire demon more sinister than the ice monster” (108, 109). This act of defamiliarization is the key to its transformation into a diorama of victimry to promote Woodrow Wilson’s pose of moralism, vacillating “between the politics of militarism and the denunciation of war” (91). It is within the context of this terrible suffering that the Beaulieu brothers create “a visionary sense of motion and presence” to bring about the destruction of such pretentions by “transmut[ing] the desolation of war with blue ravens and poetic scenes of a scary civilization and native liberty” (2, 8). From the onset of the novel, Basile and Aloysius are distinguished through their many adventures as agents of good humor and survivance, blessed by the attribution of “a furtrade surname” (1). In obvious praise of cosmopolitan literary aesthetics and the celebration of cultural hybridity, Vizenor highlights the complex history of interactions between Anishinaabe people and French explorers, trappers, and priests to demarcate a “union of ironic stories, necessary art, and native liberty” (1). As in Hiroshima Bugi, Vizenor uses Blue Ravens to illustrate that it is not simply stories of the war experience that are the most significant aspect of his narrative. The war experiences of the Beaulieu brothers, in fact, account for only thirty-three pages of the novel (Blue Ravens chapters 11–14), and these scenes are used in large part to honor the memory of Anishinaabe people who served and died in the war, including Vizenor’s own relatives, Private Ignatius Vizenor who “was killed in action on October 8, 1918, at Montbréhain, France” (3). Readers are asked to remember this fact by its repeated invocation throughout the novel beginning with the dedication Vizenor composed “In Memory of Ignatius Vizenor” (3, 11, 92, 93, 138, 139, 140, 181, 267, 268). As Basile Beaulieu observes, “the First World War continues forever on the White Earth Reservation in the stories of veterans and survivors of combat. We were the native descendants of the fur trade who returned with new stories from France” (140). Blue Ravens provides Vizenor with the means of sharing these stories with readers. Within the larger context created by the stories that are woven together, the experiences of Basile and Aloysius also provide a named and “blued” presence for the descriptions and effects of war and prompts readers to consider the ways in which traumatic events are translated into art and story. The lessons conveyed by the Beaulieu brothers’ “great friend the singing trader,” Odysseus Walker Young (48), are of particular relevance to the conception of storytelling and the representation of war. As a wearer and dealer in peace medals, Odysseus is noted for the narratives he creates about “his names” and of “the dance of the dead in memories of the American Civil War” (53). But the stories Odysseus shares at White Earth are not the conventional tales of heroism, glory, and patriotism, as he “was an enchanter and teaser among natives and traders” (55). For Odysseus, and those who experienced the wisp of his stories, “the American Civil War endured in

140 Billy J. Stratton memories, the sublime scenes forever wanted in chant or chorus of honor” where “the bloody bodies of so many young men have never withered in memory, and were summoned to stories over the years as the clover of tranquility” (56). In addition, Vizenor uses this character as an evocative polyseme that also recalls the presence of the Civil War General/then President Ulysses S. Grant, as well as the eponymous character of Odysseus in Homer’s epic poem (c. 800 B.C.E.), which functions as an important intertext throughout the novel. Demonstrating his delight in the trickster tease, the numerous references to Ulysses are also employed as an ironic envoy to James Joyce’s mock-heroic masterpiece Ulysses (1922), composed as a condemnation of the ideology of progress in the wake of the Great War. By merging these examples together into one cohesive story, Vizenor articulates a visionary conception of words and image in a choreography of transmotion that contrasts with the pronouncements made by theorists such as Theodor Adorno about the insufficiency of writing in the aftermath of the catastrophe of war. Although Adorno’s early cynicism would later be replaced by a renewed faith in the efficacy and capacity of poesis, the sense of hopelessness he famously expressed in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1953), reflecting on the paralyzing specter of the Holocaust, where mere words seem so woefully insufficient, is worth noting: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (34). Adorno’s reaction is suggestive of Cathy Caruth’s analysis of the experience of trauma in which we are confronted with “the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence” (153). Primo Levi maintains in The Drowned and the Saved, however, that both the sense of incomprehensibility and “incommunicability” that arise out of the horror of such experience forms one of the primary threats to the remembrance of horrific events (88). Despite his keen recognition of the problem, Levi refuses to allow any quarter for such effects and characterizes claims to the contrary as originating in “mental laziness,” which can then be rendered as “a dangerous vicious cycle” (89). Indeed, communication in the form of writing and storytelling must take place after the disaster, but in a way that eschews the politics of absence, victimry, and tragedy to instead articulate “the tricky tease of native stories [and] the creative run of irony” at the heart of survivance narratives (Blue Ravens 60). For Levi, the cultivation of such insight allows human beings to “contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself” (89). Levi’s notion of communication combined with my use of the metaphor of the heart works to highlight the artistic and inspirational force that animates Vizenor’s stories after and against the destruction of war. This is precisely what is conveyed in the experiences of the Beaulieu brothers, the significance of their stories of war, and the proliferating images of blue ravens that finds particular resonance in the figure of the mutilés de

Natural Reason in the Presence of War 141 guerre of Paris who wear masks “to cover ghastly facial wounds” (147). Like “the shadows of dead children” who “arise from the stone and shout back at the ravens” to haunt Ronin in Hiroshima Bugi, French war veterans such as Henri and André are shown in Blue Ravens as reduced through the screen of mechanical reproduction into a “ghostly horde” that enact the fugitive poses of Abel Gance’s 1919 silent film J’accuse. In both of these novels, Vizenor is engaged in a literary and aesthetic effort to create alternatives to the tragic simulations of trauma and war. Such a goal carries the realization of Caruth’s praxis of “speaking and listening from the site of trauma” (11), while operating as a means of cultivating a perception that “may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of others, but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves” (11). This is to say, an empathetic sensitivity to the humanity of others that is informed by the traumas of the past. For Aloysius and Basile, however, the image of soldiers adorned with the humanizing masks that were originally created by the Parisian expatriate Anna Coleman Ladd, provides this vital connection between experience and culture while bearing witness to an epoch of traumatic memory that shatters the tired and motionless histories of war and death, tragedy and victimry. The sense of active presence created by the figures of the mutilés de guerre sitting on benches and fishing along the banks of the River Seine inspire Aloysius to “paint a tiny blue raven on the metal masks, a mask with a natural image of motion” (149). Henri and André, two of the afflicted veterans that Aloysius first encounters, reject the notion however, reading “the idea of a face mark, blue raven or beast,” as “a cheeky tease” (149). The masks Aloysius envisions are conceived to be naturalistic, not impressionistic, and serve to restore the soldiers’ human dignity and unique identities through their distinctive designs, each representing an original artistic creation, “and not a mere disguise or camouflage” (150). As objects of triumph over the despair and anonymity created by the literal facelessness of the grotesque wounds of the afflicted, as well as the constrictive simulations of mimicry, Aloysius’s painted masks serve as powerful implements of survivance that are representative of “a new aesthetics of war and mutilated soldiers” (150). Undeterred by the initial suspicions of the wounded soldiers, Aloysius is “determined to restyle the meticulous resemblance of the lost faces on the masks with abstract blue ravens. The masks would become an abstract work of art, not an aesthetic disguise” (150). Vizenor’s recognition of and compassion for the soldiers’ plight, in particular are illustrative of his broader claims relating to the capacity of ironic revelatory art to transcend the cinematic surveillance and the simulations of victimry that allow a new way of seeing war and its aftereffects, while in the words of LaCapra, enabling a “reengagement in life” (22). Before these aspirations can be realized, however, the Beaulieu brothers return to Minnesota following the end of the war and travel back to White

142 Billy J. Stratton Earth, “a political treaty homeland,” where the returning Anishinaabe soldiers are reduced to the status of “political prisoners by the federal government in a civil war” (217). The stories that are shared by a fellow war veteran and cousin, Lawrence Vizenor, testify to the extreme difficulty of integrating traumatic narratives of such intensity into an accessible matrix of lived experience and cultural memory. The stories that Lawrence is prompted to recount at a banquet at the Hotel Leecy, stories “of his combat bravery and presentation of the Distinguished Service Cross,” defy the limits of strict linearity and conventional point of view (186). But as he later tells Bealieu, “there were no reliable words to represent his own experience in the rush of war. He was in combat, not a natural motion, and was not the observer. There was no natural story or course of irony” (186). The description of Lawrence and his war experience illustrates Dori Laub’s assertion that the “loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (67). The erasure of this aspect of Lawrence’s identity, whereby he has been reduced by military bureaucracy to a combat decoration, seems to proceed through the hollow of meanings of courage and valor, which “he could not easily convey” (186). Instead, the experiences of combat that Lawrence recalls border on the surreal and unimaginable, dominated with images of “blood, blood, blood, bloody hands, bloody fingernails, cheeks, nose, boots, and a blood-soaked shirt” (187). The depth of the trauma that is described by Lawrence in this celebratory gatherering reinforces Caruth’s observation about traumatic experience, which “is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (153). Upon hearing Lawrence’s stories of the stark horror of modernized and mechanized warfare, the Anishinaabe healer, Misaabe, encourages a movement away from the silence of incomprehension and the associations with tragedy and victimry, and “wanted to hear more irony in the native stories that had turned bloody with the war, and he wanted to see the portrayal and great reach of the blue ravens” (191). This desire, a generous storyteller’s invitation to visionary healing and ceremonial artistic practice, allows Basile to restore the seemingly unimaginable and incomprehensible to his known world, to recontextualize his memories of war and death into a realm of “ordinary gestures,” and to assume an active storied presence to share memories that could act as “a perfect lure of war” (193). After two years back at White Earth, the brothers return to Paris, expatriates from the imprisoning confines of reservation life and “haunted by the misery of another world apart, and grieved for the procession of wounded soldiers” (217). Basile and Aloysius, thus, make the return journey to proclaim a native voice of survivance and transmotion through new aesthetic creations of art and story. Near the novel’s conclusion, Aloysius creates from this vision a powerful exhibit of twenty-seven blue raven images, entitled Corbeaux Bleus: Les Mutilés de Guerre, marking

Natural Reason in the Presence of War 143 the marriage of blue ravens and the mutilés de guerre into powerful “trickster stories of endurance” (277). These paintings, as well as Basile’s companion book of war stories, Le Retour à la France: Histoires de Guerre, mark the substantiation of the brothers’ compassionate crossblood “vizion,” the creation of a revolutionary aesthetic that made present “the continuation of creative scenes of transformation and natural motion” that “were the most honorable sources of cultural memory” (272). In contrast to the trinkets, commemorative t-shirts, and distasteful souvenirs hawked to students at the Hiroshima Bomb Dome in Hiroshima Bugi (135), the aesthetic creations of Basile and Aloysius Beaulieu resist such appropriation and trivialization. Their works provoke a “response” that is “direct and concise, that tourist art was not about mutilés de guerre and broken faces of soldiers. Tourist art was a romantic promotion, the commercial nonsense of nationalism, not the scenes of wounded soldiers, and the masks that cover fractured faces and gestures” (277). The triumph of representation that takes flight through the creation of artistic images of blue ravens and compassionate stories of war by the Beaulieu brothers overturn the tyranny of “exile and avoidance” through “the courage of André and Henri” (277, 278). Gerald Vizenor’s dedication and unwavering devotion to the extension of these highest and most essential aesthetic aims highlight just one feature of his complex and deeply affective work that makes it so powerful, so engaging, and so enriching to all of our lives. While characters such as Ronin Browne and the Beaulieu brothers reside within the pages of the two novels discussed throughout this chapter, their spirits and stories cannot be contained by mere words alone, especially those suspended in ink on the printed page. Instead, the “vizionary” stories these characters inhabit, create, and give life to, extend into our own storied memories, dreams, and experiences to demonstrate, in a truly holistic sense, the capacity of transmotion and natural reason to provide the light of humor, visions, and “a natural sense of solace” in a world that, at times, can seem so dark (285).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism in Society.” Prisms. 1967. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1982. 19–34. Print. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 151–57. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Print. Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 61–75. Print. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. 1986. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage, 1988. Print. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.

144 Billy J. Stratton Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. 1977. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Blue Ravens: Historical Novel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. Print. ———. “Literary Transmotion.” University of Vienna/Embassy of the United States, Vienna. Amerika Haus, Vienna. 20 June 2014. Keynote Address.

11 Ecstatic Vision, Blue Ravens, Wild Dreams The Urgency of the Future in Gerald Vizenor’s Art Kristina Baudemann In his 1998 work Mixedblood Messages Louis Owens describes Gerald Vizenor’s writing as a way of looking at a discomforting reality: “From Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, Vizenor’s first novel, to The Trickster of Liberty, The Heirs of Columbus, and his most recent work, Hotline Healers, this Chippewa author’s goal has been, in trickster fashion, to upset the reader in a healthful and positive manner” (69). Owens goes on to say that “Vizenor carefully works to strip his [. . .] readers of the comforts of [. . .] clichés and stereotypes. [. . .] In fact, all of us will feel uncomfortable, guilty, and moved toward self-awareness” (69–70). Like the traditional trickster figures in Native North American myths, Owens argues, Vizenor holds a mirror up to the Native Americans to unveil hypocrisies, subvert socio-political definitions, and re-structure the rhetoric of “Indianness.” The writer boldly invades life beyond the pages—much to the discomfort of many readers and publishers (cf. 69–71). Louis Owens therefore defines Vizenor’s writing in Arnold Krupat’s words as being “not only at but of the frontier” (55):1 the text itself is born out of the desire to tease and upset, to cross imaginary borders and mix up imagined hierarchies.2 Critical scholarship has explored multiple facets of this frontier-character: the first book-length study of Vizenor’s writing, Kimberly Blaeser’s Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996), investigates intersections and interrelations between Vizenor’s open texts, different literary genres, and the Anishinaabe oral tradition; Deborah Madsen’s Understanding Gerald Vizenor (2009) provides a comprehensive overview over Vizenor’s oeuvre and its location in both the tribal and the postmodern world, while the first essay collection dedicated to the poetry of a single Native American poet, The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor (2012; ed. Deborah Madsen), sheds light on the relationship between Japanese haiku, Anishinaabe dream songs, and Vizenor’s poetry, as well as on the haibun nature of Vizenor’s prose writing (a specific form of prose derived from Japanese literature that is dense and descriptive and contains haiku). Other prominent Vizenorian scholars such as A. Robert Lee, Helmbrecht Breinig, John Gamber, or Chris LaLonde have centered their discussions on a variety of topics, including Vizenor’s neologisms, his literary activism, or his humor and satire as tools for liberation. This critical research has largely

146 Kristina Baudemann focused on tracing the elusive trickster whose shape moves fluidly between a person, a character, a textual voice, and a powerful, writerly technique. In her 2012 anthology of Native North American science fiction, Walking the Clouds, Grace Dillon offers a radically new and surprising perspective on Gerald Vizenor’s writing: Dillon ascribes the unsettling, but at the same time liberating, effect of works like Bearheart to the futuristic vision they paint in the mind of the reader. Evidently departing from the existing discourses mentioned above, Dillon navigates her steps where hardly a scholar has ventured before: she classifies parts of Vizenor’s writing as science fiction, investing Krupat’s “literary frontier” with a new (or rather, alternate) dimension.3 With his stories, Dillon argues, Gerald Vizenor carefully constructs layer after layer of past and future time, of dream, vision, experience, and trance, “showing us a world where time and space are distorted, where shamanistic possession leads to surreal vision” (16). Using, among others, Grace Dillon’s terminology of Indigenous science fiction, I will argue in the following that creating a future world is a crucial concern of Vizenor’s art, i.e., his stories, imagined scenes, and artistic program. After investigating positive and negative futurist scenarios in Vizenor’s novels Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978; 1990) and The Heirs of Columbus (1991), the analysis will focus on the shadow presence of dreams and hopes in Vizenor’s animal metaphors, the timeless quality of which links the former two works to his recent novel Blue Ravens (2014). In Gerald Vizenor’s stories and storied theory, innovative concepts and images transcend the state of both contemporary society and contemporary science, and work to create a possible future world. In Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, the revised edition of Vizenor’s 1978 novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, a group of men, women, dogs, and clown crows, as well as one parawoman, travel through the remainders of what Deborah Madsen has described as “a dying chemical civilization” (129). Scholars such as Bernadette Rigal-Cellard or Alan Velie have suggested reading Bearheart as generic parody of Christian and medieval allegories, or as an “inversion of the Anglo-American genre of ‘frontier gothic’” (Madsen 121). However, the description of a society that is addicted to progress, running out of energy and, as a consequence, descending into chaos and destruction is also reminiscent of dystopian narratives and science fiction movies. Unlike Bunyan’s pilgrims, who travel through an allegorical landscape, Vizenor’s tribal pilgrims move through the actual United States in a possible future. As Karl Kroeber notes, Vizenor’s “fictions characteristically take place in a future emerging out of the present in order to cast serious events into a comic mode that welcomes the unexpected at the expense of the supposedly predetermined” (28). In Bearheart, consumerism, egotism, and relentless industrial development have triggered the end of gasoline, economic collapse, ecological disaster, famine, and the breakdown of democratic governments. In this sense, the novel qualifies as Indigenous science fiction: a narrative, in Grace Dillon’s sense, of “Indigenous science and sustainability,” which depicts “Indigenous

The Urgency of the Future 147 scientific literacies” (7). Proude Cedarfair’s knowledge of nature—the magic of the cedar, his understanding of the seasons and of the landscape, but also of animal and human nature—enables his survival after the economic and ecological apocalypse, which affects both Natives and non-Natives alike, takes place on and off reservations: “Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart implicitly criticizes the awe-struck neoshamanism that views Native people as impervious to the very real dangers of nature” (Dillon 8). To apply another one of Dillon’s categories, Bearheart may be called an Indigenous science fiction narrative of contact—a vintage science fiction plot with a Native twist. As John Rieder notes in a book-length study, the genre of science fiction itself is deeply embedded within the imperialist experiences of the Western world. The encounter with and dominance over other cultures, as well as the fascination with and fear of the Other have become metanarrative patterns that structure science fiction narratives of first contact—stories in which humans encounter an alien race—according to the “colonial gaze” that “distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at” (Rieder 7).4 While the plot of science fiction narratives, such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) or Edgar Rice Burrough’s At the Earth’s Core (1914), as well as popular movies such as Alien (1979), Independence Day (1996), or Avatar (2009), follow the colonial logic of a survival of the fittest, Bearheart digresses from generic conventions: much like Isaac Asimov’s science fiction narrative The Gods Themselves (1972), Vizenor’s novel shows two different worlds, a Native and a white one, the encounter of which has become destructive to both since egotism and greed (for sex, money, or social status) reign supreme, and Indigenous cultures as well as Western scientific progress have sold out to capitalism. Ironically, however, this time it is Western society that is cast as the Other instead of the secluded Native tribe. Bearheart opens with life in the Cedar Circus where the Cedarfairs’ world seems to be still in order and nothing disrupts the place’s magic and natural balance. Nevertheless, the chaos of the outside world has already touched upon the Red Cedar Nation a long time ago—in fact, it is deeply intertwined with the nation’s very beginning: founded as a refuge from the corruption of companies, missionaries, and a society in which “[e]conomic power had become the religion of the nation” (Bearheart 23), many Cedarfairs have lost their lives fighting for their sovereign nation. Fourth Proude realizes that for the Cedar Circus to survive, he is forced to find a place in the market, thus ironically becoming a part of global economics in order to live out the separatist vision of his forefather, First Proude. Proude carves out an economic niche and secures the Cedar Circus’s sovereignty by using capitalism for himself: “Fourth Proude saw himself as a ceremonial diplomat. [. . .] Fourth Proude provided cedar ceremonial objects to tribal governments and cedar incense to tribal shamans and pantribal religious leaders. [. . .] With each package of cedar incense a printed legend of the cedar circus

148 Kristina Baudemann was enclosed” (15). However, the world is already too deeply corrupted: people in search of healing and spiritual guidance “camped for a few days, lusted after their women in the cedar, and then, lacking inner discipline, dreams, and personal responsibilities, moved on to find new word wars and new ideas to fill their pantribal urban emptiness” (16). Estranged from his ceremonies, his daughters, and his wife, Fourth Proude cannot fulfill his vision while remaining secluded in the sacred cedar. When agents of the federal government invade the Red Cedar Circus to claim the trees of the Circus as timber, the last source of energy, Rosina and Fourth Proude Cedarfair end up leaving their sanctuary and start moving through the devastation left behind after the world ran out of oil. On their quest for a safe spot, the Cedarfairs are joined by other outcasts and survivors and soon make contact with a post-technologized species: whitepeople, starving white zombies who panic at the sound of a car and articulate themselves with grunts, curses, and crude weapons. One of the tribal pilgrims, Benito Saint Plumero, refers to these creatures as “new generations with no causes and no effects in their machine minds” (83). Vizenor’s depiction of the future of “our post-Native apocalypse world” (Dillon 10) is not an Indigenous version of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: while the future of mankind is bleak in Bearheart, and whitepeople as well as people of Native cultures suffer from the breakdown of technology they have come to depend on, the little group’s pilgrimage through the U.S. is also an act of reclaiming their place in the world. Instances of compassion, solidarity, and love accompany their journey, such as Lilith Mae Farrier’s and Little Big Mouse’s sacrifices, the pilgrims’ grief over Belladonna Darwin-Wintercatcher’s death despite  the fact that it was her terminal creeds that killed her, or the pilgrims’ ceremony for Bishop Parasimo. As Dillon notes, even though Native writers who produce science fiction necessarily apply colonial categories such as the deliberate creation of binaries, “[w]hen viewed as tales of survivance [. . .] Native authored sf [i.e., science fiction] extends the miinidiwag tradition of ironic Native giveaway, of storytelling that challenges readers to recognize their positions with regard to the diasporic condition of contemporary Native peoples” (6). Most importantly, therefore, Bearheart is an Indigenous science fiction narrative of biskaabiiyang: the word in Anishinaabemowin translates as “returning to ourselves” and is applied to describe the concept of decolonization of Anishinaabe cultural material (Geniusz 9). Used as a scholarly term, biskaabiiyang refers to techniques of reclaiming research and knowledge and effecting Anishinaabe sovereignty, which “involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt to our post-Native Apocalypse world” (Dillon 10; cf. Geniusz 9). According to Dillon’s understanding, biskaabiiyang may also refer to the (literary) process of finding a voice, of imagining the fictional world according to Native knowledge and philosophies. “It might go without saying,” Dillon explains, “that all forms of Indigenous

The Urgency of the Future 149 futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang” (10). Escaping the tribal government’s oppression of the Red Cedar Nation, Proude Cedarfair accomplishes biskaabiiyang through his wisdom and knowledge, albeit far from his home, the Red Cedar Circus in Minnesota: he beats the evil gambler at his own game, slips away from the five whiterulers in Santa Fe, crosses the thunder fields unharmed, and passes through a stone window at Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, into the Fourth World, leaving this broken world behind to live in the dreams and stories of past and future times. Technology and modern science are hostile in Bearheart: they create places of intense suffering and targets for hostility and violence. The noise of the pilgrims’ red convertible, for instance, attracts wild whitepeople, who almost crush them inside their car. “Phosphorescence was the latest development in cosmetics,” Vizenor writes at a different place in the story, and the food fascists capture, torture, and kill women with “bioluminescent faces” (Bearheart 176). The invention of the so-called ‘word hospital’ as a way of saving Western civilization was unsuccessful; instead, the hospital continues to produce nonsense phrases and to conduct useless experiments while no effort is being made to save the innumerable victims of disfiguring cancers that were caused by chemical poisoning of the food. Vizenor’s depiction of technology is thus often understood to be completely negative, a key component of the contemporary Western “culture of death” that is directly opposite to Native cultures in which everything is animate:5 “Most aspects of Anglo culture are dead, according to his [i.e., Vizenor’s] values; they offer nothing for the spirit, and they involve the casual killing of all that is alive, only to replace it with cement and plastic” (Hume 607). While the return to myths and stories of Native survivance is indeed the only answer to a terrifying, post-technologized future in Bearheart, Gerald Vizenor’s 1991 work The Heirs of Columbus is an Indigenous science fiction story of biskaabiiyang that offers the reader a narrative alternative to a complete rejection of high technology. The Heirs of Columbus is set in the alternative universe of Saint Louis Bearheart, the fictional author of Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. As Vizenor writes in The Heirs of Columbus, “Saint Louis Bearheart, the crossblood of the tribal apocalypse, wrote in his novel The Heirship Chronicles that children wore plastic faces at the end of civilization, molded pouts and smiles, to cover cancers” (147). Bearheart, the novel, is thus revealed as Saint Louis Bearheart’s vision of future times. While the ecological apocalypse is yet to arrive in The Heirs of Columbus, the world is already peopled with nomadic masses of cancer victims. Following Felipa Flowers’s revelatory vision about the healing power of Christopher Columbus’s genes, scientists succeed in extracting a genetic signature that has the power to reverse the destructive effects of a colonizing and chemical civilization by healing broken bodies with stories and tribal memories. Inserted into the genetic code, the signature not only heals, it also carries Columbus’s Mayan ancestry. This Native futurism is much more than narrative irony mocking

150 Kristina Baudemann the desire for Native blood: it constitutes a synthesis of a science fiction futurism, i.e., an invented scientific achievement, and the established history of the Americas. In The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor bridges the gap between real past and fantastic future by shaping modern science and technology into a vessel for tribal knowledge and powerful ceremonies. As the leading biogenetic engineer in the Dorado Genome Pavilion of the Santa María Casino, Pir Cantrip, explains, “our computer memories and simulations are not yet powerful enough to support what shamans and hand talkers have inherited and understood for thousands of years” (136). Biskaabiiyang, “returning to ourselves,” is therefore not only a theme, but also a narrative strategy in The Heirs of Columbus: Vizenor creates a narrative foundation to reconcile mythic origins and tribal past with postindian existence in a modern society, the everyday life of which is replete with technology. In this way, the circle of Indigenous learning and teaching that was broken by the systematic extinction of languages and cultures in American Indian boarding schools and Canadian residential schools is now revived with the help of modern science. A similar act of reconciling traditional knowledge and high technology is apparent in science fiction metaphors of biogenetic robotics and futuristic holograms in The Heirs of Columbus: Panda, the first tribal robot, has no gender and heals children with stories. Felipa Flowers’s moccasins are electric and, if worn with Almost Browne’s magic gloves and socks, and wired to a computer, they allow their wearer access to computer-simulated “wild shadow realities” (HoC 85). Similarly, Almost Browne’s trickster laser light shows project elusive, historical personages as three-dimensional figures into the night sky over Point Assinika, casting the distant past in the neon lights of present and future technologies: Christopher Columbus arose with a burst of light in the east and came ashore; his head swelled and turned blue near the Trickster of Liberty. The adventurer raised a banner in the name of the monarchs, and then waved his sword over his head, the laser of the blade bounced on the black water. George Washington marched out of the north and met Crazy Horse and Louis Riel over the marina on the point. Almost was cheered when the four laser men, the adventurer, the general, the warrior, the crossblood, and later a lover and princess combined in blue radiance near the statue. (125) Magic and technology thus combine to create mythic figures that walk across the sky by themselves. Columbus, Washington, Riel, and Crazy Horse are players in the global games of imperialism and colonialism, but they are also vintage Vizenoresque metaphors of Native survivance: the signifiers of colonialism are stripped from their fixed positions in the historical record to enact a scene of reconciliation and forgiveness. Their blue aura indicates resurrection and healing, it is “the radiance of creation in the stone and the

The Urgency of the Future 151 blood” (16). The color establishes a reference to the mute magic of Blue Ishi, the ceremonial power of the blue storm puppets, Stone Columbus’s blue and golden metal mask, and the Indigenous science fiction futurism of Felipa Flowers’s blue electric moccasins. Kimberly Blaeser points out that luminosity may furthermore be read as a signifier for “the imaginative power of transformation” (Gerald Vizenor 176) in Vizenor’s stories. By suggesting to draw power from the unavoidable reality of a colonial past, Vizenor’s science fiction narratives are transformed into manifestoes for historical revision and conceptual change. As Karl Kroeber remarks, Gerald Vizenor “has no concern with another world, only with the immediate, practicable future of this one” (31). Vizenor’s stories thus work to change the reader’s mindset, present and future thinking, and his metaphors are the core of his aesthetics of survivance. As Vizenor notes in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, “[m]etaphors create a sense of presence by imagination and natural reason, the very character and practice of survivance” (12–13). By quoting works such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By or Martin Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language, Vizenor makes clear that metaphor, to him, is a means of perceiving our environment as a complex whole and, as such, goes beyond a linguistic figure of speech. It serves as a structure to frame our experiences by recognizing characteristics of one thing in another, or by making sense of one situation in terms of another. The urgency of the future in Gerald Vizenor’s fiction therefore transcends the science fiction poses of futuristic holograms, biorobotics, and nanotechology: not all of Vizenor’s metaphors qualify as Indigenous science fiction futurisms, but they all transform our perception of the future itself as something temporal—things that are to come—into the timeless presence of other dimensions and totemic visions. In Blue Ravens (2014), his most recent novel about two brothers from the White Earth Nation Reservation who depart for World War I, Vizenor presents an animal metaphor that carries the transforming power of his artistic program: Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu created marvelous blue ravens that stormy summer. He painted blue ravens over the mission church, blue ravens in the clouds, celestial blue ravens with tousled manes perched on the crossbeams of the new telegraph poles near the post office, and two grotesque blue ravens cocked as mighty sentries on the stone gateway to the hospital on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota. (1) By remarking that “[r]avens are blue” (2), Vizenor dissolves the firm connection between signifier and signified, between the raven and its established blackness. With the signifier detached from centuries of representation, nothing is safe anymore: one loose thread causes all connections in our visual memory to re-arrange themselves. Vizenor proceeds to invade all areas of

152 Kristina Baudemann the Beaulieu reality and simultaneously the reader’s reality to re-forge structures of meaning production: blue is “totemic and a rush of presence” (2); rainbows have a blue aura, and the uncanny blackness of the night sky gives way to the beautiful, natural play of different shades of blue. Aloysius’s blue ravens are placed on paper and canvas, but also on telephones poles, roofs, walls, and streets: they break open the material reality in specific places to allow for the artist’s sovereign vision to take plastic shape. By re-structuring the level of signification around the image of blue ravens, Vizenor creates a center for his novel other than World War I and its aftermath. The arrival of objects and ideas from a different realm than future time and material space grants his characters a way out of the unbearable reality of war: in Aloysius’s blue ravens, the mental takes shape and is always in the process of becoming. As Vizenor states in his essay on “The Aesthetics of Survivance,” metaphors are a “visionary transformation, an unrevealed presence” (14). While time and space still matter, their re-direction and re-arrangement in and through the metaphor of blue ravens is crucial: both time and space wrap around Aloysius’s blue ravens, which always existed in the realm of spirits and totems. Like the presence of blue ravens in Aloysius’s war scene paintings or on his moccasins, the shapes of animals in Bearheart and The Heirs of Columbus mock the belief that our material world is determined only by time and space. In The Heirs of Columbus, Memphis de Panther, Transom, Miigis, and Samana constantly slip between human and animal existence, while Christopher Columbus is liberated from the hooks of historical time and is given a mythical existence as a Mayan and a trickster healer. The characters’ inscription into the realm of myths and animal spirits withdraws them from clear definition and mocks terminal (and temporal) beliefs, such as Pellegrine Treves’s “fear of death and human remains” (HoC 109). Deborah Madsen has ranged Vizenor’s metaphors under the general “theme of transformation” (Understanding Gerald Vizenor 126) in his fiction. They may also be considered part of a larger mindset that Grace Dillon has described as “Native slipstream thinking” that “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream” and which “replicates nonlinear thinking about space-time” (3).6 Dillon moreover points out that “Native slipstream thinking, which has been around for millennia, anticipated recent cutting-edge physics, ironically suggesting that Natives have had things right all along” (4). The animal metaphors and laser figures in The Heirs of Columbus express slipstream thinking, since they indicate the shadow presence of levels of existence other than human life in linear time from birth to death. Similarly, at the end of Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, Proude Cedarfair, Inawa Biwide, and Rosina Parent stop moving through time and space and cross into the Fourth World. The term “heirship chronicles” is an instance of irony: it implies a temporally linear description of events towards a near or distant future, but the Native pilgrims’ movement through time and

The Urgency of the Future 153 space stops when they exchange their physical existence for a mythical one. As Vizenor writes at the end of Bearheart, “[t]hat morning when the old men were inhaling the dawn and laughing during the first winter solstice sunrise, Proude Cedarfair and Inawa Biwide flew with vision bears ha ha ha haaa from the window on the perfect light into the fourth world” (243). As Louis Owens remarks, “[c]oming over the desert with the sun, from east to west, is Rosina herself, who, like Proude, has achieved mythic existence through the identification with the traditional Navajo deity of Changing Woman” (253). The idea of linear time, a progression from past to present and into the future, is replaced with the complex simultaneity of human life and myths, stories, and dreams—separate, timeless dimensions that are, like Aloysius’s blue ravens, folded into every inch and second of material reality. As Vizenor points out in the preface to Earthdivers, “[c]reation myths are not time-bound, the creation takes place in the telling, in present-tense metaphors” (xii). It is this quality—to create metaphors on the edge between the natural world, the history of representation, and the realms of imagination, dreams, spirits, and visions—that allows Vizenor’s writing, in Louis Owens’s words, to be “not only at but of the frontier”: not only are mythical existence, colonial past, and tribal memories reconciled with a technologized everyday life, but the visual images themselves arise from the breaking and re-forging of borderlines between signifier and signified, between the word and its mental complement. The urgency of the future in Gerald Vizenor’s stories of survivance ranges from Indigenous science fiction narratives of biskaabiiyang that imagine the liberation from colonialism, and from the culture of death and chemical poisoning, to his animal metaphors. The latter are textual strategies of Native slipstream thinking, which point toward a different kind of becoming than the ceaseless progression into future time. As Louis Owens points out, Vizenor’s readers “reimagine moment by moment the world we inhabit” (248); they discover a reality that is multilayered and multidirectional—a reality in which pasts, presents, and futures emerge from and wrap around ecstatic visions, blue ravens, and wild dreams.

Notes 1. Owens here refers to Krupat’s general definition of ethnocriticism as “criticism that insists on its betweenness [. . .] while seeking a certain privilege or centrality” (Ethnocriticism 28). 2. In the 1981 interview with Neal Bowers and Charles L. P. Silet, Vizenor famously justified his techniques of confronting stereotypes and “traditional static standards” in his novel Bearheart with the words: “Some upsetting is necessary” (47). 3. In 1989, Vizenor’s lesser-known short story “Bad Breath” was featured in Curtis White’s anthology of futuristic fiction, An Illuminated History of the Future. Even though scholars have described Vizenor’s novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart as a “a relevant contribution to the future” (Nagy 247) or as showing us a “postapocalyptic society” (Hume 592), Dillon is the first to explicitly list and describe the novel as well as Gerald Vizenor’s early short story, “Custer on the Slipstream” (1978), as Indigenous science fiction.

154 Kristina Baudemann 4. Rieder refers not only to the processes of imperialism and colonialism but also to the rise of the natural and anthropological sciences (most notably evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism) that justified the West’s self-definition as evolved and scientific—in short, superior—societies (5ff). Thus, along with imagining fantastic technologies and reflecting on the future of mankind, “[t]he double-edged effect of the exotic—as a means of gratifying familiar appetites and as a challenge to one’s sense of the proper or the natural—pervades early science fiction” (4). 5. The phrase culture of death is frequently used in Vizenor’s works, e.g., in The Heirs of Columbus as a referent to the imperialist and monotheist mindset of old Europe: “Columbus escaped from the culture of death and carried our tribal genes back to the New World, back to the great river, he was an adventurer in our blood and he returned to his homeland” (9). 6. In The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor, Kimberly Blaeser also refers to the “slipstream of language” in Vizenor’s poems such as Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point: “At moments the text suggests one being appears physically similar to or maybe in the form of another being; the Native at times seems to shimmer at the edges of multiple realities” (9).

Bibliography Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. Print. ———. “The Language of Borders, the Borders of Language in Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry.” The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. Kimberly Blaeser. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. 1–22. Print. Bowers, Neal, and Charles L. P. Silet. “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” MELUS 8.1 (1981): 41–49. Print. Dillon, Grace L., ed. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2012. Print. Geniusz, Wendy Makoons. Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2009. Print. Hume, Kathryn. “Gerald Vizenor’s Metaphysics.” Contemporary Literature 48.4 (2007): 580–612. Print. Kroeber, Karl. “Why It’s a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 25–38. Print. Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Print. Lee, A. Robert, ed. Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 2000. Print. Madsen, Deborah, ed. The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. Print. ———. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2009. Print. ——— and A. Robert Lee, eds. Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2011. Print. Nagy, Katalin Bíróné. “The Reconceptualization of the Columbian Heritage into a Trickster Discourse: Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 14.2 (2008): 245–63. Print. Owens, Louis. “Afterword.” Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. By Gerald Vizenor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 247–54. Print.

The Urgency of the Future 155 ———. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series vol. 26. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Print. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Print. Rigal-Cellard, Bernadette. “Doubling in Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Pilgrimage Strategy or Bunyan Revisited.” Studies in American Indian Literature 2.9 (1997): 93–114. Print. Velie, Alan. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. “The Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. 1–23. Print. ———. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. 1978. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. Print. ———. Blue Ravens. Historical Novel. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print. ———. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981. Print. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Print. White, Curtis, ed. An Illuminated History of the Future. Boulder, CO: Northwestern UP, 1989. Print.

Contributors

Kristina Baudemann graduated from the University of Würzburg in Germany in 2012; she is currently working on her PhD project on Indigenous dimensions of time in contemporary North American Indigenous art and literature entitled “Indigenous Futurism.” In 2014, she was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Kimberly M. Blaeser is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the current Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Poet, photographer, and scholar, she teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing. Blaeser’s monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous writer. Blaeser’s other publications include three poetry collections—Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser’s poetry, short fiction, and essays have been widely anthologized, including in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Her poetry has also been translated into several languages including Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian, and French. Her current creative project featuring “Picto-Poems” brings her nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas about Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance. Birgit Däwes is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Flensburg, Germany. She received her doctoral and post-doctoral degrees from the University of Würzburg, Germany, and held previous professorial positions at the University of Mainz, National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and the University of Vienna, where she also directed the Center for Canadian Studies. Her works include two award-winning monograph studies, Native North American Theater in a Global Age (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007) and Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel

158 Contributors (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011), as well as editions such as Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), Narratives of Fundamentalism (LWU 46.2–3 [2014]), and (with Ingrid Gessner) Commemorating World War II at 70: Ethnic and Transnational Perspectives (American Studies Journal 59 [2015]). She serves as co-editor of the Routledge book series “Transnational Indigenous Perspectives.” Alexandra Ganser is Professor of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her dissertation was published as Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). Her research interests include Native American studies, popular culture and visual culture, ecocriticism, and transatlantic and transnational American studies. Her current book project, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, examines transatlantic representations of piracy and is titled “Crisis and Discourses of (Il)Legitimacy in Transatlantic Narratives of Piracy, 1678–1865.” Alexandra Hauke studied at the University of Vienna, where she received MAs in English and American Studies as well as Hispanic Studies, and at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is currently a university assistant and PhD candidate at the Department of English and American Studies in Vienna, where her ongoing dissertation project examines Native American and First Nations’ Detective Fiction (1990–2015). Her research interests include Native American and First Nations Studies, Transnational American Studies, Canadian Studies, and Contemporary American TV and Film. Chris LaLonde is the author of books on William Faulker’s early work and on the novels of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. He has published essays on Gerald Vizenor and on other White Earth Anishinaabe writers. His recent publications include essays on Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones, on mixedblood identity and cosmopolitanism in Native American Literature, and on Pawnee-Seminole hip-hop artist Quese IMC. A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent, UK, was Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, 1996–2011. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the 2004 American Book Award; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009); and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outsiders, Ethnics (2010). He is editor of the three multisets, Native American Writing (2011), African American Writing (2013) and US Latino/a Writing (2014), and essay-collections like Other British, Other Britain: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (1985) and Chinese Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story

Contributors 159 (2008). His work on Gerald Vizenor includes Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (1994), Postindian Conversations (1999), Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor (2000) and, with Deborah L. Madsen, Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (2010). Sabine N. Meyer is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Osnabrück. She is currently also a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” at Bonn, where she is working on her second book titled The Indian Removal in Native American Literature and Law (working title). Her research explores the history of American reform movements; concepts of gender, ethnicity, and civic identity in the United States in the nineteenth century; and representations of Native Americans in American popular culture, as well as the intersections of law and Native American literature. Her publications include articles on the teaching of U.S. history in German universities ( Journal of American History [2010]), on Native American literature and the transnational turn (Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo Hebel [2012]), and on representations of Native Americans in television and film (Ethnoscripts, zkmb [2013]). Her book We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota will be published in July 2015 (University of Illinois Press). She has recently co-edited and contributed to Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion (Routledge, 2015). She is also the co-editor of the monograph series Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives. David L. Moore is Professor of English at the University of Montana. His fields of research and teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels include cross-cultural American Studies, Native American literatures, Western American literatures, Peace Studies, Baha’i Studies, literature and the environment, and ecocritical and dialogical critical theory. He has taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College, University of Washington, and Cornell University. His book, entitled “That Dream Shall Have a Name”: Native Americans Rewriting America, is published by the University of Nebraska Press. His edited collection of essays, Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, is forthcoming in September 2016 from Bloomsbury Academic Publishers. Other publications include an edited volume of American Indian Quarterly as well as numerous articles and chapters. On Montana Public Radio, he co-hosts Reflections West, a short weekly literary program, at http://www.reflectionswest.org. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana. Kathryn W. Shanley, an enrolled Nakoda from the Ft. Peck Reservation, is a professor of Native American Studies at the University of

160 Contributors Montana-Missoula, and also works as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Native American and Indigenous Education. Kate Shanley is widely published in the field of Native American literature and most recently co-edited a volume (with Bjorg Evjen, University of Tromsø) titled Mapping Indigenous Presence: North Scandinavian and North American Perspectives (University of Arizona Press, 2015). She also has recent essays in These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry (2014), Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (2013), and Re-imagining Nature (2013). She co-edits (with Ned Blackhawk) the Yale University Press Henry Roe Cloud American Indians and Modernity series. She served as president-elect, president, and past-president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association from 2011–2013, and she has for the past ten years served as regional liaison for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. Billy J. Stratton is a Fulbright alumnus who currently teaches contemporary Native American/American literature, writing, and film in the Department of English at the University of Denver. His scholarship and creative work has been included in several books and in journals such as Cream City Review, Transmotion, Salon, Red Ink, Arizona Quarterly, Rhizomes, Common-place, Weber, and Denver Quarterly. His first book on the Indian captivity narrative and King Philip’s War, Buried in Shades of Night, was published in 2013. He is currently working on a critical volume on the fictions of Stephen Graham Jones to be released in Fall 2016. Gerald Vizenor is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published more than thirty books that include narrative histories, literary studies, novels, essays, short stories, and poetry. Blue Ravens, a historical novel about Native Americans in the First World War; Favor of Crows, a collection of original haiku poems; Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance; and Chair of Tears are his most recent books. Vizenor was a delegate to the Constitutional Conventions and the Principal Writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. He received the American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China and for Shrouds of White Earth, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas. Cathy Covell Waegner taught American Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in 2013. She obtained degrees from the College of William & Mary (BA) and the University of Virginia (MA, PhD). In addition to her work on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, she has published on Native American authors and issues, transculturality in the ethnic bildungsroman, minstrelsy, AfroAsian “postmodernist passing,” 400 years after Jamestown, “hybrid tropes” in film, and the

Contributors 161 interaction between American and European cultural phenomena. Waegner edited Mediating Indianness (Michigan State University Press, 2015) and co-edited project volumes with Norfolk State University scholars and conference proceedings with colleagues in France. She served as MESEA (Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) treasurer for four years. Her current research focuses on contemporary Native American literature and transcultural diasporas.

Index

Abram, David 93–8 absence 21–4, 50–1, 55–6, 63, 68–9, 80, 84–5, 93, 104, 110, 121–22, 124, 126, 131, 136–38, 140 Adorno, Theodor 140 aesthetic/s 4–5, 9, 20, 23–5, 27, 29, 49, 66, 77, 81, 90, 93, 105, 112–13, 114n7, 130–32, 137, 139, 141–43, 151–52 “aesthetics of survivance, The” 93, 151 agency 24, 30, 37, 56, 91, 93, 99–100, 125, 131; Native agency 129 Alaimo, Stacy 91, 99 Alien 147 alienation 95, 130 Allen, Paula Gunn 25, 31n12 Almost Ashore see Vizenor, Gerald American Civil War, the 10, 14n2, 139–40 a/Anishinaabe 3–4, 9, 11–12, 47, 49, 51–2, 55, 57–60, 63–69, 75, 77–9, 81–7, 100, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114n3, 122–23, 129, 133, 139, 142, 145, 148; Anishinaabeg 59, 77–8, 81, 100, 122–23; Anishinaabeg Today, The 123; Anishinaabemowin 60n1, 148 appropriation 19–20, 24, 143 Aquinas, Thomas 34 Asimov, Isaac 147 autobiography 63, 75, 79, 85, 86n1, 96, 102 Avatar 147 awareness 54, 83–4, 90–1, 93, 96, 145 Ballinger, Franchot 24–5 Barsh, Russell 11–12 Bartow, Rick 102, 104–5 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 70, 114n8 Baudrillard, Jean 19–23, 30n7

Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles see Vizenor, Gerald Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point see Vizenor, Gerald Beaulieu, John Clement 8–9 Beaupré, Charles 10, 12 biskaabiiyang 148–50, 153 blue 36, 42–4, 48–50, 70, 93, 99–100, 102–13, 114n2, 115n9, 139, 141, 150–53 Blue Ravens: Historical Novel see Vizenor, Gerald Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons 11 Bradley, David 66 Breinig, Helmbrecht 2, 30n9, 145 Breton, André 9 casino 65–6, 68–9, 119, 124, 128, 132n4, 150 ceremony 49, 102, 112–13, 148; Ceremony (see Silko, Leslie Marmon) Chagall, Marc 66–7, 70–71, 111 Chair of Tears see Vizenor, Gerald chance 3, 9, 14, 22, 26–8, 38, 45, 52, 54–8, 65, 68, 71, 73, 83, 86, 108, 119, 135–36 Chancers see Vizenor, Gerald Cherokee 11, 121, 130; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia 121 colonial/ism 3, 5, 6, 9, 19, 21, 23–4, 35, 39, 42, 44, 54, 95, 98, 120–22, 124, 126–31, 135, 147–48, 150–54; colonialist 37, 136; neo-colonial 22, 128, 131; post-colonial/ism 19, 22–3, 26, 28–30, 54; settler colonialism 40–41, 97 Columbus, Christopher 21, 36, 39, 42, 44, 48, 58, 79, 95, 99, 149–50, 152 crane/s 43, 84–7; Cranes Arise see Vizenor, Gerald

164 Index Crazy Horse 99, 150 crossblood 36, 39, 42, 63, 78, 85, 137, 143, 149–50; Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (see Vizenor, Gerald); see also mixedblood crow/s 59, 75–6, 78, 80, 103–5, 109, 111, 113–14, 146; “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” (see Vizenor, Gerald) Curtis, Edward S. 22, 30n10, 86 Custer, George Armstrong 1, 68 Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart see Vizenor, Gerald Dead Voices see Vizenor, Gerald Deloria, Philip J. 122, 128 Derrida, Jacques 23, 27, 48, 50–1, 54–6, 68, 94 Descartes, René 95 Dillon, Grace 146–48, 152 discourse 3, 5, 19, 23–4, 26–7, 38–42, 45, 54, 64, 78, 91, 99, 112–13, 123, 127, 131, 146; chanted discourse 102, 112–13, 115n11; trickster discourse 1–2, 4, 26–8, 30n5, 98, 122 Dix, Otto 8, 66 Doctorow, E. L. 70 dominance 22–3, 35, 37, 42, 84, 121, 126, 135–37, 147; cultural dominance 84, 126, 131 dream/s 48, 50–3, 68, 70, 76, 78, 85, 99, 105–7, 113, 122, 143, 145–46, 148–49, 153 Durham, Jimmie 68 Earthdivers: Trival Narratives of Mixed Descent see Vizenor, Gerald Eliot, T. S. 106 “Empire Treasons: White Earth and the Great War” see Vizenor, Gerald Empty Swings: Haiku in English see Vizenor, Gerald Erdrich, Louise 66, 84 Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People, The see Vizenor, Gerald Father Meme see Vizenor, Gerald Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku see Vizenor, Gerald framing 102, 106–7, 136; de-framing 102, 113 Franz Ferdinand von Österreich 9

Freud, Sigmund 9, 68 Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence see Vizenor, Gerald fur trade 40, 48, 58–9, 64, 127–28, 135, 139 future 5–6, 35, 48, 53, 57, 60, 82, 98, 105, 123, 127, 145–53; futuristic 146, 150–51; futurity 4–5, 117 frontier 145–46, 153 genre 2, 5, 52, 63–4, 66, 102, 105–7, 111, 113, 145–47 Glancy, Diane 84 haiku 47, 52–3, 59, 80, 82, 85, 102–13, 135, 145 Heirs of Columbus, The see Vizenor, Gerald Henry, Gordon 78, 84 hermeneutic/s 20, 24, 26–9, 98; trickster hermeneutics 24, 26, 28–9, 87n5, 135 Highwater, Jamake 1, 68 Hiroshima 57, 135–37, 143 Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 see Vizenor, Gerald Hole in the Day, William 9, 12 homeland 4, 49, 57–8, 60, 84, 86, 142 Homer 68, 70, 140 Hotline Healers see Vizenor, Gerald human rights 4, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 42–3, 45 humor 2–4, 6, 39, 42, 45, 52, 56, 65, 79–80, 84, 86, 100, 104, 113, 119–20, 123, 136, 139, 143, 145; trickster humor 4 hybrid/ity 24, 26, 29, 64, 78, 85, 139, 160; cultural hybridity 139 identity 20, 23, 25–6, 36, 43, 67, 77, 85, 93, 96, 112, 138, 142; Native identity 4; tribal identity 3 ideology 138, 140 imagination 27, 38, 42, 43, 45, 49, 63, 66, 76, 79, 82–6, 90–1, 96, 107, 113, 151, 153 independence 54, 121, 124, 129 Independence Day 147 indian 19–24, 29, 51, 56, 59, 136; indianness 29, 35, 130–31, 145; postindian 2, 6, 19, 22–3, 29, 63–4, 69, 80, 127–28, 130–31, 138, 150 Indian removal 5, 126; Indian Removal Act 126

Index 165 “Indianthusiasm” see Lutz, Hartmut Indigeneity 96; Indigenism 19; Indigenous 3, 4–6, 19, 26, 28, 39, 41, 43–4, 54, 79, 91, 94–8, 100, 102–5, 113, 123, 129, 131, 146–51, 153; Indigenous Studies 2, 4 inspiration 83, 100, 123, 140 Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors see Vizenor, Gerald intertextuality 85, 112, 137 irony 4, 6, 38, 51–2, 55, 58, 65, 68–9, 80, 112, 119–20, 131, 135–38, 140, 142, 149, 152; irony dogs 39, 54–5, 66–9, 119 Japan/ese 4, 50, 55, 66, 82, 102–3, 105, 107, 113n1, 135, 145 Jew/ish 66, 71, 121–22 Johnston, Basil 55, 76 journalism 2; journalist 48, 55, 64, 70, 83, 102, 135 Joyce, James 71, 140 Jung, Carl Gustav 26–7 justice 3, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 65, 100 King, Thomas 84 Kroeber, Karl 146, 151 Krupat, Arnold 86n1, 130, 145–46, 153n1 Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories see Vizenor, Gerald law 24, 35, 37–8, 45, 64, 70, 83, 98, 100, 120, 122, 126, 132; federal Indian law 120, 123, 130, 132 Leech Lake 47–8, 58 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 25, 68 liminal/ity 24–5, 55, 78–9, 85, 96 Luther Standing Bear 84 Lutz, Hartmut 3; Indianthusiasm 3 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 19, 21, 54 Madsen, Deborah L. 2–3, 22, 29, 30, 35, 40, 120, 145–46, 152 manifest manners 22–3, 30n4, 44, 112, 136; Manifest Manners: Narratives of Postindian Survivance (see Vizenor, Gerald) Marshall, John 120–21, 126 Matisse, Henri 70 Matsushima see Vizenor, Gerald Melville, Herman 68

memory 4–5, 9, 50, 59, 73, 75–86, 90–102, 105, 113, 135–36, 138–43, 151; cultural memory 5, 102, 105, 142–43 mimicry 1, 37, 68, 120, 124, 130–31, 141 Minneapolis 54, 57, 65, 70, 106–8, 112, 114n8 mixedblood 55, 75, 79–80, 84–6, 145 Momaday, N. Scott 79, 84 Morrison, George 66–7, 86 mortality 97, 99–101, 104, 110, 138 mythology 26, 28, 35, 42, 103 myth/s 24–5, 27–8, 63, 68, 76–7, 82, 85, 96–8, 103, 113, 145, 149, 150, 152–53 Naanabozho 36, 58, 76, 86 Narrative Chance see Vizenor, Gerald Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance see Vizenor, Gerald natural reason 4, 35, 55, 75–7, 81, 97, 100, 112, 122–23, 125–26, 130–31, 135–39, 141–43 neologism 5, 64, 90, 98, 145 oral/ity 11, 28–9, 50, 56, 81, 112–13, 115n12, 125, 132; oral stories 50, 52, 107; oral tradition 2, 27, 45, 52, 105, 145 Other, the 21, 23, 26, 66, 147 Owens, Louis 84, 145, 153 panic hole/s 69, 98–9 pantribal see tribe/tribal Paris 14, 66, 69, 71, 106, 111, 141–42 People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories, The see Vizenor, Gerald philosophy 5, 24, 26, 29, 34, 38, 60n2, 91 physics 90–1, 93–4, 152; metaphysics 94 Picasso, Pablo 70 post-colonial see colonial postindian see indian Postindian Conversations see Vizenor, Gerald postmodern/ity 2, 4, 19–22, 26, 29–30, 86, 120, 131, 145 presence 5–6, 14, 21–4, 27, 29, 30, 36, 48, 50–51, 53, 56–7, 75–6, 80–4, 86, 90–1, 93–4, 97–100, 103–4, 110, 112–13, 122, 126, 132, 135–36, 138–43, 146, 151–52; Native presence 4–6, 23, 51, 57, 59, 63, 68–9, 125, 135, 151

166 Index quantum mechanics 5, 90–1, 93–4, 96 radiance 36, 100, 10–4, 109, 150 Raising the Moon Vines see Vizenor, Gerald raven/s 70–1, 93, 103–15, 136, 139–43, 145, 151–53 remembrance 4, 9, 23, 75, 78, 80–2, 135–37, 140 removal see Indian Removal reservation/s 9–10, 12–14, 41, 47, 51–2, 54, 56–60, 64–7, 69–70, 83–4, 92, 102, 108, 111, 120–26, 128–32, 139, 142, 147, 151 resistance 5–6, 22–3, 30n11, 83–84, 120, 125, 127–32, 135, 137 Riel, Louis 79, 99, 150 Schiele, Egon 60 science fiction 6, 146–52 self 23, 25–9, 40, 67, 75, 82, 94–5, 98, 100, 119, 145; self-determination 3, 121, 123–24, 129, 131; sense of self 75, 83 sentient/sentience 39, 91, 94 Shrouds of White Earth see Vizenor, Gerald signified 27, 151, 153; signifier 6, 21, 98, 136, 150–51, 153 Silko, Leslie Marmon 34, 138; Ceremony 138 simulation/s 4, 19–24, 26, 29–30, 44, 51, 135–38, 141, 150 socioacupuncture 29, 98 sovenance 81–2, 136 sovereignty 3, 56, 80, 82, 84, 100, 120–23, 125, 131–32, 136, 138, 147–48; cultural sovereignty 5, 100, 119–20, 123–24, 128–32; inherent sovereignty 123, 131; tribal sovereignty 98, 100, 123, 127 spirit/s 22, 24, 35–36, 48, 51–2, 60n1, 67, 75, 77, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 92–3, 97, 111, 143, 149, 152–53; spiritual/ity 44, 76, 78, 81, 98, 100, 103, 106, 123, 148 story/ing 4–5, 6, 28, 45, 54–7, 63–6, 67–9, 71, 75, 76–85, 97, 108, 132n1, 136, 138–40, 142, 149, 153n2; storytelling 78, 92, 120, 131, 139–40, 148 Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories see Vizenor, Gerald supernatural 76, 97

survival 1, 5, 22, 24, 28, 35, 56, 77, 83, 96, 111, 120, 147 survivance 2, 4–6, 22–4, 28–9, 35, 37, 42, 50–1, 53, 56–7, 64–5, 68, 71, 75–80, 82–7, 90, 93, 98, 100, 103, 112, 123–25, 127–28, 130–31, 135–42, 148, 151, 153; Native survivance 19, 22–3, 51, 56, 93, 137, 149–50 Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence see Vizenor, Gerald tease 5, 23, 36–8, 45, 50–3, 55, 59, 65, 67–9, 76, 78, 82, 84, 86, 99, 104, 106, 112, 128, 135–36, 139, 140–41, 145 terminal creed/s 5–6, 63, 71, 98–9, 112, 148 territory 20, 25, 61n4, 102; Indian territory 120 totem/ic 5–6, 58, 65, 70, 81, 85, 87n8, 93, 97, 99–100, 102–9, 113, 114n1, 123, 135–37, 151–52; cosmototemic 105, 114n4, 135 transitive 44, 75–6, 78–86, 96 transmotion 2, 4–5, 17, 38, 42, 51, 56, 64, 76, 80–3, 85, 114n5, 135–37, 140, 142–43 transmutation 29, 110 transnational/ism 4, 17, 19–20, 30 trauma/tic 4–5, 37, 44, 65, 110, 127, 137–42 treaty 8, 27, 58, 82, 119, 121–28, 130, 142 tribe/tribal 3–4, 19, 21, 29–30, 35–6, 39–42, 44–5, 51–2, 56, 63, 65, 68, 75, 79, 83, 87n8, 90–2, 96–100, 120–25, 127, 129, 131–32, 136, 145, 147; pantribal 147–48 trickster/ism 1, 3–4, 17, 19–30, 31n13, 35–6, 38, 40, 42, 58–9, 68, 70, 78–9, 82, 86, 87n5, 92, 94, 96–9, 103, 105, 111, 115n11, 122, 125, 130, 135–36, 140, 143, 145–46, 150, 152; trickster discourse (see discourse); trickster hermeneutics 24, 26, 28–9, 87n5, 135; trickster theory 20, 24, 26 Trickster of Liberty, The see Vizenor, Gerald Two Wings the Butterfly see Vizenor, Gerald universe 20, 36, 55, 97, 99, 149 U.S. government, the 5, 128 victimry 4–5, 22, 24, 35, 37, 50, 56, 68, 112, 126–27, 135–42

Index 167 visionary 65–66, 69, 80–81, 83, 85, 102, 105, 112–14, 135, 139–40, 142, 152; ‘vizionary’ 136, 143 Vizenor, Clement 84–5 Vizenor, Gerald: “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice, The” 93, 151–52; Almost Ashore 58–9, 103; Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles 2, 5, 24, 98, 152–53 (see also Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart); Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point 48–9, 58, 64, 87n5, 154n6; Blue Ravens: Historical Novel 2, 4–6, 9–11, 14, 50, 57–8, 60, 61n5, 63, 69, 71, 92–3, 97, 99, 102–13, 115, 135, 139–43, 145–46, 150–51; Chair of Tears 1–2, 5, 52, 63, 67–8, 119–33; Chancers 2; Cranes Arise 52, 59; Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports 63; “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” 75, 80, 86n1, 86n3, 92, 96, 103; Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart 39, 63, 103, 135, 146–49; Dead Voices 58–9, 70; Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives of Mixed Descent 1, 63, 69, 153; “Empire Treasons: White Earth and the Great War” 115n13; Empty Swings: Haiku in English 85; Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People, The 47, 86; Father Meme 2, 5, 63–4, 70; Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku 5, 52–3, 102–7, 110–11, 113–14; Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence 50–51, 56, 63, 75, 78, 81–2, 112, 135–36, 141; Heirs of Columbus, The 4, 24, 34–6, 39, 42–5, 48, 50, 79, 91–2, 98–100, 135, 145–46, 149–52; Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 48, 50, 55–7, 64, 70, 78, 103, 135–39, 141, 143; Hotline Healers 2, 145; Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors 63, 78, 85, 87n8; Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories 63; Manifest Manners: Narratives of Postindian Survivance 29, 51, 63; Matsushima 47, 87n5;

Narrative Chance 26, 30n2; Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance 14n1, 80; People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories, The 47, 87n7; Postindian Conversations 80, 86n2; Raising the Moon Vines 47, 52; Shrouds of White Earth 2, 4–6, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 51, 56, 63, 65–7; Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories 53, 63, 85; Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence 151; Trickster of Liberty, The 51, 87, 98, 145; Two Wings the Butterfly 102; White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution, The 83, 123, 127; Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade 48, 50–1, 63 Vizenor, Ignatius 9–10, 12–14, 60, 139 Vizenor, Lawrence 9–10, 13–14, 142 waabooz 75–7; waaboozoog 75–7; waaboozoons 75–6 Warren, William 9, 86–7, 125, 127 warrior 23, 109, 129, 138, 150; Native warrior 52, 111; postindian warrior 23, 29, 130 Welch, James 44, 84 Wells, H. G. 147–48 White Earth 3, 38, 51, 55, 57–8, 65–6, 69–71, 82, 99–100, 102, 108, 112, 114n5, 122–23, 135, 139, 142; White Earth Constitution 3, 38, 66–7, 84, 122–23, 127; White Earth Reservation 3, 4, 9–10, 12–14, 58, 84, 99–100, 121, 124–25, 129, 131, 135, 139, 151; see also Shrouds of White Earth White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution see Vizenor, Gerald Whitman, Walt 97 Wiindigo 65, 98 Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade see Vizenor, Gerald World War I 4, 11, 14n3, 34, 39, 102, 104–5, 122, 135, 151–52; Great War, The 8, 9, 11, 57, 69, 115n13, 139–40