The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor 0826352499, 9780826352491

Citation preview

6.125 × 9.25  SPINE: 1.0313  FLAPS: 3.5

of one of the most important Native authors of our time.” —Hartwig Isernhagen, author of

“A much needed addition to the corpus of scholarship on a major American writer.” —Alan R. Velie, author of Native American Perspectives on Literature and History

Jacket Art: Mask Holding (detail), 2011, by Rick Bartow (pastel, graphite, spray paint on paper) Artwork courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com 800-249-7737

Jacket design:



of

gerald vizenor The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America’s most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of related Vizenor texts. Contributors discuss Vizenor’s philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor’s poetry and his prose writings.

gerald vizenor

Conversations on Native American Writing

of

Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong:

The poetry and poetics

The poetry and poetics

“A welcome addition to our knowledge and appreciation



Deborah L. Madsen is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Among her earlier books is Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (University of New Mexico Press).

Madsen

American Indians • Literature



Cheryl Carrington

ISBN 978-0-8263-5249-1

ËxHSKIMGy352491zv*:+:!:+:! Madsen_Jacket_10.29.12.indd 1

Edited by

Deborah L. Madsen

Throughout his poetic career Vizenor has returned to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. In each of the genres in which he works, Vizenor’s poetic language works to subvert fixed inherited meanings and the world views supported by, and lent reality by, these linguistic epistemologies. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor’s novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition but can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return.

11/2/12 4:41 PM

The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor

the poetry and poetics of

Gerald Vizenor

Edited by

Deborah L. Madsen

University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

© 2012 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12   1 2 3 4 5 6 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data The poetry and poetics of Gerald Vizenor / edited by Deborah L. Madsen. p. cm. Summary: “The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America’s most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of Vizenor’s related works”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8263-5249-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5251-4 (electronic) 1. Vizenor, Gerald Robert, 1934—Criticism and interpretation. I. Madsen, Deborah L. PS3572.I9Z83 2012 813’.54—dc23 2012034398

book design Text designed and composed by Catherine Leonardo Composed in 10.25/13.5 Minion Pro Regular Display type is Berling Lt Std

contents

Acknowledgments | vii

introduc tion The Tribal Trajectory of Vizenor’s Poetic Career | ix

Deborah L. Madsen

chap ter one The Language of Borders, the Borders of Language in Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry | 1

Kimberly M. Blaeser

chap ter t wo “It may be revolutionary in character”: The Progress, a New Tribal Hermeneutics, and the Literary Re-expression of the Anishinaabe Oral Tradition in Summer in the Spring | 23

Adam Spry

chap ter three Flying Gerald Vizenor Home in Words and Myths: Or, How to Translate His Poetry into Catalan | 43

Carme Manuel

chap ter four Almost California: Returning to Elemental Vizenor | 63

Susan Bernardin

chap ter five Vizenor’s Life Studies: Revisioning Survivance in Almost Ashore | 80

Linda Lizut Helstern

chap ter six Gaps, Immediacy, and the Deconstruction of Epistemological Categories: The Impact of Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry on His Prose | 98

Katja Sarkowsky v

contents

vi

chap ter seven Enriching Prose with Haiku Poetics | 113

Christina Hein

chap ter eight Reinventing the Nature of Language: The Poetics of Gerald Vizenor’s Prose | 135

David L. Moore

chap ter nine “Compassion is learned”: Of Squirrels and Men in Vizenor’s Poetry and Prose | 164

Michael Snyder

chap ter ten Vizenor’s Elegies on a Red Squirrel | 184

Arnold Krupat

chap ter eleven There’s a Hole in the Day: The Third Infantry and Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point | 196

Jace Weaver

chap ter t welve Being Embedded: Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point | 205

Chris LaLonde

chap ter thirteen The Question of Nationalism: Sovereign Aesthetics in Bear Island | 223

Lisa Tatonetti Contributors | 242 Index | 247

acknowledgments

I

t is a great pleasure to acknowledge the encouragement, support, and friendship of Gerald Vizenor, and to thank him for his invisible yet palpable contribution to this volume. Luther Wilson, former director of the University of New Mexico Press, lent his initial support to this project; acquisitions editor Elizabeth Ann Albright has been unfailingly helpful and motivating as the book slowly came into being. I am grateful to the University of Minnesota Press for their permission to reprint Jace Weaver’s foreword to Gerald Vizenor, Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (2006). Finally, I acknowledge the patience, goodwill, and hard work of the colleagues who have contributed to this book and who made the work of editing both an honor and a pleasure.

vii

introduction

The Tribal Trajectory of Vizenor’s Poetic Career Deborah L. Madsen

T

he trajectory of Vizenor’s poetic career resists a linear teleology in favor of a tribal circling, a return to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. In each of the genres in which he works, Vizenor’s poetic language works to subvert fixed inherited meanings and the worldviews supported by, and lent reality by, these linguistic epistemologies. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor’s novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition, but it can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return. Contributors discuss Vizenor’s philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and also the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor’s poetry and his prose writings. The book brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of related Vizenor texts. In this introduction, I outline some of the patterns of return that characterize Vizenor’s career as an Anishinaabe poet and storier, and that are developed in the essays that follow. Vizenor published his first volumes of haiku poems after his military service in Japan and the completion of his degree in Asian Studies. His first volume was Two Wings the Butterfly (1962); followed by Raising the Moon Vines (1964, 1968); Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku, with Jerome Downes (1966); Empty Swings (1967); and Seventeen Chirps (1964, 1968). Vizenor has continued to return to this poetic genre, as evidenced by the publication of Matsushima: Pine Islands (1984), Water Striders (1989), and Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes (1999). Vizenor’s retellings of Frances Densmore’s translation of traditional tribal dream songs in volumes such as Anishinabe Nagamon: Songs of the People and the four editions of Summer in the Spring: ix

x

introduction

Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories offer an important poetic source for the hybrid haiku/dream-song form that Vizenor develops. The formal fusing of haiku with dream song produces the symbolic “dreamscape” to which Vizenor refers as the tribal consciousness into which good poetry leads the reader. A volume of longer haiku-inspired poems, Almost Ashore, appeared in 2006, and the epic narrative poem Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point was published in the same year. Vizenor’s poetic career is characterized by reimaginings, revisions, and returns—to earlier texts, to the haiku form, to events, images, people, and places. Some of Vizenor’s individual poems have been republished in a way that punctuates his career; Adam Spry discusses the various revisions and republications of an entire poetry volume: the four versions of Summer in the Spring that Vizenor published between 1965 and 1993. Spry notes Vizenor's return in these different versions to particular issues such as the trickster; the relationship between orality and writing, and between haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs; and the importance of literature as a strategy of Native survivance. In Spry’s reading, all four versions participate in the same project: Vizenor’s recovery from the historical archive, represented here by Frances Densmore’s transcription of Anishinaabe songs, published as Chippewa Music I and II, and Theodore Beaulieu’s publication in the Progress, the White Earth Reservation newspaper, of his retellings of Anishinaabe stories. This recovery project, as Spry presents it, is part of Vizenor’s effort to bring Anishinaabe oral culture into English-language print. Both the English language and print culture were, as Spry notes, politically freighted and therefore compromised modes of expression for tribal people. Vizenor has explained his discovery of haiku and its proximity to Anishinaabe dream songs as a key to his poetics of survivance. Haiku is the poetic form to which Vizenor returns throughout his writing. Linda Lizut Helstern discusses the importance of Vizenor’s sustained use of haiku to his creation of “survivance stories” through the individual portrait poems of Almost Ashore. The ephemerality that is at the heart of haiku is identified by Helstern as central also to Vizenor’s concept of survivance in the “tragic wisdom” and awareness of loss that underpins the assertion of “active presence” in survivance. The images inspired by the natural world that are characteristic of haiku also appear in these poems that concern Paul Celan, John Berryman, and a Native woman addressed only as “Pearl.” These poetic portraits each concern a suicide but in these latest retellings of the poems, victimry is again muted and Vizenor emphasizes ontological transformation, such as Pearl’s

introduction

xi

“avian transformation” as death takes her into a different reality. The bridging of realities through a poetics inspired by the conjunction of haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs is discussed by Katja Sarkowsky. The openness of haiku, which tends to refuse active verbs in favor of imagistic juxtapositions that transfer the burden of creating meaning to the reader, is complemented by a thematic focus on the natural seasons (related to what Vizenor calls “natural reason”) and the Native presence that is implied by natural environments and the logic of seasons. Drawing on Kimberly Blaeser’s foundational work on Vizenor, Sarkowsky shows how haiku influences his prose in novels such as Dead Voices and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. These influences range from the structure of individual sentences to the quality of the imagery, the absence of narrative commentary on the action, and the natural scenes in which the narratives are set. This combination creates moments in which experience and words describing experience become identical. These are moments of ontological transformation, such as those noted by Blaeser in her essay in this volume. The influence of haiku in Bear Island, Blaeser argues, works to promote not only the visual experience that Vizenor describes as the inspiration and effect of haiku but also to promote visionary experience. Linda Lizut Helstern, in one of the several essays in this collection that addresses Vizenor’s constant return to specific life events, considers the violent death of Vizenor’s father, which is engaged in the poem “Family Photograph.” The poem, included in Almost Ashore, is the latest iteration in a sequence of four versions of the poem, published in 1974, 1975, 1990, and 2006. This latest poem, as Helstern notes, is prefaced in the volume by two poems that contextualize the poet’s loss in terms of the persistence of natural life, symbolized by the rhythm of the ocean, and the transformative power of nonhuman life, symbolized by the ritualized celebration of the sandhill crane, the totem of Vizenor’s clan. Thus, Helstern argues, in this revisioning of survivance, Vizenor extends Native survivance to embrace a fundamental planetary refusal of and resistance against dominance. Helstern shows, through a close analysis of the four versions of the poem, how Vizenor’s strategies of representation have developed in the manner of oral storying. The same degree of attention is then directed toward the poems “Guthrie Theater” (versions of which were published in 1975, 1978, 1983, and 2006) and “Raising the Flag” (1975, 1978, 2006). Helstern notes that in each revision of these poems Vizenor removes associations with victimry and so emphasizes the warrior resistance and survivance attitudes of this Anishinaabe man, in “Guthrie Theater,” and woman, in “Raising the Flag.” Helstern notices that in this poem the woman

xii

introduction

recalls the historic military victory of her Anishinaabe people over the U.S. cavalry: a Native victory that Vizenor makes the subject of his epic poem Bear Island, which was published in the same year as Almost Ashore. The murder of Clement Vizenor is referenced in a series of texts that Katja Sarkowsky discusses in terms of the shared trope of the Crane Clan, membership to which Vizenor inherited through his father: a haiku in Empty Swings, the dedication of Summer in the Spring (1984), the passage in Interior Landscapes concerning his father, and the conclusion of Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 are repetitions that cross literary genres, transcend individual texts, and by remaining in the mind of an attentive reader, become part of the reader’s memory. Each successive text calls on this readerly memory to use what is already known and to invest it, as something known, with a reality that is independent of individual texts. Clement Vizenor, Keeshkemun, the Anishinaabe Crane Clan—all gain reality in the lived experience of the reader through Vizenor’s strategy of revisioning and retelling. The killing of a red squirrel is another life event to which Vizenor returns in a succession of texts. Susan Bernardin refers to this repetition, but the three essays by David Moore, Arnold Krupat, and Michael Snyder engage in detailed responses to “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs,” “Crows Written on the Poplars,” Interior Landscapes, and Dead Voices. Moore includes in his account of Vizenor’s rhetorical technique of “mythic verism” an analysis of “Crows Written on the Poplars” that links the loss of his father with the killing of a squirrel. Life and death, presence and absence, loss and recovery—these are the substantive concepts on which Moore focuses. In his reading of this autobiographical essay, Moore traces the development of a dialogic understanding of the relationship between myth and history. Personal identity is gradually redefined from a static to a dynamic perception of the significance of Vizenor's “crossblood” status, of his location between the reservation and the city, tribal and colonial environments, and of his discursive position that empowers him to see clearly the contingent relationship between linguistic signifiers and signifieds. In his shifting relations with the squirrel he has shot, the autobiographical narrator moves from a false romantic vision of his location in the world to a loss of the illusion of unmediated experience and finally to a compassionate understanding of the importance of imaginative identification, of imaginative epistemologies, projected through the contingent medium of language. Michael Snyder’s reading of Vizenor’s continuing return to the story of the red squirrel focuses on Vizenor’s changing attitude toward, and

introduction

xiii

compassion for, animals. Through haikus published in Two Wings the Butterfly, Raising the Moon Vines, Seventeen Chirps, Empty Swings, Matsushima, “Envoy to Haiku,” and Almost Ashore, as well as “Crows Written on the Poplars,” in addition to the chapter “Death Song to a Red Rodent” in Interior Landscapes that he reads as a prose poem, and the chapter “Squirrels” in Dead Voices, Vizenor traces the trope of the dying squirrel as an occasion for Vizenor’s critique of one of the controlling binaries of Western civilization: nature versus culture. The squirrel, as Snyder interprets it, signifies a liminal condition that subverts easy conventional distinctions between the human and the animal, the rural and the urban, the earth and the sky. This subversion is located in an Anishinaabe epistemology that reveals knowledge based on this binary to be the product of Western culture, capitalism, and Christianity. For Snyder, the squirrel offers a textual focalization that enacts an indigenous perspective on the interconnectedness of all created beings, noting that the autobiographical figure of the hunter is closely identified with the squirrel through shared stories and unspoken communication. Indeed, this episode told in “Crows Written on the Poplars” and “Death Song to a Red Rodent” functions as a “birth of the author” story when the hunter declares that he will never hunt an animal again but will instead engage in linguistic battle, using “wordarrows” as his ammunition in the “word wars”: wars fought against the Western epistemological framework that separates humans from other animals and relegates those animals to the category of the “less valuable,” just as settler-citizens are separated from less-than-fully-human “Indians.” It is against the worldview that enables the killing of the squirrel that the hunter-narrator determines to struggle. Snyder reads the rejection of the squirrel-hunt as part of Vizenor’s rejection of the synecdochal status that is risked by all writers categorized as “Native authors.” Vizenor refuses to be a synecdoche of the White Earth Anishinaabeg, a token representative of this Native community. By rejecting the Anishinaabe tradition of squirrel hunting, Snyder argues, Vizenor asserts his individual intellectual sovereignty. However, Arnold Krupat’s reading of the squirrel figure in Vizenor’s three autobiographical texts and the novel Dead Voices produces a rather different interpretation of the tribal dimension of this particular motif. Krupat’s interest is in the lyrical and elegiac quality of these writings as expressions of mourning and loss that are not simply personal and individualistic but also speak to the grief of whole communities. Elegy in this context works not only as an expression of loss but also as the basis for strategies of continuance and regeneration: for the individual and for the People. It is the developing

xiv

introduction

relationship between the individual and community that Krupat traces in Vizenor’s return to the dying red squirrel, moving from the experience on which Snyder focuses, an experience that defines the hunter-narrator’s subjective position in the world and his vocation as a writer, to a narrative description that emphasizes a future in which his identity and vocation will serve the Native interests of the community by sustaining the oral tradition of storying and the survivance strategies that depend on tribal cultural traditions, ways of knowing, and forms of being. From repeated volumes of poetry to repeated poems, poetic forms, and life events, the repetition of tropes has become Vizenor’s signature phraseology. Kimberly Blaeser, for example, remarks that Vizenor’s use of particular words and images—in the context of Bear Island, phrases such as “tricky shamans,” “bearwalkers,” and “pillagers of liberty”—gains significance through the echoes of his previous usages, accumulating meaning through the reader’s remembered associations. Importantly, she observes, these echoes throughout Vizenor’s stories provide the basis for an assertion of survival. However, the association of the Pillager Clan with The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, through the phrase “pillagers of liberty,” signifies more than clan survival and endurance; the historical association between Vizenor’s novel and his signature phrase endows the Pillagers with the status of “heirs” and thus with survivance. Vizenor’s phraseology and his distinctive use of grammar and syntax are mentioned in all the essays in this volume as constituting a poetic challenge to the power of denotation in favor of indeterminate suggestiveness and “open” texts. Spry remarks on the revision of punctuation and vocabulary that characterizes Vizenor’s reimaginings of Densmore’s transcription of traditional Anishinaabe songs in Chippewa Music, which similarly introduces the potential for multiple readings by rendering ambiguous the meanings that can be attributed to individual words, phrases, and poetic lines. This ambiguity poses a particular challenge for translators of Vizenor’s work, evidenced by the essay written by the Catalan translator of Almost Ashore, Carme Manuel. Manuel explains that Vizenor’s use of a vocabulary rich in multiple meanings, combined with his preference for enjambment and minimal punctuation, produces a text that would be unintelligible if translated literally into another language. The power of these poetic methods, however, is to empower the reader of his poetry to take an active role in the production of meaning. The extensive use of allusion and the subversion of formal grammatical structures promote resistance to epistemological limitations and open the poems to meanings

introduction

xv

grounded in the presence of Anishinaabe worldviews. Grammar is a strategy of separation, division, and exclusion that Vizenor resists on the formal level of syntax, (non)punctuation, and lexicon. The ambiguity created by Vizenor’s refusal of capitalization and punctuation in favor of enjambment and rhythm makes possible a fusing of word, self, and world. But the influence of haiku on the poems in Almost Ashore is such that any epiphanic intersubjective fusing is always transient and only of the moment. Susan Bernardin explores this dynamic quality of Vizenor’s haikuinspired language in relation to his evocation of presence and absence in time and space. What she calls the “symbiosis” of motion and location is linked to concepts of being and becoming both in the substantive dimension of the poems in Almost Ashore and in the positioning of the reader. Even the title of the volume highlights process and movement rather than arrival and stasis, as Linda Lizut Helstern remarks. The title of the book, “almost” ashore, defers in the sense of Derrida’s différance, locating itself in the transitional moment that brings together presence and absence. David Moore also references Derrida’s theory of différance to initiate an analysis of Vizenor’s reworking of the dominant English language to create linguistic accesses to Native epistemologies. Through the use of neologisms and his innovations in syntax and vocabulary but primarily by applying semantic pressure (what Vizenor terms “socioacupuncture”) to the contingent relation between signifier and signified (described by Saussure and developed by Derrida), Vizenor deconstructs meanings that serve the interests of the settler nation and creates occasions to signify Native presence. As Moore points out, Derrida’s theory of the “supplement,” which describes the uncontrollable linguistic excess produced by every act of signification, serves Vizenor’s tribal purpose of exposing the enduring Native presence that is erased but not annulled by colonialist discourses. Moore takes this seemingly paradoxical situation—where presence and absence, inside and outside, conjunction and separation coexist—further to indicate the ways in which Vizenor engages the “excessive” Native presence in narratives of history, especially the U.S. story of Manifest Destiny. Indeed, Moore argues that this semantic and historical excess demonstrates a complete separation between the myth of Manifest Destiny—predicated as it is on the savagism versus civilization paradigm—and an autonomous narrative of indigenous America that, for Moore, is crystallized in the trope of the “postindian.” Moore approaches these issues through his analysis of the classical rhetorical categories of “ethos,” referring to the writer/speaker;

xvi

introduction

“grammar,” signifying the formal quality of the text; “logos,” signifying the substantive dimension of textual content; and “pathos,” referring to the reader/listener, although Moore nuances these categories by noting that one may analyze a “grammar” of ethos or pathos as well as logos and much of his essay engages with the concepts “festive time tricks,” “mythic verism,” and tribal satire as grammatical functions of Vizenor’s writers/speakers, textual content, and readers/listeners. Vizenor’s unique way of working with the technicalities of poetic language in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary presents a particular challenge in the context of translation. This issue is addressed by a number of essays, from the varying perspectives of cultural translation, the translation process from oral to written forms of expression, and the foreign-language translation of Vizenor’s work. As Adam Spry points out, the translation of Anishinaabe songs and stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a complex issue, on the one hand providing the opportunity to preserve elements of traditional culture, while on the other hand risking the fundamental transformation of these cultural elements on which Anishinaabe identity is based. Vizenor’s response to this enduring problem is to acknowledge that while the oral tradition cannot be translated, oral stories can be reimagined, as he does in Anishinabe Adisokan (1970) and Anishinabe Nagamon (1970), and the three editions of Summer in the Spring (1965, 1981, and 1993). Spry argues that, in contrast to Densmore’s literal ethnographic transcriptions, Beaulieu’s retelling of oral stories in the Progress represented a reimagining of these narratives that captures their performativity and vitality. Thus, Beaulieu’s example has served as a model for Vizenor’s strategy in relation to the use of tribal materials and his ongoing efforts to modify written English so the language can accommodate the oral tradition. Spry shows how Vizenor’s reimagination of Densmore’s transcriptions draws on Beaulieu’s model by rewriting the dream songs, not to bring them more into line with Anglo-American poetic genres, but to embrace the indeterminacy and openness that he discovered in the haiku form. Kimberly Blaeser discusses translation in the context of cultural translation, specifically Vizenor’s juxtaposition of incompatible settler-colonial and Native epistemologies in Bear Island. This is the issue with which Carme Manuel begins her essay: the comparability of her situation as a native speaker of Catalan, the language outlawed under Francisco Franco’s regime, and that of Anishinaabe-speakers in the dominant English-language culture of the United States. Manuel observes that the criminalizing of Catalan in

introduction

xvii

public spaces was a political strategy designed to repress Catalan national identity. Thus, for her, the translation of literary texts into Catalan is an act of ongoing liberation and cultural empowerment. She positions herself, as a translator, as a mediator who does not write but rewrites texts—much as Adam Spry’s essay positions Vizenor in relation to traditional Anishinaabe texts. Thus, in translating Almost Ashore, Manuel aimed not at a literal translation of the poems but a re-expression of the spirit of these texts. However, among the most fascinating elements of her essay are the excerpts from her correspondence with Vizenor as he explained the significance of particular images and tropes. For a writer of English-language texts who is inspired by the Anishinaabe oral tradition, the relationship between script and speech is proximate to translation. Vizenor’s work is characterized by his use of mythic tribal elements of language to evoke the reality of a Native ontology. Kimberly Blaeser points out that the oral contrasts with the linear temporality, “static, individualized, author-focused” qualities of writing by foregrounding the communal, cyclical, dialogic, mythic, and contextual elements of dynamic engagement between storier and listener. In Bear Island, Vizenor creates a form of written English that incorporates the cyclical and mythic into the historical, and the tribal into the language of colonialism. The use of Anishinaabemowin as another linguistic code within his primary English lexicon continually reminds the reader of Native presence and, she notes, at the same time undermines the binary division between insiders and outsiders. On the one hand, this use of Anishinaabe words, phrases, and names emphasizes all that the English language cannot represent of Native experience and, on the other hand, Vizenor’s inclusion of translations in close proximity to his use of these tribal words allows nonnative speakers to access the sense of tribal presence that the words conjure. But in his essay, Adam Spry notes that the inclusion of the Anishinaabe stories and songs from Anishinabe Nagamon and Anishinabe Adikosan in the single volume Summer in the Spring has the effect of locating Vizenor’s reimagining of Densmore’s transcription of tribal dream songs very clearly in an Anishinaabe cultural context, in particular through the tropes that are carried over from Theodore Beaulieu’s prose retellings into the dream songs: the power of the Midéwiwin, the tribal significance of dreams, and Anishinaabe understandings of the permeable relationship between humans and animals. Indeed, Spry sees Beaulieu’s stories as interpretive guides to the enduring tribal quality of the dream songs and, in this recovery of Anishinaabe terms—a recovery that has

xviii

introduction

been continued by his descendant or literary “heir,” Gerald Vizenor—there is a reconnection between Native people and their heritage that serves the interests of survivance. The work of recovery is, for Vizenor, not simply a tribal issue but also a clan issue. His work is characterized by the use of totemic images that invoke clan significances as a means to recover tribal memory. Images like the bear as a clan animal, for example, is symbolic of the mythic and tribal, as is Vizenor’s own crane totem. The evocation of tropes derived from Anishinaabe culture is part of Vizenor’s recovery of historical memory and the preservation of tribal cultural heritage. However, Susan Bernardin’s essay reminds us that all of indigenous North America provides a stance from which revisionary U.S. historical narratives can and must be critiqued. David Moore works from this critical perspective as he discusses Vizenor’s reworkings of history. Moore argues that Vizenor’s rhetorical technique of “mythic verism” brings together tribal myth and verisimilitude in which the latter signifies the ideological discourses from which dominant narratives of history and other “terminal creeds” are constructed, and which are the frequent targets of Vizenor’s trickster satire. Tribal myth, in contrast, arises from the oral tradition and is fundamentally metaphorical; mythic verism is the signifying excess of acts of verisimilitude. It is emphatically not “magical realism” because of its origins in the Anishinaabe oral tradition. Mythic verism is a linguistic access to the tribal ontology silenced and obscured by dominant practices of verisimilitude. Many essays in this volume engage with the issue of literary genre and Vizenor’s practice of subverting the conventional separations among fixed generic forms. In her essay, Kimberly Blaeser references Dean Rader’s term “epic lyric” to describe the subversion of poetic genres at work in Bear Island: the poem is subjective, historical, and focused on emotion, yet it preserves cultural traditions; it is individualistic and nationalistic at the same time. Blaeser sees the tensions arising from this challenge to generic integrity as a strategy for creating a bicultural text that is designed to encourage transformation in the reader. Lisa Tatonetti also reads Bear Island as a Native epic that is invested, formally and substantively, in issues of nationalism: through the concern with history and particularly the historical origins of a nation, as well as the cultural bonds that unite that nation such as religion or language. The problem with which Vizenor so brilliantly engages in this epic poem is the encounter of two fundamentally opposed national narratives: the U.S. settler myth of Manifest Destiny and the Anishinaabe assertion of

introduction

xix

tribal power, authority, and autonomy. These opposed national stories are grounded in opposed claims to the land and the identities that emerge from and are grounded in that land. The territorial geographies of Vizenor’s career, primarily Minnesota and California, are addressed by Susan Bernardin, who focuses her essay on indigenous presence in California. She explores the interplay of Vizenor’s critique of European imperial claims to possession and the presence of Native communities and cultures in California through his invocation of San Gregorio in the poem “Almost Ashore” and his sustained interest in the figure of Ishi. The “word traces” of Minnesota’s natural environment and the Californian coast signify, in Bernardin’s reading, the shared project of survivance across Native nations. In this context, Ishi becomes an important trope that will not allow us to forget the enduring Native presence that inheres in these places and contests settler-colonial narratives of origin. Indeed, Kimberly Blaeser notes the indigenous quality of the environment that sustains Hole in the Day and his Anishinaabe descendants in Bear Island. Ishi’s museum home at the University of California fixes him as an “Indian” in time and space; in contrast, Vizenor’s images of seasonal change evoke the presence of an alternative kind of space and time. Bernardin highlights the interconnection between place and memory that is shared by the poems in Almost Ashore, poems that construct an imaginative cartography of survivance and sovereignty in Native America. Chris LaLonde, in his discussion of Bear Island as one of Vizenor’s “Minnesota” texts, notes the rootedness of the story, which takes place on treaty land and specifically the territory of the Leech Lake Reservation. LaLonde’s essay gestures to a double embeddedness: the intricate interweaving of event and historical moment, and the intrinsic relationship between subjectivity and place-time. In both cases, place is identical with a Native ontology or understanding of reality together with a tribal epistemology. Bear Island is an epic poem firmly located in Native space but also a space under U.S. colonialist assault. As Jace Weaver explains in his detailed account of the historical contexts of the poem, the Third Infantry, the regiment sent to fight the Pillagers on Sugar Point, had served in the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War. This detail underlines the political environment of U.S. imperialist expansion in which the “last of the Indian Wars” took place. Both Weaver and Lisa Tatonetti cite contemporary newspaper reportage of the conflict, reportage that forms another of LaLonde’s modes of embeddedness: the presence of journalists

xx

introduction

among the U.S. military contingent. Native stories are embedded in tribal lands, but in Bear Island, the popular media stories that reported the war were written by journalists who were embedded in the U.S. military. Drawing on Vizenor’s writings (fictional as well as factual) about his own experience as a journalist with the Minneapolis Tribune, LaLonde makes the parallel with the U.S. Department of Defense’s contemporary practice of embedding the journalists with the troops serving in the second Gulf War; this parallel between the Indian Wars and the War Against Terror also concludes Weaver’s essay. How these stories are told enacts a particular epistemology that constructs the reality, or ontology, of the narrative that is told; Vizenor exposes to view the hermeneutic operations at work in settler-colonial and neoimperialist stories, while at the same time, offering a Native narrative that instantiates a tribal hermeneutic. Thus, Adam Spry analyzes the ways in which Vizenor reworks Frances Densmore’s transcription of Anishinaabe songs and Theodore Beaulieu’s retellings of Anishinaabe stories in order to transform the ethnographical nature of Densmore’s work into imaginative works akin to Beaulieu’s retellings of oral stories. Spry refers to Beaulieu’s strategy as “a new tribal hermeneutics” that empowers Anishinaabe survivance through the tribal modes of knowing that are promoted by Vizenor’s reimaginings of Anishinaabe cultural materials. Like his descendant, Spry argues, Theodore Beaulieu was intensely aware that the conflict between the Anishinaabe nation and the U.S. settler-nation would be a struggle for control of representation. This is what Vizenor later called the “word wars.” The U.S. claim to power is based on a claim to cultural superiority that can only be effectively countered by an effort on the part of Native nations to represent the equal value of their own cultural and political authority, on which rests claims to treaty rights, territorial sovereignty, and self-governance. Consequently, Beaulieu published stories that would sustain Anishinaabe cultural pride and political authority. His selection of stories that foreground the tribal trickster, Naanabozho, was very deliberate and Spry shows how the retellings adapt traditional oral forms to English literary forms of characterization, plot, and structure. The stories then are addressed to two readerships, Anishinaabe and Anglo-American, as a consequence of Beaulieu’s “new tribal hermeneutics.” Reading the Progress, Vizenor not only gained an understanding of the importance of the knowledge made available by literary works, Spry argues—he also gained new insights from reading Beaulieu’s caustic editorials concerning

introduction

xxi

the settler-colonial fantasy of the “Indian,” as well as the language play Beaulieu employed in these editorial pieces, and from reading details of the case regarding the efforts of the federal Indian agent at White Earth to close down the Progress because of its subversive influence on the reservation community, a case he would return to repeatedly in his writing. Katja Sarkowsky, in the first of several essays that address the stylistic and thematic continuities of Vizenor’s poetry and prose, focuses on the ways in which Vizenor’s use of poetic language is designed to disorient the reader by subverting conventional constructions of knowledge. Sarkowsky proposes that strategies developed through the writing of haiku and dream-song poetry are carried over into Vizenor’s prose writing. These strategies are twofold: the construction of epistemological gaps that result from the deconstruction of fixed knowledge categories on the one hand and, on the other, a poetics of immediacy that is grounded in demands made of the reader who must actively bridge the semantic gaps opened by the text. This double strategy Sarkowsky names Vizenor’s “haiku hermeneutics.” Complementing this hermeneutic strategy is the high degree of intertextuality that characterizes Vizenor’s poetry and prose. The continual process of revisioning and restorying sustains the open quality of each text, while creating an autonomous ontological status for the meanings that arise from these texts. Like Sarkowsky, Christina Hein attends to the role of the reader that is assumed and created by these texts as an active participant and creator of meaning; as Hein remarks, semantic closure must be found in the reader’s mind because it cannot be found in Vizenor’s texts. In her essay, Hein focuses more specifically on Vizenor’s description of haiku poetics and Anishinaabe dream songs in the introduction to Matsushima: Pine Islands (1984), influences of which she traces through the rhetorical features of his nonfiction, his theoretical essays, and his novels, specifically Griever: An American Monkey King in China and Hiroshima Bugi. Any meaning that might be available in the authorial mind is not accessible through Vizenor’s language, which is styled like haiku to provide an experience rather than an insight into the author’s individual personality. What the influence of Anishinaabe dream songs brings to this haiku-inspired poetics is the promise of experience as an imagined dreamscape, grounded in, but transforming, the natural world. David Moore also uses the term “haiku hermeneutics” to describe the unique quality of Vizenor’s poetic language in both his poetry and his prose. In his discussions of The Heirs of Columbus, The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, and “Crows Written on the Poplars,” Moore

xxii

introduction

focuses on Vizenor’s paradoxical performance of ontological presence through epistemological absence. Closely related to the hermeneutic dynamic of Vizenor’s writing is his use of what several contributors refer to as his “trickster aesthetic,” performed through disruptive, shape-shifting characters that figure transformations of varying kinds. It is the trickster nature of Vizenor’s language that Kimberly Blaeser identifies as dissolving the barriers between the human and natural. This is achieved through poetic language that produces an understanding of reality as visual illusion in Bear Island. Katja Sarkowsky discusses these textual moments of transcendence in terms of “trickster hermeneutics,” the Vizenorian “language game” that teases the referential limits of language. Using his term “festive time tricks” to describe one of the operations of Vizenor’s trickster discourse, David Moore shows how in his novels and nonfiction prose Vizenor plays with the possibilities of grammar, tense, and syntax. Moore offers an account of how in The Heirs of Columbus Vizenor has reappropriated the figure of Columbus using one of the most outrageous time tricks of all: the claim that Columbus is, in fact, a descendent of Mayan explorers who traveled to Europe. Vizenor reverses the dominant reading of historical time and transforms Columbus’s “discovery” into a homecoming, much as one of the trickster characters in Vizenor’s drama Ishi and the Wood Ducks playfully but subversively asks of the Bering Strait theory of Native American migration: in which direction did they migrate? The tribal quality of Vizenor’s work, in all literary genres, is emphasized by all the essays in this volume. It is Lisa Tatonetti’s essay that most directly confronts the relationships between, on the one hand, contemporary debates concerning Native cosmopolitanism and literary tribal nationalism and, on the other hand, Vizenor’s poetics as they are played out in her reading of Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. She uses the term “aesthetics of sovereignty” to describe Vizenor’s literary strategy in the poem and, particularly, in his complex representation of issues of land and community identities. Tatonetti argues that Vizenor is a “nationalist” writer and certainly the essays in this volume demonstrate Vizenor’s profound commitment to the Native community of White Earth and to the cultural traditions of the Anishinaabeg. However, in his theoretical writings Vizenor has consistently rejected the concept of Indian nationalism because this concept risks the reinstantiation of the simulated “Indian” as a legitimate category of literary and cultural analysis. Contributors here show that Vizenor is an Anishinaabe tribal poet, theorist, and, above all, storier whose work serves the interests of the Anishinaabeg. He

introduction

xxiii

practices the survivance that he preaches in the French legal sense of the term: survivance signifies the qualification to inherit an estate; Vizenor is heir to the vital tribal inheritance of his White Earth community, but more specifically he is heir to the Crane Clan, which he inherited from his father. Vizenor is not an “American Indian literary nationalist” in the sense described by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack; he is a White Earth Anishinaabe nationalist, evidenced by his lifelong efforts on behalf of Anishinaabeg, from his work as an advocate on Franklin Street in Minneapolis in the 1960s to his work on the constitution of the White Earth Nation fifty years later. The essays in this volume address the tribal qualities that are central to Vizenor’s writing in all genres, but throughout the book contributors are careful to attend to the brilliantly crafted poetic form of Vizenor’s work in verse and in prose. The essays engage with various dimensions of Vizenor’s literary achievement, focusing on specific poems or volumes of poetry, the influence of his poetics on his prose writings, particular formal or contextual subjects, and issues of literary and cultural aesthetics. Gerald Vizenor’s blending of Western literary and Native oral traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The critical essays gathered in this volume explore Vizenor’s work from these multiple perspectives, offering literary, aesthetic, and cultural contexts; formal poetic analyses; and close readings of individual texts, while remaining ever sensitive to the Anishinaabe-inspired poetics of Vizenor’s literary career.

chapter one

The L anguage of Borders, the Borders of L anguage in Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry Kimberly M. Blaeser A border is a vague and undertermined place created by the residue of an unnatural boundary. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then a book about performance art is surely like a sonata about sculpture. —Shawn Carkonen, review of The New World Border by Guillermo Gomez-Pena

T

he language throughout Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s critical and creative work—singularly evocative and evasive as it is, repeatedly calls up images of borders and border crossings, of the possibility of transformation. Literal boundary lines such as international borders across tribal homelands or demarcations between reservations and the rest of the United States; racial barriers encountered by Native people, including Vizenor’s Anishinaabeg ancestors; and the invented breech between reality and imaginative experience are among the several separations or confinements he investigates in his writing. And whether through mixedblood or trickster embodiments or literary or linguistic innovation, Vizenor writes to disrupt the idea of difference that fortifies frontiers, to dissolve false frames of separation, and to liberate both meaning and the marginalized inhabitants of all “other” edges of these Americas. Since so often discourse determines destiny in the Vizenor story canon, his literary works investigate the boundaries of language as readily as they indict political, legalistic, legislative, and other more recognized avenues used to limit freedom. Often though, Vizenor’s ultimate attempt is not merely to unmask totalitarian language but to break out of the confines of words entirely: to 1

2

kimberly m. blaeser

transcend verbal expression and move into the realm of spirit or experience or to put aside language in favor of a kind of resistance or activism. In this way, his own writing seems to partake of “transmotion,” a quality he recognizes as a source of survivance in tribal activists, as a “sui generis sovereignty” (Fugitive Poses, 15), and as a signifier of the sacred in works like those done by Cheyenne ledger artists (178–79). Specifically, Vizenor claims “performative transmotion is an ethical presence of nature, native stories, and natural reason,” and “Native transmotion is an original natural union in the stories of emergence and migration that relate humans to an environment and to the spiritual and political significance of animals and other creations” (181–82). Through transmotion, a story can “reach,” Vizenor believes, “to other contexts of action, resistance, dissent, and political controversy” (182). In the Vizenor canon, story and theory on story often exist together in his creative work. His narrators and fictional personae, for example, frequently dramatize the power of story. In The Heirs of Columbus, he writes of “story energy” and “stories and humor” that become the “energy that heals” (164); in the novel Dead Voices, we meet “healers” who “touched an inner sound in their stories,” and we learn of “stories that liberated shadows and the mind” (127, 16). This sovereign liberation finds particularly appealing embodiment in the poetry and poetic commentaries of Vizenor. His words themselves often shimmer at the edges of multiple realities. They frequently name or signify a “trace.” They are “agwaatese” (shadows), “wordscapes,” “dreamscapes,” “interior landscapes,” “luminious,” “traces on the wind,” “word cinemas,” and “holotropes.” The writing of Vizenor issues an invitation to an “almost world” where ideas “waiver on the rim,” where vision waits “at the treeline,” and the works themselves are “storied with narrative wisps.” “Words,” Vizenor claims, “are crossbloods, too” (“Almost Browne,” 8). Indeed, both the critical and creative in the Vizenor canon refuse solid borders; genres, too, bend and blend into one another. Tracing his poetic border crossings becomes a journey into and through the whole of his literary milieu. blood and bloodied borders: “half white earth / the other / native immigrant ” 1

As has often been noted, identity looms key in the writing of Native American authors and the same holds true for Vizenor (see Owens, Other Destinies,

the language of borders

3

esp. 3–24). Reading any of his work, particularly early collections such as Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent and Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports, means exploring the complicated terrain of racial identity and the various boundaries constructed around the category of race. The recent poetic collections of this now seventy-something White Earth Anishinaabe continue to reflect or dramatize these early preoccupations. In the long poem Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, for example, readers meet “midewiwin healer” and “elusive warrior,” the historic figure Bug-o-nay-ge-shig or Hole in the Day, who becomes, as Vizenor describes him, “marooned by race” (39, 44). In his descriptions of Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s life experiences, the author makes clear the colonial boundaries inherent to Native identity, describing, for example, the general circumstances of the Leech Lake tribal people in the 1890s, circumstances that included “hungry children . . . late annuities / demeaned / by treaty ties / federal legacies / overrun by factors / and shady agents” and “indian agents” who “protected the grafters / over native rights” (39, 46). He also describes the specific treatment of Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, who was “roughly shackled / hand to hand / by unscrupulous / federal force,” “bound to court / with no evidence / but manifest manners,” “falsely summoned / then abandoned / by the court / and federal agents” and “demeaned by customs” (41, 42, 44). Here Vizenor’s use of the phrase “manifest manners” alludes back to the idea of Manifest Destiny as well as to his own previous coining of the phrase to signal the cultural legacy and contemporary manifestations of the language, theory, and policies of Manifest Destiny (what he also describes in the volume entitled Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Suvivance as “simulations of dominance,” 5). Clearly he recognizes the racial tensions and many layers of colonialism at work in the story of Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Still the theoretical stance Vizenor takes in general refuses race as a true category and always rejects it as destiny. Therefore, in Bear Island, even though the Anishinaabe elder receives racist treatment and the Leech Lake tribal group is literally under fire, Vizenor’s poem moves beyond the physical details of the story to portray Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s mental and personal equilibrium, perhaps even what might be considered a kind of personal triumph, and, in a similar way, he portrays the survivance of the Pillager Clan of Leech Lake. His account of events then rejects the expected tragic representation and outcome, and pursues the “other destinies, other plots” that Louis Owens identifies as the focus of Native writers engaged in

4

kimberly m. blaeser

resisting the confining stereotypical images (literary border existence) of Indian peoples (18; Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa; Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, esp. 82–99). In the poetic account, Hole in the Day embodies a steady (but not violent) resistance throughout. When he returns from his false arrest, having been left without transportation home, he “walked alone / a hundred miles / back to leech lake / and sugar point” filled with “fury,” “visions of resistance,” and “natural reason” (44). If it had not been before, now his stance in regard to government intrusions is clear. We are told he “never trusted / treaty talk / warrants of commerce / federal mercenaries” nor “constitutions / federal dams / documents of credit / court petitions / legal precedent” (45–46). But the respected elder’s return to Sugar Point is also characterized by a beautiful imagistic moment in the natural place of the Anishinaabeg, a moment that stands in stark contrast to the ongoing legal finagling and chaos of the battle to come. Vizenor writes: wet and weary moccasins scored the old pillager chary of the shoreline cracked the thin river verge and bared four stately blueberries brightly frozen in the clear ice (45) Placement here carries great significance. Hole in the Day has returned to a place of balance and to a place that literally and figuratively can sustain him. Later, when the infantry arrives at Sugar Point, Bug-o-nay-ge-shig simply absents himself. “Wary of expatriates / and the wooly stench / of wet uniforms,” he is “away / among the bears / and ravens / in the maples / and white pines” (58). He has learned to shun contact with the uniforms of colonialism. Here again, Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s alternate place and natural companions hold significance. The maple and white pine distinguish the woods of northern Minnesota—the tribal elder has placed himself within a familiar and comfortable natural environment. The bear as a clan animal and the raven as suggestive of trickster, are both important symbols in Vizenor’s

the language of borders

5

writing, and Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s positioning himself “among” the two marks his locus as mythic or tribal. When the fighting has ceased, we are told he “returned at sunrise / with the ravens” to the cabin and garden that had been occupied by the army, he collected the scattered spent shells and “fashioned a memorial / war necklace,” a “remembrance” of “a defeated army” that, Vizenor writes tellingly, has been overcome “by winchesters / and a fierce irony” (86, emphasis added). Bug-o-nay-ge-shig has literally sidestepped the conflict, but still the army has been defeated and he collects a victor’s memento. Here, as throughout, the text suggests that the outcome of the war as Vizenor recounts it ultimately turns not merely on military weapons but on trickery, chance, and natural reason. For example, the opening of the poem claims “anishinaabe warriors . . . outmaneuvered / the third infantry / that October;” and, in various passages, Vizenor introduces the presence of the “crafty trickster / naanabozho,” “tricky shamans” and “natural beats / of chance and liberty,” characterizes the warriors as “pillagers of liberty,” and aligns their presence with that of “bearwalkers / spirits of the night” (19, 13, 15, 14, 62, 55). And we are told the “nervy soldiers” were “routed at last / by pillager bears” (85). Once again, the implications of certain of these phrases intensifies when linked to the past uses of these or similar terms by Vizenor. For example, the “pillagers of liberty” hearken back to Vizenor’s book The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, as well as more broadly to the trickster tradition and to the individual exploits of the tricksters in that novel. Bears and bearwalkers, like tricksters, suggest a powerful presence, a clan affiliation—“blood totems”—and a storied reality (14). The association of the Pillager warriors then with tricksters, bearwalkers, shamans, and so on underscores their survival in story that, for Vizenor, may be the most important survival. “Only stories,” the poem contends, “stand on treaty land” (46).

storying history

Indeed, here and elsewhere storying becomes one of Vizenor’s key rhetorical strategies for exploding the confinement of colonized representations. “The best stories,” he writes, “are survival trickeries on the borders” (Interior Landscapes, 73). Through his liberal use of the fictive or imaginative in rendering the historical—through his storytelling—he challenges the supposed objectivity of classic historiography. In order to construct the

6

kimberly m. blaeser

several layers of the Bear Island story—the documentary of the military clash, the personal accounts, and the mythic links—Vizenor has to combine factual details with imaginative story to move into the realm of what he has called “narrative history.”2 Within his theoretical and critical writing we find many comments by Vizenor on the nature of story, history, and oratory that offer a frame for understanding his method in Bear Island. He claims, for example, “Anishinaabeg did not have written histories; their world views were not linear narratives that started and stopped in manifest binaries. The tribal past lived as an event in visual memories and oratorical gestures; woodland identities turned on dreams and visions” (The People Named the Chippewa, 24). Vizenor alludes here to the vital quality of active story, to the “story as event” that Simon Ortiz describes in “What Indians Do”: It’s like story being told when it’s not only being told. The teller doesn’t just tell the characters, what they did or said, what happens in the story and so on. No, he participates in the story with those who are listening. The listeners in the same way are taking part in the story. The story includes them in. You see, it’s more like an event, the storytelling. The story is not just a story then—it’s occurring, coming into being. (104) Against this kind of older oral telling Vizenor contrasts conventional historiography: “The cultural and political histories of the Anishinaabeg were written in colonial language by those who invented the Indian, renamed the tribes, allotted the land, divided ancestries by geometric degrees of blood, and categorized identities on federal reservations” (19). Vizenor’s attempt in Bear Island is to find a way in the age of written text to challenge the colonial constructions of meaning and liberate tribal story. This liberation of the narrative requires a depiction of the layers of story, an invitation to the various dimensions of experience. Ortiz claims that in the process of storytelling the listener/reader bears “as much responsibility to the poetic effect as the poet,” and in such collaboration, “the compelling poetic power of language is set in motion toward vision and knowledge” (“Always the Stories,” 66). Vizenor, too, strives for this kind of literary reciprocity through imaginative storying. In his own words, “The teller of stories . . . relumes the diverse memories of the visual past into experiences and metaphors of the present” (The People Named the Chippewa, 7).

the language of borders

7

Within the poem, Vizenor does offer “diverse memories” and “metaphors.” Although the narrator’s position is never in doubt, he presents, for example, contrary accounts of the start of the armed conflict, as well as different perspectives on several of the characters of the story including Hole in the Day. The “Bearwalkers” section of the poem, dated October 5, 1889, summarizes various accounts and characterizes each in some way. “The new york times” is said to have “reported hearsay / about the Indian war” and “capital news / imagined scenes / at great distance” (63). We are presented with headlines: “troops battle savages” and “rumored massacre of one hundred men” (63). Vizenor offers Private Wicker’s account of the eruption of gunfire and the Associated Press account given by William Hascal Brill, both of which suggest a shot went off accidentally when a stack of weapons fell (64–66). But to counter these written reports and insinuations, the narrator offers a different version of events. Vizenor writes, “hole in the day / and pillager warriors / told another story” (66–67). The tribal accounts claim “soldiers fired / at native women / unarmed in a canoe” (67). The shifting of perspective, Vizenor’s juxtaposition of contrary accounts and opinions, his collage-like overlapping of ideas—all these moves become his advertisement for the subjective, mobile reality of all story. The bonds of historiography have been breached, and story—vital, inhabiting, and arising from between the seams of printed accounts—is liberated into another imaginative place, a realm of becoming. Through the idea of the transmotion of story and the understanding of storytelling as a tool of survivance, Vizenor also works to reframe the race question. Bug-o-nay-ge-shig of the Bear Island poem, for example, might readily be portrayed as a tragic victim of injustice. Indeed, as scholar William Matsen points out in “The Battle at Sugar Point: A Re-examination,” the newspaper accounts of the time would further romanticize the story and “make him a chief, a tribal leader, and a medicine man, but Bug-ONay-Ge-Shig was, in truth, only a 62-year-old man” (269–70). In his own efforts to challenge the popular and oversimplified representation of “the Native,” to dismantle the static, tragic construction of “Indian,” here and elsewhere Vizenor subtly shifts the cultural grounds of story to include tribal mythic perspectives, most notably that of the Anishinaabe trickster, Naanabozho. If there is any single imaginative figure from tribal story that provides a metaphor for challenging the tragic figure of the mixedblood or the supposed boundaries of racial identity, Vizenor finds it in the mixedblood trickster earthdiver. As he does in Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, Vizenor

8

kimberly m. blaeser

has used this trickster aesthetic throughout his career. Whether imagined as Naanabozho, Harold of Orange, Clement Beaulieu, Griever, or a host of other trickster-like characters, the figures offer variations on disruptive marginal peripatetic shapeshifters (Fugitive Poses, 20; see also Owens, Other Destinies; and Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor). Louis Owens claims in Mixedblood Messages, “Vizenor’s crossblood . . . internalizes . . . frontier or border spaces” and his “mixedblood” becomes a “cultural breaker, break-dancing tricksterfashion through all sign, fracturing the self-reflexive mirror of the dominant center, deconstructing rigid borders, slipping between the seams, embodying contradictions, and contradancing across every boundary” (40–41). 3 the slipstream of language, the “mien of stories” 

Vizenor’s long poem itself undertakes a trickster-like contradance. When he sets the stage for the drama, he creates two contexts for the tale—the tribal and the colonial. Bear Island includes multiple cues in the poetic narrative that suggest a mythic backdrop, Native ground, and a trickster presence within the story. Lines include such groundings in Anishinaabeg culture as “creation stories,” “native rights / of rivers / ginseng / cedar stands,” “chancy shamans,” “visual memories,” “a native presence,” and a host of references to elements of the natural setting including “ravens,” which are often associated with the trickster (19, 21, 22, 25). Simultaneously, Vizenor creates the military, colonial context: “constitutional greed and guile,” “the third infantry,” “sweaty newcomers / nervy soldiers / soul savages / in heavy uniforms,” “confederate cruelty,” and “wonted genocide” (19, 15–16). Taken together, these and other such phrases play off one another and solidly depict cultural division; they also counter the popular image of Native Americans as savage, turn the tables, and portray (indeed, as in the quote here, literally name) the colonists as savages. The military—symbols of the great civilization—here act uncivilized. Privates Wicker and Burkhard, for example, are reported to have partaken in the looting of cultural objects—eagle feathers and sacred drums. As the events of the story unfold, often the simple idea of the Indian as victim or ignorant savage is expanded in other ways such as when the text subtly suggests that tribal members embody trickster traits. In addition to the previous passages mentioned that literally use the words “Naanabozho,” “trickster,” or “tricky,” the work depicts a series of trickster “traces” or sketches trickster moments. “Transformer,” for example, is one epithet often

the language of borders

9

assigned to the mythic trickster, suggesting his or her power of changing form. Bear Island’s pages include multiple suggestions of transformation or close natural association that seems to manifest itself as physical likeness, perhaps even as the blending or overlapping of the boundaries between physical difference. 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. When the prebattle stage is set, for example, the poem includes these lines: bearwalkers spirits of the night lighted the shore by my heart posed at the tree line a natural crease erotic shimmer and naked natives (55) The “bearwalkers” scene ends with a “a pale light” and “blaze of maples,” and the stanza following includes a description of “native presence / ablaze in the trees” and “traces of the sunrise” (56). Are the bearwalkers and naked Natives of the poem one and the same? Do both appear in or as a blaze of maples or disappear in the shimmer of natural light? Do they “waiver at the treelines”? In the next stanza in sequence, the Native presence and the natural scene seem to align: the pillagers created a marvelous natural presence in red blankets against the maples golden birch (57) The “border” between the human and the natural visually dissolves and Vizenor’s language asserts the transformation—the pillagers have become a “natural presence . . . against the maples.” Immaterial possibility is suggested, a “seeming” that moves between physical realities; or perhaps the suggestion is only of a blending or a visual illusion. In a subsequent line, Vizenor uses the

10

kimberly m. blaeser

word camouflage: “An elusive raven / and nineteen natives / circled the garden / hidden in the brush / and waited / behind the maples / a natural camouflage” (66). However, physical association with place or the spirit of place has to some degree changed physical appearance or camouflaged physical form. Within the poem other suggestive passages imply some association greater than simple physical likeness. In descriptive stanzas about “boy river warrior,” even the name suggests indistinct form. Something about the presence of this tribal warrior also seems confounding to the military whose bullets cannot hit him even though he “stood alone . . . boldly at the back / of the garden / taunted the soldiers / shouted in anishinaabe” while the “bullets cut / and scorched / the cold air / around his body” (70–71). The subsequent lines, although most readily understood in a literal way, might also allow for multiple understandings. When Vizenor writes “the boy river turned / slowly to the leaves / untouched by the fury / and walked away / into the thick brush,” the words suggest the boy turns away from the attack into the surrounding woods. But the syntax invites us to imagine other possibilities. If we understand the character’s name to be Boy River Warrior as introduced in the previous stanza, then the deliberate addition of the article “the” before boy river implies a different reality: “the boy river” might be the young river, the boy who is like a river, and so on. Following this cue may cause us to read the next phrase—“turned / slowly to the leaves”—more imaginatively, perhaps, inflecting it with a surreal reality as well: the boy river slowly spills himself into or becomes the leaves. Whether in this passage or in other ambiguous sections of the poem, once the language itself begins to perform like a trickster/transformer—like the “warrior on a coin that never lands twice on the same side” (Vizenor’s description of the trickster)—we as readers begin to anticipate the “slippage” of determinacy (The Trickster of Liberty, xviii). We may as a result examine the poem more at the level of language and poetic syntax, allowing realism and strict denotation to fall farther away, and thus to open ourselves to the unconventional suggestiveness of the language. When, for example, Keeshkemun declares “seek me among the clouds,” he might be alluding metaphorically to his Crane Clan affiliation; he might also mean to suggest some kind of transformation or visionary experience such as that experienced by Midéwiwin members during a traditional vision quest. Among the Ojibwe dream songs is one that likewise implies that the speaker is suspended “among the clouds”: “with a large bird / above me / i am walking / in the sky” (Summer in the Spring, 35).

the language of borders

11

How we read and how many ways we read passages turns on our cultural understanding, but also on textual cue and presentation. The absence of capitalization and punctuation throughout Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point often results in “double” readings or indeterminacy. For example, early on in the poem’s “Overture,” Vizenor includes the two lines “pocket stories” and “native stories” (16). Given the parallel structure—each a two-word line including the word “stories”—we might expect a link between these lines, a comparison or contrast, for example. At first glance, we may indeed be able to read these lines as both characterizing a kind of story: a “pocket” story we might think of as like the old dime novel, a small paperback, or at least a story that can easily be pocketed, owned, and carried. The “native” story might be understood to have an alternative reality. It could be a story that grows wild or grows naturally, one that arises from a certain place, or one that belongs to Native people and is thus grounded or connected to that culture. Indeed, the lines that follow each of the two phrases also seem to characterize them: “pocket stories / traduce the dance” and “native stories / scenes of presence.” The first seems to have a negative connotation; the second, positive. However, taking the larger stanza and attempting to ferret out appropriate sense breaks, the word “pocket” seems more likely to perform as a verb and we have another reading: duty bound ushers and scalpers pocket stories traduce the dance native stories scenes of presence at the mercy of pious scorn wicked chantey confederate cruelty bounty and hue of wonted genocide by first light outgunned at sugar point forever in the book (16)

12

kimberly m. blaeser

If we understand the opening four lines as comprising a unit of meaning, those who were called “expatriots,” “sweaty newcomers,” “nervy soldiers,” and “soul savages” in the previous stanza are here characterized as “ushers and scalpers” whose duty it is to “pocket” (collect or steal) tribal stories and to “traduce” (falsely represent and probably interfere with) tribal dance. Again, we must make an assumption about the intended relationships of the lines, but if we read the next unit of meaning as beginning with “native stories,” the stories are then characterized as “scenes of presence,” an important and worthy trait in Vizenor’s larger critical scheme and contrasted with scenes “of absence.” He writes in Fugitive Poses, for example, “Natives are the presence, and Indians are simulations, a derivative noun that means an absence, in my narratives” (15; see also Manifest Manners). But these Native stories are “at the mercy of pious scorn, wicked chantey, [and] confederate cruelty” (punctuation mine). This sense phrase may end here or continue to include the “bounty and hue / of wonted genocide,” but my interest in these literary and artistic references to kinds of story and dance draw my attention to the last line in the stanza. Who or what will be “outgunned at sugar point” and what does it mean to be “forever in the book”? The Anishinaabe, of course, are literally outgunned in the sense that they have fewer warriors, military weapons, and ammunition, but it is the Native people who triumph in the confrontation and the colonial casualties outnumber those of the Anishinaabeg nineteen to one. So, if we understand the “sweaty newcomers” as those who are outgunned, how should we interpret the last line? Is the book the written record of American history? The book of the dead? Is it the book we currently hold? Is it not literally a particular book but the idea of the written account used metaphorically and positioned in opposition to oral story? The slipstream of Vizenor’s language invites this search for meaning as the structural ambiguity of his poem awakens layers of suggestive associations. Ultimately, as the narrow boundaries of language equivalency (x plus y equals z) dissolve, we enter a literary space of story in which we feel truth rather than tell meaning and fact. 4 building and “affiliation of stories” 

When we think about language itself as a border and examine the ways in which Vizenor attempts to transcend these borders, the use of the mythic and

the language of borders

13

the use of Native language become important elements in this quest for liberation from the page. Both link us to another oral realm with all the qualities inherent in that different cultural reality. Vizenor and many other scholars have theorized orality, characterizing it, for example, as dynamic, creative (a creator of reality), an act of engagement, communal discourse, dialogic, cyclical, myth- and ritual-centered, referential, and contextual (see Momaday, “The Man Made of Words”; Ortiz, “Song, Poetry, and Language”). The oral contrasts sharply with the linear historic consciousness of the static, individualized, author-focused, authoritarian written literature. More important than these contrasting theoretical constructs about language, however, is Vizenor’s actual undertaking in this particular poem, his attempts to disrupt the confinement of writing English by infusing the historic with the cyclical and mythic and the language of colonialism with the tribal. The structure of the very tale resembles oral telling since, as in the case of traditional stories, the outcome itself is not at issue. Emphasis then shifts to the process or act of telling. From the outset, Vizenor creates a cyclical and mythic context in Bear Island with mention of how the Anishinaabe “trace the seasons,” with the cycle of days symbolized by sunrise, and the generations linked by investment in place and story (13–15). Vizenor opens the poem with place—“fugitive rivers / canoe birth / white pine . . . cedar boughs”— and allusion to trickster story: “crafty trickster / naanabozho / created natives . . .” (13). The second stanza of the poem underscores the intergenerational reality as it calls to mind the still vital pictographs with these lines: worthy hunters cut the barren masks of hunger boreal shadows eternal spirits on the ancient stone (13) The shadows and spirits remembered in the imagistic tribal arts, recognized as “eternal,” survive from time immemorial and beyond their representation; suggesting perhaps a similar reality for the telling about to be shared. Among the many passages in the poem built with intertwined layers of tribal story, Vizenor’s description of the crane totem offers strands easily traced to earlier tellings. In reimagining the story of Keeshkemun (Sharpened Stone), hereditary chief of the Lac du Flambeau division of the Ojibwe,

14

kimberly m. blaeser

Vizenor incorporates details recorded by William Warren in History of the Ojibway People, including a speech attributed to Keeshkemun by interpreter Michel Cadotte Jr.: “seek me in the clouds . . . I am a bird / out of human sight / and my voice / heard from afar / resounds over the earth” (372–75). Vizenor also incorporates the tribal understanding of the clan system and, here specifically, the role of the Crane Clan to which both Keeshkemun and Vizenor belong. The powerful oratorical tradition that gives rise to Keeshkemun’s declarations has counterparts in older myths about the crane as well, including one retold by Warren regarding the origin of the crane (and crane totem) and its association with the loon (and the loon totem) (86–88). Clearly then, the narrative in Bear Island continues a longstanding tribal story tradition. Vizenor functions as teller rather than “author” of the story and understands his own role as one of the “echo makers” (as Crane Clan members are sometimes called). He both hears and continues the telling.5 In thus situating his own account within an “affiliation of stories,” Vizenor effects a liberation from the implied structural border of narrative and from a Western authorial aesthetic. In a similar manner, Vizenor’s use of Ojibwemowin within this primarily English language poem, signals an “other” cultural presence and suggests a resistance to colonial dominance, here symbolized by language. Examples of the use of Native language can be found throughout the poem, the earliest—“Manidoo”—coming in the title of the first section. Of the many Ojibwe words employed—“Naanabozho,” “bagwana,” “Midéwiwin,” “nagamon,” “mamakiziwin,” “gimoodishkiiwinini,” and so on—some may be relatively familiar to non-Ojibwe speakers, and many have a translation adjacent or near in the text. But the symbolic switch of outsider/insider roles that this Native language use accomplishes underscores the boundary of language, its “authoritarian” function, and the colonial exclusion involved in privileging the conqueror’s language. Vizenor’s decision to use “wabigamaa” (which the next line repeats in English as “the sandy narrows”), might be seen as telling, particularly since the text declares this place “bears the name / battle point” (20). Another translation for this Ojibwe word is “a channel between lakes” more clearly suggesting a separation or boundary (Nichols and Nyholm, A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe, 113). In his play with language, Vizenor seems to align the historic and the symbolic boundaries, suggesting that like physical borders, demarcations between languages can as easily become “battle points,” places of conflict.

the language of borders

15

in the territory of the epic lyric: “great storier of peace” 6

In this wabigamaa, this chasm of mutually unintelligible languages or cultures, problems of translation figure significantly, and the possibility for conflict looms. On the one hand, Vizenor’s Bear Island in its offering of a rendition of the war at Sugar Point might be seen to simply confirm the inevitability of cultural clash. On the other hand, it might instead—like a trickster tale—story the false path while teaching the true.7 Vizenor repeatedly sets a context for the reach of story and honors those who sidestep conflict, such as Keeshkemun, who adroitly avoids taking sides in the War of 1812, and Waubanaquot (Chief White Cloud), to whom Vizenor applies the epithet “great storier of peace” (82). Throughout the book, the poetic narrative cues the reader as to how we should view the actions and individuals. The stanza on Doctor Herbert Harris who “stole a sacred / birch bark scroll,” for instance, ends by underscoring the irony of his actions—“the absolute savagery / of a combat healer” (88). In the final section of the poem, as Vizenor summarizes the outcomes of the events, his narrator emphatically and straightforwardly declares: at sugar point the rightful owners of this country were mistreated defrauded and robbed natives turned their wrath against united states soldiers (86–87) The poem closes suggesting the dead and perhaps we, too, shall remain “forever haunted / by discovery / cultural conceit / and constitutional trickery” (93). But within these same poetic pages, Vizenor offers an alternative, the “pleasures / of native stories / and medicine dances,” “solitary spirits / marvelous sentiments / of shamans / court and tradition / under the cedar” (61, 20–21). Survival and continuance also imbue the poem. And the lines between these cultural “camps” or “colors” are not impenetrable. For example, the narrative reports that one Private Wicker recognized the

16

kimberly m. blaeser

Natives’ right to fight for their land, and this sentiment was “shared by many / blue soldiers” (86). The reader/listener clearly knows where and with whom their sentiments should rest and the implication is that a vision of justice, which might have prevented this unnecessary conflict, could indeed prevent a similar incident in the future. This was a “crusade of shame / a chance war / provoked by arrogance” (81). Might Vizenor then, following in the tradition of other “echo makers” and “visionary leaders,” be using his oratorical skills here together with his “native irony” in the interests of resistance (28, 86)? If understood to function as what Dean Rader calls the “epic lyric,” Vizenor’s poem might, as a “transformative, inclusive, and bicultural” work, endeavor to incite change. When Rader outlines the “epic” qualities he recognizes in much of Native poetry, Vizenor’s poem, too, can be seen to perform in a similar way. It “transmit[s] cultural traditions . . . valorize[s] deeds . . . form[s] national identities, and . . . preserve[s] culturally specific linguistic patterns”; in short, it “carr[ies] the weight, the history, and do[es] the cultural work of an epic” (Rader, “The Epic Lyric,” 128). At the same time, like the lyric, the poem is “nonlinear,” “subjective,” involves “emotions and feelings,” and is “meditative” and “musical” (129). The two strains work together, breaking down genre definitions, or as Rader suggests is true in much Native poetry, “the generic terms . . . have been exploded” (126). Vizenor, writing in his own liberated genre, in two languages, linking mythic, historic, and cyclical time, performs on the page a telling that means to invite or effect change in the world off the page, for contemporary readers/listeners. In that way, the poetry is both affective and effective, wanting to succeed as a work of literature and wanting to have an impact.8 Vizenor has built a literary career illuminating and enacting mixedblood trickster liberation. He also suggests that the liberating, creative role of the trickster earthdiver aligns with the role of the best tribal leaders and the most imaginative tribal writers when he claims, “Tribal leaders were dreamers and orators, speaking in visual metaphors as if the past were a state of being in the telling” (The People Named the Chippewa, 24), and “Earthdivers, tricksters, shamans, poets, dream back the earth” (Earthdivers, xvi). Vizenor’s manuscript Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point becomes a part of the “ghost dance literature” he writes of in Manifest Manners as, through his writing, he challenges political and literary borders and hearkens after an other, older order (63–106).9

the language of borders

17

poetic theory and performance

The fascinating range of ways Vizenor describes and understands discourse and his efforts to suggest—with his own carefully selected language—the dynamic reality of words informs the larger gathering of his poetry as well. His attempts to breech boundaries are particularly apparent in his haiku, which leads not only to a “visual experience” but perhaps to a visionary one. In his collection Cranes Arise, for example, the following haiku first sketches a striking image of blue dragonflies and then calls to mind sunrise prayer, thus suggesting a spiritual significance: bena, minnesota blue dragonflies cross their wings in the cattails sunrise service (n.p.) A particularly haunting haiku from the early (1964) Raising the Moon Vines likewise works by suggestion or implication: Under the crossing log Fresh openings in the ice Haloed with footprints (89) The image of ice freshly broken beneath a crossing log where the scene is also marked with footprints might suggest several possible scenarios: someone or some being having fallen off the log only to break through or fall through the ice below, a creature’s markings left at a watering spot, some being coming to the edge of the recent openings to explore the scene, and so on. Key to the felt sense of the haiku (rather than the simple literal account of action) are the several uses of border and border crossings. Here among the boundaries we might recognize are those of the ice separating dry air from water, the log existing between two destinations, and the imaginative space or distance between the presence of some being and its absence marked only by footprints and holes in the ice. But, regardless of what part of any above “story” we construct, the tenor of the “telling” turns on Vizenor’s use of the word “haloed.” Carrying the connotations of the

18

kimberly m. blaeser

noun “halo,” but deployed in verb form—a grammatical border crossing— the language implies a sacred quality or aura in the activities (not the tableau) of life (or here, perhaps, of death). The haiku then both speaks and embodies the boundary breaking. Vizenor’s nonhaiku poems, too, often describe and embody various notions of liberation and border breaking. In the poem “White Earth,” Vizenor’s lines, “stories turn / back to stone,” imply transformation and recall the mythic accounts of Naanabozho and his brother, Stone (Almost Ashore, 10). The Anishinaabe trickster might symbolize border crossing on many levels. In Literary Chance, for example, Vizenor identifies the trickster as “a native trope of creation,” who “absolves the monotheistic separations of animate, inanimate, animal, and human transformations and poses” (43). Other Vizenor poems depict the dissolution of different kinds of boundaries. The title poem in his Almost Ashore collection is filled with suggestions of movement, with physical borders and their breech. The first stanza opens with the image of water spilling into the dry world and with the immaterial shadow presence of the speaker: “winter sea / over my shoes / shadows / and bright warm stones.” In these poems, too, the border crossings invoked sometimes suggest an other, perhaps spiritual realm as in “Shirley by Winter,” in which the protagonist “touches / that elusive light / in the eyes of rabbits / sleeve dogs / and old men” (96). As these examples demonstrate, the art or achievement of many of Vizenor’s poems relies on metaphorical use of language, upon its ability to “mean” on multiple levels. In his several theoretical discussions of haiku, such as the introductions to Matsushima, Two Wings the Butterfly, Cranes Arise, and the 1999 edition of Raising the Moon Vines, and in his short chapter “June 1960: Haiku in the Attic” in the autobiographical work Interior Landscapes, Vizenor voices his understanding of the possibilities of language to propel us from the literal into an experiential or spiritual realm.10 He builds an artistic compendium that includes biographical details about haiku masters, short selections from their works, comments on the form from a range of scholars (Roland Barthes to R. H. Blyth), and his own characterization of haiku together with personal commentaries. Vizenor’s writing in the haiku form began early in his career, and through the years these haiku theories have informed his literary aesthetic across genres. The key qualities he notes include minimalism, simplicity, indeterminacy, animism, imagistic quality, and audience engagement. He also traces connections between the form and intentions of haiku and traditional Ojibwe songs, noting: “There is a visual

the language of borders

19

dreamscape in haiku similar to the sense of natural human connections to the earth found in tribal music, dream songs” (Matsushima, n.p.). Over the years, Vizenor has offered several lyrical descriptions of haiku, including the following: Haiku thought is intuitive, a manner of meditation at a dreamscape, a clear distance from dense grammatical philosophies and dominant political ideologies. Haiku turns are moments of wonder in the natural world, surprises at the treelines near the trail, at the woodland rim; internal transformations through mythic word cinemas, visions, and dreams, memories, unusual symmetries, and imaginative relationships between words, birds, fur, water, insect sounds, twists in the snow. Haiku is blue, tactile, musk, tribal, and a dance. (Matsushima, n.p.) Notably, the statement includes figurative references to physical boundaries or borders (“at the treelines,” and “at the woodland rim”) as well as challenges to confining dogma (“dense grammatical philosophies and dominant political ideologies”), allusions to tactics that might undermine confinement (“unusual symmetries” and “imaginative relationships between words” [emphasis added]), and a reference to literature as an agent of change (“internal transformations through mythic word cinemas”). Significant as well is the author’s decision to offer haiku theory as art itself, thus again blurring genre borders. Other of Vizenor’s comments on haiku offer equally beautiful expression of his interpretation of the form and clarify his understanding of specific aspects. So, too, do the quotations from other haiku writers or scholars he selects to include in his discussions. Among these statements that make points important to Vizenor’s haiku aesthetic (and that are memorable as well for their expression) is a comment underscoring the emphasis in haiku on brevity and on experience over speech—Roland Barthes’s observation that haiku is a “literary branch” of Zen “destined to halt language” (qtd. in Matsushima, n.p.). Likewise significant is R. H. Blyth’s comment on the source of or inspiration for haiku: “Haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things” (qtd. in Matsushima, n.p.). Finally, a description of haiku by Shosun entitled “The Argument,” which was used on the front inside flap of Slight Abrasions (Vizenor’s haiku dialogue with Jerome Downes), offers a succinct comment on form and highlights the supraliterary intentions of haiku:

kimberly m. blaeser

20

The internal feeling of haiku changes us in a moment—with no style, no manners, no special rhetoric. Logic is unnatural. The tension of language is only a gesture. That special imagination which creates haiku, changes the moment and alters the world. Wonder is silent and mindless. Change knows only itself. (n.p.) As I have suggested, the creative aesthetic encapsulated here does not inform only Vizenor’s haiku. The Shosun commentary in particular underscores the affective/effective union often sought in his writing: the “internal feeling” created by the beautifully rendered images of the poetry “changes the moment and alters the world.” Specific works might challenge political, legalistic, or territorial borders. But always, throughout Vizenor’s poetic work, the reader is invited to breech the boundaries of alphabetic constructions, to leave the confinement of the page, as writing dissolves into experience. In the closing poem of Almost Ashore, “Tropisms,” Vizenor playfully crosses literary and literal boundaries: woodpeckers hammer by rows at dawn five seven five hemlock haiku holes (109) Here “rows,” syllable limits, and haiku pattern all introduce the idea of rigor. These bonds are delightfully deconstructed by the wild image of woodpecker, the self-conscious mockery of form, and the open space of “holes.” The title implies figurative or metaphorical use of language and invites readers to imaginatively engage in making the poem. As always, words are simply threshold; language only a passage to liberation. As Vizenor writes: “social practices . . . [and] wordwound philosophies, are unmasked in the harmonies of the natural seasons” (Matshushima, n.p.). Here, too, the language of borders is challenged, and the borders of language dissolve.

the language of borders

21

not e s 1.  Gerald Vizenor, Almost Ashore: Selected Poems (Cambridge, U.K.: Salt, 2006), 9. 2.  Th is idea of the discrepancy of an “objective” news story and the “true” story has precedent in various works by the New Journalists of the 1960s and 1970s. It became the premise, for example, for Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night when Mailer set his own personal version of the 1967 march on the Pentagon against a news story from Time magazine. 3.  Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 20. 4.  I allude here to Edward Said’s use of the term “affiliation.” I have employed the phrases “affiliation of stories” and “genealogy of stories” in a previous discussion of Vizenor’s work: “Wild Rice Rights: Gerald Vizenor and an Affiliation of Story,” in Centering Anishinaabeg Studies, ed. Jill Doerfler, James Niigonwedom Sinclair, and Heidi Stark (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 5.  L ouis Owens discusses the tensions inherent in the role of “author” for Native writers in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel ([Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994], 10–12). He states, for example, “Through the inscription of an authorial signature, the Indian writer places him or herself in immediate tension with this communal, authorless, and identity-conferring source” (11). 6.  Gerald Vizenor, Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 82. 7.  Trickster stories, as teaching tools, often highlight the flawed or faulty behavior of the trickster figure. When lessons are conveyed through the stories by example, the trickster learns lessons the hard way, listeners learn them the easy way— vicariously. 8.  I draw here from Seamus Heaney’s discussion in The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), in which he claims dual roles for poetry: “it’s joy in being a process for language” and its role as an “agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices” (6). 9.  In the discussion, Vizenor claims, “The shadows and language of tribal poets and novelists could be the new ghost dance literature, the shadow literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance” (106). 10.  In the Matsushima introduction, for example, he claims, “The printed words in haiku are rendered . . .” and when we “deconstruct the printed words in a haiku there is a nothing,” but that “nothing in haiku is not an aesthetic void” but “a moment of enlightenment” (n.p.).

22

kimberly m. blaeser references

Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Doerf ler, Jill, James Niigonwedom Sinclair, and Heidi Stark, eds. Centering Anishinaabeg Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Matsen, William E. “The Battle at Sugar Point: A Re-examination.” Minnesota History (Fall 1987): 269–75. Momaday, N. Scott. “The Man Made of Words.” In Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970. Nichols, John D., and Earl Nyholm. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Ortiz, Simon J. “What Indians Do.” In Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories, 129– 39. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. ———. “Song, Poetry, and Language: Expression and Perception.” In Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance. Edited by Susan Brill de Ramirez and Evelina Zuni Lucero, 75–85. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. ———. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Rader, Dean. “The Epic Lyric.” In Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Edited by Dean Rader and Janice Gould, 123–42. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore: Selected Poems. Cambridge, U.K.: Salt, 2006. ———. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. 1984. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. ———. Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. New ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

chapter two

“It may be revolutionary in character” The Progress, a New Tribal Hermeneutics, and the Literary Re-expression of the Anishinaabe Oral Tradition in Summer in the Spring

Adam Spry

A

mong the many publications of Gerald Vizenor’s long career perhaps the most curious is Summer in the Spring. Constituting one of the earliest of Vizenor’s works explicitly dealing with tribal themes, Summer in the Spring has remained largely untouched by critics, yet still hovers on the periphery of Vizenor’s impressive oeuvre. The lack of critical attention to the book may have to do with the fact that it does not appear, at first blush, to be a piece of original writing by Vizenor. In addition, critics are confronted with the conceptual hurdle inherent in the fact that Vizenor has reprinted Summer in the Spring in four various and substantially different versions over the course of three decades. Yet, to look past these difficulties is to discover in Summer in the Spring the earliest manifestation of themes that will become central in Vizenor’s later work: the primacy of the trickster in tribal oral tradition, the haiku-like nature and beauty of Anishinaabe dream songs, and—most important—the role of literature as an essential tool of Anishinaabe survivance. This observation highlights what seems to be Vizenor’s goal in Summer in the Spring— namely, the recovery of models of Anishinaabe literary production from the historical archive. The editions of Summer in the Spring published after 1965 are split into two sections—poetry and prose—both comprised of archival material Vizenor collected and reinterpreted during his first years as a writer in the 1960s. The poetry of the first half of the collection originally appeared as translated Anishinaabe songs in ethnologist Frances Densmore’s Chippewa Music I and II, published in 1910 and 1913. The prose, comprised of both cultural information and stories about the Anishinaabe trickster Nanaabozho, was first printed in the pages of the Progress, a newspaper edited by Vizenor’s great uncle, the 23

24

adam spry

mixedblood writer Theodore H. Beaulieu, from 1886 to 1889. In both cases, the primary texts Vizenor works with in Summer in the Spring were early attempts to bring oral tradition of the Anishinaabeg to print in English. The appearance of the Anishinaabe oral tradition in printed translations, such as those of Densmore and Beaulieu, is deeply ambivalent for Vizenor. English and the written word were not neutral technologies for the Anishinaabe, Vizenor believes, but rather imposed and deeply compromised modes of expression. At the time the songs and stories of Summer in the Spring were originally published, wrote Vizenor, “Written languages and translations were contradictions in most tribal communities” ([1993], 3). Yet, at a time when tribal cultures and languages were threatened with total annihilation, writing their traditional stories and songs in English provided the Anishinaabeg with “chances to overcome tragic reason and the loss of tribal memories” ([1993], 3–4). The transformation from oral to written, Anishinaabemowin to English, was chancy because such translations risked changing the nature of the material being translated—material that represented the basis of Anishinaabe cultural identity. Indeed, any translation and publication was bound to force a degree of change because, as Vizenor argues in Narrative Chance, “There can never be ‘correct’ or ‘objective’ readings of the text or trope of tribal literatures,” foreclosing the possibility of perfect literal translation (5). In fact, Vizenor believes those attempts to present an objective rendition of the Anishinaabe oral tradition into written English are most likely to fail in capturing the vitality and creativity of the Anishinaabe people and the power of their words. As Vizenor argues, “literal translations and representations of tribal literatures are illusions, consolations in the dominant culture” (Narrative Chance, 5). Instead, Vizenor understands that bringing the imaginative and artistic works of the Anishinaabe oral tradition to print requires not cold adherence to linear word-for-word translation, but an act of imagination and artistry. “I don’t think the oral tradition can be translated well,” Vizenor explains, “but I think it can be reimagined and reexpressed” (Bowers, Silet, and Vizenor, “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” 48). The ultimate value of Summer in the Spring to Vizenor criticism is that its four successive editions trace Vizenor’s formulation of this argument in practice. Over the course of three decades Vizenor models various attempts at re-expression and reimagination, allowing critics to discern the interpretive methods by which Vizenor brings the Anishinaabe oral tradition into print. These different editions allow us to examine how Vizenor’s thought on

“It may be revolutionary in character”

25

the relationship of the oral to the written changes over the course of his long career. When considering a writer as deeply invested in imbuing his writing with qualities of the Anishinaabe oral tradition, such observation may offer invaluable critical insights to the rest of Vizenor’s work. The first edition of Summer in the Spring was published in May 1965 and consisted solely of Vizenor’s re-expressions of Densmore’s transcribed dream songs. These re-expressions were largely unchanged from how they appeared in Densmore’s transcriptions in 1910 and 1913. In 1970 Vizenor republished the material from the original Summer in the Spring as Anishinabe Nagamon: The Songs of the People. Between these two editions, Vizenor made two important editorial changes. First was the publication of Anishinabe Nagamon with a companion volume, Anishinabe Adisokan: The Stories of the People, comprised of the prose stories originally printed in the Progress and unseen by readers for almost a century. Second was Vizenor’s complete revision of the poems from the 1965 version of Summer in the Spring, radically transforming them in terms of language, presentation, and form. At first glance, these two editorial changes seem unrelated. Yet when examined in terms of content and form, Vizenor’s revisions of the poems in Anishinabe Nagamon reveal direct influences from Theodore Beaulieu’s written versions of Anishinaabe traditions and stories. The revisions also suggest a reassessment on the part of Vizenor of the value of Densmore’s translations as vehicles for expressing the artistry and value of Anishinaabe dream songs. This reassessment seems to be based, in part, on Vizenor’s recognition of Densmore and Beaulieu’s different objectives in bringing the Anishinaabe oral tradition to print in English. Where Densmore had attempted to present an ethnographic account of Anishinaabe song with as much clarity and scientific objectivity as she could muster, Beaulieu published his Naanabozho stories as imaginative works of literature. For Vizenor, Densmore’s “objective” translations failed to recognize what Beaulieu’s stories represented: that the translation from oral Anishinaabemowin to written English required a complete reimagination of material in order to reveal those characteristics that literal translation cannot capture—namely, oral expression’s vitality, performativity, and adaptability. At the same time, this reassessment did not mean that the Densmore translations could not be used as a starting point from which Vizenor might perform such a reimagination. As Vizenor explains in the introduction to the latest edition of Summer in the Spring (1993), Beaulieu’s stories presented him with “a new tribal hermeneutics” for the interpretation of the

26

adam spry

Anishinaabe oral tradition (13). I hope to show that the interpretive approach Vizenor uses to re-express and reimagine Anishinaabe dream songs as lyric poetry after 1965 is based on this “new tribal hermeneutics.” In order to do this, I will first examine how this “new tribal hermeneutics” manifests itself in Beaulieu’s texts as a method of interpreting the oral tradition in writing that privileges creativity, intervention, and formal transformation over strict literal translation, and how this interpretive strategy allowed Beaulieu to utilize the oral tradition as a tool of political resistance and communal liberation. I will then show how Vizenor employs Beaulieu’s texts to inform his interpretive strategy in his revisions of Densmore’s dream song transcriptions. Guided by this interpretive methodology, Vizenor reimagines Densmore’s translations in order to bring the literary beauty and cultural importance of Anishinaabe dream songs to light. The result is a series of beautiful lyric poems that are more a product of Vizenor’s imagination and powers as a poet than they are an “objective” translation of an uncompromised Anishinaabe oral tradition. For this reason, we can see why in later editions of Summer in the Spring Vizenor reproduces the material from the Progress with only “minor editorial changes” that do not invite “a radically different reading of the Beaulieu text,” while his later re-expressions of the Anishinaabe dream songs dramatically depart from Densmore’s original transcriptions (see McNiel, “‘The Game Never Ends’”). Ultimately, I hope to show how Vizenor’s use of this “new tribal hermeneutics” allows him to express Anishinaabe survivance through his reimagined dream songs by articulating Anishinaabe continuity and presence in the face of discourses of Native absence. ✹  ✹  ✹

The Progress was first distributed on the White Earth Reservation on March 25, 1886, by Gerald Vizenor’s relatives, Gus and Theodore Beaulieu, two well-educated, mixedblood members of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg. With Gus acting as publisher and Theodore as primary writer and editor, they made their intentions for the paper clear on the front page of the first issue: We intend that this journal shall be the mouth piece of the community in making known abroad and at home, what is for the best interest of the tribe. It is not always possible to reach the fountain

“It may be revolutionary in character”

27

head through subordinates, it is not always possible to appeal to the moral sentiment of the country through these sources, or by communications througe [sic] the general press. . . . We shall aim to advocate constantly and withhold reserve, what in our view, and in the view of the leading minds upon this reservation, is the best for the interests of its residents. And not only for their interests, but those of the tribe wherever they are now residing. However, in their salutatory address, the Beaulieus also warn presciently, “The novelty of a newspaper published upon this reservation may cause many to be wary in their support, and this from a fear that it may be revolutionary in character” (“Salutatory,” Progress, March 25, 1886, 1). To a modern reader, what makes the Progress truly revolutionary is that it presages many of the ideas about the importance of literature for tribal survivance that Gerald Vizenor would articulate a century later. The writer of the paper, Theodore Beaulieu, understood that the battle over the future of the Anishinaabe people would be fought on the field of representation, and the most important weapon he possessed was the printed page. The survival of the Anishinaabeg, Beaulieu seemed to understand, depended on their ability to prove that they were the intellectual, moral, and political equals of their colonial dominators, and therefore capable of determining the course of their own lives. At the same time, he also understood the importance of cultural traditions that informed an Anishinaabe communal identity on which their political claims of treaty rights, alternative land tenure systems, and self-governance was based. In order to achieve both goals, Theodore Beaulieu would turn to the Anishinaabe oral tradition. On December 17, 1887, Beaulieu ran an editorial under the headline “Prejudicial Vagaries!” that reprinted, in its entirety, an article from the Duluth Herald. In the article, titled “A Refuge of Murderers and Outlaws—A Redskin Alsatia,” the anonymous writer criticized the “Boston Indianidiocy” for their support of the Anishinaabeg in treaty negotiations at the Red Lake Reservation. “[T]o those who know these Indians, the habits, manners and customs, this gush is simply sickening,” the writer opined: Indians have a profound contempt for all white men. They fear them it is true, but an Injun is an Injun clear through, and when he gets a chance, he will never fail to do a white man up. . . . There are thousands of acres of splendid timber lands and farming lands within

28

adam spry the boundaries of this reservation that are now simply used as a resort for murderers, loafers, whiskey pirates, and fur thieves. This state of things will continue just as long as the sickish sentimentality in regard to the Indians is kept up.

In response, Beaulieu argued that such sentiments were “simply used to guard the frantic efforts of the ghouls and vultures of outright robbery and fraud. . . . The thousands of acres of land, the millions of feet of pine timber, etc.,—there’s the rub, that’s the eyesore of the hordes of vampires who are endeavoring by fair or foul means to get the ‘lion’s share’ of this ‘Redskin Alasatia’” (“Prejudicial Vagaries!” Progress, December 17, 1887, 1). Such an unfavorable view of the Anishinaabeg, Beaulieu believed, was not just motivated by “the ignominious spirit of greed and gain” (“Prejudicial Vagaries!,” 1). Prejudicial attitudes concerning tribal people, Beaulieu believed, were the result of a “lack of literary acumen” among Euro-Americans, who based their judgment of the Anishinaabeg on “the superficial reading of modern opinions” rather than “the observations of centuries” (“Race Prejudice,” Progress, June 23, 1888, 1). Beaulieu hoped to correct this lack of understanding by offering his own literary treatments of Anishinaabe traditions and stories that had been “handed down for centuries, from father to son” (“The Ojibwas, Their Customs and Traditions, Part I,” Progress, December 17, 1887, 1). Beaulieu published the first installment of “The Ojibwas, Their Customs and Traditions” alongside the reprinted editorial from the Duluth Herald as an obvious counterpoint to the article’s unsympathetic assessment of Anishinaabe “habits, manners, and customs.” The first seven installments of the series were descriptions of Anishinaabe cultural practices, as described by two “centenarians of the reservation,” the Midéwiwin healers Day-Dodge and Say-coss-e-gay (“Indian Traditions and Legends,” Progress, October 22, 1887, 1). These explanations of Anishinaabe practices, including information on the beliefs and rituals of the Midéwiwin, were given in Anishinaabemowin to Theodore Beaulieu, who translated and published them in English. The last four installments consisted of the stories of Naanabozho, the mythic Anishinaabe trickster, interpreted and written by Beaulieu himself. Almost a century later, Vizenor would be drawn specifically to Beaulieu’s rendition of the Naanabozho stories. The presence of the “compassionate tribal trickster” in Anishinaabe stories is, for Vizenor, part of the tremendous value and uniqueness of tribal traditions. As Vizenor argues, “The trickster is androgenous [sic], a comic healer and

“It may be revolutionary in character”

29

liberator in literature; the whole figuration that ties the unconscious to social experiences” (Narrative Chance, 188). The Anishinaabeg living at White Earth during the time of the Progress’s publication were certainly in need of healing and liberation. The Mississippi Band Anishinaabe had been forced to relocate from their homes in central Minnesota eighteen years earlier, but only after treaty negotiations nearly tore the community apart—coming to a head with the assassination of the popular political leader Hole in the Day under circumstances that remain controversial. Newly settled at White Earth, the community faced a new threat to their homes. The Dawes General Allotment Act was passed in the same year the Progress began publication, threatening to open the reservation to white land speculators and unscrupulous timber companies (see Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy). On top of all of this, White Earth was being managed by a dictatorial Indian agent named Timothy J. Sheehan, whose paternalistic and condescending attitude toward the Anishinaabeg under his jurisdiction was so severe that even local whites thought ill of him (Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa, 87–88). Although he never articulated it in such explicit terms, Theodore Beaulieu clearly intuited the connection of the trickster stories to the contemporary political struggles of the Anishinaabeg. In his advertisement for the stories, Beaulieu explicitly connected them to current concerns among the Anishinaabe about eroding land ownership and tyrannical federal authorities, writing that they would tell of the time “when this country was one great reservation and [there were] no Indian agents but Win-ne-boo-zho [Naanabozho], no ‘U.S.I.D.’ but the vast prairies and forests whose portions swarmed with game of all kind” (“Indian Traditions and Legends,” Progress, October 22, 1887, 1). The Naanabozho stories always appeared on the front page, often adjacent to editorials about the growing dissatisfaction with the governance of the Anishinaabeg at the hands of government officials. Other short stories, poems, and items of curiosity, including traditional stories from other tribes, usually appeared on page three of the Progress. The privileged, front page juxtaposition of the Naanabozho stories and serious editorial statements by Theodore Beaulieu, local leaders such as Waabaanakwad (White Cloud), and others makes it clear that Beaulieu understood the social significance of the stories. As Elizabeth McNiel argues, the Naanabozho stories published in the Progress were doing real political and cultural work for the White Earth Anishinaabeg:

adam spry

30

“Beaulieu’s late nineteenth-century Anishinaabe readers were dealing with their own harsh fates, their worst fears repeatedly having been realized. . . . [T]he trickster story would have served to remind them of their cultural resources” (“‘The Game Never Ends,’” 91–92). At the same time, the “cultural resources” in question were also being radically transformed by Theodore Beaulieu through interpretation and publication. As one can easily see when comparing an account of Naanabozho’s birth recorded and translated by ethnographers to that written by Beaulieu, the differences are striking: One day Naanabozho’s mother went out with her mother to get wood. After a while, the mother missed her daughter. There was a very high wind. She looked for her daughter, but she could not find her. Later when the grandmother was chopping wood, she found a little blood on one of the pieces. She brought the piece of wood into the wigwam. She knew the blood was her daughter’s. The next morning there was a little baby. That was the beginning of Naanabozho’s life, and he lived with his grandmother. (qtd. in Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa, 11) Theodore Beaulieu writes: One day, feeling better than usual, [Naanabozho’s mother] went outside and lay down beneath the shade of the balsam tree. . . . Suddenly there was a rustle, and a great gust of wind from the north swept by and taking the young girl in his embrace disappeared from the earth. The girl’s mother, who had been enjoying a nap, was awakened by the commotion, looked about the wigwam for her daughter, and, being satisfied she was not within, hurried outside searching and calling for her beloved child, but the sweet tones of the nightingale were the only sounds that answered her call. At last, worn and with grief and weeping, she returned to her now lonely wigwam, and while passing the tree under which her daughter had so lately reclined, she overheard a wee little voice say: Nookomis, grandmother, do not cry. I am your grandchild and have been left here to comfort and take care of you. My name is Naanabozho and I shall be many things for the comfort of you and my people . . . (11)

“It may be revolutionary in character”

31

As Alan Velie points out, Beaulieu’s rendition of the Naanabozho stories in “a highly formal and solemn English” (“The Trickster Novel,” 126) entailed a great deal of editorial intervention in form and narrative structure, moving the stories “perceptibly in the direction of . . . modern fiction” (126, 128). For example, in the oral version of the story the emotional state of the characters remains opaque, while Beaulieu rarely misses an opportunity to describe their “grief,” “enjoyment,” or “loneliness.” The lack of emotional description in regard to characters is a hallmark of oral narrative traditions, yet its inclusion is one of the defining features of Western literary forms (Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 26). In another example, Beaulieu “changes the chronotope from nondurational adventure time of the tribal tale into something closer to the chronotope of the modern novel” by taking stories that had originally been told as nontemporally specific, semiautonomous narratives, and presenting them in a single temporally linked chronicle of Naanabozho’s development and maturation (Velie, “The Trickster Novel,” 127). From his conception and birth to his ultimate confrontation with the Great Gambler, Beaulieu makes of Naanabozho’s story a continuous tale, an Anishinaabe literary epic. The result of this temporal shift can be seen in the texts above. In the oral transcription, the storyteller presents information paratactically, refusing a causal relationship from one sentence to another. This parataxis leads to an ambiguous temporality in which the reader has only a sense of the sequence of events—Naanabozho’s mother’s disappearance, Nookomis’s discovery of the blood on the wood, the appearance of Naanabozho—but not an explicit understanding of how much time has passed between them. Beaulieu, instead, uses complex sentences to illustrate the causality of events (such as “The girl’s mother, who had been enjoying a nap, was awakened by the commotion”), which creates a temporal frame in which the story occurs. Where the events of the oral transcription could take place over days, weeks, or even months, Beaulieu makes it clear though his language that the events in his story take place over a single day. On the whole, Beaulieu’s re-expressions of the Anishinaabe traditional stories have more in common with modern fiction in terms of form, characterization, and narrative structure than they do with the traditional way the Anishinaabeg told their stories. Theodore Beaulieu’s publication of the Nanaabozho stories in English allowed him to work toward multiple political goals by addressing two audiences simultaneously. While McNiel argues that Beaulieu’s novelistic English

32

adam spry

is simply a product of his attempt to present the Naanabozho stories in a way that “best suit[ed] the intended audience” of “educated Anishinaabe” (“‘The Game Never Ends,’” 97), the Progress’s readership was not exclusively tribal and was never intended to be so. Letters published in the Progress from various white business owners, local priests, and editors of newspapers Beaulieu targeted for criticism show the Progress to have a sizable non-Native readership, even off the reservation. For his Anishinaabe readers, Beaulieu’s stories of Naanabozho’s tricky resistance against unbeatable odds were, as McNiel argues, a “communal invocation of the people’s enduring strength and humor” (88). At the same time, the stories worked against negative representations of the Anishinaabe caused by his Euro-American readership’s “lack of literary acumen.” By creating one of the first articulations of Anishinaabe literature, Beaulieu proved his people capable of as much intellectual depth and artistic genius as their supposedly superior colonizers, while also conveying a sense of their cultural identity and articulating a position of Anishinaabe survival and resistance. However, in order to address both audiences, Beaulieu’s stories had to embrace “a new tribal hermeneutics,” radically transforming the Anishinaabe oral tradition at the most basic levels of form and structure. Ultimately, it was only through reimagining and reexpressing the oral tradition that Beaulieu could work toward his political goals of Anishinaabe survivance and sovereignty. ✹  ✹  ✹

Gerald Vizenor’s first experience with the Progress came shortly after he published the first edition of Summer in the Spring in 1965, when he was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota (see Vizenor, A Brief Historical Study). By chance, a reference librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society guided the young Vizenor to a bound collection of the original newsprint. Reading through the newspaper, Vizenor “was transformed, inspired, and excited by a great and lasting source of native literary presence and survivance” (Vizenor, Native Liberty, 36). What likely drew Vizenor’s attention the most on that afternoon, however, “was a flavor of iconoclasm in many of these critical reports and editorials appearing on the front page” (A Brief Historical Study, 27). Vizenor acknowledges the importance of the Progress to his career by explaining that his first encounter with the paper “provided a privy trace of assurance to consider a career as a writer” in an era in which the idea of contemporary Native writing was

“It may be revolutionary in character”

33

almost unthinkable (Native Liberty, 36). Indeed, to a modern critic, it is difficult not to see echoes of the Progress throughout Vizenor’s work. Like Vizenor’s own writing almost a century later, many of the editorials in the Progress employed caustically satirical humor as a tool of critique. Examining these editorials today, one notices early articulations of themes that would come to be the hallmarks of Vizenor’s own writings. An antiestablishment sensibility, the play of language, and a rejection of imposed discourses of Indianness can all be found in their pages. Vizenor also discovered, of course, Beaulieu’s nascent articulation of a “new tribal hermeneutics” in his rendition of the Anishinaabe oral tradition into English. After leafing through the delicate pages of the Progress for a time, the young Vizenor “looked around the reference room that afternoon for someone to convince that The Progress was absolutely revolutionary” (42). The first revolutionary impact the Progress would make on Gerald Vizenor’s writing came in the form of his reassessment of the dream-song poems he had already published in 1965. As noted earlier, the source for these poems was ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore’s transcriptions of Anishinaabe song published in Chippewa Music I and II (1910, 1913). Vizenor was drawn to Densmore’s texts due to her dedication to representing Anishinaabe music accurately, not only recording the songs on wax-cylinder phonographs and transcribing Anishinaabemowin lyrics but also seeking out translations and explanations of meaning from her tribal informants. Vizenor describes Densmore as “one of the most sensitive musicologists and ethnologists” to work with the Anishinaabeg (Summer in the Spring [1993], 19), due to her recognition that she was not working with a static primitive culture. As Densmore put it, “Chippewa songs are not petrified specimens; they are alive with the warm red blood of human nature” (Chippewa Music, 1). Yet, unlike Beaulieu, Densmore’s purpose in recording dream songs was not to celebrate the artistry and creativity of the Anishinaabeg but to prove their inherent inferiority to Euro-Americans. Densmore believed that the complexity of musical expression among a given people acted as an indicator of the degree of their civilization (see Moon, “The Quest for Music’s Origin”). She also believed that the colonized people would naturally take on the obviously superior musical forms of their colonial masters and already saw evidence of this acceptance among the Anishinaabeg, who integrated elements of Euro-American music into their own songs. Therefore she sought to preserve the oldest and most “authentic” versions of the songs, excluding any that did not conform to her own assumption of what Anishinaabe song

34

adam spry

should sound like (see Densmore, Chippewa Music II, 1–2, on the importance of establishing a song’s “identity”). However, the most damning fault of Densmore’s transcriptions in Chippewa Music is not ideological but rather that her literal transcriptions were unable to capture some of the important qualities of Anishinaabe song. As Anishinaabe anthropologist Gail Guthrie Valaskakis argues, “In Densmore’s report, there can be no smell of buckskin and woodsmoke, no soul-searing sound of the drums, or piercing voice of the singers, no collective motion of the dancers” (Indian Country, 195).Valaskakis’s assessment points to the same impossibility of translation that Vizenor articulates regarding the oral tradition of the Anishinaabeg. Any attempt to represent Anishinaabe songs fully in text can never capture the imaginative moment of creation and expression in which the songs were performed. Valaskakis also argues that Chippewa Music fails to capture the power of Anishinaabe song because “there is no analysis of the affective and ideological meaning of practice, ritual of ceremony that embraces these songs and empowers the Chippewa in the experience of their daily lives” (195). Densmore’s motivations for collecting Anishinaabe songs was not to convey their distinct cultural meaning or affective religious or social power but, rather, solely to preserve them for scientific study. Ultimately, Valaskakis concludes, “This document of our past is an enormously valuable goad to our personal and public memories, but it is essentially a dictionary of historical songs— obscure, distant, and lifeless” (195). These observations about Densmore’s methodology and resulting texts hints at their effect in Vizenor’s Summer in the Spring. As Kimberly Blaeser notes, “If the accuracy of Densmore’s work is challenged . . . then Vizenor’s ‘reexpressions,’ of course, become suspect as well” (Gerald Vizenor, 216– 17n6). The 1965 versions of the poems appear nearly exactly as they were translated in Chippewa Music, due to Vizenor’s belief that the songs “were so concisely rendered by Densmore that no changes were made except in word and line order” (Summer in the Spring [1965], 15). The 1965 version of Summer in the Spring certainly may be seen as suspect, as fidelity to Densmore’s authoritative translations is Vizenor’s intent. Vizenor’s interpretive strategy appears to have undergone a radical transformation with the publication of Anishinabe Nagamon in 1970, eliminating any concern about the suspect authenticity of the dream songs. In this collection Vizenor heavily revises almost every poem, sometimes drastically changing them from the way they originally appeared in 1965. After

“It may be revolutionary in character”

35

Vizenor had been exposed to the “new tribal hermeneutics” of Beaulieu’s stories, he showed an increased willingness to change the formal elements of Densmore’s “authentic” transcriptions in order to emphasize the literary quality of his re-expressions. The relationship between Beaulieu’s formal interventions and Vizenor’s may be difficult to discern, as their texts trace opposite trajectories but are working toward the same goal. Whereas Beaulieu’s re-expressions of the Naanabozho stories move toward greater coherence, structure, and causality in order to adhere better to the conventions of novelistic fiction, Vizenor’s poems move toward a greater indeterminacy, polysemy, and openness to reflect better the conventions of his preferred literary form—haiku. Yet, both interventions are carried out to re-express the oral tradition according to the conventions of written literary forms. As many have noted, Densmore’s transcriptions of Anishinaabe dream songs share many similarities with Japanese haiku in that they are concise, highly visual representations of experience in nature. Kimberly Blaeser explains that haiku as a form operates as an “open text” that she defines as “a text that works by suggestion, implication, absence, allusion, and juxtaposition, that works through intentional gaps, indeterminacy in various forms, and the practice of many kinds of restraint in language” (Gerald Vizenor, 119). Blaeser believes that Densmore’s transcriptions are similarly “open texts,” but she is quick to point out that there is a “central question about whether the Japanese quality was inherent in the original Ojibway dream songs or merely ‘crept into’ Densmore’s translations” (110). Vizenor, as an artist, operates outside this discourse of authenticity. If Densmore’s Japanese style is incidental, Vizenor’s is decidedly purposeful. Vizenor definitively embraces a haiku-like poetry as the literary model for his re-expressions, as can be seen in his treatment of a text that originally appeared as “Song of the Crows” in Chippewa Music. In the 1965 version of Summer in the Spring, the wording of the song is almost unchanged from the Densmore translation: The first to come I am called Among the birds. The rain I bring Crow is my name. ([1965], 19)

36

adam spry

In Anishinabe Nagamon, the same poem appears in an altered form, without a title, using more sophisticated—and polysemic—language: the first to come epithet among the birds bringing the rain crow is my name (43) While the theme of the poem remains the same, the Anishinabe Nagamon version of “Song of the Crows” opens itself to a greater number of possible readings—readings that had previously been foreclosed by the formal elements of punctuation and vocabulary. Where the punctuation in the 1965 version of the poem created enjambment that forced a linear relationship between one line and the next, Vizenor’s removal of punctuation imparts each of the lines with an element of conceptual autonomy. Each line can now be read as an individual unit, a paratactical movement from one idea to another. Like Theodore Beaulieu’s Naanabozho stories, Vizenor’s updated version of the poem does not shy away from a more sophisticated vocabulary than is found in Densmore’s translations. By using the semantically charged “epithet” rather than the explanatory “I am called,” Vizenor creates an even greater indeterminacy in the poem, leading to several possible readings. The crow may be called “the first to come” as a name, or the name of the crow itself may be a term of abuse. At the same time, the use of a word of such cosmopolitan etymology as “epithet” allows Vizenor to address the conceptual limits of Densmore’s transcriptions. For the sake of clarity and accuracy, Densmore’s translations rely on a very simple English that inherently prohibits the expression of sophisticated thought. By introducing complex language into the poems, Vizenor works against the construction of the Anishinaabeg as a primitive people incapable of expressing themselves in such a refined and “civilized” manner. All of these changes work to transform the Densmore transcription into an “open text,” but the most explicit formal shift in Vizenor’s revision of the poem is his effacement of the pronoun “I” in order to bring his re-expression into line with the literary conventions of haiku. As Vizenor observes, similarities do exist between Anishinaabe dream songs and haiku, but there is a distinct difference: “ego in dream songs . . . is dominant; in haiku, of course, it’s

“It may be revolutionary in character”

37

much more subtle” (Bowers, Silet, and Vizenor, “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” 42). Like the poem here, Patricia Haseltine notes that throughout the post-1965 versions of the re-expressions, Vizenor “has removed or deemphasized the first person pronoun in some of the poems . . . making [them] closer to the haiku” (“The Voices of Gerald Vizenor,” 32). The deletion of the first person pronoun from the songs demonstrates that Vizenor’s interest is not in preserving an historically authentic utterance but rather in attempting to imagine the song in a new literary form—that of haiku. Another intervention Vizenor makes is the juxtaposition of several songs on the same page, though these were originally published separately. This invites the reader to treat the poems as conceptually linked. In the 1981 version of Summer in the Spring, the 1970 “Song of the Crows” is paired on the page with a shorter poem: the first to come epithet among the birds bringing the rain crow is my name my music reaching to the sky (25) Vizenor includes nothing on the page or in the interpretive notes to indicate whether the reader should approach this text as separate poems or merely two stanzas of one larger lyric. Vizenor uses this juxtaposition to lead each text toward a greater openness as the reader contemplates the implied relationship of the poems, and, indeed, every other poem in the collection. This arrangement of the poems in the later editions of Summer in the Spring (1981, 1993) removes the last traces of Densmore’s ethnographic categorization. Vizenor arranges them in the collections not according to imposed categories, but rather, his artistic desires—the connections he draws between the songs are products of his own imaginative intervention. This formal technique has similar effects as Theodore Beaulieu’s formal treatment of the Naanabozho stories. In both instances, Vizenor and Beaulieu purposefully unite utterances in text for reasons of greater literary or artistic impact, even though they had borne no formal connections in the oral tradition.

38

adam spry

After the initial publication of the prose and poetry as the separate volumes Anishinabe Nagamon and Anishinabe Adisokan, Vizenor published both in a single volume with a new edition of Summer in the Spring (1981). The juxtaposition of the Beaulieu texts with the re-expressed dream songs in the same book situates Vizenor’s re-expressions in their cultural context, making clear their interpretive function for the poems. Beaulieu’s translation of Day-Dodge’s and Say-coss-gay’s teachings offers explanations of the themes that are repeated throughout the poems of Summer in the Spring, such as the importance of dreams in the daily lives of the Anishinaabeg, the ability of animals to communicate with humans, and the great healing power of the Midéwiwin. Employed in this way, the Beaulieu stories act in a similar fashion to Vizenor’s “haiku envoys,” described as “a prose concentration and discourse on the images and sensations” of his haiku poems, which he uses to express the connections between “haiku sensations and tribal survivance.” Vizenor explains, “practice combines my experiences in haiku with natural reason in tribal literature,” creating “a new haiku hermeneutics” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 60). Like Vizenor’s haiku envoys, the Beaulieu texts work to situate the dream-song poems in a specific context in relation to tribal literature that illuminates their meaning without offering a definitive interpretive statement. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the interventions Vizenor makes to Densmore’s authoritative transcriptions in Anishinabe Nagamon and later editions actually make the poems better reflections of Anishinaabe culture and beliefs, reimbuing the songs with a sense of affective power and ritual meaning. This is due to Vizenor’s use of the Beaulieu texts as interpretive guides to the cultural context in which the songs were created, again showing the utility of the Beaulieu texts as “a new tribal hermeneutics” in that they literally function as interpretations of the dream songs. This function can be shown by examining multiple revisions of a poem as it moves closer to an expression of Anishinaabe consciousness through Vizenor’s interpretation of it through the Beaulieu texts. The following song appears as item 64 in Densmore’s Chippewa Music, labeled as an “Initiation Song” sung by a Mide healer, Ki’tcimak’wa: What is this I promise you? The skies shall be bright and clear for you That is what I promise you. (82)

“It may be revolutionary in character”

39

In the 1965 version of Summer in the Spring, the poem appears with the title “Mide Initiation Song.” Vizenor explains in an interpretive note that “Most of the Ojibway words in this song were obscure” (73n25), and therefore he closely followed the Densmore translation, only regularizing the line breaks and inserting the word “Spring” to reflect the season of Midéwiwin initiation: What is this I promise you? The Spring skies Will be bright And clear for you. This is what I promise you. (25) In the 1970 Anishinabe Nagamon version, the wording of the poem is significantly reworked by Vizenor, and appears without a title or punctuation: what is this i promise you he hi hi hi the sky will be bright and clear for you this is what i promise you ho ho ho ho (72) The most apparent change to the poem is the inclusion of the vocalizations “he hi hi hi” and “ho ho ho ho,” which were not included in either the Densmore translation or the 1965 version of Summer in the Spring. The vocalizations do appear, however, in Densmore’s original Anishinaabemowin transcription, where she notes the song contains “[a]n unusual number of vowel syllables,” used simply “to fill out the measures of the song,” and that “the syllables ho ho ho ho . . . indicate the conclusion of a song” (Chippewa Music, 81, 106). Vizenor’s reinsertion of the “obscure” vocables into the poem is explained by the Beaulieu texts, which show that the vocables themselves have power, as illustrated in Beaulieu’s account of the resurrection of a young child by a Midéwiwin healer that Vizenor reprints in Anishinabe Adisokan:

40

adam spry Upon entering the lodge he ran around to the left side of the lodge exclaiming whe, whe, whe, whe, at every step. In his hands he held a mashkiki pouch and when he had made a complete circle of the lodge he stopped and making a motion towards the body of dead child with the mashkiki pouch which he held in his hands, he exclaimed, whay, ho, ho, ho. The body of the child quivered and after this had been repeated the fourth time the dead child came to life. (74)

The importance to Midéwiwin tradition of the otherwise “obscure” vocables “he, hi, hi, hi,” and “ho, ho, ho, ho” is shown in Beaulieu’s account. As Kimberly Blaeser notes, such untranslatable vocables play an important role in tribal literature, as they tie written expression back to the affective power of the oral tradition. As Blaeser argues, because “the remembered sounds themselves have power” they function “to place [Vizenor’s] own writing in the oral tradition of the midewiwin [sic] songs,” symbolically imbuing Vizenor’s poems with the same affective properties of healing and reintegration (Gerald Vizenor, 23). Healing and liberation are Vizenor’s ultimate goals in publishing Summer in the Spring, just as they were for Theodore Beaulieu a century earlier. Although many years have passed between the lives of these two writers, the Oshki Anishinaabeg still face tremendous—albeit different—challenges. Instead of having to prove their equality to Euro-Americans as they did during the period of allotment and Indian agents, one of the greatest difficulties facing the Anishinaabe people of today is to convince the world that they still exist. Complicating this project is the fact that most of the Oshki Anishinaabeg have little access to Anishinaabemowin, having been forced to adopt a language that “has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities”— English (Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 105). Forcibly denied their traditions and language, many Oshki Anishinaabeg have been inflicted with the disease of cultural amnesia, a vacuum of identity that is filled with the damaging representations of Indianness imposed by a dominant power invested in equating the terms “Native” and “extinct.” Through the project of recovery of the Anishinaabe oral tradition from the historical archive in Summer in the Spring, Vizenor is able to offer healing to the Oshki Anishinaabeg by reconnecting them with their history, beliefs, and culture. But more important, the texts Vizenor employs for the project

“It may be revolutionary in character”

41

are, much like the Oshki Anishinaabeg themselves, products of a complex history of hybridity, interpretation, and cultural mediation. While Densmore’s transcribed dream songs attempted to deny the traces of contact and negotiation, and therefore served to trap the Anishinaabeg in a static past, the stories Vizenor has found in the Progress already explicitly bear the marks of survivance in the face of overwhelming odds. Yet, by embracing the “new tribal hermeneutics” of re-expression and reimagination that he finds in the stories of his great uncle, Vizenor is able to create from a record resigned to Native absence an important articulation of the continued presence of the Anishinaabeg. Using the same technology of written English that had previously been employed to delimit and dominate his people, Vizenor proves in Summer in the Spring that the written word—the very characters on the printed page—can be truly revolutionary.

references Beaulieu, Theodore H., ed. Progress. White Earth, MN: White Earth Agency, 1886– 1889. Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Bowers, Neal, Charles L. P. Silet, and Gerald Vizenor. “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” MELUS 8, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 41–49. Densmore, Frances. Chippewa Music. Bulletin of the US Bureau of Ethnography 45. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1910. ———. Chippewa Music II. Bulletin of the US Bureau of Ethnography 53. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1913. Haseltine, Patricia. “The Voices of Gerald Vizenor: Survival Through Transformation.” American Indian Quarterly 9, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 31–47. McNiel, Elizabeth. “‘The Game Never Ends’: Gerald Vizenor’s Gamble with Language and Structure in Summer in the Spring.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no. 2 (1995): 85–109. Meyer, Melissa. The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Moon, Krystyn R. “The Quest for Music’s Origin at the St. Louis World’s Fair: Frances Densmore and the Racialization of Music.” American Music 28, no. 2 (2010): 191–210. Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

42

adam spry

Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Velie, Alan. “The Trickster Novel.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 121–39. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Vizenor, Gerald. Anishinabe Adisokan: The Tales of the People. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1970. ———. Anishinabe Nagamon: The Songs of the People. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1970. ———. A Brief Historical Study and General Content Description of a Newspaper Published on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Becker County, Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. ———. “The Envoy to Haiku.” Chicago Review 39, no. 3 (1993): 55–62. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. ———. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ———. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. ———. Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. New ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. ———. Summer in the Spring: Lyric Poems of the Ojibway. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1965. ———. Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1981.

chapter three

Flying Gerald Vizenor Home in Words and Myths Or, How to Translate His Poetry into Catalan

Carme Manuel My choice of words are imagistic, obviously, and the words become metaphors with multiple references and meaning . . . Imagistic words and metaphors are never direct, and there are often many variations in meaning. —Gerald Vizenor (pers. comm.)

O

n July 3, 1939, two weeks before the Spanish Civil War broke out, an article by Carles Cardó titled “Del plaer i del turment de traduir” (“On the Pleasure and Torment of Translating”) was published in the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya (The Voice of Catalonia). Montserrat Bacardí explains that, among other considerations, this article stressed the need to advance the translation of foreign books into Catalan (“1936,” 133). In fact, from the late decades of the nineteenth century, Catalan intellectuals and writers repeatedly voiced the need to engage in a politics of translation as a way to help enforce their policy of linguistic and cultural normality. Translation was the way to broaden horizons, to endow the Catalan publishing world with an air of universalistic regularity, and to shape Catalan as a language suitable to all expressive uses. In sum, translation was an ideological weapon against the impoverishment of a language oppressed by the power of centralized governmental institutions and the overwhelming presence of Spanish. Traditional translation theorists argue that poetry loses in translation or is untranslatable. Obviously if this were so, a good number of people would have been working for nothing since the beginning of time. Contrary to this fatalistic vision of one of the oldest jobs in the world, there are other theorists who argue that translators are reinterpreters, preservers, illustrators, and illuminators. In fact, translators are both servants and masters. They are servants to the original meaning of the text they serve and masters of a new rewriting of that same text. Daniel Weissbort declares that “the 43

44

carme manuel

translator, however guarded, is in essence a sharer, an enthusiast” (Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, xiv). It is, however, translation theorist André Lefevere who best describes my translation practice. Lefevere defines translators as people “in the middle . . . who do not write literature, but rewrite it.” They are “responsible for the general reception and survival of works of literature among non-professional readers, who constitute the great majority of readers in our global culture, to at least the same, if not a greater extent than the writers themselves” (Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 1). This is particularly true in my case. As a translator and editor of books never before translated into Catalan—or into Spanish—and as a person who can devote herself to translation as an avocation, I can always afford to choose the subject of my work. This makes it possible for me to say, perhaps ostentatiously, that “I am what I translate.” In fact, explaining the genealogy of translation in the West, Lefevere writes that “translation involves expertise” but also “commission,” although there are instances where the translator “auto-commissions his or her own translation, simply because s/he falls for the text” (“Translation: Its Genealogy in the West,” 14). I auto-commission my own translations because I always translate after my proposal has been accepted by a publisher. Hence my accountability as a “rewriter,” since, according to Lefevere, “in the past, as in the present, rewriters create images of a writer, a work, a period, a genre, sometimes even a whole literature” (Translation, Rewriting, 5). As a child of linguistic survivors of Francisco Franco’s regime of linguistic fascism, I am naturally alert to questions of oppression and colonialism. Gerald Vizenor attracted me not just because he is a poet, but also because he is a Native American poet who paradoxically can be both intensely personal and universal when representing his identity in the most powerful discourse of ethical and political work: literary language. As a rewriter for Catalan language my reasons for translating Vizenor were manifold—not least of all to have what I consider to be one of America’s greatest authors read in my language. First, I aimed at a newer and fuller representation of Native American literature in Catalan. My levels of what Lefevere would call “effective manipulation” (9) extend beyond the mere limits of poetological motivations. My rewriting is inspired by ideological reasons and when I produce a translation, edit a text, or work on an anthology of authors, I am aware that I am adapting and manipulating to some extent the originals and yet, at the same time, struggling fiercely to respect them.

flying gerald vizenor home

45

Lefevere explains that there are two factors that basically determine the image of a work of literature as projected by a translation. In order of importance they are the translator’s ideology and the poetics dominant in the target literature when the translation is produced (41). As far as the former element is concerned, I can say I have no imposed ideology because I am always the initiator of the process. As far as the second factor is concerned, contemporary Catalan literature is more alive and kicking than ever before in its history. This is also due to ongoing debates about the centrality of language identities. Catalan language is still viewed by most critics as the keystone of definitions of nationality and identity, and as such, Catalan writing has incorporated the experience of Catalan-speaking immigrants and addresses the different discourses of integration, assimilation, and exclusion. Vizenor’s poetry, firmly anchored in his politics of liberation, challenges the depictions of Native Americans traditionally found not only in America but worldwide in literature, history, and popular culture. The way Vizenor confronts stereotypical distortions of Indianness in their romanticized or victimized versions establishes cultural parallelisms of representation for ideologically aware Catalan readers. For Lefevere, ideology “dictates the basic strategy the translator is going to use and therefore also dictates solutions to problems concerned with both the ‘universe of discourse’ expressed in the original (objects, concepts, customs belonging to the world that was family to the writer of the original) and the language the original itself is expressed in” (41). These attitudes are directly related to the kind of translator one defines herself to be. For Lefevere, there are two main categories: the faithful translator and the spirited translator. I identify myself with the first type of translators, and so I will first provide the theorist’s definition of the second kind. The spirited translator, argues Lefevere, is “less awed than the ‘faithful translator’ by the prestige of the original, wants to shock his audience by updating the original so that it loses part of its classical status; takes risks in anachronisms” (50). In contrast, the faithful translator “tends to be conservative in both ideological and poetological terms. He translates the way he does out of reverence for the cultural prestige the original has acquired” (50). Whether in reverence, respect, veneration, or awe, I confront the original with deep anxiety. Spirited translators can tackle their task with a more playful attitude, most probably because they are confident in their own creative skills and abilities. Thinking of oneself as a writer may facilitate the transformation of form and content since, no matter what the result turns

46

carme manuel

out to be, it can always be considered a genuine literary recreation by another writer. This is not my case. As a committed “rewriter,” my loyalty is always first and foremost to the spirit of the original text, and whenever possible, to its letter. The reviews that my previous translations have received have made me happily aware of the cultural power of the translator. As a consequence, my rewriting inescapably shapes the reception of a work (Almost Ashore), an author (Gerald Vizenor), a literature (modern Native American writing), or a society (Native American communities in United States) in a culture (Catalan) different from its culture of origin. Quasi en terra—the title of my translation of Almost Ashore—is a facingpage edition that makes the Catalan translation of Vizenor’s poems available to Catalan readers for the first time. Yet, even if they can check my rewriting against the original, as Lefevere argues, my translation, “quite simply is the original.” This turns out to be so because “rewriters and rewritings project images of the original work, author, literature, or culture that often impact many more readers than the original does” (110). When discussing what good translators do, Lawrence Venuti argues that the foreign author’s intention cannot travel unadulterated across a linguistic and cultural divide. Even if “a translation always communicates an interpretation,” this transformation, supplemented with features peculiar to the translating language, is made comprehensible in a distinctively domestic style. For Venuti, translations “inevitably perform a work of domestication” (The Scandals of Translation, 5). The question then is what this work of domestication entails. What does it really consist of? I daresay it very much depends on the translator’s approach to her task. For Venuti, those translators who work best are “the most powerful in recreating cultural values and the most responsible in accounting for that power” (5). As a faithful translator, my domestication tries to preserve the sanctity of the original text and its aesthetic values, even if at the same time it betrays a frank sense of personal appropriation. As the woman “in the middle,” as the one between Vizenor’s words and Catalan readers, I tackled the translation of Almost Ashore with definite priorities in mind. The first was to transport the source text (his poems) into the most accurate equivalence in Catalan. My second concern was to rewrite his cultural world and values in terms acceptable to my ideal Catalan readers. In 1992 Malcolm Coulthard explained that “the translator’s first and major difficulty is . . . the construction of a new ideal reader who, even if he has the same academic, professional and intellectual level as the original reader, will

flying gerald vizenor home

47

have significantly different textual expectations and cultural knowledge” (“Linguistic Constraints on Translation,” 12). Taking into account his approach to the definition of the ideal reader and as part and parcel of that imagined community of Catalan readers, I attribute to them knowledge of certain facts, memory of certain experiences, opinions, preferences, and prejudices which act as relevant background to my rewriting. To achieve my first goal I believed I had to be thoroughly knowledgeable about Vizenor’s word-world. Palma Zlateva highlights the fact that “the translator’s knowledge is . . . the result of information about the author’s universe of discourse acquired from other texts. In practice the translator often knows more about the literary tradition the author writes in, but less about his living reality” (“Translation: Text and Pre-Text ‘Adequacy’ and ‘Acceptability’ in Crosscultural Communication,” 31). This requirement that I set for myself required my rereading with new eyes Vizenor’s fundamental books, studies of his work, and enlightening interviews. Zlateva also states that “the acceptability of a translated text in the target language should be considered part of the adequacy of its translation” (29). Vizenor’s imagery and language form a specific Vizenorian vocabulary, complex to grasp if the reader has not been initiated into his cosmography. His texts are limitless fields mined with words pregnant with symbolic meanings. The vast array of neologisms, redefinitions of misnomers, allusions, deconstructions of traditional terms, such as “Indian,” aim to reinvent the terms in which Native Americans and Native American experience have been imagined and frozen into a safe colonial space by the conquerors. In addition to this, I had to acquire a thorough knowledge of the dynamics as well as the mechanics of his poetry. How to bring the essence of Vizenor’s haikus into Catalan? How to transport that “intuitive, manner of mediation at a dreamscape,” that “imaginative intersection in the natural,” that “moment of enlightenment” (Blaeser, “Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Liberation,” 259) without losing the spirit that imbues his poems? I tried to enlighten the reader about Vizenor’s literature and wordworld in a prologue to the translation of his poems. This is part of what I wrote in the introduction: According to Gerald Vizenor, literature should always promote change, uneasiness and contradiction. In Other Destinies, Native American writer Louis Owens manifests that Vizenor’s purpose is to free Indianness with the aim of freeing Indian identity from

48

carme manuel an absolute and epic past which defines it by its isolation and tragedy. Throughout his literary work Vizenor has tried to rewrite the concept Indian, to strip it bare of its colonizing connotations and endow it with new meanings. Traditional images and stereotypes can only be dismantled if innovative literary and linguistic structures are created to counterattack the strategies employed by colonial repression. This is the reason why to tackle Vizenorian literature the reader must be acquainted with his literary world. The reader must learn the language Vizenor has deemed necessary to invent. This fresh vocabulary made up of a number of surprising neologisms he has coined, embodies a new gaze onto the world. Its originality casts an ominous shadow over the foundations of what was and, unfortunately, continues to be the past and present approach to the history of Native Americans in North America. If traditional poets are obsessed with language, Vizenor adds a new layer of meaning to this passion and transforms the aesthetic poetic craze into a constant call to the political and ideological. Like a poignant Lewis Carroll, Vizenor breaks down the logic of language and questions the mechanisms of power which lie undercover. He annihilates the fixed meaning of words, shakes language off its roots to make readers aware of its perennial ambiguities. Vizenor describes himself as a tribal wordmaker, an inventor of words inspired in the oral tradition. These tribal words keep their oral power but their sounds express transformative new spiritual energy. Among his neologisms stand the following: 1. An Indian (INDI) is a creation of the colonial history perpetrated by the great European powers and the United States, a nation which has had outrageous consequences on the native population. It is an invention, a pose, a political simulation (in Baudrillard’s terms), which Vizenor tries to unmask and which has nothing to do with the real lives of present descendants of Native Americans. White people devised this new identity for tribal communities in an attempt to alienate them from their original traditions. Thus it is urgent to initiate a war against the white man’s words, words which have fabricated non-existent individualities and identities.

flying gerald vizenor home

2. Manifest manners (FORMES MANIFESTES) is a phrase inspired by the concept of American Manifest Destiny, the white man’s mission as carrier of civilization around the world. For Vizenor, manifest manners are simulations of power and dominion. They are the ideas, inadequate names which are interpreted as authentic representations of what Native Americans truly are. 3. Terminal creeds (CREDOS TERMINALS) are static beliefs which ignore a vital commitment to life and impose a false conception of what Native Americans really are. They enforce static definitions on the world, which end up being destructive. Terminal believers are those people who accept the existence of this suicidal single vision of the world. 4. Survivance (SUPERVIURÈNCIA) is a term which conflates two concepts—survival and resistance. For Vizenor life is only possible if it entails continuous resistance. Literature must necessarily be survivance, that is to say, words pregnant with energy and humor, the only medicine which heals suffering in the world. 5. Postindian (POSTINDI) condition can only be explained if we take into account Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation. For Vizenor, the Indian has never existed in real life. What have always existed are hyperreal simulations of the Indian, created from a model which lacks origins and factual history. Simulations stand as the absence of those true facts which would define tribal communities. Postindian does away with the colonizing inventions with humor, new stories and the simulations of survivance. Vizenor stands as a postindian warrior because, as A. Robert Lee explains, the writer stands as a hunter of simulations trying to define an essentialist position of tribal people. Postindian warriors attack the simulations of dominance using simulations of survivance. 6. Vizenor wants to move the original oral tradition of tribal communities into the written culture with acts of imagination

49

50

carme manuel and literary expression. Shortening the distance between the oral and the written must be ruled by a principle which includes past memories and the memory of the past, spiritual energies, imagination, liberation, and rituals. He names this ancestral world shadow presence (PRESÈNCIA DE LES OMBRES). Shadows also comprise the silence which is felt within stories and contains references to the tribal memories and experience. Shadows are these living memories and remembrances of past histories. Vizenor believes that his mission consists of resurrecting theses shadows through his literary work. 7. The Vizenorian trickster (TRAMPÓS) is a kind of tribal survivor. He takes different forms. Sometimes he is a human being, others he is a coyote, a raven or a hare. Yet he tricks and is tricked; he has no moral sense; he enjoys food and sex; he is irresponsible and always nice. The trickster is reason and mediation, the original translator of tribal meetings. His name already signals a possibility of transformation: from man to woman, from human to animal. Tricksters are the translators of creation, they create tribal communities with their stories and pronounce the moment of memory as a trace of liberation. His humor is his main weapon. Similarly to other Native American writers, Vizenor aims at unmasking and unarming History, at dismantling politics and ideologies thriving under historiography in order to move it from the sacred spaces of objectivism and scientificism to the reigns of fiction and narrativity. And to achieve his aim he uses the implicit strategies underlying the humor of the trickster. Thanks to extraordinary language games, a limitless imagination and an irreverent conception of official History, Vizenor struggles to change the processes of power in order to free readers from preconceived notions and to encourage them to reconsider past and present realities. (“Pròleg,” 12–16)

I found this introduction necessary because, as a faithful translator, my responsibility was to find the right balance between both the imperatives of linguistic transparency and those of Vizenor’s aesthetic expressiveness in Catalan.

flying gerald vizenor home

51

Translators of poetry should try to transfer the expressive and aesthetic values of poetical language into the target language and re-create the beauty of its rhythm, rhyme, and meter. Even if no technique will cater to the poetry translator’s need perfectly, in Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint, André Lefevere proposed seven methods for the translation of poetry: phonemic translation, literal translation, metrical translation, verseto-prose translation, rhymed translation, free-verse translation, and interpretation. From these seven possibilities, I chose the sixth: free-verse translation. This method ignores the rhyme and meter of the original and aims to achieve the accurate equivalents in the target language with sound literary value. This does not mean that I translated lexically but that the result I aimed for remained semantically true to the original. In 1923, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence warned against the tendency to mythicize artists’ opinions about their own work: “The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” (7). As far as poetic texts are concerned, David Connolly argues that “an emotional involvement or affinity can also contribute to the quality of the target text although unless the translator has direct access to the poet it is virtually impossible to be able to say categorically what the poet’s intention is.” Yet, he recognizes that readers are often more informed than authors, and the meaning of a poem lies not with the author but “within the text itself and the reader’s interpretation of it” (“Poetry Translation,” 173). Hence, if “the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 7), the proper function of the translator might also benefit from this liberating ethos. Nevertheless, as a faithful translator and neither a critic nor an academic scholar—and after trying to know about the poet and his literature—I had the opportunity to ask Vizenor questions about his poems. Everybody who has ever met the man who calls himself Gerald Vizenor knows that his worth as a writer pales in comparison with his moral stature as a human being. Vizenor’s generosity made it possible for me to consult with the poet himself via e-mail about my translation problems. I asked him questions that cropped up while I was working on his texts. I wanted to be fully aware of all the possible nuances of the words in the poems. Yet poetry, as well as literary translation, involves a good deal of interpretation and the final choice of a word remained, of course, my sole responsibility.

52

carme manuel

My queries involved two main problems: the lack of punctuation in Vizenor’s poems and many Native American culture- and history-bound expressions and terms. As a general rule, punctuation is used to provide an interpretation of written language. Yet, some poets, Vizenor among them, eliminate punctuation from their poems in order to blur grammatical correctness and transpose the task of making meaning to the reader. Vizenor uses enjambment profusely. Thus his lines are rich in double meanings which are acceptable in English but unreadable if translated literally into Catalan. The translator must then decide where the natural stop should theoretically go, even though it is unwritten. Following is an example of this kind of problem and Vizenor’s answer. QUESTION: “White Earth”: “. . . cathedrals / of the winter nights / crack the ice / and curse / shaman cures / at the shoreline / centerfolds / tricky stories / medicine bundles . . .” Could you punctuate as follows: “cathedrals of the winter nights crack the ice and curse. Shaman cures at the shoreline centerfolds. Tricky stories, medicine bundles . . .”? VIZENOR: Here the word cathedrals turns in two directions, the church, and the metaphor of a natural winter scene. Not a stop, the thought continues from the previous paragraph (saint benedict catholic schools, curse the shaman cures, active sense of cures, or healing power) at the shoreline, and centerfolds refers to the magazines, and some newspapers too, that print pictures of nude women in the center section or the centerfold. The shoreline has become a centerfold of dominance, and then, the tricky stories and medicine bundles, once marooned by soldiers, await the fire, the obsession, fierce, intensity of possession, in museums. The Anishinaabe, or Chippewa have medicine bundles, usually made of otter skins. According to Lefevere, “most translators do not try to convey the literary allusions, except in an ‘explanatory note.’ Maybe because allusions point to the final, real aporia of translation, the real untranslatable, which does not reside in syntactic transfers or semantic constructions, but rather in the peculiar way in which cultures all develop their own ‘shorthand’ which is what allusions really are” (Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of

flying gerald vizenor home

53

Literary Fame, 56–57). I tried to tackle allusions in Vizenor’s poems in a twofold way, depending on the referential background they pointed to. First, I made an educated guess; then I wrote to him to make certain what these allusive terms refer to exactly. Then, if they were culture-bound expressions with some degree of readability in Catalan, I struggled to find a word or phrase which achieved an equivalent effect in this language. Following are some examples. 1. QUESTION: “Family Photograph”: “. . . native tricksters / no indian agents / reservation masters / at the cold rails / on the bridge / counting allotments / forty acres short . . .” Do you refer to the fact that Indians were robbed of 40 acres in each allotment? “Treaty women / naturals at the bar . . .” Do you mean Indian women included in Treaty Land? VIZENOR: Forty acres short. Yes, cheated out of forty acres by federal agents, forty acres stolen. Treaty women. Yes, women of the federal treaty land allotments. MY TRANSLATION: “sense els quaranta acres furtats” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added); “les dones dels tractats” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 2. QUESTION: “Raising the Flag”: “. . . she turned / at the winter bar / . . . / and honored / by song / hole in a day / pillager warriors / at bear island / and sugar point.” What does “hole in a day” refer to? VIZENOR: This is an Anishinaabe name, an eminent native warrior, in translation, and the name is also sometimes translated as hole in the sky, bug-o-nay-ge-shig, or bagone giizhig, hole in the day. MY TRANSLATION: “l’eminent guerrer indi” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 3. QUESTION: “Shaman Breaks.” “. . . mercy stones / out of reach . . . .” What are mercy stones?

54

carme manuel VIZENOR: The warm stones, the mercy of familiar stones, the stones of native experience, out of reach. MY TRANSLATION: “pedres de compassió” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 4. QUESTION: “Hand Prints”: “. . . think about hands / and eyes / spider webs / charms / birch bark / four directions / winter count / figures / eagle feathers / circles of the sun.” What do you mean by “winter count figures”? VIZENOR: These are painted native figures on hides, and the seasons measure the time, winter count, the number of winters. MY TRANSLATION: “figures / sobre una pell d’hivern” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 5. QUESTION: “Bear Walkers”: Walkers of the bear? Does it refer to traditional stories known to members of the Ojibway people? VIZENOR: The bear walkers are in native Anishinaabe stories, they are the mysterious shapes or figures of fire, balls of fire, that have been seen by many natives, and others too, in the outdoors at night, and these figures of fire, maybe a lightning bolt, are very difficult to explain scientifically. Naturally, the bear walkers have uncommon power, and are forever remembered in native stories. MY TRANSLATION: “Ossos caminants” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 6. QUESTION: “Paul Celan”: “. . . summer tease . . .” What do you mean here? “. . . the wild / restrained / by time / and copies / of winter / unwary / untaught / in stories / near the end”? Could you explain this stanza? “. . . paul celan / inspires / our resistance / by state / and portrait . . .” What do you mean by “by state and portrait”? VIZENOR: Summer tease, the tease of the season, summer in the spring, the suggestion of summer.

flying gerald vizenor home

The wild, the wilderness, is restrained by civilization, by time, and the copies of winter, the modern control of winter, of the seasons, is unwary and untaught in stories near the end, the end of the wild and natives. Nature is copied, simulated, and, unwary, none of this is taught near the end. Paul Celan inspires our resistance, by state, institution, government, and by form, picture, and formal portrait, the posed images, and the extremes end in the river, dark and cold, where Celan ended his life. MY TRANSLATION: “engany d’estiu”; “allò salvatge / refrenat / pels temps / i còpies / de l’hivern/ incautes / ignorants / en històries / prop de la fi”; “paul celan / ens inspira / la resistència / al govern / i al retrat . . .” 7. QUESTION: “Camp Grounds”: “. . . aluminium lures / mission lace / plastic flowers / decorate / gruesome traces / of disease / and the fur trade.” Do you mean lace made in the missions, or a special type of lace? VIZENOR: Yes, mission lace was made by students in some mission schools, the children were taught by Catholic nuns to make this lace, or lacework, for the mission. My image comes from the Benedictine School at the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. MY TRANSLATION: “randes de la missió” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 8. QUESTION: “Mission Motel”: “. . . missions cut / around the green / indoor pool / seasoned forever / by chlorine . . .” What do you mean by “missions”? “manifest moteliers / voted early . . .” Do you mean managers of a motel? Is the adjective “manifest” related to “manifest manners”? VIZENOR: The church missions, or the lingering memory of the claims of missionaries, cut around the green, indoor pool. A harsh

55

56

carme manuel image of the legacy of the missionaries. And now the place is a motel with fake grass and the scent of chlorine. “Manifest moteliers,” the showy, demonstrative evidence of the motel owners, or managers. I play here with my critical theory of manifest manners, that is, the manners of dominance over natives that continues as a manifest in language and literature. MY TRANSLATION: “el llegat dels missioners retallat”; “els motelers dominadors” (endnote containing an explanation of the term “manifest” by Vizenor as explained in his Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance and in his explanation to me). 9. QUESTION: “Sandprints”: “. . . museum / court names / money / manners / and erase / impermanence / by stone / encomium . . .” Do you refer to the fact that museums petrify the transcendental meanings? VIZENOR: The museums that court names, contributions of money and manners, are a contrast to the impermanence of stories and prints in the sand that are erased by ocean waves. The museums erase this impermanence of nature with stone sculptures, the praise and tribute of cultural encomium sculpture, that survives only by irony. Compare the waves of the ocean, the natural, artistic images of heart and story erased by the waves, and the waves of irony that survive the posers, that is, the permanent stone monuments in museums. MY TRANSLATION: “els museus / festegen noms / diners / maneres de la dominació / i esborren la temporalitat / amb l’elogi / de la pedra . . .” (endnote containing Vizenor’s explanation added). 10. QUESTION: “Trickster Cats”: “trickster cats / rush the fence / in silence / and roam / on the black / stained / church windows.” Do you mean windows with black glass? VIZENOR: Complicated image here, the church windows are stained black, the windows are black stained glass. The trickster

flying gerald vizenor home

57

cats roam on the black stained church windows, black because of the weather, abandoned church, and, at the same time, the images suggests the windows are black stained glass, a suggestion of menace, evil. MY TRANSLATION: “gats tramposos / corren cap a la tanca / en silenci / I vagaregen / per les finestres / de vidres tacats de negre / de l’esglèsia.” There were other words or phrases which I sensed evoked a situation that was symbolic within his poetological cosmography. Here follow some examples. 1. QUESTION: “Guthrie Theater”: Did you want to stress here the difference between what was going on inside the theater (great productions of “the classics”—Shakespeare, Pinter, etc.) and the tragedies outside lived by the Indian community? Did you have any play staged at the Guthrie in mind when writing the poem? VIZENOR: The point of view of this poem is from outside the theater, the perspective of the narrator, is outside, and observes the salute with the wrong hand, but, as you point out, there is an obvious comparison to the poses, plays inside the theater, and also, at the end of the poem, in the rich suburban hills, the cultural westerns, along with great poser Buffalo Bill who is better understood by the actors than the wounded native who salutes with the wrong hand, the left hand. 2. QUESTION: “Praise Ravens.” Is this an imperative? VIZENOR: Yes, imperative, seven ravens praise the winter, and they are always present, a winter dance over spent cultures, dead in the weeds. The ravens are a native metaphor of survivance. 3. QUESTION: You use “barbed wire” three times: first in “Shaman Breaks”; second in “Crow stories” and third in “Praise Ravens.” Barbed wire was invented by Joseph Glidden in 1874 and it provided a cheap and effective solution for homesteaders to fence lands. Do

58

carme manuel you use “barbed wire” in these poems as an element of connoting oppression, theft of native lands, frontier lines, exclusion of natives? VIZENOR: Barbed wire encloses, excludes, separates, divides the land, once native land, a symbol and metaphor of separation, containing the natives. 4. QUESTION: In “City Crumbs” you write: “noisy sparrows / under a faded / john deere sign.” Homesteaders also had problems plowing and sowing the grassland, as it was very tough to break and cast iron ploughs broke. The solution arrived with machinery from the East, such as John Deere’s sodbuster. I wonder if your reference to the “john deere sign” has to do with the land originally robbed from Indians and wasted by homesteaders’ methods of cultivation. VIZENOR: John Deere sign is literal, an actual faded sign of a business, occupied by sparrows. 5. QUESTION: “Eagle feathers” appear in “White Earth,” “Raising the Flag” and “Hand Prints.” I wonder if you use them as symbols of religion and spirituality. If this is so I think I should add a footnote explaining the eagle feather law. VIZENOR: The eagle feather is a powerful symbol in totems and ceremonial clothing. There are many eagles, and only some of them are protected by law. 6. QUESTION: “Medicine Hat.” “ jacob werner / waves a white hose . . .” I have found that Jacob Werner was an agricultural engineer who influenced decisions regarding irrigation and water supply infrastructure in Alberta across Canada. Do you refer to this historical character? If so, why do you bring him into the poem? VIZENOR: Jacob Werner is a real person. He, Jacob, waved his hose, an ordinary man, an immigrant, who lived in a small house and tended to his garden. A scene from memory. I admired his garden and he asked my name. I asked him about his family, his wives, and he told me he was an immigrant.

flying gerald vizenor home

59

7. QUESTION: Treuer Pond? Has it any historical or personal connotations? VIZENOR: Treuer Pond, a pond on the farm land of an acquaintance, Robert Treuer, located in northern Minnesota, near the Leech Lake Reservation. A personal connection. 8. QUESTION: In “White Earth,” does wild rice refer to river? Does wild rice in “Shaman Breaks” refer to river too? VIZENOR: Wild rice, is a plant that grows in slow moving water, and has been harvested by natives as a basic food. Natives continue to harvest wild rice, but in fact, the rice is actually a grass that looks like rice. So, manners of silence, over wild rice, is an image of silence as natives gather wild rice in the autumn. And, in “Shaman Breaks,” the river shores and wild rice fields were overturned. After consulting with Vizenor and making sure that I understood the word-for-word meaning of each line of the poems, I could allow myself to depart from the original as much as I felt appropriate. This is a moral issue for me. I could make a choice that I could always justify on the basis of my knowledge of the meaning of the source text. My task was to keep the concision of Vizenor’s language, the force and power of his symbols and allusions, without running into verbose explanations that could weigh down his lines. My second objective was to transform Vizenor’s cosmography into Catalan. The theoretical debate concerning cultural knowledge and cultural differences has traditionally concentrated on “words and phrases that are so heavily and exclusively grounded in one culture that they are almost impossible to translate into the terms—verbal or otherwise—of another,” explains Samira Mizani (“Cultural Translation,” n.p.). Differences between Native American and Catalan culture are obvious, but they share some parallels that might provide a common understanding despite the apparent distance: a history of oppression, marginalization, and defeat. Thus, in order to achieve my second goal I turned to the use of paratextual elements—endnotes and an introduction to Vizenor’s literature. According to Lefevere, because of the wide divergence among universes of discourse, the translator has to supplement the imagination of readers “traditionally by smuggling wordy explanations into the text, or by

60

carme manuel

relying on footnotes” (Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 86). As a faithful translator, I made use of explanatory notes because I deemed them crucial for two reasons. First, because I wanted “to ensure that the reader reads the translation—interprets the text—in the ‘right’ way”; and second, because I used them “to ‘resolve’ any discrepancies that may be thought to exist between the actual text of the original and the current authoritative interpretation of that text” (50). I am grateful to my publisher, Vicent Berenguer, for allowing me to write as many endnotes as I felt appropriate: sixty-four in total. The advantage of endnotes is that they do not spoil the original layout of the page. It may be argued that they cause inconvenience because the reader has to move backward and forward, but these exist only at his or her whim, and they are not a distraction on first reading. Being placed at the end of the book, these endnotes are as long as I believed necessary. Some contain bibliographical references, others are used for additional information pertaining to the subject in the poetic text, others contain Gerald Vizenor’s own explanations in response to my questions about a particular term or allusion, and others illuminate specific words or expressions. All of them would have been too digressive for the main text and would have interrupted the flow of reading. My job as a translator remains invisible while, at the same time, my presence paradoxically helps only those readers who want some guidance in their search for more cultural and historical background. Moreover, they allowed me to escape the limitations imposed on the translation of poetic lines. My endnotes are neither academic nor scholarly since they serve a strategic purpose: to allow Catalan readers to imbibe the profundity of Vizenor’s allusive language without marring the autonomy of his poems. “Translation involves trust: the audience, which does not know the original, trusts that the translation is a fair representation of it,” declares Lefevere rightly (“Translation: Its Genealogy in the West,” 14). And this trust is given not only to me, as an alleged expert, but also by implication to the person who checks on me: my publisher. Our working method was based on a friendly exchange of opinions. When the editor picked up a word in Catalan that I did not feel reflected the original Vizenorian meaning, we would go to great lengths to agree on a final preference that best reflected what I believed the source text really embodied and its ideal refraction in the target language. Almost Ashore is not an easy book. Vizenor is not an easy writer. “I think I’m an upsetter,” he told Neal Bowers and Charles L. P. Silet nearly

flying gerald vizenor home

61

thirty years ago (“An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” 41). The allusiveness of his language, the layers of historical and cultural Native American dispossession through the American history of imperialism and racism are overwhelmingly present and active in most of his poems. Vizenor is a poet for the recovery of historical memory, a poet who keeps the past present in every line he traces on the snow-white surface of what is his poetical trail of tears. “Native American Indian literatures have endured the manifest manners of translation for more than three centuries. The sudden closures of the oral in favor of the scriptural are unheard, and the eternal sorrow of lost sounds haunts the remains of tribal stories in translation,” once complained Vizenor (“The Ruins of Representation,” 9). Quasi a terra is one of the many Catalan rewritings that Almost Ashore may inspire, but the first to inaugurate much needed knowledge of Native American writing.

references Bacardí, Montserrat. “1936: L’hora de les traduccions.” Quaderns. Revista de traducció 2 (1998): 133–37. Blaeser, Kimberly M. “Gerald Vizenor: Postindian Liberation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, 257–69. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Bowers, Neal, Charles L. P. Silet, and Gerald Vizenor. “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” MELUS 8, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 41–49. Connolly, David. “Poetry Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Edited by Mona Baker, 170–76. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Coulthard, Malcolm. “Linguistic Constraints on Translation.” Studies in Translation / Estudos da Traducao, Ilha do Desterro 28 (1992): 9–23. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Mercury Books, 1965. Lefevere, André. Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975. ———. “Translation: Its Genealogy in the West.” In Translation, History and Culture. Edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, 14–37. London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990. ———. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

62

carme manuel

Manuel, Carme. “Pròleg. Gerald Vizenor: Un guerrer postindi de la superviurència.” In Quasi en Terra, by Gerald Vizenor, 7–22. Translated by Carme Manuel. València, Spain: Denes, 2009. Mizani, Samira. “Cultural Translation.” TranslationDirectory.com. http://www. translationdirectory.com/articles/article1507.php. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore: Selected Poems. Cambridge, U.K.: Salt, 2006. ———. Quasi en terra [Almost Ashore]. Translated by Carme Manuel. València, Spain: Denes, 2009. ———. “The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance.” American Indian Quarterly 17, no.1 (Winter 1993): 7–30. Weissbort, Daniel, ed. Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth. London: Macmillan, 1989. Zlateva, Palma. “Translation: Text and Pre-Text ‘Adequacy’ and ‘Acceptability’ in Crosscultural Communication.” In Translation, History and Culture. Edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, 29–45. London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990.

chapter four

A lmost California Returning to Elemental Vizenor

Susan Bernardin

I

n “Almost Ashore,” the closing poem of Kimberly Blaeser’s 2006 anthology of contemporary Ojibwe poetry that also provides its title—Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone—Gerald Vizenor writes: winter sea over my shoes shadow last stones every wave turns a season underfoot memory of fire tidal pools slight my hand shoulders almost ashore light breaks my traces blood, bone, stone natural seams (222) The virtual absence of verbs in this poem does not hinder the evocation of motion in time and space. The fluidity of words, refusal of punctuation, and repetition of sounds create a wordscape of changeless change. Its circulation of signature terms in the Vizenor lexicon—traces, seams, shadows, 63

64

susan bernardin

stones—juxtaposes materiality with mutability, the there and not there: bone and stone, memory and shadows. Like the haiku that opened his writing life and that have continued to shape it for fifty years, Almost Ashore teases seasonal presence. The compressed lines and sparing verbs almost complete a thought but purposely remain in need of the reader’s imaginative participation. The poem’s title itself, “almost ashore,” encapsulates Vizenor’s enduring interest in the symbiosis of motion and location, of becoming and being. More specifically, the coupling of these two words redoubles the paradox of place in his work: “almost” occupies a dynamic space of transition while “ashore” constellates multiple vantage points. The title, after all, embodies Vizenor’s penchant for words that contain multitudes. The word “almost” comprises internal contradiction (all/most); “ashore” connotes both a sense of moving toward land and a sense of standing on ground that is itself ungrounded by water’s ceaseless movement. Taken together, the title words compress Vizenor’s decades-long efforts to explode static signifiers, terminal stories, and causal limitations. Like its fitting title, the poem models motion and shifting modes of seeing. In 2006, the same publication year as Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone, Vizenor also published Almost Ashore, a book of “new and nurtured poems.” 1 Not surprisingly, the poem “Almost Ashore” (re)appears, shifted from the end of the anthology of contemporary Ojibwe poetry to the opening words of his book. Moreover, the title poem that meets the reader has suffered a sea change: added lines to each of the four stanzas elaborate and “nurture” the evocation of winter tidal movements. Consistent with Vizenor’s signature practice of producing multiple variations of his work, this version of “Almost Ashore” accumulates place markers that subtly shift context. “Almost Ashore” launches “Crane Dancers”—part 1 of the book—a suite of poems centered on White Earth and Minneapolis; its words echo throughout this section, including the haiku titled “Crow Dance”: “leech lake storm / two plovers run with the waves / natural beat.” However, the first stanza of “Almost Ashore” adds a crucial place name absent in the other 2006 version: “winter sea / over my shoes / shadows / and bright / round stones at san gregorio.” Along with the addition of markers such as “so faraway / in the mountains / and canyons,” “san gregorio” suggestively places this poem not in Minnesota but in California (Almost Ashore, 3). San Gregorio, California, appears as one of the place names, “the actual locations of the original images,” in his haiku collection, Cranes Arise. In Cranes Arise, alternating haiku scenes are inspired largely by locations in

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

65

Minnesota and California, the two states where Vizenor has spent most of his life. San Gregorio, California, instigates the lines: “ant colonies / march over the sand castles / honor the dead” (n.p.). The third line’s elliptical shift reminds us of the form’s simultaneous ability to contract and expand in meaning. Its juxtaposition of the familiar and unfamiliar echoes the pattern of “Almost Ashore,” where natural rhythms of waves and seasons are edged by “blood, bone, stone.” The notable absence of direct interpretive cues in both poems extends to the name “san gregorio.” Like the haiku, “Almost Ashore” seemingly references San Gregorio State Beach, located south of San Francisco near Half Moon Bay. The place-name itself is a trace of what unfolded in the ruinous wake of the 1769 Portolá Expedition along the California coastline. “San Gregorio” compresses the long story of “discovery” set into motion by the Spanish occupation of the central coast of California and the greater Bay Area. A roadside marker, near the entrance to the beach, identifies the site where the “tired and sick” expedition camped by an Ohlone community. The local historical association, in cooperation with California State Parks, encapsulates the official story: California Historical Landmark 26 commemorates the passage of Spanish Explorer Captain Gaspar de Portolá through this area in October 1769. Rancho San Gregorio, consisting of 17,752 acres, was granted to Antonio Buelna in 1839. The rancho extended from Tunitas Creek in the north to the mouth of Pomponio Creek and encompassed the whole of the lower San Gregorio watershed.2 In its emphasis on dates, names, and facts, this account fits the contours of what Paul Carter terms “imperial history”: “the kind of history that pays attention to events unfolding in time alone . . . [and] has as its focus facts . . . The primary object is not to understand or to interpret: it is to legitimate” (The Road to Botany Bay, xvi ). Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith similarly denaturalizes conventions of western historical narrative: “Chronology is important as a method because it allows events to be located at a point in time. The actual time events take place also makes them ‘real’ or factual. In order to begin the chronology a time of ‘discovery’ has to be established” (Decolonizing Methodologies, 30). The historical association completes its enactment of the grammar of discovery by what it does not explicitly mark. To recontextualize Vizenor’s comments in his introduction to Two Wings the Butterfly, what is valued “in

66

susan bernardin

a Japanese ink painting . . . is not the complexity of the detail but the importance of what is not there” (n.p.). Similarly, this history is most notable for what is not there: the perspectives of indigenous California. Yet hidden in plain sight is the name Pomponio Creek, named for an indigenous leader who, in all wildly variant versions of his story, died in armed resistance to Spanish occupiers. Honor the dead? In “Almost Ashore,” “san gregorio” teases the poem’s invitation to supplant tropes of possession with nature’s (and Native) presence. After all, for Vizenor, “The turns and conversions of haiku were not exotic, because nature is my sense of presence, not discovery” (Postindian Conversations, 66, emphasis mine). In its elemental evocation of a world in ceaseless motion, “Almost Ashore” formally and thematically refuses the terminal narration of memorial markers and presumptive narratives of discovery. In an interview with A. Robert Lee, Vizenor addresses elemental facets of his writing: “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” (Postindian Conversations, 141). This essay pursues the place of indigenous California in Vizenor’s work, the tease at the shoreline. California scenes, a lived presence throughout the seasons shaping the haiku in Cranes Arise, are rarely marked as such in the collection Almost Ashore. Yet, like San Gregorio, how might other word-traces close the distance between California and Almost Ashore, many of whose poems dwell in Minnesota? In poems saturated in the elemental presence of trees and ravens, shores and stones, and the exterior and interior landscapes of Minnesota, Vizenor infuses lessons honed by his long California sojourn. In doing so, Almost Ashore not only highlights a kinship of Native survivance across Native nations but also an abiding concern with liberating language, landscapes, and literature to forward those best images of survivance. Vizenor’s tricky inclusion of a name synonymous in the greater California Bay Area with the genocidal occupations following that 1769 “discovery,” reminds us that one of the central stories of his oeuvre, encompassing drama, essay, and fiction, hinges on the seeming endgame of that Portolá expedition: Ishi, California’s most famous “indian,” visually enshrined as the “last wild man” in Joseph Kossuth Dixon’s The Vanishing Race. The “discovery” of Ishi in an Oroville slaughterhouse in 1911, and the five years he subsequently spent at the University of California Museum of Anthropology as living specimen, media curiosity, and companion to anthropologists and

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

67

linguists, seemingly confirmed what those Franciscan padres and Spanish soldiers set out to do when they landed on California shores in the late eighteenth century. Speaking of Ishi and California, Vizenor once observed that, “The landscapes are overburdened with untrue discoveries” (“Naming of Ishi Court,” 41). Vizenor’s writings overturn such burdens, generating alternative readings of Ishi’s story that far exceed the discursive bounds embraced by state markers and official histories alike. Ishi has continued to inspire stories of Native survivance, appearing in paintings by Frank Tuttle, Judith Lowry, and Frank Day, and writings by Paul Chaat Smith, Thomas King, and of course Vizenor, among others. Vizenor’s two decades of teaching in California inform his incursions into the many folds of Ishi’s story, including the contentious status and rights of Native remains (including Ishi’s), repatriation, historical trauma, and the politics of recognition.

“ceci n’est pas ishi” Ishi was not his real name, Vizenor cautions the reader, but a “museum name in Times New Roman” (Postindian Conversations, 76). A word in Yani meaning “one of the people,” or “man,” “Ishi” is a placeholder, like San Gregorio, and even California. Ishi’s refusal to disclose his real name to Alfred Kroeber, Thomas Waterman, and the other academics who befriended and studied him, provides a working paradox that Vizenor fully inhabits in his writings about Ishi: “Ishi was not his native name; he was rescued by cultural anthropologists and named by chance, not by vision” (“Western American Literature Association Achievement Award Lecture,” 99). Every time Vizenor writes Ishi’s name, it is with the full sense of both the silences Ishi deliberately maintained, and the absences he was meant to embody: those of indigenous peoples in California in the early twentieth century. Accordingly, Vizenor’s writings sustain the contradictions comprising Ishi in the official record and Ishi as storier: “ishi is the subject, the object, the absence, the presence, and the main characters in his stories” (Postindian Conversations, 73). Not a rescuer, but an advocate, Vizenor writes a literature of restoration that recasts Ishi as a Native storier of presence. In so doing, he resituates the word “Ishi” in much the same way as the word “indian,” which he has long derided as a simulation. Imagining Ishi, Vizenor bucks the tide, refusing narratives of victimhood, turning Ishi’s story of bereft exile into one of complicated, moving presence.

68

susan bernardin

“Vizenor has had a long and intense fascination with Ishi,” notes Louis Owens in his essay “Staging Indians: Native Sovenance and Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s ‘Ishi and the Wood Ducks’” (227). Vizenor’s varying iterations of Ishi’s story include essays such as “Ishi Bares His Chest,” “Ishi Obscura,” and “Mr. Ishi: Analogies of Exile, Deliverance and Liberty”; novels, such as Trickster of Liberty and Chancers; and a play, “Ishi and the Wood Ducks.” His reprise appearances across genres and across several decades comprise an Ishi poetics. Kimberly Blaeser locates one of Vizenor’s most distinctive strategies as his recursive return to ideas, polishing and repolishing them in diverse forms and formats. Using the example of the ubiquitous red squirrel in his writing, Blaeser notes that, “serial accounts of events model the movement in Vizenor’s work, in which ideas exist in the trickster ‘almost world,’ always on the verge, never captured, never static” (Gerald Vizenor, 203). Recalling his ironic sense of the printed page as an “almost world,” Blaeser quotes Vizenor’s trickster writing(s) that “‘waver on the rim,’ waiting to be overturned and overturned and overturned again” (200).3 Just as the waves turn stones over and over in “Almost Ashore,” Vizenor turns Ishi’s story over and over, reimagining it most pivotally as an example of “how to live in motion, a natural sovereignty” (Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 148). With Ishi, Vizenor generates a poetics of motion, embracing both the multiplicity of his lived experience and its lessons for Native survivance as a stance of ongoing and active resistance. More broadly, his meditations on Ishi serve as springboard for concerns facing indigenous California and the rest of Indian Country: the rights of tribal bones and remains; the power of possession and naming; and the ethical responsibility of academics and institutions to indigenous homelands where they reside and to their traditional owners. Vizenor’s career at the University of California, Berkeley, was marked by his efforts to compel from its administration an official recognition— another kind of commemorative marker—of Ishi’s place in its institutional history. Berkeley’s founding role as a state institution cannot be separated from its founding role in the development of American anthropology, which was largely built on the study of California Indians, including, most notably, Ishi. During Vizenor’s tenure at Berkeley, Ishi’s story also took an unexpected turn upon the “discovery” that his brain had been shipped to the Smithsonian some months following his death in 1916. A tortuous process followed in the wake of this discovery, including ensuing debates about Kroeber’s reasons for sending the brain and Berkeley’s institutional

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

69

culpability; Ishi’s repatriation in 2000 under NAGPRA mandates; and subsequent reburial by Pit River and Redding Rancheria representatives in northeastern California (see Starn, Ishi’s Brain). In essays and lectures, Vizenor has incorporated the shifting tides of Ishi’s story as well as his own role in shaping that story, including his quest, beginning in 1985, to have Berkeley name a section of Dwinelle Hall, as Ishi Hall. To do so, he explicitly turned to California’s suppressed origin story: the state-sanctioned genocide of indigenous peoples following statehood. In the face of repeated delays and resistances to his request, Vizenor wrote to the University of California chancellor in 1992—the year of the Columbus Quincentenary—“the very institutions and the foundational wealth of this state are based on stolen land and the murder of tribal people” (qtd. in Owens, “Staging Indians,” 232). With his advocacy, Vizenor bluntly presented an alternative commemorative marker of state history: “Ishi had endured the hate crimes of miners, racial terrorists, bounty hunters, and government scalpers in northern California. . . . California natives barely survived the gold rush and colonial missions. Only about fifty thousand natives, or one in five of the original estimated population a century earlier, were alive in the state at the turn of the twentieth century. Ishi was one of those survivors” (“Western American Literature Association Achievement Award Lecture,” 98). Vizenor’s public campaign to rename part of Dwinelle Hall unsettled the very grounds on which the university was built. In a lecture given on receiving the Western American Literature Association’s Achievement Award, Vizenor recounted this story: My initiative won wide support from students and faculty, and was unanimously endorsed by the student union at the University of California, Berkeley. . . . Ishi served with distinction the curatorial associations of the new Museum of Anthropology at the University of California. He was generous with his stories, endured without rancor a museum nickname and was, after all, vested as the first native employee of the University of California. . . . None of this information, however, impressed the faculty committee that first considered my proposal. Ishi, in name and service, was denied a byword presence at Berkeley by the Dwinelle Hall Space Subcommittee. After a hearty academic discussion of toilets and closet space the denial of my initiative could not be overturned by any other campus committee. Ishi was connected to the museum by chance and he was twice denied a presence by name; however, seven

70

susan bernardin years later my direct petition to the chancellor resulted in an acceptable compromise. The actual decision had more to do with the politics of federal funds and compliance with the law to repatriate native skeletal remains. There was an urgent interest to avert criticism by supporting native issues and academic programs. (98–99)

In his tragic-comic account, Vizenor remaps the University of California, Berkeley, as a state monument, which for Ruth B. Phillips, signifies “a deposit of the historical possession of power” (“Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory,” 281). More particularly, he invokes its museum’s ongoing possession of one of the largest “deposits” of indigenous human remains in the United States. In his resistant rereading of Theodora Kroeber’s famous account, Ishi in Two Worlds, Jace Weaver reminds us that Ishi was profoundly unsettled by the close quarters he kept with human remains stored at the Phoebe Hearst Museum, where he—and they—lived. That so many thousands of skeletons remain to this day in museums across the country, even twenty years after the passage of NAGPRA, has inspired a range of Native aesthetic interventions in visual and literary arts. The human rights of human remains have likewise long generated Vizenor’s unrelenting dissection of how museums situate Indian bodies as bodies of knowledge: the anthropology department’s case of “artifacts” in his film Harold of Orange; the replacement of Native remains at the Hearst Museum with those of “sacrificed” and dissected university administrators in his radical repatriation novel, Chancers. In his influential 1986 essay, “Bone Courts: The Natural Rights of Tribal Bones,” Vizenor asserts the rights of “sovereign tribal bones, to be their own narrators, and a modest proposal to establish a Bone Court. This new forum would have federal judicial power to hear and decide disputes over burial sites, research on bones, reburial, and to protect the rights of tribal bones to be represented in court” (63). With “Ishi and the Wood Ducks” and Chancers, Vizenor establishes a California Bone Court, based on his contention that “the last rites are never the last words” (63). Like that San Gregorio haiku, Vizenor “honors the dead” of post-contact California while forwarding new narratives of Native survivance. For Vizenor’s re-creation of Ishi narratives, the motion is the meaning. As Louis Owens points out, “Vizenor makes it clear that Ishi exists forever in the moment of his stories, reinventing himself within the oral tradition with each utterance” (“Staging Indians,” 228).

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

71

If the imposition of new names serves as a constitutive act of colonial possession, then the crux of Vizenor’s signature activism on the Berkeley campus was underwritten by the recognition that “we live by names: tribal names, the names of our families, the names that determine institutions, nations, and histories” (“Naming of Ishi Court,” 41). If a constitutive act of colonial occupation is mapping, then consider the cartography of discovery, embodied by commemorative state markers and their noisy silences. At the dedication ceremony of “Ishi Court” in May 1993, Vizenor remarked, “There is a wretched silence in the histories of this state and nation: the silence of tribal names” (41). Justice Gary Strankman (Makah) noted in the same ceremony that “to call this place Ishi’s court does not give it his name . . . Ishi was not his name. You have bestowed on this bit of earth an alias, not a name—aka wild Indian, aka Ishi, aka man. He, in his existential dignity; he in his brown presence; he is beyond your power to name” (39). At the dedication, Vizenor similarly motioned toward the sustained irony of a naming ceremony built on an almost name: “Ishi Court is the natural center of this academic building. Ishi Court, you must remember, is the everlasting center of Almost Ishi Hall” (41). Vizenor’s parting words offer a masterful rejoinder to the campus administration’s refusal to rename the building itself and subsequent “compromise” to instead name its interior courtyard. With his words, Vizenor recenters Ishi’s place at Berkeley while suggesting how “Almost Hall” acts as nominal reminder that Ishi’s story itself is in ceaseless motion and thus will remain, to rephrase Blaeser—“always on the verge, never captured, never static” (see Gerald Vizenor). In “Almost Ashore” and in his word wars over Ishi, Vizenor engages in strategic naming ceremonies that install presence, the right to speak, and the necessity of motion. california traces, minnesota places

An author of several volumes of haiku, Vizenor describes his enduring interest in this poetic form and most particularly its relevance and relatedness to Anishinaabe dream song: “My haiku scenes are similar, in a sense, to the images in anishinaabe [sic] dream songs, and now these mythic connections seem so natural to me once. Once, worlds apart in time and place, these images came together by chance” (Postindian Conversations, 66). In Japan, Vizenor first found the word forms to call him home; in California, his Ishi

72

susan bernardin

poetics drew from his years of Minnesota-based journalism and led back to the 2006 publication of Almost Ashore. The collection gathers together haiku, reconstituted early poems, and poems that speak to broader concerns with memory and the place of poetry in witnessing holocausts. Taken together, the poems in Almost Ashore liberate land and language from colonial genealogies in favor of what Vizenor elsewhere calls “the virtual cartography of native survivance and sovereignty” (Fugitive Poses, 178). Crucial to his liberating tactics is the shifting recontextualization of keywords in Vizenor’s oeuvre. If his California-based Ishi texts loosen the bounds of California’s most storied Indian, then the poems of Almost Ashore loosen denotative boundaries of familiar words in Vizenor’s writing. Almost Ashore favors in its “Minnesota” poems “Native stories of survivance [as] the creation of presence, of tricky time and place, over the absence of natives in the causal histories of civilization” (Postindian Conversations, 134). Once worlds apart in time and place, imagined scenes of California and Minnesota come together in Vizenor’s Almost Ashore. Refusing the script imposed on Ishi, Vizenor counters that “Ishi is not the last man of stone” (Manifest Manners, 126). Deborah Madsen observes that Vizenor’s invocation of “stone” in “Ishi Obscura,” “may be punning here on the tribal significance of stone (the twin brother of Naanabozho, the Anishinaabe tribal trickster, is a stone)” (Understanding Gerald Vizenor, 107). In the version of “Almost Ashore” that closes the Ojibwe poetry anthology, the line “last stones” closes the first stanza. Not the last man of the Stone Age, but how a stone ages through dynamic pressures over time. A keyword found throughout Vizenor’s writing, “stone” gains narrative shading in Almost Ashore by the words it conjoins: survivance, shamans, stories, faces. Rather than embodying a static past tense that one finds in pronouncements of a stone age Ishi, stones are living texts. In his essay, “Native Transmotion,” Vizenor notes that “anishinaabe [sic] song pictures, stories, and the midewiwin [sic] scrolls, or the sacred documents of the great healers, were incised on birch bark, and cedar; other pictomyths were painted on cragged rocks” (Fugitive Poses, 172). In Almost Ashore, his poem “Hand Prints” asks us to “think about . . . hand prints / on stone / pictomyths” (26). In her travelogue, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Louise Erdrich visits islands in the Boundary Waters region whose cliff faces are painted with stories. She notes that the root word for rock painting—mazina—is the same for text or made image, and she claims the enduring vital presence of these texts for contemporary Anishinaabeg who visit them. She tells her

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

73

readers that these paintings on stone, or petroglyphs, “refer to a spiritual geography and are meant to provide teaching and dream guides to generations of Anishinabeg” (50). In her essay, “Writers on Writing; Two Languages in Mind, but Just One Heart,” Erdrich gives a lesson in stone: “the [Ojibwe] word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are not the same as they were to me in English. I can’t write about a stone without considering it in Ojibwe and acknowledging that the Anishinaabe universe began with a conversation between stones” (104–5). In Vizenor’s poem, “White Earth,” located in the “Crane Dancers” section of Almost Ashore, “stories turn / back to stone / faces of shamans / and ravens / on the federal roads” (10). The poem revisits an earlier version published in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, whose subtitle of “Images and Agonies” initiates a series of moments that borrow from haiku’s spare syllables and imagistic bent. With each brief stanza a verb seemingly directs a narrative of trickster vitality amid colonial impositions: “Fiscal storms / close the last survival school”; “Animals at the treelines / send back the hats and rusted traps” (71). In Almost Ashore, Vizenor expands the earlier version by more than one hundred lines while excising verbal directives in favor of open lines inviting narrative completion. Like much of his lyric poetry, “White Earth” features swiftly moving stanzas whose brief lines accumulate serial lists of contradictory images and evocative refrains in the Vizenor lexicon. Discussing the compositional process of his epic poem Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point in an interview with John Purdy, Vizenor said, “I started a kind of descriptive narrative, poetic style. . . . I wound up with too many connections, causative statements, prepositional phrases. It just ended up junky and kind of ponderous and phony. So I ended up imagistic” (Writing Indian, Native Conversations, 124). Refusing the traps of conventional historical narration, Vizenor created instead a “fifty-page haiku poem” (124). In similar fashion, imagistic scenes comprising “White Earth” compress the long season of colonial occupation, overseen by an unholy trinity of government agents, Catholic missions, and timber cruisers. “White Earth” invokes both the “federal ex-clave” created by treaty and his family’s Anishinaabe homelands peopled with avian presence—of cranes, ravens, and meadowlarks—and the persistence of “old healers” and “shaman cures.”

74

susan bernardin

The poem juxtaposes White Earth’s partition through “general allotments” and timber sales with its place in and as living story, since “80 acres and a trustee is never the same as that sense of Native presence in virtual cartography” (Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 174). A poem of endings, “White Earth” names the end of a hard season of plunder of white pine and of children “purling black lace” at “saint benedict catholic schools” (13). The “colonial missions” in California named in his speech at the Ishi Court dedication ceremony, those “mission gifts” that plundered indigenous California, were only too familiar to Vizenor. Catholic missions and schools at White Earth and throughout indigenous Minnesota have made repeat visits in his writing. His recent novel Father Meme, for example, confronts priests’ sexual abuse of children, overturning a narrative of victimization with resistance and revenge. “White Earth” incorporates vocabulary derived from missions at White Earth—“benedictory beads,” “crucifixions,” “sacraments”—recasting them as “mundane litanies.” Invoking “jesuit dominion / ghostly crossbones / over birds / beaver and muskrat,” Vizenor measures “the greedy / end of enlightenment / and civilization” (13). “Crossbones,” a subversive renaming of the cross and its meaning of salvation, subtly links dominating visions and the desired terminus of colonial institutions: cross/bones. Yet this passing plunder of the land and of the people, underwriting the eviction of White Earth immigrants to the “lonesome city,” including his father and members of his family, is countered by evocations of enduring seasons: “native storiers / tease the cruisers / black bears / northern lights and turn seasons / forever at the source / of lake Itasca” (12). Also then a poem of beginnings, “White Earth” suggests how most importantly, tricky stories and tricksters gesture to “stony survivance / among the bloody / stumps of white pine.” In the interview with John Purdy, Vizenor says, “I don’t take words as representation, but they do have history. And they deserve a greater meaning, many words” (Writing Indian, Native Conversations, 125). San Gregorio, White Earth. With each word in “White Earth,” Vizenor invokes the grief of post-contact history and imagines its ruins: moose browse near the mission ruins abandoned stations of the cross and toilet doors undone by storms (13)

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

75

In a scene where “ruins,” “abandoned,” and “undone” connote healing instead of devastation, “White Earth” signals its strategy for overturning and reversing terminal narratives of civilization. A poem of healing conversions and reversions, “White Earth” traces a new cartography that is hardly new, gesturing toward continuing Native presence in the land called Minnesota. A poem of endings and beginnings, of closings and openings, “White Earth” epitomizes Vizenor’s ceaseless work to antagonize static meanings and to activate a moving story of Anishinaabe survivance. From ocean shore to lake shore, Vizenor offers up “bony scraps / survivance / by tides / and wild rivers” (“Window Ice,” in Almost Ashore, 28). Almost Ashore begins as tidal movements whose “heavy waves / rush the sand” (3). In the third section of the book, entitled “Natural Duty,” Vizenor reprises that title poem, and the place of his writing in and out of time, with “Sandprints”: ocean beats my heart stories word by word in the sand erased on the waves museums court names money manners and erase impermanence by stone encomium only waves of irony survive the posers sandprints names memories

susan bernardin

76

traces of animals cowries crane totem retouched after the storm (91) In an act of remarkable compression, the title contains the entire poem, and by extension, the groundings of Vizenor’s entire work. The opening word, “sandprints,” cannot be found in the dictionary, yet it is instantly recognizable. The word’s cognates—footprints and handprints—echo the opening words of “Almost Ashore” (“winter sea / over my shoes”) and the poem “Hand Prints,” located in the “Crane Dancers” section. An almost word in an almost world, “sandprints” connotes presence and absence, the living and the leaving, a world in continual motion. Like those sandcastles at San Gregorio, sandprints are transitory. At the same time, sandprints are elemental, created by water, stone, air, and sky. The pairing of “sand” and “prints” highlights the lived relationship between words and earth shown in Anishinaabe traditions of petroglyphs and birch bark texts. Moreover, the title’s implication that the very text in readers’ hands is itself mutable, traces Vizenor’s sustained efforts to overturn the limits of the immovable printed page. The ensuing three stanzas similarly rely on active tensions generated by ambiguous word pairings. The first stanza links the ocean’s pulses with heart beats, words and waves in a scene that dissolves stories like sandprints. Its recognition of natural motion is abruptly contrasted with the monumental designs of a world of “museums / court names / money / manners.” The fluid design of these lines draws attention both to how museums act in “eras[ing] impermanence by stone,” and how they court as well as depend on, names, money, manners, and encomium (91). The trace of Ishi Court in the line “court names” amid the institutional poses in the stanza, offers another angle on the poem’s provocative consideration of memory, motion, and change. Museums, those iconic repositories of “objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest” that putatively form a nation’s cultural identity, make appearances in several poems in the collection, including “Museum Bound” and “Museum Flies.” These two poems, along with “Sandprints,” chart a different story of stone, stone taken to build monuments to manifest memory, to keep “bound” within its walls the wealth of other cultures. Yet, the stanza’s closing lines—“only waves / of irony / survive / the posers”—offer up both a declaration and an instruction: to survive (91). The

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

77

central word animating Vizenor’s work, “survive,” or “survivance,” signals the poem’s shift back to sandprints, the opening word of the final stanza. The repetition of this word, along with “waves,” “erase,” and “names,” constellates the thriving paradox of Vizenor’s writing: words that resist fixed representation, that generate ceaseless transformation. At the same time, the stanza’s inclusion of two words—“crane totem” and “cowries”—localizes the poem’s familiar thematic patterns of tidal movement and human mutability. With the naming of his avian totem and with the naming of the sacred shell of Anishinaabe creation and migration stories, Vizenor pivots the poem in crucial personal and tribal terms. The precarious survival of cranes and cowries, “retouched” in memory and in story, returns readers to elemental terms of Anishinaabe survivance. In an interview with A. Robert Lee, Vizenor says that “The Anishinaabe creation is out of water, the presence of water as a place. We are water, and there is no presence without water and trickster stories of that creation” (Postindian Conversations, 135). As waves turn seasons, “Almost Ashore” and “Sandprints,” both embed and enact revitalizing indigenous presence as antidote to cruel seasons of colonialism. To name is to affirm and to recognize, but naming is also an act that can possess, capture, and control. With his writing, Vizenor has always courted and counted on such paradoxes. In the tease of a name I began this essay, the tease of San Gregorio. Ishi’s real name remained elusive, but his almost name instigated Vizenor’s politics of name recognition at the University of California, Berkeley. In Almost Ashore, Vizenor similarly juxtaposes “court names” with the names of Native (and nature’s) long-lived presence. Through elemental scenes of seasonal motion and tidal movements, Vizenor’s poems suggest how to “counter the world with language . . . in order to be liberated.” Both his Ishi poetics and Minnesota images remind us that stones are always in motion, as are stories. The sandprints in Minnesota and the sandcastles at the California shore forever poise on the verge of shifts, turns and transitions. Both here and there, Vizenor’s wavering words compel us all to live in motion. notes 1.  Th is phrase comes from the book description found at Salt Publishing: http:// www.saltpublishing.com/books/ewk/1844712710.htm. 2.  See the website of the San Mateo Coast Natural History Association: http:// sanmateocoastnha.org/pages/san-gregorio.htm.

78

susan bernardin

3.  The phrase “waver on the rim” comes from Vizenor’s Trickster of Liberty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), xvii.

references Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. ———. ed. Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Bemidji, MN: Loonfeather Press, 2006. Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Knopf, 1988. Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling in the Land of My Ancestors. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2003. ———. “Writers on Writing: Two Languages in Mind, but Just One Heart.” In Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing, vol. 2. Edited by Eric Gansworth, 101–6. New York: Nation Books, 2007. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Niatum, Duane, ed. Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Owens, Louis. “Staging Indians: Native Sovenance and Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s ‘Ishi and the Wood Ducks.’” In I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, 227–43. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Phillips, Ruth B. “Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory: Dis-Membering and Re-Membering Canadian Art History.” In Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade. Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 281–304. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Purdy, John Lloyd. Writing Indian, Native Conversations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. “San Gregorio State Beach.” San Mateo Coast Natural History Association. http:// sanmateocoastnha.org/pages/san-gregorio.htm Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999. Starn, Orin. Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore. Cambridge, U.K.: Salt Publishing, 2006. ———. “Bone Courts: The Natural Rights of Tribal Bones.” In Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports, 62–82. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Cranes Arise. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1999.

ALMOST CALIFORNIA

79

———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. “Naming of Ishi Court.” News from Native California 7, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 38–41. ———. Raising the Moon Vines. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1999. ———. Trickster of Liberty. 1988. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. ———. “Western American Literature Association Achievement Award Lecture.” October 20, 2005. Reprinted in Pembroke Magazine 38 (2006): 97–100. ———. “White Earth.” In Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. Edited by Duane Niatum, 71. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. ———, and A. Robert Lee. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Weaver, Jace. “When the Demons Come: (Retro)Spectacle among the Savages.” In Ishi in Three Centuries. Edited by Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber, 35–47. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

chapter five

Vizenor’s L ife Studies Revisioning Survivance in Almost Ashore

Linda Lizut Helstern

A

lmost Ashore: Selected Poems owes a great deal to Gerald Vizenor’s lifelong devotion to haiku, the evanescent moment of being held briefly in fullness. Even the short poetic line he uses throughout the volume, seldom seven syllables in length, bespeaks a kinship to haiku, but Vizenor’s first volume of nonhaiku poetry has been shaped for a cultural moment when haiku has ceased to be a part of America’s general knowledge base, yet Columbus in all of his ideological trappings endures, intertwined with victimry and survivance in Native communities across America. Native survivance, according to Vizenor, “is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response”; it is “an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” that cannot be separated from its practice (Fugitive Poses, 15). In his prose Vizenor has honored such exemplars of survivance as Ishi, Keeshkemun, Charles Aubid, and Luther Standing Bear. In Almost Ashore, twelve poems focus on specific individuals, and each tells a survivance story. Six of these, previously published in one or more versions, offer special insight into Vizenor’s revisioning of survivance in this volume. That his theoretical appropriation of the term “survivance” came two decades after the first publication of such poems as “Guthrie Theater” and “Raising the Flag” suggests how central practice is to Vizenor’s theory, while reminding us that Vizenor has been “reinventing the enemy’s language” from the beginning of his career. Even as this collection gives us a new lens on Vizenor’s poetic oeuvre, heavily dependent as it is on his early work, Almost Ashore stands as the antithesis of the typical collected works. The volume showcases process while refusing finality as adamantly as the ending of any Vizenor novel. Its very title defers conclusion, constructs agency, and suggests exertion while refusing to specify the degree of effort necessary to continue on. It suggests precisely the “active presence” that Vizenor claims for stories of survivance (Fugitive Poses, 15). Below this surface, however, lies 80

vizenor’s life studies

81

a tragic wisdom akin to the understanding of the beauty and shortness of life at the heart of haiku, a wisdom gleaned from deeply felt loss. This, for Vizenor, is the very heart of survivance. In the Euramerican tradition, poems focusing on individuals are traditionally called “portraits,” but this term freezes its subject in an attitude and a moment. The term “life studies” seems decidedly more appropriate to Vizenor’s use of the genre, even when he speaks about suicides, as he does in three of these poems. My focus on the individuals in Vizenor’s landscape is not meant to suggest the paramount importance of human life in this world. Their relative rarity in Almost Ashore speaks to this fact, and so does the placement of the life studies within the text. Vizenor contextualizes them carefully. The first—“Family Photograph,” a poem about his father—is preceded by two poems that reveal a world peopled both by nonhuman and human persons, consistent with the traditional Native understanding. It is the rush of ocean waves, no valiant swimmer, that Vizenor celebrates in “Almost Ashore,” and the power through song to call into being the multiplicity of life that he honors in “Crane Dance.” The title of this ritual honoring refers to the complex mating ritual of the sandhill crane, its human connection veiled and dependent on the reader’s knowledge that Vizenor is an Anishinaabe Crane Clan descendent. Only in the context of this larger vision of life does Vizenor go on to speak of his young father’s life and death in “Family Photograph.”1 In addition to “Family Portrait,” two life studies, “Guthrie Theater” and “Raising the Flag,” are included in the book’s first section, in which virtually all of the poems touch on identifiably Native experiences. These are Vizenor’s three mostpublished poems, with the earliest versions anthologized in the mid-1970s. The remaining nine life studies fall within the volume’s third and longest section, a seemingly chance blend of Native and non-Native, urban and rural experience. Here he extends the idea of survivance beyond Native survivance to honor the human will to resist cultural dominance. In these poems, Vizenor focuses principally on poets and women. Three touch, at least implicitly, on suicide, including “Paul Celan,” which honors the Holocaust survivor recognized as the greatest German-language poet of the late twentieth century. This poem marks the very center of the text, its dark heart. “Huffy Henry” and “September Light” follow in sequence. Two widely separated life studies—“Columbus Endures” and “Double Negatives”—precede a later cluster that includes “Shirley by Winter,” “Homewood Hospital,” “Blue Bottle,” and “Silhouettes.”

82

linda lizut helstern

Vizenor’s commitment to survivance is apparent from the earliest version of his most-published poem, “Family Photograph.” This study of Vizenor’s young father creates active presence out of literal absence, for Clement Vizenor’s throat was slashed before his twenty-month-old son had even formed a memory of him. Vizenor has told the difficult story of coming to terms with his father’s death in Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. This is not his poetic focus, however. In each of the three substantively different versions of this poem, his father’s death is only hinted at in a single euphemism in the poem’s last line. Here, to speak the word, the story, is literally to bring Clement Vizenor into being, a traditional Native speech act, and each version of the poem begins with a variant of the metaphor “my father was a spruce” (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 38; Vizenor, Interior Landscapes, 29; Vizenor, Almost Ashore, 6). For Vizenor, metaphor, and notably metaphor drawn from the natural world, is a key trope of survivance. “Metaphors,” he tells us, “create a sense of presence by imagination and natural reason, the very character and practice of survivance” (“Aesthetics of Survivance,” 13). While this poem has evolved in the way of oral story, the plot trajectory has never changed: a young man from the north woods frees himself from cultural dominance on the reservation by leaving for the city, clearly an act of resistance. He is a gifted Native storyteller, but his principal audience there has long since been defeated by loyalty to the dominant culture. The young man, by contrast, seems to thrive in the city, finding both work and women and fathering a son before he “los[es] at cards” (9). The twelve stanza version of “Family Photograph” published in 1974 and 1975 highlights the contrasts between the young Anishinaabe man and the dejected older men. Revised as “The Last Photograph” fifteen years later, the poem retains a twelve-stanza structure but is cast as a compassionate trickster story where all ideological constraints, including brick tenements, can be overturned. The version published in Almost Ashore is four stanzas longer and more elaborated than its predecessors, the contrasts decidedly sharper. This revisioning enhances both our understanding of the ideologies of cultural dominance and the kinds of resistance historically possible to tribal people. The heroism that inheres for Vizenor in the practice of survivance is signaled by the startling inclusion of the name “clement vizenor” as the second line of the poem. This is not a strategy typical of the English language poetic tradition, where personal names are often omitted entirely from the portrait/homage, although they may appear circumspectly in the title or

vizenor’s life studies

83

dedication. Great tribal warriors, however, are remembered by name, their personal exploits recounted in one of the most traditional genres of tribal story. Vizenor marks this as a story of Native continuance and survivance when he identifies his father as “a native / by totems” (Almost Ashore, 6). Native identity is here conferred not by blood quantum, a dominant culture invention that sought to impose individual identities and individual land ownership on certain tribal peoples while dispossessing others. In tribes organized by clan, identity is traditionally conferred through family relationship with the natural world. The metaphor that links Clement Vizenor to the northern spruce is particularly apt, for he was born in 1908, the same year that a land patent for an eighty-acre allotment was issued to his mother (Interior Landscapes, 16). The timber harvest and the severing of tribal and family connections began at White Earth with allotment, but the young man who leaves the reservation in this version of the poem remains connected to family, his departure not the individual decision suggested in both previous versions of the poem. For the first time, too, Vizenor explicitly points out what had previously only been implied in his wood-cutting metaphor: the destructive role of “federal / indian agents” in tribal life (Almost Ashore, 6). What the young man “turn[s] / away from,” however, is not just “the reservation” and imposed “colonial genealogies”—a laudable act of resistance—but “white earth” itself, the larger network of cultural connections (6). In “The Last Photograph,” the 1990 version of the poem, this was accomplished with reckless abandon. Such is not the case here, where something of value is being forfeited in his move. Yet tribal culture remains part of the young Clement Vizenor. Even in the city “native tricksters / teased his memory” (6). In revisioning his father’s appreciation for story as a social bond, Vizenor not only specifies the qualities of living native imagination but effectively blurs the dominant culture distinction between story and reality. In a trickster moment, the poet stages a daring sortie against the joint dominance of Christianity and capitalism on the reservation, linking them deftly in a single word: “stations” mark both the via dolorosa and the railroad connection between reservation raw materials and finished products. In his social relationships, Clement moves toward the compassion that for Vizenor characterizes the woodland trickster. He does not wait passively with the old men as he did in the earliest version of the poem, nor does he honor them as in the second version; he “abide[s]” them (6). The suicidal despair of these Anishinaabe veterans in their failure to find a place in the dominant culture

linda lizut helstern

84

is not Clement’s legacy, yet the danger is close and vivid. Death by drowning in the “dark / mississippi” is stark reality, and so is the possibility, in death or life, of being constrained by the ideologies of religion and charity, manifestations of the cultural dominance these men once thought they had left behind (7). In the seventh and eighth stanzas, at the climax of the poem, Vizenor sharpens his indictment of the institutional power wielded on the reservation: the “reservation superintendents” of the earliest versions here become “reservation masters” (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 38; Vizenor, Almost Ashore, 8). The work of Catholicism, earlier limited to bribery, now encompasses five subtler yet ultimately more insidious acts, building to a crescendo of racial shame. In his most recent indictment, Vizenor lays bare the central role of language in constructing dominance, deploying such terms as “catchwords” and “mercy lines” (Almost Ashore, 8). We are left at last with no definitive stories of the old veterans, “only family photographs / washed ashore” (7). This image, of course, foreshadows the photographic image of father and son that ends the poem. At this point in the poem, however, Clement Vizenor’s story stands in sharp contrast to the veterans’ winter despair. While Anishinaabe like them, Clement is also “an immigrant,” his life full of the promise that attaches to the myth of American immigration. His job as a union painter and paperhanger might be described as a summer idyll of “fancy flowers” (8). Although he may be complicit with dominant ideology in “paint[ing] ceilings / pure white,” by far the most important work Clement Vizenor does in this version, ironically, is delivering the first white earth native stories in the suburbs (8) His Anishinaabe identity is explicitly reinforced both at the beginning and the end of the ninth stanza, and the even “treaty women” he meets suggest, for once, the possibility of mutual fulfillment: stories proliferate. When the poet introduces himself into this version poem, still, as in both previous versions, a function of blood quantum, the tone is softened by the addition of the word “promise” and the change of verb from the passive “heard” to the active “listened” (9). Gritty sex here becomes a romantic adventure, the hinted-at child a love child. The hard reality of the cold water tenement and fractured families in the following stanza, too, is softened: the premier

vizenor’s life studies

85

reality here is encapsulated in its first line, “native stories,” which “inspired survivance” in a life otherwise as bleak as that faced by the veterans on the bridge (8). These are the conditions in which both tragic wisdom and the sense of irony mature, the family bond central to native continuance and survivance. In the poem’s earliest versions, bitterness prevails until our attention is finally focused on a smile, a photograph. In the most recent, the name “clement vizenor” emerges a second time, here from the white space between the stanzas, even as a family tragedy remains unspoken within the ellipsis. Our attention, however, is soon focused on the child he holds, arguably “the new spruce,” tangible if incongruous evidence of survivance in a brick landscape with paint cans. These cans serve as our cue to refocus on the man who worked as a painter, his life now sketched out again in its barest details— blood quantum and fate. This measuring of Clement’s blood, however, is deceptively tricky and thoroughly ironic: half white earth the other native immigrant (9) This totals, at least in one reading, a whole Native person, never a victim but one who “moved to the city / and lost at cards” (9). This ascription of Native identity represents a change from previous versions of the poem and is perhaps the most significant change Vizenor makes to underscore the import of Native survivance. In both previous versions, the accounting was straightforward: “half white / half immigrant” (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 38; Vizenor, Interior Landscapes, 31). The most recent, as in its first stanza, resists the very ideology that demands such an accounting. The poem’s ending, too, underscores survivance, which Vizenor clearly links to chance through the card game: “[s]urvivance stories,” as he tells us, “create a sense of presence and situational sentiments of chance” (“Aesthetics of Survivance,” 10). The reality of Clement Vizenor’s death, compressed into the last line of the poem, gains poignance through the sequencing of scenes, but it is his lived life, framed between the despair of the old soldiers and the stark realities of the tenement, that stands out. His presence and the living connection with his son cannot be denied. The strategy that Vizenor adopts in revisioning “Family Photograph” to underscore survivance can also be seen in “Guthrie Theater” and “Raising

86

linda lizut helstern

the Flag,” both originally published in 1975.2 It was Vizenor’s experience as a social worker and urban activist in Minneapolis in the mid-1960s that provided the impetus for these poems. In Almost Ashore, they appear in sequence, a male-female pairing that showcases warrior resistance, contemporary and traditional, to dominance. The imposition of its patriarchal ideology of gender, indeed, has been one of the most repressive of all acts of Euramerican cultural dominance, and Vizenor casts Native resistance here as a comment on that fact. “Guthrie Theater” focuses on the ironic resistance of a Native combat veteran who takes on one of America’s most esteemed cultural institutions while still learning to walk with his new prosthesis. “Raising the Flag” frames a traditional Native resistance by a woman confronting both sexual degradation and the welfare system in the non-Native world. As in “Family Photograph,” the plot trajectory in the revisions remains essentially the same as in the originals. Vizenor, however, carefully reshapes and rebalances the details. The most obvious change in “Guthrie Theater,” once called “Indians at the Guthrie” is the deletion of the term “Indians” from its title. While Vizenor himself has long resisted the term and advocated its abandonment, at the time of the poem’s original publication, “Indians” held particular significance for theatergoers as the title of the politically charged play by Arthur Kopit. Given its American premiere at Washington’s Arena Stage in 1968 with Buffalo Bill as featured protagonist, Kopit’s play cemented the colonial connection between the Vietnam War and America’s nineteenth-century Indian campaigns in the minds of American intellectuals. A chance connection between a Native veteran, doubtless a Vietnam vet, and another major regional repertory theater suggests an irony in Vizenor’s original title now largely lost. What we see in the new title is the power of the cultural institution writ large; Vizenor holds his irony for the poem itself. Its first line— “american indian”—stands as a proud declaration of identity, simultaneously individual and collective (Almost Ashore, 15). What comes with the construction of this nationalized identity, as Vizenor soon implies, is a permanent wound inflicted by every cultural product associated with “Indians,” from “high western / movie mockery” to “trade beads” (15). The unspecified wound becomes a visible limp against the background of “the new theater,” yet another bastion of cultural production. There is clear irony in the way Vizenor’s phrase blurs history, for this generation’s new Guthrie is not the building that was new during the Vietnam era when the American Indian

vizenor’s life studies

87

Education and Guidance Center under Vizenor’s directorship was located just down the street (15). Vizenor’s irony hints that other things are about to change. If we expect the old Indian-as-victim story, we are going to be disappointed. There will be no descent into victimry here. At the beginning of the second stanza, the “wounded indian / comes to attention,” an act that is simultaneously respectful and psychologically transformative (15). The “smart salute” he delivers “with the wrong hand” is precisely the ironic resistance to tragedy, dominance, and victimry that marks survivance (15). The “plastic leg” meanwhile, alters our notions of what it means to be a wounded warrior. This is the modern world, and this Native warrior’s presence cannot be denied. Vizenor has sharpened the language from the closely related 1983 version of the poem to military precision. His earliest version, by far the most elliptical, places the limp, the wounded Indian, and his wrong-handed salute in the first stanza. His resistance is clear, but the presence conferred by the military jargon, the plastic prosthesis, and the pun on “smart” is lacking. As in this version, the 1983 version incorporated the culture wars into the first stanza, moving the salute and adding the plastic leg to the second. The second stanza, however, continued with a vivid description of the young thespians rehearsing their ideological roles, and they—not the salute of survivance—ultimately hold our attention. These children are themselves more complex in the 2006 poem, where they occupy the entire third stanza: they are “precious” even as they “muster nearby,” the new military language here creating a link between the culture wars and the acts of genocide that follow. The historic atrocities in the fourth stanza, precipitated by their “theatrical poses,” are devastating for those who know the stories, as vivid as flashbacks, the crucible of tragic wisdom for tribal peoples. In the poem’s earliest version, these atrocities, continuing as addiction and “cultural suicides” in near-reservation communities, span three stanzas (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 31). The all-too-familiar stereotypes overshadow the historic stories. They remain with us even when “the players mount up” and head for the hills (31). Although Vizenor attempts to refocus our attention on the salute as an act of cultural resistance with the addition of a new stanza in the 1983 version—the vet here “decorated with invented names”—victimry still dominates the poem (Bruchac, Songs for This Earth on Turtle’s Back, 264). He shifts his strategy in the most recent version. The stanza that follows the military atrocities here opens with “culture wars,” a

88

linda lizut helstern

phrase that stands in apposition to Sand Creek, Mystic River, and Wounded Knee, even as it introduces the continuing contemporary assault. Vizenor explains their impact now through ironic understatement. That they “wound the heart” suggests the mortal nature of the psychic wounds. That they also “dishonor / the uniform” destabilizes the founding principle of dominant culture military service, patriotism. The real patriots, he suggests, warriors still and not victims, are left to fend for themselves, their “cardboard suites” an ironic tribute to their dignity and survivance. Returning focus to the salute in the next stanza, Vizenor begins by repeating the first line of the poem: “american indian” (Almost Ashore, 16). The wound, here implicit rather than explicit, is subsumed in a combat decoration “for bravery,” or more specifically, “invented names” (16). In this context, the salute as an act of resistance establishes its own irony, which is inflected by tragic wisdom, not victimry. The poem’s last stanza has always attempted to forge a connection between the history of the American West and its enabling myth. Each iteration of the poem makes this more explicit. In the most recent, Vizenor creates an effective connection between broken treaties and the ideology of the theatrical moment. They remain unseen backstage. Another generation assumes its identity in an old cultural story, and the mythos of the western lives on. As the “new posers” ride off into the sunset, the poem leaves us with the lingering image, not of “the hills” of the first version, nor even “the corporate hills” of the second, but of Buffalo Bill mounted and in the lead (Almost Ashore, 16; Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 31; Bruchac, Songs for This Earth on Turtle’s Back, 264). Astride his mount, he was also the last character on the stage in Kopit’s play. Paired with his warrior’s salute, “Raising the Flag” speaks explicitly to Native women’s survivance. In Almost Ashore, Vizenor’s female subject is initially positioned within the fabric of tribal tradition that extends back through time immemorial, not, as in the 1975 version, dated by year of first white contact (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 42). “[O]nce a healer” with a respected role in her community, this Native woman is shivering and alone in a phone booth in the old heart of Minneapolis’s Indian neighborhood. Separation has been the theme of her life, beginning in “federal schools,” where tribal language was frozen out and racial isolation enforced through work placements in the dominant culture. Vizenor here describes the responsible federal agents, absent from previous versions, who “landed in heavy / leather coats,” literally as conquistadors, once again suggesting the long patriarchal and military history

vizenor’s life studies

89

underlying modern institutions of dominance. The woman who stands before us offers a sharp contrast in her “summer / jumble clothes” and “charity shoes,” vulnerable in both the past and the present. She is not, however, as in earlier versions of the poem, constructed by what she lacks—a coat. The winter cold is real, but as she checks the coin return twice, she demonstrates a degree of personal agency, however limited. This woman with the “grave / native stories” and “woodland shine” is vulnerable to men in the bar, forever a “squaw,” no more than a sum total of her sexual parts (Almost Ashore, 18). In this version of the poem there is no hint of complicity in her demeanor when “city soldiers” turn into “drunken soldiers” and verbal abuse turns physical (18). Her sexual degradation cannot be separated from the absence of her children, “stolen by welfare / security agents” (18). She is utterly alone, unable to reach them even by phone. Just at the moment when the reader projects a tragic ending for the story, however, the “squaw” discovers that her deepest vulnerability—her Native identity—is also her deepest strength, the source of her survivance. She remembers in this version of the poem the final encounter between tribal people and the cavalry, an Anishinaabe victory. Raising the tribal flag, she gives presence to the victorious Native warriors through her honor song. Their victories are hers. Whereas Vizenor previously shaped this woman’s survivance through the highly individual tradition of a dream vision that brought her children home, here he extends the poem’s dominant metaphor. Her transformation, explicitly internal in earlier versions of the poem, is here manifest reality, independent of the absence or presence of her children. Survivance inheres in remembrance, community, continuance, and the warrior tradition. When Vizenor reintroduces the life study in the third section of Almost Ashore, he honors the memories of three suicides, poets Paul Celan (1920– 1970) and John Berryman (1914–1972) and a woman known only as Pearl.3 At the very center of the text, these poems give dimension to our understanding of survivance, tragic wisdom, and the intensely difficult task of revisioning life’s darkest realities that survivance entails. As Kimberly Blaeser has observed, “[S]ometimes warriors fall” (“July 29, 2002,” 103). Each of these poems is deeply compassionate, a turning of the seasons that reveals intensely individual vulnerabilities. In the case of the two poets, as in Vizenor’s poem for his father, the life that inheres in storytelling is the paramount reality. Pearl tells her plants that she is going to die, but for Pearl, even suicide carries an element of chance.

linda lizut helstern

90

Vizenor precedes “Paul Celan” with a poem that speaks to Celan’s own almost unbearable experience in coming to terms with the reality of the Holocaust as a traveler on the night train from Antwerp to Amsterdam. Celan’s experience in Nazi labor camps and the deaths of his parents have defined his oeuvre since the first publication of Todesfuge in his native Romania in 1947. The memories remain vivid—in Vizenor’s metaphor the very weather of Celan’s mind—powerful, and utterly unpredictable: sudden storms of memory thunderous breaks of lightning (Almost Ashore, 54) It is the signal use of natural metaphors that marks “Paul Celan” as a poem of survivance. Vizenor’s Celan gives voice to the wild where the fragility of life and the reality of death exist side by side, equally real. The vibrant summer story of children and tiny hummingbirds gives way to the stark autumnal story of brown ants in a moving line, which builds, body by body, until the overwhelming magnitude of Holocaust death is on the very portal. For Celan, Vizenor acknowledges, there are “no rescues / by irony” (54). From the silence of deepest winter comes snow, a “trace of poetry” that accumulates overnight until “by memory” it completely reshapes both the city and “the doors” to the unknown that lies beyond (56). The snow here grows out of the first stanza of “Snow Crowns,” one of the three-haiku chains in the second section of Almost Ashore. There the snow’s “overnight reign” led on to noisy squirrels and sun-colored nasturtiums—to life itself (44). Here it disguises inner emptiness. Celan, born Paul Antschel, stands alone at the door, about to enter yet looking back (56). Vizenor’s image, interpreting the photograph on the cover of John Felstiner’s acclaimed biography, reads “sovereignty” in his very loneliness. The choice of vocabulary not only extends the metaphor in “Snow Crowns” but invites consideration of Celan within the frame of contemporary Native political and intellectual resistance to the dominant culture. This is the Paul Celan who inspires our resistance by state and portrait (57)

vizenor’s life studies

91

The multilayered language speaks simultaneously to politics and metaphysics. The desolation of the old veterans in “Family Photograph” runs through Vizenor’s ending, but here not even an image washes ashore. Never reconciled to mass death, Celan, the survivor, yet chose to face his ultimate reality “in the river / dark and cold” (57). Vizenor offers an entirely different vision of a poet in “Huffy Henry,” while suggesting in his title the enduring import of story, which lives on long after the teller. Henry, of course, alludes to the central character of John Berryman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 77 Dream Songs, often considered Berryman’s alter ego. Vizenor’s change of title from “Tropisms of John Berry­man” focuses on the poet’s prickly personality rather than his selfdestructive habits. The scene is a summer social gathering in the days when both Berryman and Vizenor had ties to the University of Minnesota. The poem presents Berryman in a comedy of manners and lust, at least initially. In the earlier version, it was a comedy punctuated by the genre violations of its ostensible hero, “henry drinking drinking drinking” and “henry sitting alone” (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 35). In “Huffy Henry,” a title that finally reads as irony, Vizenor seeks to reveal Berryman’s vulnerability. He grins, though tormented by the academy and academic society. He finds diversions, the “kittens” nightly on the phone, the squabbling sparrows at the gathering. It is only, however, when Berryman is seen as feeding mosquitoes, both the insect and the human variety, that he attains a generous presence worthy of his own irony, that haiku-like presence importantly linked to survivance through natural metaphor. His departing stumble— not a drunken fall, as in the earlier version—renders him eternally vulnerable, childlike among “blue / children” in the park who remind us of the innocents healed at the Dorado Genome Pavilion in The Heirs of Columbus (59).4 The “empty swings,” a phrase Vizenor chose as the title of his 1967 haiku collection, give a poignant presence to absence from this world. With “September Light,” Vizenor’s focus returns once more to a Native woman, lonely and afraid, trying to come to terms with a terminal diagnosis. The poem was first published in 1975 with the title “Unhappy Diary Days,” a title that embraces tragedy rather than survivance. When Pearl enters her apartment, her initial aimlessness soon gives way to a sense of the finite in her emotional accounting: she has but seven love letters to burn. Turning her clothes “across the seasons,” the only hint of Pearl’s Native identity, removes her from the world of the living, her last act before undressing (Almost

92

linda lizut helstern

Ashore, 60). Unconscious of the wary cat, Pearl takes her breasts in her hands and begins an avian transformation in the “tender / September light” (61). The transformation completes itself, and “pearl circles / with the birds,” seemingly at peace until a sudden turn finds her crashing “through the glass” (61). Even though we have watched her methodical preparations, we are at this moment totally unprepared for her death. When Vizenor suggests Pearl’s new connection with spiritual experience through his avian metaphor, she becomes fully present to us in all her fragility, yet a woman of power with a new knowledge of being. The transformation speaks not only to the wish for peace in death but to the dominant culture’s assumptions concerning Native spirituality. Nothing about death, Vizenor suggests, can be domesticated or explained away. It is not inevitable but wild and unpredictable, a matter of chance. Vizenor has done much in this version of the poem to strengthen Pearl’s presence and our shock, but no change is more effective than the change from “wrong trees” to “empty / trees” in the gathering darkness, the intensity of Pearl’s fear suddenly manifest (Rosen, Voices of the Rainbow, 33; Vizenor, Almost Ashore, 61). Survivance becomes visible to us in the everyday practice of both life and art, Vizenor suggests in the remaining six life studies in Almost Ashore. Here he recognizes heroic resistance in the ordinary, but perhaps most notably in the lives of old women whose circumstances seldom merit anyone’s attention. Vizenor calls forth the presence of one such woman in “Columbus Endures.” Her very name alters our stereotypical expectations. The regendering established in the two-line repetition that opens each stanza, “columbus endures / as an old woman,” underscores the irony through which we will eventually revise our understanding of the poem’s title. As Vizenor well knows, Columbus endures in Native communities as a premier symbol of all the tragedy and hardship tribal people have faced over the past five hundred years. The Heirs of Columbus was his signal attempt to re-vision this legacy of victimry. This poem is another, retelling the Columbus myth as a story that resonates with Native tradition: the visionary who sets out to bring new knowledge and new possibility back to the community. This is the Columbus who endures here despite the irony of advanced age. “Columbus Endures” bears clear relationship to an early haiku from Empty Swings where the freshness of “early snow” stands in sharp contrast with the long life of an “[o]ld woman on a park bench” smelling of mothballs (“Autumn,” n.p.). In this rewriting, however, the old woman, an agglomeration of smells, contains all possibility within herself, at once “woolly” and

vizenor’s life studies

93

animal, old with mothballs, and young with the pleasure of gum that hints of a child’s fresh attitude toward life. The “robes” she wears in the park at once suggest royalty and the sometimes incongruous layers worn by the homeless (74). Vizenor never constructs her as a victim, but the difficulty of her lonely situation unfolds early in the poem. When she beds down with her “threadbare / blanket” in the third stanza, however, the tone shifts without warning, as miraculously as winter turning to spring. This Columbus, resisting our every preconception of the homeless, “shouts / landfall ahead” (74). She is a dreamer with access to two worlds, and her dreams have the power to shape her life. When she draws her bathwater in the final stanza, her presence is fully manifest, poignantly tinged with tragic wisdom: anything in life is possible still, even a return “to the old world,” and she will be ready (75). The old woman of “Blue Bottle” cultivates survivance and her garden with fierce tenderness. She cries tears of joy at the ordinary pleasure of seeing an old friend, but her tears also suggest the tragic wisdom that comes with age. What the woman has lost comes back when she raises the hem of her dress to wipe them. Although we see her skinny and decidedly unromantic legs, she finds herself repeating the motions of disrobing for her lover and once again feels the fullness of emotional connection restored. The poignance of this moment stands as an homage to haiku poet Takuboku Ishikawa, another poet suicide. Vizenor remembers professor Edward Copeland’s profound respect for his work in Interior Landscapes and includes five poems from his slender oeuvre in “June 1960: Haiku in the Attic.” The first is an emphatic declaration of resistance to old age and death, an invitation to all mosquitoes to “Come and bite my skinny legs” (Interior Landscapes, 173). The second speaks of the same joy as “Blue Bottle”: With the joy of meeting A long lost friend, I listen to the sound of water (173) Vizenor, however, places the old woman in the waters of memory and imagination, almost ashore as she returns to the material reality of the garden. Perhaps the most outspoken resistance to dominance, tragedy, and victimry in Almost Ashore is posed in “Homewood Hospital.” This is not a story of Native resistance but human resistance. Vizenor tells other stories about working as an orderly at this private mental hospital in “Haiku in the Attic.” The poem, however, gives voice to a female patient awaiting an

94

linda lizut helstern

electroshock treatment, clearly not her first. It begins with a natural metaphor, for Vizenor the principal trope of survivance, which permits the reader to understand this woman and her fellow patients in the context of the unruly, disruptive, and entirely normal behavior of hungry sparrows at a feeder. Strapped to a gurney, the woman seems incapable of causing disruption until she speaks a litany of curses with biblical authority: “bear the mark / of cain,” she insists first (99). Her own position here seems clear. She is the victim of violence, at least until she enjoins, “bear the mark / of abel,” making the victim also a victimizer (99). Her logic escapes us until she issues her third curse, “bear the mark / of everyone,” forcing us to rethink and reintegrate the very binary that separates good and evil, life and death (99). Now fully present to us, beyond the ideological constructions we commonly share, the woman reveals the reality of the world she has come to understand, a world where life, human and nonhuman, is threatened at every turn. She describes with perfect clarity the modern world we live in, the world of “dead birds” and atomic radiation that we either cannot see or refuse to remember. With her we face the final irony, that it is she who faces shock therapy to expunge these realities. Art that engages and transforms memory offers an important model for the practice of survivance, and two of Vizenor’s life studies focus on the working artist: “Double Negatives,” which uncharacteristically focuses on Vizenor himself, and the closely related “Shirley by Winter.” Both poems speak to aloneness, the weekend absence of a son in the former, the death of a father in the latter, and to the transformation of memories at the heart of survivance. The poet/father’s thoughts drift from his son “at clear lake / with grandparents” to the river where he learned to swim, from “river and dock” to the “beached poems” on his desk which resonate, however distantly, with those earlier “family photographs / washed ashore” (90, 7). Yet suddenly the poet is not alone: “new words / old faces” (90). Remembering his first invitation to read before an audience, he gauges his personal transformation, the survivance effected through his practice of “imagistic poems” (90). The creation of this living presence has all but effaced the traces of a fraught linguistic past, even the “double negatives” that seem to waver between their grammatical and photographic connotations (90). Shirley also finds a determined survivance in art. She might even be connected with Vizenor, for her name in the American popular imagination is now forever connected to Laverne, his mother’s name. Shirley, too, must mourn:

vizenor’s life studies

95

every season she said transforms memories of her father (95) As the house returns to dust, Shirley actively resists ideological constructions of death, both the opacity of “bony feet / in a white mirror” and the “abstract sorrows” (95). She confines herself to her unfinished upstairs studio, visited occasionally by her calico cat. Her stacked canvases are “barely painted,” for what Shirley confronts here, waiting at her window, wandering “over glaciers / deserts,” is life itself. In her shaman’s journey she touches life’s essence, that elusive light in the eyes of rabbits sleeve dogs and old men (96) Shirley’s “wild colors” and creative space suggest a kinship to the earlier “Grassy Attic,” another Vizenor testament to the living imagination reminiscent of Wallace Stevens. Shirley may know this attic, but she resists being trapped here. She maintains a commitment to life as process. Like the very seasons, she insists upon change. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the boy in “Silhouettes,” the last of the life studies in Almost Ashore, also sits at a window where life enters as a line of brown ants. He is a tease, a creator of seasons, the presence of a new generation that counters the vision of the haunted Paul Celan, the brown ants on his portal “bodies,” “brothers,” the ashes of entire ancient families (55) Gerald Vizenor honors again and again in his poetry those individuals who meet life both with tragic wisdom and the imagination to resist. To achieve this balance demands heroic effort.

96

linda lizut helstern notes

1.  “Family Photograph” has been published in four different versions under three different names, though two—“Family Photograph, 1973,” published in 1974 in 25 Minnesota Poets, and “Family Photograph,” published in 1975 in Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians—are virtually identical. The latter is reprinted in Kimberly Blaeser’s 2006 anthology Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Both “The Last Photograph,” published in “June 1936: Measuring My Blood” in Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, and the version published in Almost Ashore have been substantially revised. 2.  “Guthrie Theater” was originally published as “Indians at the Guthrie” in Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians and appeared in a second version in 1983 in Songs for This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (83). Vizenor also recounted this story in a 1978 prose version in “Rattling Hail Ceremonial” in Word Arrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade (21–22). After its original publication in Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians, an untitled version of “Raising the Flag” was incorporated into the mixed-genre story “Marlene American Horse,” published in Word Arrows (39). 3.  Both “Huffy Henry” and “September Light” were originally published in 1975 in Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians, the former titled “Tropisms of John Berryman” and the latter “Unhappy Diary Days” (34–35; 32–33). 4.  Vizenor’s first use of term survivance, indeed, may be linked to the Genome Pavilion and its program of “biogenetic research on survivance” in The Heirs of Columbus (122).

references Blaeser, Kimberly. “July 29, 2002.” In Apprenticed to Justice, 103. Earthworks Series. Cambridge, U.K.: Salt, 2007. ———. ed. Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Bemidji, MN: Loon Feather, 2006. Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Songs for This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Greenfield, CT: Greenfield Review Press, 1983. Rosen, Kenneth, ed. Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. New York: Viking, 1975.

vizenor’s life studies

97

Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1–23. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ———. Almost Ashore: Selected Poems. Cambridge, U.K.: Salt, 2006. ———. Empty Swings. Minneapolis: Nodin, 1967. ———. “Family Photograph.” In Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Edited by Kimberly Blaeser, 214–15. Bemidji, MN: Loon Feather, 2006. ———. “Family Photograph, 1973.” In 25 Minnesota Poets. Edited by Seymour Yesner, 109–10. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1974. ———. “Family Photograph.” In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen, 37–39. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. ———. “Indians at the Guthrie.” In Songs for This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Edited by Joseph Bruchac, 264. Greenfield, CT: Greenfield Review Press, 1983. ———. “Indians at the Guthrie.” In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen, 31. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. “Raising the Flag.” In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen, 42–43. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. “Tropisms of John Berryman.” In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen, 34–35. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. “Unhappy Diary Days.” In Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by American Indians. Edited by Kenneth Rosen, 32–33. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. Word Arrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. 1993. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

chapter six

Gaps, I mmediacy, and the Deconstruction of Epistemological Categories The Impact of Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry on His Prose

Katja Sarkowsky

G

erald Vizenor is one of the most prolific Native writers and scholars, and an important cultural theorist; his coinage (or creative revival) of terms such as “postindian” or “survivance” has become indispensable for contemporary cultural theory and Native American studies. It is, however, Vizenor’s poetry and specifically his engagement with haiku that have stood at the beginning of his long literary and academic career. As Tom Lynch observes, Vizenor’s encounter with haiku was “formative in the development of his literary aesthetic and impelled his political consciousness” (“To Honor Impermanence,” 204). Poetry thus marks a beginning, but certainly not an “early stage” of Vizenor’s work, let alone the more “private” section in relation to his overtly political prose writing (203–4). Rather, Vizenor illustrates some of his theoretical, political, and philosophical agendas both in his poetry and his prose: “In fact, the haiku and free verse poems from this era introduce some of the language and many of the themes that became Vizenor’s trademark. In addition, Vizenor’s work in haiku and the reexpression of Anishinaabe dream songs has had important influence on his later style and philosophy of writing” (Blaeser, “‘Interior Dancers,’” 3). Hence, Vizenor’s poetry can be seen as foundational for both his theory and his narrative texts. Vizenor’s work is characterized by a deconstructionist agenda—a deconstruction of preconceived notions of “knowledge” and “fact,” “terminal creeds,” and “manifest manners,” as he calls them (Manifest Manners, 3–6). Vizenor generally deploys writing strategies that are meant to unsettle the reader’s relationship to language and conceptual thinking, and thus to bring about a more intuitive relationship between language and experience. Central to this agenda and the associated strategies is what he has called “trickster hermeneutics,” “the interpretation of simulations in the literature 98

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 99

of survivance” (15), a hermeneutics of transformation, and a “postmodern condition” (66). The trickster as the central element is combined with a number of other strategies, drawing on various cultural sources, that result in a transcultural language game. Closely connected to this, I argue, is the deployment of “haiku hermeneutics” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 30), a hermeneutics of gaps and immediacy. Both trickster and haiku hermeneutics, by creating open and often even contradictory texts in poetry and prose, can be understood as directly involving the reader. They assign her an active and creative role by staging “gaps” of cognition and perception. As Vizenor has it, “the reader creates a dreamscape from haiku, . . . the real master of the haiku is the imaginative reader who finds a dreamscape in natural harmonies beneath the words” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.) and the same creative activity is demanded from the reader in his prose. This essay discusses the intersections of Vizenor’s poetry and prose, formally and thematically. I argue that the strategies developed in Vizenor’s haiku and through his engagement with Anishinaabe dream songs are fundamental to understanding the ways in which he puts forth an agenda of unsettling notions of “truth,” an agenda of deconstructing epistemological categories through an invocation of immediacy and strategies of gaps. In the following, I briefly look more generally at Vizenor’s poetry (haiku in particular) and its relation to prose before I turn in more detail to an analysis of this influence in two novels, Dead Voices (1992) and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003).

“arising in shadows”: poetry and prose Vizenor encountered haiku as an artform (and an attitude) during his time as a soldier in Japan.1 The acquaintance with and growing appreciation of haiku opened for him a way to tribal literary traditions: “That presence of haiku, more than other literature touched my imagination and brought me closer to a sense of tribal consciousness. . . . The impermanence of natural reason and tribal remembrance was close to the mood of impermanence in haiku and other literature. My poems and stories would arise in shadows, the evanescence of interior landscapes” (“Envoy,” 28). Haiku present images and produce “interior landscapes” specifically through the reader’s encounter with the image; as will be shown in this essay, Vizenor uses this strategy not only in his haiku, but also in variations in his prose.

100

katja sarkowsky

A haiku is a seventeen-syllable poem of three lines (five-seven-five); it creates an image, “a concise concentration of motion, memories, and the sensation of seasons without closure or silence” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 28). Haiku usually avoids active verbs, too obvious a presence of the lyrical “I,” and the expression of emotion (Yasuda, Japanese Haiku, 14). Thus, the haiku presents a momentary impression that has to be complemented by the reader; through its insistence on the immediacy of experience, it is meant to help her go beyond established conceptions and realize the present.2 As such, the haiku is a very open form; it demands the active cooperation and engagement of the reader by presenting a precise image that has no meaning per se. Hence, as an artform and attitude, haiku is particularly conducive to an agenda such as Vizenor’s, which seeks to avoid closure and to unsettle preconceived notions of reality and a belief in the fixity of language. With regard to his own creative motivation, Vizenor draws a direct connection between haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs: “I would have to leave the nation of my birth to understand the wisdom and survivance of tribal literature. How ironic that my service as a soldier would lead me to haiku, and haiku an overture to dream songs” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 28). However, beyond this personal link between haiku and dream songs, there are also formal parallels between the two poetic forms. Not only are both, as Vizenor points out, “concentrated in nature” (31), but the parallels go further to encompass the way in which haiku and dream songs refer to and place the observer in nature. In his introduction to Summer in the Spring, Vizenor writes: “The song poems of the anishinaabeg are imaginative events, magical and spiritual flights, and intuitive lyrical images of woodland life” (11). What haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs have in common, therefore, is the strong imagistic element and an emphasis on the embeddedness of the individual in the world and in nature. Despite this shared focus, this individual or even individualistic view point of dream songs also illustrates the difference between these two artforms: in contrast to haiku which in its classic form rarely works with personal pronouns, there is no avoidance of them in Anishinaabe songs. “The song poems of the anishinaabeg are songs of individual freedom” (14), and as Vizenor has repeatedly pointed out, a sense of embeddedness in community and the natural world is complemented with a strong sense of the individual self, expressed in names as well as songs and visions (see The People Named the Chippewa, 13–14; also Breinig and Lösch, “Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” 156).

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 101

Vizenor’s specific way of referencing both haiku and Anishinaabe traditions has found its way into his prose as well, as Kimberly Blaeser argues: “The vision of interrelationships apparent in Vizenor’s blending of haiku and tribal inspirations in poetry and prose, together with his sense of historical events, stories and cultures merging, create a unique vision that often bridges his movement from poetry to prose” (“‘Interior Dancers,’” 8). This movement, as I seek to show in the following sections, is twofold: on the one hand, Vizenor uses formal means that make use of haiku and other poetic structures in his prose; on the other hand, through overlapping themes and images, he expands on his poetry in his prose and sets them in direct relation. This is in part accomplished by a high level of intertextual references and by Vizenor’s constant revisions of his earlier texts. As Lynch writes, “the flux of poems seeks to avoid what we might call the ‘terminal poem syndrome.’ Since each republication involves a reenactment, there are no scriptural versions of his haiku” (“To Honor Impermanence,” 214); he warns, however, against seeing these revisions necessarily as an improvement, for doing so “may be to commit the folly of canonizing a scriptural version in direct contradiction to Vizenor’s desire to avoid such fixing” (215). The same attempt to keep the text open by constant revision and republication can be observed with regard to his longer poetry (221), and numerous citations or rephrasings of earlier passages make an appearance throughout both Vizenor’s poetry and prose (see Blaeser, “‘Interior Dancers,’” 8).

“halting language”: haiku and haibun On a very general level, the impact of Vizenor’s poetry on his prose can be identified in the use of a highly poetic language in his novels. In Dead Voices, for instance, Vizenor frequently resorts to alliterative passages such as the following: “The tricksters of the tribe teased us down from the ceremonial birch and pine in the mountains, down from the treelines to new sanctuaries in the wild cities” (59). Poetic language signifies differently than prose language. In contrast to prose, as Johanne Prud’homme and Nelson Guilbert explain, poetic language seeks to “establish a coherent system of significance. A poetic text must therefore be analyzed in terms of the relationships that develop amongst the words” rather than in any reference to extratextual reality (“Poetic Language,” n.p.). While I would argue that this is generally the case for Vizenor’s postmodernist prose texts, too, the use of alliteration and

102

katja sarkowsky

other poetic devices heighten the sense of intra- and intertextual referentiality. More specifically, the formal poetic influence in Vizenor’s prose manifests itself in the use of haiku structure; as Blaeser notes, “there are many instances where Vizenor’s prose resembles the haiku structure, even more where it functions in a similar fashion: presenting tight imagery, setting scenes in nature, withholding commentary” (“‘Interior Dancers,’” 8). This has a prominent precedent in Japanese literature, and Vizenor is very conscious of it: in a number of texts—the introduction to his haiku collection Matsushima or in the novel Hiroshima Bugi for instance—he refers extensively to Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travel diary of so-called haibun. “Basho emphasized commonplace experiences in haiku, and the use of ordinary words in a serious manner. Through seasonal changes and elements from the environment his haibun and haiku connect the reader to the earth and to shared experiences in nature” (Vizenor, Matsushima, n.p.). Haibun is a mixture of haiku and prose, “a kind of prose ‘written in the spirit of haiku’” (Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 133). This form has been used extensively in Vizenor’s prose. Analyzing passages from Bearheart, Blaeser points out that “certain lines of Vizenor’s prose embody . . . haibun” (133). In the context of Vizenor’s work, haibun refers to a number of different strategies that range from loose connections to haiku to haiku-like passages within the text. True to Vizenor’s narrative project and to haiku’s close link to Zen, the “task of haiku in Vizenor’s style,” Blaeser claims, “is to thrust us into ‘the current of life’ where we can find for ourselves a moment of understanding—of enlightenment” (135). Kenneth Yasuda calls this the “haiku moment,” “a kind of aesthetic moment—a moment in which the words which created the experience and the experience itself can become one” (Japanese Haiku, 32). This haiku moment works in prose as well. Examples can be found not only in Bearheart, but in most if not all of Vizenor’s novels to varying degrees. In Dead Voices, Vizenor’s literary roots in haiku play a role both in terms of his imagistic prose passages and in passages that closely resemble haiku in that they present brief impressions of the environment: “Blue clothespins on the wire. The scent of oranges. Bright yellow houses with an unpainted garage. Black shutters” (55). These sentences are not even descriptions; by leaving out verbs, they stress the immediacy of the experience in a doubled present—that of the narrative and that of the reader. There is no judgment here, not even an active onlooker: as in haiku, the image is merely

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 103

taken in. Haiku, like its underlying Zen notion of language and reality, attributes to the small details of life an absolute significance; the image points toward nothing beyond itself. “The haiku never describes,” writes Roland Barthes, “its art is counter-descriptive, to the degree that each state of the thing is immediately, stubbornly, victoriously converted into a fragile essence of appearance” (Empire of Signs, 77). This dehierarchization of elements is similarly valid for Vizenor’s lyrical prose passages that investigate, through the image, the limits of language or even seek to “halt” it (74).3 The “halting of language” in or through these often random images works even in examples that use active verbs (as Vizenor also does in his own haiku): “White daisies stand over a bush. Elusive catbirds whistle deep in the shrubbery. Secrets are remembered” (Dead Voices, 61). While in this passage Vizenor resorts to the use of verbs, the effect is nevertheless similar to those passages that avoid them and formally are linked more directly to haiku: it “halts” the narrative, even seeks to “halt language” for a moment through the creation of a sketchy image to be taken in by the reader. This moment allows the reader to “enter” into the perspective of the narrator, see what she sees, and hence participate in the experience of an immediate present. But Vizenor goes further in investigating the possibilities of haibun and haiku structure in prose text. In the following example, not only does he use active verbs, but he also uses them in the past tense: “Moist shadows were leashed to their trees. Fog dogs prowled at dawn in the highest gardens. The eucalyptus shimmered” (60). Also, and equally in contrast to the previously cited lines, the image is highly metaphorical, thus connecting it more obviously to other poetic traditions than to haiku. Nevertheless, these lines are tied to the attempt to create a sense of immediacy through the invocation of an image. This image serves a double function: it calls on the reader to respond to the imagistic interruption in the text and to the narrative gap this creates; this gap—and this is the second effect of these lines—provides a transition from the previous narrative (told in past tense) to the following sections that are narrated in present tense. Hence, not only through the deployment of its imagistic characteristics and effects, but also in terms of narrative structure, haiku provides a way of creating immediacy through readerly experiences of “gaps,” through the momentary “halting of language” by means of language that is so characteristic for haiku. This investigation or even performance of the limits of language is also typical for Vizenor’s deployment of the trickster figure and trickster hermeneutics. The trickster is a “comic nature in a language game, not a real person

104

katja sarkowsky

or ‘being’ in the ontological sense. Tribal tricksters are embodied in imagination and liberate the mind” (Trickster of Liberty, x). The tight link between trickster hermeneutics and haiku hermeneutics are obvious. In Dead Voices, as in other texts, Vizenor uses different textual strategies in his narrative project of unsettling, and the use of these strategies changes throughout the novel (see Sarkowsky, AlterNative Spaces). The effect is different in each case, but the strategies are closely related: both haiku and trickster hermeneutics dehierarchize events, unsettle dualistic notions of reality, and therefore demand the reader’s tolerance of fundamental ambiguity. Ideally, both shift the relationship between language and experience toward more flexibility and a sense of immediacy. While numerous examples of these effects can be found in other novels, too, Dead Voices illustrates particularly well the formal influence Vizenor’s haiku has had on his prose writing. But as argued, the impact of his poetry on the novels is not confined to formal aspects; Blaeser has highlighted not only the repeated use of verbal signatures but also “thematic wind” shining through in Vizenor’s work (“Interior Dancers,” 8). And many of Vizenor’s thematic foci found their first expressions in his poetry. In the following, I will discuss Hiroshima Bugi as a good illustration of how thematic, imagistic, and intertextual aspects intertwine in Vizenor’s poetry and prose.

“thematic winds”: dead fathers and native survivance

Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 is one of Vizenor’s more recent novels that brings together several strands of his other works: the interest in Japan and in Japanese history and literature, and a circling around family genealogies, most obviously the search for traces of the dead father. Vizenor has explored both themes in detail in his autobiography as well as in his poetry. Last but not least, his more overtly political agenda plays a central role as well, most notably in form of “mixed blood politics,” the questioning of notions of “racial purity” (expressed in Hiroshima Bugi by the anglicized Japanese word hafu), and the de(con)struction of “terminal creeds” and “manifest manners.” In Hiroshima Bugi, these are not primarily, as in his other novels, the fixed notions and destructive effects of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, but the official narrative of postwar Japan as a nation of peace and victim of the atomic bomb; this narrative largely omits Japan’s

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 105

imperial aggression and wartime atrocities and is targeted by the protagonist who “mocks the insinuations of the peacemongers with more delight than a warrior at the Little Big Horn River” (Hiroshima Bugi, 157; see also Helstern, “Shifting the Ground” and Cornelißen, “Nationale Erinnerungskulturen seit 1945 im Vergleich”). Like Dead Voices, Hiroshima Bugi challenges the reader’s expectations and preconceived notions through its use of both trickster and haiku hermeneutics; it does so, however, less with regard to its formal aspects but rather by thematic and imagistic enmeshment. Set in Japan and Minnesota, Hiroshima Bugi is structured by the accounts of two narrators. Ronin is a trickster figure and son of an Anishinaabe interpreter under General McArthur and a Japanese woman; the other narrator (and the “editor” of Ronin’s manuscript) is himself an Anishinaabe veteran and seemingly a good friend of Ronin’s father: “Nightbreaker [Ronin’s father] had been reassigned ten years earlier, but even so we shared many stories and created our perfect memories of Japan. We were both anishinaabe [sic], but from different reservations. I am a member of the Leech Lake Reservation, and he lived to the west, on the White Earth Reservation” (19). Each chapter consists of two parts, Ronin’s narrative and that of his father’s friend, set off visually by the use of different type fonts. Ronin’s passages—as indicated by their titles—all seek to relate the narrator to a particular place or event (“Ronin of Rashomon Gate,” “Ronin of the Black Rain”); the nameless narrator’s parts are simply entitled “Manidoo Envoy,” a double-play on words and concepts. “Manidoo” refers to the Anishinaabe spirits, the manidoos; but it also invokes the Hotel Manidoo in Nogales, Arizona, where Ronin’s father spent the last years of his life, where the narrator of the “manidoo envoys” still lives, and that therefore provides the location for the telling of the framing narrative after the protagonist’s disappearance. The “envoy” immediately invokes Vizenor’s earlier use of envoys with regard to his haiku and thus relates the structure of the novel directly to his lifelong engagement with poetry: just like Vizenor’s “envoy to haiku,” these “manidoo envoys” serve as commentaries and explanations for the preceding Ronin story. “The envoy is interpretative” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 31), writes Vizenor with regard to his envoy to haiku, and he has pushed this interpretative element even further in Hiroshima Bugi by combining it with a postmodern play on metatextuality. Here, the envoy comments on, contradicts, cites, explains, and paraphrases the protagonist’s narration. Ronin’s stories, on the one hand, seek to counter dominant narratives about (Japanese) history and national memory, and, on the other hand,

106

katja sarkowsky

present an investigation into hybridity, liminality, and genealogy; both aspects strongly overlap with or are even grounded in Vizenor’s poetry. The debunking of national narratives is to be found frequently in his nonhaiku poems, for instance, “White Earth” or “Shaman Breaks”; more recently, his epic long-poem Bear Island has taken up this agenda, which also is central to Vizenor’s theoretical project. The interest in hybridity and liminality ties in with both Vizenor’s nonhaiku and his haiku poetry: the liminal figure of the trickster features strongly in Vizenor’s poems, unsettling language “from within.” And haiku as a genre, as illustrated earlier, confronts the reader with logical “gaps” to challenge epistemologies that rely on fixed categories and closed narratives. True to this agenda, the novel opens by establishing the unreliability of its narrative: “The Atomic Dome is my Rashomon” is the first sentence of Ronin’s story (Hiroshima Bugi, 1). “Rashomon” refers to the movie by Akira Kurosawa as well as the short stories “Rashomon” and “In the Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, on which Kurosawa has built his movie (Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, 181–82). “Rashomon,” the story of a rape and murder (or suicide) told from different, incompatible perspectives, raises fundamental questions of guilt, memory, and the (im)possibility of “truth.” Thus, this intertextual reference ties in with the text’s agenda of deconstructing a national narrative that seeks to omit historical guilt by claiming a victim status as exclusive position; at the same time, it takes up the resistance to closure already established in Vizenor’s poetry by intertextually pointing to its own unreliability. Ronin thus refuses to simply counter one closed model with another. This deconstruction of national memory is linked directly to the other central aspect, the investigation into genealogy and hybridity, both of which challenge any notion of purity or epistemological fixity. With regard to Ronin’s “impure” genealogy, the first “manidoo envoy” introduces Ronin’s search for his father at the Hotel Manidoo: “Ronin dressed for his father. He wore beaded moccasins, loose black trousers, a pleated shirt shrewdly decorated with puffy white chrysanthemums, and a dark blue cravat. Sadly, he was seven days too late” (Hiroshima Bugi, 7). The protagonist’s search for connection to his deceased father can be found throughout both narratives, Ronin’s own as well as that of the manidoo envoy. This search thematically and imagistically overlaps with earlier texts, not only Vizenor’s autobiography, but significantly also his poetry.

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 107

In Empty Swings, a haiku takes up family history and the memory of his murdered father: “With the moon / my young father comes to mind / walking the clouds” (n.p.). “Walking the clouds” can be linked to both a visionary experience and to death; as Lynch has pointed out, this haiku, “a bit mystical by haiku conventions, is more kin to Anishinabe dream songs and links Vizenor’s immediate vision of the moon with his memory of his long-deceased father, his connection to his Anishinabe heritage” (“To Honor Impermanence,” 209). Indeed, this poem echoes—or is echoed in—Vizenor’s dedication of Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories to his father, Clement William Vizenor, in which he cites the Anishinaabe orator Keeshkemun: “If you wish to know me / you must seek me in the clouds.” In Interior Landscape, Vizenor uses the same quotation to write about his father’s Crane Clan; this lyrical passage serves to link the story of his father, the story of his Anishinaabe clan, and the creation of “interior landscapes” in and through imagination: “My father died in a place no crane would choose to dance, at a time no tribal totem would endure. One generation later the soul of the crane recurs in imagination; our reversion, our interior landscapes” (3). These complex connections between poetry and autobiography are taken up again in Hiroshima Bugi in Ronin’s farewell to the reader: “I am a crane, and you readers who want to know more about me must search in the clouds. Lafcadio Hearn is a crane on my wind. Many authors fly this way” (203). In addition to the obvious thematic overlaps and direct citation, these intricate links illustrate the conceptual permeability of Vizenor’s texts across the different genres; like the categories of perception and cognition in haiku, “the text” as a closed entity is fundamentally questioned by these webs of interconnections. Along similar lines, Hiroshima Bugi directly takes up Vizenor’s engagement with haiku, both formally (which will not be discussed here further) and with regard to the intertextuality of the novel. He takes up the famous poem by the haiku poet and author of the travel diary The Narrow Road to the Deep North Matsuo Basho, “the ancient pond / frog leaps / sound of water,” a poem he cites in his autobiography and has “written back to” in his collection Matsushima.4 This poem is humorously modified in Hiroshima Bugi: “ancient pond / the nanazu leap / sound of water” (Interior Landscapes, 172; Hiroshima Bugi, 29). Nanazu are water spirits, the name invoking the Anishinaabe trickster Naanabozho; the scene in which this revision of the original poem is cited is located in the context of a trickster vision (see Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa, 3–4; Carson, “Ainu and Anishinaabe Stories of Survivance,”

108

katja sarkowsky

445). The poem itself is further discussed in the “manidoo envoy” and linked to Ronin’s search for his deceased father: “Basho is my spirit poet, he said, and then recited several haiku poems. Ronin told me that he traveled with the spirit of the master poet and his father on the roads north to Matsushima Bay” (Hiroshima Bugi, 34). This trip is a self-reflective and ironic reenactment—of Basho’s journey, of MacDonald’s and Hearn’s, as well as potentially his father’s: I washed ashore, abandoned my makeshift sailboat, and slowly made my way south, a route of spas that my father might have taken, first to the Toyomi onsen near Horonobe, Hokkaido. My backpack was light, only a change of clothes, scant toiletries, and three wet books, Narrow Road to the Far North, a haiku journey by Matsuo Basho, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan by Lafcadio Hearn, and Japan: Story of Adventure by Ranald MacDonald. (Hiroshima Bugi, 123) The journey produces an intertextual, but even more so a familial, reconnection; like categories, like texts, “family” and “genealogies” are also highly porous and hybrid constructions. Nevertheless, the related themes of journey and search in Hiroshima Bugi do not constitute a romantic trope of loss and recovery of origin; rather, these stories present a celebration of hybridity, liminality, and what Vizenor has called “survivance”: “These are the stories of native endurance and survivance; the stories that create a sense of presence, a native self, a teasable self in names, relations, and native contingencies, but not victimry. That sense of self is a creation, an aesthetic presence; the self is not an essence, or immanence, but the mien of stories” (Fugitive Poses, 20). Survivance is individual, familial, and communal, and central to survivance are stories. These stories, as Hiroshima Bugi as well as Dead Voices illustrate, are tricky, or even trickster stories—they play with and disappoint any expectation of fixity or closure. no closure: language gaps and the deconstruction of epistemological categories

In this refusal of closure, trickster hermeneutics and haiku hermeneutics merge. Both, as the previous examples illustrate, deliberately leave gaps, refuse to grant the reader certainty, and thus demand her or his active

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 109

participation in the process of creative construction. In Vizenor’s poetry, particularly his haiku, these gaps are inherent in the genre. Vizenor’s prose texts either work directly with these haiku effects, such as through the use of haibun; or they produce the sense of conceptual openness and categorial unsettling through cross references between different texts and genres, as well as by trickster hermeneutics. The trickster does not reconcile contradictions, but celebrates multiplicity and holds fragments in balance (Madsen, “On Subjectivity and Survivance,” 67–68). In both Vizenor’s poetic and prose work, the trickster often is almost synonymous with the mixedblood trickster characters such as Ronin (Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 155; Murray, “Crossblood Strategies in the Writings of Gerald Vizenor,” 219). “The crossblood, or mixedblood,” Vizenor explains, “is a new metaphor, a transitive contradancer between communal tribal cultures and those material and urban pretensions that counter conservative traditions. The crossblood wavers in myth and autobiographies; we move between reservations and cities, the stories of the crane with a trickster signature” (Interior Landscapes, 262–63). Metaphor generally and the trickster in particular is an instrument to capture experience—insufficiently—in language; it “is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness” (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, qtd. in Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” 13). This gap in comprehension, this necessary openness and uncertainty of meaning is captured by metaphor and translated from Vizenor’s poetry into his prose. His trickster hermeneutics work with instability of meaning and signification, they work through constant transformation; haiku hermeneutics function through their insistence on presence, immediacy, and like trickster hermeneutics, impermanence. Both demand of the reader conceptual openness and flexibility, as they both unsettle the relationship between language and experience. Together, they present a powerful challenge to any epistemological notion of fixity and closure.

notes 1.  Kenneth Yasuda defines “haiku attitude” as “readiness for an experience for its own sake,” which demands of the poet—an extension of the reader—a “willingness to surrender cherished intellectual concepts before the reality of

110

katja sarkowsky

his experience” (Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature and History [Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001], 13). 2.  In this, haiku as a genre is closely linked to Zen Buddhism; see, for instance, Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1970; repr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 3.  Compare in this context Vizenor’s first “spring” poem in Matsushima: “april ice storm / new leaves freeze overnight / words fall apart” (n.p.). 4.  The first poem in Matsushima reads: “calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet / water striders” (n.p.).

references Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. 1970. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Basho, Matsuo. The Narrow Rod to Oku. Translated by Donald Keene. Tokyo: Kondansha International, 1996. Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor. Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. ———. “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision.” SAIL 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 3–15. Breinig, Helmbrecht, and Klaus Lösch. “Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” In American Contradictions: Interviews with Nine American Writers. Edited by Wolfgang Binder and Helmbrecht Breinig, 143–65. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995. Carson, Benjamin. “Ainu and Anishinaabe Stories of Survivance: Shigero Kayano, Katsuichi Honda, and Gerald Vizenor.” Accessed March 2, 2010. http://www. icis.kansai-u.ac.jp/data/journa102-v1/30_Carson.pdf. Cornelißen, Christoph et al. “Nationale Erinnerungskulturen seit 1945 im Vergleich.” In Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945. Edited by Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Wolfgang Schwentker, 9–27. Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 2003. Helstern, Linda Lizut. “Shifting the Ground: Theories of Survivance in From Sand Creek and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 163–90. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Jahner, Elaine. “Trickster Discourse and Postmodern Strategies.” In Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 38–58. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Translated by Audie E. Bock. New York: Vintage, 1983. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 111 Lynch, Tom. “To Honor Impermanence: The Haiku and Other Poems of Gerald Vizenor.” In Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 203–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Madsen, Deborah. “On Subjectivity and Survivance: Rereading Trauma through The Heirs of Columbus and The Crown of Columbus.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 61–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Murray, David. “Crossblood Strategies in the Writings of Gerald Vizenor.” The Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 213–27. Prud’homme, Johanne, and Nelson Guilbert. “Poetic Language.” In Signo (online), dir. Louis Hébert. Rimouski, Quebec: 2006, http://www.signosemio.com/ riffaterre/poetic-language.asp. Sarkowsky, Katja. AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations’ Literatures. American Studies 146. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter, 2007. Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ———. Bear Island. The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ———. Empty Swings: Haiku in English. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1967. ———. “Envoy to Haiku.” In Shadow Distance. A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 25–32. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Hiroshima Bugi. Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. Matsushima: Pine Islands. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984. ———. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. “The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance.” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1993): 7–30. ———. “Shaman Breaks.” In Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. Edited by Duane Niatum, 72–73. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

112

katja sarkowsky

———. Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984. ———. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. “White Earth.” In Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. Edited by Duane Niatum, 71. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Yasuda, Kenneth. Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature and History. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001.

chapter seven

Enriching P rose with H aiku Poetics Christina Hein

A

fter some twenty years of having written and teased the reader in the haiku genre, in Matsushima: Pine Island—his sixth volume of haiku— Gerald Vizenor presents his understanding of and approach to haiku. In the introductory essay that precedes the volume, he relates bits of the reception history of haiku in the Anglophone West, makes it clear on which elements of haiku he concentrates, and relates haiku’s generic specificities and cultural background to aspects of Anishinaabe culture. In his account of what haiku is, he relies to a great extent on standard English-language works. He quotes R. H. Blyth’s Haiku and A History of Haiku, he draws on Donald Keene’s Japanese Literature and Kenneth Yasuda’s The Japanese Haiku, and he refers to thoughts on haiku by Edward Seidensticker, Roland Barthes, and others. The context that Vizenor provides is thus one in which haiku have already been interpreted and translated culturally for reception by a Western, Eurooriented readership and authorship. Yet Vizenor goes well beyond this. In his text, he inspires haiku from his own personal and cultural background, relating it to images and ideas that have featured recurrently in his poetry and prose: “Haiku,” he writes, “is blue, tactile, musk, tribal, and a dance” (Matsushima, n.p.). In the introduction, Vizenor infuses haiku with his approach to understanding and the politics of indigeneity, thereby also personalizing it. In this essay, I argue that elements of the haiku poetics that Vizenor develops in Matsushima can be traced throughout his prose writing, whether in fiction, nonfiction, argumentative essay, short story, or any of the variously mixed guises that his pieces may assume. My argument, then, falls into line with Kimberly Blaeser’s observation that Vizenor’s early involvement with haiku form, philosophy, and methods . . . has left its mark on most of his subsequent writing. . . . Vivid nature imagery, building by suggestion, tension created by unusual 113

114

christina hein juxtapositions, trickster consciousness, reader engagement—all of these traits surface again and again in Vizenor’s work as methods to move beyond the written text itself. (Gerald Vizenor, 133)

Here, I tentatively call these traits Vizenor’s “haiku poetics” and aim to illustrate their influence as a structural principle, or at least as recurring aspects of his writing in general. In the following, I first provide the basis for my argument by unfolding Vizenor’s indigenized version of haiku as he presents it in the introduction to Matsushima. The second part of my essay then turns to examples from both Vizenor’s theoretical essays and his literary fiction (though I accept that this classification is unsatisfactory for Vizenor’s writings). His early experiences with haiku, I argue, supply Vizenor with strategies of presentation and amalgamation as well as drawing the reader into his texts as the taxed and challenged participant and co-creator of meaning(s). Finally, a section is dedicated to how haiku influences converge with Vizenor’s trickster approaches and his concept of crossblood identities. vizenor’s indigenized haiku poetics

A number of key ideas can be identified that Vizenor perceives as important for haiku, their creation, and for “haiku thought,” which he presents as a mongrel combination of philosophical discipline and a state of mind required for “seeing” haiku and writing them down. Both Kimberly Blaeser and Tom Lynch have convincingly illustrated how strongly Vizenor’s vision of haiku is connected to spirituality and other aspects of Anishinaabe culture. Blaeser reports that “[s]imilarities in the forms and subjects of haiku and dream songs have been recognized and commented on” since about the 1910s (Gerald Vizenor, 111), and she proceeds to illustrate how these similarities apply to Vizenor’s understanding of haiku (115–20). Relying on these observations, I point briefly to the various instances of indigenization in Vizenor’s central ideas about haiku and their application to issues with which he is generally concerned in his writing.

Economy of Form and Language “Haiku strives for economy of language, economy of form, yet extension of meaning,” Jerome Downes writes in the introduction to the first edition of

enriching prose with haiku poetics

115

Seventeen Chirps (qtd. in Vizenor, introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). This striving for economy of form and language becomes readily apparent in the (more or less strictly interpreted) counting of syllables and lines to which haiku poets subject themselves. It is also illustrated in Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho’s famous line: “The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of” (qtd. Yasuda, “‘Approach to Haiku’ and ‘Basic Principles,’” 129). With language and form strictly limited, narrative elements that would establish context, offer commentary, hint to the resolution of conflicting elements, and result in narrative closure are generally not provided in haiku. Instead, a certain tension arises between the words and lines (or between the ideograms) that are juxtaposed without further elucidation or evaluation, between the objects or thoughts that the writer arranges next to each other for the reader’s contemplation. Vizenor relates the tension in haiku to human life in general: “There is tension in haiku thought; little in human experience is without tension, but the tension in haiku is subtle, unresolved in narrative schemes” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). Working out this tension is the task assigned to the reader: “Tension is suggested, the reader touches the places in his memories” (n.p.). The reader of Vizenor’s prose texts is aware that the tension need not necessarily be resolved and thus constitutes one of the foundations for the creation of a (potentially) “open text”: closure might be achieved in the reader’s mind but never in the text itself (see Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 113). The existence of tension along with the denial of its resolution (or narrative closure) is also a characteristic of what might be called “trickster” elements in many of Vizenor’s texts. Often, a reduced form or the scarcity of information conveyed, with the resulting insecurities and sometimes even incongruities, tease the reader, or challenge her to engage with a text whose meanings are unstable.

Intense Observation of Nature, or an Intense Experience in Nature The traditional haiku that Vizenor addresses in the introduction to Matsushima and upon which he bases his own haiku is inspired by intense and immediate experiences of nature and cherishes relation to the seasons. Drawing on Barthes, Vizenor establishes that writing generally tends to “leave readers separated from nature and mythic imagination” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). In haiku, however, “[w]ords are turned back to nature,

116

christina hein

set free in the mythic dreamscape of a haiku . . .” (n.p.). The focus lies neither on “personal attention to the author” (n.p.), nor even on an author’s personal experience of nature or perception of the world. Haiku thus facilitate access not to an authorial personality but to an experience, or an image from nature that may address, even touch, each reader personally. For Vizenor’s indigenized haiku, this means that “the images in haiku remain connected to our bodies”; “[t]he reader creates a dreamscape from haiku; nothing remains in print, words become dream voices, traces on the wind, twists in the snow . . .” (n.p.). If “[h]aiku ascribe the natural world in dreamscapes,” as Vizenor writes, and if the reader “creates a dreamscape from haiku” (n.p.), both haiku and reader are being connected to an Anishinaabe cultural background. In an indigenized approach to haiku, then, “personal narratives, social practices, remembered stories, wordwound philosophies, are unmasked in the harmonies of natural seasons. . . . [H]aiku is a spring shoot on a dark stump, not a concise wordpile in the corner of a cluttered culture” (n.p.). Evidently, Vizenor’s vision of haiku relates it to liveliness and to the cycle of ephemerality and continuation that may be attributed not only to nature and the seasons but also to storytelling practices in cultures with a strong focus on orality. As such, haiku stand in opposition to convoluted volumes of fixed knowledge stacked in storage rooms which are so often connected to Western cultures of the archive in Vizenor’s work.

A Sense of Immediacy From the communication of an intense experience in nature stems a sense of immediacy that is characteristic of text-reader communication in haiku. Haiku has repeatedly been related to Zen buddhism, and Roland Barthes goes so far as to call it the “literary branch” of Zen (qtd. in Vizenor, introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). With language philosophy and the relation between signifier and signified in mind, Barthes suggests that haiku is “destined to halt language.” The “limitation of language” in haiku does not aim for a high degree of conciseness, he maintains. On the contrary, to “act . . . on the very root of meaning, so that this meaning will not melt, run, internalize, become implicit, disconnect . . .” (qtd. in introduction to Matsushim, n.p.). Vizenor’s theoretical essays and his political fiction take a similar stance as they do not seem to be particularly interested in mimetic concision. Yet what often unfolds from among imagined scenarios, dreams, and allusions, is a presentation of biting political criticism, the deconstruction of

enriching prose with haiku poetics

117

master narratives and stereotypical assumptions along with the presentation of potential alternatives. Vizenor’s prose texts, one might say in relation to Barthes’s assessment of haiku, often display layers and various fragments of discourse(s) at the same time as they succeed at “acting at the roots” of political realities and ideological precepts. Vizenor takes this point still farther in his introduction to Matsushima when he quotes R. H. Blyth from the first volume of his Haiku: [A] haiku “is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things. . . . Haiku is the result of the wish, the effort, not to speak, not to write poetry, not to obscure further the truth and suchness of a thing with words, with thoughts and feelings. . . . A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature. . . . It is a way of returning to nature . . .” (n.p.) Certainly, a “return to nature,” even the wish to rescue the “suchness of a thing” from the “obscurity of words,” is difficult to argue in respect to the writings of an author who is influenced by Derrida, Baudrillard, and deconstructivist approaches. After all, Vizenor tends to display a considerable skepticism toward attempts to present “nature” or “the natural” in writing, and much of his work is engaged in deconstructing what has been naturalized on the level of discourse. Vizenor’s fiction and nonfiction, I would therefore suggest, are evidently not driven by an interest to return to a nature that has to be understood as prediscursive. Rather, they attempt to reach beyond social simulations and inventions, establishing certain (versions of) realities along the way and offering a sense of what might be perceived as wrong, or in need of change. As such, much of Vizenor’s writing in prose points at the “nature” of construction and the various layers of discursive constructs that surround, veil, and also partly formulate perceptions of certain issues (such as indigenous cultures and identities).

Active and Personally Engaged Reader Vizenor cites Donald Keene when he addresses the power of suggestion in haiku: “A really good poem . . . and this is especially true of haiku, must be completed by the reader . . . the writer does not specify the truth taught him by experience. . . .” (qtd. in Vizenor, introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). Consequently, the reader is left to engage the poem actively if she wants to

118

christina hein

come to understand it. Vizenor refers to Daisetz Suzuki to stress this point: “As to the meaning of such objects . . . [that have impressed the author and that she ‘barely enumerates’] it is left to the reader to construct and interpret it according to his poetic experiences and spiritual intuitions” (n.p.). From this basis, Vizenor constructs an ideal haiku reader, and it is no long shot to observe that this ideal reader possesses qualities that are also of great usefulness to the reader of most of his own texts: The reader denies implied critical interpretations, written language philosophies and ideologies, and the presence of the author, in favor of his own experiences; the reader makes the haiku from whole worlds floating down a river in natural harmonies. The reader becomes the active listener, the creator, set free in a wordless natural place. (n.p.) The reader as active listener, meanwhile, points to an intersection of haiku with the focus on oral tradition of indigenous cultures. “Haiku,” Vizenor writes, “is blue, tactile, musk, tribal, and a dance” (n.p.), creatively blending a Japanese literary tradition with his political Anishinaabe mixedblood agenda. He fuses haiku’s key ideas with an Anishinaabe trickster spirit, postmodern language plays, and the understanding of the evasiveness of signifiers and thus creates his own particular style of narration—and of argumentation. Before turning to the discussion of how “haiku poetics” reveal themselves in Vizenor’s prose writing, I recapitulate an idea from what has been presented above: one of the fundamental principles of haiku is the juxtaposition of individual ideograms, lines, images. Basho’s most famous haiku illustrates this principle very well: “an ancient pond / a frog jumps in / sound of water” (qtd. in Vizenor, “Envoy to Haiku,” 59). Connection between the individual elements has to be established by the reader, while the text itself creates the productive tension that has been discussed above. Vizenor conveys this aspect when he writes: “There are no cause and effect grammatical templates in haiku: . . . images are not static phenomena” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). This principle, along with the numerous possibilities that it opens up to the writer of argumentative and politically interested fictional prose, be it as a stylistic device or as a way of presenting (and generating) critical thought and actions, formulates the central idea of Vizenor’s indigenized haiku poetics.

enriching prose with haiku poetics

119

haiku poetics and argumentative essays

For Vizenor, the reader of haiku “denies implied critical interpretations, written language philosophies and ideologies, and the presence of the author, in favor of his own experiences . . .” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). No matter how much Vizenor’s writings seem to favor such a reader, though, it remains debatable if he would indeed want readers to “deny implied critical interpretations” in the case of his theoretical essays. Rather, I believe that, by means of “haiku poetics,” readers might be guided to denying socially implied critical interpretations that are reified and present themselves as “normal.” These restrictions already convey the limitations of translating haiku principles to any kind of prose writing, and particularly to the theoretical, politically inspired essay that does not come free of ideological implications.1 Later in this chapter, I discuss haiku strategies in Vizenor’s argumentative essays, mainly in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance and other examples of his writing that might be classified as nonfiction, particularly Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, and Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. What becomes evident rather quickly is the fact that Vizenor tries to make the presence of a personalized author elusive in his texts. Frequently, he challenges the role and idea of an implied or real author, be it by treating Gerald Vizenor as a character in Interior Landscapes or by transforming him into Clement Beaulieu in Wordarrows: “Using a created name,” he explains, the author avoids the first-person grammatical limitations in narrative perspective. Writing about myself as a character with a created name allows me to write about Clement Beaulieu from the omniscient, descriptive position I adopt when describing the other characters, rather than forcing these characters through a first-person template, or point of view. (Wordarrows, x) Whether such moves indeed have the effect of avoiding the “calling of attention to the persona of the author” that Vizenor identifies with haiku or whether they achieve just the opposite remains arguable. At any rate, a certain skepticism toward “the author” and toward a personalized first-person perspective is evident with Vizenor.

120

christina hein

Along with having the author recede to the background comes the activation of the reader as an active and co-creative participant. Challenging, at times even provoking, the reader, Vizenor plays with and exceeds what reader response theory has long established for the reception of texts generally. In Manifest Manners, for instance, Vizenor tries a game on pronouns that involves the reader in the complexities of discourses on discovery. Christopher Columbus, Vizenor begins, is the deverbative trickster, the one who landed in two pronouns, the he and you. . . . Consider the second person, you are the trickster discoverer, and you land at dawn with no missionaries or naturalists; you hear the salamanders and rush of shamans. “No sooner had you concluded the formalities of taking possession of the island than people began to come to the beach,” you wrote on October 12, 1492, at Samana Cay. You are the discoverer of histories; you are the pronouns, the absence of the nouns in simulations, but not the redeemer. You are the deverbative reader, and you are the trickster hermeneutics in the tribal literature of survivance. (107) Obviously, the implications of this passage are complex. Yet once the reader has been drawn into the text as assisting “discovery,” she is quickly made to understand a responsibility that she bears concerning its contemporary consequences. In what way exactly she “is the trickster hermeneutics in the tribal literature of survivance” remains to be worked out and determined by the reader; be it simply as an element of language play aimed to disrupt discourse, be it as a propagator of dominant discourses that are teased and potentially subverted by trickster hermeneutics, or be it by becoming active on the ground of trickster hermeneutical approaches (see Ganser, Hein, and Höpker, “Trickster Hermeneutics als alterNative Schreib- und Lesepraxis”). As in haiku, it is her task to draw on her personal and cultural backgrounds and experiences to understand the uncommented placing of a personalizing “you” next to Christopher Columbus. Where haiku might convey “a moment of temporary enlightenment,” Vizenor’s prose supplies the reader with little glimpses of larger insights to meditate on. What is this relation between “you,” on the one hand, and Christoper Columbus and discovery, on the other? A reader who opens herself up to the deeper strata of this play on pronouns, who is willing to transcend the realm of language philosophies and

enriching prose with haiku poetics

121

the mediatedness of language as a sign system may arrive at elucidating intellectual and cultural insights. Another way to mobilize the reader into being alert, critical, and willing to participate in the creation of meaning is Vizenor’s characteristic brand of juxtaposing, combining, sometimes fusing elements from different genres and generic conventions (see Breinig, “Narrative Ambivalence and the Creation of Meaning”). Thus, historical characters may undergo physical (if also metaphorical) changes in his historically oriented, argumentative nonfiction (ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, for instance, grows and shrinks in The People Named the Chippewa, 41–42), and theoretically inspired argumentative essays may be written in a prose style that is at times poetic, at times purposefully ambivalent, and at times bordering on or even transcending the border to fiction. The interspersing of academic quotations and passages from historical documents into fictional novels serves the same aim. Sentences like “Western movies, of course, are not cultural vision, but the vicious encounters with the antiselves of civilization, the invented savage” (Manifest Manners, 7) are rich in the creative use of language, which in turn adds to the density of the meaning conveyed. What is more, the status of the fictionality of certain quotations, passages, or observations frequently remains uncertain. A prime example is the “discovery of the clitoris” by Renaldus Columbus in 1559, which contributes very nicely to a series of discoverers and discoveries in both Manifest Manners and The Heirs of Columbus. Vizenor’s early collection, Wordarrows, constitutes another good example of how Vizenor challenges the reader by not adhering to traditional genre categories. While certain sections are presented as stemming directly from personal experience (such as the episodes from the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center or about Beaulieu’s organization of protests and demonstrations against the BIA in the 1960s), others (like “Roman Downwind”) might well be short stories. The line between fiction, nonfiction, and argumentative essay is further troubled by the fact that Vizenor invents some characters, supplies others with “created names,” and all the while also reports about real people referred to by their real names. Likely the most influential aspect of how “haiku poetics” reveal themselves in Vizenor’s nonfiction is the technique of juxtaposition, often with no, limited, or delayed comment, context, and explanation. Vizenor’s theoretical essays draw on this model proficiently, and it often seems as though he were designing a haiku-infused Hegelian approach, that presents not so much the

122

christina hein

juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis but of thesis, thesis, thesis, and a quotation. The task of generating a series of potential syntheses is typically left with the reader. In the following example from Manifest Manners, Vizenor works with the principle of juxtaposition and adds what he himself calls an “envoy,” a brief explanatory prose passage (see “Envoy to Haiku” and Lynch, “To Honor Impermanence,” esp. 216–17). Two brief paragraphs on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulation” are abruptly followed by a passage about Wallace Stegner’s assessment of the role of “the western landscape in the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners, 9). The juxtaposition goes uncommented until Vizenor finally supplies an “envoy,” inspired by the overall themes of the essay: “Natural scenes with ‘no histories’ are the absence of natural reason in the literature of discoveries. Tribal names and stories are real histories, not discoveries” (9). Another example is the preface that precedes the 1999 edition of Manifest Manners and that functions like an “envoy” to the essays, offering if not definitions then circumscriptions of the central terms, neologisms, and ideas. Yet the preface itself reveals traits of “haiku poetics.” Just like the essays, the preface starts briskly and the reader is propelled right into medias res. Central terms are presented by way of imagery that evidently prefers the single glance to the panoramic view. And when, after a few pages, the text turns into a more explicit narrative, it does so by means of quoted passages from three reviews of Manifest Manners. Their authors’ views and criticisms are simply offered, without any comment on Vizenor’s side as to whether he agrees with them or why he cites these passages. These pieces of opinion, evaluation, and information seem to be placed into, and next to, the main text for the reader to bear in mind and contemplate as she accesses the essays. What kind of light the reviews will shine on the essays, and the essays on the reviews, is for the reader, not the author, to assess. An approach based on indigenized “haiku poetics” leads to the creation of relatively “open texts” even in argumentative prose, and it is instrumental in giving Vizenor’s texts certain trickster qualities. Where only hints (or less) are given as to how syntheses should be established, as to where exactly complex critical remarks are aimed, and as to which parts of a sentence are explicitly negated by the verb, the reader finds herself and her faculties of reasoning teased. Elaborate passages staged on the principles of haiku poetics might also trick the reader into following, testing, a preconceived notion that she believes to be addressed—only to realize that at the end of the passage this notion is in fact the one that is being criticized.

enriching prose with haiku poetics

123

haiku poetics in literary prose: griever: an american monkey king in china and hiroshima bugi: atomu 57

Hints as to the potential application of “haiku poetics” to other literary forms are spread throughout Vizenor’s introduction to Matsushima. He cites Edward Seidensticker’s assertion that “[t]he haiku manner presents a great challenge to the novelist. The manner is notable for its terseness and austerity, so that his novel must rather be like a series of brief flashes in a void” (n.p.). Vizenor also refers to Jerome Downes’s introduction to Seventeen Chirps: “The feeling of haiku invades all literature,” Downes is quoted. “Haiku strives for economy of language, economy of form, yet extension of meaning” (n.p.). Both the problematics called upon by Seidensticker and the enthusiasm manifested by Downes are well justified. Literary, fictional prose is of course considerably different from the dense poetic form that is haiku. Characters need to be presented and developed, plot and story need to unfold; the aesthetic expectations carried to literary prose hardly coincide with the strict formality of haiku. Haiku strive to communicate an intensely experienced moment in nature to the reader in as immediate a way as possible, thereby attempting to transcend the representational quality of language. Literary fictional prose, on the other hand, is usually engaged in creating worlds that manifest themselves and are communicated to the reader through language. “The goal of haiku is its own annihilation,” Blaeser writes with respect to haiku’s immediacy and “supraliterary intentions.” “Haiku exists solely to be obliterated and replaced by experience. . . . The best haiku becomes experience” (Gerald Vizenor, 118). The novel, however, is a genre that thrives on the unfolding and expansion, rather than on the reduction, of scenery and perception. The sense of immediacy achieved by Vizenor, then, may be similar to the brief moments of recognition facilitated in his argumentative essays. Any more drastic obliterations of the novel as a medium of communication, however, is of needs precluded by its very generic specificities. Yet Vizenor’s literary prose is still suffused with a “feeling of haiku,” with some of haiku’s principles of production reverberating through the texts. In my discussion, I focus on two of Vizenor’s novels, Griever: An American Monkey King in China and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. This is not so much because his other fictional prose would not also contribute to and illustrate the argument of my essay. Rather, the thematic and cultural proximity of his “Asian novels” lends itself well to a close reading interested in the traces of “haiku poetics.”

124

christina hein

That sentences and passages found in Vizenor’s prose sometimes strongly resemble haiku, or bear a certain haiku quality, has been shown by Blaeser (Gerald Vizenor, 133–35). These chance examples from Hiroshima Bugi underscore her thesis: “The samurai of leprosy. Death in that name. Tricky stories are liberty” (Vizenor, Hiroshima Bugi, 4). Or, “Dogs and cats. Emperors and menials. Animal stages” (62). These, however, are only the more obvious ways in which haiku influences manifest their presence in Vizenor’s fiction. The principle of juxtaposition reveals itself to be particularly productive, as the choice of setting in both novels begins to illustrate. Locating a novel in a remote foreign country is as yet exceedingly rare in the field of Native American literature. Despite their Asian settings, however, Hiroshima Bugi and Griever are not merely travelogues or novels about Japan and China, respectively. Rather, they present intricate fusions of Japanese and Chinese cultural spheres and the concerns and experiences of North American Anishinaabe and mixedblood communities. Hiroshima Bugi’s protagonist Ronin, for instance, manifests a perspective and means of interpreting culture(s) that have their roots in haiku principles. “‘The Shino kami and the anishinaabe [sic] manidoo are common ancestors in my dreams,’ he told [the author of the Manidoo Envoy]. He is certainly not a religious scholar, or even a student of comparative cultures, but his stories are wise, heartfelt, and inclusive of the natural world” (64). Like the co-creator/reader of haiku, Ronin applies his creativity and personal experiences to make meaning of two cultural elements that stand as juxtaposed one next to the other. Like the haiku poet, by contrast, he stresses emotive experiences and a relation to the natural world. In a like manner, Griever perceives connections between his home culture on the White Earth Reservation and China, mostly in his dreams. “China, this is hard to believe,” he writes in a letter home, but the figures and marks on the birchbark [he receives from a Chinese bear shaman] were the same as those on tribal medicine scrolls from the reservation. There were shaman bears and humans with lines from their hearts and mouths. The whole scene was unbelievable, tribal visions on birchbark, this far from our woodland. (18) What is important, however, is that all these creative and stimulating juxtapositions of cultural spheres and aspects extend beyond the appearance of

enriching prose with haiku poetics

125

cultural trickster figures and a shared, if syncretistic, use of rituals and practices. This is where the virtue of a “haiku poetics” and its reliance on the reader as co-creator and its denial of prefabricated connections reveals itself. For once the reader has been geared to understand and accept certain similarities between Japanese and Anishinaabe cultures, for instance, she can hardly avoid relating the two traumas that are implied in the text: the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and the “American holocaust” exerted on tribal people, to use David Stannard’s term. By inherently juxtaposing Japan after the atomic bomb with the history and situation of tribal people in the United States, Vizenor stimulates the reader into synthesizing the two aspects. He creates, in other words, an intellectual haiku exercise whose engagement might communicate an insight to the reader that is inspired with a personal and immediate experience of the world. As in the reception of haiku, it remains for the reader to make use of this fertile juxtaposition and uncover a deeper meaning that is folded into Hiroshima Bugi. This productiveness of juxtaposing different, seemingly unconnected elements for generating ideological critique is also illustrated in the two novels’ engagement of Japanese and Chinese ideograms, or signs. Placing individual ideograms next to each other, Vizenor’s protagonists often achieve the creation of new meanings that go beyond the original significations. Griever’s fascination with the signs painted on the pigs’ bodies on swine island constitutes a particularly interesting and complex example. “The swine had the same common character painted on their hams, tender loins, and picnic shoulders” (Griever, 167). Yet the recurring character, ma, does not signify “hog” or “pig,” as Griever supposes. Rather, it means “horse.” The swine are not turned into horses, though, since another sign that is added in each case decisively affects the meaning. “‘Little one named Ant,’ the swine herder explained, ‘ma yi means “ant,” ma tones change, yes?’ . . . ‘Name that one over there.’ ‘Sacrifice . . . Two characters mean “horse” and “omen,” yes’” (167). The changing of tones on a syllable is a quality that would please Vizenor, the writer of chance, in writing. The referentiality of writing is here challenged and played with, since the Western reader, in the English transliteration, remains fully oblivious as to the adequate tone—and to potential plays of tonality generally. Rather, readers are left to create, to engage the signs, and something like a two-level haiku arises: on the first level, there is the juxtaposition of common signs to create new and entertaining meanings. On the second, these are found emblazoned on swine, so that the new meanings of the signs work on the material that they are written on, generating yet other

126

christina hein

meanings (which turns particularly precarious in the case of the swine that are reserved for the communist cadres every month and are inadvertently painted with the signs that signify “Mao Zedong”). The potential trickery of readers through the introduction of the plane of sound and tone into a transliterated character eventually establishes trickster haiku poetics in prose. The prerequisite of an active, participatory reader who is willing to be involved in the creation of meaning meets with the haiku-inspired praxis of juxtaposition in various other ways. Mother Whiteman, the (real or imaginary) mother of a friend of Griever educates her children by applying this haiku technique. Despite her husband’s skepticism of written records, she teaches her children to read—though in a very nature-related way that requires personal involvement as much as activity and imagination. “[I]n the winter she wrote names, and the new words she copied from magazines, on leaves and scattered them on the hard snow near their cabin in the woods. The children collected the leaves and made stories from the words” (Griever, 124). If reading can be interpreted as rather passive and as a praxis that facilitates the reception of words, and ideologies, formulated by others, it is here interwoven with physical experiences in (and maybe even of) nature and thus constitutes a wholly different experience. Finding stories on leaves in snow-covered woods seems like a precise enough description of Vizenor’s indigenized haiku practices, where inspiration from natural scenes and the personal and cultural imagination of Anishinaabe dreamscapes work together. Scattered leaves with bits of language on them refute attempts at definitive versions and narrative closure. It comes as no surprise, then, that the reader encounters various applications of this technique in both novels. Griever promptly emulates it in his exchange with Sammie Moon during the reception in Tianjin and the mayor’s laudatory speech. The whole scene offers many juxtapositions that tease the reader to unearth or imagine meanings from the passages of various conversations, observations, and the mayor’s speech that are loosely interspersed with a considerable potential for loss of orientation. Griever’s conversation with Sammie consists partly of shared whispers, partly of notes jotted down on paper napkins. A few notes critical of the Chinese regime are passed back and forth and, as though by calculated chance, some of them make their way to nervous Egas Zhang, the director of the foreign affairs bureau responsible for keeping the teachers under control. Eventually, Griever receives a note from Hester Hua Dan, translator to the foreign teachers and one time lover of Griever: “‘I am pregnant,’ were the three words printed on the note. The words were exposed to view on the table, on a

enriching prose with haiku poetics

127

mound of other words, and notes, written on napkins. The trickster had been too casual with the message” (190), which elicits strong emotional reactions from Egas Zhang who turns out to be Hester’s disapproving father. Evidently, the napkins constitute elements of the open text: meaning and cohesion can be interpreted from the brief notes, and the consequences that arise from them are beyond their authors’ control. Egas eventually murders Hester and the unborn child (if one goes with the interpretation of events of Griever, who, in turn, does not have much more but the drowned woman’s body and his thorough dislike for Egas for evidence). According to this scene, the value of “open texts” based on haiku poetics and of the indeterminacy of their meaning does not depend on the consequences and results that their reception and interpretation might lead to. Similar observations can be made concerning Ronin’s terrorist attacks on the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima Bugi. Rather than designing schemes whose messages would be rather simple and transparent, Ronin chooses acts and interventions whose aim and motivation might become clear to some of the initiated. Their complexity and vagueness, however, evidently present a challenge to mere passers-by and onlookers. What is more, the potential ways to understand and interpret his acts are manifold and highly dependent on the receiver’s cultural and personal backgrounds and therefore do not generate any unified impact. Instead, they lead into ever new situations. “The pathetic peace letters are etched on metal plates, as you know,” Ronin relates, for instance, and mounted in rows on a tower of pretense under the dome. I shouted sections of some letters and by the wild tone of my voice turned the fake sincerity into irony. An eager crowd gathered around the column, including the party of cautious Chinese. The translator, no doubt, misconstrued my irony, because they applauded my performance. (82) Irony is doubled here, as the trickster’s ironical approach is misunderstood, meaning deferred once more, and his critical performance apparently taken for either affirmative, entertaining, or both. That meaning is never fixed and that reader involvement is central in completing a communication process is underscored in this episode. The reduction of form and language so typical of haiku likewise manifests itself in Vizenor’s fiction. Often, he abbreviates or condenses form in a

128

christina hein

way that denies the reader metatextual markers to convey that a change of scenery or dimension of reality has taken place, as this example from Griever illustrates: The trickster leaned back on the [park] bench and watched the elephant, and then he traced the massive shadows, classic revival columns, from the old concession coal companies on the corner. . . . The shadows danced between the machines, over chalk line caricatures on the cracked concrete, over cold histories at the end of a worn tether. Griever held his breath until the train lurched through the mountain tunnel in a dream. In the darkness the seats turned to cages and the soldiers to monkeys. (116–17) That Griever might have fallen asleep and thus switched dimensions of reality is vaguely implied by the reference to a dream, yet it becomes fully clear only later. As long as this explanation is lacking, however, there is no indication as to whether the trickster has indeed changed reality, by means of his imagination. The interpretive possibilities remain open; the reader finds herself disoriented and activated as a decision-taking agent. Juxtapositions and a remarkable involvement of the reader manifest very strongly in Vizenor’s fiction, and the technique of editorial (and authorial) fictions as in Hiroshima Bugi underscores his skepticism of a personalized author personality. The intense contemplation of nature at the root of haiku, on the other hand, finds its way into Vizenor’s novels in a troubled and complicated way only. The concept of nature perceivable in traditional haiku suggests loci amoeni, a considerably peaceful realm whose beauties unfold before the observer’s eye. This contrasts rather strongly with the presentation of nature in Vizenor’s fiction. More often than not, the natural environment is scarred by the effects of a “chemical civilization” (The Heirs of Columbus, 147): the growth of the first horseweeds is a wonder in Hiroshima Bugi (12); in The Heirs of Columbus, children are blind or suffer from mutations, “unforgiven cancers [and] plastic faces” (147), resulting from a poisoned environment; and Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart features an environmental apocalypse as its background. In Griever, meanwhile, the astonishing natural beauty of the “old colonial resort on the Gulf of Bohai” (89) is insistently deromanticized by the trickster’s recurrent reference to the catastrophic earthquake of 1976 in which “hundreds of thousands of people died . . . in less than a minute” (97). Tampered with and spoiled by white “cultures of death” (The Heirs of Columbus, 9), or

enriching prose with haiku poetics

129

considered as powerful, maybe even agentive, nature does not serve for meditation and enlightenment. Rather, its contemplation inspires criticism of capitalist regimes or the recognition that even modern human life is strictly dependent on its natural environments. With respect to Vizenor’s haiku, Blaeser does not observe such a strong contrast. “[T]he first line or first two lines in his haiku frequently set up edenic expectations,” she writes, “and the final line or lines diffuse these inflated romantic notions of reality, thus propelling his reader . . . toward an experience of authentic underlying harmony” (Gerald Vizenor, 121). Despite these noteworthy limitations to the application of “haiku poetics” in fictional prose, it becomes clear that Vizenor successfully appropriates haiku for his own purposes and elaborates on its poetic principles, making it applicable to prose. Adding the possibility for political critique and development of character and plot, the haiku poet turns haiku storier here. Where haiku has regularly been interpreted as a passing pleasure, Vizenor’s politically engaged prose regularly teases the reader into longer contemplations.

conclusion

Many of the aspects and virtues of haiku that Vizenor advances, develops, and partly also formulates anew in his introduction to Matsushima relate very well to various elements and structures in his other writings. Eventually, it is also the figure of the mixedblood trickster that relates in an outstandingly profitable way to Vizenor’s “haiku poetics.” First, being a mixedblood allows for a variety of potential interpretations in Vizenor’s work: just like the reader of haiku, the person of mixed ancestry is at liberty to create his or her personal meaning from the combination of different cultural backgrounds. What is more, Vizenor’s use of mixedblood characters refers to the haiku principle of juxtaposition without comment. This becomes particularly evident in the meetings, pairings, and couplings of unlikely candidates that one would not usually expect to establish relationships: Battle Wilson, the sinophile writer from Oklahoma, and Yan Zhang, the wife of controloriented, rigid, and authority-loving Egas Zhang conceive a wild, blond, mixedblood girl, Kangmei, whose very existence seriously threatens her stepfather’s ideological aims. Griever himself is the product of three amorous meetings between White Earth Anishinaabe Coffee and a gypsy visiting the reservation with a traveling circus and vending show.

130

christina hein

The most striking similarity among crossbloods in Vizenor’s work is their inclination to perform trickster actions and assume trickster stances. In their roles and guises as tricksters, Ronin and Griever refuse easy identification. Their actions remain unpredictable as well as uncertain as to their various outcomes and consequences. Their resistance to offer definitive answers to questions concerning their ancestral background mirrors the lack of commentary and evaluation in a tension-filled haiku. The same denial of prearranged closure, then, is characteristic of both tricksterism and haiku. Much in line with the participatory character of haiku is the demand evident with Griever, Ronin, and the heirs for active communication partners who desire to understand the culture(s) of indigenous mixedblood tricksterism for themselves and in relation to their own personal and cultural background. Those who merely observe them from a distance, trying to control their actions as well as the meanings generated and consequences entailed by them, regularly fail to approach and understand them. One need only think of Egas Zhang, the foreign affairs director at the university in Tianjin, whose reactions to Griever’s teases are inspired by a wish for tight control and, ultimately, lethal violence; or of the government agents who stalk the casino and new tribal nation, surveying the heirs, their guests, and affiliates. When Vizenor attacks the “surveillance of the social sciences” (Manifest Manners, 168) associated with the white, Western mainstream in various of his argumentative essays, the lack of active, creative, and imaginative interaction that marks this stance becomes obvious. Opposed to the co-creator/reader required and trained by means of haiku poetics, then, stands the brand of passive observer who “already knows what he is going to find,” to borrow from Vine Deloria’s influential assessment in Custer Died for Your Sins (80). Where there is no tease and countertease, one gathers, no meaningful relations are established and the potential for cultural change is halted or subverted. Vizenor’s mixedblood tricksters, then, stand for the resistance to determination and (narrative as well as political) closure, not only because they transcend racial categories but also because they tend to challenge the interpretive patterns and implied critical interpretation of the cultures around them. All these findings notwithstanding, however, there are also instances in which Vizenor’s prose texts resist a reading based in haiku poetics. One of them is the very focus on the written word in haiku. In the introduction to Matsushima, Vizenor seeks to resolve this apparent conflict by attributing to haiku qualities usually connected to orality. Thus, he stresses the strong

enriching prose with haiku poetics

131

focus on reader/listener participation and the sense of immediacy created by haiku and associates the genre with Anishinaabe dream songs: “our voices from the oral tradition,” he writes, “are dreamsongs in a haiku” (n.p.). This indigenizing move notwithstanding, haiku are dense, reduced, and exact in ways that are opposed to the breadth, circular repetitiveness, and decorative elements characteristic of (tribal) storytelling. While this conceptual conflict need not be resolved, it also points to the productivity of fusing narrative prose, which in Vizenor’s case emulates elements of oral storytelling, with some of the elements characteristic of haiku. Another aspect where a certain friction, or tension, can be sensed between Vizenor’s laudatory stance on haiku and other critical positions is the issue of visuality, or seeing. “Haiku is a word cinema,” he writes, for instance, in the introduction to Matsushima, “a visual experience, earth toned, closer to the visual memories of the oral tradition than to written grammatical philosophies bound in print” (n.p.). In The Heirs of Columbus, by contrast, visual regimes, normalized as they are by the West, tend to be complicated, frustrated, and subverted. Vizenor achieves this in various ways: on the level of narration, he presents conflicting and contradictory images that readers can hardly imagine without resorting to ideas of oscillation, double exposure, and the like. On the level of content, the heirs openly reject practices derived from the primacy of a visual regime: protagonist Stone Columbus refuses to own a passport with a photograph and speaks on talk radio and never on television, while the new mixedblood nation values personal stories over pictorial representations. Similar strategies can be observed in the novels discussed above. Thus, Hiroshima Bugi occasionally ambiguates images, as in the case of the mongrel kabuki theater presentation (58–62). Griever meanwhile works with puns that invite unstable visualizations, as in the recurrent image of the continually sexually aroused trickster and his “cock,” which may or may not refer to the rooster, Matteo Ricci, that accompanies him on almost all of his excursions. While in not nearly such an intense way as The Heirs of Columbus, then, both novels imply a certain challenge to vision, a certain implied skepticism of the exclusive reliance on seeing and visual images. The critique of orientation on the visual in these cases evidently conflicts with the appreciatory stance of vision, of seeing as closely related to tribal oral traditions in Matsushima. Finally, a figure that Vizenor as well as the protagonists of his literary fiction like to return to is the “changing of the world through one’s imagination.” The political motivation and appeal of this approach are readily

132

christina hein

obvious. Yet classical Japanese haiku, the one that Vizenor refers to in his introduction to Matsushima, is far from political, nor would it seem to be invested in changing the world. Rather, haiku conveys a connection and connectedness to the world that it seeks to communicate quite immediately to an engaged reader. None of these conceptual reservations, however, need to be neatly resolved, or argued away. Rather, the potential for friction may work itself out in productive thought, as Vizenor so ably demonstrates in his various fusions, part-fusions, and layerings of haiku, its poetics, and prose. Rather than sticking dogmatically to just one model, in a good trickster manner, he allows for flexibility and works both various prose genres and the basics of haiku thought and haiku poetics for his own argumentative, philosophical, and aesthetic purposes as a trickster essayist and storyteller.

notes 1. I use “ideology” in the broad sense of the term, pointing to political positions, general assumptions, and ideas about social life. “Ideology” is not meant to refer to ideas such as “false consciousness,” widely associated with Marxist theory. For haiku, this means that they might well be read as not paying tribute to “written word . . . ideologies,” as Vizenor maintains (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). However, haiku themselves are not free of ideological implications, which become evident as one looks at how haiku are created, what their subject matter is and is not, who may write them, and why.

references Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Breinig, Helmbrecht. “Narrative Ambivalence and the Creation of Meaning: Genre Transdifference in The Heirs of Columbus.” In Gerald Vizenor. Edited by Simone Pellerin, 31–46. Montpellier, France: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007. ———, and Klaus Lösch. “Transdifference.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 13, no. 2 (2006): 105–22. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 1969. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

enriching prose with haiku poetics

133

Ganser, Alexandra, Christina Judith Hein, and Karin Höpker. “Trickster Hermeneutics als alterNative Schreib- und Lesepraxis: Gerald Vizenor’s Harold of Orange und Louis Owens’ Bone Game.” In Kulturhermeneutik: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Umgang mit kultureller Differenz. Edited by Christoph Ernst, Walter Sparn, and Hedwig Wagner, 159–86. Munich: Fink, 2008. Hein, Christina Judith. “Transdifference as a Strategy of Resistance in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus.” In Trans/Oceanic, Trans/American, Trans/lation: Issues in International American Studies. Edited by Susana Araújo, João Ferreira Duarte, and Marta Pacheco Pinto, 105–22. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. Lynch, Tom. “To Honor Impermanence: The Haiku and Other Poems of Gerald Vizenor.” In Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 203–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, and Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1992. Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St. Paul, MN: Truck Press, 1978. ———. Empty Swings: Haiku in English. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1967. ———. “Envoy to Haiku.” Chicago Review 39, no. 3 (1993): 55–62. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. ———. Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1987. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. ———. Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Introduction to Matsushima: Pine Islands, n.p. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. ———. “Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus.” boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 19, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 223–35. ———. Matsushima: Pine Islands. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984. ———. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

134

christina hein

———. “Word Cinemas.” Book Forum 5, no. 3 (1981): 389–95. Yasuda, Kenneth. “‘Approach to Haiku’ and ‘Basic Principles.’” In Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader. Edited by Nancy G. Hume, 125–50. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

chapter eight

R einventing the Nature of L anguage The Poetics of Gerald Vizenor’s Prose

David L. Moore

O

ne of the most immediate and elusive aspects of Gerald Vizenor’s writing is the distinctive originality of his style, the complex, careful, yet cavalier ways that he recasts the English language to fit, or better, to generate, his unique voice. No one else writes like Vizenor, Anishinaabe novelist, poet, and critical theorist. For me, it was a quickly acquired taste. Once I realized that the strange vocabulary and syntax opened a new door into an old land, I was hooked. For many, his playful intellectuality and polemical undertones, his rhetorical positions as compassionate trickster, the picaresque movement of his associative imagery, his startling turns of phrase, and his teasing critical insights make his prose endlessly fascinating, almost addictive, like a delightful puzzle. Yet the puzzle is not frivolous. It startles and unravels the postmodern, postindian, postcolonial self, who might be any reader. Following that disquieting pleasure, I look in this essay at how Vizenor’s “haiku hermeneutics,” which I analyzed in an earlier study of his poetry, also constitutes the poetics, the conscious aesthetic theory, of his prose. The prolific outpouring of his publications over the past four decades matches the headlong momentum of his sentences, each diving into unexpected turns and opening new curves of thought, mapping new mental territory, yet invariably returning to the same Native ground, the same principles of re-representation. As readers we often feel in his prose that we become privy to the trick of narrative chance, to an endlessly tactile engagement with compelling indigenous realities, with lives revalidated, with energetic thoughts that embrace living bodies—that in turn disprove terminal creeds. He is an artist who creates his audience. His lines reshape his readers from the inside out, precisely as he reshapes the English language. Anishinaabe scholar and poet Kimberly Blaeser has written the definitive study that identifies Vizenor’s literary roots in haiku. I am grateful for her many gestures in “The Multiple Traditions of Gerald Vizenor’s Haiku Poetry” 135

136

david l. moore

that I and others have taken up in later analysis of his work. She extended that reach of analysis further in her “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision.” In the process she laid out key aesthetic principles in understanding his poetry as the heart of his work. As she points out, “In fact, the haiku and free verse poems from this [early] era introduce some of the language and many of the themes that became Vizenor’s trademark” (“‘Interior Dancers,’” 3). Certainly we are all indebted as well to Vizenor himself for his unique articulations of the processes of his poetics and his hermeneutics, even while he teases—or strip-teases—the subject of survivance, another performance of presence in absence. To be sure, his self-expositions remain properly tricksterish, so that they may need unpacking (not defining) for some readers as well. Indeed, not only his neologisms, but his original reworkings of syntax and vocabulary, driven by the same creative force that would rework history for the survivance of Indian peoples, amount to the initiation of a new discourse, a reshaping, a reinvention, of the English language to a level of transformative intensity unparalleled in modern poetry and prose. In his critical and autobiographical essay, “Envoy to Haiku,” he quite directly explains the cross-cultural literary roots discovered during his military service in the 1950s and followed later in his college studies. This is the dynamic that I want to begin to discuss in this essay: how Vizenor reinvents in his poetics even the nature of the dominant language to open a linguistic door into indigenous experiences. I read these poetics in both his poetry and his prose. There are obvious features of his language, such as the multiple modes or even genres, skipping from narrative to scholarly citation to dialogue and back around within a single paragraph, that extend the poetry into his prose. Thus there emerges a pattern where paragraphs and episodes frequently include an expository introduction with a clear “thesis statement” as map of or through the outrageous language and events to come. As often as not, the thesis statement is itself imaginatively peculiar. Here, for example, is a smattering of opening lines to paragraphs from The Heirs of Columbus: The Mayan shamans and hand talkers landed unused in the Old World and declared their heritable radiance in the shadows and spiritual causes of Jesus Christ, Christopher Columbus, and Sephardic Jews. (28)

reinventing the nature of language

137

Truman Columbus shouts that the “dikinaagan of civilization is located at the headwaters of the gichiziibi,” or the cradle board of civilization is at the Mississippi River. “Civilization started right here in our stories at the river we named the gichiziibi,” she shouted that night with her back to the warm stones in the tavern on the mount. (13) “The Maya created tobacco and civilization,” croaked Truman. “Now we got computers and fast food, so the old cultures must come to an end in warm, reasonable sentences.” (20) Here the periodic and cumulative sentences accelerate from startling beginnings to resonant finales. They do so without becoming exotic, because the declarative, almost imperative tone takes its own subjectivity seriously. Perhaps Vizenor’s most notable stylistic device is his gift of neologisms, large and small, such as “wordarrows,” “socioacupuncture,” “comic holotrope,” “narrative chance,” “manifest manners,” “holosexual,” “panic holes,” “pronounance,” “double others,” “terminal creeds,” “survivance,” or “postindian,” that punctuate the sentences. His original qualities are layered throughout the language. I will take as my lens some of Vizenor’s own selfreflections and some basic paradigms of rhetoric, defined by Native and nonNative scholars, to try to make visible how Vizenor twists his lens for a different focus and different sort of communication.

haiku hermeneutics

Transformed into what we shall discuss as his “festive time tricks,” “mythic verism,” and “tribal satire,” Vizenor’s pivotal “haiku hermeneutics” animate the poetics that shape the originality of his prose. In an essay on his poetry, “Moon Vines Among the Ruins: Gerald Vizenor’s Poetics of Presence,” I discussed his early discovery of this “haiku hermeneutics” as a set of insights into the semiotics and poetics of traditional Japanese haiku (“Envoy to Haiku,” 30). Through the process of mastering and publishing his own haiku, Vizenor became fascinated with the connotative resonances of language, the shades of meaning in poetry as nuance and imaginative suggestion. “Shadow words and haiku thought are intuitive” (32). He began to celebrate the

138

david l. moore

evocative potential inherent in the slippery signification of language itself. In a contradance with the “festive tricks” of communication, he had a polemical epiphany that showed him how to apply haiku hermeneutics to the literary Indian wars. He realized that he could manipulate the (post)structures of slippery signification, the deconstructive language games, in the very form and function of Native American representation. Just as nature remains both outside and inside the language of haiku, Native Americans remain outside and inside the language of history. “We are shadows, silence, stones, stories, never that simulation of light in the distance” (Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 64). Rather than the simulations and misrepresentations of dominant history, Native Americans remain a presence—legal, political, cultural, material—on the shadowed underside of that dominant metanarrative. Fetishized as the noble savage, the “Indian,” remains more than the repressed desire and fear in American ideology. For Vizenor, Native America’s silent stories are as solid as stones. And some stones can speak. “Shadows tease and loosen the bonds of representation . . .” (72). Eventually, the new European and American theoreticians of language and literature, the poststructuralists and deconstructionists, helped Vizenor draw a technical map of those poetics. De Saussure’s revolutionary discovery of the obvious, later elaborated by Derrida’s différance, is that there is no natural connection between representation and content. Derrida’s further theories of “excess” or “supplement,” the persistent, ineffable reality beyond or within textuality and signification, serve Vizenor to articulate that open door of “tribal storiers.” Vizenor flew with those iconoclastic insights. “The survivance of tribal nicknames, shadows, and memories, in the absence of the heard, is the différance that misconstrues the representations of presence, simulations and the gender burdens of pronouns” (97). He uses the deconstruction of false representation to affirm the survivance of tribal presence, even in “shadows” and “memories.” Vizenor in fact celebrates the presence that exceeds representative différance. Because dominant discourse “misconstrues” indigenous experience—“the survivance of tribal nicknames, shadows, and memories”—and because mainstream representations of Indians focus in and on “the absence of the heard” and are deaf to indigenous voices, Vizenor has work to do. By playing with gendered simulations of Native presence in narrative, he develops a poetics in prose that reshapes the language to hear and feel the startling presence of Native America. Whether or not he exercises another form of exoticism is a question for another time.

reinventing the nature of language

139

postindian tricks

Affirming Native presence beyond its forced absence in dominant language is tricky by definition. The trick of presence in absence is Vizenor’s haiku intuition, intensified by an aesthetic integrity that refuses any claim to definitive presence—so that absence, “shadows,” and “shimmers of coincidence” (“Shadow Survivance,” 96) are valued over “terminal creeds.” As he writes in the chapter “Shadow Survivance,” “The classical notion that thoughts were representations of content, or the coherent meaning of words, is not the same as the nature of shadows in tribal names and stories. Shadows tease and loosen the bonds of representation in stories. The meaning of words are determined by the nature of language games” (72). That classical, commonsense notion of language was and is that natural, concrete reality is somehow present in words, that there is somehow an inherent link between the representation and the referent, the signifier and the signified. Language games are the manipulations of discourse to try to define and shape content or concrete reality through our formative ideas about reality, to define the “meaning of words” (72). As Vizenor asserts of the pronoun “I” referring to Indian voices in autobiography, there is no natural connection between representations of Indians in English and the content of Indian lives—even in the language games of Indian autobiography. Notice his insistence, “Shadows are over the sounds, words, and traces. The shadows and traces are silence, but shadows and silence are not the trace. Shadows are motion, not presence, shadows touch no presence or absence over sound and sentences” (71). The limits of language only reaffirm the existence of the indefinable. Chance and impermanence, as they emerge in the slippery spaces of signification thus become liberatory. Simulations, absence, the heard—these are linguistic spaces where figurative language, where trickster discourse, can gesture to Indian lives without defining and limiting them. Through such discursive breakthroughs Vizenor concocted trickster discourse, a semiotic spark that became his lifelong literary project, his flaming “wordarrows.” By this method he rewrites Indian experiences and perspectives into history and literature. As he explicates his own project, “The trick, in seven words is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (Trickster of Liberty, xi, italics in original). In an earlier essay, I parsed this manifesto as a single idea in four directions: first, the trick

140

david l. moore

itself is the seed idea from haiku that reality tricks representation, that however much discourse tries to determine and to dictate, the changeable world eludes definition. It is essentially an affirmation of spirit, as it energizes Native American expression for the next steps. Secondly, to elude historicism is more specifically to apply that trick to the common hierarchical structures of colonial history. It means to elude the narrative of “Manifest Destiny,” of “civilization versus savagism.” Thirdly, to elude racial representations is even more specifically to apply that trick to the racial markers of that common history. It means rejecting the “terminal creeds” that would erase “the vanishing Indian” from history. Fourthly, to remain historical returns to the trick of affirming Native presence as de facto history despite all that false historicism. Finally, Native presence in Vizenor’s oeuvre does not stand merely in opposition to Manifest Destiny. Instead it belongs in an entirely separate narrative not founded on the binary system of civilization and savage. Hence his toying with the term “postindian.” Just as poststructuralism deconstructs the binaries of structuralism, so Vizenor’s postindian deconstructs the binaries of history. The postindian is a presence outside of history as it has been written. Postindian consciousness is a rush of shadows in the distance, and the trace of natural reason to a bench of stones; the human silence of shadows, and animate shadows over presence. . . . Shadows are neither the absence of entities nor the burden of conceptual references. . . . Shadows are honored in memories and the silence of tribal stones. (“Shadow Survivance,” 64) Vizenor’s link between shadows and the postindian is crucial. “The white man’s Indian” (see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian) has remained a bright screen of Euro-American projections ever since Columbus invented “Los Indios.” According to Vizenor and many other scholars, the entire discourse of Indianness is a colonial discourse, “that simulation of light in the distance.” As the bodies and cultures and history of Native America have always stood in the shadows of that projection, any “postindian” not only occupies those shadows, but transforms them beyond the colonial dialectic. Thus “Shadows are neither the absence of entities nor the burden of conceptual references. . . . Shadows are honored in memories and the silence of tribal stones” (“Shadow Survivance,” 64).

reinventing the nature of language

141

In a further trick, Vizenor affirms a peculiar form of humor as the third of “four postmodern conditions in the critical responses to Native American literatures”: “the third is trickster liberation, the uncertain humor of survivance that denies the obscure maneuvers of manifest manners, tragic transvaluations, and the incoherence of cultural representations” (“The Ruins of Representation,” 7–8). In other words, the liberating energy of trickster humor frees Native narratives and imagery to showcase survivance against American mainstream narratives of Manifest Destiny, projected tragedy, and stereotypical fatalism. He envisions something beyond “the end of the trail.” The vanishing Indian has not vanished! (In addition to “trickster liberation,” Vizenor’s other three postmodern strategies are “aural performances,” “translations,” and “narrative chance.”) Vizenor explains in his original and uniquely compressured language that these four conditions “are an invitation to tribal survivance. The traces of natural reason and the shadows of coherence have endured over science in the humor of cotribal stories” (8). The science of which Vizenor speaks is primarily the peculiar objectifying social science, emerging out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, that would measure indigenous skulls while erasing indigenous humanity. In his perpetual critical mode, he further defines particulars of his own style, and we can use some of those features as a lens into the poetry of his prose. In his 1988 novel, The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, one moment in the zany narrative, to which we shall return, outlines three features of trickster poetics that work throughout Vizenor’s language. “Festive time tricks,” “mythic verism,” and “tribal satire” are three unique stylistic features that constitute “shadows” rather than signs in Vizenor. Rather than pretend to clear referents in a structuralist sense of signification, Vizenor’s three interrelated stylistic features celebrate a poststructuralist uncertainty, an elusive dance among “the ruins of representation.” He manipulates ambiguities (that is, the old-fashioned term of literary “ambiguity”) in order to out-maneuver the limiting definitions—the terminal creeds—of stereotypical mainstream and social scientific views of Indians. He prefers a “loosened” form of signification in “shadows” that “tease and loosen the bonds of representation” (“Shadow Survivance,” 72). Thus the style itself embodies “trickster liberation.” Before we look at textual examples, one further contextual perspective will be useful. Not only do these three features overlap, but they each apply at each different stage of the expression. Festive time tricks infuse the

142

david l. moore

narrative shifts of mythic verism, while both the tricks and the verism flow through tribal satire, which in turn weaves through the others. We shall see how each can form the others’ content, yet as I read into Vizenor’s texts through these three lenses, I find that mythic verism may be the larger category, the trickster structure of meaning around which festive time tricks and tribal satire function as rhetorical qualities. For this reason, I will give more room to the discussion of mythic verism. Furthermore, all three elements function at each stage of the writing and reading exchange. Vizenor’s forceful stylistic attributes work to reshape what I will map as four stages in the cycle of communication, drawing on classical Western rhetorical topics: ethos, grammar, logos, pathos. To follow the linear analysis, keeping in mind many ways that these categories remain cyclic and overlapping, here are functional definitions. “Ethos” is the author’s position, as in Vizenor’s narrative persona of the compassionate trickster. “Grammar” and “logos” are the form and content of the message, respectively, as in tropes of the postindian. “Pathos” is the reader response, partially shaped and directed by the author and generally addressed, as we shall see, as “the active reader,” liberated from modernist projections by the trickster ethos. Thus we have multiple dimensions of a rhetorical dynamic in speaker-message-listener. In fact, one can apply the grammar/logos or form/ content dialectic to each stage of the triad, producing at least six dimensions. For this look at the uniqueness of Vizenor’s style, it will suffice to look at his three features—“festive time tricks, mythic verism, and tribal satire”—with an emphasis on the middle term, at only a few positions of this map of rhetorical exchange. As suggested earlier, Vizenor’s strong idea of the postindian shapes virtually all aspects of his work and thus constitutes a context for the unique textual quality that Vizenor brings to these dynamics of communication. His postindian concept attempts to jettison any discourse of “Indianness” because of its impossibly conflicted implications in historical misrepresentations of the impossibly reductive but pervasive dichotomy of civilization and savage. A postindian deconstructs the fundamental dialectic of the five centuries of the modern era: colonizer/colonized. Of course, entire economies, nations, histories, and global cultures are constructed on that binary. Perhaps that is a fundamental reason why Vizenor’s prose feels so disconcerting or disorienting: because he reorients modern human identity. So let’s look at these three features of Vizenor’s style, always edging toward a postindian perspective.

reinventing the nature of language

143

festive time tricks

Tricks of time work in the ethos of the writer, in the logos of the text, and in the pathos of the reader, but we can also read them, perhaps most closely, in the grammar of the text itself, where Vizenor blithely shifts temporality in tense and syntax. Vizenor’s playfulness allows outrageous combinations in his sentences, and this ethos of his contagious “festive-ness” may create sympathos in the reader to play along. One or two examples should suffice. In his novel, The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, for instance, on the way to a poignant but satirical jaunt with Ishi, Tune Browne, one of Vizenor’s tricksters, decides to become “an independent candidate for alderman in the cities. Bale DeMoralia, his mixedblood manager, bought him a gold watch; the trickster held his breath and dressed in beads, bone bits, and furs. Later, on election eve, he appeared at parties, transformed in braids and ribbons, a proud invention and the reversal of the tribal striptease” (44). The prose is compressed, even as it expands into surprise. Note the time shift and resultant ambiguity in between the two phrases in the second clause of the first sentence: “the trickster held his breath” invokes a moment; “and dressed in beads,” etc., invokes a sequence of time: “held (breath)” and “dressed” are verbs that function here on different temporal plateaus, the former fleeting and the latter more enduring. That forced juxtaposition creates a slippage of narrative time, unless the trickster is magically holding his or her breath throughout the dressing and even the wearing of beads, bones, and furs. Thus another layer of uncertainty, “the uncertain humor of survivance,” permeates the syntax, and it supports indigenous survivance by eluding limiting conventional definitions (“The Ruins of Representation,” 7). Further, the content, now the logos, of the scene, a critique of “the tribal striptease,” focuses on “a wild contradiction” that matches the juxtaposition in that very dynamic of temporal slippage in the grammar. “DeMoralia argued that tribal cultures were colonized in a reversal of the striptease, and ‘now the trickster must remove his mock vestments in accordance with old photographs . . .’” (Trickster of Liberty, 44). To make himself public, to come out as an Indian, the trickster must shed the sepia layers of colonial projections that set him or her posing as a vanishing race. Alluding to Roland Barthes’s analysis of how “at that final moment of nakedness a ‘woman is desexualized,’” Vizenor goes on in this critical fiction to quote Barthes on striptease, where “the spectacle is based on the ‘pretence of fear,

144

david l. moore

as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration’” (qtd. in Trickster of Liberty, 44). Vizenor and Barthes are playing with a theory of sublime seduction, as Vizenor explains the colonial dimensions of this eroticism, in a satire of Edward Curtis’s sepia photos that pretend to capture the vanishing Indian: Familiar tribal images are patches on this “pretence of fear” and there is a sense of “delicious terror” in the structural opposition of savagism and civilization found in the cinema and in the literature of romantic captivities. Plains tepees, and the signs of moccasins, canoes, arrowheads, and numerous museum teasers, conjure the cultural rituals of the invented past; the pleasures of the tribal striptease are denied, data-bound in instrumental research, stopped in emulsion, colonized in written languages to resolve the insecurities and inhibitions of the dominant material culture. (Trickster of Liberty, 44) Here Vizenor deconstructs the tired paradigm of Turner’s frontier thesis in “the structural opposition of savagism and civilization” (44). The frontier mentalities of Curtis and “the dominant material culture” would arrest Native lives, “stopped in emulsion” of photography and “instrumental research,” what Vizenor dismisses elsewhere as “terminal creeds.” Instead, he juxtaposes binaries to substitute for and triangulate the oppositional frontier mentality in “the cultural rituals of the invented past,” as his next paragraph explains, beyond Frederick Jackson Turner’s historiographic denial of the tribal striptease: DeMoralia lectured that winter that the “striptease was primal, the first thrust in socioacupuncture, suspense account remedies that must be realized in festive time tricks, mythic verism, and tribal satire.” He rails that “these eternal contradictions release the delicious ritual terror in captured images, so watch the wild candidate undress the invention and lose the election.” (44) Winning and losing would follow precisely the “structural opposition” that the trickster eludes. Form and content here conspire toward Vizenor’s trick. Back to grammar, the central verb, in “He rails that,” emerges nonidiomatically, that

reinventing the nature of language

145

is without its standard usage linked to “against”—where it should be “He rails against . . .”—so that Vizenor’s trickster discourse may rage and rail, but not against anything in this nonoppositional paradigm. Especially as he is invoking “eternal contradictions” that somehow transcend and thus festively celebrate, or win, while losing the election, he remains satisfied with the “uncertain” in this humor, because he may thus survive. Again, such forms of festive time tricks also function in the dimension of logos or content, as Vizenor toggles back and forth between history and myth. His novelistic tribal satire of Christopher Columbus in The Heirs of Columbus, where the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” is a descendant of earlier Mayan explorers to Europe, tricks historical time with a revised mythic verism that invites the reader to join in the festivities. “Columbus was Mayan,” said Stone. . . . “The Maya brought civilization to the savages of the Old World and the rest is natural,” said Stone. “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) In Vizenor’s trickster mode, where “we heal with opposition, not separation” (The Heirs of Columbus, 176), Vizenor both reverses the colonial dialectic and weds the antagonists in ancient cross-cultural marriage, the erotic opposite of separation. Moreover, he pulls on the linear tail of Western progress to loop time into a circle, perhaps the ultimately festive time trick. “Since then, the explorer has become a trickster healer in the stories told by his tribal heirs at the headwaters of the great river” (3). Thus the novel ensues, flowing with the Mississippi River and with the natural cycles of earth, water, air, and fire out of Vizenor’s Ojibwa country in Minnesota and into history. Vizenor expands on his view of Columbus in the chapter “Eternal Havens” in his collection Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, where, also on the occasion of the quincentennary, he historicizes the Admiral’s value for festive time tricks: “Columbus was denied beatification because of his avarice, conceit, and the malevolence of his discoveries; nonetheless, several centuries later his missions and eternal stare were uncovered anew and commemorated as entitlements in a

146

david l. moore

constitutional democracy” (108). Vizenor marks the irony between the Church’s refusal to canonize Columbus and the United States’ reappropriation of the Admiral as saintly explorer who opened the New World to the divine American dream. Across time and across the translations of historiography, Columbus is converted from a criminal to a saint. The slipperiness of signification here serves the metanarrative of Manifest Destiny as the founding entitlement of dispossession by Euro-Americans of indigenous land. Thus, Vizenor’s trickster discourse feels entitled to continue the slippage by the time trick of re-reappropriating Columbus as a descendant of Mayan explorers. mythic verism —and myth

In rewriting Columbus, Vizenor also establishes an alternative “mythic verism” claiming to be at least as “verifiable” as the representations of Columbus in American history textbooks. When “Christopher Columbus discovered the eternal haven of simulations; he landed in resistance literature” (“Eternal Havens,” 108). In spite of initial and persistent colonial projections, the Western Hemisphere was not a tabula rasa, but a complex human ecology, and Vizenor is glad to reproduce a trickster literature in resistance to the sanctified simulations of dominant history. Another important term in the Vizenorian neolexicon for a poetics of Native presence in history, this phrase affirms a reality or verity of mythic narrative, a focus on literary and political efficacy. By this formulation he verifies a metaphorical substance, a sensation under narration. As Vizenor explains in an interview, mythic verism derives from the oral tradition; it “comes from a metaphorical use of traditional energy and reverences” (Bruchac, Survival This Way, 309). Indeed, this process of his poetics may be the core of his conceptual link to the oral tradition, a belief in or reverence for “metaphorical use of traditional energy” (309). When words become “energy,” and especially when that energy is connected to “traditional” cultural belief, then the writer’s project falls in step with ancient dances. Trickster discourse becomes “transformative,” as Kimberly Blaeser indicates in Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Tall tales and their shadows—that is, their proportional plausibility compared to America’s ideological versions of history—constitute a “mythic verism” permeated with festive time tricks and tribal satire. Clearly a

reinventing the nature of language

147

response to Latin America’s magical realism and arising partly out of Anishinaabe oral traditions instead of Christian discourse, Vizenor’s mythic verism claims a certain revisionary historical and social weight that contrasts with the somewhat more fanciful and individual escapism of magical realism. This distinction calls for a comparative study far beyond the reach of this essay, but it is useful in launching this section. “Mythic verism” as a term invokes at least two discourses, that of “myths we live by” and that of verifiable, scientific truth. By combining these discourses, Vizenor points both to the mythic aspects of science and history, and to the “truth” of our mythologies. It is a paradoxical juxtaposition that opens precisely the cracks in representation that the trickster likes to inhabit. Vizenor contrasts his mythic verism, what I would call a dialogic, against the mirroring dialectic of verisimilitude. “Verisimilitude is the appearance of realities; mythic verism is discourse, a critical concordance of narrative voices, and a narrative realism that is more than mimesis or a measure of what is believed to be natural in the world” (“Trickster Discourse,” 190). Through the invocation of heteroglossia in “a critical concordance of narrative voices,” he makes discursive room for the retelling of history as mythic verism, in contrast with the two-dimensional appearances of verisimilitude (190). It is an ancient question of aesthetics, whether the impressionistic or the realistic, the imagined or the mimetic, more effectively represents the world in art. Yet Vizenor’s concern is not primarily aesthetic. As the following critique of mimesis indicates, Vizenor’s project is ethical, to resist misrepresentation. He writes in “Shadow Survivance,” The representations of the past are more than mere human mimesis in the prenarrative dimensions of tribal lives, and more than the aesthetic remains of reason in the literature of dominance. . . . Simulations of the tribal real and the colonial arrogance that precedes a tribal referent are the most common representations in histories. The simulations of manifest manners are new burdens in the absence of the real and the imposition of presence. (63–64) If “the tribal real” must step out from behind “the colonial arrogance” that has co-opted “most common representations in histories,” Vizenor would do so without replaying dominance, either in discourse or in domain. James Ruppert describes how Vizenor’s discursive approach to mythic allusion allows the author to mediate rather than dictate meaning:

148

david l. moore The multifaceted interweavings of actions, people and transformations allow Vizenor to take a mediative stance which moves beyond the privileged representations of science, especially social science and its textual analog, Literary Realism. The reader is encouraged to identify with an epistemological perspective, mythic in its assumptions. As conversation and discourse, the novel shifts meaning production away from terminal creeds of the author, with one-to-one allegories and privileged representations, onto the reader with his view of many perspectives. (Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 9–10)

Here we may see the rhetorical dynamics of Vizenor’s ethos shaping possibilities for the reader’s pathos through both the grammar and the logos of the text. A dialogical field of perspectives is focused in Vizenor’s effort to generate “the active reader.” Dialogical writing and reading is an effort to help the reader avoid co-opting the text with “terminal creeds” of colonial dialectics, anthropological objectification, or popular exoticizing. A reader’s tendencies to fall back into those dialectical grooves is constantly mediated by the multiple possibilities in the discourse. As Vizenor explains, “These postmodern conditions are both oppositional and noetic mediations on narrative chance” (“The Ruins of Representation,” 8). By re-creating postmodern conditions of alternative narratives that undermine the historical metanarrative of colonial tragedy, Vizenor amplifies the narrative chances. The reader must take those chances to read the text. Thus Vizenor’s prologue to his novel The Trickster of Liberty summons this active reader to fill the gaps left by the discursive fragmentation of authority: “The active reader implies the author, imagines narrative voices, inspires characters, and salutes tribal tricksters in a comic discourse; an erotic motion under the words absolves the separation between minds and bodies” (xi). Where a tragic discourse would soliloquize a monologue for the reader to attend at a distance, a comic discourse opens an intimate dialogue with the reader, obviating the dialectic of self and other as reader and text, and engendering or making visible the reader’s dialogical exchange as inexorable, even de facto. Regarding Vizenor’s mythic verism as a rewriting of history, Ruppert invokes Hayden White, one of the key players in the twentieth-century effort to reconceive historiography. Citing White’s assertion concerning the dynamics of tropes, that history is shaped by literary devices, that “tropics is

reinventing the nature of language

149

the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively” (qtd. in Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 14), Ruppert applies this theory to Vizenor’s language games: Vizenor accentuates the tropic and holotropic nature of his narratives over any realistic context. He attempts to so completely create the characters in discourse that their realistic conventions will not remain predominant in the reader’s epistemology. Vizenor is convinced that the active reader’s participation makes him a player in the language game. As he weighs and plays with the ironies, cultural myths and social metaphors, myth and meaning as constituted by discourse become the reader’s central concern. (Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 14–15) The effect and cause of this activation of the reader is in fact an erasure of the author, who shifts the questions, in Foucault’s reckoning, from, “Who really spoke? . . . With what authenticity or originality?” to instead, “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? . . . What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects?” (“What Is an Author?,” 119–20). Here, with Foucault, Vizenor says farewell to a type of authenticity. Vizenor’s discourse indeed creates spaces, or makes visible those places, for possible subjectivity apart from authentic replication of an ideal self. For received authenticity ultimately longs for all degenerated appearances to merge into the former ideal, the ideal identity. Betty Bell, writing in “Warrior Clowns: Gerald Vizenor’s Interpretative Space in Native American Identity,” describes Vizenor’s alternative dynamic for Native American readers in terms of identity as discursive praxis: Vizenor’s writings inhabit and interrogate Native American identity; his use of irony deconstructs (unveils) the images of identity and enters into those images in order to allow them to self-deconstruct as well. By “exploding” these images, Vizenor creates an open, indeterminate, “interpretative” space in which Native Americans can reappropriate their experience. (3) That interpretive space is where mythic verism plays out, where Vizenor’s language games, as trickster discourse itself, can mediate and affirm the

150

david l. moore

substance of living oral traditions. Within that general strategy of discourse as mediation, as an interpretive space where the active reader can enter, there are then specific ways in which Vizenor’s discourse engenders the reader’s dialogue. mythic verism —and verity

Mythic verism for Vizenor confronts the harshest “realities,” beginning for him with the unexplained, uninvestigated, and thus racist murder of his Ojibwa father in an alley in Minneapolis when Vizenor was a toddler. In “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies,” Vizenor describes a later experience of shame, loss, and eventual self-acceptance as he relates a day of hunting in the north woods at age nineteen. He connects the verism of his self-discovery to mythic dimensions of the violent loss of his own father’s presence in his life. His theme, as always, is that “mixedbloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities” (101), and he carries the theme of dynamic rather than static identities toward a dialogic “between” myth and history, where he finds himself. He speaks of his own identity in the third person: The mixedblood is a new metaphor, he proposed, a transitive contradancer between communal tribal cultures and those material and urban pretensions that counter conservative traditions. The mixedblood wavers in autobiographies; he moves between mythic reservations where tricksters roamed and the cities where his father was murdered. (101) Rural and urban here mingle as mythic verism, both nourishing and brutal. Yet on this day recounted in the autobiography, Vizenor will perpetrate his own violence as a hunter, and in his ensuing anguish, crystallize his own mixedblood identity between not only the cities and the reservation, not only between the historical opposites of colonial and tribal worlds, but between sign and signified in a language game as well, along a trickster edge. In a key autobiographical commentary he describes having imagined himself one among the animals as a hunter, but denies the reality of that romance, marking the difference between the terms “tribal” and “mixedblood,” as he foregrounds his own trickster discourse. After imagining himself in first person

reinventing the nature of language

151

among the squirrels and birds, he self-reflexively admits the limits of his language game, speaking of himself again in third person (a linguistic turn that presages his later discussions of the potency of “pronounance”): “I was jumping with them but against them as the hunter.” Here, in the last sentence, he pretends to be an arboreal animal, a romantic weakness; he was neither a hunter nor a tribal witness to the hunt. He was there as a mixedblood writer in a transitive confessional, then and now, in his imaginative autobiographies. (105) The truthfulness, the verism, of his autobiographical reflection cuts through a “romantic weakness” that would objectify and co-opt, or pretend to be, his prey. Teasing another meaning out of “mythic” as he validates the “imaginative,” even fictional dimension of representation in autobiography, Vizenor plays here with the uneasy balance conjoined in the phrase “mythic verism.” He further explicitly contextualizes this confession of his own restriction and freedom within the dialectical limits of language by citing George Steiner from After Babel: Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is. . . . Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or “un-say” the world, to image and speak it otherwise. . . . To misinform, to utter less than the truth was to gain a vital edge of space or subsistence. Natural selection would favor the contriver. (105) Vizenor’s trickster discourse seems at first reading to adopt Steiner’s oppositional role of the linguistic contriver for cultural survival, but he complicates Steiner’s formulation by later indicating that he uses language not to “unsay” the world, but to assert difference, a mythic “world as it is” in a language game. This subtle strategy requires a closer look. Vizenor uses language not to replace one reality with another but to show how reality itself is shaped by semiotic difference as much as by unity, how different myths create reality semiotically, through language derived by the slippery signifier from the physical world. For Vizenor, reality itself is “a text,” functioning as a pragmatic projection of myth through language. The more we acknowledge that projecting function of language and cultural myth, the more we can shape our reality. Betty Bell suggests his foregrounding of this language game:

152

david l. moore Vizenor restores illusion to the image of Native American identity. For Vizenor, the “wild histories” of Native American identity are historically, culturally, and linguistically bound images; they are fetishistic emblems created and exploited by the dominant culture and internalized by the Native American community as performance identities. (“Warrior Clowns,” 1)

Vizenor’s critique of the social constructions of Native American “identity,” interpellated by colonial relations and reified by the discourse of what he elsewhere calls “manifest manners,” does more than deconstruct those “bound images.” As ideology slips when it becomes conscious, the white man’s “Indian” gives way to Vizenor’s “postindian.” There is no there there. Thus he accentuates that fetishism: “imagination is the real world, all the rest is bad television” (Griever, 28). Native Americans must imagine themselves mythically back into their reshaped reality, verism, against generations of scholarly and popular misrepresentation, against “bad television.” For example, as Vizenor reflects autobiographically on his experience among the birds and squirrels, he dramatizes the “tough-minded” poignancy of his own linguistic distance from received reality by first graphically describing his own mistakes as a young hunter. By this literary shriving, he translates losses into “mythic redemptions.” I raised my rifle, took aim, and fired at a large red squirrel running across an oak bough. He fell to the ground near the trunk of a tree, bounced once, and started to climb the tree again. The bullet passed through his shoulder, shattering the bone. His right front leg hung limp from torn skin. He fell to the ground and tried to climb the tree again. He instinctively reached up with his shattered paw, but it was not there to hold him. Blood was spreading across his body. He tried to climb the tree again and again to escape from me. (“Crows Written on the Poplars,” 105; italics in original) This horrific scene of intimate pain described through palpable guilt is followed immediately by his attempt to make reparation. “The slow death of the squirrel burned in his memories; he sold his rifles and never hunted animals” (105). An intense, minor tragedy becomes an allegory for the loss of unmediated experience: “Instead, he told stories about squirrels and compassionate tricksters” (105–6). He becomes a cultural survivor, instead of a tragic hunter,

reinventing the nature of language

153

as his identification with the squirrel grows deeper than his former romantic projection now through compassion: “He was a survivor. He knew when and where to hide from the hunters who came in groups to kill—their harsh energies were burned in the memories of his animal tribe” (106, italics in original). By this process of overcoming alienation through imaginative compassion, he distinguishes himself from Steiner’s writers who would “misinform” or “un-say” the world: The squirrels in his autobiographies are mythic redemptions; he remembers their death and absolves an instance of his own separation in the world. . . . He refused to accept the world as a hunter; rather than contrive stories or misinform, he fashioned a bloodsoaked mask that he dared the hunter to wear in his autobiographies. (“Crows Written on the Poplars,” 106) The cruel incident with the squirrel becomes a trope for the bloody history in which he himself is so implicated as a mixedblood American. He describes further his dialectical alienation as a hunter moving into his dialogical compassion as a survivor: “I was alone. My presence and my intention to kill squirrels were disguised by sleep and camouflaged by my gentle movements in the woods. I did not then know the secret language of squirrels. I did not know their suffering in the brutal world of hunters” (106). And rather than “un-saying” the world through language, he goes on to explain the compassion in trickster discourse as inherent to its own reality, what he elsewhere calls “mythic verism”: He understands the instincts of the survival hunter, enough to mimic them, but the compassion he expresses for the lives of animals arises from imagination and literature; his endurance has never been measured in heart muscles, livers, hides, horns, shared on the trail. His survival is mythic, an imaginative transition, an intellectual predation, deconstructed now in masks and metaphors at the water holes in autobiographies. (105) His own survival as “mythic, an imaginative transition” in trickster discourse becomes an affirmation of the power of language, including the English language, not only to enclose, but to make visible new possibilities of experience. Thus myth, through language, becomes a reality, where reality

154

david l. moore

is a linguistic projection. This language game not only makes new possibilities visible but also makes them real, where the world is a text. Compassion becomes the liberating power of the language game. Out of compassion for material pain, he gives up the hunter’s rifles for a mixedblood writer’s “wordarrows” and “cultural word wars.” The English language has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, simulated tribal cultures, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of paracolonialism has been a language of liberation for many tribal people. (“The Ruins of Representation,” 27) Vizenor’s language of liberation attempts to rewrite colonial history, as well as his own violence, by constructing over and over again varieties of a “comic holotrope,” which, as he says, connects signifier, sign, and signified in a whole system to overcome in mythic language the alienations of history. He rewrites history by foregrounding the writing process itself, by attesting to the dialogue between signifier, sign, and signified, as between reader, text, and author, while weaving myth in material narrative. Vizenor’s particular postmodernism includes the brutal history that colonial historiographers write as tragic, and to the extent that it incorporates that projected tragedy by rewriting it, it transmutes it into a trickster comic mode. Vizenor’s transmuting moment in the woods characterizes his positive postmodernism, when, after his own thorough implication in the dialectic of death, “The squirrels in his autobiographies are mythic redemptions” (“Crows Written on the Poplars,” 106). Yet in that comic rather than tragic mode, as he says, “rather than contrive stories or misinform, he fashioned a blood-soaked mask that he dared the hunter to wear” (106). That masked hunter of the dialectic lurks in the dialogues of The Heirs of Columbus as first the mythic wiindigoo,1 and alternately as the “federal operatives” who eventually thaw the frozen wiindigoo to release him against tribal people, or as neocolonialist tribal government officials, “older men with their tongues stuck on cold federal metal” (75), who impose bureaucratic obstacles to the tricksters’ redemptive plans. In an important sense, that dialectic is the opposite of Vizenor’s “mythic verism.” In his essay, “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in which he introduced “mythic verism,” Vizenor

reinventing the nature of language

155

explains that this discursive strategy “assumes that the theoretical arbitrariness of signs has been resolved in comic holotropes” (190).2 He claims to achieve this resolution of the dialectic in the sign through a tropic embrace of the system of signification: “Comic holotropes comprise signifiers, the signified, and signs, which in new critical theories provide a discourse on the trickster in oral narratives, translations and modern imaginative literature” (190), such as his own. Thus his multiple tricksters signify the cultural survival of which they are both the signs and the signified. Their laughter comically tropes the whole system of imaginative signification by which cultures survive, in a dialogue of selves and other selves, subject-to-subject, rather than the dialectic of self and other, subject-to-object. For example, in the novel The Heirs of Columbus, in order to show how mythic verism overtakes the dialectic of colonial history, Vizenor cites a historian on Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison, and then directly rewrites Morison’s enthusiastically colonizing description. Morison first: “‘In his readiness to translate thought into action, in lively curiosity and accurate observation of natural phenomena, in his joyous sense of adventure and desire to win wealth and recognition, he was a modern man’ wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in Admiral of the Ocean Sea” (29). According to the historian, Columbus is a modern man ultimately because of his capitalistic curiosities. Morison’s emphasis on specular desire in “curiosity” and “observation” recreates Vizenor’s attribution of Lacanian voyeurism and “espied discoveries” of the colonial dialectic. Instead, Vizenor rephrases Columbus into a colonial, tragic tension of the inner blue radiance of the New World in conflict with his European body. In Vizenor’s lexicon, “the blue radiance” of the New World “has been carried in blood and stories by adventurers, traders, mystics, dancers, and puppeteers in the Old World” (28). In Vizenor’s reappropriation of Columbus, the Admiral dwells along those margins as a border crosser, adventurer, and trader, where Vizenor sees the possibility of dialogue. Following Morison’s quotation, Vizenor re-narrates the mythic history: “Columbus was a child of weavers, healers, and the sea in an unstable city; indeed, he would be a modern man, a tragic man, because his stories and blue shadows would abandon the burdens of his bones in the Old World” (29). The tragedies of modernism that Vizenor describes here are precisely the conceptual boundaries that his postmodernism must blur, deconstruct, and exploit. Columbus failed to fulfill his own trickster possibilities in the New World, which gives rise to the need for this trickster novel. Here, Samana, the

156

david l. moore

New World hand talker and trickster, cures Columbus’s cursed penis on his first voyage: Christopher Columbus wrote a secret letter at sea, on his return from the first voyage to the New World. The letter was sealed in a container to survive a demonic storm [of the wiindigoo water demons]. He announced his discoveries, insecurities, silence and sense of separation, the visions that pursued him on the ocean sea, and his wild pleasures and liberation with a hand talker named Samana. She had “golden breasts and thighs,” and she was the “first woman who moved me from the curse of my secret pain,” he revealed in the letter. (31) In Vizenor’s mythic narrative of the veritable secrets of history, the New World can cure the Old. Yet aside from his authorial intention (which is purposively submerged in a trickster discourse to “intend” an “active reader”), how are we to read this rewriting? As a hopeful myth? As revisionary history? As “mythic verism”? To guide the reader, Vizenor chooses as the epigraph to The Heirs of Columbus Sartre’s manifesto in “What is Literature,” which contrasts with the dividing line that Steiner, as Vizenor cited him, draws between language and “the world as it is”: The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain; one does not redeem evil, one fights it; the most beautiful book in the world redeems itself; it also redeems the artist. . . . We want the man and the artist to work their salvation together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil. In light of Vizenor’s reckoning with the squirrels, his own “work” as trickster discourse may “be at the same time an act” of subversive compassion. His prose is a mythopoetic effort to contravene history. It is his discursive weapon, his “wordarrows,” which he wields in trickster fashion against the tragic history of Columbus and centuries of colonization and genocide. His postmodernism, as a “comic holotrope” of trickster discourse, attempts to encompass the painful dialectics of history by throwing over to the comic mode of dialogics rather than to dialectical tragedy. “Comic signs and tragic

reinventing the nature of language

157

modes are cultural variations, the mood and humor in a language game; but they are not structural opposites. Comic world views are communal; chance is more significant than ‘moral ruin’” (Narrative Chance, 9). Thus festive time tricks mythic verism. By retelling oral traditions in contemporary narrative voices that blur the time barriers between past and present, Vizenor releases oral myths from their retrospective focus as time-bound dramas and refocuses them on their contemporary, perhaps timeless, allegorical functions. He goes so far as to create a fantasy in The Heirs of Columbus of spiritual value in the shadow of history’s mercantile genocide, where Europeans are transformed by the first peoples on this side of the Atlantic. “‘The Maya created Columbus,’ said Stone. ‘The dreams that carried him back to his stories in the blood are the same dreams that heal, he is the bear signature of our humor and survival’” (20).

tribal satire

Is mythic verism then a more reliable narrative than dominant history? For Vizenor that’s a non-question in favor of narrative chance. The point is that humor is a trigger of action. As Louis Riel says in The Heirs of Columbus, “Whether the heirs believe their stories is not the point, because no culture would last long under the believer test; the point is that humor has political significance and as a scenario, no government has ever been praised for the reduction of communal humor” (166). Thus anything that is not postindian, and even some things that are, make fair game for Vizenor’s tribal satire. Nothing is unquestionably sacred because he starts with the harshness of his own reality. For instance in “Ice Tricksters,” he even plays on the hallowed Lakota name Big Foot, the leader of the ill-fated Lakotas at the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, as “Pig Foot” in an entirely different narrative (“Ice Tricksters,” 115–24). Before we look at a few targets of tribal satire, let’s remember Vizenor’s quite explicit theory of humor as healing. Grown out of the moccasin game of Ojibwe wiindigoo spirits, Vizenor’s logic links teasing, opposition, humor, and healing. In The Heirs of Columbus, the voices map “the everlasting opposition in communal imagination, ironies, and memories, the very energies and agonistic humor of tricksters and shamans” (135). These “very energies” are tied to the “genetic signature” carried in the heirs themselves, thus their potent erotic tendencies. Vizenor recruits biochemical specifics for this

158

david l. moore

mythic verism, to identify the four amino acids, the “four crucial substances,” that make up DNA and proliferate into “three billion codes and signatures” (134). The biochemical building blocks of life create the patterns of trickster humor: “. . . those who can imagine their antinomies and mutations are able to heal with humor,” and, “‘These four letters are held together in a signature by their opposites, the biochemical codes are held by their own opposites, and here is where the shaman and the trickster touch that primal source of humor, imagination, and the stories that heal right in the antinomies of the genetic code’” (134). “We heal with opposition, we are held together with opposition, not separation, or silence, and the best humor in the world is pinched from opposition” (176). Yet Vizenor contrasts the work of wordarrows with the real thing in the text of The Heirs of Columbus, as Stone Columbus, one of the central trickster heirs, contemplates the violent history of Louis Riel and his nineteenth-century war against the Canadian government for Metis freedom: Stone was heartened by the wild heat of his resistance and spiritual visions, but not by the cold weather of his tragic creeds. The heirs pursued the same mission of resistance and tribal independence, but theirs liberated the mind with the pleasures of trickster humor, and held no prisoners in the heart. (160) Thus Vizenor is quite explicit about the ethics of his aesthetics. “We heal with opposition.” That oppositional healing can be excruciating in Vizenor’s tribal satire. A postindian condition is so slippery and difficult to achieve, yet anything that falls short is a suitable target. As we saw among the “festive time tricks,” Vizenor’s aspiration to “eternal contradictions” may be the impetus for his trickster self-positioning in a more-radical-than-thou ethos that satirizes, for instance, American Indian Movement (AIM)–like characters who replay Indian stereotypes. In a bar scene in The Trickster of Liberty, one militant character’s political, rather than eternal, contradictions of hate and victimhood get the brunt of quiet scorn from “the elder at the bar” (113). When Coke de Fountain, an “urban pantribal radical and dealer in cocaine” begins his “Last Lecture” to the Indian bar crowd, the narrator dismisses him with this description: “His tribal career unfolded in prison, where he studied tribal philosophies and blossomed when he was paroled in braids and a bone choker. He bore a dark

reinventing the nature of language

159

cultural frown, posed as a new colonial victim, and learned his racial diatribes in church basements; radical and stoical postures were tied to federal programs” (111). The joke proliferates. Every action is not only dismissed but criminalized, from tribal philosophies to a bone choker, from a career in prison to stoical postures, as a colonial simulation of Indianness. This mode of satire permeates Vizenor’s fiction, where the politics of so-called traditionalism is exposed as ineffective, as failing to bring about change precisely because it merely follows the patterns of the dominant culture. As “Shadows tease and loosen the bonds of representation,” this tribal satire might be called an intratribal tease (111). Another mode might be called a cross-cultural tease, as when the heirs of Columbus work to ransom the remains of Columbus for those of Pocahontas, who died in Europe. The plot involves kidnapping and murder, evoking levels of personal emotion in the characters and in the reader. The historical perspective and the politics, however, remain explicit and objective, amplified by the subjective feelings: “Christopher Columbus was disinterred once more in the politics of racial terrorism and the shame of colonial fortunes” (116). The satirical reversal of history reduces five hundred years of lucrative colonialism to shame and terrorism. Another mode of tribal satire weaves traditional stories into contemporary context, and thus might be labeled a mythic tease. For instance, Vizenor launches the novel early on with a classic creation story of the Ojibwe trickster, Naanabozho, who, after he “created the new earth with wet sand” had to stand on his toes as the water rose (5). The demons in the water caused him to defecate, and with pleasure, but his shit would not leave; several turds floated near his mouth and nose. Naanabozho was at the highest point on the earth and could not move, so he invented meditation with trickster stories and liberated his mind over his own excrement. (5) This scatological story is bracketed by fundamental eschatology, where, on the one hand, Naanabozho is protective and compassionate, as he “would never leave the world to the evil gambler and his dark water,” and, on the other hand, he is generous and creative, as the next story line indicates: “The trickster created this New World with the sand a muskrat held in her paws” (5). Thus, as in so many trickster stories, the sacred and the scatological combine. The humorous interaction of opposites heals the world.

160

david l. moore

A final example of tribal satire should suffice, a form that combines the cross-cultural and the mythic tease, and here Vizenor again hits below the belt, this time on the biggest target. Returning to a foundational theme, the dialectic of oppositional healing certainly resides in Vizenor’s mythic verism of Columbus’s own “twisted dick.” “His what?” asked the judge. “You know, his twisted cock,” said Binn [Binn Columbus, one of the “heirs”]. “What does that mean?” asked Judge Lord. “Columbus had a twisted dick, he inherited a curse like the twisted mouth of evil gossipers,” she said. Binn smiled at the judge and then turned to the courtroom; she raised a cocked finger and the spectators cheered once more. (74) In Vizenor’s myth of the underbelly, the shadows, of history, “the curse of a twisted penis had been laid on men as revenge by the women who were burned with the bear codex and other manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria” (30). He develops this myth into a Lacanian view of colonial history where Europe gazes on America, mapping the oppositional dialectics of history onto a reciprocal dialogics of myth. As he writes of historical fabrications in “Eternal Havens,” “Columbus is a miraculous representation of the nation, and he is a simulation of the long gaze of colonialism, that striven mannish stare with no salvation in the absence of the real” (110). The exploration and voyeurism of colonization are equated with sexism, but meanwhile, back in the novel, that formula is resolved algebraically by factoring in the androgynous possibilities of trickster identities: Columbus was cursed with the twisted comic prick of a man and a woman, the ultimate pain of love and pleasure that he would endure in paradise. Women would endure the espied discoveries of an interior penis, as the New World weathered the culture of death from Western civilization. (The Heirs of Columbus, 32)

reinventing the nature of language

161

By Vizenor’s reckoning, Europe looking at the New World is the patriarchal penis looking at the maternal clitoris, but twisting and turning on itself as the lethal dialectic of history returns to self against the other. Vizenor does not back down from the reader’s embarrassment or desire or other stimulated response to this tribal satire. The conventionally sacrosanct figure of Columbus becomes not only the emperor with no clothes, but with painfully detailed sexual distress. The graphic descriptions continue. Is there a lesson here? Tribal satire grins and turns the pages of documented biography for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As his pain has become the reader’s, the pain he caused conveys as well. Yet the trickster remains, juggling festive time tricks, spinning mythic verism, looking for the next reader of tribal satire to take the tease. Through these three features of his self-reflexive poetics, Vizenor reworks in his prose the denotative nature, the “manifest manners,” of dominant language to open a linguistic door into indigenous experiences and perspectives. He thus creates and opens dynamic discursive spaces in and through which Native self-representations may elude and recast “terminal creeds.” He has not only invented the term “survivance,” but he has constructed a new use of language to get us there.

notes 1. Vizenor’s two Ojibwe transliterations cited here are spelled as follows: “wiindigoo” and “Naanabozho.” 2. Vizenor addresses the theoretical question of comic resolution as mirroring structuralism’s totalizing tendencies: “While there are similarities to theories in structuralism, the comic holotrope is more than the unexpected harmonies that survive even the worst translations; it is a discourse, not an isolated element in mythic structures or social science models” (“Trickster Discourse,” 190).

references Bell, Betty. “Warrior Clowns: Gerald Vizenor’s Interpretative Space in Native American Identity.” Unpublished essay from the Discussion Group on American Indian Literatures, MLA Convention, New York, December 27, 1992.

162

david l. moore

Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978. Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. ———. “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision.” SAIL 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 3–15. ———. “The Multiple Traditions of Gerald Vizenor’s Haiku Poetry.” In New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Edited by Arnold Krupat, 344–69. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1993. Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Penguin, 1991. Lee, A. Robert, ed. Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Lyons, Scott Richard. “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51, no. 3 (2000): 447– 68. Moore, David L. “Moon Vines Among the Ruins: Gerald Vizenor’s Poetics of Presence.” In Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Deborah Madsen and A. Robert Lee, 106–28. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” College Composition and Communication 53, no. 3 (2002): 396–434. Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Vizenor, Gerald Robert. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 99–110. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. “Eternal Havens.” In Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, 107–25. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. “Envoy to Haiku.” In Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 25–32. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1987. ———. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. ———. “Ice Tricksters.” In Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 115–24. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.

reinventing the nature of language

163

———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. ———. “The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance.” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 7–30. ———. “Shadow Survivance.” In Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, 63–106. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature, 187–208. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. ———. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

chapter nine

“Compassion is learned” Of Squirrels and Men in Vizenor’s Poetry and Prose

Michael Snyder

S

quirrels are ubiquitous. Unlike most animals they exist in almost every climate and region. They have relationships with humans all over the globe. They are wild and urban; they represent the liminal space between the natural and the artificial or man-made. They occupy different worlds: the sky (high up in the trees, and don’t forget flying squirrels), the earth, and even underground. Vizenor’s fascination with and theorization of crossbloods, along with liminal spaces between different cultures and identities, between the reservation and the city, and between nature and culture—or the treeline, as he frequently puts it—attract him to the squirrel in his writing. In his work, Vizenor frequently challenges binary logic, and the binary of nature and culture is one that he subverts from an Anishinaabe perspective.1 It is the influence of Western culture, capitalism, and Christianity that has caused the divisions between human beings and other species, he implies. “The animals in native narratives must tease creation and mediate the memories of that divine shimmer at the treeline. The simulations of our separation are scriptural; causal and comparative abstractions that are otherwise undone by nature,” Vizenor writes in his essay “Literary Animals” (143). This reference to scripture alludes to the Bible presenting mankind as a special creature favored by God and granted “dominion” over the animal kingdom (Gen. 1:24–28). From an indigenous perspective, however, the space between our animal brothers and sisters and us is illusory, a mere simulation: “all our relations.” Vizenor links the squirrel to indigenous peoples and the oral tradition. In his 1992 novel Dead Voices, Gerald Vizenor links squirrels with the experience of many contemporary tribal peoples, including the Anishinaabeg: “We are squirrels on that slow burn at dawn, down from the treelines to our tribal agonies in the cities . . . the tricksters of the tribe teased us down from the ceremonial birch and pine in the mountains, down from the treelines into 164

“compassion is learned”

165

new sanctuaries in the wild cities” (59). This passage exemplifies Vizenor’s poetic prose, which makes use of much alliteration and an almost incantatory rhythm. Vizenor often uses the metaphor of the treeline to evoke liminality, an indeterminate space-between. In Vizenor’s poem “Museum Bound,” collected in Almost Ashore, Vizenor writes: “black squirrels / depot bears / carrion crows / march at the treeline” (80). In “Medicine Hat,” from the same collection, Vizenor writes: “eyes of animals / wary creases / at the treelines” (65). Pointing toward his crossblood engagement of liminality and indetermination, treelines figure so prominently in Vizenor’s work that Anishinaabe critic Kimberly M. Blaeser cites the phrase “at the treelines” as “classic ‘Vizenorese’” (“‘Interior Dancers,’” 8). Squirrels are omnipresent; that is why they are important yet regarded as expendable. Almost everyone has had a run-in with a squirrel or can tell a squirrel story. We are intimately linked with squirrels in our memories and everyday experiences. For example, three close college friends once spent a beautiful day together dosing on a synthetic entheogen. An old dorm room window is thrown open wide to let in the blue sky and breeze. From the stereo, Tuvan throat singers astound them with droning multitonal madness. Then suddenly, as if uncontrollably attracted to the mystical sound, squirrels swarm in circles on the big oak tree just feet away from the open window; one of them scrambles up the outside wall, stares at them as if mad, daring them to stop his ingress. The squirrels’ vertical round dance on the bark seems to burn a fiery ring into the tree. Squirrels are found on college campuses where students have adopted or chosen as mascots these mundane animals. Squirrels will feed from one’s hand but remain wild. At my alma mater the baseball team named themselves the Black Squirrels after those campus specialties, which comically led to a controversy about the political correctness of this sobriquet. Like Vizenor, many of us have accidentally hit a squirrel in our car or seen one that has been hit. On my bicycle I frequently check on motionless or partially crushed squirrels to make sure that they are not suffering. Yet we generally do not value squirrels because of their commonness. They are rodents, varmints, tree rats; however, “are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God” (Luke 12:6). Squirrels therefore are a test case study of our attitudes toward animals. We may feel strongly about saving the whales, not clubbing cute baby seals, not eating horses, or not torturing kittens in Satanic rituals, but a lowly squirrel may not generate such sympathy. “My poems and stories about the squirrels were heard as . . . an invitation to honor mere rodents and tree rats,”

166

michael snyder

Vizenor laments in his essay “Envoy to Haiku” (32). But Vizenor is open to the interconnectedness of humans and other species and our potential sensitivity to one another: “The squirrels must have heard the literature in their name that winter. Silence is not a natural world; the earth hears no balance in termination” (32). Squirrels even mirror human characteristics we may mask or wish to forget. Their rapacity: Mountain snow Squirrels rush the apricots Late apologies (Almost Ashore, 45) Their anxiety, their justifiable suspicion of human beings, their aggression: cocksure squirrels break the ice at the window raid the bird feeder (“Envoy to Haiku,” 31) Yet squirrels are also wise, thinking of the future as they store away nuts to find during the winter. Squirrels are appealingly ludic, sometime clowns. Blaeser, in her landmark critical book-length study of Vizenor, and Arnold Krupat, in The Turn to the Native, have commented on the fact that Vizenor has iterated time and again a harrowing squirrel hunting story in which he begs the maimed squirrel for forgiveness and ultimately repudiates hunting, which has appeared five times in print alone. First, he tells the story in the first person in his essay “I Know What You Mean, Erdrupps MacChurbs: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors,” collected in Growing Up in Minnesota (1976). Next, he oscillates between first and third person narration while quoting from the earlier text and reflecting upon the telling of that experience in an “autocritical autobiographical” essay titled “Crows Written on the Poplars” in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Third, he narrates the grueling experience in the first person in a lyrical and elegiac chapter of his brilliant memoir, Interior Landscapes: “October 1957: Death Song to a Red Rodent” (1990). He extends the anecdote in poetic prose in the chapter “Squirrels” in his novel Dead Voices (1992), this time told by a birch tree but using the hunted squirrel’s point of view. The red squirrel is given a name, Ducks, and is made female

“compassion is learned”

167

this time. These alterations are partly a result of Bagese, the elderly urban exile crossblood Anishinaabe woman, being the primary storyteller, but they more importantly register Vizenor’s enhanced empathy that has grown over the years with the processes of reflection and retelling. Finally, Vizenor briefly summarizes the experience in the section “Escape Distance” in his long essay “Literary Animals,” collected in Fugitive Poses (1998). In Vizenor’s dramatic and traumatic squirrel-hunting experience, while “pretend[ing] to be a tribal hunter,” a college-aged Vizenor repeatedly wounds a squirrel in his attempt to put it out of its misery (“October 1957,” 167). In desperation, young Vizenor takes several more shots at the squirrel but repeatedly fails to put it to rest. It seems that this urban crossblood was searching for himself and his Ojibwe-ness, and wanting to do something traditional and connected to tribal land. Vizenor implies that he did not properly attend to the ceremonial or meditative preparations of the tribal hunter needed to enter that woodland world with authenticity. Vizenor was overly urban, not properly attuned to the natural environment he has entered. He is out of place: “My energies were mechanical from the cities; my breath had been over concrete, and my hands on gun oil. . . . I had come from the cities to kill them with my rifle, to breath concrete into their souls, to eat their bitter thighs” (168). He does not fit the ecology. Vizenor’s prose writing on the squirrel reaches the same poetic heights as his best poetry, exemplified by such striking metaphors as “to breath concrete into their souls.” As young Vizenor tries and fails repeatedly to end the squirrel’s sufferings with gunshots, the story plays like a grim version of the scene from the historical comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight refuses to give up the battle despite having all of his limbs hacked off one by one, insisting, “it’s just a flesh wound.” We watch in horror as blood bubbles from the animal’s mouth—Vizenor spares us none of the grotesque details. “He looked at me. I watched his dark eyes; he was close to death, he wanted to live” (“October 1957,” 169). He begs the animal for forgiveness and prays that it, like Lazarus, will come back to life. In praying for the animal Vizenor presages Matt Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell; in one panel the one-eared bunny finds a “dead squirrel” on the street while playing and attempts to barter with God to make it live again. “I moved closer to his eye once more and pleaded in tears, please forgive me. Please live once more,” Vizenor writes (169). Before this experience Vizenor had “never learned the language of the squirrels, or the stories of their brutal death at the hands of urban hunters” (168). Vizenor learns compassion for the commonest of

168

michael snyder

creatures that day and continues to learn more deeply from the experience over the years as he reflects, retells, and reinscribes it. He learns that it does not matter that the red rodent is small and mundane or that it is traditional for Anishinaabe men to hunt the squirrel. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham declares: “It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. . . . The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (qtd. in Singer, Animal Liberation, 7–8). Vizenor tries to comfort the dying animal and strokes its coat, literalizing the metaphor of having “blood on one’s hands.” Vizenor sings a tribal death song to the red rodent, “a song in a low voice without words until dark” (“October 1957,” 170). This harrowing experience leads Vizenor to decide never to hunt again unless his existence depends on it: “I would defend squirrels and comfort them in death; that would be the natural human response” (170). He extrapolates a moral principle from his experience, a philosophical view of man in nature. This last remark is no doubt controversial in making a claim about what is “natural” and “human” that could be vulnerable to accusations of essentialism. This phrase, like “natural reason,” can seem problematic, especially coming from a theorist who has been deemed postmodern and informed by deconstruction and poststructuralism. Moreover, in making a declaration that not hunting animals but defending and comforting them is “the natural human response,” Vizenor is going against Anishinaabe tradition and forging his own individualist path. The experience and his gradually expanding compassion for animals is also directly connected to his path toward becoming a writer. In the version from I Tell You Now, he writes, “The slow death of the squirrel burned in his memories; he sold his rifles and never hunted animals. Instead, he told stories about squirrels and compassionate tricksters” (105). Gerald Vizenor put down the gun and instead began shooting “wordarrows” and engaging in activist “word wars” against simulations of indigenes, autoposeurs, stereotypes, bureaucracies, and institutional racism. Wordarrows became the title of an early (1978) Vizenor book of nonfiction prose originally subtitled “Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade,” which tells of interactions and negotiations between Ojibwes and government agencies and EuroAmericans.2 Vizenor would fire wordarrows in his early journalism and activist writings in advocacy of his White Earth Anishinaabe people.

“compassion is learned”

169

In the novel Dead Voices, Vizenor connects the hunter and the squirrels even more closely, focusing on shared stories and language between species. We are told by the squirrels: “The hunter became a birch in a word, and he heard the stories of the squirrels, and he wanted his stories to become their stories. His memories moved with ours as squirrels. Could he have become a shaman who hears the birch and our ancient languages?” (63–64). The squirrel opens the possibility that the hunter, whose memories are aligned with the squirrels even as he puts them in his sights, could have been a shaman or medicine man but somehow took the wrong path. While the crucial importance of the iterated squirrel hunting story cannot be overemphasized, surprisingly, no critic has looked at the long evolution of Vizenor’s attitude toward animals, represented by the synecdochal squirrel. This evolution must be traced back all the way to his composition of haiku poetry dating to his first book publication, Two Wings the Butterfly: Haiku Poems in English, from 1962. Haiku was a literature of liberation for Vizenor that opened many doors. “The essence of haiku,” Vizenor opens his essay on haiku in his recent (2009) collection Native Liberty, “is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, imagic moment. Haiku is a mood of creation, an elusive, ironic sense of place, motion, and impermanence; a tricky fusion of nature, emotion, ethos, culture, and survivance” (“Haiku Traces,” 257). Vizenor’s interest in haiku stems from his early experiences in Japan. At age sixteen, Vizenor misrepresented his age to join the military, served in Japan, and lingered afterward; he was influenced by the nation’s culture, literature, and recent traumatic history enough to author several books of haiku poetry and much later his 2003 novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. “Haiku, in a sense, caught me out on the road as a soldier in another culture and gently turned me back to the seasons, back to the tease and native memories,” he writes in “Haiku Traces” (258). Vizenor returned to the United States in the early 1950s. Vizenor finds that haiku and Anishinaabe tribal dream songs are sympathetic and commensurate in their sensibility and aesthetic. In fact the shadowy, extraverbal qualities of haiku opened his appreciation for his own culture’s oral literature. “I would have to leave the nation of my birth to understand the wisdom and survivance of tribal literature,” Vizenor writes in “Envoy to Haiku” (26). In his introduction to Matsushima: Pine Islands, Vizenor explains: “Haiku ascribe the natural world in dreamscapes: personal narratives, social practices, remembered stories, wordwound philosophies, are unmasked in the harmonies of natural seasons” (n.p.). He might be talking of

170

michael snyder

Native Americans when he says, “A haiku is not a . . . museum artifact; haiku is a spring shoot on a dark stump, not a concise word pile in the corner of a cluttered culture” (n.p.). Unlike the ostentatious poetry of Euro-American “wordies,” as they are referred to in Dead Voices, haiku seeks to express the “sentiments of natural experiences when words dissolve” (n.p.). The wordies, on the other hand, to quote again from “Museum Bound,” are of “noisy cultures / out of time” that “clutter the names / of every animal / and bird / museum bound” (Almost Ashore, 80). For Vizenor, haiku resonates with a tribal or Anishinaabe sensibility. In his essay “Haiku Traces,” he writes: “Haiku scenes are similar, in a sense, to the dream songs and visionary images of the Anishinaabe, Chippewa or Ojibwe. I was inspired by these literary connections at the time” (258). He found that haiku lent itself to literary evocations of his White Earth Anishinaabe homelands. “The visionary voices in haiku and native dream song are intuitive, a dynamic presence that only appear to be passive because it is not the ego or self that discovers and owns nature in poetry,” Vizenor writes (270). At the risk of overgeneralization, in a broadly indigenous North American perspective, the individual does not see herself as removed, separate from, or above nature, which corresponds to the egoistic logic of European selfhood; she is rather a part of the natural world. The division between nature and culture is bogus, merely self-serving. Haiku was also personally significant to Vizenor’s biography, career development, and sense of literary style and aesthetics. His small, self-published books of haiku led to his first academic job and began his long and distinguished academic career. “How ironic that my service as a soldier would lead me to haiku, and haiku an overture to dream songs” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 26). Vizenor has published in a myriad of genres, including the novel, short story, imagistic verse, satire, screenplay, literary and cultural criticism, journalism, and more. But his first love, haiku, shaped the tone of the remainder of his long and prodigious career. “That presence of haiku, more than any other literature, touched my imagination and brought me closer to a sense of tribal consciousness,” he reflects (27). In “Haiku Traces,” Vizenor writes: “Nature is a presence not permanence, and a haiku moment is an aesthetic survivance. My first literary creations were haiku scenes, and since then, that imagistic sense of nature has always been present in my writing” (261). Vizenor follows this thought with self-reflexive perspicacity when he appends, “I may never know if my haiku are right by nature, only that the scenes are my best memories” (261). Vizenor sees haiku an as exemplary “national literature”

“compassion is learned”

171

from which tribal (and other) nationalist writers might learn something: “Haiku would be my introduction to the pleasures of literature, a national literature that did not exclude the common reader by dominance, decadence, or intellectual elitism” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 26). Vizenor came to learn and interpret for us what he calls “the secret language of squirrels” (I Tell You Now, 106). For many of the reasons I have enumerated—their liminality, their seeming triviality or dispensability, their humorous qualities—they interest him but also because they have a place in Anishinaabe tradition and storytelling, and because they are, or were, traditionally hunted by many Anishinaabeg. Vizenor writes in “Haiku Traces”: “Many Anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals, birds, and other totemic creatures in experience, visions, and memory. The same can be said about haiku scenes, that the visions of nature are the perceptions and traces of memory” (259). Moreover, Vizenor had childhood experiences involving squirrels and family members; in a separate chapter of Interior Landscapes, Vizenor refers to “[t]he back stoop of that tavern where I fed the squirrels while my grandfather drank in the dark” (262). Haiku, memory, and squirrels form a nexus together with Vizenor’s philosophical interest in shadows. Vizenor stresses the oral or extralingual properties of haiku, its “shadow words.” “The shadows are the silence in heard stories, the silence that bears a referent of tribal memories and experience. The shadow words are active memories, and the memories of heard stories,” Vizenor writes in the essay “Shadow Survivance” from Manifest Manners (72). “Haiku are shadow words and sensations of the heard,” he states in “Envoy to Haiku” (32). No doubt Vizenor is aware that the etymology of the word squirrel can be traced back to a Greek word meaning shadowtailed, making the squirrel a doubled animal—two wings the butterfly—that carries around its own shadow, an idea that fascinated Vladimir Nabokov. In “Haiku Traces,” Vizenor writes: “The aesthetic creases, or the precise turns, traces, and cut of words in haiku, are the shadows of experience, inspiration, and memory” (258, my emphasis). Memory, shadows, haiku, and squirrels: like Nabokov’s Pnin from the novel of the same name, Vizenor is possessed by squirrelly hauntology. Nabokov is another author fascinated with the umbra and its possibilities. The exiled Professor Timofey Pnin seems to be haunted by the squirrel in moments of sadness or farce in Nabokov’s novel as he is haunted by alienation or memories of his homeland:

172

michael snyder A train whistled afar as mournfully as in the steppes. A skimpy squirrel dashed over a patch of sunlit snow, where a tree trunk’s shadow, olive-green in the turf, became grayish blue for a stretch, while the tree itself, with a brisk, scrabbly sound, ascended, naked, into the sky, where the pigeons swept by for a third and last time. The squirrel, invisible now in a crotch, chattered, scolding the delinquents who would pot him out of his tree. Pnin, on the dirty black ice of the flagged path, slipped again, threw up one arm in an abrupt convulsion, regained his balance, and, with a solitary smile, stooped to pick up Zol. Fond Lit., which lay open to a snapshot of a Russian pasture with Lyov Tolstoy trudging across it toward the camera and some long mared horses behind him, their innocent heads turned toward the photographer too. (Pnin, 73)

Like Vizenor, Pnin is haunted by memories of the homeland, in Pnin’s and Nabokov’s case, his Russian homeland that he was forced to leave behind. Both men encounter the squirrel in solitude. In Pnin, Victor is Pnin’s son who had lived with his remarried mother and only recently learned that Timofey Pnin was his father when his mother’s second marriage was dissolving. We learn that, as in Vizenor, the squirrel takes on a special significance or place of odd affection in Pnin. Timofey had sent his son “a picture postcard representing the Gray Squirrel. The card belonged to an educational series depicting Our Mammals and Birds; Pnin had acquired the whole series especially for the purpose of this correspondence. Victor was glad to learn that ‘squirrel’ came from a Greek word which meant ‘shadow-tail’” (Pnin, 88). “Haiku scenes ascribe the seasons with shadow words, the light that turns a leaf, a bird, a hand. Shadow words are intuitive, concise, the natural motion of memories, and the seasons,” Vizenor writes (“Haiku Traces,” 272, my emphasis). In contrast to the Eastern or tribal view of animals and nature, the Western view is emblematized by the series title of Pnin’s stationery: “Our Mammals and Birds.” Vizenor also loves the squirrel because it is so adaptable and resilient in a plethora of environments. As a species it evidences transmotion and has covered the earth. The squirrel displays hardy survivance. Despite the poisons and threats of the urban environment, Vizenor’s squirrel in Dead Voices tells us, not unlike Samuel Beckett, who is quoted in an epigraph of the novel, “We must go on” (62). Stories of the squirrels continue to promulgate. As the work of Krupat, Blaeser, and others testifies, Vizenor’s

“compassion is learned”

173

squirrel has attracted interest from critics and scholars, both Anishinaabeg and non-Natives. Although Vizenor’s hunting experience occurred before any of his haikus were published, the meaning of the experience changed and evolved as the poet grew older and reflected more deeply upon it. Vizenor experienced an epiphany, but his understanding of this moment grew over the years and his compassion for animals and empathy expanded gradually. Of his own iterations of this story, Vizenor commented that “ten years ago he wrote about what he chose to remember from an experience twenty years before that, when he shot and killed a red squirrel” (I Tell You Now, 103). This passage implies that the act of memory and self-writing is selective and that we are constantly revising and reshaping the meaning of the past. In a passage quoted by Vizenor, Paul John Eakin writes: in “the autobiographical act itself . . . the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness” (qtd. in Vizenor, Interior Landscapes, 263). The squirrel-hunting story becomes a repository, a resource for his growing compassion for animals, but it was not given birth fully formed from this watershed experience. In fact, Vizenor is quite squirrel-like in that he stashes away materials that he reuses in the future like nuts in a tree trunk. The experience is the nut, but as Vizenor writes in Interior Landscapes, “my compassion for animals arises from imagination and literature” (265). In his earliest haikus Gerald Vizenor does not reveal the full compassion and even empathy he achieves later, when he comes to identify with the squirrel. Vizenor often revises or reworks earlier haikus, as is typical of his work across genres. As critic Tom Lynch writes in an essay on Vizenor’s poetics, he “constantly revises his haiku” (“To Honor Impermanence,” 214). In Vizenor’s earliest work dating from the early 1960s, a certain detachment or bemusement in the voice of the speaker is discerned that may be sympathetic but not fully compassionate. A haiku from the Autumn section of Two Wings the Butterfly reads: Noisy squirrels Bare acorns from the leaves: Floating flakes of snow. (12) The image of the acorns is beautifully expressed through the metaphor of snowflakes. Yet the squirrels themselves are chastised as “noisy.” In the Spring section, the squirrel becomes a figure of humor in an apparent

174

michael snyder

favorite trope of Vizenor’s. This haiku is derived from a youthful perspective that teases the dignity of elders. An elderly squirrel Fluffed with the spirit of Spring: Fell from a tree. (25) The laughs are at the expense of the old animal. It has been said by John Joseph Mathews, for example, that some Native American humor arises from the dignity of elders being teased or compromised by still extant lust or desire symbolized by spring. In his 1964 collection Seventeen Chirps, Vizenor also reveals this sense of detachment in two poems addressed to young squirrels. He issues a command: Shoo young squirrel! That tree had only eleven leaves Go find another. (n.p.) With the word “eleven” Vizenor has used eleven syllables; each of these words becomes one of the leaves. “Only eleven leaves” is a wonderfully poetic phrase that the mouth savors in speaking. It typifies the alliteration deployed by the poet. In this instance Vizenor favors the beauty of the tree over the rodent and intervenes, disturbing the natural events. But by 1984, a change in attitude is registered in his revision: red squirrels shake the smallest maple tree four leaves abide (Matsushima, n.p.) In this case, the haiku could be seen as a description in the present tense. Or, “shake the smallest maple tree” could be seen as a command to the squirrels to shake the tree, reversing the spirit and the rebuke of the earlier poem. The second poem focuses on the leaves that remain, while the first dwelt on the leaves that had been there before the noisy squirrel. Juxtaposing these two poems in particular exemplifies Vizenor’s analysis of the development of his own craft in composing haiku. In “Envoy to Haiku,” he remarks that his early haiku of the 1960s were of common experiences told in the past tense,

“compassion is learned”

175

while the more recent haikus were more “metaphorical, concise and with a sense of presence” (30). In another older haiku from Seventeen Chirps addressing a “young squirrel,” he writes, Young squirrel Do you have a good memory? Spring will tell. (n.p.) If the squirrel recalls where he or she stashed the nuts for winter sustenance, then he will live to see spring. If not, he will die or at least suffer. For the speaker of this haiku, only “Spring will tell”—the survival of the young squirrel is not an issue to expend much worry or care over. But at the same time, the poem connects memory and survivance, a meaningful rhetorical link in its indigenous context. In that same collection, however, Vizenor hints at what is to come when he writes: Compassion is learned With the robins on the sidewalk Right after the rain (n.p.) In this poem, the speaker notes the hunger with which these red birds pluck worms from the ground, facilitated by the wet earth. John Joseph Mathews, an author admired by Vizenor (Fugitive Poses, 104–5) would link the red robin with “red” Osages at the close of his novel Sundown (1934). Almost thirty years later, in Dead Voices, Vizenor links the squirrel and the red birds once more, this time from the point of view of a squirrel: “far below us the robins listen for worms to move in the moist earth” (61). Being there with the robins and seeing their need and voracity has taught him more compassion, built upon that already achieved via his hunting experience. As his collections of haiku continued to appear in the 1960s, we can see Vizenor become more interested in images of shelter and protection for animals. His own outlook moreover seems to be more strongly compassionate. In the book Raising the Moon Vines (1964), Vizenor writes: The gentle rain Brought down the plum blossoms Over the garden mice (21)

176

michael snyder

and My neighbor’s low wood pile Became the new kitten’s home Crowding the chipmunks (23) In the latter poem there is a certain tenderness and even daring in taking up this subject, a “new kitten,” that could easily produce schmaltz in lesser hands. Although the comical haiku about the elderly squirrel falling from a tree is reprinted, and rightfully so, in the Winter section of this book, we detect a new sensibility in a previously unpublished poem: On a leafless bough A grey squirrel huddles still Ruffling his tail (96) This is a stark and potent image. In this haiku, Vizenor seems concerned for the squirrel and his future—as with seeing the robins’ hunger, he has learned more empathy through empirical observation and seemingly can no longer indulge in abstract detached thoughts such as “Spring will tell” whether the squirrel lives or dies. By November 1967, when Empty Swings was published, Vizenor’s compassion for animals had grown significantly. As earlier mentioned, squirrels are often seen as a liminal creature—a wild animal, but one that often shows signs of domesticity and lives among human environments. Vizenor’s theorization of crossbloods and “almost brown” characters evinces his fascination with liminal zones and in-between spaces. For example, in the story “Almost Brown,” we are told Vizenor’s fictional crossblood title character, who was almost born on the White Earth Reservation, “lived on the border between two school districts, one white and the other tribal. . . . Each school thought he attended the other” (110). Seeing squirrels as occupying a liminal zone between man-made and wild environments, in some of his haikus Vizenor reveals sympathy with the animals that struggle in the face of human manipulation of the natural world. In the 1984 collection Matsushima: Pine Islands, he writes,3 Squirrel in the rain Plodding like an old man Trees were trimmed (n.p.)

“compassion is learned”

177

While he once mocked the old squirrel fallen from a tree in a burst of illusory youthful energy, he now sympathizes with the animals whose movements are reduced to that of an octogenarian due to a human obsession with taming nature. Similarly, in Matsushima he later would write, tree trimmer squirrels complain at the detours terra mongrels (n.p.) Vizenor’s use of the word “mongrel” is another signature term referring to animals but often linked with liminal crossbloods such as Almost Brown in his title story, who was “born in the back seat of a beatup reservation car, almost white, almost on the reservation, and almost a real person” (“Almost Brown,” 111). “I grew up with mongrels,” Brown teasingly tells a “blonde anthropologist” (109). It is not until after an exchange about constellations that it is revealed that the “mongrels” are dogs (109). Remarkably, Vizenor goes beyond compassion in one haiku from the Winter section of Empty Swings, which anthropomorphically gives agency to the squirrel: Down the fence Squirrels design the snow Teeth like a pumpkin (n.p.) In this poem, the lowly tree rat becomes an artist, a grand designer. A wonderful contrast is set up between the first two lines and the third. The first two are wintry and brisk with repetition of the “d” and “s” consonant sounds. Then, the third line jumps out of the winter wonderland into Halloween with contrasting new consonant sounds. Similarly, in a wonderful image from Matsushima: first snow squirrels tie the trees together double bows (n.p.) The squirrels construct not just paths but art, aesthetic double bows. This artistic role makes sense when we consider that Vizenor has called himself “part squirrel,” registering his identification with the animal, going way beyond mere sympathy (qtd. in Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 5). “Once, he [even]

178

michael snyder

leaped over a fence to block a man who had raised his rifle from shooting two squirrels,” Vizenor writes (I Tell You Now, 105). Thus, across his haiku collections of the 1960s (all of which were composed after his squirrel-hunting debacle) and between these books and his 1984 haiku collection Matsushima: Pine Islands, through the figure of the squirrel we can trace Vizenor’s growing sympathy and empathy for other species. His detachment diminishes and his compassion expands. His use of figurative and aesthetic language grows over time as well. In “Envoy to Haiku,” the poet reflects on his development as a crafter of haiku: “The haiku in my first three books, Raising the Moon Vines, Seventeen Chirps, and Empty Swings, were common comparative experiences in the past tense. Later, in Matsushima, my haiku were more metaphorical, concise and with a sense of presence” (30). The culmination of Vizenor’s compassion for animals is narrated in his postmodern memoir Interior Landscapes, in which he retells the hunting story and adds a new coda. Vizenor’s prose here and in Dead Voices is a direct extension of his burgeoning compassion for the squirrel that developed across his collections of haiku, from Two Wings the Butterfly (1962) through Matsushima (1984). Anishinaabe critic Kimberly Blaeser writes in her essay “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision” that we can trace the intersections between his poetry and prose, the transformations of those poetic moments into larger works of prose. Not only do the same visionary winds blow through the Vizenor canon, but his early poetic engagement left its mark on his prose form as well; story dynamics repeat themselves, phrases and scenes reappear in multiple echoes and transformations. (8) In Interior Landscapes, Vizenor appends a second squirrel death story: An automobile had crushed the lower spine and pelvis of a red squirrel. I watched the animal scratch the cold asphalt with her front paws; she hauled her limp body to the wet maple leaves at the curb. Closer, I cried and the squirrel shivered; then I warmed her with my hands, eased her into death, down to the mother sea. (265) This is an extension of his resolve never to hunt again and a coda to that reiterated story in which he finally receives some forgiveness. In Dead Voices,

“compassion is learned”

179

which retells two stories of squirrel deaths from the perspective of squirrels themselves, the birch tree says, “The hunter was not forgiven then. . . . He sold his rifle and never thought about hunting again, but he was not forgiven until later when he acted to save a squirrel in the city” (68). Each retelling adds deeper pathos, reflection. With Dead Voices the (word) hunter finally allows himself forgiveness from the squirrel. While squirrel hunting is traditional for many Anishinaabe people, and hunting can be necessary for survival—a fact Vizenor acknowledges—he rejects it in spite of this. Another tribal writer from the midwestern United States, the incredibly gifted Mesquakie poet, memoirist, and novelist Ray A. Young Bear, also engages the squirrel and displays ambivalence about Mesquakie hunting tradition. Young Bear and Vizenor are sometimes linked as postmodern Native American writers who blur the boundaries of genre and exhibit deft linguistic skill and playfulness. In Young Bear’s Remnants of the First Earth, his sequel to Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, in the protagonist Edgar Bearchild’s mind, the squirrel becomes linked with a sacrificial king: John F. Kennedy, or “the Squirrel King named John” (275). Becoming a successful squirrel hunter is valued and traditional, but Edgar displays some ambivalence, first during his description of the grisly preparation of the meat: “Once they were properly singed, they were degutted, cut into quarter pieces, and then rinsed, along with the squirrel’s head. Several hours in a boiling pot of water, lid partially closed, made the charred pieces of sinewy meat tender” (274). Edgar has mixed feelings about the hunt; however, “the honor that came with a belt full of dangling squirrels was hard to resist” (274). On the day that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas— November 22, 1963—Edgar’s uncle and his sidekick Alfred bag ten squirrels apiece. With their belts stuffed with “dangling squirrels,” they are a grotesque and comical sight. In his half-dream state Edgar remembers this day, back when he was just twelve years old. As in Vizenor’s work, squirrels are again linked to memory: “the small game was slated to make the main dishes for a family-sized ghost—remembering people no longer here—feast” (274). The squirrels have been shot “perfectly” in the head, as Edgar’s uncle Winston had taught. This method precludes a traditional Mesquakie “delicacy,” however: “boiled squirrel brains.” The headshot has been adopted to make a “clean kill” and to prevent suffering. So tradition has been put aside to eliminate “the chance of a wounded squirrel returning home high atop the inaccessible cottonwood trees and dying inside a hollow tree next to his mate,” as Uncle Winston puts it (274).

180

michael snyder

But this is not enough to assuage Edgar’s misgivings about the squirrel, who becomes a noble in his dream, and whom he rescues in his imagination. In a dream, linked to memory, Edgar connects the date of the killing of the president with the killing of squirrels—both downed by perfect “head shots” (274). “I dreamt that the president of the United States was one of the unfortunate fox squirrels back then,” Edgar says and wonders about JFK’s final thoughts (274). Vizenor prays that the dead squirrel he shot will come back to life; Edgar imagines the Squirrel King Kennedy being saved from the insect assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “In jerky, squirrellike gestures the president leapt forward from the cab of the limousine, and the excess skin on his autumn-fattened sides expanded into a parachute, guiding him, upward and away from the range of the Carcano rifle” (274). Both the killing of the squirrels and, much more so, the killing of a president have caused trauma to young Edgar, who as a character in Remnants of the First Earth and Black Eagle Child seems to be closely modeled on the author himself. Both Edgar/ Ray and Vizenor work through these disturbing deaths repeatedly: at twelve “I questioned if we could manage world affairs without the Squirrel King named John,” Young Bear writes (275). During this scene, in which Edgar is in a visionary half-dream state, he is enveloped by the buzzing, humming, and droning sounds of nature and all kinds of animals and insects can be seen and heard (273). With these thoughts of concern about the squirrels, he is becoming one with nature, almost sinking into the landscape of a Southern California mountainside where he dreams of his Mesquakie homeland. Both Young Bear and Vizenor seem to question or challenge tradition when it comes to the squirrel hunt. Although Vizenor is proud of his cultural traditions and frequently writes of Anishinaabe history and subjectivity, he insists on singularity and individual intellectual sovereignty. To Vizenor, “an individual vision could be more inclusive than entire communities,” as he boldly writes in Manifest Manners (177). In many cases the individual has to decide for herself what is right and go beyond the assumptions or conventions of one’s community—despite one’s love and respect for it. In rejecting this particular tradition, Vizenor is no less Anishinaabe; in fact, to paraphrase something Jill Doerfler, White Earth Anishinaabe, has remarked to me: an insistence on individual autonomy and personal independence is actually very Ojibwe. Vizenor’s compassion is learned through meditation, storytelling, “imagination and literature” (Interior Landscapes, 265). “The metaphorical bears, wolves, mongrels, totemic cranes, and other creatures, are traces of

“compassion is learned”

181

native transmotion and Survivance,” he writes in “Literary Animals” (133). The experience itself is powerful and necessary, but it is through the reflection and retelling that deeper meaning and ethical significance reveal themselves. “Native stories must create a natural union of authored animals on a tricky landscape of human and animal survivance,” Vizenor writes (136). The animals reward our thought and compassion in spades; the animals give back generously.

notes 1. The Anishinaabe have also been referred to, less correctly, as the Ojibwe, Ojibway, Ojibwa, and Chippewa. 2. “Ishmael nibbles his food. He has the face of a deer but eats like a squirrel,” Vizenor writes in “The Edible Menu and Slow Food Tricksters” in Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty ([1978; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003], 108). 3. The famous Japanese master of haiku Basho “visited Matsushima and wrote in his haibun diaries about the moon over the pine islands, the treasures of the nation. I was there three hundred years later, touched by the same moon and the master haiku poet” (Vizenor, “Envoy to Haiku,” in Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader, ed. A. Robert Lee [Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994], 29).

references Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. ———. “‘Interior Dancers’: Transformations of Vizenor’s Poetic Vision,” SAIL 9, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 3–15. Krupat, Arnold, ed. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Lynch, Tom. “To Honor Impermanence: The Haiku and Other Poems of Gerald Vizenor.” In Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 203–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2002. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1975.

182

michael snyder

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. 1953. Reprint: New York: Vintage International, 1989. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Avon, 1975. Vizenor, Gerald. Almost Ashore: Selected Poems. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2006. ———. “Almost Brown.” In Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 107–14. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Edited by Arnold Krupat, 99–109. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ———. Empty Swings: Haiku in English. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1967. ———. “Envoy to Haiku.” In Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 25–32. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. “Haiku Traces.” In Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, 257–76. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ———. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. ———. “I Know What You Mean, Erdrupps MacChurbs: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors.” In Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods. Edited by Chester Anderson, 79–111. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. “Literary Animals.” In Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, 119–43. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. ———. Matsushima: Pine Islands. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984. ———. Native Liberty: Natural Realism and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. ———. “October 1957: Death Song to a Red Rodent.” In Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, 167–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Raising the Moon Vines: Original Haiku in English. Minneapolis: Callimachus, 1964. ———. Seventeen Chirps: Haiku. Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1964. ———. “Shadow Survivance.” In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, 63–106. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

“compassion is learned”

183

———. Two Wings the Butterfly: Haiku Poems in English. St. Cloud, MN: private printing, 1962. ———. Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty. 1978. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Young Bear, Ray A. Remnants of the First Earth. New York: Grove, 1996.

chapter ten

Vizenor’s Elegies on a R ed Squirrel Arnold Krupat

A

very great deal of what can be considered indigenous, elegiac expression—oral performances and written texts generally concerned with death and loss—appears to be strongly oriented not only toward commemoration and mourning but toward collective consolation and revitalization in the interest of what Gerald Vizenor has called the continuance and survivance of Native tribal nations.1 I refer here to “Native American elegiac expression” rather than Native American elegy (I will alternate between the two locutions later on) because “elegy” is a term that names a genre of Western poetry from the classical period until today addressing death and loss, a genre that does not exist among traditional, oral, indigenous performances. So, too, is it the case that there are not a great many elegies in the written work of Native authors. But John Frow has observed that, whereas “the elegy as a genre remains . . . specifically concerned with the act of mourning a particular person,” the elegiac mode—what I have called elegiac expression—“is a matter of tone— of reflective melancholy or sadness . . .” (132). Frow quotes Morton Bloomfield’s view that since the early romantic period, elegy is not so much “a genre but a mode of approaching reality” (132). Bloomfield may or may not be correct, but we can certainly study the ways in which Native performance and writing approach the reality of death and loss. Such study makes clear the fact that oral elegiac expression traditionally has been and continues to be a form of cultural work functioning—to cite the title of a book published by Jace Weaver in 1997—so That the People Might Live. It is grounded in the fact that any individual death affects not only the family or loved ones of the deceased, but the entire community— clan, moiety, tribe, or nation. So, too, is it the case that a great many elegiac texts by Native authors respond to death and loss with what Weaver has called a “communitist” (xii, xiii) perspective; they grieve for the deceased but determinedly work to ensure that the People are consoled and their loss overcome so that collective life can go on. 184

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

185

A passage from the Iroquois Condolence Rite puts it this way: “Hail, Grandfathers,” one of the condolers chants, Isn’t this what you decreed: In the far future this institution shall be carried on, that the law shall be continued by our grandchildren? Hail, Grandfathers! (Peter John, qtd. in Fenton, “An Iroquois Condolence Council,” 117) An individual has passed on, but his name and his office do not die. Both the name and the office will be bestowed upon another who will work to sustain the People. Among the Tlingits of the northwest coast, after the death of an important person in the community, at a gathering called koo’eex,2 condolence oratory acts, as a Tlingit elder told Sergei Kan, as “medicine on [the People’s] wounds in times of sorrow” (qtd. in Kan, “Words That Heal the Soul,” 53), that the People might live. “Its most explicit function,” Kan concludes, is “removing grief from the souls of the mourners/hosts and helping them to return to normal life” (53). So, too, were the various Ghost Dance movements—not just in the 1890s but earlier and later as well—oriented not only to reuniting the living with the dead but also toward restoring lifeways that the People had lost, so that they might continue and survive. In the written literature, we may note that from the first third of the nineteenth century onward, when traditional people were first recruited for entirely untraditional autobiographical projects, even well in to the twentieth century, some managed to tell their “individual” life stories very much as the story of their People. As I have shown elsewhere, we find Black Hawk and Black Elk, for example, using their autobiographical narration as a form of symbolic action to regenerate the collective life of the People.3 All of this is to say that traditional, oral elegiac expression as well as a great deal of written Native American elegiac expression—there are some exceptions—responds to loss very differently from elegy in the West. An indigenous person will mourn, but she will not, like the speaker in John Milton’s “Lycidas,” envision passage “to fresh fields and pastures new” as marking an end to grief (46). Nor will the Native mourner find solace when “Lilac and star and bird twine . . . with the chant of [his] soul,” like the speaker in Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. . . .” (2288).

186

arnold krupat

In Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” an elegy for the poet’s mother, the speaker cannot achieve an ultimate acceptance of or reconciliation to his loss. Rather, Ginsberg’s poem concludes in an angry standoff between God and the poet’s ego: “Lord Lord O Grinder of giant Beyonds my voice in a boundless / field in Sheol” (36). I have found nothing whatever in traditional, oral Native American elegiac expression nor, for that matter, in contemporary Native written elegy, that parallels the purely self-oriented, individualistic responses to loss of a Milton, a Whitman, or a Ginsberg—writers of different times and temperaments, to be sure, but exemplars generally of what a broader survey would find in Western elegy. In three autobiographical essays and a novel called Dead Voices, Gerald Vizenor has published versions of what I will call an elegy for a red squirrel.4 Of course, most elegies are written in verse, while these are in prose; nonetheless, a study of them is not out of place in a consideration of the relation between Vizenor’s poetry and his poetic prose, such as the present volume. With each return to and revision of the story, Vizenor moves from an account that treats the death of the red squirrel as helping to define himself individually and vocationally as a writer, to one in which his identity and vocation specifically contribute to the continuance and survivance of the People. In the final, most complex and developed elegy on the squirrel’s death, he mourns so that the People might live—because, as the final words of Dead Voices state the matter, “We must go on” (144). Although it would be difficult to point to any contemporary artist more theoretically sophisticated than Vizenor—anyone familiar with his work will be aware of how well stocked his texts are with quotations from a wide range of theorists—it seems to me that this is a more nearly “organic,” in the Gramscian sense, development than an ideological or theoretical one. The preeminent postmodernist American Indian author, in this instance at least, seems to have written his way to a thoroughly traditional mode of Native American elegiac expression.5 ✹  ✹  ✹

In “1956: In a Low Voice Without Words,” the penultimate section of an autobiographical essay called “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs” (1976), Vizenor recounts the story of how, as a young man, he had hunted a large red squirrel in the woods of Minnesota.6 His first shot shattered the squirrel’s shoulder bone; a second shot “tore the flesh and fur away from the

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

187

top of his skull;” a third “tore his lower jaw away,” and a fourth and final shot “shattered his forehead” (107). As this animal “who wanted to live more than anything” (107) dies, Vizenor asks his forgiveness, weeps, and sings “a slow death song in a low voice without words until it was dark” (108). This moving story is central to Vizenor’s “Crows Written on the Poplars” (1987), a text that he calls “a mixedblood autobiographical causerie and a narrative on the slow death of a common red squirrel” (101). “The first and third person personas,” he writes, “are me” (101). The first pages of “Crows Written on the Poplars” alternate, in more or less standard autobiographical fashion, important events in the author’s life—the terrible fact of his father’s murder when Vizenor was less than two years old (102), time spent in Japan (103–4), and studies in creative writing at New York University (104–5)—with references to the shooting of the red squirrel. In “Crows Written on the Poplars,” he quotes passages from his earlier account and offers commentary on them. After a second quotation from the 1976 text, Vizenor, speaking of himself in the third person, writes that “the slow death of the squirrel burned in his memories; he sold his rifles and never hunted animals. Instead he told stories about squirrels and compassionate tricksters” (105–6, my emphasis). As a consequence of the squirrel’s death, Vizenor gives up animal hunting and takes up in narrative the mythic figure of the trickster who will become acentrically central to his future work. Refusing “to accept the world as a hunter” (106), Vizenor became instead a writer, a “word hunter” (106). Yet his elegiac reflections on the death of the red squirrel have not yet been tied to the survivance of the People. Toward the end of this piece, he quotes George Steiner, who writes, “We speak first to ourselves, then to those nearest to us in kinship and locale” (108). But what Vizenor will increasingly find, as he returns twice more to the death of the red squirrel, is that there can be no such sequencing for the tribal person who can only speak fully to or of himself by speaking to or of those “nearest to us in kinship” or nation, by speaking in the first person plural.7 Thus, he returned to the story of the red squirrel in his book-length autobiographical volume, Interior Landscapes (1990), where the story appears in a chapter called “October 1957: Death Song to a Red Rodent.” Here, it is not only the date of the squirrel’s death that has changed. The first three paragraphs of this version of the event once more add reflections developed by Vizenor in the years since “I Know What You Mean, Erdupp MacChurbbs,” but what is most curious about this account is the way in which it insists, on

188

arnold krupat

the one hand, upon a specified distance between Vizenor and the red squirrel—he calls the animal a “rodent,” writes short, terse sentences, interrupts the narrative with quotations, and suggests that the squirrel “dared” him to the hunt (168, my emphasis)—while, on the other, it draws him so close to the animal that he briefly shifts pronominal reference from “I” to “we.” In “Crows Written on the Poplars,” Vizenor had complicated his autobiographical selfreference by using, as I have said, both the first- and third-person pronouns, but this is different, and as we will soon see, the use of a “we” referencing both human and animal persons becomes central to Dead Voices. In Interior Landscapes, the narrator tells us that the hunter’s first shot passed through the squirrel’s shoulder and shattered the bone. His right front leg and paw dangled from torn flesh. He dropped to the ground and tried to climb the tree again, and again. I understood his instinct to escape. (168) The speaker adds, “in a dream we reached up with our right paw, shattered and blood soaked, but it was not there to hold us” (168, my emphases), so the wounded squirrel “fell down again.” In spite of the apparent identity of hunter and squirrel just specified by “we” and “our,” a radical separation between hunter and hunted is also registered: the squirrel “watched me with his dark eyes,” and “I watched him.” As the squirrel one last time tries to escape, the narrator speculates that the animal most particularly sought to escape “the city in me” (168), the urban identity Vizenor had earlier acknowledged for himself in “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs.” “I pretended to be a tribal hunter,” the narrator states, “but my survival identities were urban . . . my time in the cities did not depend upon the hunt” (167). The chapter concludes, I sold my rifle and never hunted to kill animals or birds again. The violent death of a wild animal caused by my weapon was a separation from the natural world not a reunion. I would defend squirrels and comfort them in death; that would be the natural human response. I would not shoot an animal again unless my life depended on the hunt. (Interior Landscapes, 170) Although Vizenor the hunter-turned-writer had several times identified himself as both an urban and a tribal person, his novel, Dead Voices

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

189

acutely raises the question of whether it is actually possible for tribal persons to survive in the cities. The novel’s answer to this question in part involves the hunting of the red squirrel. As expanded and elaborated in Dead Voices, the elegy for the squirrel becomes an elegy for the oral tradition and the tribes in the traditional manner of providing consolation and renewal. The urban hunter who in 1956 or 1957 shot a squirrel in the woods will finally be forgiven in the city (circa 1992), something that comes about when he shows compassion for a squirrel crushed by a car. Elegies for the squirrels confirm the author’s achievement of an identity now as a tribal writer with a specific commitment to preserving the oral tradition in writing, that the People might live.8 The narrator of the first and last chapters of Dead Voices is Laundry, a Native American college professor who teaches at a university in California (a bit like Vizenor himself at the time).9 He has been given that nickname by a tribal woman named Bagese who believes he smells like laundry soap. It will be Bagese, not Laundry, who narrates the episode concerning the squirrel. Bagese has invented a game she calls wanaki, whose rules involve a set of seven cards with images of animals, insects, or birds.10 Each day she draws a card, identifies with the image on it, and then narrates stories in the first person plural; she narrates that is, from the plural but unified perspective of both herself and the natural creature on the card.11 In a chapter titled, “Squirrels, June 1979,” Bagese, having drawn the wanaki squirrel card, begins, “We are squirrels out on a thin branch, and we run at dawn with the leaves” (Dead Voices, 59, emphases added). She also says that the “birches told their stories,” (62) and it is strictly speaking “the birch”—rather than Bagese herself—who tells of a “tribal hunter” who “pretended to be the animal he hunted for food” (63).12 Bagese then takes over the narration as the tribal hunter “listened to the stories of the birch” and also “pretended he was part of the birch” (63). The account that follows repeats material from Vizenor’s earlier accounts of the hunting of the squirrel, but, again, with differences. For one thing, the squirrel whose experience Bagese-as-squirrel narrates has acquired a proper name, Ducks, and a change of gender: Ducks is pronominally referred to as “she.” For another, the depiction of her pain and her struggle to live have been much expanded. Although the hunter had previously taken four shots to dispatch the squirrel, Bagese now says, “That miserable hunter shot her five times” (63). She notes that “The hunter pleaded to the squirrel, pleaded to be forgiven” (66), and that he takes the very last blink

190

arnold krupat

of her eye “as her forgiveness.” She then notes what Vizenor himself had earlier noted, that finally the hunter “cried, and . . . sang a slow death song without words until it was dark” (67). But according to the birch, The hunter was not forgiven then. . . . He sold his rifle and never thought about hunting again, but he was not forgiven until later when he acted to save a squirrel in the city. (68, my emphasis) On that occasion, the hunter carried a red squirrel “about the same size as the one he shot” crushed by a car, “to the boulevard,” where “he stretched out beside the squirrel, touched his [sic] head and paws, and sang a death song . . . . The hunter was forgiven at last in the city” (68). Whether it is Bagese or the birches who tell these stories of the hunter and the hunted, as orally transmitted “natural” stories, they are contrasted to the stories of the unfortunate “wordies,” academics, or more generally people who write, people who—as Bagese sees it—have entirely “lost their stories” (63). So, too, would Laundry’s/Vizenor’s stories in print—presumably the ones he has earlier told about hunting the squirrel, but perhaps other stories as well—be “dead voices” (67). This last matter is an important theme in the novel, for Bagese strongly believes that the oral tradition cannot be preserved in writing and, indeed, at one point Laundry had promised Bagese that he would not write and publish the stories she had told him. But sometime after he has been forgiven in the city, toward the novel’s conclusion, he announces that he has, after all, decided to publish her stories. Yet Bagese also believes that the cities must become the sanctuaries for tribal people because, as she puts it, “the tribes are dead” (134), and this presents a desperate problem in that it is her sense that “There is nothing to be done with our voices in the cities” (134). But it is only through the voiced story that the People might live, and she asserts many times, “We must go on.” This synecdochic use of the first person plural also appears at the end of the novel, as Laundry quotes Bagese and himself concludes, “We must go on” (136). “We must go on” is a revision of the last words of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on” (179), which Vizenor had placed as one of the epigraphs to Dead Voices, and the shift from “I” to “we” on the part of Bagese and Laundry, is, as I’ve tried to show, indicative of a commitment to the continuance and survivance of the People. We learn that Laundry “waited a few more years and then decided that the stories [Bagese had] told [him] must be published” (143, my emphasis). These stories in print

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

191

will not be dead voices; rather, they will sustain the People, for “We must go on” (144). What I have tried to do here falls far short of a “reading” of Dead Voices; I’ve limited myself to discussing the way in which that novel’s commitment to the continuance and survivance of the People—“We must go on”—has affected Vizenor’s elegy for the red squirrel he had shot some thirty-five years earlier. My point has been that his returns to and revisions of the story gradually led him to produce an account consistent with traditional, oral elegiac expression. (Although, as I have noted, a brief return to this material in Fugitive Poses in 1998 is more nearly consistent with the earliest accounts.) Whereas his earliest reflections on the death of the red squirrel led him to become not a hunter but a word hunter, his (not-quite-) final reflection, mediated by a woman named Bagese and a birch, leads him to become a writer in the oral tradition, committed to the continuance and survivance of the People.

notes 1. Vizenor has, over many years and in many texts (e.g., in the novel, The Heirs of Columbus [Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991], and in several of the essays in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance [Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994]), posited the tribal values of continuance and survivance as an alternative to the Western values of progress and dominance. For his most recent thoughts on survivance, see the introduction to his edited collection of essays called Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 2. “Koo’eex” simply means “inviting.” These “inviting” gatherings have generally been called “potlatches,” from a word in Chinook jargon taken from Nootka. Until recently (e.g., Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, H tuwunaagu yis, for healing our spirit; de Laguna, “Some Dynamic Forces in Tlingit Society”; and Kan, “Words That Heal the Soul”), potlatches have been badly described as a result of “reading” them through Kwak’wak’a (formerly Kwakiutl) potlatches. 3. For this reading of Black Hawk’s autobiography, see my “Black Hawk’s Life: Patterson’s Story; Native American Elegy” (American Literary History 22, no. 3 [Fall 2010]: 527–52). For Black Elk, see my “‘That the People Might Live’: Notes Toward a Study of Native American Elegy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 343–63. I am attempting to study Native American elegiac expression in the manner Craig Womack called for more than a decade ago; I am, that is, so far as an outsider

192

arnold krupat

can, “working from within the nation, rather than looking toward the outside” (Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 12). For an early attempt to treat Native elegiac expression strictly from the outside, see Nora Baker Barry’s examination of four themes in Old English elegies as a framework for consideration of James Welch’s Winter in the Blood as elegy, “Winter in the Blood as Elegy” (American Indian Quarterly 4 [1978]: 149–57). 4. Among other Native American elegies for wild animals (e.g., not for “pets”), see in particular Simon Ortiz’s “For Our Brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, Squirrel” (in Woven Stone [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992]). Carter Revard’s poem, “That Lightning’s Hard to Climb” is, as the author states, an elegy for a tree, a catalpa struck by lightning (106). 5. The extended account in Dead Voices, however, was not quite the last telling of the story. Vizenor revisited it once more in a single page in chapter 3 of Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) called “Literary Animals,” in a section of that chapter entitled “Escape Distance” (130). The chapter, the section, and the section’s title are all of great interest, but I will not attempt to examine them here except to note that this final account—it is the last account of which I am aware—returns to a more individual and vocational use of the episode. The penultimate page of Kimberly Blaeser’s book-length study of Vizenor mentions the four tellings (Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996], 203), and Kathryn Hume’s consideration of Vizenor’s “metaphysics” also mentions them (in “Gerald Vizenor’s Metaphysics,” Contemporary Literature 48 [2007]: 586). 6. Vizenor first encounters Erdupp MacChurbbs in 1949 in a section of his autobiography called “1949: Every Threshold an Internal Fire.” MacChurbbs—I suspect the name is some sort of anagram or joking reference, but I have found no account of its derivation or meaning—is one of the “little woodland people of love who lived in [Vizenor’s] thoughts and fantasies during [his] year of silence in the third grade” (Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], 95). MacChurbbs teaches Vizenor that the “[l]ittle people disappear when civilization and terminal beliefs surround them” (96), a lesson he has taken to heart. MacChurbbs reappears briefly in Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World ([Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992], 131). 7. Vizenor quotes more from Steiner than I have cited. Steiner also writes that “At its intimate centre, in the zone of familial or totemic [sic] immediacy, our language is . . . most dense with intentionality and compacted implication. Streaming outward it thins, losing energy and pressure as it reaches an alien speaker” (qtd. in “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies,” in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987], 108). This might seem

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

193

to privilege Native American traditional oral expression, but if so, that is only because Steiner views this “intimate” discourse from a romantic, evolutionary perspective that regards it as a paradise inevitably to be lost. Vizenor’s elegies for the red squirrel may eventually “reach” “alien” readers, but they seek to do so in a manner that retains the “dense . . . intentionality and compacted implication” of language directed to “those nearest us” in a “kinship” that is not based on blood alone (“Crows Written on the Poplars,” 110). 8. I am attempting to show how the concerns of Dead Voices modify the elegy for the red squirrel, developing it in ways that align with traditional elegiac expression. This is a more limited and/or specialized effort than trying to show how the elegy for the red squirrel works in the novel as a whole—and, as I have noted, Vizenor’s subsequent use of the story in Fugitive Poses seems to return to earlier senses of its meaning. 9. I have argued for an autobiographical reading of Dead Voices in “Dead Voices, Living Voice: On the Autobiographical Writing of Gerald Vizenor” (in The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 70–87), considering as well the matters of pronominal reference and also of nicknames in Vizenor’s work to that date. Dead Voices also repeats many times the phrase “stories in the blood,” a phrase Vizenor had also used in The Heirs of Columbus, and one I have found troubling: see “Ratio- and Natioin Gerald Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus,” in The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture ([Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 56–69). An excellent critique of my rationalist or social-scientific approach, and a thoroughly convincing explication of Vizenor’s very different “trickster” approach to these matters, may be found in Chadwick Allen’s essay “Blood (and) Memory” (American Literature 71 [1999]: 469–84). 10. I have found no source for the term “wanaki” in relation to a game of any sort. “Wanaki,” an Ojibwe word that does not appear in any contemporary Ojibwe dictionaries, does appear, however, in Bishop Fredric Baraga’s Dictionary of the Ojibway Language (1853; repr. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1992). The definition is “I inhabit a place in peace, undisturbed, I live somewhere in peace” (398). Professor Scott Lyons pointed out that the Baraga dictionary “lists a whole lot of ‘wan’ words” (pers. comm., March 5, 2010), such as “Wanakia, I make him live in peace. . . . Wanakiwendam, I am appeased in my thoughts, in my mind, I am out of danger, out of trouble” (398). Professor Lyons, who has helped me greatly with these matters, notes that not only is “wanaki” a nearly ubiquitous signifier of “indigenous,” as in, for example, the names of golf courses in Ojibwe campgrounds and in Papua, New Guinea, but it has also made its way “as part of the standard Na’vi greeting in the movie Avatar, e.g., ‘Wanaki Kamayu,’ ‘I see you’” (Lyons, pers. comm.). 11. A brief but very useful account of these matters is given in Kathryn Milun’s review of Dead Voices.

194

arnold krupat

12. Thus it would seem that the event has been moved forward more than twenty years in time.

references Allen, Chadwick. “Blood (and) Memory.” American Literature 71 (1999): 469–84. Baraga, Fredric. A Dictionary of the Ojibway Language. 1853. Reprint, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1992. Barry, Nora Baker. “Winter in the Blood as Elegy.” American Indian Quarterly 4 (1978): 149–57. Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. Edited by John G. Neihardt. 1932. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Black Hawk. Black Hawk: An Autobiography. Edited by Donald Jackson. 1833. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Dauenhauer, Nora, and Richard Dauenhauer. H tuwunaagu yis, for healing our spirit: Tlingit Oratory. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Juneau: Sealaska Heritage Foundation, 1990. de Laguna, Frederica. “Some Dynamic Forces in Tlingit Society.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8 (1952): 1–12. ———. Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, 1972. Fenton, William. “An Iroquois Condolence Council.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 4 (1946): 110–27. Frow, John. Genre. London: Routledge, 2006. Ginsberg, Allen. “Kaddish.” In Kaddish and Other Poems, 7–36. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961. Hume, Kathryn. “Gerald Vizenor’s Metaphysics.” Contemporary Literature 48 (2007): 580–612. Kan, Sergei. “Words that Heal the Soul: Analysis of the Tlingit Potlatch Oratory.” Arctic Anthropology 20 (1983): 47–59. Krupat, Arnold. “Black Hawk’s Life: Patterson’s Story; Native American Elegy.” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 527–52. ———. “Dead Voices, Living Voice: On the Autobiographical Writing of Gerald Vizenor.” In The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, 70–87. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

vizenor’s elegies on a red squirrel

195

———. “Ratio- and Natio- in Gerald Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus.” In The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, 56–69. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. “‘That the People Might Live’: Notes Toward a Study of Native American Elegy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Elegy. Edited by Karen Weisman, 343–63. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Lyons, Scott. Personal communication, March 5, 2010. Milton, John. “Lycidas.” In John Milton: The Complete Poems. Edited by John Leonard, 41–46. London: Penguin, 1998. Milun, Kathryn. “Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World by Gerald Vizenor.” Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 481–84. Ortiz, Simon. “For Our Brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, Squirrel.” In Woven Stone, 251. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Revard, Carter. “That Lightning’s Hard to Climb.” In Winning the Dust Bowl, 106–7. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Vizenor, Gerald. “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 99–110. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lin-​ coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs.” In Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods. Edited by Chester Anderson, 79–111. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Whitman, Walt. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. . . .” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. B, 1820–1865. 7th ed. Edited by Robert Levine and Arnold Krupat, 2288. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

chapter eleven

There’s a Hole in the Day The Third Infantry and Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Jace Weaver bug-o-nay-ge-shig bear island pillager midewiwin healer elusive warrior more than sixty years the third native honored by the name hole in the day —Gerald Vizenor, Bear Island

T

he Third U.S. Infantry, established in 1784 as the First American regiment, was the storied veteran of many imperial campaigns. Created by an act of Congress, it formed the nucleus of the regular U.S. Army. William Henry Harrison commanded it on the Canadian border during the War of 1812, after which it was rechristened the Third Infantry. In 1840, it was sent to Florida to fight the Second Seminole War. Under Winfield Scott, it stormed the ramparts of Chapultepec. As a result of its hard-charging in the MexicanAmerican War, it was given the rare distinction of being permitted to pass in review with bayonets fixed. During the Spanish-American War, it fought its way from San Juan Hill to Santiago before returning home to the safety of Fort Snelling in Minnesota. For thirty-five years following the end of the American Civil War, the Third Infantry and units like it secured the United States’ Manifest Destiny, ensuring the expansion of the “area of freedom” (in Andrew Jackson’s phrase) through the dispossession of the continent’s indigenes, while fear gripped a nation. “Waiting for the word from the West” was a reluctant pastime of a worried populace. All that was believed to have been rendered unnecessary, 196

There’s a hole in the day

197

however, with the dying echo of Hotchkiss guns over the killing fields of Wounded Knee. Now, in 1898, eight years after the United States’ proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” in the Indian Wars, three years after Frederick Jackson Turner calmed jangled nerves, when, at a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery,” he declared the end of the Frontier, newspapers stunned previously complacent readers with headlines like “Troops Battle Savages.” Rumors spread of a massacre akin to Custer’s. Home less than a month from Cuba, the Third Infantry had been ordered out of its barracks to fight Indians one more time. This, the incident that Gerald Vizenor relates so brilliantly in Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, really happened. Were it not for the fact that six recruits died for no good reason—as is usually the case in imperial adventures—it would bear all the hallmarks of satire, a kind of late-nineteenthcentury Mouse That Roared. In his essay “The War Cry of the Trickster,” Alan Velie notes: Like many other Indian novelists—Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich—Vizenor began his writing career as a poet. His first eight books were collections of poems, most haiku, a form Vizenor discovered when in Japan as a soldier in the 1950s. But starting with the publication of Wordarrows, a collection of essays and sketches, and Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, a novel, Vizenor became known primarily as a prose writer as he churned out an astonishing amount of fiction and nonfiction: novels, short stories, criticism, memoirs, and works on the culture and politics of Indian Country. Bear Island shows that Vizenor has not lost his touch as a poet. (149) Indeed it does. Written in blank verse, the epic poem has a spare expressive form reminiscent of Vizenor’s much-loved haiku. worthy hunters cut the barren masks of hunger boreal shadows eternal spirits on the ancient stone (Bear Island, 13)

jace weaver

198

Even more so, however, in its hypnotic rhythms, I hear the sounds of that first environment, the mother’s womb, the heartbeat, the drum. Vizenor uses this most Native cadence to tell his story. Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, Hole in the Day, a chief of the Pillager Band of Anishinaabe, demeaningly called “Old Bug” by White colonial masters, was arrested for suspected involvement in liquor trafficking and brought to Duluth, Minnesota, for trial. When the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, he was released and left to make his way a hundred miles back to his Leech Lake reservation by his own devices. Walking the distance and arriving home sick and weak, he swore never again to collaborate with the colonizer’s judicial system. In late September 1898, when Bug-o-nay-ge-shig came into the Onigum Agency at Leech Lake to pick up his annuity payment, he was arrested for refusing to answer a summons to testify in federal court in connection with another whiskey-selling case. He shouted out for help, and some twenty-two Natives, including at least some women, answered his call, spiriting him away from the authorities. Marshal Robert Morrison and Arthur Tinker, the inspector of agencies, panic-stricken and embarrassed by their own incompetence, reported that a “vicious mob” of two hundred Anishinaabe warriors had attacked and overpowered them. They requested military assistance. On September 30, a raw second lieutenant of the Third Infantry arrived with twenty-two men. For three days they kept vigil while Morrison and Tinker negotiated futilely with the Anishinaabe for the surrender of Hole in the Day. Reinforcements were requested, and seventy-seven additional soldiers, under the command of General John Mosby Bacon and Brevet Major Melville Wilkinson came, arriving on October 4. brevet major melville wilkinson mustachioed combat commander third infantry regiment fort snelling service in civil and colonial wars gallant crusader plucked the nez perce

There’s a hole in the day

199

from their homeland by military lies (92) Bacon and Wilkinson were both frustrated Indian fighters. In 1896, Bacon led a contingent of black walk-a-heaps of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry out of Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona in pursuit of Yaquis who had been raiding around Nogales and Harshaw. According to official military accounts, the “search proved inconclusive” (Finley, “Fort Huachuca,” 4). Wilkinson was aide-de-camp to General O. O. Howard when he was commander of the Department of the Columbia. As Vizenor suggests, he fought the Nez Perce at the Battle of the Clearwater (July 11–12, 1877), but he did not accompany Howard in his successful pursuit of Chief Joseph and his band as they attempted to reach Canada (Michno, Encyclopedia of the Indian Wars, 309– 10; Terry, “Oregon Army Officer, School Leader Deserves Higher Place in History”). On October 5, Bacon’s contingent, accompanied by newspaper reporters, set out by barge and steamship for Bear Island, where Hole in the Day was reportedly holed up. Finding the place deserted, the force moved on to Sugar Point, site of Hole in the Day’s homestead. Once again they saw no one. Unaware that they were surrounded and being watched, they prepared to bivouac. As the troops were stacking arms, one rifle fell over and discharged. Thinking they had been discovered, the Indians opened fire. Major Wilkinson, previously wounded at Antietam, was struck three times—the third time fatally—as he paced the makeshift skirmish line, encouraging his men and urging them to keep under cover. major wilkinson about the same age as hole in the day bravely tread by martial counts over cabbage hearten the soldiers by swagger and shouts give it to them boys give ’em hell we’ve got ’em licked (Bear Island, 69)

200

jace weaver

The soldiers fired back at shadows and spent an anxious night shivering in the cold, scared and under constant threat. Two days later, Bacon’s forwarded dispatch arrived at the War Department in Washington: “Commenced fighting at 11:30 yesterday. Indians seem to have best position. Not moving. Major Wilkinson, five soldiers and two Indian police killed; awaiting reinforcements” (qtd. in Weaver, foreword to Bear Island, xi). The word had once again, and very unexpectedly, arrived from the West. The Potsdam-St. Lawrence Herald in New York carried a front-page headline: An Indian Uprising. Subheads read Fighting with United States Troops in Minnesota—A Hot Fight and Indians in Bad Mood. “The Indian troubles in Minnesota have suddenly assumed a very serious aspect,” the article began. “A detachment of soldiers under the command of General Bacon was attacked by a strong body of Indians on Bear Island, Leech Lake, about thirty miles from Walker, Minn. and a hot fight ensued which lasted nearly all day. It is feared General Bacon’s command has been massacred” (qtd. in Weaver, foreword to Bear Island, xi). The “strong body” of Indian warriors was actually only nineteen men, most of whom melted away during the night. Hole in the Day was never reliably placed at the scene. the new york times reported hearsay about the indian war at sugar point capital news imagined scenes at a great distance headlines raved troops battle savages rumored massacre of one hundred men and boldly inquired in banner type is general bacon dead (Bear Island, 63) On October 7, the New York Times reported the “mass of conflicting reports” concerning the “imperiled soldiers.” It related Major Wilkinson’s last moments. According to the Times article, “Indians Besiege General Bacon,”

There’s a hole in the day

201

as he lay mortally wounded, he raised himself on one elbow from a pool of his own blood and cried, “Give ’em hell, General; never mind me” (“Indians Besiege General Bacon,” 1). In fact, even before the word arrived from the West, the War at Sugar Point was over. On the evening of October 6, 214 Minnesota militia, armed with a Gatling gun, arrived in Walker by train. The following day, as they headed for Bear Island, they were met by the previously besieged Third Infantry, coming the other direction. The Pillager warriors had simply let them withdraw. General Bacon and the Army told things very differently: they had won the day. According to the Portland Oregonian, Bacon eulogized Major Wilkinson, writing, “It was his courage and example which inspired the men to rush forward and earn a victory against the awful odds.” Wilkinson’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times paid tribute, “Endless are the stories which might be told of his exploits. It was a life of constant change and endeavor that kept him young” (Terry, “Oregon Army Officer, School Leader Deserves Higher Place in History”). A month after the engagement, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece about it in its illustrated magazine. The article included photographs of Sugar Point and three Leech Lake inhabitants. Written by an evocatively named L. E. Cavalier, it was highly critical not only of the military tactics employed in the campaign but of the policies of the general government overall—for being too lenient. Cavalier’s editorializing conclusion reads: The Indians have not been treated as they should have been. No one attempts to deny this. They have been robbed and in many ways have been defrauded, not only by the settlers and traders, but by officials who are supposed to guard their interests and who, either through cupidity or stupidity, have failed to do so. There are many reforms that should be instituted in the laws and in the manner of dealing with the Indians. But no matter how they are ill-treated they have no legal or moral right to resist and kill those who are sent to enforce the law, and the only proper way to protect the Government, the settlers, the officers of the law, and the Indians themselves is for the Government and the officials to stop the temporizing policy which has always been the policy of the Government, and meet lead with lead and not with sugar. As soon as the Indians are convinced that the Government means business and is not to be trifled with, then

202

jace weaver they will behave themselves, and there will be no more trouble and no more such tragedies as the battle of Leech Lake. (IMS-3)

The underlying causes of the “war” were all too familiar, sounding sadly similar to those that provoked Little Crow’s War in the same region in 1862. In 1933, Colonel Henry Wurdemann, an adopted Anishinaabe who had served as secretary to U.S. senator Joseph Quarles during the congressional investigation of the incident, published an account of the skirmish and the subsequent inquiry: treaty payments, of which little actually reached the hands of the Native recipients. Uncaring Indian agents. Capricious treatment of Indians. It was reported that there were desecrations of Indian graves. And Indians were being cheated out of revenues from timbering on their lands. In the aftermath of the battle—as always happens—changes were promised. Following the uprising, the American public once more cocooned itself in a blanket of denial, ignoring its culpability for what had occurred. The incident was erased from conscious memory. The Indian Wars still ended on the frozen ground of the Dakotas. Today, the Leech Lake Tourism Bureau, discussing Hole in the Day’s resistance, states, “That last vestige of the old century was followed by a new century of building . . . lodges, hotels, resorts, campgrounds, steamboats, sternwheelers, dance pavilion and floating resort, excursion boats (one of which was 135 feet long), roads, canals, dams, libraries, schools, churches . . . right up to today’s shops, stores, restaurants, theaters, casinos, marinas, national forest, state parks, and so much more” (“History,” March 28, 2010, n.p.). The Cliffs Notes of theft and dispossession. By 1898, though they themselves did not know it, Native Americans were already forgotten. The American nation had turned its attention to a wider Manifest Destiny to be fulfilled in the Caribbean and the Pacific, in places such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and Hawaii. With the Spanish-American War, the United States defeated a European colonizer and willed itself into a world power, a status ratified by its victory in World War I. The “Empire of Liberty” had reached its limits in North America, and territories had to be found abroad. No longer content to stay at home and merely be an example to the world—the Puritans’ “shining city on a hill”— the nation now felt compelled to impose its model on others. Indians had been pacified and were, quite simply, irrelevant. Hole in the Day scoured the ground around his home, collecting cartridge casings. He strung them into a necklace, which he wore with pride. He

There’s a hole in the day

203

was photographed wearing the strand, a rifle at the ready, cradled in the crook of his left arm. The picture adorns the dust jacket of Vizenor’s book. hole in the day gathered cucumbers and spent shells from newly issued krag jorgensens cast among bloody potatoes and wounded cabbages fashioned a memorial war necklace native survivance remembrance a defeated army overcome by Winchesters and fierce irony (Bear Island, 86) Before he died in 1918, Bug-o-nay-ge-shig saw the U.S. Forest Service take over management of all national forest lands and the creation of a huge national forest encompassing ceded Anishinaabe territory. He saw the peaceful and profitable sale of fish and maple syrup to whites. And he witnessed Anishinaabeg and whites fighting side-by-side in the U.S. Army during World War I. Still, he prized his war trophy necklace. When he passed away, he was one of the most respected individuals in the area. The Third Infantry went on to other imperial conflicts. From 1899 to 1902, it battled insurrectos in the Philippines. And a century later, its namesake, the Third Infantry Division (or 3rd I.D., in macho Defense Department shorthand), was the tip of the spear in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. When the Pentagon was attacked on September 11, 2001, the “Old Guard” Third Infantry, headquartered in Fort Myers, Virginia, was one of the first units on the scene. The Indian Wars are long forgotten, purged from the popular memory. The flurry of panic in October 1898 mimics the color-coded hysteria in the wake of 9/11. Once more a nervous citizenry waited for the next shoe to drop. This time, it was no longer waiting for the word from the West. Instead, it awaited that word from the Middle East, or Afghanistan, or Indonesia, or

204

jace weaver

even from here in the “homeland.” It waited and was afraid, just as afraid as that same citizenry was during westward expansion. After “regime change” and American-mandated elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Empire of Liberty was once more on the march.

references Cavalier, L. E. [No Title]. New York Times. November 6, 1898, IMS-3. Finley, James P. “Fort Huachuca: The Traditional Home of the Buffalo Soldier.” Huachuca Illustrated: A Magazine of the Fort Huachuca Museum 1 (1993). http:// www.huachuca.army.mil/sites/History/PDFS/ Buffalo.pdf. “Indians Besiege General Bacon.” New York Times. October 7, 1898. Leech Lake Tourism Bureau. “History.” March 28, 2010. Michno, Gregory F. Encyclopedia of the Indian Wars: Western Battles and Skirmishes, 1850–1890. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing, 2003. Terry, John. “Oregon Army Officer, School Leader Deserves Higher Place in History.” Accessed March 6 and March 27, 2010. http://www.oregonlive.com/O/index.ssf/ 2010/03_army_officer_school_lea.html. Velie, Alan. “The War Cry of the Trickster: The Concept of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: the War at Sugar Point.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 147–62. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Vizenor, Gerald. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Weaver, Jace. Foreword to Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, by Gerald Vizenor, ix–xiii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

c h a p t e r t w e lv e

Being Embedded Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Chris LaLonde

W

hite Earth Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor writes phrases, sentences, lines, and passages that are stunning in their richness and aptness, their capacity to produce or invoke an image, and to capture moment, place, sentiment, and intelligence. By way of opening, then, let me offer what to my mind are the most poignant lines in Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point: “only stories / stand on treaty land” (46). Six words capture the pain, heartbreak, and suffering that came with the treaties between the People and the U.S. government in Minnesota. Those six words also sound the possibilities of story to inform, to reveal, and to teach. Such is the case with Vizenor’s 2006 book-length poem, which tells the story of an event little remembered and less remarked upon in contemporary America: the battle between troops of the U.S. Army Third Infantry and Leech Lake Pillagers on October 5, 1898, nearly eight years after the massacre at Wounded Knee and the oft-characterized “end” of the Indian Wars in the United States. The soldiers had gone to northern Minnesota from Fort Snelling in St. Paul in an effort to apprehend Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, an Anishinaabe of the Pillager Band sought by authorities as a witness in a trial to be held more than one hundred miles to the east in Duluth, Minnesota. Alan Velie reads the war at Sugar Point, rightly I think, as the “anti–Wounded Knee”: rather than a story that offers up the indian as victim—helpless men, women, and children gunned down on a cold December morning in 1890—we have a story of Native triumph and, thus, of Native survivance (“The War Cry of the Trickster,” 149).1 Like Velie, Helmbrecht Breinig reads Bear Island in terms of survivance, which is not surprising given that these essays are in a collection edited by Vizenor devoted to survivance, and both critics attend to the word itself and the importance of writing in articulating what the word embodies. Velie quotes from Vizenor’s Manifest Manners early on to make the point: “The postindian warriors encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as 205

206

chris lalonde

their ancestors once evinced on horses, as they create their stories with a new sense of survivance” (qtd. in “The War Cry of the Trickster,” 147). Breinig closes his essay with the proclamation that while survivance “may mean different things [to Natives in the Americas] . . . it is language, the spoken and written word, through which survivance becomes real” (“Native Survivance in the Americas,” 57, emphasis added). Thanks to writing, the outrages and atrocities committed by non-Natives against Natives, and Native resistance to and in the face of those wrongs, can be inscribed, to quote Vizenor’s Bear Island, “forever in the book” (16). Stories that stand on treaty land in Bear Island and indeed the story that is Bear Island do so in place of and to mark the trees that have been cut by “greedy timber barons” who “with empty eyes / scorched the pine” (46). As supplement and testament, the stories are, as were the trees, rooted in land, in the particular place that is the Leech Lake reservation; hence the title of my essay. Indeed, Bear Island reveals that Native being in the text is embedded in place and Anishinaabe worldview, and I will tease this out by attending to particulars of the poem. At the same time, the text also compels us to think about being embedded in relation to writing, to stories by nonNatives, and to American imperialism by reminding us that not only were there soldiers, Indian agents, law enforcement officers, and Natives at Sugar Point in early October 1898, there were journalists as well. First, then, to the journalists and journalism. Vizenor had a career as a journalist in Minnesota, of course, and he has spoken in interviews about his deep fondness for the profession, his time as a practicing journalist, and those he worked with at the Minneapolis Tribune. He has remarked about how writing under pressure, writing quickly, and striving for clarity helped him as a writer (“Mythic Rage and Laughter,” 90). What he has termed his nostalgia for journalism, moreover, stems from “the wit and pleasure of contradictions, the tease of manners, and the insecurities of tough love” he found in the newsroom (Postindian Conversations, 43). The “keen focus on things” (“Mythic Rage and Laughter,” 89–90), “the great play of language” (Postindian Conversations, 43), and those he worked with and learned from, then, are what make that place and time, the Tribune newsroom in the late 1960s, a home for Vizenor. Given Vizenor’s connection to and interest in journalism, it makes sense that reporters and newspaper stories would feature in Bear Island. The text makes clear that reporters for Twin Cities newspapers became war correspondents on the day they boarded a lake steamer with troops and local

being embedded

207

authorities. Vizenor attributes the popular story of how the battle began, with the accidental discharge of a soldier’s rifle, to St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter William H. Brill. This suggests a certain awareness of, interest in, and commitment to the positions of Brill and his colleagues at Sugar Point and the stories they tell. So too does the fact that twice in the poem Vizenor uses the phrase “newspaper storiers” (57, 78) to characterize the correspondents, for he has said of himself, “I am a storier” (Postindian Conversations, 61). However, the poem also takes pains to link soldiers and reporters. They suffer together the difficult passage across Leech Lake on a chilly October morning (Bear Island, 57), buffeted by the wind and soaked by spray. The reporters are “cornered that autumn / in a bloody garden” along with “third infantry / officers and soldiers” (72). After the initial battle, soldiers and reporters are “side by side” (78) in Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s cabin during the long cold night of the fifth, fearing another attack and hoping for reinforcements to arrive soon from Walker and points south. Vizenor’s critique of the Minnesota flagship daily in 1968, his awareness of the limitations of the press, and the context of war help us to see why Bear Island links reporters and soldiers. His entry into journalism stemmed from a conference presentation in which he indicted editors and publishers of “racist violations of human rights in stories and advertisements published” in the paper (Interior Landscapes, 201). Years later, when asked about the American Indian Movement (AIM), Wounded Knee, and his reporting on both the group and the occupation, Vizenor remarked on the difference between what he reported and what was reported by others. That difference is because “the media needed a better story than the facts would maintain. The United Press International (UPI) reporter, for instance, was never there, and yet he was the first to report the hostages story. These, no doubt, were the stories that activated the military” (Postindian Conversations, 45). Vizenor’s own editors at the Minneapolis Tribune craved that “better story,” going so far as to make the UPI reporter’s claim of hostages at Wounded Knee the lead paragraph to the article on the takeover written by Vizenor and published with his byline (Interior Landscapes, 236). The six-part editorial series Vizenor wrote on AIM in 1973 made clear his awareness of the media’s power and its limitations. He notes in the first paragraph of “Bandits in Rapid City” that “The American Indian Movement could not survive as a revolutionary tribal caravan without the affinity of lawyers and the press and the sympathy of the church” (repr. in Crossbloods, 169); in the first article of the series, Vizenor notes that while the “confrontation idiom” of AIM plays well with

208

chris lalonde

the media, “[j]ournalists seldom reported what happened beyond the symbolic punch-out at the front door” (repr. in Crossbloods, 160). Journalists are storiers, then, but that does not mean that their stories are divorced from ideology; nor does it mean that the facts will get in the way of a better story, though one must ask, better for whom? Consider the October 6, 1898, front-page story of the battle in the New York Times, which Bear Island makes clear in no uncertain terms “reported hearsay / about the indian war / at sugar point” (63). The dateline puts story and audience in place and time—Walker, Minnesota, October 5—in order to make and keep present the battle that had already occurred. The first sentence does the same; the second sentence proclaims, “It is reported that the detachment of soldiers, numbering 100 men, under the command of Gen. John M. Bacon, was massacred by Indians and that the General himself fell in the fight” (“Troops Battle With Indians,” October 6, 1898, A1). This is far from accurate. Now, initial reports of breaking events, particularly conflicts, are often wrong, of course, but what is telling is not that the report is incorrect, but what the particular mistakes reveal. Even though the article will immediately note that the massacre is an unconfirmed rumor, the story has already been put into play; and it is a very old story, one featuring bloodthirsty savages on the margins of civilization, ready to attack without mercy. Both Velie and Breinig have noted that Vizenor positions the war at Sugar Point against the backdrop of the Spanish-American War, and, indeed, the text encourages us to think about the relationship between America’s early imperialist efforts abroad and its subjugation of Natives at home. More than one historian and cultural studies critic has recognized the link, of course, and Bear Island phrases it late in the text when we read that one of the soldiers wounded at Sugar Point was also part of the Santiago de Cuba campaign. Literally, if not figuratively, closer to home, the battle at Sugar Point and the initial reports in the New York Times are played out against the backdrop of a sham battle staged to great effect some five hundred miles away. The 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha featured a “battle” between whites and indians that was touted by the Omaha Bee as a “brilliant success” when it was first staged on August 10, 1898 (qtd. in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 116). Thousands would see the battle over the course of its run to the close of the Exposition on October 31, “thrilled by the performance” (116) and its depiction of both the savagery of the indians and the ultimate triumph of the white man. The performance replicated and reinforced a central theme of the Exposition, especially following victory in the Spanish-American War: the

being embedded

209

inevitable decline of indians, the rise of American civilization in their stead, and the promise of the future for the country both within and beyond its borders (108). When President McKinley visited the Exposition on October 12, just a week after the battle at Sugar Point, he was treated to a performance that featured indians battling indians, rather than whites. Robert Rydell argues that that “show depicted both the ‘degeneracy’ of Native Americans and the paternal role of government. Described as ‘alarming,’ full of ‘serious possibilities,’ it nonetheless left the impression that the federal government had the matter of savagery well under control” (122), an impression that had been undone by the real battle at Sugar Point. Small wonder, then, both that indians would fight indians in the battle staged for McKinley’s benefit and that the next day perhaps the most famous indian prisoner of them all, Geronimo, would appear at the Exposition and embrace the man who captured him, General Nelson A. Miles. The imprisonment of Natives in the dominant culture’s imagination and iconography is captured in the Minneapolis Press Club’s October 11, 1898, gathering to celebrate the safe return of the war correspondents from battle, for there members of the press “Dressed in Indian Costumes in Honor of the Occasion” (“Minneapolis Press Club Indians, n.p.).2 Philip Deloria has argued that, broadly speaking, whites dressed as indians either in the spirit of revolution and the effort to create a national identity or as a response to anxieties about identity brought on by modernity (Playing Indian, 7). In the Press Club tableau, however, something else is going on. In dressing up and playing indian, the press honors the occasion of their colleagues’ return by presenting that which must be shed (Indianness) in favor of what is underneath (whiteness) and threatened by what the costumes signify. The costumes are clearly just that, but they do not so much call into question the fluid or dynamic nature of identity as they both mask and reveal the real and fixed whiteness of the correspondents and the real racism that dictates the costumes and their appearance to mark the occasion in the first place. In the photograph, tellingly, the correspondents who survived the battle are not in costume. This makes sense, of course, and not simply because they were under fire by the Pillagers at Sugar Point. They need wear no disguise because the earliest reports of their actions and subsequent articles indicate they are one with the soldiers and the ideology that drives the country. The October 6 account in the New York Times, under the main headline Troops Battle with Indians, reported that the correspondents were “brought into the thick of the fight” because of their presence on the scene,

210

chris lalonde

“fought with the soldiers,” and were seen “taking vigorous part with their revolvers” (“The Indian Rising,” front page). Although this part of the article would also be later called into question, at least one soldier claiming that the journalists took cover away from the cabin and clearing after the first shots were fired, the articles of at least one of the correspondents makes clear that the link between press and infantry was rooted in similar ways of seeing and thinking about the indian. In the October 10, 1898, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune, K. C. Beaton wrote, “Now I will not be perfectly happy until I attend the funeral of the last redman on earth. As long as redmen exist I shall feel as though life was not just exactly what it is cracked up to be and that at all times we are in danger” (qtd. in Matsen, “The Battle at Sugar Point,” 273). The following week, General Bacon was quoted in the same paper as saying, Not that I am revengeful but that I would see this question settled now in such a manner that the Pillagers will learn what it means to take up arms against representatives of the government under which they live. . . . I don’t want to kill any Indians, but as I told them at the council the other day, they must be killed if they cannot be taught a lesson in any other way. (qtd. on 274) Both statements echo the despicable “only good Indian . . .” sentiment, of course, and they also resonate with the thirst for vengeance of U.S. troops after the defeat at Sugar Point (“The Indian Rising,” front page). The reports from Sugar Point resonate with stories dispatched from a front 105 years later. Dick Cheney proclaimed in an April 2003 speech to the American Society of News Editors that having embedded journalists “side by side with our troops all the way into Baghdad” (qtd. in Bratich, “Regime-ofTruth Change,” 238) revealed the administration’s commitment to openness and freedom of the press, but military articulations of the rationale governing embedding journalists and, most critically, the stories filed by those embedded tell a different story. The lead paper in the U.S. Army War College’s Perspectives on Embedded Media, by Lieutenant Colonial Terry R. Ferrell, is unabashed in its pronouncement that “the most effective means of influencing national will is to establish a close relationship between reporters and soldiers. The most effective way to do this is to embed reporters in front line units” (“Information Operations and the New Threat,” 9). Ferrell adds that “an aggressive use of information operations” was key from the beginning in the planning and implementation of Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to

being embedded

211

“ensure that the message on the success of the United States strategy in Iraq passed to the world” (10). A commitment to “the message of success” makes the next sentence’s claim to the development of “a program for ensuring complete media coverage of the operations” (10) painfully ironic. Critics of the policy of embedding journalists note that complete media coverage was far from the case. Beyond the strict guidelines reporters were subject to concerning what they could and could not cover, where they could and could not go, beyond the possibility of self-censorship born of the program, the embedded journalists, and therefore the audience, “witness[ed] the skirmishes from the point of view of the military” (Kumar, “Media, War, and Propaganda,” 61), coverage was decontextualized (Pfau, “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone,” 83), and it was “significantly more positive toward the military” (Haigh, “A Comparison of Embedded and Nonembedded Print Coverage,” 149) than the coverage by reporters not embedded with the troops. This makes sense, of course, for in the words of one study, “Embedding makes journalists members, albeit temporarily, of individual military units. This allows journalists to come to know the troops they are covering and to internalize the values of the military unit they are embedded in” (Pfau, “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone,” 83). Moreover, the episodic, personalizing framing of the stories, more than one critic noted, sacrificed the context necessary if one was to see the bigger picture of the conflict (“Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: How Embedding Alters Television News Stories,” 190). We see and get to know individual soldiers, individual units, but such coverage prohibits us from seeing a larger picture of the Iraq War and the political, economic, and ideological forces that at once prefigure and drive the conflict and its presentation to the public. Bear Island does offer the reader sketches of individual Natives and soldiers, and quoting soldier George Wicker in the introduction appears at first glance to give us another perspective on the war and the Pillagers. In Wicker’s story of the battle, published the following year, he writes that he “dreaded to fire my gun at the unfortunate red man” (Bear Island, 8), who was simply defending his land and rights. Wicker claimed, too, that other soldiers shared his feeling. Nevertheless, Wicker begins his article for the Illustrated Home Journal by labeling the Native a “barbarous ‘Child of Nature,’ the Indian, who after years of teaching still retains the savage, warlike nature of his ancestors.” In the poem itself, moreover, Vizenor includes

212

chris lalonde

two critical qualifiers along with Wicker’s claims. First, Wicker’s position is “an errant sentiment / shared by many / blue soldiers / after the war / at sugar point” (86). It is errant precisely because it deviates from the norm espoused by the dominant culture. Second, and crucially, the poem follows Wicker’s “errant sentiment” with a stanza telling the reader that Wicker “stole eagle feathers / sacred miigwan” from Bug-o-nay-ge-shig’s “ceremonial cabin” (87). This violation has to call Wicker’s sentiment into question. What is more, stealing material and symbolic objects of Anishinaabe culture effects an erasure of evidence of that culture that is akin to the theft of artifacts from the Iraq National Museum following the Third Infantry’s arrival into Baghdad. In the latter case, as Jack Bratich notes, it becomes all that much easier to assert the triumph of Western civilization over barbaric others if evidence of “the Mesopotamian origins of civilizations” has been stolen or destroyed (“Regime-of-Truth Change,” 240). In the former, plundering the cabin of a Midéwiwin healer and taking sacred objects makes it easier to identify, in Wicker’s words, with “the poor savage” for “[h]e, too, loves his forests, lakes, streams, his native soil” (Bear Island, 9). Here, Wicker’s words capture both of the reasons Deloria identifies for playing indian: the adverb tells us that, like the indian, the white man loves the natural world, and thus in identifying with him, the white man is identifying with something he wants and needs to find in himself. The identification is undercut by the word “savage” to define the Native, of course, just as it is by the sentence which positions the indian as the subordinate supplement, the “also,” that completes the equation of white identity rather than calling both equation and identity into question. Before Bear Island, then, the published stories that stand on treaty land concerning the conflict between the Third Infantry and the Pillagers have been freighted with the prevailing notions of the indian and his relationship to the dominant culture. The reporters are storiers, but the reports have neither play nor tease. Not so Vizenor and his poem. Rather, Vizenor embeds himself at Sugar Point in 1898 in order that he might tell the story. The antecedent in his oeuvre for his presence on the shores of Leech Lake is “Sand Creek Survivors.” In that text, the suicide of thirteen-year-old Dakota Dane Michael White in 1968 and the massacre of Cheyenne at Sand Creek in 1864 are linked because both are the result of the “curse of racism” (248). Racism makes White and all other Natives survivors of Sand Creek while at the same time subjecting them to continued abuse. Clement Beaulieu, the mixedblood

being embedded

213

reporter sent to cover the funeral, opts to begin his story with the sentence “Traditional white colonial racists banished tribal cultures and isolated the survivors” (253). The delayed lead gives the reader critical context for White’s suicide, but the editor rejects the opening move, telling his reporter to “[s]ave it for the archives” (253), so Beaulieu instead begins with a direct lead. In doing so, of course, the context is buried, if not lost. Vizenor sees and would have us see the bigger picture: time and space collapse because Sand Creek and other “grievous events” are present “in dreams and visual tribal memories” (248). In recognizing and situating Dane Michael White at Sand Creek (249), the mixedblood reporter sent to cover the youth’s funeral for the Minneapolis Tribune helps us see that acts of imagination can bring seemingly disparate times and events together. Such is the case with Bear Island, of course, as in that text we have a pointed rendering of grievous events against Natives in America by the authorities and the dominant society at large. Included in that picture is the Sand Creek Massacre. There, the militia led by Colonial John Chivington “wasted forever / the stars and stripes” (Bear Island, 31). Bagwana is the embodiment in the poem of Vizenor embedded at Sugar Point in October 1898, which is why, I think, the section of the poem after the opening overture is named for the Pillager warrior who survived not a battle with U.S. troops or American vigilantes, but a confrontation with a large force of Dakota. William Warren recounts the story of the battle that claimed the lives of thirty-three Dakota warriors and all save one member of the Pillager war party. Warren writes that Bug-aun-auk, the sole Anishinaabe survivor, “never would give but the most supernatural account of his manner of escape” (qtd. in Bear Island, 6). Vizenor makes the story his own, and in doing so stresses the transformative power of song and story and their connection to survival. The Pillager warrior “survived the war,” the poem suggests, thanks to “manidoo nagamon / spirited songs” (Bear Island, 23). Some eighty years later, Bagwana is present at Sugar Point, thanks to Vizenor: traces of bagwana turned in translation by my heart a native warrior and natural presence at the tree line (21)

214

chris lalonde

Both Bagwana and Vizenor are there at the tree line, thanks to the indeterminacy, and therefore the possibility, afforded by the poem’s lack of punctuation. There, too, is Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, who escaped authorities at Onigum some three weeks prior to the battle thanks to the effort of Anishinaabe men and women. In Bear Island, the “old warrior / pillager of liberty / escaped in the shadows / at the tree line” (41). The tree line is also where bearwalkers can be found, those shape-shifting shamans who embody transformation and, tacitly, reference another worldview. The treeline is Vizenor’s haunt, of course, for it is a both/and place, a contact zone, where presence, possibility, and indeterminacy are accentuated and hold sway. As such, it resonates with the traditional Anishinaabe multilayered cosmos and worldview. The earth is an island situated in suspension between realms. Above it is the sky-world, home of Kitche Manitou and the Thunderers, while below it is the underworld, peopled by manitouk as well (Smith, Island of the Anishinaabeg, 44–47). Boundaries and borders are fluid, as is evident in White Earth Anishinaabe Winona LaDuke’s statement that the “Anishinaabeg world undulated between material and spiritual shadows, never clear which was more prominent at any time. It was as if the world rested in those periods” (All Our Relations, 115). Given the centrality of liminality and transformation to the Anishinaabe cosmos and worldview, it is no wonder that Vizenor would invoke “first light” as the time both of “wonted genocide” and, critically, when the military is “outgunned / at sugar point” (Bear Island, 16). At dawn, not yet day but no longer night, what comes to light in and with the poem is the war and its context. In his introduction, Vizenor tells his reader that Bagwana, the transcription of Bug-aun-auk, is translated as “‘at random,’ ‘by chance,’ ‘anyhow,’ and ‘by heart’” in two of the standard Anishinaabemowin-English dictionaries, and that he translates it as “by my heart” (6). The warrior’s name is a telling conflation of chance, proximity, life, route, and movement, all of which echo aspects of Anishinaabe life and worldview. Bagwana is by Vizenor’s heart, then, because his name captures and articulates play and place, movement and life; he is also by Vizenor’s heart because like Bagwana, Vizenor turns to song, rooted in tradition, and flights of imagination in the name of survivance. Moreover, the Pillager warrior is with Vizenor, and vice versa, because his story and his actions stand as a powerful example of how one can best confront and triumph against what seems on the face of it at least to be insurmountable odds.

being embedded

215

The New York Times “imagined scenes / at a great distance” (Bear Island, 63) the day after the battle, scenes that, like the Omaha Exposition battle, spoke more to the dominant culture’s desires and fears than to the war and its causes. Vizenor closes that great distance in his work via the invocation and deployment of Bagwana and the Anishinaabe orator Keeshkemun. The spirit of the latter, who responded to the British with an “avian metaphor” emphasizing voice, hearing, and what is out of sight but not out of mind, rises with Bagwana, with Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, and with Vizenor throughout the poem. In describing the Pillager’s victory, for instance, we read hole in the day by my heart trace of native shamans soared overhead with the ravens in the white pine and mighty maples (73) Here, then, we have other voices, other traces, that tell another story, one that stands as a supplement to the one told and then forgotten. The very title of Vizenor’s text reveals its supplementary nature. Bear Island harkens to initial dispatches on the war sent by an Indian agent and a U.S. marshal. The former proclaimed that “Indians . . . on the mainland of North Bear Island opened fire on troops,” while the latter sent the message “Battle begun at Bear Island” (“Troops Battle With Indians,” A1). Those initial errors need to be addressed, as does the ideology underpinning the authorities and the country. The early dispatches offered up the stereotypical representations of the indian. The New York Times subheads for the October 6, 1898, front-page article on the battle declared the Pillagers “Bear Island Savages” and shouted the rumored “Massacre of One Hundred Soldiers.”3 The next day, the Times editorial on the “Indian Rising” proclaimed that the trouble in Minnesota was all the more shocking because “we had all come to consider that the extermination of the Indian, as a human being who will not work and hence is out of place in an industrial age and country, had advanced so far that there was no danger of an Indian war anywhere within our borders” (“The Indian Rising”). Seen in this light, whether savage or shiftless, the indian has no place in America. Bear Island makes clear that the

chris lalonde

216

dominant culture’s positioning of the indian as other is accomplished via representations that are, in turn, linked to the country itself: “supreme portraits / courts and congress / brushed aside / the constitution” (47); the definition and dismissal of the indian are nothing less than “stories bent / against nature” (48). In order to address and undo the representations and the ideology that underpins them, one needs what comes after the colon in Vizenor’s title: a location in the right place, literally and figuratively. Toward that end, Vizenor’s text makes clear that Anishinaabe being is embedded in place. What is more, Vizenor gives us both a personalized frame in and with the text, one linked to Anishinaabe worldview and particulars of place, and the bigger picture necessary in order that the reader can situate the war at Sugar Point in relation to Native-white relations and survivance rather than victimry. The poem’s opening stanza brings together the local and the larger context in striking fashion: the anishinaabe natives of the miigis fugitive rivers canoe birch white pine face the clouds and cedar boughs (13) In identifying the people as “the anishinaabe,” the poem immediately informs the reader that the perspective to be articulated, and that needs to be adopted, is not that of the dominant culture and the local, state, and federal authorities, for they name the people the Chippewa. The miigis shell links Vizenor’s poem to traditional stories of how the people followed the sacred shell west to what is now recognized as their homeland; to be “natives of the miigis,” then, is to be identified by and in relation to traditional stories and the worldview they articulate. The next lines expand on the connections and contexts articulated as they accentuate place, material culture, and orality. Birch and white pine are telling choices, for they announce two different types of forest—red pine–white pine and paper birch–trembling aspen—and in the process give voice to the diversity that marks the area in and beyond the Leech Lake reservation in north-central Minnesota. It is this diversity

being embedded

217

that enabled and enables the people to practice the seasonal round and to find food, materials, and medicine in the natural world. The two tree species also subtly give voice to two different value systems and ways of looking at the world, for the birch is critically important to Anishinaabe material and symbolic culture, while white pine was and is prized by the timber industry. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that the timber industry turned to birch as a source of wood for its pulp mills. The Anishinaabe “face the clouds,” finally, because one needs to pay attention to the sky in order not to be caught out by the weather and, crucially, because that is where one turns to hear the echo-makers, like Keeshkemun and Vizenor, whose words resonate with and through the daily lives of the People. The poem’s third line stands as a Vizenor masterstroke in phrasing the nature of place and the historical situation that led to the war at Sugar Point. “Fugitive” can be, and indeed needs to be, read as both noun and adjective. As the former, the Anishinaabeg, rooted in tradition, are fugitives from and in the eyes of the government and the dominant society at large. Such was the case with Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, of course, both because a warrant was issued for his arrest after he refused to answer a subpoena to testify in a Duluth court and because of his escape from the authorities at Onigum on September 15, 1898. This, then, is the easier reading to apprehend, but one must also recognize that the rivers are fugitive. As an adjective, “fugitive” nicely renders the nature of rivers insofar as they are elusive (consider a river’s course) and given to change (consider seasonal fluctuations in water level). Equally to the point, the rivers are fugitives because they too are subject to the will of the dominant society: they are dammed in the name of Minneapolis mills and mill owners—and, ultimately, of the government and the country. The poem’s second section makes this clear at its opening by locating “sugar point / near bear island / south of federal dam” (19). Begun in 1882 and operational in 1884, Federal Dam was part of the dominant culture’s effort to shape and control the landscape and the natural world. One of three dams built by the Army Corp of Engineers in the Mississippi Headwaters region, it served the business and political interests downstate by providing consistent water flow over St. Anthony Falls (Carroll, “Dams and Damages,” 4) to power the Minneapolis mills. The Anishinaabeg of the region were opposed to it and the other dams, recognizing that land would be drowned and lifeways would be lost. In the words of the Pillager Sturgeon Man to the 1883 commission on the dams and reservoirs projects, “No white man knows of the damage that will be done to us. As long as the

218

chris lalonde

sun shall pass over our heads we would have been able to live here if this dam had not been commenced. Every year what supports us grows in this place. If this dam is built we will all be scattered, we will have nothing to live on” (qtd. in “Dams and Damages,” 10). Tellingly, Vizenor recognizes that when it comes to Natives and the natural world, there is little if any separation of church and state. Nature is defaced “in the name of god” (Bear Island, 33). Unable or unwilling to consider other stories, the emissaries of the West and of capital “convert rivers / unearth the otters / manoomin / native wild rice / buried in reservoirs” (33). Together, “convert” and “otters” solidify the link between religion and the state, for otters are connected to healing and the Midéwiwin Grand Medicine Society, and it is the worldview and practices underpinning the society that missionaries attempt to undo by converting Anishinaabeg to Christianity. Everything flows from the poem’s first stanza. Its quiet emphasis on movement, place, identity, historical particularity, orality, and different ways of knowing and being resounds, like Keeshkemun’s voice, throughout Bear Island. The government, the Church, captains of industry, subjects of the dominant society . . . never court natural reason crane migrations thunderstorms blueberries in the snow wild cracks of ice the marvelous poses of ravens (34) Which is to say that they do not recognize that which the Anishinaabe have and do recognize and articulate through stories and song: the centrality of movement, cycles, and place-sense, the importance of balance, transitions, chance, and contingency. The play of “cracks” reminds us of the need to take care, take nothing for granted, and pay attention, always, to contexts. The Thunderers, linked in the Anishinaabe lifeworld to Naanabozho and thus—Vizenor recognizes—capable of producing a trickster signature, work to keep Misshepeshu, the underwater lynx in traditional stories, in check, and in doing so help to maintain a necessary balance in the world. The dynamic relationship among Naanabozho, the Thunderers, and Misshepeshu

being embedded

219

is a reminder to take care and a caution against being greedy and taking too much. Bear Island links the historical reality of white greed and traditional stories in its description of the rampant, illegal, and unethical logging of Native land in Minnesota: “tender fern / wild roses / [are] bare and broken” (46) by felled trees, dragged stems, and rough roads cut through the woods so that logs can be taken to water and then to mill. The roses harken to a traditional story Basil Johnston records concerning how at one time the once plentiful roses dwindled to the point of near extinction because of overeating by the rabbits and a lack of attention paid to what was happening by the others (Ojibway Heritage, 43–45). The story stands, then, as a caution against just the sort of activity sanctioned by the “greedy timber barons” (Bear Island, 46): they have “empty eyes” because they cannot see the connections between all things and how fragile are those connections. The dominant society and its agents offer up “stories bent / against nature” (Bear Island, 48). Natives and the land are made subject to “wordy dominance” (29) uttered and written in the name of greed and the need to create and perpetuate other images. Vizenor’s story, on the other hand, is offered—the first of Bear Island’s two epigraphs tells us—in the name and hope of liberty. If one knows the passage in Walt Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass from which the epigraph comes, moreover, one also recognizes that it is the poet—in this case Vizenor—who is “the voice and exposition of liberty” (Leaves of Grass, 627), an exposition that stands in contradistinction to the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition. To be that, the epigraph from Anishinaabe historian William Warren tells us, one must have a full knowledge of the place where the war for liberty takes place and be a good reader of signs: An intimate geographical knowledge of the country is also required by a successful war leader, and such a man piques himself not only upon knowing every prominent stream, hill, valley, wood, or rock, but the peculiar productions, mineral and vegetable, of the scene of operations. (qtd. in Bear Island, n.p.) What Vizenor offers us, if we are likewise good readers of the signs, is a story of native survivance on the rise that cold

220

chris lalonde october morning at sugar point natural beats of chance and liberty (14)

Vizenor’s story attends to nature, rather than being bent against it. Its invocation of sound and rhythm is striking, given the fact that being is embedded in the text, as is its recognition of the role played by chance. Striking, too, finally, is the importance of beats in terms of route or territory. If, as John Carlos Rowe reminds us, imperialism is interested both in land and in routes over and through it in order to capitalize on the territory (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 9), then Vizenor’s route counters it. His beat is a natural one, although never a romantic one thanks to its being grounded in an Anishinaabe understanding of and commitment to place.

notes 1. Here and elsewhere I follow Vizenor’s lead in using lower case and italicizing “indian” to indicate that I am referring to that construction created and perpetuated by the dominant culture. 2. I am indebted to Bruce White for supplying me with a photocopy of the newspaper photograph. 3. By the time Bear Island refers to those headlines, three-fourths of the way through the poem (63), the reader is painfully aware of the inaccuracy of the “savage” label.

references Bratich, Jack. “Regime-of-Truth Change.” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2 (2004): 237–41. Breinig, Helmbrecht. “Native Survivance in the Americas: Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 39–60. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Carroll, Jane Lamm. “Dams and Damages: The Ojibway, the United States, and the Mississippi Headwaters Reservoirs.” Minnesota History 52, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 2–15. Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

being embedded

221

Ferrell, Terry. “Information Operations and the New Threat.” In Perspectives on Embedded Media: Selected Papers from the Army War College. Edited by Michael Pasquarett, 1–20. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Army War College, 2004. Haigh, Michel, et al. “A Comparison of Embedded and Nonembedded Print Coverage of the U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.” Press/Politics 11, no. 2 (2006): 139– 53. “Indians Besiege General Bacon.” New York Times. October 7, 1898, A1. Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Kumar, Deepa. “Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management During the 2003 Iraq War.” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 48–69. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston: South End Press, 1999. Matsen, William. “The Battle at Sugar Point: A Re-Examination.” Minnesota History (Fall 1987): 269–75. “Minneapolis Press Club Indians.” Minneapolis Times. October 13, 1898, n.p. Pfau, Michael, et al. “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 74–88. Pfau, Michael, et al. “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: How Embedding Alters Television News Stories.” Mass Communication and Society 8, no. 3 (2005): 179–95. Pinckney, Roger. “Old Bug’s Necklace.” American History 29, no. 5 (November/ December 1994): 40–44. Roddis, Louis. “The Last Indian Uprising in the United States.” Minnesota History Bulletin 3 (1920): 272–90. Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Smith, Theresa. Island of the Anishinaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1995. “The Indian Rising.” Editorial. New York Times. October 7, 1898. “Troops Battle With Indians.” New York Times. October 6, 1898, A1. Velie, Alan. “The War Cry of the Trickster: The Concept of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 147–62. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Vizenor, Gerald. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

222

chris lalonde

———. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. 1976. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Interior Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. “Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” Studies in American Indian Literature 7, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 77–96. ———. “Sand Creek Survivors.” In Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Edited by A. Robert Lee, 247–59. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Michael Moon. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Wicker, George. “In the Battle with the Chippewas.” Illustrated Home Journal 4, no. 7 (1899): 105–10.

chapter thirteen

The Question of Nationalism Sovereign Aesthetics in Bear Island

Lisa Tatonetti

I

n his recent essay “A Relevant Resonance: Considering the Study of Indigenous National Literatures,” Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) rightly contends that “‘Nationalism’ is almost as radioactive a term as that other ‘n’ word,” pointing out that “for some reasons that are similarly worthy, you can’t easily separate the idea of nationalism from its legacies of devastation . . . a long and sordid list [that includes] fascism, racism, pogroms, genocide, ethnocide, concentration camps, mass graves, the murdered, the disappeared, the erased” (“A Relevant Resonance,” 62–63). While recognizing the fraught history of nationalism, Justice focuses his work on an indigenous understanding of nationhood, which he defines as “the political expression of kinship-based peoplehood” (64). Justice’s work both here and elsewhere is part of a body of literature in American Indian literary studies that engages with questions of indigenous nationalism. Discussions of nationalism have been occurring in the field, as Jace Weaver (Cherokee), Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek/Cherokee), and Robert Warrior (Osage) point out in American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006), since at least the early 1980s when Acoma poet Simon Ortiz published “Toward a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism” in the summer 1981 edition of MELUS (an essay they append to their collectively authored text). Published almost twenty years after Ortiz’s piece, Craig Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999) has been a landmark text in current critical conversations about Native literatures. In fact, I would hazard a guess that as the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, Womack is joining Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) in the ranks of the most-cited critics in the field. In recent years, Womack and Vizenor have been portrayed as two sides of a disciplinary binary at the center of many conversations in American Indian literary studies. Within this binary, Womack has been used as the 223

224

lisa tatonetti

poster boy for what is often portrayed as a reductive and exclusionary version of literary nationalism, where he most commonly paired with Weaver, Warrior, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota). On the other end of this rigorously enforced binary, Vizenor is lauded as the trickster proponent of a deeply theorized cosmopolitanism by critics such as Arnold Krupat and Elvira Pulitano. The polarization of this critical divide is crystallized in the scholarly responses of Pulitano and Womack. Just as Womack’s Red on Red is a lynchpin in current understandings of American Indian nationalism in literary studies, so Pulitano’s 2003 Toward a Native American Critical Theory is central to recent definitions of literary cosmopolitanism within the field. Thus, although neither author is by any means the first to claim their particular critical perspective, they have become the iconic texts in the scholarly conversation about nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the past five years. The focus on these two texts is due at least in part to Pulitano’s widely publicized dismissal of Native nationalism and Womack’s heated response to her work in his section of the coauthored American Indian Literary Nationalism. Ironically, it can be argued that Womack’s public rejoinder is responsible for Pulitano’s current visibility. Pulitano begins her text by positing first “that there is no nontheoretical criticism,” and “second . . . that no critical theory produced from the socalled margin escapes the question of functioning within a ‘dominant’ discourse, not even a Native American theory” (Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 4). Her analysis of Warrior and Womack uses Cook-Lynn to set up literary nationalism, a theoretical approach that focuses, as CookLynn notes, on sovereignty, land, and language revitalization. Pulitano situates the two theorists as critical allies of Cook-Lynn before she analyzes first Warrior’s Tribal Secrets (1994) and then Womack’s Red on Red. Pulitano herself champions a theory of hybridity and cultural translation, which she contends “is already operating in any form of Native discourse” since such discourse is “the product of more than five hundred years of cultural contact and interaction” (61). As a result of what she sees as their inevitable imbrication in Western discourse, “Warrior and Womack,” Pulitano argues, “produce a critical strategy that ultimately collapses back on itself because of failed logic, internal contradictions and linguistic inconsistencies” (61). Of Warrior, she claims that his “position itself points toward a definiton of Indianness that, in the end, anthropologizes and ossifies Native experience” (67). In addition, Pulitano challenges Warrior’s use of Vine Deloria, Jr., and John Joseph

question of nationalism

225

Mathews as the examples for Warrior’s theory of intellectual sovereignty by arguing that both Deloria and Mathews are cosmopolitan writers. Similarly, Pulitano’s critique of Womack centers on “how his call for a Native American literary separatism and for a Native perspective ultimately reinscribes colonial definitions of Indianness and simply reverses the Western binary structure of an us/them universe through which Native American studies continues to be the Other of Euroamerican [sic] discourse” (80). Basically, Pulitano maintains that Womack’s claim of a Creek perspective is essentialist; his stance “fixes that tradition as a cultural artifact” (85). She also contends that Womack uses “language and tools borrowed from the colonizer,” which he connects instead to Creek nationalism, a move that she believes eroticizes and segregates Creek literature (86). Finally, Pulitano questions Womack’s position as a Native writer in the academy, arguing that his academic audience and “privileged position” subvert his argument for Creek centrism (92). For their part, Warrior and Womack join with Jace Weaver to offer a response to such contentions in American Indian Literary Nationalism. In their preface, they suggest Pulitano “embraces the footloose, rootless, mixedblood hybridity . . . in which both everyone and no one is Indian. It becomes impossible to espouse a Native perspective” (xx). Weaver notes in the introduction that Pulitano is hardly alone among non-Native critics in becoming trapped in what I have termed the “delicate gymnastics of authenticity.” There is something more grounded in Native identity that such scholars cannot admit. And it is here that Pulitano sells short, especially, Vizenor. As Krupat perceptively observes, “In one place or another, Vizenor has written that tribes are dead; Indians are inventions, or simulations; Indians are Indians, or post-Indians; and so on. Such remarks might be read as rejections of an ‘Indian’ identity in favor of some ‘emergent hybridity.’ But the identity Vizenor has elaborately been defining and redefining has at base the deep and unmistakable roots in ‘tribal’ values—which can and indeed must be taken along wherever one may go. . . .’ Though Vizenor champions what he calls ‘crossbloods,’ he nonetheless champions them as Natives rather than as ‘hybrids.’” While we all have specific differences, there is more that unites critics that Pulitano identifies

226

lisa tatonetti with the “separatist” school with those she places in the “dialogic” box than divides us. (21–22)

Weaver’s observation points to a key schism over the position of Vizenor in the cosmopolitan/nationalism binary. To Pulitano, Vizenor is the epitome of the cross-cultural writer she idealizes. She contends that, for Vizenor, “sovereignty is an idea—a ‘kitchy’ European political fiction—that has no connection to the ways of life of Indigenous peoples. Similarly, the ideology of nationalism, which relies strongly on the notion of sovereignty, is a further example of ‘indian’ simulations. . . . Rejecting any form of separatism and essentialism as far as Indian identity is concerned, he celebrates a discourse that is communal and comic” (Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 184–85). Thus, though Weaver suggests the divide between the ideologies of Vizenor and indigenous nationalists are not as discrete as they have been made to appear, Pulitano sees a clearly marked distinction. As I have argued in my review of his edited collection of essays, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, Vizenor himself reinforces this divide in his introduction.1 He maintains “the concurrent native literary nationalists construct an apparent rarified nostalgia for the sentiments and structures of tradition and the inventions of culture by a reductive reading of creative literature” (“Aesthetics of Survivance,” 17). Although he does not, as does Pulitano, explicitly call nationalist critics essentialist, he does contend that literary nationalists “denigrate native individualism, visionary narratives, chance, natural reason, and survivance for the ideologies that deny the distinctions of native aesthetics and literary art.” Vizenor goes further to maintain that indigenous literary nationalists call for a “single native literary aesthetic” (17). He does not, however, expand on what this aesthetic is or how or where it is evidenced in the field. In the end, then, readers are left with a definite sense that Vizenor critiques Native literary nationalism, but with no clear explanation of the impetus behind that position. Several of the essays in the collection reinforce this idea of a radical ideological divide in the field. So, for example, in the second essay, Karl Kroeber begins with a discussion of an “either/or” binary that sets Vizenor’s theories on one side of a divide and Native nationalists on another. Kroeber suggests that “recent critical writing by natives has displayed equivalently disturbing symptoms of a new defensiveness, such as claims that only natives are capable of truly understanding American native literatures and that only they are capable of

question of nationalism

227

devising methods of critique for native writing” (“Why It’s a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian,” 26). Kroeber, Pulitano, and even Vizenor himself are just a few examples of the many recent critics that position Native literary nationalism as inherently at odds with Vizenor’s texts and theory. Only one recent essay goes against the grain of the current disciplinary divide. Anishinaabe scholar Niigonwedom James Sinclair offers an important addition to this conversation, as, in contrast to Pulitano, he agrees with and significantly extends Weaver’s reading of Vizenor, maintaining “Vizenor’s imaginative ideas can be applied to current material struggles of Indigenous (and specifically Anishinaabeg) sovereignty and self-determination” (“A Sovereignty of Transmotion,” 128). To make his case, Sinclair focuses on Vizenor’s theory of transmotion, arguing, “Using a traditional and historical sense of motion, grounded in Anishinaabeg politics and intellectualism, Vizenor invents and didactically describes the struggles Anishinaabeg should take up to articulate concepts of nationhood and assert sovereignty” (137). Vizenor’s imaginative play with language and sign, the fabric of Pulitano’s celebration, is not dismissed in Sinclair’s reading. Instead, he acknowledges this power and claims that “[f]or Vizenor, survivance begins in creative and active imaginations” (138). The recognition of Vizenor’s poststructuralist play is mediated, however, by the contention that the act of imagination—which Sinclair compares to the originary vision of the Anishinaabeg’s Kitche Manitou—“brings forth expression, action” (142). Subsequently, “[e]ach imaginative process holds meaning only if action is taken,” and “[l]anguage is the best, clearest, and strongest form of bringing thought into motion” (142). Ultimately, then, Transmotion is not about giving up tribal identities, knowledges, and beliefs when you leave the imaginative world, but bringing them into being. By evoking them, Anishinaabeg can invoke them to assert experiences, ideas, and knowledges as families, relatives, kin. These invocations can also become complex expressions of collectivity, interconnectivity, and nationhood. (145) Sinclair is, to my knowledge, the first theorist to recognize the ties between Vizenor’s theory and his complex articulation of Anishinaabeg nationhood. Outside of Sinclair’s reading, the conversations surrounding these two “poles” in the field of American Indian literary studies have become

228

lisa tatonetti

increasingly binarized since the publication of Pulitano’s Toward a Native American Critical Theory, reifying what I suggest is an exaggerated divide in the field. I follow my overview of how Vizenor’s work has been employed in debates in Native American literary nationalism, then, with a reading of Bear Island to argue that despite Vizenor’s writing being used as a touchstone for what Pulitano calls the “hybridized or cross cultural perspective of Native American discourse modes,” his epic poem can be read an example of nationalist discourse. Through this analysis, I show that, ultimately, Bear Island is an example of what I term an “aesthetics of sovereignty,” art that has, as its very foundation, questions of indigenous nationhood.

reading bear island against the grain

In Bear Island, Vizenor brings to light what for many contemporary readers would be a little-known historical event: the 1898 Third Infantry attack on Anishinaabeg at Sugar Point, near Bear Island in northern Minnesota. As Vizenor explains in both his introduction and the epic poem that follows, the attack was a result of the U.S. Army’s pursuit of Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, or “Hole in the Day,” a Midéwiwin healer and honored Anishinaabe warrior of the Pillager Band.2 Previously, Hole in the Day had been arrested and taken from his Leech Lake reservation to stand trial in Duluth, Minnesota, where he was abandoned more than a hundred miles from home once all charges were dropped.3 After a difficult trip back to Leech Lake from Duluth, Hole in the Day was understandably unwilling to surrender to U.S. authorities when they attempted to arrest him in September 1898. Instead, when Onigum Agency authorities tried to again send him to Duluth for refusing to answer a federal subpoena, Hole in the Day called for help and was promptly extricated from custody by a group of fellow Anishinaabeg.4 Embarrassed at the Pillager’s easy escape, the agency inspector, Arthur Tinker, and federal deputy marshal Robert Morrison exaggerated the incident and called for troop reinforcements; twenty-two members of the Third Infantry arrived on September 30. When negotiations for Hole in the Day’s return were unsuccessful, “seventy-seven additional soldiers, under the command of a General Bacon and Brevet Major Melville Wilkinson” arrived on October 4 (Weaver, foreword to Bear Island, xi). The following day, the soldiers boarded two steamers and set out to Sugar Point where they arrived and occupied the Midéwiwin healer’s house and garden. They were met by nineteen Pillager

question of nationalism

229

warriors, who defeated the Third Infantry in a single day. This story of Native survivance is the basis of Vizenor’s text. One of the most evident points to connect Bear Island to an ideology of nationhood is the text’s genre—epic poetry. Occurring in both oral and written forms, the epic has a history that many argue is as long as the tradition of human storytelling. In Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World, Margaret H. Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Lindgren Wofford set out some conventions of epic poetry, which they define as a poetic narrative of length and complexity that centers around deeds of significance to the community. These deeds are usually presented as deeds of grandeur or heroism. . . . The epic also has a peculiar and complex connection to national and local cultures: the inclusiveness of the epic—the tendency of a given poem to present an encyclopedic account of the culture that produced it—also explains its political potency. This political explosiveness is evident in the charged contemporary performances of the epic. . . . To look at the position of the epic in the contemporary world is to pose, not to evade, the question of epic ideology and its relation to nationalism [and] national identity. (2–3) The epic, then, traditionally has a deep investment in nationalism. As such, it “has typically claimed to narrate the recovery of an originary identity of a group bound by linguistic ties (the Homeric epics), tribal bonds (the African poem Sun-jata), religion (the Pentatauch), nationality (Comões’s Lusiades), or empire (Virgil’s Aeneid)” (Beissinger et al., Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World, 5). In terms of the historical events of Bear Island, the Pillagers’ successful resistance to the U.S. government was linked to the first three of these aspects of group identity through their assertion of tribal sovereignty. The tension over issues of tribal versus U.S. governmental authority are clear in 1898 articles about the Pillagers. For example, in a New York Times article published on November 6, L. E. Cavalier recaps the events that led to the U.S. defeat at Sugar Point, explaining, About a month ago two Indians were arrested by the United States Marshals and started for Duluth, where they were wanted as witnesses. While taking these Indians from the agency jail to the

230

lisa tatonetti steamer they were rescued by a large party of their friends. It was then announced that the Indians would under no circumstances allow the arrest of any member of their tribe. The Indians who made this threat were the Bear Islanders, or Pillager Chippewas. (n.p., emphasis added)

Speaking of the “origin of the trouble,” a piece from the previous month’s New York Times situates the conflict within a larger history, saying, “It was determined to move the Indians from their present quarters to lands inside the White Earth Reservation. The latter lands are superior to those owned by the Indians, but traditions are strong with them and they hold with tenacity to their old lands and old associations (“The News in Washington,” emphasis added).” Finally, a September 25, 1898, letter from the Pillager leaders to the U.S. government addresses the unscrupulous lumber practices that were a significant problem at the time. In their letter, the Pillagers imply they will take action to protect their rights and property if necessary, though they diplomatically note their hesitancy to do so, saying, “We are reluctant about taking such forcible measures to protect our tribal property from spoliation, as existing circumstances warrant us in doing.” (qtd. in Roddis, “The Last Indian Uprising in the United States,” 277n6). In each case, the contemporary discourse points to a clash over issues central to indigenous nationalism—tribal autonomy and land ownership. Both the historical events surrounding the war at Sugar Point and the epic poem that Vizenor constructs in response to those events are embedded in a discourse of indigenous sovereignty. And, as the context of Vizenor’s poem reminds us, at Sugar Point in 1898, sovereignty is not a “a ‘kitchy’ European political fiction—that has no connection to the ways of life of Indigenous peoples” (Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 184). In fact, at its very heart, the story of Hole in the Day’s successful resistance to the U.S. government’s demand for his surrender is about who has authority over tribal peoples and lands and about how indigenous knowledge of tribal landscape subverts the arrogant assumptions of manifest manners. And although, as Pulitano notes, Vizenor is “particularly attracted to notions of infinite play, indeterminacy, manipulation, and creative escape, concepts that play a crucial role in postmodernist and poststructuralist discourse theory,” he is, in Bear Island, writing specific Anishinaabe tribal history even as he plays with the poetic conventions of line and language (147).

question of nationalism

231

This attention to tribally specific contexts and histories has long been part of the project of literary nationalists like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. However, few people link Vizenor’s literary aesthetics with Cook-Lynn’s nationalist politics. In fact, as Craig Womack points out, “If critics have viewed Gerald Vizenor as the most postmodern of Native writers, they have tended to regard Cook-Lynn as his opposite, a throwback to an antiquarian literature based on polemics instead of theory” (“A Single Decade,” 73). Cook-Lynn privileges writing that offers what she terms an “indigenous view of the world,” in which “the very origins of a people are specifically tribal (nationalistic) and rooted in a specific geography (place),” and “mythology (soul) and geography (land) are inseparable.” (“The American Indian Fiction Writers,” 32). Although there is a decided possibility that Vizenor himself might term such criteria an example of an “indian” simulation, which like “the nonsense of Indian blood quantum authenticity” could be “used and abused in the politics of race,” Cook-Lynn’s criteria for Native nationalism aligns rather flawlessly with the politics of Bear Island (Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 75, emphasis in original). The prose introduction to Bear Island and the “Overture: Manidoo Creation,” which begins the epic poem proper, set the stage for the rest of the text. These two opening pieces are followed by five sections: “Bagwana: The Pillagers of Liberty,” “Hole in the Day: Grafters and Warrants,” “Bearwalkers: 5 October 1898,” “Gatling Gun: 6 October 1898,” and “War Necklace: 9 October 1898.” Each of these five sections has a particular function in the larger arc of the epic poem: “Bagwana”—a transcription of the name “Bugaunauk,” or Hole in the Day—sets up the events at Bear Island by introducing the story of the Pillagers and the historical context of the clash at Sugar Point; “Hole in the Day,” in epic style, expands readers understanding of the “hero” or central figure of the poem; “Bearwalkers” and “Gatling Gun,” as their dates suggest, focus on the events and people at Sugar Point, while “War Necklace” offers a view of the aftermath. Each of these sections attends to concerns important to Native literary nationalists. In the opening of his text, Vizenor situates the war at Sugar Point and, particularly, Hole in the Day and his fellow Pillager warriors, in both Anishinaabe cosmology and history in ways that mirror Cook-Lynn’s definitions of indigenous nationalist literature. His prose introduction begins with an Anishinaabe origin story about “the miigis, the midewiwin spiritual shell, or cowrie. . . . [A] source of visionary presence in the northern woodland lakes. . . . The miigis arose from the eastern sea and moved westward with the

232

lisa tatonetti

natural course of the sun” (Bear Island, 3). Vizenor reminds readers through this story of the Anishinaabeg’s relocation from what is now called Madeline Island in Lake Superior, where the sacred shell was originally found, to, in the case of the Bear Island Pillagers, northern Minnesota. With this narrative and the explanations that follow, Vizenor locates the Anishinaabeg in place, creation, and clan, blending aspects of spirituality and tribal geography in what could be called, to use his own words, “the transmotion of virtual cartography”—an active and vital mapping of Native presence (Fugitive Poses, 170). As part of such a cartography, Vizenor introduces unfamiliar readers to the “Pillagers of Leech Lake . . . one of the original five clans of the Anishinaabe . . .” whose “warriors are admired for their courage, independent spirit, and resistance to federal agents and policy” (Bear Island, 4). Such clans and clan stories are central to the Anishinaabeg; as he explains in Fugitive Poses, “The native world is actuated in anishinaabe totems and stories of survivance. The totem is a native metaphor, a literary connection with creation, shamanic visions, and natural reason” (123). After clarifying the importance of both the clan system and the Pillagers to the Anishinaabeg, Vizenor chronologically recounts the events from September 1898, when Hole in the Day was arrested and subsequently liberated from federal marshals, to June 3, 1899, when the Native warriors who fought to defend Hole in the Day were granted pardons. He concludes not only by pointing to the Pillagers’ victory over the Third Infantry, but also by highlighting how they “bravely resisted the federal policies that spurned their Native rights and eroded their sacred land” (Bear Island, 10). Vizenor’s introduction, then, can be seen to mirror the sort of tribally specific emphasis on spirituality, geography, and sovereignty central to indigenous literary nationalists rather than the type of cosmopolitan hybridity for which he is more often celebrated. This focus on Anishinaabe land and cosmology is repeated in the brief section that begins Vizenor’s epic poem, entitled “Overture: Manidoo Creations.” The title itself references both music and spiritual creation, thereby marking the connection between poetry and song in Anishinaabe tradition. Alan Velie notes, “The rhythms and imagery are such that short passages in Bear Island look just like Chippewa songs” (“The War Cry of the Trickster,” 152). Much like the “traditional tribal songs” Anishinaabe theorist and poet Kimberly Blaeser links to Vizenor’s haiku, these songs do “not so much report as participate in or embody life” (Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 119). With such dynamic representations in mind, Sinclair’s argument that transmotion is key to Vizenor’s nationalism provides a particularly useful frame

question of nationalism

233

through which to read the “Overture.” In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor explains, “The connotations of transmotion are creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance; transmotion, that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty” (15). The use of the Latin term “sui generis” defines Native sovereignty as unique, singular, preexisting. And while Vizenor separates that concept from a limited “territorial sovereignty,” he by no means discards indigenous sovereignty; instead, he redefines and expands sovereignty through his concept of transmotion. Although brief, the “Overture” exemplifies Vizenor’s theory of transmotion: it sings Anishinaabe history into being and situates the Anishinaabeg themselves in the sacred—they are “natives of the miigis,” and in tribal geography, they move within a landscape of “rivers, “pine,” and “cedar” with a familiarity that enables them to handily defeat of the Third Infantry (Bear Island, 13). The story of the Pillagers’ victory is beautifully and briefly rehearsed, as well—this time in lyric rather than prose form: we hear again of “that cold / october morning / at sugar point” when “tricky shamans / rout the missions / wily manners” and “native stories,” though “at the mercy / of pious scorn / wicked chantey / confederate cruelty / bounty and hue of wonted genocide,” “by first light / outgunned” the soldiers “at sugar point” (14–16). In Vizenor’s “Overture,” then, tribal story is creation, imagination is action, and the epic poem a tribal song of survivance. With such active storytelling, the first section of Bear Island meets a classic convention of epic poetry in which the narrator begins by staking the central theme of the piece. In both the introduction and the “Overture,” that theme is not limited to the historical story of the battle at Sugar Point nor to the life of Hole in the Day, the epic hero, though both are significant. Instead, Vizenor’s epic poem is about the power of Anishinaabe tribal stories and imagination, about the importance, as Sinclair might say, of bringing such stories “into being. By evoking them, Anishinaabeg can invoke them to assert experiences, ideas, and knowledges as families, relatives, kin.” “These invocations” in the “Overture” of Vizenor’s Bear Island, thus become “complex expressions of collectivity, interconnectivity, and nationhood” (“A Sovereignty of Transmotion,” 145). In the subsequent section, “Bagwana: The Pillagers of Liberty,” Vizenor’s narrative again employs conventions of epic poetry to construct an ideology of “collectivity, interconnectivity, and nationhood” (“A Sovereignty of Transmotion,” 145). The section begins, as is common in epic poetry, in medias res, when Sugar Point “comes to light” and “native rights / of rivers /

234

lisa tatonetti

ginseng / cedar stands” are “stolen by grafters,” and “constitutional / greed and guile” situate “treaty decadence / over native liberty” (Bear Island, 19). The juxtaposition of the terms “treaty” and “decadence” bring up a central point where my interpretation of Vizenor’s discourse on sovereignty differs from Pulitano’s. This difference is key to reading Bear Island as a nationalist text rather than as an example of a “hybridized dialogue—or ‘mediational’ strategy—connecting two different worlds or worldviews” (Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 9). In his influential book, Blood Narrative, Chadwick Allen discusses “treaty discourse,” noting that the treaty-making process implicitly recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous nations; specific treaty documents explicitly vow that imperial or settler governments will uphold sovereignty. . . . Because historic treaties recognize Indigenous nations as sovereign, they continue to offer strong legal and moral bases from which Indigenous minority peoples can argue for land and resource rights as well as articulate cultural and identity politics. (17) With treaty discourse in mind, Vizenor’s use of treaties as metaphor here and elsewhere in Bear Island could be argued to be an example of nationalist concerns. But Vizenor repeatedly qualifies his use of the term “treaty” both here and in his theoretical work; he depicts treaties not as a tool for resistance, but instead as a negative imposition of settler colonialism— “treaty decadence,” he writes, is placed “over native liberty” (Bear Island, 19, emphasis added). The treaty becomes another of Vizenor’s ironic simulations, much like his well-known “insistence that the word Indian be spelled lowercase and italicized,” which “reflects his dissatisfaction with the problem of identity among tribal people, who have been burdened by names invented by the dominant society” (Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 152). This dismissal, which is central to Pulitano’s claim for Vizenor’s hybridity, marks Vizenor’s rejection of the language so often employed by Native nationalists. But while Vizenor rejects a settler colonial lexicon, he is not focused on hybridity, on “connecting two different worlds or worldviews” as Pulitano might suggest (9). Rather, in Bear Island, he celebrates Native rights (or “liberty”) and centers an Anishnaabeg-specific history and cosmology in which, as he explains in Manifest Manners, “tribal sovereignty is inherent, an essential right that has been limited but not given by the government” (145).

question of nationalism

235

Throughout “Bagwana: The Pillagers of Liberty,” Vizenor speaks to the strength of Anishinaabeg people and beliefs. “Anishinaabe warriors” are “honored forever” and Hole in the Day is repeatedly invoked through the epithet “by my heart,” which Vizenor explains is a translation of his name. Additionally, Vizenor uses this section of Bear Island to mark the place the attack on the Pillagers holds in the settler colonial history of the United States. Thus “Bagwana” reaches backward to speak of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, two infamous massacres in which the U.S. Army attacked indigenous people with radically different outcomes than that of the Sugar Point battle. “Bagwana,” then, offers a wider view of the “grafters” denounced in the subsequent section, which focuses on the epic hero, Hole in the Day. As the physical and ideological center of Bear Island, “Hole in the Day: Grafters and Warrants,” shows plainly how Vizenor’s epic poem exhibits Native nationalist sentiments. First, the section immediately recognizes the material conditions of the 1890s Anishinaabeg as well as pointing toward the root of those conditions—U.S. imperialism: natives shiver at onigum agency hungry children bound in blankets wait outside for late annuities demeaned by treaty ties federal legacies overrun by factors and shady agents (39) Condemnation of U.S. government corruption permeates both this stanza and the rest of the section. These fairly plainspoken concerns with tribal history and social justice are not the ironic simulations for which Vizenor is most often lauded; they, in fact, again align with what some might term Cook-Lynn’s “polemics,” her attention to settler colonial history and tribally specific resistance. The rest of the section follows in this vein as it condemns the marshals who attempt to arrest Hole in the Day and who later call in troop reinforcements as a “bounty posse” and “federal mercenaries,” while also addressing the graft of the “greedy timber barons,” (who the Pillagers

236

lisa tatonetti

themselves spoke out against at the time), and the flooding of Anishinaabe tribal lands for a “federal dam” (Bear Island, 40, 41, 46, 47). “Bearwalkers: 5 October 1898” and “Gatling Gun: 6 October 1898,” the two sections of the poem that focus on the battle itself, also condemn U.S. settler colonialism in a manner similar to “Hole in the Day.” Additionally, they further a nationalist ideology through their depiction of the relationship between land and nation. Connections to land are significant in American Indian literature for both nationalist and nonnationalist writers and critics. For writers like Cook-Lynn, land tenure concerns are key. To return again to Cook-Lynn’s definition of nationalist writing, she argues that “mythology (soul) and geography (land) are inseparable” (“The American Indian Fiction Writers,” 32). But such beliefs are not the purview of indigenous nationalist writers and critics; an acknowledgment of the tie between indigeneity, spirituality, and land crosses ideological lines in the field. Throughout Native studies, then, indigenous relationships to land and landscape are important whether they be political, spiritual, or some combination of the two. Within a nationalist paradigm, however, these relationships are regularly and intentionally connected to the political sovereignty of Native nations. As an example of just such a connection, Bear Island’s representation of land and landscape is wedded to the Pillagers’ successful resistance to the strictures of settler colonialism and thus to Anishinaabeg claims to national identity and tribal sovereignty, two central concerns of Native literary nationalists. Newspaper accounts of the period recognize the tie between the Pillagers and the landscape in which they defend their rights. A series of New York Times articles highlight the ways in which landscape functions in the public imagination. On October 7, 1898, the Times published a brief report entitled “A General Uprising Feared,” which quotes a telegram sent to President William McKinley the previous day by the editors of the Minneapolis Times, the Tribune, and the Editor Journal: “A general out break in or around [Leech Lake] would probably result in the massacre of many citizens. In a country so heavily wooded the present force is, in our judgment, wholly inadequate.” In the same edition of the paper, an unnamed correspondent writes, “General Bacon, who has great experience with the Sioux and other savages, did not take much stock in these professions of friendship, and ordered a party of his company to search the adjoining timber for any lurking savages, but none were to be seen. They must have hidden in the thick underbrush, and those unaccustomed to searching timber could

question of nationalism

237

easily have been deceived, for it was not ten minutes after this that the firing had commenced” (“Indians Besiege General Bacon,” 1). L. E. Cavalier perhaps puts it best when he notes, “The Government seems to think that one soldier is as good as ten Indians, while as a matter of fact, when the Indians are fighting in their own country, in positions selected for themselves, one Indian is at least equal of three soldiers” (n.p.). Each of these pieces recognizes, to one degree or another, how the Anishinaabeg’s knowledge of their land offers them a military advantage. But land here is not merely protection: it functions in these accounts as a metonym for the Anishinaabeg themselves. The “heavily wooded” country, the “thick underbrush,” the “timber” that impedes the search for Hole in the Day and his supporters, in each case these references are employed to evoke dominant fears of Native people, of their unruliness, and their superior knowledge of the landscape the United States had come to think of as its own. Vizenor’s account of this same landscape and these same events also employs images of Anishinaabe land and landscape metonymically, but in Bear Island, such references are linked not to fear, but instead to what he himself might term “the actual presence of natives.” In Vizenor’s metonymy, then, landscape represents the Pillagers and their successful defense against the arrogance of the encroacher’s manifest manners. Sugar Point is full of such possibilities: in it are “solitary spirits / marvelous sentiments / of shamans / court and tradition / under the cedar” and “traces of ” Hole in the Day, “a native warrior / and natural presence / at the tree line” (20–22). Even their farmed land protects the Anishinaabeg against the “immigrant soldiers” who “lost the war / that afternoon / in a vegetable garden / twice cultivated / by hole in the day / a wiry shaman / who lived at sugar point” (35–36). Hole in the Day evades arrest and “escape[s] in the shadows / at the tree line” (41). The landscape, then, is shield and protector for both him and the Pillagers, those “bearwalkers / spirits of the night” who “lighted the shore” while Hole in the Day “posed at the tree line / a natural crease” (41). The Anishinaabeg are a “native presence / ablaze in the trees,” “a marvelous / natural presence / in red blankets / against the maples” whereas the soldiers can only “crouch ungainly” (56–57). This striking contrast between the soldiers’ conflict with the land and the Pillagers’ refuge in the same is repeatedly drawn. Land enables the Anishinaabeg to remain “unrecognized / by worried soldiers” (60); and unlike the soldiers, the Native fighters are afforded cover, “shrouded at home / in the brush / under the maples,” which, we are told, are “natural camouflage” (61, 66). The immigrant soldiers, neither “at

238

lisa tatonetti

home” nor protected, are “ordered . . . / to dig trenches” (71). They attempt to forcibly shape the landscape of the Anishinaabeg into walls and barriers. But the Pillager land affords protection only to its own and even the “bloody garden” metes out death to a “foolhardy private” who is “the last casualty” of war (78). Bear Island therefore reinforces what the newspaper coverage of the period recognized, that the Pillagers’ rout of the Third Infantry, their successful defense of their people, and, through that defense, their claims to tribal sovereignty are buttressed by the very landscape itself. This focus on land represents yet another of the many ways Vizenor’s epic poem functions within a tribal nationalist rather than a cosmopolitan paradigm. As Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks points out, One of the central problems with the way hybridity theory has been applied to Native texts is that it does not . . . account for the relationship between community and land. Rather culture and identity seem to rest with the individual ‘subject,’ who seems oddly out of place, displaced, caught between two assumed worlds or perspectives that are so intertwined that they no longer exist independently of each other. (“Afterword: At a Gathering Place,” 240) Such is not the case for the Anishinaabeg in Vizenor’s text, who he ties to land and nation and grounds in place and worldview. Bear Island’s form and focus, then, can be interpreted as exemplifying an aesthetics of sovereignty— the poem’s very foundation engages key concerns of indigenous nationhood. This reading of Vizenor’s epic poem destabilizes the current critical divide in the field: Vizenor’s writing has been employed as a corrective to Native American literary nationalism, yet Bear Island demonstrates that such a discrete binary collapses upon closer analysis. I suggest that this disconnect rests not on faulty interpretations of Vizenor, but instead on limited understandings of indigenous literary nationalism that incorrectly equate it with an uninformed essentialism. Thus, I conclude, as I began, with the words of Native nationalist Daniel Heath Justice, who argues: Indigenous nationhood is more than simple political independence or the exercise of a distinctive cultural identity; it’s also an understanding of a common social interdependence within the community, the tribal web of kinship rights and responsibilities that link the People, the land and the cosmos together in an ongoing

question of nationalism

239

and dynamic system of mutually affecting relationships. It isn’t predicated on essentialist notions of unchangeability; indeed, such notions are rooted in primitivist Eurowestern discourses that locate indigenous people outside the flow and influences of time. . . . The central focus of indigenous nationhood, then is on peoplehood . . . the relational system that keeps the people in balance with one another, with other peoples and realities, and with the world. Nationhood is the political extension of the social rights and responsibilities of peoplehood. (“‘Go Away Water!,’” 151–52)

notes 1. Portions of this paragraph are drawn from my review. 2.  William E. Matsen debates this sort of characterization of Hole in the Day, claiming that although “newspaper reporters would make him a chief, a tribal leader, and a medicine man,” Hole in the Day “was, in truth, only a 62-yearold man whose neighbors rose to protect him from what they perceived to be a flagrant misapplication of whites’ law” (“The Battle at Sugar Point: A Re-Examination,” Minnesota History 50, no. 7 [Fall 1987]: 269–70). 3.  Pauline Wold recalls that when Hole in the Day “was a young man, he had been taken to Duluth . . . but after the trial was over he was left to get back to the reservation the best way he knew, and as it was in the middle of winter, he almost froze to death before reaching home. Then he vowed that never again would he let himself be taken on such a trip” (“Some Recollections of the Leech Lake Uprising,” Minnesota History 24, no. 2 [June 1943]: 143). 4.  A n article published in the September 17 New York Times situates this event on the previous day: “Walker Minn, Sept. 16—Deputy United States Marshal Morris Onary Kushing and Shabon Dash King, arrested Pillagers at the Leech Lake Indian Agency to-day, and while trying to bring them here, the prisoners were rescued by their band. The Indians refused to give up the criminals, and are much excited” (“Indians Threaten Trouble: Rescue Prisoners from Sheriff at Leech Lake Agency, Minn,” New York Times, September 17, 1898, http://www.proquest.com. er.lib.k-state.edu/).

references Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

240

lisa tatonetti

Beissinger, Margaret H., Jane Tylus, and Susanne Lindgren Wofford, eds. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Lincoln: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Brooks, Lisa. “Afterword: At the Gathering Place.” In American Indian Literary Nationalism. Edited by Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, 224–52. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Cavalier, L. E. “Article 11—No Title.” New York Times. November 6, 1898. ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851–2006) with Index (1851–1993). Accessed May 16, 2010. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World and First Nation Sovereignty.” In Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, 78–97. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. “The Fight with Pillagers: Gen. Bacon’s Report to the War Department—Warm Praise of Officers and Soldiers.” New York Times. November 2, 1898. ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851–2006) with Index (1851–1993). Accessed May 16, 2010. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/. “General Uprising Feared.” New York Times. October 7, 1898. ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851–2006) with Index (1851–1993). Accessed May 16, 2010. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/. “Indians Besiege General Bacon.” New York Times. October 7, 1898. ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851–2006) with Index (1851–1993). Accessed May 16, 2010. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/. Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Go Away Water!’: Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics’ Collective. Edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, 147–68. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. ———. “A Relevant Resonance: Considering the Study of Indigenous National Literatures.” In Across Cultures/Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures. Edited by Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque, 61–76. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010. Kroeber, Karl. “Why It’s a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 25–38. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Matsen, William E. “The Battle of Sugar Point: A Re-Examination.” Minnesota History 50, no. 7 (Fall 1987): 269–75. “The News in Washington.” New York Times. October 6, 1898, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851–2006) with Index (1851–1993). Accessed May 16, 2010. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/.

question of nationalism

241

Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Roddis, Louis H. “The Last Indian Uprising in the United States.” Minnesota History 3 (1920): 273–90. Sinclair, Niigonwedom James. “A Sovereignty of Transmotion: Imagination and the ‘Real,’ Gerald Vizenor, and Native Literary Nationalism.” In North American Indian Writing, Storytelling and Critique. Edited by Gordon Henry Jr., Nieves Pascual Soler, and Silvia Martínez-Falquina, 23–58. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009. Tatonetti, Lisa. “The Both/And of American Indian Literary Studies.” Western American Literature 44, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 276–88. Velie, Alan. “The War Cry of the Trickster: The Concept of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 147–62. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1–23. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ———. Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Weaver, Jace. Foreword to Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, by Gerald Vizenor, ix–xiii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, eds. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Wold, Pauline. “Some Recollections of the Leech Lake Uprising.” Minnesota History 24, no. 2 (June 1943): 142–48. Womack, Craig S. “A Single Decade: Book-Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics’ Collective. Edited by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton, 3–104. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. ———. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

contributors

Susan Bernardin is an associate professor in the Department of English and chair of women’s studies at the State University of New York at Oneonta. She has published articles and book essays on foundational and contemporary Native writers, including Gertrude Bonnin, Mourning Dove, and Louis Owens. She is a coauthor of Trading Gazes: Euro-American Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880–1940 (2003) and is currently working on a new edition of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song, in collaboration with Karuk tribal members and non-Native scholars in northwestern California. She is a two-time recipient of the Western American Literature Association’s Don D. Walker Award for best published essay in western American literary studies. Kimberly M. Blaeser (Anishinaabe) is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of the first booklength study of Gerald Vizenor’s work, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996). Her publications include three books of poetry—Trailing You: Poems (1994), Absentee Indians (2002), and Apprenticed to Justice (2007)— as well as the anthologies Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (1999) and Traces in Blood, Bone, & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), and more than sixty appearances in anthologies and journals. She is a past vice president of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and currently serves on two American Indian literature series boards for university presses. She recently received an Artists Fellowship in Poetry from the Wisconsin Arts Board and is at work on a creative collage, Family Tree. Christina Hein is a doctoral student in the American Studies Department at Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her dissertation project is titled “Gazing Back at Whiteness: Concepts of Gendered, Classed, and Sexualized Whitenesses in Selected Works by Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and Craig Womack.” Linda Lizut Helstern is a member of the English faculty at North Dakota State University. The recipient of a 2007 North Dakota Humanities Council 242

contributors

243

Remele Fellowship for research and public humanities, she publishes frequently on Native writers, notably Gerald Vizenor and Louis Owens. She recently served as guest editor for a special issue of Southwestern American Literature on the atomic Southwest. Trained in museum studies, she has also designed museum exhibits. Arnold Krupat is a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the recipient of Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Guggenheim Foundation (2005–2006) fellowships, and a recipient of the Sarah Lawrence Excellence in Teaching Award (2007). He has a special interest in cultural studies and Native American literatures. He is the author of For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1989), The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (1989), Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (1992), The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture (1998), Red Matters: Native American Studies (2002), All that Remains: Native Studies (2009), That the People Might Live: A Theory of Native American Elegy (2012), and two novels, Woodsmen or Thoreau & the Indians (1994) and What to Do? (2012), and he is the editor for Native American literatures for the Norton Anthology of American Literature and of a number of other anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism (1993). With Brian Swann, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, which won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose in 2001. Chris LaLonde is the author of a book on the early fiction of William Faulkner, William Faulkner & Rites of Passage (1996); a book on the novels of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer and scholar Louis Owens, Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns (2002); and numerous essays on Native American literatures and, more generally, twentieth-century American literature. He has published work on telephony and information and communication technologies in Vizenor’s work and on the “ceded landscape” of his fiction. He is a professor of English and director of American studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Deborah L. Madsen is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her publications include American

244

contributors

Exceptionalism (1998), Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (ed., 1999), Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory (ed., 2003), Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature (ed., 2009), Understanding Gerald Vizenor (2009), Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (ed. with A. Robert Lee, 2010), and Louise Erdrich (ed., 2011). She is coeditor with Gerald Vizenor of the State University of New York Press book series, Native Traces; editor of the University of Nebraska series, Companions to Native Literatures; president of the Swiss Association for North American Studies; and a member of the editorial advisory board of PMLA. Carme Manuel is a professor of African and American studies at the University of Valencia. Her publications include Nor Shall Diamond Die: American Studies in Honour of Javier Coy (ed. with Paul Scott Derrick, 2003) and Teaching American Literature in Spanish Universities (ed., 2001). David L. Moore is a 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 literary theory. He has taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College, University of Washington, and Cornell University. His book “That Dream Shall Have a Name”: Native Americans Rewriting America is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press. Katja Sarkowsky is a professor of new English literatures and cultural studies at the University of Augsburg in Germany. Her research focuses on transnational and transcultural exchange processes in the English literatures of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania, and Canada. Her publications include AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (2007) and the coedited book, Travelling Concepts, Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe (2009). Michael Snyder currently teaches at the Oklahoma City Community College. His essay on Vizenor’s relationship with postmodern theory appears in the Broadview Press anthology Across Cultures/Across Borders. His essays have appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Critique: Studies in

contributors

245

Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere, and his reviews have appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal and Skyscraper. Adam Spry (Anishinaabe) is a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York. He was raised on the Flathead Reservation in Washington State and was an inaugural recipient of an American Graduate Fellowship in 2007. He has presented his work at recent American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conferences. Lisa Tatonetti is an associate professor of English and American ethnic studies at Kansas State University. She is coeditor, with Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, and Deborah Miranda, of Sovereign Erotics, an anthology of queer Native writing. She has contributed to the recent publications Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays (eds. Jan Roush and Jeff Berglund [2010]) and Strawberries in Brooklyn: Maurice Kenny, Mohawk Poet (ed. Penelope Kelsey [2011]), as well as the recent special issue of GLQ on “Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity” (2010); her essays have also appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Studies in American Fiction, Western Literature, and MELUS. She is currently working on a book project that maps the rise and importance of contemporary Two-Spirit literature. Jace Weaver (Cherokee) is the Franklin Professor of Religion and Native American Studies, adjunct professor of law, and director of the Institute of Native American Studies, at the University of Georgia. His book publications include: That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (1997), Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture (2001), Turtle Goes to War: Of Military Commissions, the Constitution and American Indian Memory (2002), and Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (2010). His coauthored book American Indian Literary Nationalism won the 2007 Bea Medicine Award for scholarship in American Indian studies. In 2009, he was the recipient of a Special Recognition Award from the Centers for Disease Control for his work to promote Native public health.

index

Beaulieu, Gus, 26–27 Beaulieu, Theodore, x, xvi, xvii– xviii, xx, 24, 25–28, 29–32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 Beissinger, Margaret H., 229 Bell, Betty, 149, 151–52 Bentham, Jeremy, 168 Berenguer, Vicent, 60 Bernardin, Susan, xii, xv, xviii, xix Berry, Nora Baker, 192n3 Berryman, John, x, 89, 91 Black Elk, 185, 191n3 Black Hawk, 185, 191n3 Blaeser, Kimberly, xi, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxii, 34, 35, 40, 63, 68, 89, 98, 101, 102, 104, 113, 114, 123, 124, 129, 135–36, 146, 165, 166, 172, 178, 192n5, 232 Bloomfield, Morton, 184 Blyth, R. H., 18, 19, 113, 117

Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, 106 Allen, Chadwick, 193n9, 234 allotment, 73, 83 American Indian Movement (AIM), 207–8 animals, xiii, xvii, 38, 150–51, 164–81 Aubid, Charles, 80 Bacardí, Montserrat, 43 Bacon, John Mosby, 198–99, 200–201, 208, 210, 228, 236 Bagwana, 213–14, 215 Baraga, Fredric, 193n10 Barthes, Roland, 18, 19, 103, 110n2, 113, 115, 116–17, 143–44 Basho, Matsuo, 102, 107, 108, 115, 118, 181n3 Baudrillard, Jean, 48, 49, 117, 122 Beaton, K. C., 210 247

248

index

Bowers, Neal, 60 Bratich, Jack, 212 Breinig, Helmbrecht, 205, 206, 208 Brill, William Hascal, 7, 207 Brooks, Lisa, 238 Buelna, Antonio, 65 Bug-aun-auk. See Bagwana Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, 3, 4–5, 7, 53, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 205, 207, 212, 214, 215, 217, 228, 230. See also Hole in the Day Cadotte, Michel, Jr., 14 Cardó, Carles, 43 Carter, Paul, 65 Cavalier, L. E., 201–2, 229, 237 Celan, Paul, x, 55, 89–90, 95 Cheney, Richard Bruce (“Dick”), 210 Chivington, John, 213 Clan, 83, 232; animals, 4, 5; Crane, xii, xxiii, 10, 14, 81, 107 colonialism, xix, xx, xxi, 3, 4, 6, 8, 13, 14, 27, 33, 40, 44, 48, 69, 71, 72, 73, 77, 140, 143–44, 147, 154, 155, 156, 159, 160, 225, 234, 235, 236 Columbus, Christopher, xxii, 92, 93, 120, 140, 145, 155 Columbus, Renaldus, 121 community, xxii Connolly, David, 51 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 224, 231, 235, 236 Copeland, Edward, 93

Coulthard, Malcolm, 46 crossblood, xii, 109, 129–30, 164, 165, 176, 177, 225. See also mixedblood Curtis, Edward, 144 Custer, George Armstrong, 197 Dawes General Allotment Act, 29 Day, Frank, 67 Day-Dodge, 28, 38 Deloria, Philip, 209, 212 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 130, 224 Densmore, Frances, ix, x, xiv, xvi, xvii, xx, 23, 25–26, 33–35, 36, 37, 39, 41 Derrida, Jacques, xv, 117, 138 dialogism, xii, xvii, 147, 148, 153 Dixon, Joseph Kossuth, 66 Doerfler, Jill, 180 Downes, Jerome, 114, 123 dream songs, ix, x, xi, xvi, xvii, xxi, 10, 19, 23, 25–26, 33, 34, 35, 36–37, 38, 41, 71, 98, 99, 100, 131, 169, 170, 171 Eakin, Paul John, 173 elegy, xiii, 184–91 epic, 16, 31, 229, 231, 233, 235 epistemology, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 98–109 Erdrich, Louise, 72–73, 197 Felstiner, John, 90 Ferrell, Terry R., 210–11

index Foucault, Michel, 149 Franco, Francisco, xvi, 44 Frow, John, 184 gender, 86, 88–89, 160–61 genocide, 12, 69, 87, 156, 157, 223 Geronimo, 209 Ghost Dance, 185 Ginsberg, Allen, 186 Glidden, Joseph, 57 Gramsci, Antonio, 186 Groening, Matt, 167 Guilbert, Nelson, 101 haibun, 101, 102 haiku, ix, x, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, xxi, 17–20, 21n10, 23, 35–37, 38, 64, 66, 71–72, 73, 80–81, 98–104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110n2, 113–32, 137–38, 169–78, 197, 232 Harris, Herbert, 15 Harrison, William Henry, 196 Haseltine, Patricia, 37 Heaney, Seamus, 21n8 Hearn, Lafcadio, 107, 108 Hein, Christina, xxi Helstern, Linda Lizut, x, xi, xv hermeneutics, 23–41 history, xii, xviii, 5–6, 7, 50, 65, 68–69, 71, 140, 145, 146, 147, 148–49, 154, 157, 160–61, 196–204, 230, 233, 234, 235

249

Hole in the Day, xix, 4, 7, 29, 199, 200, 202–3, 230, 232, 233, 235, 237, 239n3 Howard, O. O., 199 Hume, Kathryn, 192n5 identity, xii, xiv, xix, 2–3, 24, 27, 32, 40, 45, 48, 83, 86, 89, 150, 152, 167, 186, 189, 209, 225–26, 227, 229, 234, 236, 238 “Indian,” the, xxi, 6, 7, 8, 48, 49, 67, 86, 140–41, 144, 152, 205, 208–9, 210, 211, 212, 215–16, 220n1, 224–25, 231, 234 Iraq, 210–11, 212 Ishi, xix, 66–72, 77, 80 Ishikawa, Takuboku, 93 Jackson, Andrew, President, 196 Johnston, Basil, 219 Joseph, Chief, 199 journalism, xix–xx, 21n2, 206–13, 236–37 Justice, Daniel Heath, 223, 238–39 Kan, Sergei, 185 Keene, Donald, 113, 117 Keeshkemun, xii, 10, 13–14, 15, 80, 107, 215, 217, 218 Kennedy, John F., 179–80 King, Shabon Dash, 239n4 King, Thomas, 67 Ki´tcimak´wa, 38 Kopit, Arthur, 86, 88

250

index

Kroeber, Alfred, 67, 68 Kroeber, Karl, 226–27 Kroeber, Theodora, 70 Krupat, Arnold, xii, 166, 172, 224, 225 Kurosawa, Akira, 106 Kushing, Morris Onary, 239n4 Lacan, Jacques, 155, 160 LaDuke, Winona, 214 LaLonde, Chris, xix, xx land, xix, xxii, 29, 58, 74, 83, 146, 180, 196, 203, 205, 206, 211, 219, 224, 230, 231, 232, 234, 236, 237–38 language, ix, xii, xiii, xiv–xvi, xxi, xxii, 1–22, 24, 36, 48, 51, 74, 84, 98, 101–2, 103, 109, 114–15, 116, 120–21, 125–27, 135–61, 206, 224, 234; Anishinaabemowin, 24, 25, 28, 39, 40, 73, 214; Catalan, 43–61; Ojibwemowin, 14, 193n10; Spanish, 43–44 Lawrence, D. H., 51 Lee, A. Robert, 49, 66, 77 Lefevere, André, 44–45, 46, 52, 59–60 Lowry, Judith, 67 Lynch, Tom, 98, 101, 107, 114, 173 Lyons, Scott, 193n10 lyric, xiii, 16, 26, 37, 100 MacDonald, Ranald, 108 Madsen, Deborah, 72

Mailer, Norman, 21n2 Manifest Destiny, xv, xviii, 3, 49, 104, 140, 141, 146, 196, 202 Manuel, Carme, xiv, xvi Mathews, John Joseph, 174, 175, 225 Matsen, William, 7, 239n2 McKinley, William, President, 209, 236 McNiel, Elizabeth, 29–30, 31–32 memory, xii, xviii, 50, 61, 71, 72, 76, 89, 90, 94, 106, 171, 173, 175, 179, 213 Midéwiwin, xvii, 10, 28, 39–40, 212, 218 Miles, Nelson A., 209 Milton, John, 185, 186 Milun, Katryn, 194n11 mixedblood, 1, 7, 8, 26, 129, 150 Mizani, Samira, 59 Momaday, N. Scott, 197 Moore, David, xii, xv, xviii, xxi, xxii Morison, Samuel Eliot, 155 Morrison, Robert, 198, 228 motion, xv, 64, 68, 71, 76, 232 museums, 56, 70, 76 myth, xii, xvii, xviii, 5, 7, 8, 12–13, 14, 18, 88, 146–57, 160, 231, 236 Naanabozho, 18, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29–32, 35, 36, 37, 72, 107, 159, 218–19. See also trickster Nabokov, Vladimir, 171–72 nationalism, xviii, xxii, 223–39

index nature, xiii, xxi, xxii, 4, 9, 64, 66, 90, 100, 115–16, 128, 170, 180, 212, 217–20 ontology, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 104, 147 orality, x, xi, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxiii, 6, 23–41, 48, 49–50, 131, 146, 157, 171, 184–86, 189, 190, 216 Ortiz, Simon, 6, 192n4, 223 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 180 Owens, Louis, 3, 8, 21n5, 47, 68, 70 Phillips, Ruth B., 70 place, xv, xix, 10, 13, 64, 216–18, 231, 232; California, 63–77; Japan, 104–5, 169, 187; Minnesota, 64–65, 75, 198, 208, 216–17 Portolá, Gaspar de, 65 Portolá Expedition (1769), 65 postindian, xv, 49, 139, 140, 142, 152, 158 potlatch, 191n2 Progress, The, 23–41 Prud’homme, Johanne, 101 Pulitano, Elvira, 224–28, 230, 234 Purdy, John, 73, 74 Quarles, Joseph, 202 Rader, Dean, xviii, 16 reader, xxi, 11, 46–47, 48, 51, 64, 98, 100, 103, 113, 115, 116, 117–18, 119–21, 122, 125, 148–50

251

repatriation, 67, 68, 70; NAGPRA, 69, 70 Revard, Carter, 192n4 Riel, Louis, 158 Rowe, John Carlos, 220 Ruppert, James, 147–48, 149 Rydell, Robert, 209 Said, Edward, 21n4 Sarkowsky, Katja, xi, xii, xxi, xxii Sartre, Jean-Paul, 156 satire, xvi, xviii, 33, 157–61 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xv, 138 Say-coss-e-gay, 28, 38 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 121 Scott, Winfield, 196 Seidensticker, Kenneth, 113, 123 Sheehan, Timothy J., 29 Shosun, 19–20 Silet, Charles L. P., 60 simulation, xxii, 12, 40, 48, 49, 67, 98, 122, 138, 147, 159, 160, 164, 225, 226, 231, 234, 235 Sinclair, Niigonwedom James, 227, 232, 233 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 65 Smith, Paul Chaat, 67 Snyder, Michael, xii, xiii songs, Ojibwe, xiv, 18–19, 33–34, 232 sovereignty, xx, xxii, 27, 32, 72, 223–39 Spry, Adam, x, xiv, xvi, xvii–xviii, xx

252

index

squirrel, red, xii–xiv, 68, 152–54, 164–81, 184–91 Standing Bear, Luther, 80 Stannard, David, 125 Stegner, Wallace, 122 Steiner, George, 151, 153, 156, 187, 192n7 stereotypes, 4, 45, 48, 87, 92, 158, 215 Stevens, Wallace, 95 Strankman, Gary, 71 survivance, x, xi, xiv, xviii, xix, xx, xxiii, 2, 7, 23, 26, 27, 32, 38, 41, 49, 57, 66, 68, 72, 75, 77, 80–95, 96n4, 108, 136, 141, 143, 175, 181, 184, 187, 190, 191n1, 205, 206, 227, 233 Suzuki, Daisetz, 118 Tatonetti, Lisa, xviii, xix, xxii Third US Infantry, 196–204, 205, 207, 212, 228, 229, 232, 233, 238 time, 143–46 Tinker, Arthur, 198, 228 translation, xiv, xvi–xvii, 15, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 34, 35–36, 39, 43–61, 214, 224 trauma, 67, 72, 74–75, 125, 212–13, 235 Treuer, Robert, 59 trickster, x, xx, xxii, 1, 4, 5, 7–9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21n7, 23, 28–29, 30, 50, 68, 83, 98–99, 103–4, 105, 107, 120, 127, 139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 187 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 144, 197

Tuttle, Frank, 67 Tylus, Jane, 229 University of California, Berkeley, 68–71 Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie, 34 Velie, Alan, 31, 197, 205–6, 208, 232 Venuti, Lawrence, 46 Vizenor, Clement, xi, xii, 82–85, 107, 150, 187 Vizenor, Gerald, works: Almost Ashore, 18, 20, 46–61, 63–77, 80–95; Anishinabe Adisokan, 25, 38, 39–40; Anishinabe Nagamon, 25, 34–35, 36, 38, 39; Bear Island, 3–16, 73, 196–204, 205–20, 223–39; “Bear Walkers,” 54; “Blue Bottle,” 93; “Camp Grounds,” 55; “City Crumbs,” 58; “Columbus Endures,” 92–93; Cranes Arise, 17, 64–65; “Crows Written on the Poplars,” 150–54, 187, 188; Dead Voices, 102–4, 164–65, 166–67, 169, 178–79, 188, 189–91, 193nn8–9, 194n10; “Double Negatives,” 94; Empty Swings, 92, 106–7, 176; “Family Photograph,” 53, 82–85, 86, 96n1; Father Meme, 74; Fugitive Poses, 191, 192n5, 193n8; “Grassy Attic,” 95; Griever: An American Monkey King in China, 124–27, 128, 131; “Guthrie Theater,” 57,

index 85–88, 96n2; “Hand Prints,” 54; Heirs of Columbus, 131, 136–37, 145–46, 154, 155–61, 193n9; Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, 104–8, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131; “Homewood Hospital,” 93–94; “Huffy Henry,” 91, 96n3; “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs,” 186–87, 188; Interior Landscapes, 178, 187–88, 192n6; Manifest Manners, 120, 122, 145; Matsushima, 19, 113–32, 174, 176–77; “Medicine Hat,” 58; “Mission Motel,” 55; Narrative Chance, 24; “Paul Celan,” 54, 89–91; Praise Ravens,” 57; “Raising the Flag,” 53, 86, 88–89, 96n2; Raising the Moon Vines, 17–18, 175–76; “Sand Creek Survivors,” 212–13; “Sandprints,” 56; “September Light,” 91–92, 96n3; Seventeen Chirps, 174–75; “Shaman Breaks,” 53; “Shirley by Winter,” 18, 94–95; “Silhouettes,” 95; Summer in the Spring, 23–41, 107; “Trickster Cats,” 56; Trickster of Liberty, 141, 143–45, 158–59; Two Wings the Butterfly, 65–66, 169, 173–74; “White Earth,” 18, 52

253

Waabaanakwad (White Cloud), 29 Warren, William, 213, 219 Warrior, Robert, xxiii, 223, 224–25 Waterman, Thomas, 67 Waubanaquot, 15 Weaver, Jace, xix, xx, xxiii, 70, 184, 223, 224, 225–26, 227 Weissbort, Daniel, 43–44 Welch, James, 192n3, 197 Werner, Jacob, 58 White, Bruce, 220n2 White, Dane Michael, 212–13 White, Hayden, 148–49 Whitman, Walt, 185, 186, 219 Wicker, George, 211–12 Wilkinson, Melville, 198–99, 200, 201, 228 Wofford, Susanne Lindgren, 229 Wold, Pauline, 239n3 Womack, Craig, xxiii, 191n3, 223–24, 231 writing, x, 24–25, 49–50, 52 Wurdemann, Henry, 202 Yasuda, Kenneth, 102, 109n1, 113 Young Bear, Ray A., 179–80 Zlateva, Palma, 47

6.125 × 9.25  SPINE: 1.0313  FLAPS: 3.5

of one of the most important Native authors of our time.” —Hartwig Isernhagen, author of

“A much needed addition to the corpus of scholarship on a major American writer.” —Alan R. Velie, author of Native American Perspectives on Literature and History

Jacket Art: Mask Holding (detail), 2011, by Rick Bartow (pastel, graphite, spray paint on paper) Artwork courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com 800-249-7737

Jacket design:



of

gerald vizenor The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America’s most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of related Vizenor texts. Contributors discuss Vizenor’s philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor’s poetry and his prose writings.

gerald vizenor

Conversations on Native American Writing

of

Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong:

The poetry and poetics

The poetry and poetics

“A welcome addition to our knowledge and appreciation



Deborah L. Madsen is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Among her earlier books is Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (University of New Mexico Press).

Madsen

American Indians • Literature



Cheryl Carrington

ISBN 978-0-8263-5249-1

ËxHSKIMGy352491zv*:+:!:+:! Madsen_Jacket_10.29.12.indd 1

Edited by

Deborah L. Madsen

Throughout his poetic career Vizenor has returned to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. In each of the genres in which he works, Vizenor’s poetic language works to subvert fixed inherited meanings and the world views supported by, and lent reality by, these linguistic epistemologies. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor’s novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition but can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return.

11/2/12 4:41 PM