English Studies Forum

The “Cosmopolitan Consciousness” of Gerald Vizenor and Native American Literary Separatism

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted, as a side effect of capitalism, a worldwide transformation of the modes of cultural production. More than one hundred and fifty years later, their words still resonate:

In place of the old local and national seclusions, and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (84)

But as the United States and indeed the world become increasingly culturally heterogeneous and integrated, as peoples and cultures increasingly come into contact with one another and become inter-dependent, intellectual production in the U.S. generally and the literary scene in the American academy more specifically have become increasingly segregated. While, as Guillermo Gómez-Pena argues, in Dangerous Border Crossers, “nomadism and migration have become central experiences of millennial postmodernity” (11), American literature, ironically, is growing more and more balkanized as a new “garrison mentality” takes hold (Vizenor, Earthdivers 11), one which breaks literature and life up into “ethnic, religious, sexual, class, and regional franchises” (Crouch 18).[ii] The American academy, unfortunately has become a space of “bizarre eclecticism where everyone must know their place […] Artists and activists spend more time competing for attention and funding than establishing coalitions with other individuals and groups” (Gómez-Pena, New World 15).[iii]

Speaking in terms of race, Paul Gilroy, in Against Race, argues this separatist mentality may be due to what he calls a “crisis of raciology,” or the “lack of confidence in the power of the body to hold the boundaries of racial differences in place” (22). While Gilroy, here, speaks of a crisis of race and raciology, this crisis of representation certainly extends to ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and nation, as it is no longer easy to take recourse in these categories as stable signifiers or arbiters of identity. The deliberate fragmentation of American literature and the retreat of America writ large into mono-ethnic neighborhoods are reactionary responses to this crisis of representation. The difficulty of representing “Others,” and the anger that results from the (mis)representation of “Others,” has resulted in an enforced monologic-mentality that finally smacks of narcissism. Stanley Crouch succinctly describes this attitude: “If I don’t write about you, you won’t write about me., I’ll stick with my favorite subject—myself—and I suggest you do the same” (18; emphasis original). Because in millennial postmodernity the “subject” is fragmented,[iv] representation becomes increasingly difficult; so by retreating into enclaves, various “ethnic” or “racialized” groups can monitor the way in which they are represented.

While such a crisis, as Gilroy suggests, opens up the possibility of disabusing ourselves of racial and ethnic categories (and concomitantly the abuse suffered at the hands of those who benefit from their enduring legacy), paradoxically, “in this anxious setting, new hatreds are created not be the ruthless enforcement of stable racial categories but from a disturbing inability to maintain them” (22). Gilroy goes on to argue, for those who fear miscegenation, “crossing as mixture and movement must be guarded against. New hatreds and violence arise not, as they did in the past, from supposedly reliable anthropological knowledge of the identity and difference of the Other but from the novel problem of not being able to locate the Other’s difference in the common-sense lexicon of alterity” (105-06). It is not homogeneity, then, that leads to violence towards or the (often violent) exclusion of the “Other,” but the very heterogeneity (the result of “mixture and movement”) that—as a result of proximity to or the inability to recognize an “Other”—was to temper, if not entirely prevent, violence and exclusion.[v] Cultural integration was to bring about a sense of solidarity with those who were formerly seen as “Other.” As Richard Rorty argues, solidarity is “thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (192). Solidarity, as Rorty imagines it here, has much in common with what Derrida calls “unconditional hospitality” (Borradori 128).[vi]

And yet, the very dialogue with the “Other” that heterogeneity and proximity were to bring about has not occurred to any great effect within the literary and academic world.[vii] In fact, as Crouch observes,

as life in America becomes an ever more intriguing mix of styles, relationships, alliances, and even combinations of cuisine, things have gotten so mucked up and segregated in the world of literature that one does not expect American writers to tell us about anything other than themselves, their mono-ethnic neighborhoods, their own backgrounds, the narrowest definitions of the class from which they come, their erotic plumbing and its meaning, how much or how little melanin is in their skin, and so forth. (19-20)

Rather than risk the “challenge of writing across the color,” gender, sex or class line (23), writers have increasingly turned inward toward their own territory, their own little corner of the world; and those who are highly invested in their particular corner of the world—for their sense of identity—have posted sentries at the “territorial limits” to guard against intruders (25). As Gómez-Pena argues, “in reaction to the transculture” Marx predicted would arise as capitalism transforms cultural production (New World 11),

a new essentialist culture is emerging, one that advocates national, ethnic, and gender separation in the quest for cultural autonomy, “bio-regional identity,” and “traditional values.” This tendency to overstate difference, and the unwillingness to change or exchange, is a product of communities in turmoil who, as an antidote to the present confusion, have chosen to retreat to the fictional womb of their own separate histories. Even our so-called “progressive” communities are retrenching to a fundamentalist stance. (11)

The result of this retrenchment is that identity—racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, class, human/non-human—has become a kind of property, a cultural possession.[viii] And within the putatively progressive community of academia, the view of culture as “property” is rather widespread. Following this logic, African Americans “own” Nat Turner, and William Styron’s crime, according to certain African American scholars, was not necessarily that he wrote a bad novel about Turner, but that he, a white man, dared to write a novel about Turner at all.[ix] Styron dared to cross the color line. He, like William Faulkner in Go Down, Moses, Cormac McCarthy in The Stone Mason, Kazua Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day, Richard Price in Clockers, and James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room, chose to “leave home,” to “step outside of what he or she happens to be in terms of class or sex or ethnicity or sexual persuasion” (Crouch 25), and to test himself by “finding out if [he had] the imagination to render vividly and believably people unlike the ones [he] grew up next door to” (50). Rather than encouraging such cross-cultural encounters in literature, which is part and parcel of “the creation of a multiparticipatory society” (Gómez-Pena, New World 15), “anyone who steps outside of what he or she happens to be in terms of class or sex or ethnicity or sexual persuasion receives a scolding” from those who have designated themselves “the border guards of identity” (Crouch 25; Gómez-Pena, Dangerous 12).

The dream of a proper world literature, and what Gilroy calls a “cosmopolitan utopia,” has given way to enclaves (284). Not surprisingly, in these enclaves the discourse is monologic, and it is often “one-sided” and “narrow-minded” (Marx 84). Writers talk to their own “people,” and they together construct “their” history. Those “people’s history,” then, is inevitably and often purposefully constructed in isolation, separate and free from outsiders—those “others” who have, one would assume, “their” own “people” and “their” own “history.” Group and individual identity is tied to this particular enclave. Who “I” am and what “I” am is defined within given parameters, and these parameters, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, must be guarded.[x] “We” define who “we” are, not “them.”

Some may find such a Manichean mentality useful. But writers like Styron, Faulkner, McCarthy, Price, Ishiguro, Baldwin, and Gerald Vizenor, among others, who risk leaving home, who risk transgressing territorial limits to disrupt spatial boundaries in order to create a cosmopolitan consciousness rooted in dialogue with “others,” view such thinking as pernicious and dangerous. Rather than turning inward toward his own ethnic neighborhood, Gerald Vizenor uses fiction to address the “epic complexities and appetites” of a whole host of characters from a variety of cultural locations (Crouch 28). But more than that, his “stories”—like his “tricky” characters—seek to disrupt his readers’ mental categories that delimit experience and sap the “life energy” that fuels their imaginations (Coltelli 165). Vizenor’s fiction invites readers to change and to “imagine themselves always and in a new sense” (164). He invites them to move out of their mono-ethnic neighborhoods and to go out into the world, to meet, greet, and apprehend “the other in terms of mutual humanity” (Crouch 29).

Because of five hundred years of cultural contact with non-indigenous peoples, within the discursive space of Native American discourse the authenticity and integrity of the Native “subject” is a central concern. The Native American mixed-blood novelist and critic Louis Owens argues that “for the contemporary Indian novelist—in every case a mixedblood who must come to terms in one form or another with peripherality as well as both European and Indian ethnicity—identity is the central issue and theme, and, as Clifford has suggested, ethnic identity is always ‘mixed, relational, and inventive’” (Other 5). The “worldview reflected in novels by American Indian authors,” he writes, can be “defined primarily by a quest for identity: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’—or mixedblood—in contemporary America” (20)?

While what it means to be—and how we are to define—black, Chinese American or Chicana in contemporary America is certainly a central issue to African American, Chinese American, and Mexican American writers, for example, the vehemence with which the issue of what it means to be “Indian” is raised within the discursive space of Native American literature is unparalleled in any other Ethnic American discourse. As Owens rightly claims, “today there is more wrangling over diverse issues (identity, authenticity, essentialism, critical colonization, appropriation, and so forth) in this arena of American literature than in any other nook or cranny of contemporary writing” (Mixedblood xv).

This vehemence arises out of a particular area within Native American discourse, namely the area dominated by literary separatists like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Robert Allen Warrior, Annette Jaimes, Karen Swisher, and Craig Womack, among others. These critics argue that Native American (oral and written) literary traditions, Native American (oral and written) history, and Native American culture, in its numerous tribal varieties, are independent of those of the West, that these traditions and the discourse about these traditions are the property of natives, and that non-native scholars, even those who want to work with and empower Indian people, should step aside (Swisher 192). Their frustration at the infiltration of whites into Native Studies echoes Ann DuCille’s discomfiture with white critics trespassing on the scholarly turf of African Americans. In “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” DuCille examines “some of the consequences of the current explosion of interest in black women as literary and historical subjects” (86-7). Among other things, she explores “the ways in which this interest—which seems to [her] to have reached occult status—increasingly marginalized both the black women critics and scholars who excavated the fields in question and their black feminist ‘daughters’ who would further develop those fields” (87).

The current explosion of interest in Native American literature by non-natives has separatists seeking out their own space away from what appears to be an academic-colonialist deluge of Western and, therefore, non-indigenous, scholarship. Separatists seem to be asking the same question Barbara Christian, in “The Race for Theory,” posed concerning African American literary criticism: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism” (61)? If the answer for Christian, as it would be for DuCille, was/is African Americans, the answer for Native American separatists, not surprisingly, is unequivocally Native Americans. Certainly, though, not all Native American artists and scholars share the nationalist view propagated by Native American literary separatists any more than all African American critics agree with the position held by Christian and DuCille. Within Native American discourse, Gerald Vizenor, an anishanaabe poet, novelist and critic, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the separatist position.

In this essay I will argue that Gerald Vizenor’s fiction, which is heavily indebted to anishanaabe[xi] oral, mythic, and cultural (and therefore “nationalist”) traditions, as well as the Western philosophical tradition, moves beyond the strictures of Native American epistemology to embrace a cosmopolitan worldview that draws on and integrates anishanaabe, Western and Eastern philosophic traditions. A cosmopolitan perspective, as I use it here, embraces a perspective “consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity (rather than homogeneity) as the social and cultural norm” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 3). Vizenor’s theoretical position, as evidenced in the two novels I will be discussing, Griever: An American Monkey in China (1987) and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), has much in common with what Paul Rabinow calls a “critical cosmopolitanism.” By Rabinow’s definition, “critical cosmopolitanism” is an “oppositional position, one suspicious of sovereign powers, universal truths, overly relativized preciousness, local authenticity, moralisms high and low” (258). “What we share as a condition of existence,” Rabinow argues, “is a specificity of historical experience and place, however complex and contestable they might be, and a worldwide macro-interdependency encompassing any local particularity. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this situation” (258). Rabinow defines “cosmopolitanism” more specifically “as an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness […] of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories, and fates” (258; emphasis mine). “Although we are all cosmopolitans,” Rabinow suggests, we have “done rather poorly in interpreting this condition” (258). Critical cosmopolitanism, as Arnold Krupat makes clear, opposes foremost the “determinations of monoculturalists” (Ethnocriticism 243), like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,[xii] who have not only “done rather poorly in interpreting this condition,” but have rejected it outright.

Before I look at certain of Vizenor’s postmodernist fictions in terms of a “cosmopolitan consciousness” that is part and parcel of a “critical cosmopolitanism,” in Part I of this essay I will discuss the issue of who can and who cannot speak about Native American issues. The need to announce one’s social location before engaging in scholarship on indigenous issues necessitates that I alert readers to my own social position, i.e. my cultural background, my present location vis-à-vis the academy, tribal nations, etc.

In Part II I will articulate the argument for and the limitations of a separatist literary tradition by focusing primarily on the arguments put forth by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) and Craig Womack (Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee). These critics, along with scholars like Robert Allen Warrior (Osage), have directly or indirectly attacked Vizenor’s fiction because it lacks a “nationalist” focus. They argue it is too broad and encompassing in its thematic concerns. Unlike Vizenor, the separatists resist, if not denounce outright, the use of literary theories grounded in Western epistemology to interpret Native American literature, arguing, in effect, that “critical theory represents little more than a new form of colonial enterprise” (Owens, Mixedblood 51). Cosmopolitans like Vizenor and fellow mixedblood critic and novelist Louis Owens, by contrast, not only celebrate Western critical theories, but employ them often.[xiii] In Part III I argue that, while critics like Womack have very little to say about critical theories not arising out of a native episteme, Vizenor embraces the language and style of postmodernism, and his most important influences, other than the anishanaabe woodland trickster figure Naanabozho, are Bakhtin, Baudrillard,[xiv] and Derrida.

Beginning Part III with a discussion of Vizenor’s Bearheart, I claim Vizenor’s novels are simply fictionalizations of his theoretical methodology, that is, his postmodern trickster hermeneutic. Vizenor’s novels The Trickster of Liberty (1988) and Chancers: A Novel (2000), for example, read very much like Manifest Manners, his first full-length theoretical work. Trickster of Liberty opens and concludes with a theoretical essay, citing Kundera and Kristeva, and Barthes is cited in the body of the novel itself. Vizenor’s “sources,” he admits, “are part of my work” (Postindian 125). Fiction and a Vizenor-style literary criticism explicitly overlap in Hiroshima Bugi, wherein each chapter is immediately followed by a section called “Manidoo Envoy, which consists of analysis and explication. By turning fiction into theory and theory into fiction, Vizenor renders them indistinguishable. While I won’t address Vizenor’s theoretical works specifically, it should be clear that all of Vizenor’s novels enact theory.[xv]

In Part IV, I argue that because Vizenor’s work pushes beyond the boundaries of Native American discourse and embraces a view of the world where cultural boundaries are always fluid, always mutable, a “nationalist” reading is too limited in scope. I go on to suggest that mixedblood critics like Louis Owens and non-native critics like Alan Velie, David Murray, and especially Arnold Krupat, apply methodologies that are more conducive than those the separatists offer to navigating the labyrinth that is Vizenor’s oeuvre.[xvi] These critics have been receptive to Vizenor’s turn toward postmodernism and away from nationalist concerns and the nationalists’ investment in “terminal creeds,”[xvii] one of which is that Native Americans have an “inborn Indian consciousness” (Konkle 151). Arnold Krupat, for example, has been especially receptive to Vizenor’s work and has used it often to put forth his own theory of “ethnocriticism.” But while Krupat’s work is indeed important and has done much to illuminate Vizenor’s work, I will argue, finally, that Krupat’s attempt to rescue Vizenor from postmodernism, which Krupat at times admits to loathing, is misguided. That Vizenor has fully embraced postmodernism is beyond question,[xviii] and in this sense, he doesn’t need rescuing.

For Vizenor the Native American “trickster is postmodern” (Vizenor, “Postmodern” 9), and mixedbloods or “crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline” (Vizenor, Crossbloods vii). If Harold Bloom’s cultural hero is the “strong poet” and Richard Rorty’s is the “liberal ironist,” Vizenor’s hero is the “mixedblood,” a “cultural breaker, break-dancing trickster-fashion 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” (Owens, Mixedblood 41).

Vizenor’s work, like the trickster figure, simply cannot be contained within the borders of a tribal nation, and mixedblood critics and non-Native critics seem more willing to leave the idea of a “sovereign nation” (one defined by land or territory) behind and move toward a “new mixedblood nation” and what Vizenor calls “a new consciousness of coexistence” that is transnational and transcultural (Vizenor, Earthdivers ix). Unlike the literal sovereign “nation” that nationalist critics call for, Vizenor’s “mixedblood nation” is less a particular place—a fixed territory—than it is an imaginary space. And this space is necessarily inclusive. In Earthdivers, alluding to the tribal creation myth in which “the cultural hero or tribal trickster asked animals and birds to dive for the earth” upon which a new “turtle island” (or a new earth) would be built, Vizenor writes:

[…] in the metaphor of the Métis [the French word meaning “mixedblood”], the white settlers are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into the unknown, into the legal morass of treaties and bureaucratic evils, and to swim deep down and around through federal exclaves and colonial economic enterprises in search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island. (x-xi)

In other words, white scholars are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into the unknown, into Native American literature, and to swim deep down and around through Native American scholarship in search of a few honest words upon which to build anew urban turtle island. By rewriting Vizenor’s words in this way, the current dilemma within the dialogically agitated discursive space of Native American discourse in the academy becomes readily apparent.

While mixedblood scholars like Vizenor and Louis Owens dive “in search of a few honest words” with white and other non-native scholars into the “unknown”—the world of Native American literature in all its tribal and individual varieties—a number of Native American separatists has assumed the role of coast guard or border patrol. If Vizenor and Owens, among others, want to break down cultural barriers and open up borders, if Vizenor and Owens champion the métis and celebrate what Clarence Major calls the “many forces at work” constituting complex and multifaceted identities (Shepperd 3), Native American separatists champion “purists,” and the “monoculturalists of America” (Cook-Lynn, “American Indian” 131). In “What is an Author?” Foucault examines the relationship between “an author and a text” in order to determine “the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it” (115). While Foucault, like Barthes, concludes that “the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this [author-]function are far from immutable,” and can “imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” (138), Native American separatists, even while conceding as they do that indigenous texts derive from a community, are finally unwilling to cut the umbilical cord that attaches author(s) and text, a move which could open the door to non-Native scholarship on Native Americans. So Native American purists, like Cook-Lynn et al., continue to pose “the tiresome repetitions”: “Who is the real author?” “Have we proof of his authenticity and originality” (Foucault 138)? Postmodernists, who follow Foucault’s lead, conclude that it doesn’t matter who is speaking—there’s simply no way to know. But separatists, heavily invested in the politics of identity, argue, in no uncertain terms, it matters.

It is the case, though, that Vizenor, too, worries over authors who pose as “authentic” Native Americans when they lack any tribal connection. In “Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the Cultures of Names,”[xix] he openly attacks writers like Jamake Highwater, William Least Heat-Moon, Kenneth Lincoln, and Hertha Wong as “‘wannabe’ romantics” who “pursue an obscure tribal connection, an adoption, a passive wisp of ancestral descent in a document or name,” in order to make a name for themselves as “authentic” native writers (119). The hard-line separatist stance, though, goes beyond the critique of these “autoposers” or “penenatives” (Vizenor, Fugitive 15). As Vizenor argues, separatist critics are often just as guilty of adopting a “romantic,” “nativist” view of “Indians” as these autoposers, because they, like faux “Indians” (Highwater, et al.), tend to reinscribe “essentialist versions of Native history and identity” (Vizenor and Lee 3). “Even native resistance,” Vizenor writes, “is a romantic conversion of cultural dominance” (38). In any case, when it comes to those who subscribe to “terminal creeds,” or “beliefs that seek to impose static definitions upon the world,” Vizenor is an equal opportunity critic (Owens, Afterword 249).[xx]

If the discursive space of Native American literature and theory[xxii] can be described as a veritable “contact zone,” a “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 6), the separatist solution to this “colonial encounter”—which, to separatists, is the source of “intractable conflict”—is, in effect, to push out the colonists, to neutralize the “zone” by making it not a contact zone, but a postcolonial, monocultural, native zone. Entering this zone, the discursive space of Native American culture and scholarship, demands identifying oneself. Entering means answering the question, “who’s speaking?” When reading Native American scholarship by natives and by non-natives, the importance of identification is made readily apparent by what seems a basic requirement: the need to announce one’s status as a native or a non-native, and if the former is applicable, one’s tribal affiliation. Take the following line from “Seeing (and Reading) Red” by Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice: “The work by Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Craig Womack (Muskogee Cree/Cherokee), Tomson Highway (Cree), and others gives young Queer Natives, like myself, a richer understanding of our places in the world” (104). In a footnote found in this same essay, Justice references a conversation with “poet/activist/scholar Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee Two-Spirit/Queer, also of African, Irish, Lenape, and Lumbee ascent)” (119; emphasis original).

This need to announce one’s “social location” or emphasize specific cultural markers speaks to the importance of “authenticity” within the context of Native American discourse, a discourse still heavily wedded to identity politics. It also speaks to the desire (by some) to safe-guard the borders of Native American scholarship from the encroachment of non-natives (meaning, of course, “whites”), those whom Justice, in “Seeing (and Reading) Red,” liberally refers to as “yonegs” (100, 101,105, 106; emphasis original). While Vizenor, “a storier of tricky scenes and tragic wisdom,” is busy breaking down identities, separatists, or what Vizenor might call “native reactionaries,” are actively shoring them up (Vizenor and Lee 37, 38). Because the matter of who’s speaking is of paramount importance within Native discourse, entering this particular contact zone demands an identification card that announces whether you are one of “us” or one of “them.” As Krupat writes, “In our current ‘age of [bad] experience,’ we know it is impossible to proceed without some reference to one’s own ‘positionality’ or ‘social location’: the instantiation of personal bona fides as being one of ‘us,’ the offer of apologetic admission for being one of ‘them’” (Turn 2).

It is interesting to note that such a requirement does not seem as pressing in other discursive arenas, say, in the discourse of African American, Chinese American, or Chicano/a scholarship. While it is true that Barbara Christian raised this issue in “A Race for Theory,” it is not standard form for a white scholar to announce (and then apologize for) her/his “whiteness” before proceeding with a reading of Beloved or Corregidora. And non-white scholars are not required to announce their social location before writing about “white” writers. Nowhere, for example, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s study of Yeats, Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats, does she pause to speak of her “positionality,” her “Indianness,” and no one has questioned her ability to “speak for” or “speak about” a modern Irish writer.[xxiii] And yet, in our current age, the need to assert one’s social location persists because it is believed a “speaker’s location […] has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize one’s speech” (Alcoff 7). But as Linda Alcoff argues: “To the extent that location is not a fixed essence, and the extent that there is an uneasy, underdetermined, and contested relationship between location on the one hand and meaning and truth on the other, we cannot reduce evaluation of meaning and truth to a simply identification of the speaker’s location” (17).

Despite the difficulty of “positioning” oneself, due to the slipperiness and fluidity of an ever-shifting “social location,” I will, however, pause momentarily to position myself, recognizing, with Vizenor, that “I [am] not an isolated self and [cannot] think about myself without the presence of many others” (Vizenor and Lee 58),[xxiv] and that, while my “location” does not “determine meaning and truth,” my “location bears on meaning and truth” (16; emphasis original). By doing so I am, following Spivak, attempting to avoid the pitfalls of “speaking for” and/or “speaking about” others. I, like Spivak, prefer “speaking to” others. By “speaking to” others, “the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity of the oppressed but still allows for the possibility that the oppressed will produce a ‘countersentence’ that can then suggest a new historical narrative” (Alcoff 23). Scholars, Alcoff writes, “should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others” (23). While “speaking with” certainly sounds diplomatic, it is not always easy to do when the “other” is asking you—because you are not “one of them”—to step aside. And yet, as Krupat writes, “cosmopolitans will choose solidarity knowing full well that those whom we have chosen to support may not always be overjoyed to find us marching with them” (Red 18).

Having grown up in a middle-class family in a small town in southeast South Dakota, a town which, for all intents and purposes, was 99.9% “white,” I have always identified myself as “white.” And yet my great great grandmother on my father’s side (my grandmother’s grandmother), was a full-blooded Native American, a fact which my father was loathe to disclose. My paternal grandmother attempted, to my father’s dismay, to register her three grandchildren (all boys) with the Santee Sioux tribe in Santee, Nebraska—the small town in which she was raised and, after marrying my grandfather, outside of which she bought a farm and raised her own family. That my brothers and I possessed native blood was not something my father was proud of, and he did not support my grandmother’s decision to register us with the Santee Sioux tribe.

Growing up, I learned little of my native ancestry because it was clear my father was ashamed of it. He spoke of natives as “them” or “those people,” so inquiring about my great grandfather never seemed like a good idea, knowing my father’s reaction wouldn’t be anything but negative or evasive. I did know, though, with some certainty that my grandmother had indeed registered us with the tribe despite my father’s objections. So even though I identified as “white,” I always knew that that wasn’t exactly the case, and, while in my teens, I often wondered (though little more) about my native heritage, and even considered pursuing Native Studies at the University of South Dakota. But because that part of my genealogical history was never sufficiently nurtured by my parents, I was unable, for whatever reason, to sustain an interest in that part of my background, even after taking a course in Native American Thought at the University of South Dakota. But because of my native heritage, upon turning eighteen, I was “awarded” $700 as my “share of the judgment funds derived from the Mississippi Sioux Award, Act of October 25, 1972.” This was money distributed by the Enrollment and Claims Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Department of the Interior to individuals with native blood (blood quantum being the U.S. government’s measure of Native identity). And this money, in my mind, was evidence of my enrollment in the Santee Sioux tribe.

In subsequent years I discovered that my grandmother’s request to enroll my two brothers and me in the Santee Sioux tribe had been denied because we lack sufficient blood quantum, and that the money from the BIA was proof only of lineal descent and not enrollment. The tribe gave my grandmother and, of course, my parents an opportunity to appeal the tribe’s decision but an appeal was never filed. While, according to documents I’ve received from the U.S. Department of the Interior, I do possess “at least 1/16 degree Santee Sioux Indian blood,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs argues that “one must possess one-quarter Indian blood” to qualify for enrollment in a tribe (Swann xx).[xxv] By such a measure, I simply do not qualify. And if, as Brian Swann has argued, “Native Americans are Native Americans if they say they are, if other Native Americans say they are and accept them, and (possibly) if the values that are held close and acted upon are values upheld by the various native peoples who life in the Americas” (xx), again, I simply do not qualify as Native American. I speak, then, as a non-native, an outsider.[xxvi]

But if I am not, by either Swann’s or the BIA’s definitions, a Native American, what am “I”? My great great grandfather on my father’s side came from Ireland, and my great grandparents on my mother’s side came from Holland, which, it could be argued, makes me only a third generation American. How then do Holland and Ireland affect my positionality? What do they say about my “social location”? Am I, because of what Cook-Lynn calls “the reality of race memory,” in a better position to write on Yeats than Spivak (“American Indian” 82)? Am I in a better position to research and write on Van Gogh than Arthur Danto? If, as Rabinow suggests, “we are all cosmopolitans” and “we live in-between” identities, from what specific social location am I speaking, and how would I know? Does being a cosmopolitan erase the significance of “social location,” or does it simply point to the idea that we are all bound up with one another by the very reality of hybridity and the complexity of genealogy and identity formation?

While these questions might seem tangential, within the discourse of Native American separatism, these kinds of questions are very important. In her introduction to Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, a collection of essays on the question of who should and who should not be involved in Native American scholarship, Devon A. Mihesuah writes, “although I do not profess expertise on my tribe’s history or culture, as a biracial Choctaw/French female I feel more at ease—and more useful—writing about my own tribe, writing about larger issues that affect all Indians such as repatriation and stereotypes, or writing fiction” (12).

Given my own background and academic training in ethnic American literature, I too feel more at ease writing about ethnic issues generally and Native American issues particularly than I do writing about W.B. Yeats, for example. But this ease derives not from race-memory but from personal and scholarly interests conscientiously pursued over a number of years. Consciousness of my own hybridity drives my interest in cultural hybridity and transculturation, that is, the degree to which cultures resist and absorb other cultures.[xxvii] Because hybridity is the reality of millennial postmodernity, it is important that scholars resist the urge to sequester certain parts of their identity in the interest of purity and separatism.

On this point, it is tempting to ask Mihesuah if she has adequately theorized the ways in which her French ancestry shapes her scholarship, which, incidentally, isn’t always about her “own tribe” at all.[xxviii] While she mentions her own hybridity, she chooses not to explore it, making it easier to make claims about Native separatism. For example, despite her “nagging feeling that” she was “being nosy when writing about Others,” Mihesuah wrote her first book, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, “on the Cherokee Female Seminary because its sociopolitical aspects are intriguing and because five of my ancestors attended the Male Seminary” (12). “But,” in a surprising admission, Mihesuah writes, “Cherokee is not the tribe in which I am enrolled, nor are they the people with which I identify” (12). I say “surprising” because Mihesuah goes on to argue, “if Cherokees want information about their traditions and thoughts published, let them write it themselves or recruit someone to write it for them” (12). In other words, Cherokees should write only about Cherokees, and Choctaws should write only about Choctaws, advice Mihesuah dispenses but does not heed. Mihesuah’s own work exposes one of the contradictions not only of separatism but of essentialism. In what way do Cherokees have privileged access to “Cherokeeness,” given “race-memory” and Cherokee blood, if a Choctaw can do a legitimate (because well researched and historically grounded) study of Cherokee women? Despite Mihesuah’s admonition, I, with Louis Owens, “do indeed insist upon my privilege to write of experience outside my immediate ethnic tribal heritage and outside my gender as well” (Owens, Mixedblood 21).

The argument that “Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian” people (Swisher 193), and that “tribal people need to safeguard the borders of their cultural domains against research and publishing incursions” (American Indian Science 6), is most forcefully propagated by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. For Cook-Lynn, safeguarding the borders of “Native American Studies as an academic discipline” is of paramount importance (Cook-Lynn, “Radical” 10-11). She argues, “the integrity of what we do comes from the sober understanding of, and the regulating, and defending of the parameters of that discipline, parameters which may be either tribally specific or global or panindian” (11). Like Daniel Heath Justice, Cook-Lynn imagines barbarian “yonegs” at the gate, “invad[ing] every genre” (“Intellectualism” 113). “American writers,” she claims, “have never hesitated to plunge into literary fields of exotic origin and call them their own. Thus, the borrowing and trading of literary kinds has flourished” (113).

The goal of separatists is to shore up the borders of Native American discourse, to make it the exclusive domain of authentic natives who have a genuine relationship to the land. And for scholars like Cook-Lynn, Justice, and Womack, authentic native scholarship and literature must have ties to the land. As Womack writes, “as a baseline requirement, narratives that claim to be tribal, it seems to me, must demonstrate some kind of connection to tribes. If a story has no connection to a specific landscape, in what sense can it be an Indian story” (“Alexander” 61)? And Justice asks, “who is better qualified to understand the land than the peoples who have shared life with her for untold ages? We belong to this land; we’re not guests of the Invaders, to be given access to their whim. The knowledge of Native peoples is the voice of Turtle Island that speaks closest to all of humanity. This is our inheritance” (“Seeing” 102).

It is clear that separatists see the incursion of non-natives into the space of Native American discourse as analogous to the colonization of Indian land by Westerners.[xxix] In both cases, invoking sovereignty means claiming the right to self-determination—freedom from the influence of non-natives. According to Womack, sovereignty is “inherent as an intellectual idea in Native cultures, a political practice, and a theme of oral traditions; and the concept, as well as the practice, predates European contact” (Red 51), and this inherent right must be recognized and respected by outsiders. But, according to Cook-Lynn, “Euro-American scholars have always been willing to forego discussion concerning the connection between literary voice and geography and what that means to Indian nationhood” (“American Indian” 89). Therefore, literary sovereignty, nationhood, and native identity are inextricably linked through their relationship with the land. Because Euro-American scholars have no ties to the land—they do not belong to the land, as native peoples do—the relationship between Euro-American scholarship and native literature, rooted as it is in a specific tribe, a specific place, a specific language, and tribally specific mythology, is always, in effect, one of alienation.

But it is not only Euro-American scholars who are alienated from native land and literature. Cook-Lynn, in “Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” levels her sharpest critique at what she calls “the mixed-blood movement” (“Intellectualism” 128). For Cook-Lynn, mixedbloods—like Louis Owens, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Michael Dorris, Diane Glancy, Thomas King, Paula Gunn Allen, and, of course, Gerald Vizenor—are complicit with Western colonialism because their work offers “few useful expressions of resistance and opposition to the colonial history at the core of Indian/White relations” (124): “Instead,” she goes on to write:

Because the writings of mixedbloods do not focus on “resistance and opposition to […] colonial history” (128), and because the ideas in the work of mixedbloods “are not generated from the inside of tribal culture” (129), they are not legitimate or authentic. Mixedbloods, in terms of blood and scholarship, have been watered down.[xxx] Insufficient blood quantum equals a lack of investment in indigenous struggles. Cook-Lynn argues that mixedblood literature that does not engage tribal politics or ground its ideas in native culture and mythology can be “characterized by excesses of individualism” (128). And when mixedbloods “articulate a private vision with little or no interest in understanding the national conscience,” she writes, “their voices seem shamefully inauthentic” (“American Indian” 95).

Cook-Lynn’s critique of the mixedblood stems from her nativist approach, which argues that “colonialism needs to be replaced by the recovery and promotion of pre-colonial, indigenous ways” (Ashcroft et al. 159). For her, the “mixed-blood literary movement is signaling that a return to tribal sovereignty” and indigenous ways “on Indian homelands seems to be a lost cause, and American individualism will out” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 128). What Cook-Lynn wants to recover is a “real Indian past” (134), but she argues “that the mixed-blood movement is led by those whose tribal past has never been secure” (128). A “real,” “authentic,” “Indian past,” then, depends on a “pure” identity, one grounded in pre-colonial, indigenous ways, and, of course, blood. But Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, has articulated the paradox of the nativist approach: “The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. When a people undertake an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes” (224). What Cook-Lynn calls “First Nation ideology” must take into consideration the reality of five hundred years of European contact (“Intellectualism” 130). Furthermore, by championing “the purists” (131), Cook-Lynn idealistically invokes what amounts to a “Native essence,” a pre-contact, pure identity (Pulitano 62).

Cook-Lynn’s argument is, in effect, grounded in identity politics. She attempts to circumscribe a monocultural space in which a pure identity can emerge free from Western influence. The presence of mixedbloods complicates and therefore threatens the purity of this space because they infuse native culture, “through biology and intermarriage,” with a non-native “otherness” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 129). And it is this non-native influence which draws attention away from the need to address “tribal nation hopes and dreams” (128). The mixedblood literary movement, then, because it does not “develop ideas as part of an inner-unfolding theory of Native culture” and does “not contribute ideas as a political practice connected to First Nation ideology,” is “a literary movement of disengagement” (130-31). Authentic native writers, or those writers whose tribally specific writings are connected to the land and First Nation ideology, engage communal values, while mixedblood writers, who because of that “otherness” within have directed their energies away from indigenous communities, have adopted a politics of “individualism.” Cook-Lynn writes:

The mixed-blood literature is characterized by excesses of individualism. The “I,” the “me” story, and publishing projects by university and commercial presses in the “life story” genre are the result more of the dominance and patriarchy most noted in American society than of tribalness. Mixed-blood literary instruction may be view as a kind of liberation phenomenon or, more specifically, a deconstruction of a tribal-nation past, hardly an intellectual movement that can claim a continuation of the tribal communal story or an ongoing tribal literary tradition. (128)

Cook-Lynn’s use of the word “deconstruction” here is hardly unintentional. Like other separatists who eschew the Western philosophic traditions prevalent within the academy, Cook-Lynn links deconstruction/post-structuralism with postmodernism and a politics of individualism. Deconstruction is fundamentally a critique of the humanist subject, which is, then, by extension, a critique of bourgeois individualism. This seemingly deliberate conflation, however erroneous, allows her to attack mixedblood writers—like Louis Owens and Gerald Vizenor—who have made use of post-structuralism and postmodern theory in their own work.

Yet it is obvious that Cook-Lynn’s articulation of postmodernism, like Womack’s and Justice’s, betrays misunderstanding. Rather than recognizing that “the idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism,” a stance which might buttress her own, Cook-Lynn attacks both pluralism and postmodernism (Harvey 48). She argues that a “‘tolerant’ national climate with resourceful diversity curricula have forged the apparatuses through which the study of aesthetics, ideology, and identity in native thought have flourished to the detriment of autonomous models in Native Studies” (“Intellectualism” 127). Similarly, Justice, in “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” opposes “autonomy of community and self-within-community” to “postmodern individualism” (117).

Interestingly enough, while the pluralistic stance of postmodernism opens a space for “difference and otherness, as well as the liberatory potential it offers for a whole host of new social movements (women, gays, blacks, ecologists, regional autonomists, etc.),” it is “difference and otherness” that Cook-Lynn and Justice oppose (Harvey 48). While Cook-Lynn sees postmodernism as a politics of individualism, her desire to foreclose or circumscribe a native identity is itself a gesture of individualism: it is the desire to create a space in which “otherness” is excluded. It could be argued that separatists like Cook-Lynn, Justice and Womack rightfully oppose postmodernism but do so for the wrongs reasons. Like separatists, postmodernists oppose individualism at all levels, arguing that the “individual” or “subject” exists at the nexus of a multitude of complex and often contradictory intersecting forces. As Hilary Weaver argues, “identities are always fragmented, multiply constructed, and intersected in a constantly changing, sometimes conflicting array” (240). In this sense, the individual or subject always already, in Walt Whitman’s words, “contain[s] multitudes.” The postmodern self always already exists as a “self-within-community,” making Justice’s distinction between “self-within-community” and postmodernism a false one (Justice, “Seeing” 117).

But the critique of the subject goes straight to the heart of Cook-Lynn’s resistance to mixedbloods and their interest in postmodernism. The philosophic tradition out of which postmodernism arose is Western, and, therefore, according to separatists, the critique of the subject is itself a Western notion. The rejection of postmodernism is a rejection of the notion that the self is multiple—that there is no “pure,” uncontaminated self, no self that isn’t already a “contact zone.” That the self is always already multiple is an idea that mixedbloods like Vizenor have whole-heartedly accepted. Again, for Vizenor, “crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline” and crossbloods are tricksters (Crossbloods vii), and “the trickster is a communal sign” (“Postmodern” 9). Cook-Lynn’s critique of postmodernism and mixedbloods is a critique of the trickster and trickster discourse, because the trickster and trickster discourse transgress boundaries and reject any claim to purity. By celebrating trickster discourse and not what Cook-Lynn sees as an “aesthetic of traditional stories,” crossbloods represent cultural degeneration (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism 125).

Because Vizenor is a “major voice in this mixed-blood discourse,” Cook-Lynn singles him out for criticism (125). After quoting from Vizenor’s “The Ruins of Representation,” in Manifest Manners, she writes, “the postmodern conditions, [Vizenor] says, are found in aural performance, translation, trickster liberation, humor, tragic incoherence, and cross-causes in language games. Almost all of the current fiction being written by Indians is created within these aesthetics in contradistinction to the hopeful, life-affirming aesthetic of traditional stories, songs, and rituals (125). Mixedblood literature, in other words, is too messy, too performative to be hopeful or life-affirming. Too many boundaries are crossed. Identities are called into question. And yet, regrettably, in pluralist, postmodern America, “mixed-bloodedness [has become] the paradigm of preference” (125).

Cook-Lynn’s assertion amounts to suggesting that what might be called postmodern tricksterism has become hegemonic in and outside of the American academy. Theory in the U.S. was in its hay-day in the 1980s and early 1990s, and postmodernism, as a cultural zeitgeist, no longer holds the appeal it had even a decade ago. At the risk of speculation, I would argue that, while pragmatism, which rejects the notion of an essential, transcendental subject, has had a long intellectual history in the U.S., from William James, C.S. Pierce, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, liberal humanism is still the “paradigm of preference” not only in the American academy but, ironically among Native American separatists.[xxxi] Separatists critique deconstruction on the grounds that it is too individualistic, yet the position that Justice, Cook-Lynn, and Warrior take is heavily indebted to liberal humanism, which posits “human nature” as being “essentially unchanging” (Barry18), and “individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique ‘essence’” (18). Justice, for example, speaks freely about “all humanity” (“Seeing” 102), and Warrior praises John Joseph Mathews for his humanism. “Mathews,” he writes, “gives us an example of intellectual sovereignty deeply committed to humanism […] [H]e avoids slipping into rhetoric that separates American Indians either from the rest of humanity or from their own past” (103, 102).[xxxii] So while separatists reject the putative individualism of postmodernists, they re-embrace individualism by taking refuge in humanism, and the notion that the (indigenous) subject is “antecedent to, or transcends, the forces of society, [and] experience […]” (Barry 18).

In response to the rise of the mixed-blood as a kind of Western cultural topos, then, Cook-Lynn embraces a separatist stance rooted not in performance—the idea that identity is culturally defined and then performed—but in individual biology (“Fiction” 87). Cook-Lynn has made it clear that being authentically native means having native blood—that “being native” is not a question of performance but of blood line. “Behavior alone,” she argues,

does not make one a Lakota. One cannot be a Lakota unless one is related by the lineage (blood) rules of the tiospaye. While it is true that the narrow definition of biology was not accepted by the Lakotas, since they are also related to the animal world, spirit world, and everything else in the world, biology was never dismissed categorically. On the contrary, it is the overriding concern of the people who assiduously trace their blood ties throughout the generations. (94; emphasis original).

Because performing identity is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, it is not surprising that Cook-Lynn takes refuge in blood lineage to ground native identity. She rejects outright the “idea that if you act like a Lakota you are a Lakota” (94; emphasis original). She critically attributes the argument that “whoever wants to be tribal can join the tribe” to Gerald Vizenor (85), arguing that, by doing so, Vizenor, and writers like Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Scott Momaday, “seem to leave American Indian tribal peoples in this country stateless, politically inept, and utterly without nationalistic alternatives” (85). Being mixedblood, then, leads to a kind of cultural betrayal: impurity of blood equals impurity of culture, and concomitantly, the devaluation and eventual eradication of an authentic indigenous way of life. In a passage worth quoting at length, Cook-Lynn writes,

A great deal of the work done in the mixed-blood literary movement is personal, invented, appropriated, and irrelevant to First Nation status in the United States. If that work becomes too far removed from what is really going on in Indian enclaves, there will be no way to engage in responsible intellectual strategies in an era when structures of external power are more oppressive than ever. Moreover, no important pedagogical movement will be made toward those defensive strategies which are among the vital functions of intellectualism: to change the world, to know it, and to make it better by knowing how to seek appropriate solutions to human problems. Teaching is the mode intellectuals use to reproduce, and their reproduction should be something more than mere self-service. How long, then, can mixed-blood literary figures teach a Native American curriculum in literary studies of self-interest and personal narrative before they realize (and their students catch on to it) that the nature of the structural political problems facing the First Nation in America is being marginalized and silenced by the very work they are doing? (130-31)

Vizenor’s betrayal comes in the form of “appropriating” non-native philosophies and playing on—or “inventing”—tradition. Vizenor’s work, in typical postmodern fashion, makes use of whatever intellectual ideas are at hand. His highly imaginative works form a collage or even a pastiche of indigenous, Western, and Eastern ways of thinking and knowing. While Cook-Lynn maintains that Vizenor’s fiction is apolitical, by combining the anishanaabe trickster figure, Naanabozho, and poststructuralist theory, Vizenor breaks out of “traditional” literary forms to create new ways of seeing and being in the world. In this sense, the kind of imaginative literature Vizenor creates is, in fact, deeply political. Like African American novelist and poet Clarence Major, Vizenor believes that “imaginative […] freedom precedes social liberation” (Klinkowitz 155).[xxxiii]

Vizenor’s use of poststructuralist theory, though, has alienated separatists like Cook-Lynn and Robert Warrior. Because Vizenor’s writings “enact” poststructuralist theory—in the way that Derrida’s Of Grammatology can be said to perform “deconstruction”—they are often rather difficult to comprehend, and do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. It is not only the content of Vizenor’s writings, then, that frustrates someone like Cook-Lynn, it is also the form. “Indian stories, traditions, and languages,” she writes, “must be written, and they must be written in a vocabulary that people can understand rather than the esoteric language of French and Russian literary scholars that has overrun the lit/crit scene” (137). Because Vizenor’s work draws as much from Continental theory as it does from indigenous traditions, in terms of both content and form, separatists argue that it does nothing to promote First Nation ideology or draw attention to the problems facing First Nations. As Robert Allen Warrior writes:

Vizenor replicates the conclusions and praxes of French theory. Like Foucault, he is resigned to allowing power and knowledge to play out their own control. Like Baudrillard, he is resigned to there being only more simulation underneath simulacrum of the world that modernism and capitalism has produced. Like Derrida, difference becomes the only politics that the creative artist or intellectual can offer. While he opens tremendous avenues at the level of creativity and critical reflections, at the level of program, Vizenor offers us little. (17)

Rather than offering a political response to “what is really going on in Indian enclaves” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 130), Vizenor’s writings emphasize creativity, the play of language and its role in expanding consciousness, that is, its role in loosening “the seams in the coarse shrouds of imposed identities” (Vizenor, Interior 262). Whereas Cook-Lynn, Warrior and Womack argue that, in order to ensure native survival, literature needs to serve native cultures, play its part “at the level of program” (Warrior 17), and function didactically in a native “pedagogical movement” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 130), Vizenor contends that “survival is imagination, a verbal noun, a wild transitive word” (Interior 263). For Vizenor, though, opening “tremendous avenues at the level of creativity and critical reflections” is itself a political act of native survival, what he calls native “survivance,” which is “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence” (Fugitive 15). Indeed, “the visionary literature that transforms what we once thought of as a native presence becomes a literature that heals, and a literature that liberates” (Vizenor and Lee 63).

Craig Womack, like Vizenor, believes that literature is important because it has the power to transform and to liberate. But unlike Vizenor’s, Womack’s vision, as we have seen, is necessarily tied to the land, and, in terms of literature, a circumscribed native literary tradition:

Native artistry is not pure aesthetics, or art for art’s sake: as often as not Indian writers are trying to invoke as much as evoke. The idea behind ceremonial chant is that language, spoken in the appropriate ritual contexts, will actually cause a change in the physical universe. This element exists in contemporary Native writing and must be continuously explored in building up a national body of literature and criticism—language as invocation that will upset the balance of power, even to the point, as Zebolsky argues, where stories will be preeminent factors in land redress. (Red 16-7; emphasis original)

The critique here of “art for art’s sake” is a fairly common one among Native separatists. For example, in “Intellectualism and the New Indian Story” Cook-Lynn writes, “Today, American Indian artists, novelists, poets, and scholars who are publishing their own works seem to take an art for art’s sake approach […] Publishers want to take on only what will have a reasonably wide readership, and it is thought that the purists will not be read. Few discussions about the moral issues in producing art are taken seriously” (131). To “art for art’s sake,” Daniel Heath Justice, in “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” opposes “art for Life’s sake” (109). He argues that the aesthetic view of art for art’s sake centers on the “artist’s individual personality” and that “such a view […] frequently brings with it a hypernarcissism and self-centered conceit that contributes to the destabilization of the basic values and kinship ties of tribal communities” (108). The issue here is the function of imaginative literature and, of course, native identity.

For Womack, Cook-Lynn, Warrior, and Justice, native writers have an obligation to native culture, an obligation that transcends the “self.” Ironically, while separatists critique the modernist notion of art for art’s sake, separatists like Womack often sound a lot like modernists. Echoing a sentiment T.S. Eliot expressed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—that what happens in the process of writing poetry “is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable” (762)—Womack writes, the storyteller “reminds us that she is not the author of the story but the vehicle of a tradition. The individual artistic ego is subsumed by the will of the community” (Red 90).[xxxiv]

This critique of art for art’s sake is a back-handed critique of Vizenor and other native writers who have embraced postmodernism, which, according to Justice, “transcends petty politics, morality, and even human life” while making “individual self-expression […] the ultimate value of art” (Justice, “Seeing” 108). For Womack, Cook-Lynn, Warrior, and Justice, Vizenor’s works are about Vizenor. They are simply self-centered expressions of his private vision, written in inaccessible language, and they contribute nothing to the continuation of native culture and the fight for land redress, the basic components of native sovereignty. What separatists want is a literature that addresses these issues and does so in authentic “Native voices” from an authentic “Native perspective” (Womack, Red 4). And for separatists there “is such a thing as a Native perspective” (4; emphasis original). As Womack writes, “I do not subscribe, in other words, to the notion that a Native perspective is, at best, problematic, if not impossible. I feel that Native perspectives have to do with allowing Indian people to speak for themselves, that is to say, with prioritizing Native voices” (4). Authentic Native voices are crucial if there is to be an authentic, sovereign Native American literary canon and if there are to be sovereign Native American nations (the two being interdependent). While scholars like Arnold Krupat have consistently argued for the inclusion of native literature in the Western canon, Womack argues that

tribal literatures are not some branch waiting to be grafted onto the main trunk. Tribal literatures are the tree, the oldest literatures in the Americas, the most American of American literatures. We are the canon. Native people have been on this continent at least thirty thousand years, and the stories tell us we have been here even longer than that, that we were set down by the Creator on this continent, that we originated here. For much of this time period, we have had literatures. Without Native American literature, there is no American canon. (6-7; emphasis original)

Womack makes clear that the Native American canon “predates” the American canon. He sees “them as two separate canons” (7). While this isn’t the place to rehearse the debate for or against Native inclusion in the canon, the important point to be made here is that for separatists, Native voices—embodied in Native literature—can be separated out of the heteroglossia that is contemporary culture in the United States. As Womack argues,

whatever we might say about the inherent problems concerning what constitutes an Indian viewpoint, we can still reasonably assert that such a viewpoint exists […] Whatever one might argue about postmodern representation, there is the legal reality of tribal sovereignty, recognized by the U.S. Constitution and defined over the last 160 years by the Supreme Court, that affects the everyday lives of individuals and tribal nations and, therefore, has something to do with tribal literatures as well. (6)

Again, Womack links “an Indian viewpoint” and “tribal sovereignty.” Separating Native voices from non-native or Western voices is an act of sovereignty, an act of de-colonization. And only a sovereign Native literature, one not influenced by non-native voices, can contribute to “tribal sovereignty” or land redress. As Elvira Pulitano writes, Womack “does not envision any moment of dialogue with Western critical discourse, claiming that ‘the primary purpose of [his] study is not to argue for canonical inclusion or opening up Native literature to a broader audience’ but to develop a theoretical discourse that will allow Native people to decolonize themselves” (79). In other words, “Native literatures deserve to be judged by their own criteria, in their own terms, not merely in agreement with, or reaction against, European literature and theory” (Womack, Red 243).

But as with the argument for native sovereignty over certain areas of land, the argument for literary separatism necessarily ignores the reality of five hundred years of contact with “the West,” which, it must be said, is hardly a homogenous, monolithic entity. The central problem with the separatist position is how one might go about “separating” out Native voices, Native perspectives (whether religious or philosophical), and Native literature from the cacophony of non-native voices.[xxxv] As Krupat writes, “Native philosophical and religious thought and Native literary expression are available for study and commentary only insofar as they exist in texts. And Native American writing, whether in English or in any indigenous language, is in itself testimony to the conjunction of cultural practices, Euramerican and Native American; it is inconsistent with any claim to a radical cultural independence or autonomy” (Turn 17). Pulitano echoes Krupat, writing, “the term Native perspective is itself problematic and contradictory. Once the oral tradition enters into dialogue with the rhetorical systems of the Western tradition, once it forcefully enters a book such as Red on Red, a product of the conjunction of cultural practices and hybridized discursive modes, an authentic Native perspective, such as the one promoted by Womack, becomes an ironic contradiction” (81; emphasis original). And yet writers like M. Annette Jaimes, following Womack, Cook-Lynn and Justice, insist there is such a thing as an “Indian voice.” In her introduction to The State of Native America, Jaimes claims it “can be said” that the contributors to this collection who are Native American “speak with an ‘Indian voice’” (10). Krupat rightfully criticizes such a claim, arguing, “Jimmie Durham does not sound like Wendy Rose; neither of them sounds like John Mohawk, and both of them on occasion sound at least a little bit like Jim Vander Wall, a non-Native contributor” (Turn 8).

The insistence that there is such a thing as an “authentic” Native voice is based on the assumption that there is a Native essence that can be expressed in writing, what Womack, among others, calls “Red English.” If a native writes in the colonizer’s language, their rhetorical strategies—their uses of “Red English”—function oppositionaliy. As Bakhtin argues: “He can make use of language without wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions” (299). So the “voice” of the native can, in effect, be used against the colonizer’s language. But, at the same time, “the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles […]” (300; emphasis original). So “language,” “voice,” and “being” are ineluctably bound. To claim that Jimmie Durham and Wendy Rose speak in an “Indian voice,” as separatists do, is to argue that “to be an Indian (whatever that may mean) is always and everywhere to be this, that, or the other foreknown and fixed thing, that to be of European background (whatever that may mean) is to be this, that, or the other foreknown thing” (Krupat 5; emphasis original). But the separatist position is only “made possible by […] rhetoric” (7). As Krupat argues, “to assert the existence of ‘an “Indian voice”’ discernible in critical writing, is to argue rhetorically, not logically” (Turn 8). He goes on to write,

one may fantasize that in the history of the Americas, Columbus’s three little boats sank shortly after setting out, but the fact remains that from 1492 on, neither Euramerican intellectuals nor Native American intellectuals could operate autonomously or uniquely, in a manner fully independent of one another, for all the differences in power relations […] And Native American writing, whether in English or in any indigenous language, is in itself testimony to the conjunction of cultural practices, Euramerican and Native American; it is inconsistent with any claim to a radical cultural independence or autonomy. (18, 17)

As James Clifford argues in “Diasporas,” how “long […] it take[s] to become indigenous” is a political question, open for dispute, and not simply a given (309; emphasis original). If this is the case, then, what an indigenous “voice” is, and what an indigenous “perspective” might be, is open to question rather than transparently obvious.

Similarly, when Karen Gayton Swisher asks non-native scholars to “[step] aside” or “defer to Indian authors,” because non-natives lack the “passion from within and the authority to ask new and different questions based on histories and experiences as indigenous people,” she is reinscribing an essentialist notion of native identity: in this case, the rather strange notion that only natives have the necessary passion “within” to do native scholarship. In effect, “all” white scholars, because they are white, lack the requisite passion to write about “others.” A white scholar (whatever that might mean) can apparently write passionately about Thomas Pynchon but not Ray Young Bear. But, as Krupat argues, echoing Linda Alcoff,

to know that a particular scholar is a white male is not necessarily to know what he thinks—about white males, about Indians, or about anything else. The case is the same if a particular scholar is an Indian, male or female […] [H]istorical indigenousness is not the same as mythical autochthony: there is no essence of America that Native people automatically incarnate, just as there is no essence of Europe (or elsewhere) inherent in people or groups with near or distant ties to those places. This is why there can be no guarantee that Indian journalists will write ‘better’ or more accurate or more sympathetic stories about Indians than will non-Indian journalists. (Turn 4).

Such a view, of course, does not sit well with scholars like Justice who believe Native Americans are “better qualified to understand this land” because they’ve lived on it for “untold ages” (“Seeing” 102). Justice here succinctly articulates the separatist notion “of purity and geopiety, in which the earth and Nature are used as sources of spiritual value uniquely accessible to Indians,” a view Vizenor finds particularly abhorrent (Murray 31).

Like Krupat, who argues that “to be Indian—whatever the (vexed) criteria for Indianness might be—provides no guarantee of any particular journalistic or scholarly or critical perspective or expertise” (Turn 4), Duane Champagne, in “American Indian Studies Is for Everyone,” argues that “one does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way […] The mere presence of Indian blood within a scholar […] does not ensure better or more sensitive historical or cultural understanding of Indian people” (182-83). While Womack believes “educating white folks about Indians […] [is] like teaching hogs to sing: it wastes your time and only frustrates the hog” (Red 21), Champagne argues that “as in all human groups, culture, institutions, and social and political processes are usually understandable to most anybody who is willing to learn and who at least may observe, if not participate, in the process” (182). In other words, you don’t have to “be” native to know and understand native beliefs, cultural practices, and traditions. One learns to “be” native in the same way that one learns to “be” Catholic. The young native and the young Catholic are both catechumens.[xxxvi]

Non-natives, separatists claim, are ignorant of and indifferent to native concerns, and yet when a “white” person attempts to educate him or herself about those concerns, he or she is met with hostility and the directive to “step aside” and leave native culture to the natives. Non-natives then are faced with what Krupat calls “the problem of the double bind”: “To take seriously the advice of many native scholars that if America is to survive, it had better learn something from the Indian—and then find a wide range of attempts to learn categorized as intellectual tourism, cultural imperialism, or the imposition of an unjust burden on the Indian—is to find oneself in a double bind” (Turn 12). One of the scholars to whom Krupat undoubtedly refers, even if he doesn’t mention him by name, is Louis Owens who, in “‘Everywhere There Was Life’: How Native Americans Can Save the World,” argues that “everything in existence is dependent upon and related to everything else […] This is a lesson Native Americans and all indigenous peoples really do have to teach, and it is time the world began listening carefully” (Mixedblood 226, 236). The relationship, then, between Native Americans and indigenous peoples and non-natives should be one of reciprocity, a dialectic of give and take, a transaction best described as sharing.

The idea of reciprocity must be extended to scholarship as well. If natives have much to teach non-natives, then it is safe to assume non-natives have something to teach natives, and one of the ways in which this “teaching” takes place is through the process of reading scholarship by “others.” In “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” Justice admits to having “given up reading anything by yoneg scholar Arnold Krupat,” arguing that “the core of his critical philosophy seems to be an insistence on seeing contemporary Indian writing as an expression more of white influences than as the vibrant artistry emerging from adaptable tribal traditions” (105; emphasis original). While Justice’s criticisms of Krupat are as often off the mark as they are acute,[xxxvii] his decision to ignore Krupat doesn’t bode well for the near future when a thoughtful and measured dialogue between natives and non-natives will be more important than ever as “cross-cultural encounters […] will increasingly mark the future” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 31). But Justice’s decision to stop reading Krupat is consistent with the separatists’ decision not to read non-native scholarship about natives. As Haunani-Kay Trask asserts: “a choice has been made for things native over non-Native” (43). And yet this move is a dangerous one. As Mihesuah writes,

Many Indians would be satisfied if only Indians wrote about Indians. Some prefer not to read anything written by white men and women, not under understanding that having a command of the canon of the field is the only way to establish a point of departure. If there are problems with previous works about Indians, how can one correct these histories if one hasn’t read them? Conversely, how can the reader recognize incorrect works if she or he doesn’t know the correct versions? (14)

Native scholars who ignore the work of non-native scholars run the risk of misrepresenting certain critical positions, e.g. Justice’s and Womack’s erroneous claim that postmodern literature is individualistic,[xxxviii] in the same way that non-native scholars who do not read primary texts by natives make themselves vulnerable to stereotyping or making generalizations about native peoples and their complex histories.

It may surprise, if not totally dismay, separatists scholars to know that James Welch, a “highly esteemed Blackfoot-Gros Ventre author raised squarely within Blackfoot country and intimately familiar with what it means to be Indian in Montana today, has admitted to not only depending upon family or tribal oral stories but also reading a large number of books about the Blackfeet—books by on-Indian authors—in order to write his historical novel Fools Crow” (Owens, Mixedblood 19). “Since he was drawing rather heavily upon writings by white authors for his factual details,” Owens asks, “does this undermine the ‘authenticity’ of the only historical novel yet written from within an Indian perspective by an Indian author” (19)? For Owens, the answer is obviously “no.” Like Duane Champagne, Owens and Welch recognize that “one does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way” (Champagne 182). And because cultures are not homogenous but highly variegated, no one, not even cultural insiders, has access to every aspect of his or her own culture.[xxxix]

In terms of “Indians,” then, Krupat writes, “Indians, simply by being Indian (and I note again that what it means to be Indian is not always and everywhere the same thing), are [not] automatically and inevitably the best people to consult for every task involving the interpretation and understanding of Indian history, literature, and culture,” as James Welch’s reliance on non-native scholarship to write Fools Crow attests (Turn 10). While separatists cling to the notion that there is an “Indian viewpoint” that grants privileged access to the “truth” of Native experience (Womack, Red 6), the position of Krupat, Owens and Welch, on this point, echoes James Clifford’s argument regarding “partial” truths. For Clifford, “ethnographic truths are […] inherently partial—committed and incomplete […] In this view, more Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic, all constructed truths are made possible by powerful ‘lies’ of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control” (“Partial” 7). The separatist position is one of exclusion, a deliberate attempt to safeguard the borders of native literature, land, and experience from outsiders.

Vizenor, of course, recognizes the reality of the United States as a veritable “contact zone,” in which “radical independence or autonomy” is impossible (Krupat, Turn 17). Having come to terms with this, Vizenor writes from a “‘contact’ perspective,” which “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” (Pratt 7). “[A contact perspective], Pratt explains, “treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). Refusing to adopt the separatist stance of exclusion, Vizenor welcomes responsible scholarship about natives written by non-whites. In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Vizenor admits to being

greatly impressed by non-Indian teachers, writers, and critics because they’re very dedicated […] I’m so pleased that so many people and more and more take [Native literature] seriously, and it’s a very serious scholarship, which is impressive—doesn’t mean I agree with it, but it’s impressive. It’s the kind of stuff you can argue with, honestly, respectfully, and not come up feeling raped or victimized. It is really serious and it’s good stuff, and it’s open [to] play, in the best sense. (177, 178)

Similarly, Vizenor refuses to cordon off a space within the broad area of American literature or even World literature for something called “Indian literature.” Taking a position that mirrors Clarence Major’s on the subject of a recognizably “black aesthetic,” Vizenor argues that “if we speak of Indian literature, then we reduce the rich complexities of human experience of every tribal group, of every writer coming from a uniquely, distinctly identifiable experience” (Isernhagen 84).[xl] What Vizenor opposes is the notion of a monolithic entity called “Indian literature” that subsumes singular artistic expressions under a fixed rubric. What, after all, does Womack’s Drowning in Fire have in common with Vizenor’s Bearheart or Hyemeyohsts Storm’s Seven Arrows? This is not to say, though, that Vizenor celebrates individualism or the authority of the author. Having fully embraced the “death of the author”[xli] and the postmodern “self”—nomadic, fluid, anti-representational—he resists categories that seek closure through representation. For Vizenor, “nothing is closure” (Coltelli 178). Whereas Vizenor rejects categories that seek to delimit “uniquely, distinctly identifiable experience,” Womack and M. Annette Jaimes, for example, are content to classify disparate narrative “voices” under the category of “Native voice” (Womack, Red 6), which amounts to saying, as Krupat points out, that the voice of Wendy Rose (a Hopi) and the voice of Jimmie Durham (a Cherokee) both represent an “Indian viewpoint,” all distinct cultural traditions, histories, etc., aside. While Natives differ in terms of specific tribal traditions, have various historical relationships to dominant culture (with, say, the British or the French), have assimilated into or rejected dominant culture in varying degrees, speak radically different languages, etc., somehow, according to separatists, an “Indian viewpoint” and a “Native voice” has arisen from the efflux of history, survived intact, and can be articulated.

Part II: “What we had was a basic misunderstanding, a thunder storm, you might

While Vizenor’s oeuvre is enormous, the issues with which he has concerned himself over the years have been surprisingly consistent.[xliii] In this section I will look at the way Vizenor’s fiction challenges notions of static identity and moves, finally, beyond the boundaries of a specifically Native American discourse and towards a transcultural, cosmopolitan perspective. In an interview with Neal Bowers and Charles L. P. Silet that took place on April 18, 1980, Vizenor succinctly articulates the ideas that were and continue to be at the center of his work:

About Indian identity I have a revolutionary fervor. The hardest part of it is I believe we’re all invented as Indians […] So what I’m pursuing now in much of my writing is this idea of the invented Indian. The inventions have become disguises […] There is another idea I have worked in the stories, about terminal creeds […] It occurs, obviously, in written literature and totalitarian systems. It’s a contradiction, again, to balance because it’s out of balance if one is in the terminal condition. This occurs in invented Indians because we’re invented and we’re invented from traditional static standards […] Some upsetting is necessary. (45-47)[xliv]

Indian identity, invented Indians, terminal creeds: In Vizenor’s writings, these three issues are inextricably linked and are at the heart of his critique of separatism. If any of these three can be said to have a privileged position in Vizenor’s works, if there is one that seems to encapsulate the other two, it is “terminal creeds,” or “beliefs that seek to impose static definitions upon the world” (Owens, Afterword 249). As Louis Owens writes, “such beliefs are destructive, suicidal, even when the definitions appear to arise out of revered tradition” (249). This desire to impose a static definition upon the world best characterizes the separatist position, and Vizenor sets out with “a revolutionary fervor” to dismantle it.

Separatists seek the right to sovereignty: the right to self-representation, to present a “native identity,” a “Native perspective” (Womack, Red 6). As Womack writes: “Native literature, and native literary criticism, written by Native authors, is part of sovereignty: Indian people exercising the right to present images of themselves and to discuss those images […] A key component of nationhood is a people’s idea of themselves, their imaginings of who they are” (14). Yet as Pulitano rightfully argues: “To insist, as Womack does, that seeking out a Native perspective is ‘a worthwhile endeavor’ […] amounts to a dismissal of the mutual interdependencies that more than five hundred years of history have thrust on the American continent. More significantly, it means turning Native identity into a textual commodity that continues to perpetuate fabricated versions of Indianness” (81), what Vizenor calls “the invented Indian.”[xlv] In Red on Red, to make his case for Native sovereignty and native identity, Womack, like Cook-Lynn and Daniel Heath Justice, takes a romanticized and, ultimately, nativist approach to native history.[xlvi] In other words, he invokes terminal creeds. He writes:

Through imagination and storytelling, people in oral cultures reexperience history. This concept of ancestral memory relates to nationalism in that sovereignty is an intersection of the political, imaginary, and literary. To exist as a nation, the community needs a perception of nationhood, that is stories (like the migration account) that help them imagine who they are as people, how they came to be, and what cultural values they wish to preserve […] Within the telling, the event is reexperienced so that the people are reconstituted as a nation as they hear about their origins in ancient stories and journeyings. (Red 26)

The implication is that there is a static and recoverable history—and thus, an authentic cultural identity—that can be “reexperienced.” Womack, here, “appeals to a supposedly authentic past in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective one true self to reinforce the idea of nationhood” (Pulitano (83). And an authentic, Native national literature, according to Womack, will tap into the traditions and rituals that arose out of this “authentic past.” But as Silko writes, in Ceremony, “after white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (126). While Womack suggests, then, “that the oral tradition can be reimagined and reexpressed owing to the living quality of language,” and argues that “by redirecting the language of the oral tradition, Native people concentrate […] on ‘cultural survival rather than cultural disintegration’” (Pulitano 83), what he

seems to overlook is the danger that occurs when oral stories are used as an avenue to legitimate identity and authenticity. Given the ongoing transformation of stories, and given the extraordinary vitality and adaptability of the oral tradition, the attempt to fix traditions through the use of names conceived as markers of authenticity leads to a perpetuation of the dominant discursive modes. (83)

In this sense, rather than opposing Western colonialism, Womack, by appealing to “authenticity,” is perpetuating it. As Betonie in Silko’s Ceremony says,

things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive. That’s what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more. (126)

So while Womack claims to oppose those who perpetuate the “vanishing [tribes] mentality” (Red 65), and argues that the oral tradition is a “living literary tradition” (66), he does so by employing a “nativist” approach that “cling[s] to the ceremonies the way they were.” Womack, in a gesture consistent with the nativist approach, wants to “forget Europe” and the reality of five hundred years of contact and Euroamerican-Indigenous intercultural exchange (Appiah 72). As Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, in In My Father’s House:

Nativism invites us to conceive of the nation as an organic community, bound together by the Sprachegeist, by the shared norms that are the legacy of tradition, struggling to throw off the shackles of alien modes and thought. ‘Here I am,’ Senghor once wrote, ‘trying to forget Europe in the pastoral heart of Sine.’ But for us to forget Europe is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our identities; since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us. (72)

But rather than “turning to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us,” Womack advocates turning away from Western philosophical thinking and “recover[ing] and promot[ing] pre-colonial, indigenous ways” (Ashcroft, et al 159). Womack and Justice, dismissive as they are of non-native critics who, as they argue, do not seem to recognize the ongoing “cultural survival of the [Native] communities” (Justice, “Seeing” 111), ironically “fix” what it means to be “Indian” by calling for an “authentic” Native identity rooted not only in land, but a recuperable Native past, one that is recoverable through “oral stories” and “fix[ed] traditions” (Pulitano 83).

The positions put forth by separatists like Cook-Lynn, Womack and Justice are thoroughly critiqued by Vizenor, who, as David Murray argues, is “committed to rejecting any view of traditional Indian cultures as fundamentally centered and fixed” (34). What Vizenor advocates is “loosening the seams in the coarse shrouds of imposed identities” (Interiors 263). And there is nothing he does not subject to a “loosening of the seams.” Identity, texts, race, ethnicity: All are deconstructed, shown to be inventions. And Vizenor finds the tools of his trade anywhere he can find them. He is “as likely […] to invoke a French Michel Foucault as a Sioux Vine Deloria, an American John Rawls as a Chippewa Harold Goodsky, each contributing piece might best be thought the expression of what Vizenor calls ‘new survivance’” (Lee 269). Vizenor argues “we meet at the seams” (Interior 263), or at what Anzaldua calls the border, a place “of contradictions,” a place of “shifting and multiple identit[ies]” (Preface). Because Vizenor “operates at the frontier site of various discourses, in the border zone in which identities are conceived as multiple, shifting, and fluid,” he is “uncomfortable with issues of allegiance” (Pulitano 113). There is, for Vizenor, something fascistic in the desire to fix identity. For him, “there are no ‘pure’ identities as there are no ‘pure’ races or cultures” (Krupat, Red 109). The separatist worldview, in this sense, is indeed fascistic.[xlvii]

In a discussion with Laura Coltelli about “America’s attitude toward skin color,” and the issue of the “full-blood and the mixed-blood,” Vizenor says, “that’s the ultimate tragic worldview—a terminal single-minded fascistic formula for the world is terminal […] And to try to come up with a single idealistic definition of tradition in a tribal culture is terminal. Cultures are not static, human behavior is not static” (172).[xlviii] And Vizenor opposes those who wish to “control the definitions, the symbols, and the masks they’ve constructed about culture” (161). Because “Native identities are more chance” or contingent “than the inheritance of an organic culture” (Vizenor, Fugitive 35), as separatists argue, Vizenor rejects “eugenic blood counts and other fascist certitudes of identity” (69). In Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998), his most theoretically sophisticated work to date, Vizenor quotes Pizer’s Toward a Radical Origin to counter the separatists’ claim to authentic origins, which is subsequently used to ground an authentic identity: “Authentic origins are inherently plural and divergent, and an extended mediation upon them both reinvigorates attention to history and subverts the supremacist claims of particular groups by showing that their ethnicity, religion, or discipline is ‘always already’ […] entangled with others” (27; Pizer 15). “The native persona is mediation,” Vizenor writes, “and always ‘entangled with others’” (Fugitive 28). Recognizing this, Vizenor rejects individualism—or the notion of an authentic, monadic, humanist self—and nationalism, suggesting that both are totalitarian and fascistic,[xlix] because they set limits, close off possibilities and regulate experience. In short, they circumscribe a territory.

Vizenor’s project, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s, is one of deterritorialization—the deterritorialization of the individual and the “politics of nations” (Vizenor and Lee 125). Deterritorialization, as Deleuze and Guattari use the term, is synonymous with what Vizenor calls “loosening the seams” (122); and like Deleuze and Guattari, Vizenor sets out to “[loosen] the seams of culture,” of identity and of nations (122). For Vizenor, the self and the nation do not exist in isolation, and are anathema to separatism. The self and the nation instead are “transcultural zones of contact” (Owen, Mixedblood 26). Louis Owens refers to this zone of contact as the “frontier” (26), which he contrasts with the notion of territory:

“Frontier” stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of “territory” as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue […] Territory is conceived and designed to exclude the dangerous presence of that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination, for the ultimate logic of territory is appropriation and occupation, and trickster defies appropriation and resists colonization. (26)

The separatist argument is one for containment, for a territory “conceived and designed to exclude” non-natives. But for Owens and Vizenor, separatism—of self and nation—is impossible, and Vizenor succeeds in refashioning these concepts in a way that eludes circumscription. Owens writes, “for those of use who […] are mixedbloods, the hybridized, polyglot, transcultural frontier is quite clearly internalized” (27). In other words, the “I,” like the nation, is not monadic or monocultural. It is a transcultural frontier. The “I” lives in and with others. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Bakhtin argues, “the I hides in the other and in others, it wants to be only an other for others, to enter completely into the word of others as an other, and to cast from itself the burden of being the only I (I-for-myself) in the world” (qtd. in Vizenor, Manifest 103).[l]

In a passage that Vizenor is fond of quoting, George Gusdorf writes: “Throughout most of human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others; he does not feel himself to exist outside of others, and still less against others, but very much with others in an independent existence that asserts its rhythms everywhere in the community. No one is rightful possessor of his life or his death; lives are so thoroughly entangled that each of them has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (qtd. in Manifest 95). Ironically, as separatists are working to shore up the borders of “Indian country,” “Euroamerica remains involved in an unceasing ideological struggle to confine Native Americans within an essentialized territory defined by the authoritative utterance ‘Indian’” (Owens, Mixedblood 27). By advocating exclusion, separatists and Euroamerica, it seems, are colluding in the project of colonialism, while mixedbloods like Vizenor “resist this ideology of containment and […] insist upon the freedom to reimagine themselves within a fluid, always shifting frontier space” (27). On this point Vizenor quotes Danilo Kis, who, in Homo Poeticus, writes, “nationalism is the ideology of banality” (17; qtd. in Vizenor, Fugitive 39), and “paranoia, individual and collective paranoia” (39; emphasis original). In order to effectively resist this fascistic ideology of containment and banality, the first order of business, for Vizenor, is to challenge the very idea of indian.[li] To Kis’s argument that nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic, or ethical” (Kis 18; qtd. in Vizenor, Fugitive 39), Vizenor adds,

likewise, the racialist ties of indian identities are creases of paranoia and dominance, the banal ideologies of victimry. The indian must sacrifice the uncertainties of individual experiences and count a kitschifacient simulation as a real native presence. The new enemies of the indian kitschymen are natural reason, wordsters, and spiritistic consumers. Truly, the fickle crystal setters in search of the authenticity and overreal were crossed by the kitschymen. The chance of native stories and trickster hermeneutics is sure to deconstruct the indian simulations of a consumer presence. (39; emphasis original)

Deconstructing “racialist ties to indian identities” and “indian simulations” is what Vizenor attempts to do in all of his writings. In “Tricksters and Transvaluations,” the Prologue to his novel The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988), he writes, “the trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (xi; emphasis original). While Vizenor, since the beginning of his career as a journalist and teacher, has consistently argued that “we’re all invented as Indians” (Bowers and Silet 45), it is in his first novel, Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles,[lii] that Vizenor attempts to articulate fully the notion that indians are a Western invention.

The idea of “Indian,” as Vizenor uses the term, is a terminal creed. It is an imposed, static representation taken as real. In Manifest Manners Vizenor writes, “the Indian was an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation; the word has no referent in tribal languages or cultures. The postindian is the absence of the invention, and the end of representation in literature” (11). When separatists call for an “authentic” native literature, they are appealing to authentic or accurate representation of the real: real Indians, real culture. Womack’s critique, in Red on Red, of Alice Callahan’s Wynema is grounded in the question of (mis)representation, and thus of the simulation, wherein the real is the simulation and the simulation is the real. He writes, “in addition to the rejection of Creek culture, there is misrepresentation of culture, but misrepresentation of a particularly interesting ilk […] What interests me here is not that Callahan’s depiction is grossly inaccurate, not that she gets it wrong. I am struck by how wrong she gets it, and by the fact that she has to be purposefully, not accidentally, misrepresenting culture” (115). Vizenor’s response to misrepresentation is not a return to the real, but rather a rejection of representation altogether, the “end of representation in literature” (Vizenor, Manifest 11). “There can never be ‘correct’ or ‘objective’ readings of the text or the tropes in tribal literatures,” Vizenor writes, echoing Harold Bloom, “only more energetic, interesting and ‘pleasurable misreadings’” (Narrative Chance 5).[liii] In the battle over representation, one simulation is inevitably replaced by another. After rejecting Callahan’s depiction of Creek life, Womack simply imposes his own representation, which authentically represents Creek history, Creek land, Creek culture, and “Indian voices” (121).[liv] He insists, in modernist fashion, on “the descriptive function of writing—writing as a ‘picture of reality’” (Tyler 40). Vizenor’s work, though, foregrounds what Colin Samson calls “the trouble with the real” (Samson 286; emphasis original). Samson succinctly articulates Vizenor’s position on the real:

The real as an “it” is a simulation, something real. What is labeled as “real,” what is concluded to be “fact,” what is produced as the trump card over all other forms of making sense of the world, simulates the real experience of people, or in the case of natives, groups of people who become configured as indians. A simulation purports to represent some reality, but, like the indian, it takes on a life of its own, it becomes a free-floating signifier, disconnected from that which it is supposed to represent. As such […] simulations like the indian celebrate the absence of people, not their presence. People—Vizenor’s natives—which are a moving and dynamic presence, are mute and silent beside the simulation. In North America, it is the indian as a simulation that has informed racist cultural representations and repressive public policies. (287)

As is clearly evident, here, Vizenor’s conception of indian is heavily indebted to Western theory generally and Baudrillard specifically. In Simulacra and Simulations Baudrillard writes, “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). The same sentiment is echoed by Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality: “This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (8). “Tribal people,” Vizenor writes in Crossbloods, “have been invented as ‘absolute fakes’” (55). To believe in the real, then, is to believe in an “absolute fake”: parody having collapsed into the real.

It is fair to say Western theory permeates everything Vizenor writes. Indeed, his fiction blurs the boundary between fiction and theory in such a way that his fictional works often seem little more than a working through of his favorite theoretical positions. In contrast to separatists, who reject Western theory as just another manifestation of colonialism and use only ideas “grounded in the influences and complexities of contemporary and historical American Indian life” (Pulitano 63), Vizenor believes that indians should not be precluded from using theoretical tools crafted in the alembic of a Western episteme. He asks, “why not […] avail yourself of both postmodern western theory and crossblood ‘stories in the blood’? Why not, once again, subject text as much as ethnicity or race to a ‘loosening of the seams’” (Lee 269)?[lv] Bearheart, again, like all of his writings, is an example of Vizenor availing himself to postmodern theory and “stories in the blood” in order to overturn terminal creeds and liberate the imagination.

“Writing,” Vizenor argues, “ought to be pushing consciousness,” and Bearheart does just that. It “[pushes] consciousness” (Bowers and Silet 45). “In political terms,” Vizenor argues, “rather than to serve the bourgeoisie and tradition, the function of literature ought to be to continually change and upset, to contradict, in the sense of Marxian esthetic revolution” (45). In stark contrast to separatists who believe literature—grounded in indigenous tribal belief systems—ought to be a continuation of tradition and function politically in the struggle for indigenous identity, sovereignty and land redress, Vizenor’s focus is the liberation of the imagination and the subversion of the bourgeoisie. While Vizenor is still interested in sovereignty, it is of an imaginative kind. In an interview with Kimberly M. Blaeser, Vizenor explains that, for him, “life is different now. Other people have to write about that [reservation life] now. I’m too far from that” (Blaeser 203). In Fugitive Poses he writes, “Native sovereignty is transmotion, and the rights of motion are personal, totemic, and reciprocal; not base line surveys, futurity, or possessory […] Transmotion, that sense of native motion and an active presences, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty” (16, 15). Bearheart , in both content and form, exemplifies “survivance,” what Vizenor calls the “creases” of native transmotion and sovereignty.

In Bearheart, a motley crew of circus pilgrims, seven clown crows and two mongrels, led by Proude Cedarfaire, who, along with his companion, Rosina, were forced off their land by the federal government, are on a journey—they are in motion—to the Fourth World, which they will enter through a vision window at Pueblo Bonito. In this post-apocalyptic tale, written very much in the (trickster) spirit of The Canterbury Tales, Moby Dick, and Pilgrim’s Progress, Vizenor attempts a “conversion of the themes of discovery, western expansion, and manifest destiny […] Bearheart,” the author of this story-within-a-story, “is on a native journey, a reversal of that western movement” (Vizenor and Lee 96). Vizenor explains that Bearheart “is a survivance pilgrimage […] Naturally, as the journey is the sovereignty of motion—and once again, the stories are survivance, not victimry. My novel is heat and irony, not a heroic imitation of action, and the politics of identity is too whiny and mundane to run with the tricky motion of native stories” (96). This passage is important because it highlights the connection between sovereignty and identity, a connection separatists insist upon as well.

Yet, in contradistinction to the separatists, Vizenor puts “sovereignty and identity” in motion, and in so doing they become “vectors,” or “point[s] of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction” (Massumi xiii). In other words, as concepts, sovereignty and identity have “no subject or object other than” themselves (xiii). They are “acts” (xiii). Sovereignty and identity are not to be circumscribed or fixed. They are not to become monotheistic territories, “the closed equation of representation” (xiii). They are to be created in motion, as acts, and in relation to other acts. In Bearheart, the journey to the Fourth World—“the world of imagination, transformation, and survivance” (Vizenor and Lee 98)—“is the sovereignty of motion,” (96); Bearheart is an act of creation and “stories of creation are survivance, as the creation takes place in the performance of the story” (98). While this sentiment—that creation takes place in the performance of the story—is one with which even separatists would agree, the difference between Vizenor’s position and the separatists’ is analogous to that between dialogic and monologic discourse. For separatists, stories are monocultural, home-grown, sovereign, and not the “product of the conjunction of cultural practices” (Pulitano 81). In “Trickster Discourse” Vizenor invokes Todorov to explain Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and to debunk the notion that discourse can exist in isolation:

In his studies of Mikhail Bakhtin, Todorov explains that “human utterance” is an interaction and the context “belongs to history.” The utterance is similar to a sentence, both are discourses. “The most important feature of the utterance […] is its dialogism” or the “intertextual dimension,” which means that “all discourse is in dialogue with prior discourses on the same subject […] There is no utterance without relation to other utterances, and that is essential.” (191)

Having fully embraced postmodernism, and the idea that “the world is a text” (Vizenor, “Postmodern” 5), Vizenor subscribes to the notion that discourse is “the maker of the world, not its mirror […] The world is what we say it is, and what we speak of is the world” (Tyler 37). “Tribal narratives,” he writes, “are discourse and in this sense tribal literatures are the world rather than a representation” (“Postmodern” 5). Being in the world means being in the world with others and sharing language. By sharing language, by being in dialogue, the world and history are created cooperatively. For Vizenor, “language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradiction between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (Bakhtin 291). Following Lyotard and Wittgenstein, Vizenor thinks of these new “‘languages’ of heteroglossia” as language games, and the most important player in this game is the trickster figure. As Velie explains,

to Vizenor trickster is first and foremost a sign in the semiotic sense, a sign in a language game, a comic holotrope. This means that Vizenor conceives of trickster as a product of language, who must be seen in a linguistic context; trickster is not a reified social urge, fitting neatly into the model of a social scientist […] Vizenor describes the comic holotrope as a “dialogism,” meaning that trickster can only be understood as part of a greater whole, the “collection of ‘utterances’ in oral traditions” […] To Vizenor the tribal world view is comic and communal; the comic spirit is centered in trickster, a figure created by the tribe as a whole, not an individual author. (“Discourse” 131)

Because Bearheart is a trickster novel, it is necessarily polyglot, meaning “different voices […] appear in [the] work” (125), and, therefore, it avoids a monologic perspective. It “is a consonance of narrative voices in discourse” (Vizenor, “Trickster” 188), a “comic discourse, a collection of ‘utterances’ in oral traditions; the opposite of a comic discourse is a monologue, an utterance in isolation” (191). “Many voices enter into his texts,” Elizabeth Blair writes (78). “The critic, tribal historian, and polemicist, among others, intrude upon the storyteller. Other texts suggest themselves by both their presence and their absence in the primary text, and the primary text itself slips the seams, reappearing elsewhere in Vizenor’s oeuvre” (78).

If for Vizenor “the trickster is postmodern” (Vizenor, “Postmodern” 9), then the trickster novel is postmodernist fiction, which, as Linda Hutcheon argues, “puts into question that entire series of interconnected concepts that have come to be associated with liberal humanism: autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalisation, system, universalisation, centre, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness, origin” (qtd. in Christopher Butler 52).[lvi] Vizenor, it is clear, does not share Craig Womack’s skepticism about postmodernism. Rather he argues that “postmodernism liberates imagination and widens the audiences for tribal literatures; this new criticism rouses a comic world view, narrative discourse and language games of the past” (“Postmodern” 6). In Red on Red Womack argues that a “key component of nationhood is a people’s idea of themselves, their imaginings of who they are” (14). While Vizenor wouldn’t disagree with Womack on this point generally, he’d certainly take issue with the notion that a “people’s idea of themselves”—their identity—can be generated in isolation (as sovereigns), because “people” or “subjectivities” are “the trace of plural and intersecting discourses, or non-unified, contradictory ideologies, the product of a relational system which is finally that of discourse itself” (Currie 64). He considers narratives in isolation a “limited language game,” a “tragic monologue” (“Postmodern” 12). Vizenor wants to open up narratives, not limit them. As David Carroll writes, “any narrative that predetermines all responses or prohibits any counter narratives puts an end to narrative itself by suppressing all possible alternative actions and responses, by making itself its own end and the end of all other narratives” (77). The trickster in the trickster novel “is agonistic imagination and aggressive liberation, a ‘doing’ in narrative points of view and outside the imposed structures” (Vizenor, “Postmodern”13).

In Bearheart, the chapter entitled “Terminal Creeds at Orion”[lvii] functions as a particularly powerful counterstatement to separatists like Cook-Lynn, Justice, and Womack. In Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, the focus of this particular encounter on the pilgrims’ journey to the Fourth World, Vizenor has created an “Indian” who lacks irony, and therefore can speak authoritatively to the people of Orion about “tribal values” (Vizenor, Bearheart 191).[lviii] Belladonna, who in Bearheart is the “voice” of separatism, has internalized the imposed structures of “Indianness.” Her sense of identity has grown “out of James Fenimore Cooper and John Wayne and centuries of static definitions of ‘Indianness’ imposed—beginning with the very name itself—upon tribal people by an invading and dominating culture” (Owens, Afterword 248). In other words, her internalized sense of identity has grown out of colonialist narratives, and rather than liberating herself from the static definitions these narratives impose, she literally defends them to the death.

Orion, “framed in a great wall of red earthen bricks,” is a settlement of families who were “descendants of famous hunters and western bucking horse breeders” (Vizenor, Bearheart 189). If the circus pilgrims wish to enter Orion for food and rest, they must “be prepared to eat eat eat and defend [their] ideas and views on the universe” (189). The hunters and breeders believe that “narcissism is a form of isolation,” and that “terminal creeds are terminal diseases” (189). They “cannot live without questions” (191). The pilgrims, tired and hungry, agree to the conditions and enter Orion. “While the food was being served the hunters and breeders announced that one of the pilgrims would be obligated to speak after dinner. Belladonna agreed to talk about tribal values” (191). After dinner Belladonna nervously begins her talk about “tribal values and dreams” (194):

“We are raised with values that shape our world in a different light […] We are tribal and that means that we are children of dreams and visions […] Our bodies are connected to mother earth and our minds are part of the clouds […] Our voices are the living breath of the wilderness.” (194)

Before Belladonna can continue, she is interrupted by a hunter who asserts, “my father and grandfathers three generations back were hunters […] They said the same things about the hunt that you said is tribal” (194). The hunter then asks, “Are you telling me that what you are saying is exclusive to your mixedblood race” (194)? “‘Yes!’ snapped Belladonna. ‘I am different than a whiteman because of my values and my blood is different […] I would not be white” (194). An “old woman breeder” then says to Belladonna, “We can see you are different from a man, but tell us how you are so different from white people” (194). Belladonna replies:

“We are different because we are raised with different values [. . .] Our parents treat us different as children […] We are not punished because our parents give us the chance to experience limits […] We are never yelled at as children, our parents use their eyes to tell us what we have done wrong […] We live in larger families and never send our old people to homes to be alone […] Tribal people seldom touch each other[lix] […] We do not invade the personal bodies of others and we do not stare at people when we are talking […] Indians have more magic in their lives than whitepeople.” (194-95)

At this point a “hunter with an orange beard” interrupts Belladonna to “find something out here before [she] makes [him] so different from the rest of the world” (195). He asks her about “this Indian word [she] use[s]” (195). “Tell me which Indians are you talking about, or are you talking for all Indians […] And if you are speaking for all Indians then how can there be truth in what you say” (195)?[lx] Belladonna goes on to claim that “Indians have their religion in common,” that “an Indian is a member of a recognized tribe and a person who has Indian blood,” and that “Indian blood is not white blood” (195).[lxi] But, of course, the hunters continue to question every word Belladonna uses, especially “Indian.”

In a passage that will appear again and again in different form in nearly all of Vizenor’s published works, the hunter with the red beard dutifully informs Belladonna that “Indians are an invention […] You tell me that the invention is different than the rest of the world when it was the rest of the world that invented the Indian […] An Indian is an Indian because he speaks and thinks and believes he is an Indian, but an Indian is nothing more than an invention […] Are you speaking as an invention” (195)? Belladonna, at this point, is obviously tired of being questioned and just wants to get on with her talk. “Mister,” she responds, “does it make much difference what the word Indian means when I tell you that I have always been proud that I am an Indian […] proud […] to speak the voice of mother earth and the sacred past of the tribes” (195). At the request of the hunter, she continues:

“Well, as I was explaining, tribal people are closer to the earth, the meaning and energies of the woodlands and mountains and plains […] We are not a competitive people like the whites who competed this nation into corruption and failure. We are not competitive because we share our lives and dreams and use little from the earth.” (195)

After a female hunter asks Belladonna about her use of the collective pronoun “we,” wondering if she was “talking for all tribal people,” and then criticizes her for her “collective generalizations,” Belladonna “smirked and turned in disgust from the hunters and breeders” because “she,” as they accurately conclude, “does not want her beliefs questioned” (196).

Vizenor uses this chapter generally and Belladonna specifically to challenge the terminal beliefs of natives who have internalized static definitions of “Indianness” and perpetuate native victimry. As one breeder explains to Bishop Parasimo, “your mixedblood friend is a terminal believer and a victim of her own narcissism” (198). When the bishop, in his “trine word habit” (97), asserts, “but we are all all all victims,” a breeder responds in words that might as well be Vizenor’s own:

“The histories of tribal cultures have been terminal creeds and narcissistic revisionism […] If the tribes had more humor and less false pride then the families would not have collapsed under so little pressure from the whiteman […] Show me a solid culture that disintegrates under the plow and the saw? […] Surviving in the present means giving up on the burdens of the past and the cultures of tribal narcissism […] No other culture has based social and political consciousness on terminal creeds […] Survival is not narcissism […] All terminal creeds fail.” (198)

Monologues are terminal creeds, because it is only in a monologue that definitions can go without being questioned; and like terminal creeds, all monologues, according to Vizenor, fail. They “collapse inward” (198). And Belladonna “cannot give up her frail bromides without facing the fear of collapsing inward,” said the breeder with a scar on her forehead (198). The way to avoid terminal creeds or monologues, the way to avoid “collapsing inward (192),” is to question, to recognize that “there are no last words to this world” (192).[lxii] “Questions and verbal doubts,” said one woman breeder at Orion, “keep us from the voices of internal violence […] the violence that comes from shaving conversations too close to agreements” (192). A monologue, here, is to be understood as a kind of internal violence, because it precludes a counternarrative. It functions to block dialogue. What makes Bearheart a “trickster novel,” among other things, is its resistance to monologue, its “emphasis upon community rather than individuality and upon syncretic and dynamic values in place of the cultural suicide inherent in stasis” (Owens, Afterword 249).

Drawing on Norman Mailer’s “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” Vizenor, in “Trickster Discourse,” writes, “comic shit is a smooth sign and shit floats in trickster narratives, but when the ‘communication within us’ is blocked, when the comic holotrope is ruined with literal shit, ‘the odors and shapes are tortured, corrupt, rich, fascinating […] even tragic” (204). For Vizenor internal violence, a kind of psychological constipation, is the result of monologic discourse, that is, when “communication within us” is blocked. This blockage, Vizenor asserts, is a terminal disease. And, again, it is what Deleuze and Guattari call “fascism”—the “desire” through representation to reduce “manyness to the One of identity” (Massumi xiii), to the “very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault, Preface xiii). It is the desire for a circumscribed territory, a literal sovereign nation in which identity can be shored up. By refusing dialogue, one resists what Mailer calls a “bowel inspection” (Vizenor, “Trickster” 204), and he recommends such an inspection, “because feces are the material evidence of the processes of communication within us” (204). To avoid internal violence, to avoid the fascism within us, one must submit to a bowel inspection, to dialogue, to narrative flow.

In trickster narratives, like Bearheart, “shit floats” and flows. And if for Deleuze and Guattari, schizoanalysis is the cure for fascism, for Vizenor, “tricky stories are the cure” for “terminal creeds” (Vizenor and Lee 38). Tricky stories are dialogic (diarrhetic). They are desiring-machines. They are intertextual. They connect up with other texts, as “desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented […] Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objections” (Deleuze and Guattari, AO 5-6). Tricky stories, which seek to turn readers into tricksters, disrupt boundaries or loosen “seams.” They refuse closure. Vizenor writes:

The trickster narrative situates the participant audience, the listeners and readers, in agonistic imagination: there, in comic discourse, the trickster is being, nothingness and liberation; a loose seam in consciousness; that wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences and narratives; and, at last, the trickster is comic shit […] This comic liberator is a healer in language games, chance and postmodern imagination; the trickster, as semiotic sign, ‘denies presence and completion,’ that romantic ‘vital essence’ in tribal representations, and the instrumental language of social sciences. (“Trickster” 196, 192)

In Trickster of Liberty, the warrior clown asserts, “‘those people who dread the trickster and the mind monkey must dread their own freedom’” (42). Those who dread tricky narratives that refuse closure and resist authentic tribal representations, for Vizenor, “dread their own freedom.”[lxiii] By refusing the liberatory and healing power of playful language, they desire that which dominates and exploits them. In a trickster narrative, by contrast, “the listeners and readers imagine their liberation; the trickster is a sign and the world is ‘deconstructed’ in a discourse” (Vizenor, “Trickster” 194). The “words,” in this discourse, “heal by refusing to take themselves seriously” (Blair 88), and in Bearheart, Vizenor creates the Bioavaricious Word Hospital to satirize those who demand meaning and clarity in language, those who believe language functions mimetically and describes the world rather than creates it.

Located in Bioavaricious, Kansas, the Word Hospital is “where terminal creeds—language whose meaning is fixed, language without creative play—are the goal of the hospital staff” (Owens, Other 237). As one of the staff members explains: “When government discovered that there was something wrong with our language,” and that “the breakdown in law and order, the desecration of institutions, the hardhearted investigations, but most of all the breakdown in traditional families was [due to] a breakdown in communication […] elected officials creat[ed] this word hospital and eight others in the nation” (Vizenor, Bearheart 166). At the hospital, a “dianoetic chromatic encoder” is “used to code and then reassemble the unit values of meaning in a spoken sentence” (167). A “tall woman” at the hospital goes on to explain that:

Each word in this sentence, for example, […] would be encoded and given a color value such as red for hot words and cool blue for other words. Each word in the language has a color coded value and chromatic meaning in association with these words. Chromatic deductions on several thousand lines of free verse were turned over to intelligence organizations […] We have also encoded the speeches and writings of radical organizers and terrorists. For examples, we have studied the possessive nouns and shifting verbs of Dennis Banks from the old American Indian Movement, the writings of Patricia Hearst and Bertrand Cellanoid. The last chromatic studies were made on the words of Charles Manson, in fact, the machine stopped on one of his prison messages, dreamers dreaming dreams of dreams dreaming dreamers. (167-68)

While such scenes are undoubtedly funny, humor being the modus operandi of the trickster narrative, Vizenor’s critique is quite serious. As Louis Owens points out, the Bioavaricious Word Hospital “seems suspiciously like a metaphor for the Euroamerican colonial endeavor seen from the point of view of the American Indian. Certainly the entire westering impulse of American manifest destiny is indisputably bioavaricious, devouring the continent—and now the third world—as it attempts to re-form the world in its own image” (Other 237). Vizenor’s critique is equally applicable to separatists who want to control the language/discourse of and about natives, and who do so by “regulating and defending” the “parameters” of native studies (Cook-Lynn, “Radical” 11).

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, for example, has regularly “denounced native scholars in universities who carried on dialogues furnished for them by Euro-American traditions,” calling them “‘Colonial laureates’” (Samson 281). For Cook-Lynn, “her own political convictions [are] certainties, and her unifying call [is] racialist and nationalist” (281). Like the staff at the Bioavaricious Word Hospital who search for certainty in language, Cook-Lynn finds certainty in the language of racialism and “a restricted nationalist agenda for Native American Studies” (280). Such a “restricted” agenda, grounded as it is in the terminal creeds of race and nation, is a terminal disease. It is monologic and fascistic. It “restricts” dialogue and limits discourse. It blocks the flow of communication. And as Vizenor, in an interview with Kimberly Blaeser, explains:

To me there is no more profound gesture in communication, or I want to use the word discourse […] than to set someone free in talk. This is so precious and so gentle and so powerful because so often people don’t set us free—they try to control us with language […] I think the simplest act of personal liberation is imagination, talk, the play of imagination—in other words, talking so that an idea actually is part of it yet sets you out of it. (4)

By restricting dialogue and limiting the flow of discourse, Cook-Lynn can control meaning. She can, for example, determine “the appropriate interpretation” and thus the truth “of traditional literatures” (“Fiction” 93).

If, as Vizenor argues, the “function of literature ought to be to continually change and upset, to contradict” (Bowers and Silet 45), then the monologic, “garrison mentality” of the separatists must be rejected (Vizenor, Earthdivers 11; emphasis original). In contrast to separatists, Vizenor “himself, his literary creations, and his philosophy,” as Blaeser rightfully argues, “all breathe multiplicity” (Blaeser 4). Blaeser writes, his work “refuses […] definition or categorization. His work, his life, and his theory exist in the continuous process of unraveling truth, because the unraveling demands imaginative participation and the freedom to continue growth and discovery” (4). Separatists who do “not envision any moment of dialogue with Western critical discourse” (Pulitano 79), and who, like Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, “would live as inventions” by defining themselves “according to the predetermined values of the sign ‘Indian” (Owens, Afterword 254), and who, like Hannah in Vizenor’s Griever, “attempt to define [themselves] as ‘Indian’ to the exclusion of [his/her] mixedblood ancestry[lxiv] and, more fatally, to the exclusion of change” (250), especially the change brought on by five hundred years of contact with Euro-Americans, are “victims of their own terminal vision” (254). Vizenor’s trickster novels, which are, as I have argued, fictionalizations of his theory, function to open up dialogue by rejecting static definitions and categories that prohibit communication with others.

As he is well aware, the novel as a form is particularly suited for such a task. According to Bakhtin, “the development of the novel is a function of the deepening of dialogic essence, its increased scope and greater precision. Fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements (‘rock bottom truths’) remain that are not drawn into dialogue. Dialogue moves into the deepest molecular and, ultimately, subatomic levels” (300). “The novel,” Michael Holquist adds, “is the characteristic text of a particular stage in the history of consciousness not because it marks the self’s discovery of itself, but because it manifests the self’s discovery of the other” (75). This point, for Vizenor, is crucial. Trickster novels or dialogic novels, as we saw with Bearheart, do not collapse inward, but rather “collapse outward” (Vizenor, Bearheart 198). That is, they make connections outside themselves. “They exist in the process of becoming” (Blaeser 4). “Other becomings will link up here, molecular-becomings in which the air, sound water are grasped in their particles at the same time as their flux combines with mine. A whole world of micro-perceptions which lead us to the imperceptible. Experiment, never interpret. Make programmes, never make phantasms” (Deleuze and Parnet 48). As Vizenor says of himself: “I am still discovering who I am, the myth in me […] I am part crow, part dragonfly, part squirrel, part bear. I kick the sides of boxes out. I will not be pinned down. I am flying home in words and myths” (“Gerald” 168).[lxv]

Part IV: Vizenor’s Cosmopolitan Consciousness: Griever: An American Monkey

Like Vizenor himself, Vizenor’s narratives cannot be pinned down. They are endlessly allusive and elusive. They collapse outward and defy all delimiting categories. They include—rather than exclude—“any material […] fit to receive man’s stories” (Barthes, Image 142). As Barthes writes, in Image—Music—Text,

away, the negative where all identity is lost […] As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself […] the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins […] Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances—as though any material would fit to receive man’s stories. (79, 142; emphasis original).

Having fully aligned himself with the postmodern tradition, he embraces what Charles Russell calls the “field of free play” (248). “Postmodern creation,” Russell writes, “is expressed in the acceptance, even glorification, of play, chance, indeterminancy, and self-conscious performance” (248).

In contradistinction to the staff members at the Bioavaricious Word Hospital who want to stop play, chance, and indeterminancy, preferring static definitions, clear interpretations and, therefore, certainty, Vizenor rejects interpretation and certainty, because it stops play. Vizenor’s Bearheart, then, functions as a counterstatement to narratives of closure, whether those narratives are grounded in native traditions—as separatists argue they should be—or not. In this first novel, Vizenor, a “storier of tricky scenes,” gives us a tricky story meant to challenge “terminal creeds” and terminal believers (Vizenor and Lee 37). In Bearheart Vizenor begins the project of upsetting boundaries and pushing consciousness by going beyond not only the tribal nation but beyond the borders of the United States. In stark contrast to the novels of Craig Womack and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, in both Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987) and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2004), Vizenor’s work goes international, and his novels become transcultural zones of contact. The “field of free play” in these novels now includes both China and Japan, respectively, and any other “material […] fit to receive” (Barthes, Image 142) his tricky narratives.

If essays, as Scott Russell Sanders argues, in The Paradise of Bombs, are “experiments in making sense of things” (xiii), “stories,” for Vizenor, are the way cultures come to terms with existence, how they make sense of the world around them” (Velie, “Indian” 91). And due to the process of globalization, as cultures come into contact more and more, new, broader stories are needed. As Gómez-Pena argues, in Dangerous Border Crossers, “as our (cultural) continents collide and overlap in the rapid process of ‘globalization,’[lxvi] the ongoing migration of South to North and East to West redefines not only geopolitical borders, but also language (the currency of lingua franca), identity (national and personal), activism, art and popular culture” (11). Like Gómez-Pena, himself a trickster, an activist and a performance artist, in Vizenor’s Griever and Hiroshima we see, in Griever and in Nightbreaker, respectively, the trickster figure functioning or performing as “a cross-cultural diplomat, an intellectual coyote (smuggler of ideas) or a media pirate. At other times, s/he assumes the role of nomadic chronicler, intercultural translator, or political trickster,” someone who is always disobeying, trespassing, bridging gaps, remapping, reinterpreting, and redefining, all in order to “find the outer limits of his/her culture and cross them” (Gómez-Pena, New World 12; emphasis original). Unlike the separatists who turn inward for meaning, Vizenor turns outward to undo meaning, to keep “meaning” (and what Rorty calls a “final vocabulary”) at bay, in order to open up the greatest number of interpretive and communicative possibilities. His novels, in this way, invite “intercultural dialogue, radical thinking, and community building” (16).

Vizenor begins Griever: An American Monkey King in China—a novel in which the Anishinaabe trickster figure, Naanabozho, (dis)incarnated here as Griever de Hocus, meets his trickster cousin, the Chinese Monkey King—with four important epigraphs that provide clues as to how to “experience” or “encounter” Griever, and, by extension, all of Vizenor’s narratives. Of the four epigraphs, three are particularly useful, and have significance not only for understanding Vizenor’s theoretical position, but for illuminating the cross-cultural elements of the novel. The first is a quotation from Octavio Paz’s The Monkey Grammarian: “Writing is a search for the meaning that writing itself violently expels. At the end of the search meaning evaporates and reveals to us a reality that literally is meaningless.” Here Vizenor is admonishing us not to go in search of meaning, as Oedipa Mass does, for example, in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In Griever, we do, though, follow Griever as s/he goes on a quest for manuscripts, as Oedipa Mass seeks to solve the mystery of Tristero. Griever finds a recipe and Oedipa finds nothing. Both Griever and The Crying of Lot 49, in this sense, subvert “the question” and negate “the very idea of pilgrimage” (Rigal-Cellard 334). But because the trickster is “a semiotic sign; not cultural material or discovered elements that are recomposed to endorse invented models in social science,” that is, because the trickster exists in language, trickster discourse is always going to elude meaning (Vizenor, “Trickster” 188). Griever, for example, is preoccupied with “between categories” and “live[s] interstitially” (Babcock 154; emphasis original).[lxvii] For Vizenor, “we,” always an “I” that contains multitudes, “meet at the seams” (Interior 263), and meaning, fleeting and contingent as it is, is performed at the interstices.

The second epigraph is from James J. Y. Liu’s Essentials of Chinese Literary Art: “Chinese drama is largely nonrepresentational or nonmimetic: its main purpose is expression of emotion and thought, rather than representation or imitation of life. In other words, it does not seek to create an illusion of reality, but rather seeks to express human experience in terms of imaginary characters and situations.” This, too, is the “main purpose” of Griever. The novel does not represent or imitate life. It is nonmimetic and non-representational. “Monologic realism and representation in tribal literatures,” Vizenor writes, “is a ‘bureaucratic solution’ to neocolonialism and the consumption of narratives and cultures” (“Postmodern” 6). In Red on Red, Womack, who embraces realism and representation in tribal literatures, finds just such a “bureaucratic solution” to neocolonialism: “Whatever one might argue about postmodern representation, there is the legal reality of tribal sovereignty, recognized by the U.S. Constitution and defined over the last 160 years by the Supreme Court, that affects the everyday lives of individuals and tribal nations and, therefore, has something to do with tribal narratives as well” (6).

Unlike Vizenor, Womack here rejects the “postmodernist claim that Native and non-Natives are constantly deconstructing each other” (Pulitano 79). Monologic realism and representation function in the service of what Vizenor calls bureaucracy and Gómez-Pena calls a “homogenized global culture” (New World 11). And like Gómez-Pena, Vizenor opposes a “homogenized global culture,” as well as the emergences of a new essentialist culture, “one that advocates national, ethnic, and gender separatism in the quest for cultural autonomy, ‘bio-regional identity,’ and ‘traditional values’” (11). Against these two alternatives—ultranationalism or a homogenized global culture—Gómez-Pena offers a third: “the hybrid—a cultural, political, aesthetic, and sexual hybrid” (11), or what Vizenor simply calls “the trickster.” The hybrid or trickster, then, performs identity. It does not express a pre-existing sense of identity but is always in the process of becoming, which brings us to the third epigraph Vizenor uses to introduce Griever.

In Chinese Shadows Simon Leys writes,[lxviii] “A Chinese sociologist has most convincingly described how the Chinese tend to look at human behavior in terms of role-playing and to consider themselves somewhat as actors playing their own existence.” The emphasis here is on the performative quality of identity. “Literary performance,” Vizenor writes, “is at the heart of my stories” (Vizenor and Lee 125). And Griever “has a tricky brilliance, and his performances truly liberate people in stories” (122). If Griever, as a youngster, liberated the soon-to-be-dissected frogs in science class to the dismay of the teacher who quickly designated him the “frog king” (Vizenor, Griever 49), and freed the chickens[lxix] and the cock he’d later name Matteo Ricci from the market in Tianjin, China, where he was teaching, his tricky performances are meant to loosen “the seams in the coarse shrouds of imposed identity” (Vizenor, Interior 262). While Griever does not so much liberate people as he does animals, Griever, the novel, is meant to deterritorialize the minds of readers. Griever, Vizenor remarks, was “created in the intellectual tradition of the freedom of thought, and the stories of transformation could be an inspiration to those readers who might loosen the seams of authoritarian governments” (Vizenor and Lee 123). In Griever, China is used “as the signifier for all colonizing regimes […] all mind-colonizing societies, including his own” (Rigal-Cellard 317, 324), in other words, all regimes and societies that try to stop the flow of meaning, pin down identity by denying its performative quality, and stop communication.

In Griever, Griever, like all tricksters, is androgynous. He is able to “transmute himself into his opposite” (321-22). At the end of “Free the Garlic,” in Griever, we see our trickster become “a woman there beneath [Sugar Dee’s] hair, and with thunder in her ears, she peeled the blossoms; she pulled her head down in the lamben heat, down on her breasts; dibbled and sheared her high nipples with the point of her tongue” (55). In the bawdy fashion of tricksters, Griever changes into a woman to suckle the lesbian Sugar Dee’s breasts. Because Griever, in contrast to those “subjects” separatists champion, is a post-humanist trickster, he will not be pinned down by the restrictive regimes of race, class, gender, or human. (Griever, we are told, is half human, half simian). He is polymorphous. He is a “holosexual trickster, an erotic perpetrator of many genders” (Vizenor and Lee 118). In Earthdivers, to describe the trickster, Vizenor quotes from Susan Stewart’s Nonsense: “As the embodiment of disparate domains, trickster is analogous to the process of metaphor, the incorporation of opposites into a new configuration” (105). This “new configuration,” according to Paul Radin, who Vizenor is rather fond of quoting,[lxx] is “at one and the same time, creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes and who is duped himself” (ix). Not surprisingly, following Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva “has called such coexistence of opposites ‘dialogic’” (Babcock 164).

In “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Barbara Babcock writes, Kristeva “sees the dialogical tradition originating in Menippean satire and carnival that are characterized by a plurality of languages (sign systems), a confrontation of types of discourse and ideologies with no conclusion and no synthesis—a polyphony which makes monologue impossible. Dialogic phenomena such as tricksters […] are also singularly resistant to monological interpretation” (164). Griever, then, in his many guises resists static definition, a characteristic which makes him particularly suited for cross-cultural encounters. Griever, like all of Vizenor’s tricksters, is a mixedblood who inhabits that “between” space—“between” at least two worlds, and “between” at least two cultures. As Rigal-Cellard argues, “more than ‘of two worlds,’ he is ‘of three worlds’” (330).

In Griever, the trickster balances tenuously between the world of China and the anishinaabeg (and on the margin, the “third world,” of each), and, therefore, embodies Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity.” Hybridity dismantles “essentialist notions of identity and pure origins” (Pulitano 178). Vizenor’s “trickster hermeneutics” (Vizenor and Lee 128), which celebrates the hybridity of the mixedblood/trickster, also has much in common with what Bhabha calls the “third space.” As Bhabha suggests, “The importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (Rutherford 211). Vizenor’s Griever, then, is just this “third space.” It is the very space—a veritable contact zone—out of which Vizenor’s “new consciousness of coexistence” can emerge (Vizenor, Earthdivers ix). And this new consciousness is necessarily cosmopolitan. As Stonequist writes, “the fate which compels [the trickster or ‘marginal man’] to live, at the same time, in two worlds is the same which compels him to assume, in relation to the worlds in which he lives, the role of cosmopolitan and stranger” (xvii). In Griever, Vizenor puts his trickster hermeneutics, which negotiates between different epistemologies, into practice (Pulitano 178).

Griever, we are told, is “a mixedblood tribal trickster, a close relative to the old mind monkeys; he holds cold reason on a lunge line while he imagines the world” (Vizenor, Griever 34). Those who imagine new worlds are liberators, and “those who liberate, in traditional stories, are the heroes of the culture” (40). In this sense, then, Vizenor’s hero is the cosmopolitan trickster—a “mind monkey” (21)—who is unafraid to imagine new worlds. In creating Griever, Vizenor brought together the tricky mind monkey (of Journey to the West) and Naanabozho, the anishinaabe trickster. He “decided then to bring these two fantastic characters together in name, creation, irony, cultural play, and cousinry” (Vizenor and Lee 166). These characters subvert “authoritarianism” (120) and counter “ideologies of absolute control” (121). They, in short, upset terminal creeds, including those creeds that underwrite the “politics of nations” (125). “Nationalism,” for Vizenor, “is the most monotonous simulation of dominance in the first person pronouns of tribal consciousness. The stories of tribal names chase new metaphors as the simulations of survivance” (Manifest 60).

The mixedblood trickster, then, stands as a new metaphor in Vizenor’s work. As Blaeser writes, the “metaphor of the mixedblood itself represents a confluence in Vizenor, standing as it does not merely for the condition of race but also for the mixedblood conditions of culture, spiritual values, and traditions, sites of knowledge and truth, and personal and social motives, as well as for the mixed conditions of literary traditions” (156). Vizenor’s Griever is the “third space”[lxxi] in which the cosmopolitan culture hero Griever practices his trickster hermeneutics to upset all boundaries (Cook-Lynn’s “parameters”) and ideologies to create a new cosmopolitan consciousness. In the final scene of Griever: An American Monkey King in China, we see Griever literally take flight in an ultra-light and Vizenor fly home in a narrative flourish as he pushes toward a new cosmopolitan consciousness, “a new consciousness of coexistence” (Vizenor, Earthdivers ix).

In Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, a kabuki novel,[lxxii] the trickster finds himself in Japan overturning the “ideology of peace” (Vizenor, Hiroshima 81). But it is not the plot of Hiroshima that interests me here. If in Griever Vizenor wedded the Chinese mind monkey to the anishanaabe trickster figure Nannabozho to create the hybrid Griever, in Hiroshima Vizenor gives us Ronin, a “hafu” (or mixedblood/hybrid), whose father, Nightbreaker, was an anishinaabe from the White Earth reservation, in the U.S., and whose mother, Okichi, a “bugi” dancer (8), “might have been Ainu from Hokkaido” (51). The narrator informs us that “the Ainu are the indigenous natives of the islands of northern Japan […] The Ainu and the anishinaabe told similar stories about natural reason, their creation, animal totems, and survivance” (51).[lxxiii] Ronin is “a unique and ironic healer, a trickster by stories, not by character simulations. ‘I am hafu, a ronin trickster by chance of my conception,’ he told a journalist, and explained that his presence is not secured by a pure originary moment. His native stories evade closure and victimry” (64).[lxxiv] By bringing together these cultural conventions and parallels in Griever and Hiroshima Bugi, Vizenor is evoking the collective experience that goes beyond individualism.

As he did in Griever, rather than turning inward toward his own culture, Vizenor in Hiroshima looks outward to other cultures to make connections with and to make “sense of the world around” him (Velie, “Indian” 91). In Hiroshima Vizenor, through Ronin, puts Shinto in dialogue with indigenous anishanaabe beliefs, showing that cross-cultural contact does not destroy “traditional” beliefs but rather is essential for survivance. The narrator writes, “Ronin is a master of uncertainties and survivance. He revels in the stories of the kami, the spirits and shrines, and savors the sensibilities of a religion that has no missionaries, but he spurns the divine descent of the emperor. Royalty, he told me, is a depraved convention of cruel separatism and mannered dominance” (63). The “emperor,” Ronin asserts, is “fascistic” (63), because he’s a nationalist who tried to control Shinto, and, we are told, he succeeded in doing so for a time (63). But in Shinto, “there are no monotheistic creators, no grave founders, no sacred scriptures, no authoritarian doctrines, and no sincere notions of almighty dominance” (63). As in the anishinaabe belief system, Shinto “honors the kami, the mountains, animals, rivers, stones, and more” (63). The trickster, Vizenor tells us, in The People Named the Chippewa, “is related to plants and animals and trees; he is a teacher and healer in various personalities who, as numerous stories reveal, explains the values of healing plants, wild rice, maple sugar, basswood, and birch bark to woodland tribal people” (3-4). And as Ronin tells the narrator, “the Shino kami and the anishinaabe manidoo[lxxv] are common ancestors in my dreams’ […] Animals and birds are the primary source of his visions” (64). Despite the emperor’s desire to control Shinto—to make the religion about the emperor himself, to own it exclusively—we see that such containment is impossible. And this is precisely Vizenor’s point.

Griever and Hiroshima Bugi manifest Vizenor’s cross-cultural dialogic approach to literature, which merges anishinaabe beliefs with Eastern and indigenous epistemes and “effaces spatial boundaries” (Babcock 159). By mixing culture and cultural influences, Vizenor critiques static notions of identity, and refuses delimiting categories and boundaries that prevent or block the flow of communication. In other words, he rejects categories of exclusion, recognizing that “exclusions are what racist culture is all about” (Martinez 3).[lxxvi] His novels are cosmopolitan in the sense that they attempt to create what Arnold Krupat calls “the polyvocal polity” (Voice 216), and what Allon White refers to as a “complex of co-existing and mutually understanding cultures,” an “ultimate political perspective of humanity as a unity-in-difference” (White 233). Bearheart, Griever, and Ronin free the flow of energy from totalitarian nation-states: the U.S. and corrupt tribal governments in Bearheart, China in Griever, and the Japanese emperor in Hiroshima Bugi. By extension, they work to subvert the terminal creeds (“authoritarian doctrines”) of tribal nations and static notions of personal identity and authentic literary traditions.

What Griever and Hiroshima Bugi demonstrate is that “strategies of hybridization and cultural syncretism are already going on in the literature produced by Native American authors. They are the result of the ‘conjunction of cultural practices” that have “shaped Native-European” and Eastern “relations for more than five hundred years” (Pulitano 190).[lxxvii] This conjunction is nowhere more evident than in the final pages of Hiroshima Bugi. “The Japanese,” Ronin once told the narrator,

have always been influenced by the outside, and at the most critical moments in their history. Theatre, arts, and literature were saved by outsiders […] This irony provided him [Ronin] with a vision and sense of adventure. There were times when he seemed convinced that by shouts, encounters of the kami spirits, and trickery he could create stories of human dignity and survivance, rather than the dead letters of tradition, obedience to the emperor, and peace poses” (205-06).

Dead letters of tradition are the result of stagnation brought on by isolation, ultranationalism, and separatism.

While cosmopolitanism imagines a world of cultural interaction, the border of various discourses always the “shimmering fluid zone of trickster” (Pulitano 191), separatists imagine a world apart, where knowledge and traditions are “owned” by or belong to the tribes, “who retain or should retain (individually, collectively, ‘nationally’?) primary if not exclusive rights to possession and use” (Krupat, Turn 20). In Hiroshima Bugi Vizenor warns against such a vision, arguing that the ownership of and blind adherence to tradition and the notion of an authentic tribal past is myopic. And Dell Hymes agrees. Hymes writes, “a world in which knowledge of each people was owned exclusively by that people itself would be culturally totalitarian. Just as it is indefensible to have an anthropology in which only outsiders know, and insiders are only known, so it is simply to reverse that inequity. None of us is able to stand outside ourselves sufficiently to know ourselves comprehensively” (42-43). Yet the desire to defend the parameters of Native Studies and the borders of tribal nations against cosmopolitans—both natives and non-natives—persists.

Cook-Lynn openly decries “Native Indian writers [who] accept the notion that they can, and perhaps should, with impunity become cosmopolitans, serving as translators of materials into an already existing mode, or that they can and should legitimize ‘hybridity,’ or that they can and should transcend national affiliations, or that they can and should simply serve as ‘exotica’” (“Fiction” 83-4).[lxxviii] Yet Cook-Lynn, like Womack, is a novelist, and as Bakhtin argues: “Diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre” (300; emphasis mine). While it is true that Bakhtin speaks of monologic novels,[lxxix] novels by Native Americans, because they’re written in a contact zone, on the fluid border of various discourses (political, cultural, ethical, religious), cannot help but contain, as all dialogic novels do, a diversity of voices. And those voices are always already shot through with the language of (an) other(s). On this point, Owens writes, “separatist sentiments are easy to understand but difficult in the end to ratify entirely. The real problem is that we do not have the luxury of simply opting out because, whether we are heard by Said, Sollors, or others, we already function within the dominant discourse. To think otherwise is naïve at best, for the choice was made for all of us generations ago” (Mixedblood 52). Rather than cynically deny this reality, Vizenor creates novels that form the “basis for a transfrontier communitas” (Rigal-Cellard 337), what Pulitano calls “a global community” (191).

In this way, Vizenor’s novels resemble what Mary Louise Pratt calls “autoethnographic expression[s],” which “undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (7; emphasis original). “Autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations […] They are bilingual and dialogic […] [and] are typically heterogenous on the reception end as well, usually addressed both to metropolitan readers and to literate sectors of the speaker’s own social group, and bound to be received very differently by each” (7). Not being satisfied with simply engaging in a dialogue with “the colonizer’s own terms,” Vizenor looks beyond the frontier space of the U.S. (and the West) to a global communitas. Vizenor’s work enacts his belief that “we can aspire to forms of democracy capable of resisting racialization[lxxx] and its distinctive hierarchies and of answering the powerful appeal of nationalisms with a cosmopolitan utopia” (Gilroy 284).[lxxxi] Vizenor’s engagement with and utilization of postmodern theory (in tandem with the subversive trickster figure who, embodying the postmodern, upsets both boundaries and hierarchies) is a crucial part of his larger project, which is to open up dialogue with “Others” and recognize the “Other” always already “within” the “self,” and to create imaginatively a transcultural zone of contact.

It is not surprising that Vizenor in Griever and Hiroshima Bugi explicitly addresses Chinese and Japanese culture.[lxxxii] The trajectory of his work, in keeping with his long-standing engagement with postmodernism, is one of expansion and greater inclusion, and in this sense his works can be said to be “diasporic.” His postmodern novels challenge static notions of culture, identity, and nation, conceiving them diasporically rather than in “petrified forms” (252). As Gilroy writes,

diasporically resists reification in petrified forms even if they are indubitably authentic. The tensions around origin and essence that the diaspora brings into view allow us to perceive that identity should not be fossilized in keeping with the holy spirit of ethnic absolutism. Identity, too, becomes a noun of process. Its openness provides a timely alternative to the clockwork solidarity based on outmoded notions of ‘race’ and disputed ideas of national belonging. (252)

Vizenor, similarly, believes that cross-pollinating his diasporic trickster hermeneutics with the “best moods of politicized postmodernism” will bear fruit, while, surprisingly, Arnold Krupat, one of Vizenor’s first (yoneg) champions and best explicators, has done his best to rescue Vizenor from postmodernism, that French disease towards which Krupat admits a “general hostility” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 21). While Vizenor, in “Postmodern Introduction,” cites favorably a passage from David Carroll’s “Narrative, Heterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard” to make a case for the “little dissident narratives […] circulat[ing] inside, or even initially, outside the boundaries of the totalitarian state” that work to subvert and discredit it (Carroll 75; Vizenor, “Postmodern” 6), Krupat rather flippantly dismisses Carroll’s—and by extension, Vizenor’s—argument that “wisps of narrative” have any affect whatever on the “dominant metanarrative” (Carroll 75). Rather than engaging Vizenor’s diasporic narratives on their own terms—that is, as postmodern narratives—Krupat attempts to discredit postmodernism and use Vizenor’s work to introduce his own critical methodology called “ethnocriticism,” which is supposed to be more ethnographically sensitive than postmodernism.[lxxxiii]

Vizenor’s work is, admittedly, an exemplary model of the ethnocritical discourse Krupat advocates, and Vizenor’s writings serve Krupat well.[lxxxiv] But the issue is why Krupat, who has proven to be a most incisive critic of Vizenor’s oeuvre, is, like so many Native American separatists, critical of Vizenor’s engagement with postmodernism. Vizenor is quite comfortable using postmodern theories and theorists and, as we have seen, does so frequently. In Postindian Conversations, Vizenor says that “tricky courage comes from those writers and postmodern theorists who have thought about these matters, and who have created a theoretical language of discourse, aesthetic deception, deconstruction, and survivance” (60). But while Vizenor finds postmodern theory useful and postmodern theorists courageous—as trickster figures tend to be—Krupat, like separatists, is critical of Vizenor’s use of postmodern theories both as “fictive strateg[ies] and as a critical approach to Native texts” (Blair 89), arguing that the postmodern is not “native.”[lxxxv] In this sense, Krupat finds himself in good standing with separatists like Womack, Cook-Lynn, Justice, and Warrior.

But to suggest, as Krupat and separatists do, that “the postmodern is not Native is to deny both Vizenor’s identity and his unique abilities as a critic, a writer, and a thinker” (Blair 89). To give Vizenor, the postmodern novelist and critic, his due, we must do the courageous thing and take him at his word. We must read him as a postmodern “storier of tricky scenes” (Vizenor and Lee 37). We must agree that his work is “best exemplified by the figure of the trickster, whose shape-changing, limit-transgressing antics provide the best guide […] to who and what we are, and, as well, to how we ought to read” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 183). And if Vizenor’s diasporic novels manifest a cosmopolitan consciousness, a consciousness of co-existence, then we as readers must become cosmopolitan readers. As K. Anthony Appiah, in “Cosmopolitan Reading,” suggests:

different and welcome to their difference. Cosmopolitan reading is worthwhile because there can be common conversations about share objects, the novel prominent among them. Cosmopolitan reading is possible because those conversations are possible. But what makes the conversations possible is not always shared culture […]; not even, as the older humanists imagined, universal principles […]; nor shared understanding […]. What is necessary to read novels across gaps of space, time, and experience is the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world: and that, it turns out, there are people everywhere more than will to do. (224-25; emphasis original)

Vizenor’s work invites us to “conjure a world,” to actively and ironically re-imagine the past, to actively and ironically imagine the present, and to actively and ironically imagine and then create—“from visual memories and ecstatic strategies”—the future (Vizenor, Chippewa 7). This, for Vizenor, is native survivance.

In The Heirs of Columbus a mongrel[lxxxvi] reminds us that “mongrels created the best humans, we had that crossblood wild bounce in our blood,[lxxxvii] but we never imagined that on two feet the beasts would lose their humor and memories, and turn against those who hauled them from the muck” (16). The cosmopolitan world we conjure, Vizenor suggests, should be one in which humans resist the urge to turn against mongrels, and resist that persistent and loathsome urge to turn against one another. His tricky stories remind us of that “crossblood wild bounce in our blood,” and like Pierce Inverarity, in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Vizenor teaches us to “keep it bouncing […] that’s the secret, keep it bouncing” (148). To keep it bouncing is to celebrate the mongrel in us. It is to celebrate alterity and difference—the cosmopolitan trickster unbound. And like the cosmopolitan trickster Griever, Vizenor “has an unusual imaginative mind […] and he could change the world if he is not first taken to be a total fool” (Griever 49). But Vizenor “[is] not crazy. He ha[s] never been crazy. He ha[s] only seen and heard the world as it always [has been]: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time” (Silko 249).

Notes

[i] See page 217 of Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993).

[ii] On separatism as one strategy of “oppositional consciousness” in the “postmodern world,” see “U.S. Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement I” in Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed (2000).

[iii] One glaring irony regarding government funding is that Native American separatists like Karen Gayton Swisher want non-native scholars to “step aside” and leave scholarship on indigenous peoples to Native scholars. Yet Swisher welcomes federal money—money from the government against which natives are fighting for sovereignty—for American Indians. Because of the Indian Education Act of 1972, which provided money for the education of American Indians, “a contemporary cadre of Indian professionals and practitioners can write about Indian education with great depth and meaning […] Many of these graduates [of major American universities] now are making a difference in Indian education. They are leaders and they are beginning to write” (Swisher 195, 196). Native American separatists serious about sovereignty would generate funds from within tribal nations, rather than accepting federal money.

[iv] On the fragmentation of the subject in postmodernism, see Jameson’s Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), especially 11 and 27.

[v] There are a number of important, recent works exposing the use of violence to exclude the “Other.” For example, on the violent exclusion and mass slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, see Radiyar Omaar’s Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (1994), 347-54; Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2003); as well as Leonard Thompson’s The Political Mythology of Apartheid (1985). For violence against Native Americans, see The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992), ed. M. Annette Jaimes; Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1998) and Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (2004). For a general treatment of genocide, see Eric D. Weitz’ A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (2003). For other examples, see “Chapter 3: Identity, Belonging and the Critique of Pure Sameness” of Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000).

[vi] Derrida argues that the current difficulty of engaging with “others” may stem from the very notion of “tolerance” itself. As Derrida reminds us,

the word “tolerance” is first of all marked by a religious war between Christians, or between Christians and non-Christians. Tolerance is a Christian virtue, or for that matter a Catholic virtue. The Christian must tolerate the non-Christian, but, even more so, the Catholic must let the Protestant be. Since we today feel that religious claims are at the heart of the violence […], we resort to this good old word “tolerance”: that Muslims agree to live with Jews and Christians, that Jews agree to live with Muslims, that believers agree to tolerate “infidels” or “nonbelievers” […] Peace would thus be tolerant cohabitation. (Borradori 126-27)

What Derrida makes clear is that “tolerance,” far from suggesting an unconditional equality—or the idea that “your” ideas/beliefs/values/morality/ethics are just as good as “mine”—implies an unspoken hierarchy; it is “always on the side of the ‘reason of the strongest’” (127). While “my” values are clearly the “right” ones, because of what Rey Chow calls “benevolent tolerance” (Chow 13), I will tolerate your otherness, your deviation from the True path. Tolerance, in other words, “is a supplementary mark of sovereignty, the good face of sovereignty, which says to the other from its elevated position, I am letting you be, you are not insufferable, I am leaving you a place in my home, but do not forget that this is my home” (Borradori 127; emphasis mine). Tolerance, then, as “the good face of sovereignty,” is a sleight of hand.

In place of the notion of tolerance, Derrida posits “hospitality.” Tolerance, for Derrida, is “conditional hospitality,” or a “scrutinized hospitality, always under surveillance, parsimonious and protective of its sovereignty” (128). Conditional hospitality is offered only “on the condition that the other follow our rules, our way of life, even our language, our culture, our political system, and so” (128). In contradistinction to tolerance, then, Derrida suggests “pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, [which] opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other” (128-29; emphasis original). Within the U.S., it is not “hospitality” but “tolerance” that is “most commonly practiced by individuals, families, cities, or states”—and, not surprisingly, academic departments (162). For a lengthy discussion of “hospitality,” see the long, final chapter of Derrida’s Acts of Religion (2002), and for an excellent critique of “benevolent tolerance,” see “Introduction: From Biopower to Ethnic Difference” in Rey Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002).

[vii] For a very fine discussion about how we might learn from “Others,” see Paula Moya’s “Learning How to Learn from Others: Realist Proposals for Multicultural Education” in her Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (2002).

[viii] Paul Gilroy argues, “the emphasis on culture as a form of property to be owned rather than lived characterizes the anxieties of the moment” (24). For a discussion of identity as “ethnic property” or a “cultural possession,” see “Segregated Fiction Blues” in Crouch’s The Artificial White Man (2004), “Criticism and Native American Literature” in Arnold Krupat’s The Turn to the Native (1996), and Michael Brown’s Who Owns Native Culture? (2003).

[ix] See William Styron’s Nat Turner, Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), ed. John Henrik Clarke. For an important and timely discussion about whether white scholars can and/or should teach texts by African American writers, see the essays collected in White Scholars / African American Texts, ed. Lisa A. Long (2005).

[x] See Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s “The Radical Conscience in Native American Studies,” 11. I will discuss Cook-Lynn at length later in this essay.

[xi] As Vizenor points out in The People Named the Chippewa (1984), “in the language of the tribal past, the families of the woodland spoke of themselves as the Anishinaabeg until the colonists named them the Ojibway and Chippewa” (13). In what follows I’ll use anishinaabeg (the plural) or anishinaabe (the singular) where necessary rather than the colonial designations, Ojibway (or Ojibwe) or Chippewa.

[xii] Cook-Lynn’s critique of cosmopolitanism can be found in Chapter 8: “The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty” of her Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996).

[xiii] In Other Destinies (1992), Louis Owens writes, “today, thanks in part to critics such as Foucault and Lyotard, marginalized literatures are moving onto the center screen of critical concerns” (19). Owens does not, though, uncritically celebrate postmodern theory, and he does a very fine job of articulating his reservations about its application to Native American literature in “An Introduction to Indian Novels,” in Other Destinies.

[xiv] While the spectre of Baudrillard can be felt even in Vizenor’s earliest work, including Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), reissued in 1990 as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, the full measure of Baudrillard’s influence is evident in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, the collection of essays wherein Vizenor defines “Indians” in distinctly Baudrillardian terms: “Indians, in this sense, must be the simulations of the ‘absolute fakes’ in the ruins of representation, or the victims in literary annihilation” (9). The work of Deleuze and Guattari has also clearly influenced Vizenor, even though he, as far as I know, only cites them once in all of his oeuvre. See Manifest Manner, 103. I would argue, though, that Vizenor’s work has as much, if not more, in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s than any other single theorist, even those he cites frequently. The opening paragraph of A Thousand Plateaus reads much like a description of Vizenor’s Manifest Manners or Fugitive Poses. There they write: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms [as Vizenor will in Wordarrows, for example] to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not to the point where one no longer says I, but to the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (3). Like A Thousand Plateaus, Vizenor’s books—especially Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses—are “assemblages, [and] as an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs” (4). The first thing one notices when reading Manifest Manners is the way in which Vizenor piles up or assembles quotations from innumerable sources, which has the effect of subordinating his own “name,” making it “unrecognizable.” Vizenor, too, uses everything in range to “show how [he] got to [his] ideas, rather than how [his] ideas are represented as some treasure of authority […] The native trickster,” like Deleuze and Guattari, “teases the ownership of ideas and history” (Vizenor and Lee 127). In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor both invents new words and attributes new connotations to neologisms he created and used in earlier works. He writes, “my vocabulary in these five essays includes several new and connotative words […] Other words […] are used with new connotations” (15). Similarly, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari “multiply the terms of their analysis […] in order to prevent their position from stabilizing in an ideology, method, or single metaphor. If the business of philosophizing is to invent new concepts, as Deleuze believes it is, that is precisely what they [including Vizenor] do, making their work multiply in a myriad of conceptual matrices” (Best and Kellner 98).

[xv] In Coyote Kills John Wayne, Carlton Smith argues that, “while postmodern theory may provide a critical vocabulary with which to interrogate certain marginalized texts, much more significantly, these same marginalized texts provide example and vitality for what some might regard as the overtly cerebral, tiredly European errand of postmodernity. But postmodernism merely explicates what the Other has actually demonstrated. Thus, Derrida explains the arcane mysteries of absence, trace, and the slippery possibilities of presence. But the trickster—favored trope of Native American literature—actually performs these sleight of hands. The texts speak—perform—the same lexicon” (6).

[xvi] While this assertion might seem like too much of a generalization, I make it based on the premise that “nationalist” critics, because they are “nationalist” critics, pay little attention to critical theories not grounded in tribal traditions. Anecdotally, when, during his visit to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I asked Craig Womack about postmodernism, which he criticizes a number of times in Red on Red, he admitted to not having read much about it.

[xvii] “Terminal Creeds” are “static utterance[s] that [insist] upon [their] own authority, taking part in no dialogue” (Owens, Mixedblood 156). Here we see the influence of the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard. Terminal Creeds, I’d argue, are what Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, calls “metanarratives” or “grand narratives,” and what Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, calls a “final vocabulary,” which is “‘final’ in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force” (73). We can see here why authoritarian regimes—like China in Vizenor’s Griever; The Republic in Plato’s Republic; Christian colonizers, many anthropologists, and sadly, separatists—seek to tame or destroy those, like the trickster figure, who prefer postmodern language games over static utterances and monologues.

[xviii] The publication of Narrative Chance in 1989 alone is evidence that Vizenor’s engagement with postmodernism is more than superficial or fleeting. Krupat’s decision to ignore or downplay Vizenor’s investment in postmodernism says little about Vizenor and a lot about Krupat.

[xix] Vizenor addresses the issue of autoposers at length in “Wistful Envies” in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998).

[xx] In conversation with A. Robert Lee, Vizenor singles out Ward Churchill for critique: “The grand leader of natives by victimry is Ward Churchill, but ironically, he serves a rather modernist cause of victimry. The theater of native victimry, it seems, attracts the largest but not always the most active audience. Churchill, no doubt, would object to most of my theater scenes [in Fugitive Poses], and he might misread the reproduction of a painting by David Bradley on the cover of Fugitive Poses […] [Churchill] cries Indian victimry, but his academic poses are revisionary modernism, and that leaves him without much humor or irony” (Vizenor and Lee 154, 161). Tomo Hattori, in “China Man Autoeroticism and the Remains of Asian America,” argues that “Asian Americanists, for the most part, cling defensively to modernist notions of identity […]” (218). The same can be said of Churchill and Cook-Lynn. While applying labels is fraught with danger, reading Vizenor’s work alongside that of separatists reveals the modernist, humanist, and, therefore, ironically, individualist sensibility of the latter.

[xxi] I’ve adapted this line from “Chapter 5: A Nice Jewish Boy among the Indians” in Krupat’s Turn to the Native (1996).

[xxii] The first and only full-length study of Native American literary theory is Elvira Pulitano’s Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003). The focus of Pulitano’s study is Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Craig S. Womack, Robert Allen Warrior, Greg Sarris and Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor.

[xxiii] In “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Linda Alcoff parses the difference between “speaking for” and “speaking about.”

[xxiv] In Postindian Conversations, Vizenor writes, “I try to avoid the first person pronoun, but that, of course, is not always possible in the construction of scenes from memory” (58-9). In an interview with SAIL, Vizenor explains that the “I” offers only a “very limited perception. It’s extraordinarily limited and I don’t like the ‘I.’ Even in my autobiography I don’t use ‘I’ very much” (“Defy” 45). In what follows, I am, like Vizenor in his own autobiographical writings, mostly constructing “scenes from memory,” while recognizing that the “I” is an “elusive pronoun” (59). “To invoke a fixed or consistent ‘I’ or ‘we,’” David Murray argues, “is to risk being fixed” (26). And I, like Vizenor, do not want to be “pinned down” (Blaeser 5).

[xxv] According to BIA records, I am a direct lineal descendant of the Mdewakanton Oyate Najapi tribe of the Sioux. My father’s mother, Luella Bell Trudell, is the daughter of Antoine O. Trudell and Katherin DeRadd/DeRod, and Antoine O. Trudell (for whom no birth certificate exists) is the son of Mary Iciyapewin and Francois/Francis/Frank Trudell. Mary Iciyapewin was a full-blood member of the Mdewakanton Oyate Najapi tribe.

[xxvi] To be clear, according to the office of Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action, being “white” means “persons having origins in any of the original people of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East, while being “American Indian/Alaskan Native” means being of the “original people of North America or who maintain cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition.”

[xxvii] See Mary Louise Pratt’s “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).

[xxviii] In an interview with Hartwig Isernhagen, Vizenor speaks to the issue of his own French ancestry and the impact of colonialism. His remarks here contrast well with Mihesuah’s in her introduction to Natives and Academics. Vizenor says: “the primary colonial impact has been Spanish, French, English, and Russian. That has all had an impact in very unique ways on different tribal communities, and through intermarriage. Many Anishinaabe surnames are French from the fur trade. Some tribal groups had less contact between each other than they did with colonial agents. For instance, is it any surprise that I could say to an interpreter of my work that I have more in common with the French than I do with the Lakota? What would be so surprising about that” (85)?

[xxix] As Daniel Heath Justice writes, in “We’re Not There Yet, Kemo Sabe: Positing a Future for American Indian Literary Studies,” “when anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, and other academics intrude on Indian people and communities, decide for themselves who we are and were without consultation with us, unearth our ancestors and engage in destructive testing on their remains, or otherwise wield academic and Euro-American privilege to impose themselves and their ideas on our communities, they are merely replicating the all too familiar pattern of colonialist domination on Indian Country” (265). Justice does go on to write, though, that “considerate non-Indians have a place in our communities, and we hold enormous respect for those who are sincere and responsible, regardless of their ethnicity—just as we are ashamed of those Indians who hurt their communities and families by selfish, unthinking, or uncaring behaviors and thoughts” (266).

[xxx] On this point, see Malea Powell’s “Blood and Scholarship: One Mixed-Blood’s Story,” in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition, ed. Keith Gilyard (1999).

[xxxi] What the “paradigm of preference” outside the academy happens to be at this historical moment is any one’s guess. Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson would argue that postmodernism is the effect (or the cultural logic) of changes in the mode of production and the movement of capital, and thus, certainly not a preference. It’s not that America or scholars in the American academy “prefer” postmodernism. It could be argued that Americans of whatever stripe didn’t choose postmodernism; it, in all of its varieties, chose us. This said, a large percentage of Americans—most of whom are probably unaware that they live in something academics call “postmodern America”—identify as Christian, and would, therefore, reject not only postmodernism but liberal humanism. Recent polls suggest that “about 94 percent of Americans believe in God, 89 percent in heaven, and 72 percent in hell and the devil” (Singer 92). Is Christianity, then, the “paradigm of preference”? George Cotkin, in Existentialist America (2003), argues that America is and always has been an existentialist country: “Existentialism makes a special claim on the attention of Americans at the opening of the twenty-first century. Until (and, alas, even after) September 11, 2001, many Americans wrapped themselves in a sense of invincibility, convinced that material gain would extend indefinitely and American power and global reach protect them from all threats. More recently, such pretensions shattered, we might well judge existence to be quite precarious, threatened by forces that we can neither understand fully nor combat easily. In this frightening world, existentialism invites us to confront the tragic nature of existence and to place simplistic dichotomies and naïve optimism behind us. It is an invitation that we turn down only at great risk” (283). In terms of art, Christopher Butler suggests that “the staple of many people’s artistic experience still lies within a form of liberal realism, which keeps better faith than the postmodernists with the possibility of arriving at the truth, and at a truth where humanitarian as well as political considerations are relevant” (126). He goes on to argue, in contrast to Cook-Lynn, that “there is plenty of great art outside postmodernism,” and that “postmodernist art has been a very significant but not obviously predominating part of all of this activity” (126, 127).

[xxxii] For evidence of Warrior’s humanism, see Tribal Secrets, particularly the chapter entitled “Intellectual Sovereignty and the Struggle for an American Indian Future,” 91, 110, 111, 122, 124.

[xxxiii] This sentiment is shared by Gloria Anzaldúa. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999), she writes, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (109).

[xxxiv] In The Trickster of Liberty (1988) Vizenor plays on the final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: “‘This is the way the world begins, this is the way the world begins,’ the sergeant chanted, ‘this is the way the world begins, not with an anthropologist but with mongrels and tricksters in a language game’” (xviii).

[xxxv] For a discussion of contemporary philosophy and philosophical issues by Native American philosophers, see American Indian Thought, ed. Anne Waters (2004).

[xxxvi] The use of “catechumens” here is especially appropriate, because Native Americans pass down history and traditions orally. According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, catechumen means “(one who is) being taught orally,” and “catechist” means “1. a person who catechizes,” and 2. “to teach by word of mouth” (327).

[xxxvii] Justice, in a footnote to “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” rightfully criticizes Krupat’s review of Womack’s Red on Red that appeared in College English in May 2001. Yet the notion that Krupat in any way suggests that tribes are not adaptable, which Justice seems to be doing by stressing adaptable in the line quoted above, is a gross misreading of Krupat, whose work has been praised by both Vizenor and Owens. While Owens has his own criticisms of Krupat, he nonetheless credits Krupat with “breaking important ground in his search for a way of talking about [American Indian] literature” (Mixedblood 55). In an interview with A. Robert Lee, Vizenor credits Krupat with being “one of the first interpreters of native life stories and autobiography, and he observed a distinctive literary practice that was different from what he found in other autobiographies […] The point he makes, theoretically, is wise and perceptive” (Vizenor and Lee 61).

[xxxviii] It is worth mentioning here, in contrast to Justice’s and Womack’s romantic view of natives, that Vizenor believes “that natives are probably the most individualistic people of any communities in the world. Consider the value of individual visions, the value of individual descriptive dreams and nicknames. In other words, the many ceremonies, shamanic visions, practices, and experiences in native communities are so highly individualistic, diverse, and unique, that romantic reductions of tradition and community as common sources of native identity are difficult to support, even in theory” (Vizenor and Lee 62).

[xxxix] This applies as well to issues of gender and race. As Louis Owens reminds us, authors have always been writing “outside” their own race, gender and/or ethnicity: “Willa Cather ‘boldly’ insisted upon her privilege to write of experience beyond her immediate gender with a male narrator in My Antonia […] Henry James ‘boldly’ wrote What Massie Knew from the point of view of a young girl, [and] the Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge boldly wrote about a Mexican-California bandit, and so forth” (21). Clarence Major, it is worth noting, wrote beautifully and sensitively about an elderly African American woman in Such Was the Season and a Hopi woman in Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, while the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey is a young Asian American male. Experience, as Krupat writes, “is not monolithic” (Turn 10). Being “female,” however one defines the term, does not automatically give one access to the “Truth” of “femaleness,” any more than being “African American” gives one access to what bell hooks, in Black Looks, calls “the black imagination”—“psychic state that informs and shapes the way black folks ‘see’ whiteness” (169).

[xl] In an interview with John O’Brien, Clarence Major asserts, “but as far as some kind of all-encompassing black aesthetic is concerned, I don’t think black writers can be thrown together like that into some kind of formula. Black writers today should write whatever they want to write and in any way they choose to write it. No style or subject should be alien to them. We have to get away from this rigid notion that there are certain topics and methods reserved for black writers. I’m against all that. I’m against coercion from blacks and from whites” (Bunge 12). Major has also stated that the “so-called black experience […] is another term that has no meaning whatsoever. There is no single black experience. There are certain kinds of cultural aspects of the experience of black people generally that might be summed up in that way, but it seems to minimize the importance of diversity within the culture. That’s just one of the troublesome things about labels. The minimization” (64).

[xli] Vizenor cites Barthes sympathetically quite often, and Vizenor’s view of the author and text accord with his. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes writes, “thereby, literature (it would be better, from now on, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world-as-text) a ‘secret,’ i.e., an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity we may call countertheological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to halt meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law” (1132). Vizenor, too, refuses meaning, to which the epigraphs for Griever attest. And Vizenor’s rejection of “terminal creeds” is, in effect, a refusal of “God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”

[xlii] From Bearheart, 168.

[xliii] Kimberly M. Blaeser, at the end of her study of Vizenor, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, provides an extensive bibliography of Vizenor’s work. At the end of her article on Vizenor, “Woodland Word Warrior: An Introduction to Gerald Vizenor with a Bibliography of His Work,” A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff provides a “selected bibliography prepared in consultation with Gerald Vizenor and includes most of his published creative work” (37).

[xliv] Vizenor’s phrase, “some upsetting is necessary,” echoes one found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s notes: “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task” (50; emphasis original). Vizenor’s thinking often mirrors Nietzsche’s. In “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche writes, “what, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are won out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins” (46-7). Vizenor’s critique of term “Indian” is very Nietzschean. On this point, see particularly “Introduction: Tragic Wisdom” and “Penenative Rumors” in Fugitive Poses (1998).

[xlv] The possibility of sovereignty is also compromised by the reality of multinational capitalism, what Fredric Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, also calls “late capitalism.” In Turn to the Native, Arnold Krupat speaks to the point: “[…] it should be said that in the present moment of transnational capitalism no state or nation has sovereignty in the strong sense of the dictionary definition. Even the United States is subject to the requirements of multinational corporatism, as, for example, in the instance of American economic policy toward Mexico, a policy largely determined by the need to bail out Citibank. Mexican ‘sovereignty,’ meanwhile, like the ‘sovereignty’ of all developing nations, is thoroughly compromised by the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund” (15). We are reminded here of the words of Marx and Engels that began this essay.

[xlvi] Daniel Heath Justice’s Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History is to be published in January 2006 by University of Minnesota Press.

[xlvii] As Foucault argues in the Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the “essential principles” needed in order to live “counter to all forms of fascism” is: “Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and access to reality” (xiii).

[xlviii] In the spring of 2005, sixteen year old Jeff Weise walked into his school on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota and shot and killed eight students and one teacher, then turned the gun on himself. Weise openly claimed to be National Socialist, and in January 2004 he posted a message on nazi.org that read: “I’ve been feeling a strong connection towards Nazi Germany, and it’s not necessarily the most pleasing thought, though I can’t help it. I feel like in a past life I was a German soldier” (qtd. in Maag 36). He would later write: “I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations” (36). As Chris Maag reported, in “The Devil in Red Lake,” “racial purity became an issue for [Weise], and he lamented that Native American stock was being diluted by intermarriage” (36-7). While there is every indication that Weise had emotional problems, following his father’s suicide in 1997 and a car accident in 1999 that left his mother severely brain damaged, his interest in racial purity and fascism speaks tragically to the dangers of ultranationalism.

[xlix] My use of fascism here follows Deleuze and Guattari’s definition as articulated in Anti-Oedipus, and therefore differs from M. Annette Jaimes’s more literal or historical use of the word—that is, as synonymous with “historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini” (Foucault, Preface xiii)—in her Introduction to The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. There Jaimes draws an analogy between the Nazi Holocaust and what she calls “the Holocaust in North America,” or the attempt, by the U.S., to extinguish “its indigenous population” (3). “The purpose of [The State of Native America],” she writes, “is to make a contribution to the emergence of the consciousness necessary to realize the liberation of North America from the grip of its Nazi heritage” (9).

[l] Womack, not surprisingly, opposes the use of Bakhtin to talk about or interpret Native texts. In just one of many jabs Womack takes at the academy, in Red on Red, he writes: “Departments often look for someone to do multicultural literature rather than Native studies; teach an Amy Tan novel now and then, throw in a little Ralph Ellison, a native author once in a while, and string it all together with the same damn Bakhtin quotes we’ve all heard a million times, reducing literary studies to little more than an English department version of the melting pot” (8). The work of Gerald Vizenor and Louis Owens, it should be noted, is heavily indebted to Bakhtin.

[li] In order to indicate that “Indians” are a simulation, a Western invention, Vizenor writes Indian in lowercase and in italics, e.g. indian. As he explains in Fugitive Poses, “My first use of the italicized indian as a simulation was in The Everlasting Sky. The natives in that book were the oshki anishinaabe, or the new people. Since then, natives are the presence, and indians are simulations, a derivative noun that means an absence, in my narratives” (15). That separatists like Womack, Cook-Lynn, Warrior and Justice use “Indian” rather uncritically, speaks to the fact that they too have bought into this Western invention, even while putatively critiquing it.

[lii] Bearheart was originally published in 1978 by Truck Press as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. The title of the novel was changed to Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles when it was reissued by the University of Minnesota Press in 1990. In an interview with A. Robert Lee, Vizenor explains why he made this change:

Most people referred to my first novel as Bearheart long before the title was changed. Others remembered my novel as Darkness or Saint Louis, and obviously had some difficulty finding it in bookstores. So it made perfect sense to change the title to Bearheart, one strong word, in the later edition published by the University of Minnesota Press. The subtitle, The Heirship Chronicles, comes out of the fact that the novel is inside a narrative written by Saint Louis Bearheart, who worked most of his life in the heirship division, or as a young radical said, ‘the hairship,’ of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. The novel begins there, in a federal heirship office, where Bearheart, an old man, gestures to a young radical to find the manuscript of his novel in a file cabinet. The subtitle is a reference to the actual novel written by the man named Bearheart. (Vizenor and Lee 95)

[liii] For an excellent explanation of “misreading,” see particularly Harold Bloom’s “Poetry, Revisionism, Repression,” in his Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (1976).

[liv] As Pulitano argues, what Womack “fails to realize […] is that his own analysis and interpretation of the story work in the same ethnographic mode, albeit with the terms reversed. He becomes the insider claiming to present the correct meaning of the story merely on the basis of an authentic Native perspective. Interrogating only his investigation tools when he should also be interrogating his position as a critic and subject of investigation, Womack voices simulations of tribal identity […]” (85).

[lv] Non-native critic Alan R. Velie was one of the first critics to explore the relationship between postmodernism and Vizenor’s Bearheart. In “Vizenor: Post-Modern Fiction,” Velie writes, “Bearheart shocks and puzzles many readers, but once it is understood that Vizenor’s fiction is shaped by Anishinaabe folklore and the post-modern tradition, the book is not so puzzling after all” (163).

[lvi] Vizenor often derides both liberal politics and liberal humanism. In his Introduction to Narrative Chance, for example, he writes, “The paternal rhetoric of liberal politics, however, promised that peace, wealth and power would be shared; but there was no salvation in the domination, revision or transvaluation of tribal cultures […] [Arthur Koestler] writes, ‘replace aggression by sympathy,’ as liberal humanists and postcolonial interpreters have done with tribal cultures, ‘and the same situation will no longer be comic but pathetic, and evoke not laughter but pity’” (10, 13).

[lvii] A version of “Terminal Creeds at Orion” appears as “Terminal Creeds” in Earthdivers, 183-91.

[lviii] The journey in Bearheart is, I’d argue, a “journey through ego-loss” (Seem xix). As Mark Seem writes in his Introduction to Anti-Oedipus: “Like [R.D.] Laing, [Deleuze and Guattari] encourage mankind to take a journey, the journey through ego-loss. [Deleuze and Guattari] go much further than Laing on this point, however. They urge mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations” (xix-xx). Bearheart sets out to challenge “anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring.” We see this most powerfully in the scene, drawn from Anishinaabe mythology, in “Abita Animosh,” in which Lilith Mae Farrier has sex with her two boxers. Here Vizenor foregrounds the ontological question of “what is nonhuman in man”: “The crows know which of our lives are birds and animals and humans” (94). In Postindian Conversations Vizenor provides a context for the Lilith Mae Farrier story: “Here is the play on native stories of human and animal relations, the wild allegories, ironies, and myths of families. The stories tease a native creation, a time of stones and tricksters, a time when humans and animals and birds got on pretty well, including language, and sex, and in some of the best native stories humans were related to bears, the creation of crossbloods” (Vizenor and Lee100).

[lix] In Manifest Manners Vizenor recounts a story in which a teacher, like Belladonna, embraced the erroneous idea that indians do not touch one another: “Native educators likewise contributed to manifest manners, and did so with a curious crease of authenticity. I had invited an outstanding native education to meet with the reservation students; she told them that indians ‘do not touch each other.’ That notice, naturally, prompted a humorous response, but the students truly wanted to know what indians she was talking about. She had written as much about cultural values in her dissertation, and at many education conferences, advanced the idea that indians were not touchers. Many teachers embraced the ‘no touch’ notion to answer an apparent indian reticence in public school, and the rest is manifest manners” (xi).

[lx] Vizenor discusses this scene in Postindian Conversations, 109.

[lxi] This scene with Belladonna is reproduced with some variation in Vizenor’s Chancers: A Novel (2000). See especially the chapter entitle “Terminal Indians,” 84-96.

[lxii] Here Vizenor sounds a lot like Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. To believe that “there are no last words to this world” is, in Rorty’s vocabulary, to be an “ironist,” someone who understands that their “final vocabulary”—or the “set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives […] formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes”—is contingent (73). For Rorty, an “ironist” is “someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself” (73). Separatists, in this sense, cannot be considered ironists.

[lxiii] Slavoj Zizek’s articulation of “interpellation” is relevant here. As Rey Chow explains:

For Zizek, interpellation succeeds not because those who are being interpellated cannot see through its manipulation (that is, not because they are filled with false consciousness or misguided by lies) but because there occurs at a certain moment in the interpellative process a necessary leap, which pulls together the otherwise irreconcilable gap between the subject per se and the objective reality to which the subject is hailed to respond. The point of interest—for him, at least—is not whether there exists a resistive subject who may or may not answer the call; rather, it is that, only by answering such a call, only by more or less allowing one’s self to be articulated in advance by this other, symbolic realm, can one avoid and postpone the terror of a radically open field of significatory possibilities. If one must speak of resistance, Zizek’s argument implies, what the subject always resists is this terror of complete freedom rather than the ideological, institutional process of being interpellated […] From this, it follows that identity—be it civic, religious, institutional, or cultural—is the result not exactly only of an imposition of rules from the outside or only of a resistance against such an imposition; it is also the result of a kind of unconscious automatization, impersonation, or mimicking, in behavior as much as in psychology, of certain beliefs, practices, and rituals. It is such automatization, impersonation, and mimicry that, in turn, give that identity its sense of legitimacy and security—and, ultimately, its sense of potentiality and empowerment. (109-10; emphasis original)

In other words, the assertion of an “authentic” Native American identity and Native resistance to the symbolic realm, which is grounded in a Western episteme and manifested in civic, religious, institutional, and cultural praxes, are “in part the mimetic enactment of the automatized stereotypes that are dangled out there in public, hailing the ethnic” (110). For more on interpellation in Zizek’s own words, see The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), 43, and “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology (1994), 1-33.

[lxiv] In “Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” Cook-Lynn, after criticizing mixedblood writers and the “mixed-blood movement,” writes, “a whole list of writers do not situate themselves within the mixed-blood or mainstream spectrum such as Momaday, Silko, Ortiz, Young Bear, Warrior, Medicine, Willard, Deloria, Bird, Crum, Woody, Bull Child, and dozens more for whom books matter and intellectualism has meaning, come to mind as people who will become something more than icons for American pop culture” (135). Cook-Lynn’s list here is problematic for a number of reasons. To take only two examples, of her family, Silko has written: “We are mixed bloods—Laguna, Mexican, white […] All those languages, all those ways of living are combined, and we live somewhere on the fringes of all three” (Rosen 230). And as Owens points out, “in his famous novel [House Made of Dawn] Momaday, himself half-Kiowa and perhaps thirty-second Cherokee if we are playing the blood-quantum game, is writing about Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico as an outsider while assuming insider privilege. He is also writing a novel that is replete, in fact bulging at the seams, with the easily recognizable techniques and tropes of modernist American literature. In short, Momaday borrowed a tribal culture other than his own as his subject, and he appropriated modernist fiction as his dominant paradigm” (Mixedblood 156).

[lxv] The idea of flight has always been important to Vizenor. As he explains in Postindian Conversations: “Griever is always in tricky motion, and the totemic image of flight is native survivance. Crows, eagles, chickens, and other birds are present in most of my stories, along with many tricky mongrels. More to the point, my ancestors are of the anishinaabe crane totem, and my turns and stories of creation are more avian than arboreal, contrary to my tease of bears at the treelines” (117).

[lxvi] For an excellent overview of the term “globalization” from a Marxist perspective, see Fredric Jameson’s “Globalization and Political Strategy.”

[lxvii] See page 27 of Griever, for example. As Rigal-Cellard rightfully points out, this page “reads like an exercise in synonyms for ‘interstices’” (319).

[lxviii] In Postindian Conversations, Vizenor admits that “my novel owes much to the thoughts of other writers” and goes on to discuss Simon Leys, specifically (123).

[lxix] Vizenor and his wife, Laura Hall, actually freed the chickens at the Tianjin market. He recounts this episode in Postindian Conversations.

[lxx] While Vizenor quotes Radin often, it is always to critique his view of the trickster. Radin argues that the “trickster knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites [and yet,] through his actions all values come into being” (xxii-xxiv; qtd. in Vizenor, “Trickster” 204). In contrast to Radin’s trickster, Vizenor’s is “compassionate,” and is “never evil, never, never” (Griever 24). Vizenor shows the trickster’s compassionate side by creating “panic holes.” As Rigal-Cellard explains, in Griever, “everytime someone is hurt or defeated, Griever buries his rage in ‘panic holes,’ shouting into the earth his affliction, or trying ‘to protect the people he loves,’ ‘to balance the world,’ […] and he is the only professor outraged by the shooting down of the air Korea airline” (318). As Vizenor explains in Postindian Conversations: “Panic is creation, and the hole is a trickster story. Shout into a panic hole and listen to creation, shout at the earth and the season change. Panic is natural, and the shout is survivance” (109). It is interesting to note that Maxine Hong Kingston uses panic holes in “Great Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains” in China Men, 116-17.

[lxxi] This “third space,” in Vizenor’s work, might also be called a “transformational space.” As Vizenor writes in The People Named the Chippewa: “Naanabozho, the compassionate woodland trickster, wanders in mythic time and transformational space between tribal experience and dreams” (3).

[lxxii] “The word ‘kabuki,’” Vizenor informs us, in Hiroshima Bugi, “literally means ‘to tilt’ or ‘to slant,’ a reference to the ‘outlandish behavior and dress’” (64). Kabuki, then, functions as a perfect description of the trickster and the trickster novel.

[lxxiii] This passage is repeated in various forms throughout Hiroshima Bugi, indicating its significance. See, for example, 122, 125, and 137.

[lxxiv] In Postindian Conversations Vizenor asks us to “consider the very chance of [his] conception. Lovey, my mother, told me that when she first saw my father, who was a postindian newcomer to the city, she thought he looked just like George Raft. She might not have noticed him otherwise. So my conception, and these conversations, are traced to the countenance of a movie actor. Families are chance and contradictions, and so were mine” (20).

[lxxv] For an excellent explication of the “manidoo,” see Basil Johnston’s The Manitous: The Supernatural World of the Ojibway. Johnston begins with the Ojibway creation story: “According to tradition, Kitchi-Manitou (the Great Mystery) created the world, plants, birds, animals, fish, and other mintous in fulfillment of a vision” (xv). Both Griever and Hiroshima Bugi evidence Vizenor’s “holistic conception of nature,” which “values animals as much as people” (Babcock 322). On the topic of a holistic approach to Native American literature, see Gregg Sarris’ Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993).

[lxxvi] On how “exclusion” functions to shore up identity, see Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, especially 163-171, and Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 3. On the link between racism and fascism, see Paul Gilroy’s Against Race (2000). There he argues that the “links between racism and fascism […] should be seen as part of contemporary political conflict rather than as relics which express the essential, unchanging meaning of Nazism” (326).

[lxxvii] It is important to note that Womack makes it clear that “the Native Americanist does not bury her head in the sand and pretend that European history and thought do not affect Native literature, or does she ignore the fact that Native literature has quite distinctive features of its own that call for new forms of analyses” (Red 243). Many native and non-native critics are perfectly willing to acknowledge both of these points. Yet, having acknowledged these two points, the argument for literary separatism becomes tenuous. In Zizek’s terminology, the separatist’s position could be considered a “cynical” one. As Zizek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists on the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (29).

[lxxviii] Note how Cook-Lynn’s critique of Native Americans, here, echoes Frank Chin’s critique of Maxine Hong Kingston. In fact, Cook-Lynn cites Chin in “The American Indian Fiction Writers”: “Frank Chin’s observation that in the case of Asian works, history was nearly destroyed by Christian missionaries and is now being faked by writers continuing in that tradition must be taken up by Native American critics as a cause-and-effect probability” (85).

[lxxix] For the difference between monologic and dialogic novels, see Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). It is important to note that “in Bakhtin’s view, however, a novel can never be totally monologic, since the narrator’s reports of the utterances of another character are inescapably ‘double-voiced’ (in that we can distinguish therein the author’s own accent and inflection), and also dialogic (in that the author’s discourse continually reinforces, alters, or contests with the types of speech that it reports)” (Abrams 63). Similarly, as Krupat writes, “Indian texts are always the consequence of collaboration” (“Approach” 119).

[lxxx] We are reminded here those important seven words in Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty: “The trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (xi; emphasis original).

[lxxxi] In Mixedblood Messages Louis Owens writes, “if [Vizenor’s] writing must be labeled, we had better call it tribal utopianism” (156).

[lxxxii] In his Introduction to Postindian Conversations (1999), A. Robert Lee discusses the influence of Japan on Vizenor. See especially 2-3. For a brief account of Vizenor’s time in China, see Chapter 7 in Postindian Conversations.

[lxxxiii] For a definition of “ethnocriticism,” see Krupat’s Introduction to his Ethnocriticism (1992).

[lxxxiv] See, for example, Chapter 5 of Ethnocriticism (1992).

[lxxxv] Vizenor certainly would dispute this, and, in fact, does in about everything he’s written. Vizenor, in Postindian Conversations, for example, claims that “my relatives created the first postmodern texts on the [White Earth] reservation, and at the same time, they brought to print the oral stories of anishinaabe survivance […] Alice Beaulieu, my anishinaabe grandmother, and my father were postindian immigrants, and in that sense postmodern natives on the move from the reservation to modernity, the industrial world of Minneapolis” (21). In Crossbloods Vizenor writes, “crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline, an encounter with racialism, colonial duplicities, sentimental monogenism, and generic cultures” (vii). And in “Postmodern Introduction,” he asserts, “the trickster is postmodern” (9).

[lxxxvi] Mongrels, for Vizenor, are trickster figures. Ronin, in Hiroshima Bugi, is referred to as a mongrel: “[Ronin] is a mongrel, a roamer, and his stories are a worthy tease of nature, culture, and empire dominance” (64).

[lxxxvii] Krupat is right to point out that Vizenor, here, is not suggesting there is something “essential” in or pure about native blood. Krupat writes, “though blood may count in The Heirs of Columbus, ‘good’ blood is not the mythical sangre pura privileged by racists of every stripe but is always-already mixed blood” (Turn 65). In The Trickster of Liberty, for example, Sergeant Alex/Alexina Hobraiser asserts, “Mixedbloods are the best tricksters, the choice ticks on the tribal bloodline” (xii). Unfortunately, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn often gives herself over to arguments that appear racist. For example, in “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” she suggests that the “half-breed” (36) is a threat to Plains Indians. “For the most part,” she writes, “native populations continue to view intermarriage as one of the risks to cultural and political survival, and there is plenty of evidence in contemporary tribal life to indicate that the Plains Indians have always regarded it with suspicion. Native languages describe biological and cultural relationships of human beings to one another with great explicitness, and the half-breed phenomenon is held in quite tentative regard by native-language speakers. The Sioux still call those with white blood iyeska, literally translated as ‘talks white,’ and it is not generally considered as a complimentary term” (36). In Griever, Hannah, whose position Vizenor is clearly ridiculing, sounds an awful lot like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: “[Hannah] is a hereditist, withstands miscegenation, and neither speaks nor listens to people that she determines are mixedbloods. More than once she has turned in silence from a conversation when she discovered that the person was a mixture of races. She did not know about the racial identities of the trickster” (77). Rigal-Cellard writes that “in such a caricatural character Vizenor elaborates on the central concern of his work: relationships between the sexes, the races, the classes, around which the whole question of colonization and alterity revolves” (328). For an account of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, at the “Translating Native Cultures” conference at Yale University in February of 1998, publicly expressing hostility towards “Colonial Laureates” colonizing Native Studies, see Colin Samson’s “Overturning the Burdens of the Real: Nationalism and the Social Sciences in Gerald Vizenor’s Recent Works.”

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