Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Vizenor in 2007. Photo by Vizjim. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikipedia.

Gerald Vizenor
Born	1934 Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Occupation	writer, Literary Critic, Professor, Ethnographer
Nationality	White Earth Band of Ojibwe
Genres	postmodern, Anishinaabe traditional, haiku
Literary movement	postmodernism, Native American Renaissance
Notable work(s)	Interior Landscapes, Manifest Manners, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart
Influenced Thomas King

Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is a Native American poet, prose writer, and academic, with over 30 books to his name.

Life

Youth and education

Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. His father was murdered in an unsolved homicide when he was less than 2 years old. He was raised by his Anishinaabe grandmother, his Swedish American mother, and a succession of uncles in Minneapolis and the White Earth Reservation.

Following the death of his informal stepfather, who had been his primary caregiver, Vizenor lied about his age to enter the Minnesota National Guard in 1950 at age 15, but was honorably discharged before his unit went to Korea.

Vizenor joined the army 2 years later, serving in Japan as the nation was still reeling from the impact of nuclear attack. This period would inspire his interest in haiku, and much later his 2004 "kabuki novel" Hiroshima Bugi.

Returning to America in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G.I. Bill funding to earn a degree at New York University: this was followed by additional postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota, where he also undertook graduate teaching. During this period he married and had a son.

Activism

Between 1964 and 1968, Vizenor was a community advocate. During this time he served as director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, which brought him into close contact with dislocated Native Americans from reservations, many finding it profoundly difficult to survive in a culture of white racism and cheap alcohol. This period is the subject of his collection Wordarrows: Whites and Indians in the new fur trade, some of the stories in which were inspired by real events. Working with homeless and poor Natives may have been the reason Vizenor looked askance at the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM), seeing radical leaders such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt as being more concerned with personal publicity than the "real" problems faced by American Indians.

In this spirit, Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor. His investigation into the case of Thomas James White Hawk, while never pretending that White Hawk was innocent, raised difficult questions about the nature of justice in dealing with colonized peoples. It was credited with being the work that led to the death sentence on White Hawk being commuted.

During this period Vizenor coined the phrase “cultural schizophrenia” to describe the state of mind of many Natives torn between Native and White cultures. His investigative journalism into the activities of American Indian activists uncovered many instances of hypocrisy and drug dealing among the movement’s leaders, and earned him a number of death threats.

Academic career

Beginning teaching at Lake Forest College, Illinois, Vizenor was quickly appointed to set up and run the Native American studies program at Bemidji State University. Later he was professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1978-1985), which he satirized mercilessly in his fictions. During this time he was also a visiting professor at Tianjin University, China.

Following 4 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Provost of Kresge College, and an endowed chair for a year at the University of Oklahoma, Vizenor taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American studies.

He is the founder-editor of the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies series at the University of Oklahoma Press, which has provided an important venue for critical work on and by Native writers.

Vizenor is professor emeritus at Berkeley, and a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico.

Writing

Fiction

Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays and of course many novels. He has been named as a member of the literary movement Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance.

His debut novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), later revised as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), brought him immediate attention. A science fiction novel, it portrayed a procession of tribal pilgrims through a surreal, dystopian landscape of an America suffering an environmental apocalypse brought on by white greed for oil. Simultaneously postmodern and deeply traditional, and inspired by N. Scott Momaday's pioneering works, Vizenor drew on poststructuralist theory and Anishinaabe trickster stories to portray a world in the grip of what he called “terminal creeds” – belief systems incapable of change.(Citation needed) In one of the most famous and controversial passages, the character Belladonna Darwin Winter-Catcher proclaims that Natives are better and purer than whites, and is killed for her belief in racial separatism with poisoned cookies.(Citation needed)

Subsequent novels have seen a shifting and overlapping cast of tricksters turn up anywhere from China to White Earth to the University of Kent. Frequently quoting philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Vizenor’s fiction is allusive, humorous and playful, but always ultimately serious in dealing with the state of Native America. Proclaiming himself as much the enemy of those who would romanticize the figure of the Native as he is of those who would continue colonial oppression, Vizenor constantly returns to the theme that the “Indian” was an invention of European invaders – before Columbus’ first landing, there was no such thing as an “Indian”, only the peoples of various tribes (such as Anishinaabe or Dakota).

To deconstruct the idea of "Indianness," Vizenor uses strategies of irony and jouissance. For instance, in the lead up to Columbus Day in 1992, he published The Heirs of Columbus, in which he teasingly claims that Columbus was in fact a Mayan Indian trying to return home. In Hotline Healers, he claims that Richard Nixon, the American president who did more for American Indians than any other, did so as part of a deal in exchange for traditional “virtual reality” technology.

Non-fiction

Vizenor has authored several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses, and in addition has edited several collections of academic work on Native American writing.

In his own full-length studies, Vizenor is concerned with deconstructing the semiotics of Indianness. For instance, the title of Fugitive Poses relates to Vizenor's assertion that the term indian is a social-science construction that replaces native peoples, who become absent or "fugitive". Similarly, the term "manifest manners" refers to the continued legacy of Manifest Destiny, especially the way native peoples are still bound by narratives of dominance that replace them with "indians". In place of a unified “Indian” signifier, he suggests that Native peoples be referred to as tribal, and always where possible put into their own particular tribal context. To discuss more general Native studies, he suggests using the term "postindian," which would get across the idea of disparate, heterogeneous tribal cultures unified only by Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them. Among his many other neologisms is “survivance”, a cross between the words "survival" and "resistance," which Vizenor uses as a replacement for “survival”, saying that it carries an implication of an ongoing, changing process, rather than the simple continuance of old ways into the modern world, and pointing out that for tribal peoples, the act of survival is based in resistance.

He continues to be critical of both Native American nationalism and Euro-American colonial attitudes.

Recognition

Awards

• American Book Award for Shrouds of White Earth, 2011.
• MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award, 2011.
• Distinguished Minnesotan, Bemidji State University, 2005
• Distinguished Achievement Award, Western Literature Association, 2005
• Lifetime Achievement Award, Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, 2001
• PEN Excellence Award, 1996
• PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, 1990
• Artists Fellowship in Literature, California Arts Council, 1989
• New York Fiction Collective Prize, 1988
• American Book Award, 1988
• New York Fiction Collective Award, 1986
• Best American Indian Film, San Francisco Film Festival, 1984
• Film-in-the-Cities Award, Sundance Festival, 1983

Publications

Poetry

• Poems Born in the Wind. Minneapolis, MN: 1960.
• The Old Park Sleepers: A poem. Minneapolis, MN: Obercraft Printing, 1961.
• Two Wings the Butterfly: Haiku poems in English. St. Cloud, MN: privately published, 1962.
• South of the Painted Stones. Minneapolis, MN: 1963.
• Seventeen Chirps: Haiku in English. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1964.
• Slight Abrasions: A dialogue in haiku (with Jerome Downes). Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1966.
• Empty Swings: Haiku in English. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1967.
• Anishinabe Nagamon = Songs of the people. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1970.
• Summer in the Spring: Ojibway lyric poems and tribal stories. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1981;
  • also published as Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe lyric poems and stories. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
• Matsushima: Pine islands haiku. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1984.
• Water Striders: Haiku poems. Santa Cruz, CA: Moving Parts Press, 1989.
• Raising the Moon Vines: Haiku poems. Minneapolis, MN: Nodin Press, 1999.
• Bear Island: The war at Sugar Point. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Almost Ashore: Selected poems. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006.
• Favor of Crows: New and collected haiku. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

Novels

• Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St. Paul, MN: Truck Press, 1978;
  • revised as Bearheart: The heirship chronicles. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
• Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal heirs to a wild baronage. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
• The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press / Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991.
• Dead Voices: Natural agonies In the new world. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
• Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne novel. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1997.
• Chancers: A novel. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press]], 2000.
• Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
• Father Meme. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
• Shrouds of White Earth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (Excelsior Editions), 2010.
• Chair of Tears. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
• Blue Ravens: A historical novel. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

Short fiction

• Earthdivers: Tribal narratives on mixed descent. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
• Landfill Meditation: Crossblood stories. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1991.

Non-fiction

• The Everlasting Sky: New voices from the people named the Chippewa. New York: Crewell-Collier, 1972.
• Wordarrows: Indians and whites in the new fur trade. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1978;
  • also published as Wordarrows: Native states of literary sovereignty. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
• The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative histories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
• Crossbloods: Bone courts, bingo, and other reports. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
• Manifest Manners: Postindian warriors of survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press / University of New England Press, 1993;
  • also published as Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance
• Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical myths and metaphors. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009.
• Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian scenes of absence and presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
• Postindian Conversations (with A. Robert Lee). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
• Literary Chance: Essays on native American survivance. Valencia, Spain: Universtitat de Valencia, 2007.
• Native Liberty: Natural reason and cultural survivance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
• The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a native democratic constitution. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Collected editions

• Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor reader. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England, 1994.

Edited

• Touchwood : A collection of Ojibway prose. St. Paul, MN: New Rivers Press (Many Minnesotas Project, No 3), 1987.
• Narrative Chance: Postmodern discourse on native American Indian literatures. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989; Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
• Native American Literature: A brief introduction and anthology. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
• Survivance: Narratives of native presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
• Native Storiers: Five selections. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio / video

Gerald Vizenor's "North Dakota"

• Gerald Vizenor (VHS). Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995.

See also

• Native American poets
• List of U.S. poets

References

Biographies

• Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, by Kimberly Blaeser
• Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, by A. Robert Lee
• Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, by Alan R. Velie
• Gerald Vizenor: Profils Americains 20, ed. Simone Pellerin. Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007. (In English)
• Gerald Vizenor: Texts and contexts, ed. A. Robert Lee & Deborah Madsen, 2011.
• Understanding Gerald Vizenor, by Deborah Madsen, 2010.

Interviews or Essays

• Contemporary Authors: Biography – Vizenor, Gerald Robert (1934-), Thomson Gale.
• Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series), Jace Weaver, Univ. Oklahoma Press.
• Postindian Conversations, Gerald Robert Vizenor, A. Robert Lee, University of Nebraska Press.
• Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans, Michael Katakis (Editor), University of Pennsylvania Museum Press.
• Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor, Dallas Miller, 1995, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 7, 77, 1995 Spring.
• Subverting the Dominant Paradigm: Gerald Vizenor's Trickster Discourse, Kerstin Schmidt, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 7, 65, 1995 Spring.
• That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, Jace Weaver, Oxford University Press.
• "Text as Trickster: Postmodern language games in Gerald Vizenor's 'Bearheart." (Maskers and Tricksters), An article from: MELUS, by Elizabeth Blair
• Gerald Vizenor and his 'Heirs of Columbus': a postmodern quest for more discourse. An article from: The American Indian Quarterly by Barry E Laga
• Monkey kings and mojo: postmodern ethnic humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor, An article from: MELUS, by John Lowe
• Postmodern bears in the texts of Gerald Vizenor (Critical Essay), An article from: MELUS, by Nora Baker Barry
• "Bad Breath": Gerald Vizenor's Lacanian fable. (Critical Essay), An article from: Studies in Short Fiction by Linda Lizut Helstern
• Native American Writers of the United States, (Dictionary of Literary Biography, V. 175), Kenneth M. Roemer (Editor), Gale Research.
• Woodland word warrior: An introduction to the works of Gerald Vizenor, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff.
• Survival This Way: Interviews With American Indian Poets, Joseph Bruchac III (Editor), (Sun Tracks Books, No 15) University of Arizona Press.
• Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, Laura Coltelli, University of Nebraska Press.
• Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans, Lucy Lippard (Editor)
• Contemporary Authors. Autobiography Series (Vol 22. Issn 0748-0636), Gale Research
• American Contradictions: Interviews With Nine American Writers, Wolfgang Binder (Editor), Helmbrecht Breinig (Editor), Wesleyan University Press.
  • First published in German as Facing America, Multikulturelle Literatur def heutigen USA in Texten und Interviews, Rotpunktverlag, Leipzig, Germany, 1994.
• Native American Autobiography: An Anthology (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography), Arnold Krupat (Editor), University of Wisconsin Press.
• Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods, Chester G. Anderson, University of Minnesota Press.
• Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest, Mark Vinz (Editor), Thom Tammaro (Editor), University of Minnesota Press.
• Gerald Vizenor, a special edition, Louis Owens (Editor), Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 1997, including:
  • "Interior Dancers": Transformations of Vizenor's Poetic Vision, Kimberly M. Blaeser
  • The Ceded Landscape of Gerald Vizenor's Fiction, Chris LaLonde
  • Blue Smoke and Mirrors: Griever's Buddhist Heart, Linda Lizut Helstern
  • Liberation and Identity: Bearing the Heart of The Heirship Chronicles, Andrew McClure
  • Liminal Landscapes: Motion, Perspective and Place in Gerald Vizenor's Fiction, Bradley John Monsma
  • Waiting for Ishi: Gerald Vizenor's Ishi and the Wood Ducks and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Elvira Pulitano
  • Doubling in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Pilgrimage Strategy or Bunyan Revisited, Bernadette Rigel-Cellard
  • Legal and Tribal Identity in Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, Stephen D. Osborne
• Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 3), Louis Owens, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 15), James Ruppert, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Native American Perspectives on Literature and History, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, Vol 19) by Alan R. Velie (Editor), University of Oklahoma Press.
  • (Articles by Rodriguez, Velie and Blaeser address Vizenor's writings.)
• The Turn to the Native, by Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press.
• Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, Edited by Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk
• I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, Brian Swann, Arnold Krupat, Brompton Books Corp.
• Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History, and Spirit, Martin Zanger (Editor), Mark A. Lindquist, University of Wisconsin Press.
• Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility, Michael Katakis, Russell Chatham (Illustrator), Mercury House.
• Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to Present, 1492–1992, Peter Nabokov, Penguin USA
• Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Mit Press.
• Listening to Native Americans: Making Peace with the Past for the Future, John Barry Ryan, in Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture, Vol. 31, No.1 Winter 1996 pp. 24–36.
• Transformation in Progress by Annalee Newitz and Jillian Sandell, in Bad Subjects, an online journal.
• Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History, Stripes, James D., A dissertation.

External links

Poems

• Gerald Vizenor b. 1934 at the Poetry Foundation
• Haiku by Gerld Vizenor at Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

Prose

• Stone Babies from Weber Studies
• “Survivance: Theory and Practice in Native American Narratives” - Talk at University of Minnesota 2006.

Books

• Gerald Vizenor at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Gerald Vizenor in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Other works at Blue Ravens

About

• Gerald Vizenor (1934-) at Native American Authors]
• Gerald Vizenor at Minnesota Authors Biography Project
• Gerald Vizenor Official website.
• Vizenor’s academic resume. (NB this is not up-to-date)
• Salt Publishing website for Almost Ashore – includes video footage, excerpts and biography
• Gerald Vizenor in Dialogue with A. Robert Lee from Weber Studies
• Interview with “The Berkleyan”, 1994
• "To Honor Impermanence: The haiku and other poems of Gerald Vizenor" by Tom Lynch
• The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor essays available in .PDF

This article incorporates text from Nativewiki under the GFDL license.