Gerald Vizenor

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Gerald Vizenor
Gerald Vizenor in Geneva, 2000
Gerald Vizenor in Geneva, 2000
BornGerald Robert Vizenor
1934 (age 89–90)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation
  • Writer
  • literary critic
  • professor
  • ethnographer
Nationality
Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart
Website
www.hanksville.org/storytellers/vizenor/

Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is an American writer and scholar, and an

American Studies at the University of New Mexico
.

Early life

Gerald Vizenor was born to a mother who was

National Guard
.

Honorably discharged before his unit went to Korea, Vizenor joined the army two years later. He served with occupation forces in Japan, with that nation was still struggling to recover from the vast destruction of the nuclear attacks that ended World War II. During this period, he began to learn about the Japanese poetic form of haiku. Later he wrote Hiroshima Bugi (2004), what he called his "kabuki novel."[3]

Returning to the United States in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G.I. Bill funding to complete his undergraduate degree at New York University. He followed this with postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota, where he also undertook graduate teaching. After returning to Minnesota, he married and had a son.

Activism

After teaching at the university, between 1964 and 1968, Vizenor worked as a

Minneapolis, Minnesota
, which brought him into close contact with numerous Native Americans from reservations. Many found it difficult to live in the city, and struggled against white racism and cheap alcohol.

This period is the subject of his short-story collection Wordarrows: Whites and Indians in the New Fur Trade, some of which was inspired by his experiences. His work 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.[citation needed]

Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the

death sentence commuted.[5][6]
: 261 

During this period Vizenor coined the phrase "cultural schizophrenia" to describe the state of mind of many Natives, who he considered torn between Native and White cultures.[7][8] His investigative journalism into American Indian activists revealed drug dealing, personal failings, and failures of leadership among some of the movement's leaders. As a consequence of his articles, he was personally threatened.

Academic career

Beginning teaching full-time at

Native American Studies program at Bemidji State University. Later he became professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1978–1985).[9] He later satirized the academic world in some of his fiction. For example, in "The Chair of Tears", in Earthdivers.[6] During this time he also served as a visiting professor at Tianjin University
, China.

Vizenor worked and taught for four years at the

American Studies at the University of New Mexico
.

Vizenor was influenced by the French post-modernist intellectuals, particularly Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.

Fiction

Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays, and many novels. He has been named as a member of the literary movement which Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance, a flourishing of literature and art beginning in the mid-20th century.[10]

His first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), later revised as

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 noted and controversial passages, the character Belladonna Darwin Winter-Catcher proclaims that Natives are better and purer than whites. She is killed with poisoned cookies, purportedly for her promoting racial separatism.[citation needed
]

In Vizenor's subsequent novels, he used a shifting and overlapping cast of trickster figures in settings ranging from China to White Earth Reservation to the University of Kent. Frequently quoting European philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Vizenor has written a fiction that is allusive, humorous and playful, but deeply serious in portraying the state of Native America. He has refused to romanticize the figure of the Native and opposes continued oppression. Vizenor's major theme is that the idea of "Indian" as one people was an "invention" of European invaders. Before Columbus arrived, no one defined Indian as other; there were only the indigenous peoples of various tribes (such as Anishinaabe or Dakota).[citation needed] (They defined "other" among themselves, often divided by languages and associated cultures.)

To deconstruct the idea of "Indianness," Vizenor uses strategies of irony and Barthesian jouissance. For instance, in the lead-up to Columbus Day in 1992, he published the novel, The Heirs of Columbus, in which Columbus is portrayed as a Mayan Indian trying to return home to Central America. In Hotline Healers, he claims that Richard Nixon, the American president who he said did more for American Indians than any other in restoring sovereign rights and supporting self-determination, did so as part of a deal in exchange for traditional "virtual reality" technology.[citation needed]

Non-fiction

Vizenor has written several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses. He has edited several collections of academic work related to Native American writing. 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.

In his own studies, Vizenor has worked to

Manifest Destiny. He wrote that native peoples were still bound by "narratives of dominance" that replace them with "Indians".[12][13] In place of a unified "Indian" signifier
, he suggests that Native peoples be referred to by specific tribal identities, to be properly placed in their particular tribal context, just as most Americans would distinguish among the French, Poles, Germans and English.

In order to cover more general Native studies, Vizenor suggests using the term, "postindian," to convey that the disparate,

Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them. He has also promoted the neologism of "survivance", a cross between the words "survival" and "resistance." He uses it to replace "survival" in terms of tribal peoples. He coined it to imply a process rather than an end, as the ways of tribal peoples continue to change (as do the ways of others). He also notes that the survival of tribal peoples as distinct from majority cultures, is based in resistance.[1]

He continues to criticize both Native American nationalism and Euro-American colonial attitudes.

Honors

Both his fiction and academic studies have contributed to his being honored as a major Anishinaabe and American intellectual and writer.

Selected works

Fiction

  • Blue Ravens. Wesleyan University Press. 2014.
    ISBN 978-0-8195-7416-9
    .
  • Shrouds of White Earth (SUNY P)
  • Father Meme (University of New Mexico Press)
  • Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (Nebraska UP)
  • Chancers (Oklahoma UP)
  • Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (Wesleyan UP)
  • Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (Minnesota UP) (revised version of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart)[14]
  • The Heirs of Columbus (Wesleyan UP)
  • Griever: An American Monkey King in China (Minnesota UP)
  • The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Emergent Literatures)
  • Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. University of Minnesota Press. 1981.
    ISBN 978-0-8166-1048-8
    .
  • Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories (Wesleyan UP)
  • Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (University of Oklahoma Press)
  • Chair of Tears. Bison. 2012.
    ISBN 978-0-8032-3840-4
    .

Non-fiction

Poetry

  • Poems Born in the Wind (1960)
  • The Old Park Sleepers (1961)
  • Two Wings the Butterfly (privately printed, 1962)
  • South of the Painted Stones (1963)
  • Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (Oklahoma UP)
  • Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku, with Jerome Downes (Nodin Press, 1966)
  • Water Striders (Moving Parts Press)
  • Seventeen Chirps (Nodin Press)
  • Raising the Moon Vines (Nodin Press)
  • Matsushima : Pine Island (Nodin Press, 1984)
  • Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes (Nodin Press, 1999)[20]
  • Empty Swings (Haiku in English Series) (Nodin Press)
  • Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (Minnesota UP, 2006)
  • Almost Ashore (Salt Publishing, 2006)
      • Published in translation as:
      • Quasi en Terra (in Catalan). Translated by Carme Manuel Cuenca. Valencia: Denes. 2009.
        ISBN 9788496545922
        .

Plays and screenplays

Edited anthology

  • Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1997)

Edited collections of essays

  • Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Oklahoma UP)
  • Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Nebraska UP, 2008)

Autobiography

See also

References

  • This article incorporates text from Nativewiki under the
    GFDL
    license.
  1. ^ a b Helstern, Linda Lizut (2008). "Shifting the Ground: Theories of Survivance in From Sand Creek and Hiroshima Bugi". In Gerald Vizenor (ed.). Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. p. 167.
  2. ISBN 978-0-8166-1848-4
    .
  3. ISBN 978-2-84269-830-0
    .
  4. ^
    • Vizenor, Gerald (June 1968). "Why Must Thomas White Hawk Die?". Twin Citian. Vol. 10, no. 11.
    • Vizenor, Gerald (1976). "Thomas James White Hawk: Murder on Good Friday" and "Commutation of Death". Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies. Minneapolis: Nodin Press.
  5. ISSN 0730-3238
    .
  6. ^ a b Blaeser, Kimberly M. (2005). "Gerald Vizenor: Postindian liberation". In Joy Porter; Kenneth M. Roemer (eds.). Cambridge Companion To Native American Literature 2005. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 257–270. p. 263: ... the 1981 Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent, a collection of twenty-one narratives which includes a section entitled 'Earthdivers in Higher Education'. The opening story of the book, 'The Chair of Tears', offers a pointed satire of academic politics and an equally damning send up of the posturing and politics involved in Indian blood-quantum debates.
  7. ISSN 0730-3238
    .
  8. ISSN 0730-3238
    .
  9. ^ University of Minnesota Department of American Indian Studies Homepage
  10. ^ Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
  11. doi:10.1017/S0021875899576238
    . [Review].
  12. ISBN 978-0-8032-9628-2
    .
  13. ISBN 978-0-8061-2874-0
    .
  14. ^ a b c d "Gerald Vizenor", Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, ed. by Jennifer McClinton-Temple and Alan R. Velie, Facts on File, 2007, pp. 376–378
  15. ^ "Awards: Previous winners of the MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies — 1974–2012". MELUS The Society for the Study of MultiEthnic Literaure of the United States. Archived from the original on December 15, 2023.
  16. ^ American Book Award announcement Archived September 11, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ "2020 Lifetime Achievement Awardees". Paul Ré Peace Prize. Paul Bartlett Ré.
  18. ^ "Honorary Curator 2021–2022: Gerald Vizenor". American Haiku Archives.
  19. ^ see this cover at Google Books, accessed February 19, 2011.
  20. ^ Vizenor, Gerald (1999). Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes. Minneapolis MN: Nodin Press.
  21. JSTOR 41416330
    .

Further reading

Monographs and essay collections on Vizenor's work

Essays on Vizenor's work

Journals

Anthologies

  • I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, Brian Swann, Arnold Krupat, Brompton Books Corp.
  • Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours, Diane Glancy; Mark Nowak (eds.), Coffeehouse Press.
  • Stories Migrating Home: Anishnaabe Prose, Kimberly Blaeser (ed.), Loonfeather Press: Wisconsin
  • Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories, Craig Lesley; Katheryn Stavrakis (eds.) Dell Books
  • Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of the Contemporary Native American Experience, Clifford E. Trafzer (ed.)
  • Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature, Simon J. Ortiz (ed.), Navajo Community College Press
  • Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back: An Anthology of Poetry by American Indian Writers, Joseph Bruchac (ed.), Greenfield Review Press
  • Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion, Janet Witalec, Visible Ink Press.
  • Words in the Blood: Contemporary Indian Writers of North and South America, Jamake Highwater (ed.), New American Library.
  • Blue Dawn, Red Earth: New Native American Storytellers, Clifford E. Trafzer (ed.), Anchor Books
  • The Lightning Within: An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Fiction, Edited and with an introduction by Alan R. Velie, University of Nebraska Press.
  • American Indian Literature: An Anthology, Alan R. Velie, University of Oklahoma Press.
  • Harper's Anthology of 20th century Native American Poetry, Duane Niatum (ed.) HarperCollins
  • Twenty Six Minnesota Writers, Monico D. Degrazia (ed.), Nodin Press.
  • After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Larry McCaffery (ed.), Penguin USA
  • The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress, Mary Bartlett (ed.), University of New Mexico Press.
  • The Writer's Notebook, Howard Junker, HarperCollins.
  • Listening to Ourselves: More Stories from 'the Sound of Writing', Alan Cheuse; Caroline Marshall (eds.), Anchor Books.
  • Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Larry McCaffery (ed.), Fc2/Black Ice Books
  • Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards 1980–1990. Ishmael Reed; Kathryn Trueblood; Shawn Wong (eds.), W W Norton & Co.
  • Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus (Turning Point Series), Ray Gonzalez (ed.), Broken Moon Press.
  • A Gathering of Flowers: Stories About Being Young in America, Joyce Carol Thomas (ed.), Harpercollins Juvenile Books.
  • American Short Fiction, Spring 1991. Laura Furman, University of Texas Press.
  • An Illuminated History of the Future. Curtis White (ed.), Fc2/Black Ice Books.
  • Fiction International, San Diego State University Press.
  • An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Alfred Arteaga (ed.), Duke University Press.
  • Contemporary Archaeology in Theory, (Social Archaeology), Robert Preucel; Ian Hodder (eds.), Blackwell Pub.
  • Encyclopedia of North American Indians, by Frederick E. Hoxie (ed.),
    Houghton Mifflin
    Co.
  • A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell Reference), Richard Wightman Fox; James T. Kloppenberg (eds.), Blackwell Pub.
  • Culture and the Imagination, Proceedings of the Third Stuttgart Seminar on Cultural Studies, Verlag Für Wissenschaft und Forschung: Stuttgart, Germany, 1995
  • From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, Ronald Takaki (ed.), Oxford University Press.

Interviews

Textbooks

  • The McGraw-Hill Introduction to Literature, Gilbert H. Muller,
    McGraw Hill
    Text.
  • Ways in: Approaches to Reading and Writing About Literature, Gilbert H. Muller, John A. Williams, McGraw Hill Text.
  • The Harper American Literature, Volume 1; 2nd Edition, Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan, Martha Banta, Justin Kaplan, Harpercollins College Div.

External links

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