Gerald Vizenor

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Gerald Vizenor

Gerlad Vizenor photographed in Geneva, 2006.
Born:	1934 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.
Occupation:	Novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, ethnographer
Genres:	Postmodern, Anishinaabe traditional, haiku
Literary movement:	Postmodernism, Native American Renaissance
Website:	[1]

Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is a Native American (Anishinaabe) writer, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. One of the most prolific Native American writers, with over 25 books to his name, Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. Vizenor is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Activism 3 Teaching career 4 Fiction 5 Non-fiction 6 Awards 7 Notes 8 Bibliography 8.1 Fiction 8.2 Poetry 8.3 Screenplays 8.4 Other works 8.5 Autobiography 8.6 Books about Gerald Vizenor 9 External links 10 See also

[edit] Early life

Gerald Vizenor’s father was murdered in an unsolved homocide when Vizenor himself was less than two years old.^[1] He was raised by his Anishinaabe grandmother, his Swedish American mother (an alcoholic), 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. Honourably discharged before his unit went to Korea, Vizenor joined the army two years later, serving in a Japan still reeling from the impact of nuclear attack, a period that 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 start 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.

[edit] 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 that Vizenor looked askance at the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM), seeing the 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 colonised 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.

[edit] Teaching career

Beginning teaching at Lake Forest College, Illinois, Vizenor was quickly appointed to set up and run the Native American Studies programme at Bemidji State University. Later he was professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis^[2] (1978-1985), which he satirised mercilessly in his fictions.^[3] During this time he was also a visiting professor at Tianjin University, China. Following four years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Provost of Kresge College, and an endowed chair for one year at the University of Oklahoma, Vizenor took up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. He is current professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

[edit] 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.^[4] His first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), later revised as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), brought him immediate attention. The first science fiction novel by a Native American,^{[citation needed]} 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, 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 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 East Anglia. 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 romanticise 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 Indian-ness, Vizenor uses strategies of irony and jouissance. For instance, in the lead up to Columbus Day 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.

[edit] Non-fiction

Vizenor has authored several studies of Native American affairs, most famously Manifest Manners, and in addition has edited several collections of academic work on Native American writing. He is the founder-editor of the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies series at the University of Oklahoma Press (1990 to present), which has provided an important venue for critical work on and by Native writers.

In his own full-length studies, Vizenor is concerned with deconstructing the semiotics of Indian-ness. 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 only unified by Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them. Among his many other invented or toyed-with words is “survivance”, which he 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.

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

[edit] Awards

• 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, 1990 and 1996
• Artists Fellowship in Literature, California Arts Council, 1989
• New York Fiction Collective Prize, 1988
• American Book Award, 1988
• Film-in-the-Cities Award, Sundance festival, 1983

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Vizenor, Interior Landscapes, pp. 28-32.
2. ^ http://cla.umn.edu/amerind/
3. ^ "The Chair of Tears", in Earthdivers, pp 3-29
4. ^ Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

• Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, Univ. Nebraska Press.
• Chancers, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 36), University of Oklahoma Press.
• Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel, Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5304-2.
• Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 2), University of Oklahoma Press.
• Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1852-6.
• The Heirs of Columbus, Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6249-1.
• Griever: An American Monkey King in China, University of Minnesota Press.
• The Trickster of Liberty : Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Emergent Literatures). ISBN 0-8166-1629-9.
• Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1048-7.

[edit] Poetry

• Almost Ashore, selected poems, Salt Publishing, 2006.
• Bear Island : The War At Sugar Point, Minnesota UP 2006. ISBN 0-8166-4699-6.
• Empty Swings (Haiku in English Series), Nodin Press.
• Matsushima : Pine Island Nodin Press, 1984.
• Raising the Moon Vines, Nodin Press.
• Seventeen Chirps, Nodin Press.
• Two Wings the Butterfly, privately printed.
• Water Striders, Porter Broadside Series, Moving Parts Press.
• Slight Abrasions, A Dialogue in Haiku, with Jerome Downes, Nodin Press.
• Summer in the Spring : Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, Vol 6), University of Oklahoma Press.

[edit] Screenplays

• Harold of Orange (1982)

[edit] Other works

• Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, University of Nebraska Press 1998.
• Shadow Distance : A Gerald Vizenor Reader, Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5277-1.
• Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8032-9629-0.
• Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories, Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5243-7.
• Crossbloods; Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1854-2.
• Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Wesleyan University Press.
• Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 8), University of Oklahoma Press.
• The Everlasting Sky; New Voices from the People Named the Chippewa, MacMillan Pub Co.
• The People Named the Chippewa : Narrative Histories, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1306-0.
• Touchwood : A Collection of Ojibway Prose (Many Minnesotas Project, No 3), New Rivers Press.
• Thomas James Whitehawk, investigative narrative in the trial, capital punishment, and commutation of the death sentence of Thomas James Whitehawk, Four Winds Press, 1968.
• Native American Literature : A Brief Introduction and Anthology, Harpercollins Literary Mosaic), Watson-Guptill Pubns.

[edit] Autobiography

• Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1848-8.
• Postindian Conversations (with A. Robert Lee), University of Nebraska Press.

[edit] Books about Gerald Vizenor

• Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition - Kimberley Blaeser
• Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor - A. Robert Lee
• Four American Indian Literary Masters: N.Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerard Vizenor - Alan R. Velie

[edit] External links

• Official Gerald Vizenor site
• Salt Publishing website for Almost Ashore - includes video footage, excerpts and biography
• Gerald Vizenor at the Minnesota Authors Biography Project
• Gerald Vizenor at the Native American Authors Project
• Interview with “The Berkleyan”
• In conversation with A. Robert Lee
• “A Chance of Survivance”, interview with Jack Foley. Originally broadcast on Cover to Cover, KPFA-FM, 8/26/96
• Vizenor’s academic resume. (NB this is not up-to-date)

[edit] See also

• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction