Gerald Vizenor

Works

• 1994Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance

  Essays arguing that the “indian” is a simulation of colonial discourse, from Columbus’s error to films and museums, behind which real Native people disappear; “postindian” stories of survivance undo these simulations.

• 1998Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence

  Lectures that develop “survivance” and “transmotion”, the sovereignty of motion in Native stories, against images of Native people as absent, vanished or victims.

Position

Vizenor is on the map as a theorist who brought the methods of postmodern criticism into Native American studies and turned them against the images made of Native people. The word “indian”, which Vizenor writes in lower case and italics, is a colonial invention that began with Columbus’s error and was continued in novels, films, museums and the social sciences; in “Manifest Manners” (1994), with reference to Jean Baudrillard, Vizenor describes these images as simulations, manners of domination in which Manifest Destiny lives on and behind which real Native people disappear. Against them Vizenor sets “postindian” stories and “survivance”, an active sense of Native presence that is more than survival and refuses both tragic victimry and nostalgia. The trickster of Anishinaabe stories, Naanabozho, becomes a model of thought that is comic, open and resistant to fixed identities. “Fugitive Poses” (1998) adds “transmotion”, a sovereignty of movement that cannot be confined to territories or fixed images. The term survivance is now widely used in Native American and Indigenous studies, and Vizenor’s work on the constitution of the White Earth Nation carried the idea of Native sovereignty into constitutional practice.

Life & context

Gerald Robert Vizenor was born in 1934 in Minneapolis and is an enrolled citizen of the White Earth Nation, one of the Anishinaabe nations of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Vizenor grew up in Minneapolis; during service with the US Army in Japan in the 1950s Vizenor came to know haiku, which shaped the early poetry. Vizenor studied at New York University and the University of Minnesota and in the 1960s and 1970s worked as a community organiser in Minneapolis and as a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, reporting among other things on the American Indian Movement. Vizenor then taught at Bemidji State University, the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where Vizenor directed Native American studies; later Vizenor was professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Vizenor founded and edited the series American Indian Literature and Critical Studies at the University of Oklahoma Press. The novel “Griever: An American Monkey King in China” received the American Book Award in 1988. Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, ratified in 2009.

Further main works

• Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (novel, 1978)
• Griever: An American Monkey King in China (novel, 1987)
• Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (ed., 1989)
• Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (2009)