Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence

Introduction

The book is based on Vizenor’s Abraham Lincoln Lectures at the University of Nebraska and appeared in 1998. It continues the critique of the “indian” as a simulation and asks how Native presence can be shown in stories, art and law against the images of absence – the “vanishing race”, the noble or tragic victim, the object in a museum. Here Vizenor develops the concept of “transmotion”: the sovereignty of motion that appears in Native stories, visions and journeys and cannot be confined to territorial borders or fixed identities. The “fugitive poses” of the title are the poses into which photographers and ethnographers placed Native people, and which Native stories escape. The concepts of survivance and transmotion have since been taken up in literary studies, art history and Indigenous legal thought.

Connections

Builds on

• Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance1994 · Gerald Vizenor

More works by Gerald Vizenor

• 1994Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance