790 The American Century: Literature since 1945I rapped the last beaver with a pelt of more than two year’s growth,” he recollects.
“I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement
papers that would take away our woods and lake. I axed the last birch that was older
than I.” Tracks captures the conflicted state in which the Chippewas live, now that
their culture and even their character have been invaded by the whites, and their
lives of hunting and gathering, living with the earth, all but lost to anything but
memory. But it also conjures up the animistic world that people like Nanapush still
inhabit. In this novel, “the spirits of the dead” accompany the living, people resort to
magic and medicine to accomplish their aims, and a woman may drown three times
and be three times saved – thanks, it seems, to the water spirit or manitou,
Misshepeshu. The land may be subject to taxes, but it still seems alive; and, as
Nanapush says, “land is the only thing that lasts from life to life.” Nanapush may be
a richly historical character, but he carries with him traces of Native American
folktale and legend. His name links him with the Chippewa trickster Naanabozho,
who appears in traditional oral narratives as a culture hero. “Nanapush. That’s what
you’ll be called,” his father tells him. “Because it’s got to do with trickery and living
in the bush. The first Nanapush stole fire. You will steal hearts.” A joker, trickster, and
a storyteller, Nanapush is also a mediator. When young, he reveals, he served as a
government interpreter. Older, accepting what he calls “this new way of wielding
influence, this method of leading others with a pen and piece of paper,” he is elected
tribal chairman. Mediating between white and Indian society, even while he
maintains his traditional view of the world, Nanapush is no more simply one thing
or another – man or trickster, tied to old ways or captivated by the new – than Tracks
is simply a record of cultural resistance or surrender, survival or defeat. The strength
of both the character and the novel lies, precisely, in their many dimensions, their
density of texture. What is told here is a story of triumph not despite but through
tragedy, the heroism of continuance against all the odds. As Nanapush recollects
greeting his granddaughter Lulu on her return from a boarding school off the
reservation, the nature of that triumph is caught in a single, organic image that
concludes the novel. “We gave against your rush like creaking oaks,” he tells Lulu,
“held on, braced ourselves together in the fierce dry wind.”
“Postindian mixedblood:” Gerald Vizenor uses that phrase several times in his
self-chronicle, Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990). It
could act as a mnemonic for a life and a career that includes more than thirty
published books and a vast quantity of shorter pieces. Contrariety, a willingness to
resist, even deconstruct all cultural categories, has always been his trademark. And,
in the pursuit of his transgressive project, he has drawn into his armory both
postmodern cultural theory and such Native American forms of resistance as the
trickster or joker. Vizenor uses the term “postindian” to express the notion that,
since Native lives have been so encrusted in myth and stereotype, it is necessary to
move on from, or leave behind, all fabricated versions of “the Indian.” The
“survivance,” as he calls it, of Native life, in its all and every variety, is imperative. But
that, if it is to be realized, depends on what Vizenor, in a collection of essays titled
Crossbloods (1992), has described as socioacupuncture, a cultural striptease whichGGray_c05.indd 790ray_c 05 .indd 790 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM