The American Century: Literature since 1945 791“reverses the documents, deflates data, dissolves historical time, releases the pressure
in captured images and exposes the pale inventors of the tribes.” Or, in other words,
the most effective response to false images is not just more accuracy, better history,
but a creative awareness – using humor, self-reflexivity, myth, and dream – of how
such images have to be deconstructed and used rather than ignored and dismissed.
Vizenor uses the term “crossblood,” in turn, not just because he himself is of a
radically mixed heritage, including Chippewa–Ojibway origins among many others,
but because he sees identity as dialogic, double-edged, and mobile. Crucially, he uses
this term, or “tribal people,” rather than the term “Indian.” This is, not least, because
he insists to be an Indian now is to be a mixedblood, both racially and culturally,
even though the cultural traditions in which Indians have been represented have
always associated pure blood with authenticity and “half-breeds” or mixedbloods
with degeneration. Waging war against what he regards as the “terminal creeds” of
American myth, Vizenor has tried to liberate “Indianness” from its invented
simulations and one-dimensional portrayals, whether originating in the white or
Indian world. Both, as he sees it, serve to restrict Native people, producing only a
“narrative of tribal doom,” fixed images of “Vanishing Americans” caught at the
moment of their vanishing. “The trick,” Vizenor explains in his novel The Trickster of
Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baranage at Petronia (1988), “in seven words is to elude
historicism, racial representations, and remain historical.” It is to create a new sense,
and a new sensation, of tribal presence in the ruins of the old; using “wonder, chance,
coincidence” to produce a vision of individual and communal being that is always
on the move, always cutting across and undercutting boundaries – and that flies
forward through the “shimmer of the imagination.”
Characteristically, Vizenor has said that he wants his work to “break out of all
restrictions,” “out of invented cultures and repression,” to “break out of the measures
that people make.” So, although some of his work is more clearly fiction or nonfiction,
he tends to move freely across genres. Fiction, autobiography, history, social or
cultural commentary, folklore, myth, and fantasy: all are always, in his writing, in
unstable and exhilarating relation with each other. As a result, the reader is never
permitted to forget the problematic nature of any representation of the American
Indian, including self-representation. Boundaries are further blurred, to the point of
invisibility, by Vizenor’s habits of revision and repeating material, only slightly
altered, from one book to another. Vizenor’s first novel, for instance, Darkness in
Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), was reissued as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles
(1990). Since its initial publication, he has produced among other books that might
be classed as novels (although they not always are) Griever: An American Monkey
King in China (1987), The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in
the New World (1992), Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (1997), and Father
Meme (2008). Along with these there have been series of linked stories such as
Landfill Meditations (1991) and collections of essays (including Manifest Manners:
Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994)), as well as an autobiography, poems, and
journalism. All continue his project of mixing trickster language with the strategies
of postmodernism, so as to become a textual shapeshifter, deinventing and thenGGray_c05.indd 791ray_c 05 .indd 791 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM