"Buried in Fine White Ash": Violence and the Reimagination of Ceremonial Bodies in "Winter in the Blood" and "Bearheart"

Abstract

The body is a site of power and transformation in James Welch's Winter in Blood and Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart. In these texts, poetics and politics of identity emerge in somatic images that both support and resist ceremonies and stories integral to American Indian and Euro-American traditions. Ceremony, as both mimetic and productive of social processes, provides frame in which imaginary identification with and resistance to dominant cultures are inscribed and made manifest. The inscription of power is a writing on body, a complex and extremely visceral process in which ceremonial rhetoric is a matter of wounding, violation, or evisceration. Like body, imagination in these texts is perpetually (or permanently?) disfigured: it is not capable of transcending bodies/figures that are always already torn, shattered, or, as in case of Vizenor's fascination with immolation, burned. It is crucial to recognize that visceral images in Winter in Blood and Bearheart articulate inscriptions of power as product of an intricate interweaving of material practice and spiritual imagination. In their essay Bodily Reform and Historical Practice, John and Jean Comaroff argue that the making of body is often a more visceral matter than is conveyed by categories of a Cartesian social science that imagines power as an abstract or cerebral force. The Comaroffs argue that [b]ecause it is an active force, power (like agency) must be sought in active body, body that lives in time and moves through space.' Violence toward body, however ritual-