Gerald Vizenor

Abstract

Gerald Vizenor is the most prolific of contemporary Native American writers. To date, he is the author of sixteen works of fiction, fourteen volumes of poetry, two dramatic works, an autobiography, and numerous landmark books of cultural theory and intellectual history, in addition to which he has edited several influential collections of scholarly essays, literary anthologies, and an anthology of his own work. He is also the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. Twice the winner of the American Book Award (1988 and 2011), his achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious accolades. It is notable, however, that direct scholarly engagement with Vizenor’s published work underrepresents his towering influence, which exceeds the domain of Native American literary studies. His neologism “survivance,” for example, features in a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. Permeating public and academic discourses alike, much of his theorizing of Native American experience can be traced to his biography. Born in Minneapolis on 22 October 1934, his Anishinaabe father was murdered while Vizenor was an infant, leading to years moving between the home of his paternal grandmother on the White Earth Reservation, foster families, and periods living with his mother, a third-generation Swedish American. This environment introduced Vizenor to life as a person of mixed descent: a postindian identity that, in his work, exists in tension with the settler-colonial stereotype of “the Indian.” The powerful influence of his grandmother’s Anishinaabe tribal culture has produced in his writings not only his signature trope of the mythical trickster, as well as “re-expressed” traditional stories, but also the concepts like survivance, manifest manners, terminal creeds, Native presence, and transmotion that inform both his writings and scholarly approaches to it. The historic experience of Native people, familiar to Vizenor from his work as a community organizer and political activist, stands behind these concepts, but his writing is also characterized by a theoretical density that reflects his academic standing: he is professor emeritus of both the University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico. There are two corresponding trends in Vizenor scholarship: one teases out the tribal Anishinaabe foundations of his work, the other situates his writings in non-Native contexts such as postmodernism; however, reduction to a simple binary belies the complexity and sophistication of criticism inspired by this most prolific, challenging, and innovative of writers.