“Nothing More Than the Chance of Remembrance”: Gerald Vizenor and the Motion of Natural Reason in the Presence of War

Abstract

From the publication of Gerald Vizenor’s earliest haikus and journalistic writing, to imagistic flights of poetic clarity and his interrogations of moribund bureaucracies as teased ironies in a new fur trade, one can discern the seeds of his now fully germinated ideas of native motion and natural reason. In novels such as Darkness in Saint Louis: Bearheart (1978), The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) and his most recent, Blue Ravens (2014), these “vizionary” terms have provided a distinctive and effective means of making sense of the folly and horror of war. In Hiroshima Bugi and Blue Ravens , readers encounter native characters that address the absurdities of war and the legacy of colonialism with a keen sense of irony to create what Vizenor terms a “visionary sense of native presence” ( Blue Ravens 3). Touchstones of natural reason and survivance are given presence in the trickster hermeneutics of Ronin Browne, who disrupts the “simulations of peace” at Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome, while the visionary stories and cosmototemic art of Basile and Aloysius Beaulieu dance in word and image to create a new historical memory that bridges the divide between White Earth and World War I Europe. In both novels, Vizenor extends the synergetic critical/creative project that forms the basis of his extensive body of work whereby native people repudiate the fugitive poses perpetuated by the literature of dominance and nostalgic victimry to assert an active native presence by a resistance that is carried in the motion of “memories, stories of totemic creation, shamanic visions, burial markers, medicine pictures, the hunt, love, war, and songs of a virtual [native] cartography” ( Fugitive Poses 170).