Sacred Reversals: Trickster in Gerald Vizenor's "Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent"

Abstract

'' ' ARTHDIVERS, says Gerald Vizenor at beginning of Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), is imaginative metaphor. The vehicle for this metaphor is a culture hero (sometimes trickster, like Wenebojo Ojibwe story Vizenor cites his preface) found extensively native American myth. This figure directs animals to dive into great flood until one finally returns with grains of dirt from which hero magically creates present earth mass. The tenor of metaphor is Vizenor's protagonists, mixedbloods, or M6tis, tribal tricksters recast culture heroes, mournful heirs survivors from that premier union between daughters of woodland shamans white fur traders. The M6tis or mixedblood earthdivers these stories dive into unknown urban places now, into racial darkriess cities, to create a new consciousness of coexistence (ix). Traditionally standing between two cultures, M6tis earthdiver will integrate America's divided anima. Furthermore, in metaphor of M6tis earthdiver, white settlers are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into unknown ... to swim deep down ... search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island (ix). To lead us to such creative realization, M6tis earthdiver must also be a trickster, for the world must be realized through inversions opposites, sacred secular of sort associated with tricksters (123). Because Vizenor refers frequently to his characters as tricksters to their reversals contradances, trickster element is apparent throughout twenty-one mainly satirical narratives of Earthdivers. Because association of blood with earthdiver-trickster is Vizenor's own, rather than one found oral traditions, what might be less apparent is that Vizenor's tricksters are very much those of native American oral traditions, even if their trickery is contemporary world. Whether Vizenor's rendering or that of oral tradition, trickster is an elusive figure. Like a subatomic particle, he defies final definition of time, place character. (Perhaps Dakotas were suggesting as much when they ended stories about trickster Ikto with and from then on, who knows where Ikto went next.) Vizenor acknowledges