Subverting the Politics of Discourse in Gerald Vizenor's Heirs of Columbus

Abstract

Vizenor is an illustrious novelist whose works, especially The Heirs of Columbus, dwells upon some of the substantial and significant issues facing the modern-day Native American nationals of America and Canada as the majority of the Native American tribes straddle along the borders between the two countries. Victor believes in Saidian terms that the white Euro-American colonizers, after making inroads into the native people's land, established their stranglehold by maintaining and perpetuating the policy of the misrepresentation of the native people. Through a body of specialized writings about the colonized people, the Europeans in the first place and Americans afterward- after the center was shifted from Britain to America as a result of far-reaching political and economic changes in the world scenario- grossly misrepresented the indigenous people by portraying them as uncivilized, ignorant, brutes, inferior, born to be ruled over and, thus, by implication defined themselves as civilized, democratic, knowledgeable having the divine sanction to rule. They had this cultural/anthropological theory of their innate superiority over the non-white to ideologically support and legitimize their exploitative agenda.