Wiindigoo Sovereignty and Native Transmotion in Gerald Vizenor's <em>Bearheart</em>

Abstract

In the study of American Indian literatures, the rise of criticism focused on literary nationalism, with its emphasis on tribal-specific approaches to literary study, the sovereignty of Native nations, and claims to tribal homelands, would seem to herald the displacement of Gerald Vizenor’s work from a central position in the American Indian literary canon. Indeed, Vizenor has been criticized for failing to address or for actively subverting in his creative work and criticism these issues of primary concern to literary nationalists. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the earliest and most ardent proponents for a nationalist perspective in American Indian Studies, identifies Vizenor as “a major voice” in what she calls “mixedblood discourse,” characterized by “an aesthetic that is pathetic or cynical, a tacit notion of the failure of tribal governments as Native institutions and of sovereignty as a concept, and an Indian identity which focuses on individualism rather than First Nation ideology” (“American Indian Intellectualism” 124–25). Sean Kicummah Teuton, arguing for a tribal realist approach to identity formation and knowledge production, sees Vizenor writing from the zone of the trickster in his poststructural criticism, which seems to reject any normative claims to American Indian identity, history, and land: “[D]isconnected from a distinct culture and land, it ultimately cannot support a coherent Native identity, nor protect actual Native territories.” Moreover, Teuton claims that Vizenor’s “ahistorical trickster fiction,” such as his novel Bearheart, “provides little guidance on how to construct one’s own Native selfhood,” and instead