“You’re Always More Famous When You Are Banished”: Gerald Vizenor on Citizenship, War, and Continental Liberty

Abstract

“You’re Always More Famous When You Are Banished”Gerald Vizenor on Citizenship, War, and Continental Liberty Colleen Eils, Emily Lederman, and Andrew Uzendoski In September 2013 Gerald Vizenor visited the University of Texas at Austin as a guest of the Department of English’s annual Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (tilts). In addition to delivering a keynote presentation titled “Survivance and Totemic Motion in Native American Indian Literature and Art,” Vizenor met with graduate students Colleen Eils, Emily Lederman, and Andrew Uzendoski for a formal interview followed by an open question- and- answer session. Vizenor’s prolific contributions to Native poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, as well as his importance to ethnic literary studies, made him the ideal choice to open tilts’s yearlong public forum titled “Reading Race in Literature and Film.” His lecture linked visuality and literature to underscore the continuing social and political stakes of representations of race, ethnicity, and citizenship in indigenous art. This presentation set the stage for a series of talks by such notable scholars, artists, and activists as Junot Díaz, Sherman Alexie, and Julia Alvarez; filmmakers John Sayles and Maggie Renzi; and the writers, directors, and actors of Alex and Andrew Smith’s film adaptation of James Welch’s Winter in the Blood. In addition to his contributions through poetry, fiction, and scholarship, Vizenor is also a journalist, teacher, and professor emeritus at the University of California–Berkeley. He is a pen Excellence Award winner (1996) and twice a winner of the American Book Award (1988, 2011). He has received lifetime achievement honors from melus (2011) and the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas (2001), as well as the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association (2005), among other honors. Vizenor accepted a new challenge by taking [End Page 213] part in the constitutional conventions held by the White Earth Nation in Minnesota between 2007 and 2009. Vizenor served as the principal author of the constitution, which was published in a volume titled The White Earth Nation: The Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution (2012) that also includes essays by Vizenor, Jill Doerfler, and David E. Wilkins. We spoke with Vizenor two months before the constitution was put to voters in a referendum; White Earth citizens approved the constitution by a vote of 2,780–712 on November 19, 2013. In the following interview, his first since retiring as a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, Vizenor explains the process of how the White Earth delegation developed their constitution. He considers how his recent work on the White Earth constitution, along with his long- term interest in issues of sovereignty and citizenship, shapes his two most recent novels, American Book Award winner Shrouds of White Earth (2010) and Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (2014). He also discusses the process of writing historical fiction when the history under consideration remains largely inaccessible. For example, to prepare for Blue Ravens, a historical novel about Anishinaabe men serving in the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and living in postwar Paris, Vizenor incorporated a diverse set of archives: his research brought him from obscure Becker County, Minnesota, records held in the Minnesota Historical Society—in which he found a wealth of information on local World War I soldiers, including Natives from the White Earth Reservation—to Google Earth’s Street View in Paris. Vizenor’s movement from hyperlocal to global sources of knowledge has a Native precedent not only in Vizenor’s own fiction but also in what he terms “transmotion,” a spirited movement of imagination and/or body. He situates the concept of transmotion conceptually and historically while describing the stakes and possibilities of producing innovative scholarship, an enterprise that—after several decades as a leader in Native and ethnic literary studies—he continues to undertake. q: What was your role in the White Earth constitutional convention? v: I was a delegate, a sworn delegate, among forty delegates. We met at four weekend constitutional conventions on the reservation in the Shooting Star Casino—that adds a little bit of irony in the process—because there is a conference center connected to the casino. It was well...