Gerald Vizenor - Fiction

Fiction

Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays and of course many novels. He has been named as a member of the literary movement Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance. His first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), later revised as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), brought him immediate attention. One of few science fiction novels by a Native American, it portrayed a procession of tribal pilgrims through a surreal, dystopian landscape of an America suffering an environmental apocalypse brought on by white greed for oil. Simultaneously postmodern and deeply traditional, inspired by N. Scott Momaday's pioneering works, Vizenor drew on poststructuralist theory and Anishinaabe trickster stories to portray a world in the grip of what he called “terminal creeds” – belief systems incapable of change. In one of the most famous and controversial passages, the character Belladonna Darwin Winter-Catcher proclaims that Natives are better and purer than whites, and is killed for her belief in racial separatism with poisoned cookies.

Subsequent novels have seen a shifting and overlapping cast of tricksters turn up anywhere from China to White Earth to the University of Kent. Frequently quoting philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Vizenor’s fiction is allusive, humorous and playful, but always ultimately serious in dealing with the state of Native America. Proclaiming himself as much the enemy of those who would romanticize the figure of the Native as he is of those who would continue colonial oppression, Vizenor constantly returns to the theme that the “Indian” was an invention of European invaders – before Columbus’ first landing, there was no such thing as an “Indian”, only the peoples of various tribes (such as Anishinaabe or Dakota).

To deconstruct the idea of "Indianness," Vizenor uses strategies of irony and jouissance. For instance, in the lead up to Columbus Day in 1992, he published The Heirs of Columbus, in which he teasingly claims that Columbus was in fact a Mayan Indian trying to return home. In Hotline Healers, he claims that Richard Nixon, the American president who did more for American Indians than any other, did so as part of a deal in exchange for traditional “virtual reality” technology.