January/February 1995
Utne Reader
Gerald Vizenor laughs, rages, and dazzles away the prevailing
image of the Native American as solemn and simple. In a stream of
novels, books of poetry, and essays (a representative sampling of
which have been collected in Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor
Reader) the Minnesota-born Vizenor, who teaches at the
University of California-Berkeley, celebrates Native Americans'
stubborn ability to lead creative lives in the face of wrong and
repression. Vizenor's image of Native life, informed by the
tradition of trickster tales, challenges both racism and the stodgy
rules of contemporary storytelling.
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Like Coyote and the other great trickster figures of the Native
American nations, Gerald Vizenor likes to stir things up. What he
likes best to stir up are the hoary notion that the Indian stands
for something single and simple--savagery, tragedy, or tribal
wisdom--and the idea that life can be lived without amazing,
painful (and funny) contradictions every step of the way.
In book after book of poetry, essays, and fiction, Vizenor has
expounded and played dazzling literary tricks with his Native
heritage, showing Indian thought coalescing with, illuminating, and
running nimbly ahead of contemporary literary and cultural theory.
Out of the pain of Native history, he coins powerful cultural terms
like survivance--'not just survival,' he insists, 'but a
quality and condition of remaining imaginative under domination and
getting on with things.'
In books like Griever: An American Monkey King in China
(1987) Vizenor sends Native American characters, and finds Native
American histories, all over the world. 'Indians are usually seen
as capsulized,' he says, 'limited to one environment, with the
illusion of stability in that environment. But Indians have been
engaged all over the world for centuries, in Europe, even in Asia.
The first `Western' teacher of English in Japan was a Native
American.'