#gerald vizenor

[waywordsstudio]

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸'𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀:

- Tommy Orange - 𝘞𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘴

- Gerald Vizenor - 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴

The podcast: 𝗟𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗡𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗱𝘀, Feb 20

waywordsstudio.com

[manwalksintobar]

FAT GREEN FLIES // Gerald Vizenor

                    fat green flies     square dance across the grapefruit                   honor your partner

[lifeinpoetry]

half truths / peeling like blisters of history

Gerald Vizenor, from “Seven Woodland Crows,” When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

[uwmspeccoll]

Indigenous Peoples Day 2021

The 2nd Monday of October continues to be a contentious tug of war between those who wish to commemorate the heritage and contributions of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and those who wish to celebrate the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the hemisphere, which had disastrous consequences for the indigenous populations of the Americas.

In honor Indigenous Peoples Day, we present the cover of Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor’s 1991 novel The Heirs of Columbus published by Wesleyan University Press in Middletown, Connecticut. The novel, which forms part of our Native American Literature Collection, reclaims the story of Christopher Columbus on behalf of Native Americans by reimagining the explorer as a descendent of ancient Mayans and Sephardic Jews who only desires to return to his ancestral homelands in America. Meanwhile, his modern-day descendants, the heirs of the title, try to repatriate his bones and establish a fantastical genetic institute for tribal healing.

In one way, Vizenor offers a bridge between the two contenders for the 2nd Monday in October, but ultimately the novel is what Choctaw/Cherokee novelist and critic Louis Owens considers as Vizenor’s "best trickster-satirist mode" in "a brilliant appropriation of the master symbol of Euroamerican history."

Wisconsin officially recognized the 2nd Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day in 2019.

View our previous Indigenous Peoples Day posts.

View our other posts on Native Americans.

[wearebeguiler]

Tricksters are real in stories but not in the flesh. Tricksters are not blood or material, but imagination. Tricksters are the kind of thought that raises hope, that heals, that cures, that cannot be traced. The power of a trickster would be diminished, even abolished, by human representations. Humans are not tricksters, but tricksters can be human. Tricksters are not moral but live forever in imagination. And the trickster is not immortal either. Tricksters liberate the mind, and they do so in a language game. Tricksters do not represent the real or the material. Tricksters are not alive in tribal imagination to prove theories of the social scientists. Tricksters have become anthropologists, but no anthropologist has ever understood a trickster. Tricksters have become anthropologists if only long enough to overturn their theories and turn them into cold shit. But tricksters are not moral or functional. Tricksters are not artifacts. Tricksters never prove culture or the absence of culture. Tricksters do not prove the values that we live by, nor do they prove or demonstrate the responses to domination by colonial democracies. Tricksters are not comsumables. Tricksters are not breakfast cereal. Tricksters are ethereal. Tricksters only exist in a comic sense between two people who take pleasure in a language game and imagination, a noetic liberation of the mind. . . .

Gerald Vizenor,  Anishnaabe writer and scholar, 1993

[always-returning]

I mean, the holovisionary scenes of memory provide an imagistic gaze, a visionary source that creates various points of view, narrative voices, and an indeterminate literary shelter for listeners and readers.

Gerald Vizenor in "Praise the Ravens" interview

[hclib]

NOW ON VIEW IN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Resistance and Self-Determination: American Indian Cultural Activism in Minnesota in the 1970s

The recent anti-DAPL protests by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota have brought attention to the ongoing obstacles faced by American Indian groups in their attempts to assert their rights over their tribal land and its uses. In Minnesota, the 1960s and 1970s bore witness to a similarly urgent rise of American Indian activism in response to assimilationist governmental policies. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the United States government implemented a series of legislations that attempted to terminate the recognition of tribal sovereignty. Among the most drastic was Public Law 280 (1953), which gave the State jurisdiction over American Indian reservations, and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 which displaced American Indian populations by encouraging reservation-dwelling individuals to move to cities to seek employment.

These policies continued to have devastating effects on the American Indian population, leading to high unemployment rates, poverty, health epidemics, and police harassment. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis to combat these policies and its effects and AIM’s popularity grew across the United States. AIM is best known for its controversial militant protest tactics, including occupations of Alcatraz (in 1969) and Wounded Knee (1973). Not all members of the American Indian community agreed with these tactics, however, and several other social movements and advocacy organizations arose during this period. These movements were integral to the reversal of termination policies in the 1970s, and the adoption of federal policies that gave some recognition to the specificity American Indian civil rights.

While there were complex debates within the American Indian community regarding tactics, common to them was the call for American Indian self-determination and the vitality of American Indian culture in opposition to colonial oppression and narratives of victimry. The materials displayed here, from the Minneapolis Athenaeum’s North American Indian Collection, represent the use of cultural forms of expression in the 1970s to advocate for American Indian self-determination as an individual, collective, and political right in Minnesota. In recognition of this right, this display gives precedence to American Indian voices by highlighting materials produced by or in close consultation with indigenous authors and community members.

This display, featuring material from the Minneapolis Athenaeum’s North American Indian Collection, was curated by James K. Hosmer Special Collections volunteer Alexandra Alisauskas. Alex is a researcher and educator who has taught art history at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and St. Cloud State University. Six displays featuring the Minneapolis Athenaeum’s collections will be on view in the Special Collections Department at the Minneapolis Central Library June through August 2017.

[thegeekanthropologist]

Let's pause for a moment to clarify one possible Native conception of Apocalypse, in contrast to its association with biblical canon. Lawrence Gross (Anishinaabe) contends that Anishinaabe culture is recovering from what he calls "post-apocalypse stress syndrome" and describes Apocalypse as the state of being aakozi, Anishinaabemowin for "he/she is sick" and, more to the point, "out of balance." Native Apocalypse is really that state of imbalance, often perpetuated by "terminal creeds," the ideologies that Gerald Vizenor warns against in advocating survivance in the face of invisibility. Imbalnce further implies a state of extremes, but within those extremes lies a middle ground and the seeds of bimaadiziwin, the state of balance, one of difference and provisionality, a condition of resistance and survival. Native apocalyptic storytelling, then, shows, the ruptures, the scars, and the trauma in its effort ultimately to provide healing an da reutnr to bimaadiziwin. This is the path to a sovereignty embedded in self-determination

Grace L. Dillion, Walking the Clouds: An Anthopology of Indigenous Science Fiction