“Words are Crossbloods”: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor

 

When I first met Gerald Vizenor in the summer of 2009 at the Study of the U. S. Institute (SUSI) on Contemporary American Literature1 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, our meeting was a "chance" in the way Vizenor argues that "life is a chance." We met again at his poetry reading at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard on October 16, 2014.2 It was a chance that I was there, and that I was privileged to meet him again. This interview, conducted over email, was also a chance.

Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota, is an intellectual polymath and a unique voice of Native American presence in the world of letters. He is a prolific and versatile author and editor of more than thirty books, including Blue Ravens (2014), Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku (2014), Shrouds of White Earth (2010), Almost Ashore (2006), Hiroshima Bugi (2003), Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999), and Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998). He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the 2011 American Book Award for Shrouds of White Earth. His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986), won the 1988 American Book Award and the 1986 New York Fiction Collective Award.

 In his new novel, Treaty Shirts: October 2034 - A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation, released this month, Vizenor creates an ironic analogy between the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867 and the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation through the allegorical narratives of seven Native exiles from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations. In her review of Treaty Shirts, Diane Glancy, author of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (2014), says: "In writing that's full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be."

 As Vizenor himself explains it, he creates a sense of presence, not the past tense. He writes to a presence of natural motion, successfully keeping a sense of motion in his poetry, fiction, autobiography, drama, narrative history, and even essays, critical theory and journalism. An inveterate coiner of such terms as "survivance," "victimry," "storier," "wordmaker," "crossblood," and "transmotion," Vizenor consistently resists one-dimensionality and keeps words in motion as one of the finest storiers of the 20^th and the 21^st century. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

SR: To the world, you are known as a "crossblood" or a "mixedblood" Anishinaabe and one of Native America's most accomplished writers. You have Anishinaabe-French ancestry, and you are a member of the first generation of your family to be born off the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, but you spent much of your childhood on the reservation. In your explanation, the identity of the Indian is an absolute fake because the word has no referent in tribal languages and culture. You, however, recognize the "postindian" identity, which replaces the Indian invention, and celebrates "postindian warriors" who create a new tribal presence in stories. Could we say that you are a transnational "postindian" writer?

GV: Postindian is a philosophical concept and discussion, a critical irony, not a state of presence or the description of a literary practice. I am a writer, a creative and critical writer, not a postindian writer. The concept of postindian cannot be easily described, it is ironic in that sense, and only suggests a more creative response to the many categories that have been used to describe natives. Natives have been in motion by migration, trade and encounter on the continent for many centuries before contact with Europeans. The creative scenes of natural motion, or visionary transmotion, are at the heart of every native story. Transnational is a descriptive concept, and transmotion is visionary, a creative sense of natural motion in the world.

SR: Are the seven narrators of Treaty Shirts—native exiles from the White Earth Nation, known only by native nicknames, yet related to characters in your other novels and stories—futuristic "postindian warriors" that create a new sense of native presence in their stories? Does the number seven play a special role in the creation of the novel?

GV: Nicknames are common and personal in native communities, and a person may have several nicknames in the course of associations and experiences. The seven exiles in Treaty Shirts were once delegates to the constitutional conventions, and dedicated to the native ethos of egalitarian governance. The Constitution of the White Earth Nation continues with the seven exiles at the same time that the treaty territory that established the reservation has been abrogated by the federal government. The seven exiles create a historical union with a constitution in motion, the ethos of the constitution is visionary, and neither the constitution nor the seven can be divided or distracted by government doctrines of authority. There are seven indivisible modes of native enlightenment: the four seasons, the sky, the earth, and the visionary presence of a storier.

SR: Where is home for you?

GV: My home is with the presence of friends and family, and not in one place. I am at home in a natural stand of cedar in the Chippewa National Forest, and home is the White Earth Nation. I am at home with colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Minnesota, at home with family in Seattle, Washington, with good friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Paris, and in London.

SR: Does American literature represent an organic intersection between indigenous populations and those from other continents?

GV: The meaning of the word "indigenous" is not obvious in creative literature. Novelists create characters and scenes in an imagined world, not in an academic bower, descriptive carriage, or ethnographic compartment. Literary artists create the scenes and characters that may seem familiar to readers. The organic intersections, structural or essential, are restricted by the language of the social sciences, and are not obviously the subject of literary art.

SR: What is your opinion about the state of Native American literature in our society today?

GV: Native American Indian creative narratives are a new literature of discovery. Yes, the discovery of new styles of literary art to uncover the original play of native stories, creation and trickster stories, and to reveal the various practices of native irony.

SR: Is literature in crisis? Are the humanities in crises? If so, what remedy would you propose to cure both?

GV: The only crisis in native literature is in publishing, print or electronic, and, of course, the limited sources of income from creative literature. Literary artists, those who create innovative styles and visionary scenes, have never easily found publishers.

SR: You have already discussed a postmodernist form of Native American literature. In your book, what is a contemporary form of Native American literature? 

GV: Visionary, ironic, and innovative.

SR: You describe your style of writing as a visual experience. What is your visual experience of the contemporary world?

GV: The visual in literary art is created, original, and not a representation, simulation, pose of the real, or a material presence. My idea of the visual in literary art is a sense of transmotion, a sense of natural visionary motion, the motion of the seasons, for instance, and that perception of transmotion or visionary motion is never the same. The visual motion in my literary art is not merely recounted or descriptive.

SR: How much of your writing is based on personal experience?

GV: My imagination is personal, my dreams and visionary associations are personal, distinctive, intimate, and memorable in literary art.

SR: Could you say how you started as a writer and briefly reflect on your life of a man of letters? Has your poetic vision shaped your personality?

GV: I was thirteen years old and impressed by journalism, the excitement of writing about events, and later actually became a journalist for a daily morning newspaper, the Minneapolis Tribune. I was eighteen and wrote haiku poetry and short stories as a soldier stationed in Japan. That, in a sense, was the start of my practice as writer. I imagined, at the same time, the life of a creative writer. Then, as a college student after my service in the military, novelists Herman Melville, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Wolfe, Albert Camus, and William Faulkner indirectly inspired me to become a writer. The development of my literary style, however, was not directly related to these writers. Joyce created scenes that were associations of elusive time, and with an immense sense of religious and literary history. Melville was a masterful literary artist of natural motion, more than any motion picture or painting could provide of whales. Wolfe was absorbed with distinctive details of motion and place. Faulkner created a sense of visionary motion, and the great irony of ordinary deliverance. I read The Stranger by Camus in translation, and the concise sense of motion was related to the interaction of characters and time. I perceived these critical circumstances as a close reader, but they were not my experiences, and certainly not in translation. My literary style was never an imitation of any other writer. I discovered my literary artistic style in the stories told by natives and by my relatives, and in the tease of images, that precision of visual imagination and motion in the haiku poems of the Japanese.

SR: You are a contemporary writer, but you take your readers on a journey to the old truths of the heart and soul, and it is a difficult journey. You produce texts that the readers must become involved with. Is it difficult to communicate with the contemporary reader?

GV: Commercial publishers have endorsed the themes of absence and victimry, rather than a native presence and survivance. Most readers expect the romantic structures of a vanishing race, the lonesome warrior, and natives without humor or a sense of irony. My novels and critical theories create scenes and situation of native survivance, and my stories overturn the notions of historical absence with irony. In other words, my readers must learn how to read about the intricacies of the native cultures of presence, and to appreciate innovative literary styles that tease and counter the familiar themes of victimry.

SR: Has your aesthetic of "survivance" changed over the course of time? For example, is it different in Treaty Shirts? How do you see survivance in the 21^st century?

GV: Yes, my earlier discussions of survivance as a cultural condition have become a more perceptive sense of survivance with literary irony. Consider Winnetou by Karl May, and Hanta Yo: An American Saga by Ruth Beebe Hill, for instance, as obvious romantic simulations and absurd narratives about native cultures that can be reviewed with pleasure as unintended irony. These popular hocus pocus simulations of native victimry do not deserve a serious historical critique. Treaty Shirts, my most recent novel, is an aesthetic narrative of survivance in the voices of seven native exiles that declare a new egalitarian nation in motion with the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. The exiles created the first modern native nation in motion, and in so doing recognize an ancient tradition of visionary transmotion in the world.

SR: In your work, you effectively bridge many different spaces such as: the space between the different cultures, the space between oral and written stories, the space between past and present... Humor is one of your tools. What makes humor aesthetic?

GV: Alice Beaulieu Vizenor, my grandmother, and my great uncle John Clement Beaulieu taught me to appreciate the common tease and trickster aesthetics in native stories, or the practice of stories that were ironic by evasive gestures, and favors that avoided terminal creeds. Native trickster stories created a sense of presence, and sidestepped the expectations of closure or conclusions, or the denouement so familiar in the academic discourse of the short story. Native stories were never the same, not a mere recitation, and in the same way creation stories were never related as liturgy. Native stories created a presence, not an absence or closure.

SR: Would you call yourself a "trickster figure" as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday has once called you?

GV: Trickster characters are imagined, created in stories, not actual or corporeal, and the creative art of trickster stories has never been a cultural representation. Native storiers and novelist are not tricksters, but the storier and writer may create trickster scenes and characters that are remembered in the motion of the seasons. Tricksters are elusive, evasive, even ironic in the course of literature. N. Scott Momaday is not a trickster, but he has made use of trickster themes in his stories. Native writers may practice and study trickster hermeneutics, but that would not include an academic synthesis or ethnographic reduction of creative writers as trickster figures.

SR: You argue that life is a chance as well as a story. What about the aesthetics of emotion? Is it also a chance? Is it underrated in the time of digital technologies and consumerism?

GV: I am alive and a writer by chance, the chance of conception, the chance of choices and experience, and the chance of an education. I am not writing at this moment because of some cultural sentence of monotheism.

SR: You are a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and drama. What literary genre you feel most comfortable in?

GV: I am accomplished in many forms and styles of writing, creative and journalism. I was a staff writer for the Minneapolis Tribune for several years, and at the same time continued to write haiku poetry. Imagistic poetry has inspired me more than any other form of literature. The concise perceptions of motion, the turn of seasons, crows in the poplars, bright leaves frozen in the winter ice, these natural scenes have influenced my poetry and prose. I also use imagistic scenes in historical and critical essays.

SR: What is your favorite work [of your own writing]?

GV: Three novels: Hiroshima Bugi, Blue Ravens, and Treaty Shirts. These three novels are innovative in style, ironic in the sentiments and memories of the past, and narratives that are the visionary transmotion of native survivance.

SR: You resist boundaries and singularity in your poetry and poetics. Your philosophy of poetic expression is unique, your poetic genres are innovative, and the influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form makes even your theoretical essays poetic. What is your most challenging experience: is it your literary work or your literary theory? 

GV: The motion of the seasons and other visionary scenes of temper and teases come to mind easily, in thought, dream, and reading, and give rise to a sense of presence, but the actual choice of words, and the visual perceptions and connections in poetry are never easy. Creative and poetic images may be easy to imagine but literary images are seldom easy to write.

SR: Contemporary scholars such as Amy J. Elias, Christian Moraru, John D. Pizer, Alan Kirby, Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Giles, and many others have recently introduced the planetary model of a wide-ranging set of developments in cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical contemporaneity that is different from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism and environmentalism. In their introduction to The Planetary Turn (2015), Elias and Moraru point out that the best discussions of planetarity move closer to the vital problem of the ethical relation obtaining in new models of transnationality, internationality, or multinationality. Is your new novel "planetary"? Could we trace planetary relationality in your poetic space in general?

GV: Planetary is a word established in astrology, the history of planets and the science of astronomy. The word planetary has a great longevity of meaning that delivers a sense of motion and structure, of climate and pollution. I appreciate the spacious continuation of the word planetary as a concept and critical discourse of time, contemporary culture and literature. My sense of chance and natural motion, or transmotion, however, would resist any suggestions of structure, or the fashion of principles that determine and define the aesthetics of literature. I generally resist most theories that establish models, as these academic practices, in my view, deliver academic simulations in the same way that ethnography delivered models of native cultures. Models are ironic simulations. This is not a new analogy, but rather an old practice of models and structures with a new theory.

SR: Could Native American literature be seen as "planetary"?

GV: I would not embrace native literature as planetary.

SR: You write: "Listen, there are words almost everywhere. I realized that in a chance moment. Words are in the air, in our blood, words were always there, way before my burned book collection in the back seat of a car. Words are in the snow, trees, leaves, wind, birds, beaver, the sound of ice cracking; words are in fish and mongrels, where they've been since we came to this place with the animals. My winter breath is a word, we are words, real words, and the mongrels are their own words. Words are crossbloods too, almost whole right down to the cold printed page burned on the sides." (Landfill Meditations, 8) I will close without a question, and ask you to have the last word, to open some new spaces ...

GV: Archive and seven other native characters in Treaty Shirts: October 2034, A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation, my new novel, are native exiles, banished from the reservation, and they declare a new nation on an island near the border with Canada in Lake of the Woods. Archive is a nickname, and he comments on the demise of native totems and the destruction of animals in the fur trade:

La Grande Paix de Montréal has never been abrogated in tact or forsaken in diplomacy. Yet, that historical union and memorable peace treaty was directly connected to the decimation of totemic animals in the empire fur trade and has never been forgiven in the court of shamans, or revised with irony in the native stories of colonial enterprise and the shakedown of liberty.

Come closer, listen to the steady crack of totemic bones, trace the bloody shadows and getaways, endure the steady wingbeats of scavengers, and count out loud the seasons and centuries of peltry stacked in canoes, the gory native trade and underfur treasure of two empires, and the everlasting agony of the beaver. . . .

The beaver and native totems were sacrificed once in the empires of the fur trade and orders of courtly fashions, and then totemic animals were converted into tawdry casino tokens, the new crave of peltry and games of chance.

The animals of cagey casino cultures were considered more as a nuisance and the sources of new diseases than the traditional inspiration of survivance totems and continental liberty.

The new totems and cultural burdens of natives were hardly significant when compared with the decimation of animals, and demise of the original totemic associations in the furious continental fur trade of the past three centuries. No national separation strategy, treaty deceit, constitution, dominion, tiresome overcompensations of monotheism, or the romantic tread of enlightenment could absolve the outright cruelty and slaughter of animals for felt hats and furry fashions in Europe.

(from Treaty Shirts)

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This interview was conducted by email on February 4, 2016. Treaty Shirts is available now from the Wesleyan University Press: http://www.upne.com/0819576286.html

 

Selma Raljevic is an assistant professor of literature at the English Department at the Faculty of Humanities of Dzemal Bijedic University of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her first book, Faulkner and Selimovic Were Here: Modernism, Alienation and Disintegration, will be published in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2017.