Part One: Chance, Coincidence, and Natural Motion
Questions by Rey M. Rodríguez
1. How did you get started in writing, for those new to your writings, and why do you write?
My responses to the how, when, and why Gerald Vizenor came to be a writer are eccentric, ironic, and entangled with a wide range of personal and literary experiences. Some writers were inspired by great books and envisioned the authors. Most of the early novels by native authors were published in the thirties and were not in print or available to imagine at the time.
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck was an agreeable story at age seven, but the romance of horses would never influence my course as a writer. God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell was banned in Saint Paul and other cities, and at age fifteen that was reason enough to read the novel about sex and wealth on a farm in Georgia. My response to the banned novel was cocky, “I can do better,” an arrogant comment that luckily was not revealed to anyone at the time.
My first serious story as a writer was rejected in a tenth-grade high school literature class. The narrative account of my experiences was not accepted, and that alone was motivation to become a writer. I was fifteen years old and lied about my age to enlist in the Minnesota Nation Guard. The military duties were twice a month at the Minneapolis Armory and then in the summer two weeks of combat training at Fort Ripley in Minnesota. The teacher refused to accept my story about some events at a military camp because she did not believe the events were my actual experiences. That was an early and easy lesson, some readers may not believe the writer, a native writer. I enlisted in the United States Army three years later and served first in a tank battalion at Hokkaido, Japan, in 1952.
One decisive inspiration to become a creative writer was directly related to the chance discovery of A Stone, a Leaf, a Door by the novelist Thomas Wolfe. I read the entire book standing at a library shelf on a troop ship bound for Japan. The book was a selection of poetic phrases from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. The senses of natural motion were elusive and secretive, and the sway of images caught me in a literary daydream by chance.
I completed several short stories in the next few months, and later that year wrote a novel in the style of automatic writing, or the irony of spirit writing. I purchased a portable typewriter and wrote about sixty pages of descriptive scenes and dialogue in a single night. There was no sense of time, and no instructions, critical cues, or knowledge of how to write anything, only the inspiration to be an author.
Japanese haiku, two, three or four line imagistic poetry was another traceable source of my inspiration as a poet. I read Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson and other poets in translation. Japanese citizens owned scrolls with the beautiful calligraphy of famous haiku poems. The only relative and critical experiences to compare at the time were the imagistic haiku to the dream songs of the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe. The comparison seemed easy at the time, only because my knowledge was very limited about the imagistic and ironic native dream songs.
I was transferred a year later to a military base near Sendai, Japan, a short distance from Matsushima Bay and Island. Matsuo Basho had walked for more than two years from Edo or Tokyo to Matsushima. I visited the same island more than two hundred and fifty years later and imagined the presence of the poet Basho. I attempted to write haiku at the time, and the first poetic scenes were more descriptive than imagistic, and a few years later my sense of concise imagistic poems matured in a Japanese literature seminar with Professor Edward Copeland at the University of Minnesota. He was an exceptional teacher and with great respect he responded to my haiku images with his own, a secure culture of images. Copeland had served as a translator during the military occupation of Japan.
New York University accepted me as a student and military veteran, and that first year at Washington Square College was one more course of chance. Look Homeward, Angel and other novels by Thomas Wolfe continued as a secure inspiration to become a writer. The most memorable experience that first year was an unusual seminar in literature and writing taught by the poet Eda Lou Walton. She presented my three page creative episodes, a weekly assignment, several times as favorable examples of descriptive images and original metaphors of motion, gestures and place. That favor was the first public recognition as a writer. Walton celebrated the literary realism of the novelist Henry Roth, an immigrant, who had lived in the lower East Side of New York. He wrote about the misery, detachment, and desperate poverty in his novel Call it Sleep. The dreamy sprawl of autobiographical gestures and buoyancy of metaphors in Look Homeward, Angel was romantic and an extreme cultural distance from the destitution and rage of immigrants, and descriptions of the cultural distance easily eroded my literary obsession with the sway of metaphors and images by Thomas Wolfe.
My experiences as a writer were more about chance and coincidence than any other single concept, strategy, or literary objective. The chance discovery of A Stone, a Leaf, a Door and Look Homeward, Angel inspired me to be writer. Call it Sleep inspired me to create more crucial situations of cultural separatism with native mockery, irony, and shamanic rage. The haiku experiences were extraordinary, the chance of military service at a post near Matsushima and thirteen years later the experience was enhanced by the translation and publication of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Sketches by Matsuo Basho in 1966. My automatic overnight novel in the military was lost, and my second novel, Fate in August, has never been published. My first haiku poems were published in the early sixties, and most recently in Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku, Wesleyan University Press, 2014.
I served as a native advocate on the streets of a desperate urban reservation, or existential colony, in Minneapolis in the early nineteen sixties, and later investigated and published a widely read brochure that protested the death sentence of Thomas White Hawk in South Dakota. The expanded essay about capital punishment and other critical essays about natives were published in the Twin Citian Magazine. The Minneapolis Tribune, a morning newspaper, hired me as a staff writer in 1968. My daily articles were descriptive, mostly urgent, and my reports of events were never imagistic or metaphorical. The experiences as a journalist increased my sense of precise words to explain the absence of natives in history.
Natives and suicide are two words that forever burden my memories with the sentiments of misery, the separatism of treaty reservations, casino cultures as sardonic salvation, and reveal the mockery and weary stories of native continental liberty in the ruins of civilization. One crucial story that has haunted me for more than fifty years is my report on the suicide of Dane White, an abandoned and lonesome thirteen year old native who had been confined in a county jail for more than six weeks for the crime of truancy from a public school. My story about the funeral services and burial was published on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune on November 21, 1968.
Kin, Friends Attend Rites for Young Indian
By Gerald Vizenor
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer
Sisseton, South Dakota: Catholic funeral services for Dane White were held here Wednesday in English and the Dakota language at Saint Catherine’s Indian Mission Church.
Following the service, attended by seventy-five people, all but six of whom were Dakota Indians, Dane was buried in Saint Peter’s Catholic Cemetery.
Born in Sisseton thirteen years ago, he took his own life Sunday in the Wilkin County Jail, Breckenridge, Minnesota, where he had been held since October 7 awaiting a juvenile court hearing. . .The Reverend William Keohane conducted the service. Two hymns were sung in the Dakota Language.
“Dane White is here, in the background of the banquet table. Lord, remember Dane in your Kingdom,” Father Keohane said in prayer, pointing to the large painting of the Last Supper behind the altar of the small Indian Church.
Six of Dane’s school friends carried his gray metal coffin from the church. Fifteen cars formed the procession to the cemetery on the edge of town.
Following the service at the grave, the six young Indian pallbearers removed their honoring ribbons and placed then on the coffin.
A cold Dakota wind blew across the slope of Saint Peter’s cemetery. The six pallbearers were the last to leave the grave.
In the early nineteen seventies the country encountered an energy crisis, a critical shortage of gasoline. Hundreds of automobiles waited in lines at service stations around the country, and the lines were longer in California. The country was out of gas, and the culture was based on the critical mobility of automobiles and gasoline. The only cultures of endurance were native, and, in my view at the time, that ironic reality would become envy and another colonial seizure of timber and other native resources on treaty reservations.
My first published novel was about the dissociation of a gasoline culture, the speculative scenes of fury on territorial highways, the violent conclusions of greed and gasoline, and natives were on the road from the north to the southwest. Natives encountered demons and settler savages, the fascist occupation of towns and public buildings, and monarchies on sections of interstate highways. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart was first published by Truck Press in 1976. The revised edition of the novel was published as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by the University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles starts with a letter to the reader, a necessary revision of the first edition to assure readers that the shamanic spirit and temper of the author was created and not the same as the name on the cover and title page. Saint Louis Bearheart was the author, a more plausible storier than a native professor at a university. The bear is in me now. Not since the darkness of boarding school and the writing of this book, the heirship chronicles on the wicked road to the fourth world, has the blood and deep voice of the bear moved in me with such power. . .The Bureau of Indian Affairs hired me to dance in the darkness on the cabinets and to remember the heirship documents, the cross blood tricksters at the tree lines. We laughed, no one in the cities would believe that we were related to animals, that we were bears in these stories.
2. Who were and are your major Indigenous inspirations as writers and which do you consider your most important influences?
In the sixties and seventies there were only a few books in print by native authors. N. Scott Momaday, the novelist with a great sense of totemic shadows in a native landscape, published House Made of Dawn in 1968. Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. Momaday, Leslie Silko, and James Welch were the second great wave of native writers. Ceremony recounts witchery and overturns the monotheistic separation of animal and human spirits. Winter in the Blood is a brilliant creation of ironic scenes and characters.
The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle, first published in 1938, was an inspiration, scenes of extraordinary native characters, and an uneasy manner of victimry at the end of the novel. McNickle had submitted a handwritten manuscript to the publisher entitled “The Hungry Generations.” The original manuscript was rejected and later accepted with revisions of victimry to satisfy the readers of native fiction. The Hungry Generations was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2007.
3. How do you define poetry, and what is its importance today?
My poetry is imagistic and with no punctuation or personal pronouns. Possessive pronouns dominate the chance of creative situations and force a revision of the imagistic sense of presence and natural motion. My most recent poems are five-line imagistic scenes that combine the inspiration of concise haiku poetry and the dream songs of the Ojibwe.
4. Given the moment, what does it mean to decolonize literature, and what advice do you give to emerging Indigenous writers who are attempting to do so?
The devious political structures of separatism on treaty reservations once denied natives the ordinary right to publish books or newspapers. My direct relatives published the first independent newspaper on a treaty reservation on March 25, 1886, and the federal agent seized the press and ordered the native publisher and editor to vacate the reservation. They refused to leave and a year later a federal court judge ruled that The Progress could be published anywhere in the country and on the White Earth Reservation. The separatism of natives was once equally devious in the translation of native stories as cause and effect and with no sense of natural motions or totemic associations. Native storiers continue the resistance of separatism and the cultural romance of discovery and victimry with mockery and characters of survivance.
