Part Two: Resistance, Presence, and the Arithmetic of Blood
Questions by Hunter Wienke
1. Your concept of survivance has become a cornerstone in Indigenous literary criticism. How has your understanding or articulation of survivance evolved over the course of your writing career?
The commercial publishers of books and magazines edited stories to reveal native victimry that satisfied the readers. The indians were the commerce of literary savagism, cultural simplicity, and at times brave and heroic, but the stories always ended with the clear course of separatism and victimry. My native stories and novels create characters and situations that mock separatism and establish themes of resistance and survivance over any traces of victimry.
My critical essays advance the literature of survivance and mock the commercial themes of native separatism and victimry. From my first published novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles to my most recent novel, Theatre of Chance: Native Celebrities of Nothing in an Existential Colony, the native manners and themes of resistance, survivance, and mockery counters the literary commerce of native victimry. My recent series of five interrelated native historical novels, Blue Ravens, Native Tributes, Satie on the Seine, Waiting for Wovoka, and Theatre of Chance, present hand puppet parleys that advocate native survivance and tease the agents of victimry. My first critical and historical discussions of native victimry and survivance were in academic essays and in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, 1990.
I was a sworn delegate and principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation that was ratified on April 4, 2009. The Preamble includes a reference to survivance. “The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty.”
2. Your fiction frequently blends autobiography, tribal oral traditions, and postmodern techniques. How do you see these elements interacting—and what possibilities or tensions do they create for Native storytelling today?
Trickster cosmologies, especially creation stories that were badly translated by anthropologists, counter the serious trouble of a flood and create a new earth with no separations or divisions of time, character, or species. The shamanic scenes are totemic shadows with no distinction of gender or other divisions of spirits. The trickster reveals that his relatives are stones, and when his relatives burst in a fire, the fragments of native relations and trickster stories are scattered everywhere.
Some of my stories are created with shamanic rage and others with a sense of totemic shadows, mockery, and diverse associations of ironic trickster stories. Characters in my stories observe relations, contradictions, and cultural simulations, and carry out these diversions in the same obscure sense of time and course of irony. Native relations and characters in stories or critical essays must show some sense of resistance and mockery of the cultural models of ethnography and the pretentions of popular culture.
My characters enact scenes of natural motion, totemic shadows, resistance, and mockery of popular and commercial expectation of indian cultures and literature. The characters in my novels carry out the irony, mockery, and sense of native presence over victimry and the absence in history.
3. Your work often resists linear structure and embraces fragmentation, multiplicity, and contradiction. What draws you to these forms, and how do they reflect Indigenous worldviews or challenge colonial modes of storytelling?
The creation of native stories in the structure of a written language is never the same as the elusive characters and strategic hesitations and gestures of oral stories, yet it was necessary for me to create a sense of natural motion, tease, totemic temper, and the visual sensations of oral stories. The silent printed words are no comparison to the company of generous and responsive native storiers. Some natives never learned to recognize the subtle hesitations of an oral storier. The characters in my stories create the memories and hesitations of native storiers with elusive gestures, dream songs, and the shamanic presence of hand puppets in obscure parleys. Oral storiers and some creative literary authors have carried out the sensations of natural motion with no structures of time or possessive pronouns, and these conventions were centuries ahead of the existential theatres of the postmodern. The elusive sense of time, natural motion, totemic shadows, mutable characters, and the generous tease of native nicknames and mockery in oral stories is surely evidence enough that natives could have been reviewed as an ironic deconstruction of monotheism and the narratives of mercenary commerce and culture.
The early native parodies and mockery of ethnographic models of cultures could serve as a second notice of postmodern perceptions. More, some native leaders and storiers mocked the gestures and service manners of federal agents in their absence. Natives might consider that the creative literature of survivance, mockery, irony, and strategic satire outshine the early theories of postmodernism.
4. In a time when authenticity and identity are hotly debated topics, especially in Native literature, how do you approach questions of representation and cultural authority in your work?
The lists of pretendians are punitive and not a serious measure of more than the fascist federal arithmetic that determines the blood quantum or degree of “Indian blood” for enrollment and services provided by the federal government. The circulation of pretendian names is punitive and pernicious because it is based solely on federal blood quantum records and does not consider any variations for errors or recognition that many native families never “enrolled” their children as members of federal reservation.
The fascist agents of pretendians apparently did not consider that the federal arithmetic of blood quantum was unreliable for various reasons, including the deliberate arithmetic reduction of native blood. The notion of an authentic political bloodline is a crude simile of separatism. The authentic bloodline indians diminish day by day. The ludicrous course of arithmetic divisions of blood as reveals of character and dedication deserves eternal shamanic mockery.
A more humane practice would consider a native presence based on blood relations and families, not on the arithmetic deceptions of federal agencies that would rather reduce the number of natives for any reason, such as the aberrant arithmetic reductions of indian blood to show that natives are closer to civilization. The miscalculations of navigation and simulations of indians with an absurd dose of serviceable blood is the grand puppet parley of shamanic mockery.
The sworn delegates to the White Earth Constitutional Conventions discussed the various measures of native standing and services and rather than perpetuate the punitive arithmetic degrees of blood, ratified an article in the Constitution that “Citizens of the White Earth Nation shall be descendants of Anishinaabeg families and related by linear descent to enrolled members of the White Earth Reservation and Nation according to genealogical documents, treaties, and other agreements with the government of the United States.”
The literary designation of “authentic” native authors should not be determined by the fascist actions of pretendian agents or commercial publishers but instead editors and readers should be more critical of the way authors create characters in natural motion and reveal the presence of animals and birds and critically evaluate the use of pronouns and references to totemic associations that have a distinct presence in the novels of many native authors. Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and many other authors, for instance, create animals in their stories that have essential associations and a sense of presence. Native mongrels and other animals are teased with nicknames as personal relations in my creative stories. Other critical considerations of native literary empathy would include the distinctive narrative scenes of survivance and critical mockery of treaty separatism and victimry.
5. Looking back at your body of work—from “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs” to “Satie on the Seine”—what do you think has been misunderstood most often by critics, and what would you want emerging Native writers to take from your legacy?
Chester Anderson, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, invited me almost fifty years ago to contribute a short autobiography for publication in Growing Up in Minnesota. The invitation was deferential, of course, and my response was ironic, a declaration that first person autobiographical narratives were unreadable as counterfeit confessions limited by an abstruse personal possessive pronoun. Anderson smiled and a few weeks later accepted my counter proposal to imagine and create stories about an elusive native character named Gerald Vizenor.
Four years after the publication of Growing Up in Minnesota my original resistance to possessive autobiographical narratives was confirmed in the publication of “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” an essay by Georges Gusdorf in Autobiography Essays: Theoretical and Critical by Jame Olney, Princeton University Press, 1980. “The concern, which seems so natural to us, to turn back on one’s own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal,” observed Gusdorf, a French philosopher and founder of critical theories of autobiography. “The man who takes delight in drawing his own image believes himself worthy of a special interest. . . This conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization.”
My stories at the time were never decided with possessive pronouns and certainly not the consciousness of singularity in the ruins of civilization. My sense of native presence and recognition in a world of literary envy and trickery was never secure in a dominant monotheistic culture. Treaty reservations and native existential colonies in cities revealed cultural separatism but not a “specific civilization.” The communal pleasure of mockery and irony in trickster creation stories and the elusive native stories of chance, totemic shadows, shamanic mockery and irony are not comparable to “metaphysical preconditions.” Gusdorf declared that “Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions. . .humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered the perilous domain of history. The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future.”
The most memorable native oral storiers are elusive, the pleasure of subtle facial gestures and diversions, and the stories are more memorable in the communal harmony of other storiers, the balance of sound, breath, gestures, and hesitations that are understood by the storiers and those present. The memories of scenes in native oral stories are conceivable but not easy to duplicate as published stories, but native authors must continue to tease the chance and spirit of oral storiers in original narratives for publication.
Erdupps MacChurbbs reminded me that he was on my shoulder that summer of that notable resistance to possessive pronouns and told me that the autobiographical deceptions of the moment never had a native past and there was nothing more in the future than another chance to tease the moment and create a sense of natural motion and presence in native stories.
MacChurbbs easily provided a steady course of nicknames in my stories, and every native nickname was a tricky chance in creation stories. He was a miniature puppet and mighty at the same time, with no bloodlines, no terminal divisions of identity, and yet he is an imagined shaman that roams in the memory of an imagistic poet and storier. He told me to “free yourself from the customs of civilized measurements. We are so big, and so little at the same time. You have learned only one way to measure the world. Puppets of imagination vanish in culture of terminal creeds. Mockery and irony never expire, but some people exaggerate their presence and reach for cultural perfection through the exalted structures of possessive pronouns of the past.”
MacChurrbs is a native shaman and trickster with no direct relations by sound or meaning to any other names or words, a puppet character of imagination who has teased and tormented me for almost eighty years. He favored the literary creation of hand puppet parleys in Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade. There are fifteen hand puppet parleys in the novel, including Sitting Bull and Victor Hugo, Carlos Montezuma and Émile Zola, Chief Joseph and Voltaire, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, Charles de Gaulle and Maréchal Philippe Pétain, Gertrude Steine and Adolf Hitler, near the Place du Panthéon during the Nazi Occupation of Paris.
