Vizenor Concordance: On CHARACTERS

“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.” (1.2)

“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.” (1.2)

“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.” (1.4)

“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.” (2.1)

“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.” (2.2)

“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.” (2.2)

“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.” (2.3)

“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.” (2.4)