Vizenor Concordance: On ESSAYS

“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.” (1.1)

“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.” (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)

“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 specific civilization.”” (2.5)

“Deloria died twenty years ago, and his critical observation that natives are perceived as “unreal and ahistorical” continues with only slight revisions of the dominion course of treaty separatism and victimry.  My insistence on the word native is an obvious resistance to the spurious discovery name, indian, and in my essays and literary stories the word native and indian are printed in lower case italics, a necessary style to avoid the dominance of capitalization, and the same resistance to other invented native cultural names.  Casino cultures and commercial native literature have counted, for the most part, as a more current course of unrealities and cultural histories of separatism.” (3.1)

“My critical contention about monotheism, the mercenary fur trade, reaty reservations separatism, casino cultures, the politics of existential native colonies, the conversion of communal stories of survivance to victimry in commercial novels, and the digital depictions and artificial intelligence, continue to broaden critical theories and other interpretations of native literature.  Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were more instructive at the time about storiers, essays, and literature than the other distinguished scholars and philosophers of the Frankfurt School.” (3.2)

“The native essays of resistance, and the grand theories of mockery and survivance, are not traditions.  The native essay is contention not a meditation, not separatism, not cultural absence, or the mastery of natural motion.  The essay is an ironic venture, a tease of creation stories, and the native essay is a tease of Theodor Adorno and his theory of the essay cited in a collection of my essays, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 1998.  The “essay retains, precisely in the autonomy of its presentation, which distinguishes it from scientific and scholarly information, traces of the communicative element such information dispenses with,” observed Adorno in Notes to Literature.” (3.2)