Vizenor Concordance: On SEPARATISM

“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.” (1.1)

“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.” (1.1)

“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)

“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)

“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.” (2.4)

“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 motionand 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)

“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 into 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.”” (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)