Vizenor Concordance: On THE SHAMANIC

“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)

“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.” (1.1)

“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.” (2.2)

“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)

“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 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)

“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.” (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)

“German Marxism and Critical Theory at the Frankfurt School first focused on cultural materialism, communism, and the politics of fascism and consciousness.  Critical theories are creased and complicated by expositions, analytical translations, violence, political and cultural events, and creative perceptions.  Shamanic favors and the recognition of critical theories become a clever chase of native consciousness.  The consideration of native totemic shadows, trickster cosmology, the chance of irony and mockery on separatist reservations and in existential colonies, are seldom the subject of critical theories.” (3.2)

“Native storiers have never been easy to consider in the anonymity of existential colonies in cities or at universities, but a grand theory of totemic sensations of mockery, chance of healers, and elusive totemic shadows created by oral storiers continue in some native nations that are not casino cultures.  The native grand theories of mockery and irony easily deconstruct digital images and artificial intelligence as nothing more than evasive agency decoys and analogue simulations of futuristic reservations of victimry.  The sense of presence and ironic manner of native storiers is elusive and never a digital memory.  Digital depictions and other enactments of artificial intelligence depose the native novels that have not created totemic shadows and the ironic presence of storiers.  Benjamin would surely salute the grand theories of mockery and irony as restorations of the last native stories of shamanic hesitations and liberty on the continent.” (3.2)