not avoid sexuality or violence in his writing and has been criticized for his concentration on both. He has confirmed in interviews that he includes violence and sexuality in his work because he believes it is unhealthy to suppress these aspects of the human experience. He claims that to deny violence is to create victims who can be controlled by the symbolic appearance of violence: People cannot fight things that they do not know.

In its presentation of violence, Vizenor’s work does not depart significantly from much of the folk literature of the past—the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the Mother Goose rhymes, many of the stories in Greek and Roman mythology. In approaching Vizenor’s novels, one must keep in mind the philosophical reasons for the violence that pervades the author’s writing.

Judging from some of his public utterances, Vizenor has given considerable thought to developing new ways to work with the English language. He would like to break the bonds of grammatical convention, to imagine ways in which language can be pushed to new extremes. He has experimented with using an intermixture of tribal languages with the English in which he writes. He first attempted such experiments in his collection of stories Wordarrows, with results that left many readers confused and frustrated. In Griever, Vizenor introduced elements of Chinese into the mix with moderately successful results, perhaps because Griever is structurally a more conventional novel than any of his other work.

In The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Vizenor exercised his authorial prerogative to bend history to his own fictional ends, an approach that distressed some of his more literal readers and critics. Vizenor, however, is indisputably daring, interesting, and enticing in everything he writes. If his literary experiments do not always succeed, he must nevertheless be admired for the originality of his attempts.

Griever: An American Monkey King in China

First published: 1987

Type of work: Novel

The story of a Native American teacher, a trickster, who teaches in China.

In order to comprehend Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Western readers must consider Vizenor’s statement that tragedy is a Western invention. Native American tales emphasize the comic with little overlapping toward the tragic. With this in mind, one can consider Griever de Hocus (as in Hokus-Pokus) the sort of trickster protagonist Vizenor set out to create.

Griever, a Native American teacher, himself a consummate trickster, finds himself teaching at Tianjin University in China, just as Vizenor, also a consummate trickster, did for a while in 1983. Griever considers himself a reincarnation of the legendary Chinese Monkey King. He has arrived in China at the precise moment that a surge toward Western-style capitalism and consumerism has been loosed upon the country, transforming it from a communistic to a capitalistic state.

Having little allegiance either to Western values or the communist state, Griever, in a series of lively adventures, has a light-hearted affair with the daughter of a government official. The affair takes an ominous turn when the young woman becomes pregnant and is murdered.

Vizenor, well schooled in ancient literature, employs his broad background to shape his story. He draws on a classical Chinese story, “Journey to the West,” and a version of the story, “Monkey,” to structure his own tale. In “Monkey,” the title character is born when a huge boulder the gods have impregnated bursts open and releases him. He develops into a religious person who goes to India in quest of sacred writings. This story has been influential not only in Vizenor’s writing but also in Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing (1986) and in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989).

Much of Griever involves dream sequences in which truths are revealed to Griever, although Vizenor does not always identify crucial actions in his novel as being dreams or reality. In one such sequence, which is obviously a product of a dream, Griever, his face painted to make him look like a monkey, performs acts of charity and heroism like freeing the chickens from a large market. In two other such acts, he frees a bird from its cage only to have it fly back in, and he frees prisoners on their way to execution from the truck carrying them to their doom only to have many of them refuse to flee.

As such acts prove futile, Griever, who has constructed a tiny, ultralight airplane, flies it across China with Kangmei, the sister of Griever’s dead lover, a crossblood. This flight ends in a mixed-blood marriage between the two. Despite such fantastic turns, Griever is a satirical indictment of communist rule in China. It comments on everything from bound feet to governmentally sanctioned murders.

The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Using language daringly and intermixing the Chippewa language with English, Vizenor creates a stinging satire which the trickster controls.

Creating a framing device of prologue and epilogue, Vizenor presents vignettes, some stingingly satirical and many based on his experiences in the academic world. In the prologue, Vizenor’s protagonist, Sergeant Alex Hobriser, a name that is clearly satirical, comments on Eastman Shicer, who is both a cultural anthropologist and an aerobics instructor. This juxtaposition of professions provides a clue of what will follow.

Vizenor warns that academic attempts to “harness the trickster in the best tribal narratives and to discover the code of comic behavior, hindered imagination and disheartened casual conversation.” From this iconoclastic base, the author proceeds to use language so unique yet so reflective of Chippewa communicative patterns that it may bewilder Western readers.

The narrative, enclosed in the envelope pattern that creates its structural frame, consists of a selection of vignettes about the grandchildren of Novena Mae Ironmoccasin and Luster Browne and of memoirs by these two. Luster is a caring trickster who tells his tales more to amuse than to inform.

As in most of Vizenor’s writing, characters from previous works recur. Griever de Hocus is a de facto member of Luster Browne’s family, accorded family membership by decree rather than birth. The stories, imbued with a sense of the magical, the mythical, and the mystical, can be read in random order.

Vizenor sets the early vignettes in Bejing or Tianjin, where he taught during part of 1983. He shifts focus from China to Patronia, the imaginary baronetcy on the White Earth Reservation that Luster Browne received from President Theodore Roosevelt. This far-reaching baronetcy extends to an anthropological museum at the University of California at Berkeley.

Vizenor obviously is not constrained here by reality or by an attempt to depict actual or fictional events in ways that seem reasonable to Western readers. Luster’s land holdings also include the Native American Indian Mixedblood Studies Department of the University of California, a take-off of the Department of Native American Studies with which Vizenor was affiliated at the University of California at Berkeley.

Vizenor uses the trickster to release the stereotypical, frozen mind-sets of Westerners, to free them from the linear thinking that they consider rationality. Vizenor’s presentation of life is not structured in consistent, rational patterns, but that is not to imply that it is deficient any more than the world that an author such as Lewis Carroll created in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872) is deficient. Rather, it is refreshing and liberating to readers who surrender themselves for transportation to a new universe.

Crossbloods

First published: 1990

Type of work: Essays

This collection of essays and articles concentrates on the major issues that confront Native Americans in modern America.

This volume shows the range of Vizenor’s work over a twenty-year span. The pieces included present him as the investigative reporter he was in the early 1970’s and as the creative and academic writer he became. The collection is somewhat rag-tag, but it is significant for showing the author’s development.

The book is divided into two major sections. The first, “Crossblood Survivance,” deals with the problems of those who, like Vizenor, are not pure-blooded. These “crossbloods” constitute the largest group among those who claim to be Native Americans. To survive in their Native American environments, Vizenor says, these people sell out much that their forbears held sacred. They redefine treaties, reaching compromises that promise short-term gains. They are instrumental in bringing gambling to reservations, and they abrogate the hard-won fishing and hunting rights for which their ancestors fought.

With the money these compromises generate come the problems that accompany gambling and other easy-money schemes. Vizenor implies that American Indians are losing their selfhood or, more accurately, are selling out to the highest bidder. Tribal pride, once the hallmark of the reservation, is being subordinated to immediate gain.

“Crossbloods and the Chippewa,” one of the more recent contributions to the volume, focuses compellingly on some of the major problems facing Indians. Some of these problems are caused by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which exerts pressure to have tribal children attend federal boarding schools, effectively removing them from their families and their cultures. What is done in the name of education, Vizenor argues, is essentially a form of tribal genocide imposed by a paternalistic government that thinks it best to homogenize Native Americans, to draw them into the dominant culture at any cost.

The second half of this book consists largely of investigative articles written by Vizenor during his days as a journalist. “Capital Punishment,” a detailed report of Thomas White Hawk’s murder of a South Dakota jeweler, shows Vizenor at his journalistic high point. Vizenor might have updated this contribution to reflect the commutation of White Hawk’s prison sentence and his reintroduction into the outside community.

Perhaps the most poignant of the essays in this book is “Bone Courts: The Natural Rights of Tribal Bones,” in which Vizenor writes about a matter that he discusses in many of his books: the robbing of Indian grave sites in the name of archeology or anthropology. Vizenor cites Thomas Echo-Hawk, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, who contends that a Native American who desecrates a white person’s grave is imprisoned but that a white person who desecrates a Native American burial mound wins a doctorate.

The Heirs of Columbus

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Stone Columbus, who claims direct descent from Christopher Columbus, attempts to establish a sovereign Native American nation.

Although Vizenor and his publisher call The Heirs of Columbus a novel, it takes an act of faith to accept it as such. The book, an occasional piece written to mark the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, is fanciful, taking great liberties with the facts that historians have unearthed. The concept of the book and the social problems it poses, which are similar to those on which Vizenor has often focused, are significant. Also important are his use of Native American mythology and his emphasis on the trickster tradition that is a fundamental part of Native American lore.

Stone Columbus is a talk-show host made rich by his floating bingo parlor on the Mississippi River—a riverboat destroyed by fire—whose activities were protected by treaties Stone’s forefathers forged with the white invaders of their land. Stone claims direct lineage from Christopher Columbus, whom he declares to be a crossblood with Mayan ancestors who visited Europe before Columbus visited the New World.

Stone claims his lineage through Samana, a “hand talker,” among the first people to greet Columbus when he landed in San Salvador. The explorer was burdened by an incredibly large, deformed penis, twisted in such a way that any sexual experience was excruciatingly painful to him, a fact substantiated by historians, some of whom Vizenor cites in his book. Samana, nevertheless, engages in intercourse with Columbus, who impregnates her. It is through that union that Stone claims his Columbian lineage.

Stone, financially secure and well known, attracts around him a band of followers with whom he hopes to establish a Native American nation in the northwestern United States. His followers hope that they can reproduce the healing genes of the Mayan people and use them to save the world from cataclysm. The symbol of Stone’s new sovereignty is the half-completed Trickster of Liberty statue, the subject of Vizenor’s earlier novel, The Trickster of Liberty. Standing in a harbor, visible from toe to crotch—which is where construction terminated—the statue becomes a bitter, mocking emblem of the straits in which Native Americans find themselves.

The great irony of The Heirs of Columbus is that the explorer sets in motion the forces that landed American Indians in their present state. Columbus does not emerge from this book as a real character, although Vizenor has researched his material well. Nor is Stone Columbus much more real than his ancestor; rather, he is the symbol of a genocide that a Eurocentric culture has visited upon an indigenous people.

Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World

First published: 1992

Type of work: Novel

Players in a card game actually become the animals depicted on the cards they turn over ritualistically.

White men hear the “dead voices” to which Vizenor refers in his title, the voices of the printed word or carefully prepared lecture. These are the voices not of a ritualistic, storytelling tradition but the desiccated croakings of a literature apart from nature. In this novel, Vizenor focuses on American Indians who live in urban Oakland, California, rather than on a reservation.

Bagese, a shaman, engages in the tarotlike game of wanaki with the seemingly autobiographical narrator. The game extends from December, 1978, until December, 1979, with a prologue dated February, 1982, and an epilogue dated February, 1992. Vizenor has important things to say; he must say them even at the cost of losing some of his Eurocentric audience. His message becomes a moral imperative.

In wanaki, the participants, over an extended period, turn over cards bearing representations of bears, fleas, squirrels, mantises, crows, and beavers. When a card is turned, a participant becomes the creature on the card; accepting this demands a cognitive leap that people raised outside Native American traditions may not comfortably make. The tales that make up this novel—which is perhaps actually more a collection of short fables than a novel—are creation stories. They have to do with the quintessential forces of the universe, but Chippewa forces are far different from those considered quintessential in the Eurocentric world.

Bagese, a “tribal woman who was haunted by stones and mirrors,” warns the narrator never to publish the stories in this collection or to reveal the location of her apartment in Oakland. At the end of the year-long wanaki meditation, she disappears without a trace.

Bagese considers the best listeners for her stories to be “shadows, animals, birds, and humans, because their shadows once shared the same stories.” This suggestion of intergenerational continuity suggests a Native American concept of reincarnation. Like most of Vizenor’s writing, Dead Voices is witty, infused with a pervasive humor that distinguishes the author’s work from that of such other Native American writers as N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie.

Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel

First published: 1997

Type of work: Novel

This novel satirizes modern culture and invokes many autobiographical elements as it unfolds.

“Almost Browne” is a play on words suggesting the crossbloodedness of the story’s protagonist. Almost received his name because he was born in the back of a car that was almost within Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation. A crossblood, a term Vizenor invented, Almost is not quite Native American (brown), not quite white. He is the son of a native nun, Eternal Flame Browne, and a native priest, Father Mother Browne, whose trickster activities are motivated by the conviction that he is born to torment authority figures.

Like Vizenor, Almost is a trickster. Also like Vizenor, he teaches at the University of California at Berkeley as a member of the Transethic Situations Department. All goes well for him until the honor of delivering a commencement address befalls him. Almost, in full trickster form, gives a ribald speech that leaves students and faculty astounded.

Vizenor intersperses the novel with satirical chapters. In one such chapter, he has Almost establish a telephone call-in service that will connect troubled callers with Native American healers. This chapter is an obvious burlesque of the New Age and of the call-in psychic telephone services available at a price to troubled people.

In one of the novel’s few flashbacks, Almost has an offer from President Richard Nixon to become vice president provided that he will organize a Native American invasion that will free Cuba from communist rule and will bring down its president, Fidel Castro. Vizenor uses this proposal to explain the eighteen-minute gap in the Watergate tapes that caused so much consternation during the hearings in the early 1970’s and that forced Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

Vizenor loved taking pot shots at Nixon, whose attraction to Native Americans involved only his own political ambitions. In this novel, he takes similar pots shots at luminaries as diverse as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the guru of black literary criticism whose seminal book The Signifying Monkey (1988) touches on some of Vizenor’s interests; Ishmael Reed, the black poet and novelist, who also uses the monkey tradition in some of his writing; Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, whose calls for gender equality shook the nation; and Claude Levi-Strauss, the celebrated French anthropologist and linguist.

Among the novel’s more hilarious chapters is one that focuses on a typically silly faculty meeting of the English department at Oklahoma University. In this chapter, Vizenor satirizes several of the colleagues who annoy him and indirectly lauds the few whom he considered his supporters.

Although this novel includes a great many references to Vizenor’s earlier writing, making it desirable for readers to be familiar with his earlier work, the novel can be read by first-time Vizenor readers for its sheer comic impact. Vizenor’s own activities as a trickster throughout his life, particularly during his tormented early life following the death of his father and stepfather within a short period, inform this work with an authenticity that readers will immediately glean and appreciate.