SOURCE: "Beyond the Novel Chippewa-style: Gerald Vizenor's Post-Modern Fiction," in Four American Indian Literary Masters: N Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, pp. 124-48.

[In the following excerpt, Velie provides an overview of Vizenor's works and argues that Vizenor's writing can be best understood through a consideration of Anishinabe beliefs, his life experiences, and the nature of the postmodern novel.]

Gerald Vizenor is a mixed-blood Chippewa or, as the Chippewas prefer to call themselves, Anishinabe. His father's family was from the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Vizenor's father, Clement, who was half Anishinabe and half white, left the reservation for Minneapolis, where he worked as a painter and paperhanger for three years before he was murdered by a mugger, who nearly severed his head while cutting his throat. The chief suspect, a large black man, was apprehended but was released without being prosecuted. During the same month Clement's brother died in a mysterious fall from a railroad bridge over the Mississippi.

Gerald was twenty months old at the time of his father's murder, too young to remember him. Twenty-five years later, however, he questioned the officer in charge of investigating the crime. The detective defended his shoddy investigation by saying, "We never spent much time on winos and derelicts in those days … who knows, one Indian vagrant kills another."

While Vizenor's mother battled poverty in Minneapolis, she sometimes kept Gerald with her and sometimes left him with his Anishinabe grandmother; sometimes she allowed him to be taken to foster families. When Vizenor was eight, his mother married a hard-drinking, taciturn mill engineer named Elmer Petesch, and this brought some stability if not joy into Vizenor's life. After eight years, however, Vizenor's mother deserted Petesch, leaving Gerald behind. After several months Vizenor also moved out, but Petesch broke his dour reserve and pleaded with Vizenor to return, and for a brief period the two lived together as close friends. After five months, however, Petesch died in a fall down an elevator shaft, and Vizenor was alone again.

Given this childhood, filled with desertion and violent deaths, it is not surprising that Vizenor developed a bizarre and bloody view of the universe. Rather than reacting with despair, however, Vizenor has joined the fight against absurdity and injustice with the elan of the Anishinable trickster Wenebojo.

Vizenor has had a varied professional career. He has served as director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis and worked as an editorial writer for the Minneapolis Tribune. Currently he teaches in both the Department of Native American Studies in the University of California at Berkeley and the English Department of the University of Minnesota.

Like Momaday, Welch, and Silko, Vizenor writes both poetry and fiction. He published thirteen poems in Kenneth Rosen's Voices of the Rainbow, for the most part mordant glimpses of Indian life in America today. He has also published a collection of haiku, the result of his experiences—as a private first-class in the army—on the Japanese island of Matsushima.

Vizenor has published a memoir of his early life entitled "I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors." In it Vizenor not only relates the violent and bizarre story of his childhood but also tells about his fantasy life. Erdupps MacChurbbs is one of the "benign demons and little woodland people of love" who people his fantasies. These little people provide a rich inner life for Vizenor and help him keep his sanity in a mad world.

They are the little people who raise the banners of imagination on assembly lines and at cold bus stops in winter. They marched with me in the service and kept me awake with humor on duty as a military guard. The little people sat with me in baronial ornamental classrooms and kept me alive and believable under the death blows of important languages.

Chippewa mythology is full of stories about benign demons and little woodland people, and stories about Vizenor's Anishinabe grandmother are probably the chief source for MacChurbbs and his friends. However, as the name MacChurbbs suggests, Vizenor, like most other Americans, probably picked up some Irish fairy lore as well.

In 1978, Vizenor published a series of sketches entitled Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. The book is a series of sketches, principally about Anishinabe whom Vizenor met as Director of the Employment and Guidance Center. In these sketches Vizenor appears to be the Isaac Bashevis Singer of the Chippewa: he combines an extremely keen eye for detail and an appreciation for an interesting story with a scrupulous sense of honesty. The result, like that of Singer's works, is a highly revealing picture of a ghetto people—their power and dignity, flaws and foibles, and, above all, their essential humanity.

Wordarrows is an important key to understanding Vizenor's poetry. The poems, although they often deal with the same characters and subjects as the essays, are cryptic and allusive, and the reader can understand them more fully after reading Vizenor's prose pieces. For example, the nameless heroine of the poem "Raising the Flag" is described more fully in the sketch "Marlene American Horse" in Wordarrows, and the "wounded Indian" in the poem "Indians at the Guthrie" is the Rattling Hail of "Rattling Hail's Ceremonial" in Wordarrows.

Wordarrows also provides valuable background information for understanding Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, Vizenor's major work. The fictional framework of the book is as follows: Saint Louis Bearheart, an old man who works in the Heirship Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has spent ten years at his desk in the Bureau secretly writing a manuscript entitled "Cedarfair Circus: Grave Reports from the Cultural Word Wars." When members of the American Indian Movement break into the offices of the BIA, one of them, a young Indian girl, encounters Bearheart sitting in the dark, and, after having sex with him, goes off to read the book. What she reads is what we read.

"Cedarfair Circus" is the story of a strange group of Indian pilgrims who wend their way from Minnesota to New Mexico at some future time when, because of insufficient oil supplies, American civilization has collapsed into bloody anarchy. Murderous and perverted figures hold power, among them the Evil Gambler, the fast-food fascists, and the pentarchical pensioners. The wanderers do battle with these forces of evil, sustaining heavy losses, but eventually a few of them make it to freedom.

The leader of the pilgrims is Proude Cedarfair, the last in the line of the Cedarfairs who refused to leave their ancestral home in northern Minnesota to go to the Red Cedar Reservation, the fictional name of the White Earth Reservation where Vizenor's forebears lived. Proude lives in the midst of a large circle of cedar trees named by his family the Cedar Circus (the Cedarfairs have lived as clowns and tricksters for generations, battling the evil incursions of the whites and hostile Indians with their wit).

When there is no more oil available, the government commandeers trees, and Jordan Coward, the corrupt, drunken president of the Red Cedar Reservation government, attacks the trees of the Cedar Circus. Proude decides not to confront the evil chief and the federal agents, however, and with his wife, Rosina, he sets out on his cross-country odyssey. Others join them in their wanderings, until they have assembled quite a ragtag army.

The first to join Proude and Rosina is Benito Saint Plumero, who calls himself "Bigfoot." He is a "little person, but his feet and the measure of his footsteps were twice his visual size." Bigfoot received his cognomen in prison while serving time for stealing from a park the bronze statue he is in love with. The Cedarfairs meet Plumero at the "scapehouse of weirds and sensitives," a survival center established (with federal funds) on the Red Cedar Reservation by thirteen "women poets" from the cities. Bigfoot has been staying at the scapehouse to provide sexual services to the weirds and sensitives with his remarkable penis, President Jackson. The most interesting of the weirds and sensitives are Sister Eternal Flame, whose "face was distorted with comical stretchmarks from her constant expressions of happiness"; Sister Willabelle, whose body is marred by horrible scars from worms and piranhas which attacked her when her plane crashed in the Amazon jungle; and Sister Talullah, the "law school graduate [who] could not face men in a courtroom without giggling like a little girl so she concentrated on interior litigation and the ideologies of feminism and fell in love with women."

The Cedarfairs take Bigfoot with them and soon are joined by Zebulon Matchi Makwa, a "talking writer and drunken urban shaman"; Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, the daughter of a white reporter named Charlotte Darwin and Old John Winter Catcher, a Lakota holy man Charlotte met while she was covering the Wounded Knee episode of 1973; Scintilla Shruggles, a "new model pioneer woman" and keeper of the Charles Lindbergh house for the Minnesota Division of Historic Sites; Iniwa Biwide, a sixteen-year-old youth who "resembles a stranger"; Bishop Omax Parasimo, a religious master who wears a metamask with the same features as Scintilla Shruggles; Justice Pardone Cozener, "the tribal lawyer and one of the new prairie big bellies"; Cozener's homosexual lover, Doctor Wilde Coxswain, "the arm wagging tribal historian"; Sun Bear Sun, "the 300 pound, seven foot son of Utopian tribal organizer Sun Bear"; Little Big Mouse, "a small white woman with fresh water blue eyes," whom Sun Bear Sun carries in a holster at his belt; Lilith Mae Farrier, the "horsewoman of passionless contradictions," a child-hating school teacher who is the mistress (literally) of two massive boxer dogs; and Pio Wissakodewinini, the "parawoman mixedblood mammoth clown," a man who was sentenced to a sex change operation for committing two rapes.

On their travels the pilgrims face and overcome a succession of enemies. First is the Evil Gambler, Sir Cecil Staples, the "monarch of unleaded gasoline," who wagers five gallons of gasoline against a bettor's life in a strange game of chance. Sir Cecil always wins, then allows losers to choose their form of death. Sir Cecil was reared on interstates by a truck-driving mother. Because Ms. Staples had been sterilized by the government (for having illegitimate children while on welfare), she took to kidnapping children from shopping malls. She stole thirteen in all, bringing them up in her truck as she drove back and forth across the country and finally turning them out at rest stops when they were grown. Staples told her children that they "should feel no guilt, ignore the expectations of others, and practice to perfection whatever [they did] in the world." Sir Cecil decided to practice the art of killing people.

Needing gasoline for the postal truck they have obtained, the pilgrims choose lots for who will gamble with Sir Cecil. Lilith Mae Farrier, the lady of the boxers, is selected. When she loses, Proude also gambles with Sir Cecil, with the understanding that, if he should win, Lilith lives and Sir Cecil dies. Proude wins, and kills Sir Cecil by strangling him with a "mechanical neckband death instrument," but Lilith, depressed by her loss, immolates herself and her boxers.

Back on the road, the pilgrims meet a procession of cripples: "The blind, the deaf, disfigured giants, the fingerless, earless, noseless, breastless, and legless people stumbling, shuffling and hobbling in families down the road." Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher warns the pilgrims: "Never let the cripple catch your eye. These cripples are incomplete animals lusting for our whole bodies." Little Big Mouse ignores Belladonna's advice and performs a nude dance for the cripples, who become so excited that they pull her into hundreds of pieces.

When they reach Oklahoma, the pilgrims meet the "food fascists" who have hung three witches from the rafters of the Ponca Witch Hunt Restaurant and Fast Foods to season them before cutting them into pieces for takeout orders. The pilgrims decide to save the witches and, sneaking back at night, rescue two of them, but Zebulon Matchi Makwa, the smelly drunken urban shaman and talking writer, is overcome by desire and has intercourse with his witch in the restaurant, where they are discovered and killed by the fascists.

Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher is killed by a colony of "descendants of famous hunters and bucking horse breeders," who put to death anyone they catch espousing a "terminal creed," that is, the belief that there is only one true way. Vizenor borrows the idea of terminal creeds from Eric Hoffer's remarks about "true believers." Ridiculing terminal beliefs is a major theme in Vizenor's work, since he detests zealots, whatever their views, and particularly those who are humorless as well as narrow-minded. Belladonna's terminal beliefs, which concern the superiority of the tribal way of life, are views Vizenor finds congenial in many respects, and the people who kill her are unlovable, rigid rednecks, so the story of the death is told with a good deal of ambiguity and irony.

Many other curious events follow. Bishop Omax Parasimo is killed by lightning, and Justice Pardone Cozener and Doctor Wilde Coxswain, the homosexual lovers, decide to stay at the Bioavaricious Regional Word Hospital, a facility established by the government to investigate public damage to the language. Sister Eternal Flame catches Proude's wife Rosina and Bigfoot at fellatio and murders Bigfoot. Proude and Iniwa Biwide travel by magic flight to Pueblo Bonito where a vision bear tells them to enter the fourth world—as bears—through a vision window in the pueblo. The novel ends with Rosina arriving at the pueblo and finding beartracks in the snow.

Clearly this is a strange book…. We can better understand it by examining the Anishinabe and other Indian influences of Vizenor's, by taking a look at what he has written about his personal experiences, and by examining the "post-modern" novel, the tradition in which Vizenor is writing.

Tricksters and clowns are common in Indian cultures. Among the Indians the trickster, under various names and guises, is usually the principal culture hero of the tribe, a figure second in importance only to the supreme god. But he is a highly ambiguous figure. As his name implies, he is primarily one who plays tricks. He is also the butt of tricks, and how often he is the tricker rather than the trickee seems to depend in part on how the tribe views itself. Some tricksters are usually successful; others are almost always the victim of tricks. Although the trickster is generally a benefactor—who in some cases creates man, brings him fire, and rescues him from enemies—he can also be a menace, because he is generally amoral and has prodigious appetites for food, sex, and adventure. He is capable of raping women, murdering men, eating children, and slaughtering animals. In fact, the trickster violates all tribal laws with impunity, to the amusement of the listeners of the tales, for whom he acts as a saturnalian surrogate.

The Chippewa trickster is called Wenebojo, Manabozho, or Nanabush, depending on how anthropologists recorded the Anishinabe word. According to the myths, Nanabush is the son of a spirit named Epingishmook and Winonah, a human. His mother dies shortly after he is born, and Nanabush is reared by his grandmother Nokomis. He has miraculous powers, particularly the ability to transform himself into whatever shape he wants. In his metamorphosis as a rabbit he acts as a benefactor, bringing the Chippewas fire. He saves mankind and the animals by taking them on his raft in a flood, and he teaches the Chippewa the Mide ceremonies, their most important religious rituals.

Like most tricksters, however, Nanabush is also a dangerous figure, and in one tale he murders most of his family before he realizes what he is doing. In another, he marries his sister, bringing shame on himself and his family.

Vizenor's conception of the trickster seems to be in line with Chippewa tradition—tricksters are benevolent but amoral, lustful, irresponsible, and given to fighting evil with trickery. Trickster tales often combine violence with humor. Tricksters are peripatetic, and trickster tales usually start, "Trickster was going along…." Vizenor's pilgrims, and the structure of his book, reflect this.

Sacred clowns are important in Indian religion. Although they appear to have played little part among the Chippewas, Vizenor would have heard of them from members of other tribes. Among the Sioux, Cahuilla, and Maidu, for instance, clowns performed absurd acts at the most important religious ceremonies, mocking shamans and religious leaders, pestering participants by throwing water or hot coals, dancing and cavorting, and trying to swim in shallow puddles. Among the Cheyenne, clowns acted as "contraries" who did everything backwards, saying "goodbye" when they met someone and "hello" when they left, and walking or sitting on their horses backwards. Among Pueblo tribes clowns ate feces and drank urine, pretending that they were delicious.

Anthropologist Barbara Tedlock claims that the purpose of the clowns was to cause laughter, thus "opening up" spectators emotionally to spiritual forces. She also argues that the mockery of sacred objects and rituals by the clowns served to show spectators that terrestrial rituals were not important. It was the meaning behind them, the higher world of the spirits, that was important.

What Tedlock says may be so, but I think that she overlooks the most important function of clowns, a function similar to the clowning at the medieval European Feast of Fools, in which once a year subdeacons sang filthy songs in church, mocked the sacrament, and threw the bishop in the river. These ceremonies allowed a saturnalian release to people whose religious and moral codes were very demanding. In a way the clowns are the reification in the tribe itself of the trickster figure of mythology; that is, they are figures who can ridicule customs, rituals, and taboos with impunity to the delight of spectators who are forced to obey them.

The Evil Gambler is a familiar figure in Indian mythology, although I could not find a reference to him in the collections of Chippewa tales that I read. Silko has a version of the story in the Laguna myths that she intersperses in Ceremony. In it Kaup'a'ta, or the Gambler, who lives high in the Zuni Mountains, plays a stick game with people, gambling with them for their beads and clothes. By feeding his victims a combination of cornmeal and human blood the Gambler gains control over them, and they cannot stop gambling until they lose everything they own. When the victims are naked, the Gambler gives them one more play, to recoup their losses or lose their life. The Gambler has killed many victims before Sun Man, using the knowledge that his grandmother Spiderwoman gives him, is able to outwit the Gambler and kill him. Vizenor's episode of Sir Cecil Staples puts the same story into a different context.

As bizarre as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart seems, Vizenor derives much of his material from people he actually knows. Lilith Mae Farrier, for instance, the zoophilic boxer lover in Bearhteart, was an acquaintance of Vizenor's, to whom he devotes a chapter in Wordarrows. Like the fictional Lilith, the real Lilith was molested by her step-father on a camping trip, made a point of feeding reservation mongrels, and was thrown off the reservation by the outraged wives of the reservation officials by whom she had been propositioned. When she left the reservation, the dogs followed her van. All of them eventually dropped out in exhaustion except for two boxers that she had refused to feed (they had reminded her of her stepfather). She fed the boxers, and "In time they learned to take care of me, you know what I mean." The real Lilith Mae did not immolate herself, although she did have the boxers chloroformed. So, in this case, if the book is kinky, it is because the truth can be as bizarre as fiction.

The combination of humor, fantasy, violence, and explicit sex that characterizes Bearheart is nothing new in literature: Petronius's Satyricon, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F.J. are three of many older works one could cite that mix sex and violence with fantasy in comic fictions. But with Cervantes, and writers like Defoe and Richardson in England, the European novel turned away from fantasy, toward realism and the complexities of experience for the rising middle class. This trend reached its pinnacle with Henry James, who said, "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life … the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel." This is not to say that nonrealistic fiction disappeared after the mid-eighteenth century, of course, but merely that it was not in the mainstream of the novelistic tradition, and often, as with science fiction, it was dismissed as subliterary.

In recent years, however, nonrealistic writers like Jorge Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Italo Calvino have emerged as major literary figures abroad, and in America in the 1970s much of the best, and even best-selling, writing has been utterly nonrealistic. Writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Ishmael Reed, Donald Barthelme, and Alvin Greenberg now dominate American fiction, and Bearheart puts Vizenor squarely in their tradition.

There has been a great deal written on the "post-modern novel" or "new fiction" as it is variously called, but in my opinion the best analysis and description is in Phillip Stevick's "Scherezade runs out of plots, goes on talking; the king puzzled, listens: an essay on the new fiction." At the end of the essay Stevick proposes some "axioms" as a step toward establishing an aesthetic of the new fiction. Essentially Stevick argues that the new fiction ignores established fictional traditions to an extraordinary extent, purposely establishes a limited audience, departs from the illusionist tradition, and represents writing as play.

These things are certainly true of Bearheart, which is clearly a fair specimen of the post-modern novel. To expand on Stevick's points: first of all, whereas most fiction of the past centuries has reacted against some aspect of previous fiction, the new fiction simply ignores the tradition of the modern novel. Cervantes, Defoe, Fielding, Hawthorne, James, Hemingway—to name just the first novelists that come to mind—reacted against, borrowed from, parodied the writers of previous generations. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist, reveals the influence of Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway in House Made of Dawn. But Vizenor, like most of the post-modernists, simply ignores American writers of previous generations. He owes more of a debt to his Anishinabe grandmother than to Hemingway or Faulkner.

Second, we should note that, however much most European and American writers have railed against the philistinism of the bourgeoisie, western literature since Homer has aimed nonetheless at what Dr. Johnson called the "common reader." The new novel decidedly is not for that good soul. It is too raunchy, too crazy, too strange. Scenes like that in which the Scapehouse sisters eat stuffed kitten while Bigfoot crouches under the table performing cunnilingus on them, or in which Bigfoot decapitates the man who has stolen the bronze statue he is in love with, or in which the cripples tear Little Big Mouse limb from limb, are too bizarre and painful for the "common reader." Post-modern fiction, as Stevick puts it, "willingly acknowledges the partiality of its truth, the oddity of its vision, and the limits of its audience."

Third, Bearheart, like other post-modern novels, incorporates generous amounts of bad art. It is an irony that new fiction, caviar to the general, borrows much from the art of the masses. This is not new to literature: a New York Irish barroom song is at the heart of Finnegan's Wake, and Ionesco, when asked about the major influence on his work, named Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx. But if this tendency predates the new fiction, it is carried to new highs—or lows—there. Ishmael Reed works Minnie the Moocher and Amos and Andy into The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Alvin Greenberg's Invention of the West is based on the schlock Western novel and horse opera. Although greatly transcending them, Bearheart has certain similarities in tone, subject, and approach to Mad and Penthouse magazines and to Andy Warhol movies like Frankenstein.

Stevick points out that, although we are oblivious to and therefore unoffended by the Irish popular culture in Joyce's work, the popular art in the new fiction is our own bad art, and we recognize and deplore it. As Stevick puts it, new fiction seems more "audacious and abrasive than it really is because it occupies a place at what William Gass, following Barthelme, calls the 'leading edge of the trash phenomenon.'"

As for philosophical and aesthetic depth, Bearheart is as devoid of it as are the works of Barthelme, Reed, and Elkin. In contrast to writers like Momaday, who makes heavy use of symbolism, novelists like Vizenor eschew it completely. For them the surface is the meaning; there is nothing between the lines but white space, as Barthelme says.

I hardly need to belabor Stevick's point that new fiction departs from the illusionist tradition. Obviously Bearheart is a radical departure from the air of reality that James admires in novels. What Vizenor is doing is creating a caricature by exaggerating tendencies already present in American culture, so that even if the picture he paints is grotesque or not at all true to life, it is recognizable, like a newspaper cartoon of Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.

Finally, the post-modern novel is writing as play. There are precedents for this, of course: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy comes to mind, and undoubtedly Joyce was playing in Finnegan's Wake, though the joke seems to be on the reader. The tone of Bearheart may be at times savage, bitter, or violent, but at the heart of the book is an ever-present and peculiarly Indian sense of humor.

Whites may wonder just what it is that Indians have to laugh about today, or they may psychologize about the Indians' need for laughter, but this is unfair to Indians, who, despite the dour image of the cigar-store mannikin, have always cherished humor for its own sake. Vizenor has a story in Wordarrows about how the U.S. Communist Party's secretary general, Gus Hall, asked protesting Indians in Minneapolis to write about their grievances for communist newspapers. Vizenor states: "The tribal protest committee refused to write for the communists because—in addition to political reasons—there was too little humor in communist speech, making it impossible to know the heart of the speakers."

Bearheart shocks and puzzles many readers, but once it is understood that Vizenor's fiction is shaped by Anishinabe folklore and the post-modern tradition, the book is not so puzzling after all.

Earthdivers, Vizenor's latest book, is about mixed-bloods. In this work Vizenor (who, like Silko, is keenly aware of being half-white and half-Indian) tries to celebrate the unique status of the mixed-bloods—to reverse the prejudice that has plagued them, to make a hero of the half-breed. To appreciate what Vizenor does, it is useful to review racial attitudes toward Indians and mixed-bloods in America.

The word half-breed has always had a negative connotation in American English, like half-blood, it seems to connote bastardy. Mixed descent is not necessarily bad; Oklahoma politicians, and most other Oklahomans, for that matter, are eager enough to claim Indian blood. But the figure of the half-blood in the racist mythology of the Old West often represented an illicit mixture of the worst of both races, the hateful, untrustworthy spawn of renegades and barmaids.

According to Harold Beaver, John Rolfe was the first British colonist to marry an Indian, a woman named Motsoaks'ats. Their son, Thomas Rolfe, would appear to have the distinction of being the first American mixed-blood. Although the colonists were aware of the Biblical prohibition about marrying "strange wives" and passed laws against intermarriage between whites and Indians, the practice was widespread, and mixed-bloods like Sequoyah, Osceola, Stand Watie, and Jesse Chisholm were famous—or infamous, depending on one's politics—in the nineteenth century.

Mixed-blood characters in American fiction are generally negative, or at best ambiguous; Injun Joe of Tom Sawyer, for instance, is a "half breed devil." Twain, who was so compassionate to blacks, revealed a great deal of intolerance in his depictions of Indians, not only in Tom Sawyer but also in his account of the "Goshoot Indians" in Roughing It. His hideous portrait of Injun Joe seems to indicate a belief that, if full bloods were backwards, half-breeds were bestial.

Beaver lists other literary mixed-bloods who appear in major American literary works—Poe's Dirk Peters (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), Hemingway's Dick Boulton (In Our Time), and Faulkner's Boon Hogganbeck and Sam Fathers (Go Down Moses)—and states that "all are pariahs in some sense—quick-witted, tough, valiant even—who are revealed as the ambiguous saviors of white men." To this list we might add Ken Kesey's Broom Bronden of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, who, though certainly not quick-witted, is a pariah and who, in a highly ambiguous sense, saves Randle Patrick McMurphy from what he perceives as a fate worse than death, life as a vegetable.

Racial attitudes change quickly, and today white Americans' ideas about mixed-bloods are a subset of their ideas about Indians, and these need to be briefly reviewed, and in particular contrasted to, their ideas about other minorities, especially blacks. In the chapter "The Red and the Black" in Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria points out that Indians and blacks were treated not only differently, but with an opposite emphasis: blacks were systematically excluded from white American life, while Indians were forced into it:

It is well to keep these distinctions clearly in mind when talking about Indians and blacks. When liberals equate the two they are overlooking obvious historical facts. Never did the white man systematically exclude Indians from his schools and meeting places. Nor did the government ever kidnap black children from their homes and take them off to a government boarding school to be educated as whites…. The white man systematically destroyed Indian culture where it existed, but separated blacks from his midst so that they were forced to attempt the creation of their own culture…. The white man forbade the black to enter his own social and economic system, and at the same time force-fed the Indian what he was denying the black.

Whatever progress in integration of blacks has been made in the past decade, the legacy of segregation remains, and the point is still valid.

Perceptive as his essay is, Deloria omits two points that have an important bearing on our perception of mixed-bloods. The first is that you can be half Indian, but you cannot be half black; if you are discernibly black, you are black, period. During slavery, when blacks were sold, distinctions were made between mulattos, quadroons, and octaroons, and the term mulatto was current in American speech in my youth. Whether because of black pride or some other factor, there is no such word any more: mulatto is a signifier without a signified. The coffee-colored O.J. Simpson is a black, or an Afro-American perhaps, but he is definitely not a mulatto.

Contrarily, a mixed-blood with one full-blood grandparent, with one-quarter Indian "blood," is considered presumptuous, mendacious in fact, if he claims that he is simply Indian. Whereas light-skinned products of black-white marriages are accorded the same sort of treatment as their darker brothers, the lighter progeny of Indian-white marriages are often derided by whites if they try to claim tribal identity. "You are not an Indian; you're one of us" is what mixed-bloods are told, even in cases in which they have an Indian name.

The rules for ethnic identity vary with the group. You are a Jew only if your mother is a Jew or if you convert, and among the orthodox your gentile mother must convert, too (a hangover from the days when men were more suspicious of their wives and when Cossacksraped Jewish girls). The mainstream American attitude toward ethnicity is that you are what your father is, that is, what your name is. If your name is Kowalski, you are Polish, even if your mother's name is O'Brien or Goldberg. Nor are you asked to prove that you are Polish. Finally, Indians are the only racial group, with the exception of WASPs, that anyone ever tries to sneak into. I have never heard of anyone who tried to pass for black, or Jewish, or Italian, but I know a number of cases in which whites have tried to pass for Indians.

White attitudes toward Indian mixed-bloods are more hostile in literature and film than they are in life. In Oklahoma, for instance, the Cherokee Indian blood of Will Rogers and W.W. Keeler (former president and chairman of the board of Phillips Petroleum Company) was regarded as a positive, romantic, and colorful attribute. Keeler, who was elected principal chief of the Cherokees, was proud of his Indian blood and received a great deal of publicity as a result of it.

Vizenor comes from a corner of the country where mixed-bloods have a sense of identity of their own. He is a Minnesota Métis. Métis is a French word (cognate with Spanish mestizo) for a person of mixed Indian and French-Canadian ancestry. Whether it was because these whites were Gallic rather than English, Catholic rather than Protestant, or nomadic trappers rather than sedentary, land-hungry farmers, the French Canadians were more tolerant of the Indians than were the Anglo-Americans, and married with them more frequently. The result was the Métis, a mixed-blood people with a definite cultural identity. Vizenorquotes historian Jacqueline Peterson: "Intermarriage went hand in glove with the trade in skins and furs from the first decades of discovery…. The core denominator of Métis identity was not participation in the fur-trading network per se, but the mixed-blood middleman stance between Indian and European societies." Because Vizenor's family were Anishinabes from the White Earth Reservation, and his mother was a Beaulieu, he is Métis in the narrow as well as the extended sense of the term, which now simply means mixed-blood.

Vizenor's central metaphor for mixed-bloods is the earthdiver of the Anishinabe creation myth. This myth, which appears in many cultures throughout the world, has four invariable traits: a world covered with water, a creator, a diver, and the creation of land. The Anishinabe version, in which the trickster Wenebojo is the diver, goes as follows: Wenebojo is on top of a tree that is protruding from the water. He defecates, and his excrement floats to the top. He asks Otter to dive to the bottom and bring up some dirt out of which to construct the earth. Otter tries but drowns. Wenebojo revives him and asks him if he saw any dirt, but Otter says "no." Next Wenebojo asks Beaver, who also drowns. When revived, Beaver says that he saw some dirt, but could not get to it. Then Muskrat tries. He too floats to the surface, senseless, but clenched in his paws and in his mouth are five grains of sand. Wenebojo revives Muskrat and throws the sand into the water, forming a small island. Wenebojo gets more dirt, enlarging the island, and lives there with the animals.

Psychologizing anthropologists explain this tale as a cloacal myth, that is, as one that reflects male envy of female pregnancy in its excremental theory of creation. It is typical of Vizenor's sense of irony that he both presents and ridicules the theory of excremental creation. It is always hard to pin Vizenor down. He seems to give credence to the idea, which he finds amusing, but deplores the "secular seriousness" of the scholars who propose it: "The academic intensities of career-bound anthropologists approach diarrhetic levels of terminal theoretical creeds."

The earthdiver is Vizenor's central metaphor for the mixed-blood. The vehicle earthdiver has two elements, the earth and the diver. As a diver the mixed-blood cuts through the polluted sea we live in to the rich floor below, and brings back some earth to create a new land:

White settlers are summoned to dive with mixed-blood survivors into the unknown, into the legal morass of treaties and bureaucratic evils, and to swim deep down and around through federal exclaves and colonial economic enterprises in search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island.

The earth, the other part of the vehicle, not only signifies nature, the sacred earth, but also federal funds, the rich muck that acts like manure on tribal projects:

When the mixed-blood earthdiver summons the white world to dive like the otter and beaver and muskrat in search of the earth, and federal funds, he is both animal and trickster, both white and tribal, the uncertain creator in an urban metaphor based on a creation myth that preceded him in two world views and oral tradition.

And, as a metaphor yokes two different things in one comparison, mixed-bloods are linked between white and tribal cultures: "Métis earthdivers are the new metaphors between communal tribal cultures and those cultures which oppose traditional connections, the cultures which would market the earth." All of Vizenor's mixed-bloods are earthdivers of one kind or another, but the story of Martin Bear Charme corresponds best to the earthdiver myth as a cloacal creation story. A founder of the Landfill Meditation Reservation, Bear Charme pops up in a number of Vizenor's works.

Bear Charme left his reservation in North Dakota and hitchhiked to San Francisco when he was sixteen. He tried welding in a federal relocation program but soon turned to garbage, out of which he built his fortune, "hauling trash and filling wet lands with solid waste and urban swill" in the South Bay area. Having made his life out of refuse, Bear Charme, unlike other scraplords who went from dumps to mansions, made garbage his life, meditating in his dump, and seeing garbage as a metaphor for the worthwhile things in life—contact with the earth, and the process of recycling and renewal.

With Bear Charme, Vizenor stands a cliché on its head. We normally think of filling the Bay as despoiling nature—that is certainly the way conservation-oriented newspapers like the Bay Guardian portray it—but Vizenor, with his characteristic irony, shows that making land from garbage is a reverential act to nature:

The status of a trash hauler is one of the best measures of how separated a culture is from the earth, from the smell of its own waste. Bear Charme teaches that we should turn our minds back to the earth, the rich smell of the titled earth. We are the garbage he [once said]. We are the real waste, and cannot separate ourselves like machines, clean and dumped, trashed out back into the river. We are the earthdiver and dreamers, and the holistic waste.

Bear Charme makes his dump a "meditation reservation," a place to renew one's link to the earth:

Charme chanted "come to the landfill and focus on real waste," shaman crow crowed backward on her perch in the sumac. "Mandala mulch, and transcend the grammatical word rivers, clean talk and terminal creeds, and put mind back to earth. Dive back to the earth, come backward to meditate on trash, and swill and real waste that binds us to our bodies and the earth.

One of the appealing things about Vizenor's works is that they appear to be one huge moebius strip. Never mind that there are poems, essays, stories, and novels. They seem to be parts of a unified whole because the same characters scuttle in and out, often telling the same stories. Rattling Hail appears in a poem and then an essay; Lilith Mae Farrier is in an essay and then a novel; Clement Beaulieu appears everywhere. Bear Charme first appeared in a story entitled "Land Fill Meditation," which was published in the Minneapolis Star Saturday Magazine in February, 1979. In the story, Beaulieu/ Vizenor introduced Bear Charme as the narrator who tells the story of Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, the mixed-blood killed for her terminal views. Vizenor lifts the tale, without Bear Charme, and puts it in Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. The story appears a third time in "Windmills of Dwindle Hall," an episode in Fourskin, Vizenor's unpublished novel about life in the Native American Studies Department at Berkeley. The story is narrated by Bear Charme, a character in "Landfill Meditation," a collection of stories by Clement Beaulieu, alias Gerald Vizenor. These stories are the subject of a seminar conducted by Pink Stallion, a key schlussel in this roman à clef, a mixed-blood Valentino known for picking the lock of every blonde in Berkeley.

The narrative technique of "Windmills" is marvelous, a mise en abime in which Vizenor is the oat box Quaker holding up a box on which Pink Stallion is seen holding up a box on which Beaulieu/Vizenor is seen holding up a box on which Bear Charme is seen telling the story of Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher. This story, slightly revised, appears as "Classroom Windmills" in Earthdivers.

In the Anishinabe myth the earthdiver is the trickster Wenebojo. As the product of the marriage between a spirit and a man, Wenebojo is a sort of mixed-blood himself. In Anishinabe mythology, and indeed, all Indian mythology, the trickster is mediator between man and god, a hero sent by God (Manito, Earthmaker, Wakan Tanka) to help man on earth. In a way the mixed-blood is a mediator as well: most Indian Studies programs are staffed by mixed-bloods, who become interpreters who define tribal culture to the white community.

The trickster in Vizenor's work who best captures the spirit of Anishinabe mythology is one who operates in the academic arena, Captain Shammer, the short-term chairman of American Indian Studies at Berkeley in Earthdivers. Shammer, called Captain because he is a trickster of martial masks who parades around campus as a military man, was selected as the seventh chairman of American Indian Studies because he had the fewest credentials and was lowest on the list of applicants. The search committee reasoned that the past six chairs, who had failed miserably, were experts, and that it was time to pick someone without qualifications. Shammer, true to his military nature, "took hold of the well-worn pink plastic mixed-blood reins and rode the old red wagon constellations proud as a tribal trickster through the ancient word wars, with mule skinners and ruminant mammals, behind academic lines."

Shammer's term lasts three weeks—tricksters, as I said, are traditionally peripatetic—but during those weeks he has an enormous impact. His first move is to put the Department of American Indian Studies up for sale to the highest bidder. This may seem outrageous, but as Dean Colin Defender puts it, "Higher education has always been for sale on both ends, research and instruction; the difference here is that this new Chair, part cracker I might add, is seeking the highest, not the lowest, bids." The winner of the bidding is the Committee on Tribal Indecision, which changes the name of the department to Undecided Studies.

Another service that Captain Shammer performs for his department is to bring in Old Darkhorse, proprietor of the Half Moon Bay Skin Dip, whose specialty is coloring skin. Now America's attitude about skin color is not simple. On the one hand, light skin is better than dark when it serves to identify a person as Caucasian rather than Indian or black. Being pale, however, is inferior to being tan the color of the leisure class of Aspen and Acapulco. As long as one is easily identifiable as a Caucasian, it is good to be as dark as possible. Lightness is also a disadvantage for mixed-bloods, both among tribal people and among members of the white community (who can feel more liberal if they are dealing with dark dark people and not wasting their liberalism on light dark people). Accordingly, Old Darkhorse performs a real service by darkening mixed-bloods through dunking. In his early experiments the technology was not very sophisticated, and the dunkees would emerge "marbled … like the end papers on old books." Soon, however, Darkhorse perfects his process and is able to help light mixed-bloods "when the darkest mixed-bloods were much too critical of the light inventions, the pale skins varieties needed darker flesh to disburden their lack of confidence around white liberals."

One of the main thrusts of the "satirical contradance" Shammer performs is Vizenor's spoof of Americans' reactions to skin color—not only the prejudices of whites but those of mixed-bloods and full bloods as well. Vizenor is well aware that no race has a monopoly on prejudice, and he has no reluctance to satirize the color consciousness of Indians. To this end he has Captain Shammer introduce his colorwheel, a register of skin tones ranging from white through pink and tan to dark brown. The colors are numbered and refer to explanations in a manual on tribal skin tones and identities. Shammer, for instance, was a four, about which the manual reads:

Mixedbloods with the skin tone color wheel code four are too mixed to choose absolute breeds or terminal creeds. Fours are too light to dance in the traditional tribal world and too dark to escape their flesh in the white world…. Fours bear the potential to be four flushers, too much white in the hand and not enough in the tribal bush.

Having darkened the pale mixed-bloods and sold the department, Shammer moves on, trickster fashion.

In all his works, but most of all in Earthdivers, Vizenor deals with the delicate subjects of race relations, color, and ethnic identity. But he does not deal with them delicately. He slashes away at prejudices and "terminal beliefs" with merciless satire, exposing and ridiculing whites, full bloods, and mixed-bloods. His friends are no safer than his enemies, and being on his side does not guarantee immunity from being lampooned. That is the way it should be, of course, and, as much as anyone, Gerald Vizenor deserves a place in the Half-Breed Hall of Fame.