SOURCE: "'The Game Never Ends': Gerald Vizenor's Gamble with Language and Structure in Summer in the Spring," in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1995, pp. 85-109.

[In the following essay, McNeil argues that Vizenor continues the work of the original editor of the stories—Theodore Hudon Beaulieu—by bringing them to a general readership.]

The trickster myths in Gerald Vizenor's Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories come nearly verbatim from a series of tales in The Progress, the first newspaper published on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. Appearing in the late 1880s, the series was originally edited by Theodore Hudon Beaulieu. From the standpoint of the contemporary literary scholar, the series might simply seem an historical collection of tribal lore and a useful collection from which to develop a source study for Vizenor's works, but for Beaulieu's Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) audience or Vizenor's interested non-Anishinaabe academic audience engaged in the study of the dynamic function of open-ended trickster discourse, these narratives offer insight concerning the function and enduring value of native texts.

A brief review of the publication history of the tales offers Vizenor's contemporary audience insight into their original intention. Twenty years before Beaulieu's publication of the narrative series in The Progress, Anishinaabe families had begun to experience another in a series of removals, this time from their homes in different parts of the state to the newly organized White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. One hundred years of the gradual stripping away of Anishinaabe land and natural resources, as well as the threat of further erosion of tribal sovereignty, compelled Gus and Theodore Beaulieu to establish The Progress.

With Gus as publisher and Theodore as editor, the Beaulieus initiated publication of The Progress because they believed the Anishinaabeg needed a forum in which to share vital news and to vent frustrations. The "Salutatory," written by Gus's brother, Reverend Clement H. Beaulieu, as the opening article of the first issue, states the Beaulieus' purpose: to advocate for the tribe's best interests. Beaulieu specifically notes that, while they do not wish to antagonize the government, they "may be called upon at times to criticise individuals and laws, but," Beaulieu qualifies, "we shall aim to do so in a spirit of kindness and justice. Believing that the 'freedom of the press,' will be guarded as sacredly by the Government, on this Reservation as elsewhere…." The newspaper's masthead dedicates The Progress to "A higher Civilization: The Maintenance of Law and Order."

Despite this rather moderate statement of intentions and conservative motto, after publication of the first issue the U.S. Indian agent on the White Earth Reservation seized the press, charging the Beaulieus with voicing "incendiary and revolutionary sentiments." A jury trial and a subsequent hearing before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., cleared the Beaulieus of the charges, awarded damages, and restored them to their newspaper. After a nearly twenty-month hiatus for litigation, the Beaulieus published the second issue of The Progress.

The Progress continued to include criticism of the federal Indian Bureau, as well as current local, national, and international news. In the third weekly issue of the renewed publication, Theodore Beaulieu lets subscribers know that the paper will soon begin "a series of Indian stories, traditional and legendary … which will date away back when this country was one great reservation and no Indian agents but Win-ne-boo-zho," the trickster. However, the Beaulieus' publication of the text of the Dawes or General Allotment Act, which appears "by request" of their readership, temporarily held back presentation of the series. The Dawes Act was of monumental significance to the Anishinaabeg, because it served to break up the people's communally held land into individual family allotments which then, in concert with further legislation that followed almost immediately, allowed Anishinaabe land to be sold to white settlers or lost to speculators, especially those working for the timber industry. The Dawes Act proved divisive in certain Anishinaabe communities by inspiring competition and breaking down communal cohesiveness. By delaying the trickster stories to publish the General Allotment Act text, the Beaulieus served their readership by informing the people of the exact nature of the act, hence perhaps discouraging land sales in communities that resisted allotment.

The front-page series of cultural information and trickster stories finally begins in December 1887, with twelve installments appearing until May 1888. The Anishinaabe texts edited by Theodore Beaulieu were narrated by Saycosegay and Day Dodge, two leaders of the Midéwiwin, the Anishinaabe sacred society (Summer). Day Dodge, "Grand Sachem and Medicine Seer of the White Earth Ojibwas," was then about ninety years old, "which means he was born before the turn of the nineteenth century," Vizenor says, "when the anishinaabeg were not yet colonized and suppressed on federal exclaves or reservations" (Summer). In his introduction to the stories, Beaulieu insists that these men are the best living authorities and that the translation of their texts is as near verbatim as possible because, he later adds, it is in the readers' best interest to offer them "the exact language" of the Meda priests. The series includes "many interesting and useful lessons on the History, Customs, Traditions and Legends of the Ojibwas, not omitting the charming jocularity of the endless tales of the never dying WAIN-NAH-BOO-ZHO!" As the series unfolds over the months, Beaulieu lets his readers know that the never-ending "story of 'WAINAHBOOZHO' and his many adventures, will be continued as fast as the manuscript can be prepared."

In 1970, Vizenor published in Anishinabe Adisokan stories he had selected and edited from Beaulieu's Progress series. Along with the third edition of his collection of Anishinaabe lyric poems (1965, 1970), Vizenor republished the Anishinabe Adisokan stories in Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories in 1981. The 1993 edition of Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories is a contribution to the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series.

The above brief history of the publication of the trickster tales demonstrates their complex publication context. Because the 1887–88 series came at a time when the Anishinaabeg were in need of renewed hope—removal to White Earth Reservation in many cases meant abandoning homes, possessions, and livelihoods to begin again in a new place—the myths served Beaulieu's audience as a kind of wide-reaching communal invocation of the people's enduring strength and humor. The central figure in the series is, appropriately, the humorous, "never dying" trickster Wainaboozho.

With Wainaboozho—or Naanabozho, as Vizenor calls him—anything is possible. In some Anishinaabe tales, he is stupid, greedy, lustful, incestuous, abusive. He engages in mean, thoughtless escapades, sometimes premeditating vengeful tricks; he even kills his own brothers. And yet, as the Anishinaabe culture-hero, Naanabozho also commits the selfless creative acts that he was put on the earth to perform (Summer). In his introduction to Summer in the Spring, Vizenor describes Naanabozho in these Beaulieu-Vizenor narratives as the "compassionate tribal trickster" (Summer). As a culture-hero, Naanabozho recreates the world after the flood, brings fire, and offers "salvation" to the people. He is "reputed to possess not only the power to live but also the correlative power of renewing his own life and of quickening and therefore of creating life in others." Naanabozho has been sent by Giizis Manidoo, the Great Spirit, to teach the people what is essential for their existence.

In the "Naanabozho Obtains Fire" tale in Summer in the Spring, the trickster goes against the wishes of his grandmother (his nookomis) and sets out to steal a ray—a smile—from the sun spirit, Giizis Manidoo. Naanabozho, who was born of an earthly mother and the manidoo (spirit/god) who is the north wind, journeys to the sun's island home and then turns himself into a rabbit; the sun's daughters find him wet and bedraggled on the lake shore. They rescue the little bunny, and thus Naanabozho gains entrance into the sun's house. The rabbit revives and, "twitching his lips and nose in a most ridiculous fashion," is so comical that he makes the sun smile. Naanabozho catches the burning ray in a piece of punk he had tied onto his back for the purpose and exits before the sun can catch him. Because he paddles so quickly back to the earth and his grandmother's wigwam, the fire is fanned to a blaze that spreads to his rabbit fur.

[B]efore he could extricate himself from his rabbit skin, the hair was afire, and matters looked serious sure enough. He was now nearing the shore from whence he came, and he at once commenced to howl and called loudly for nookomis to hurry up: Come to me, I am afire, hi-hai, nookomis come quick!

The humorous scene continues with the old woman "so excited … that she forgot all about her stick and a sprained ankle" in her haste to get to the canoe—although she does remember to grab a pot in which she plans to collect the fire. The undignified hero yells pathetically for his grandmother, who, probably because he is not always nice to her, takes her time attending to him. Only after she has the fire safely in the pot does she care for her smoldering grandson. As a result, "In many places the rabbit skin had burned through. And when at last nookomis pulled it off his back, great pieces of his own skin and flesh came off with it. Poor naanabozho, he was indeed a sorry-looking sight after he was relieved of his fiery jacket" (Summer). As this tale demonstrates, the trickster is a creator, a destroyer, a shapeshifter—an agent of transformation. At the same time, even in the same story, the culture-hero—as a raggedy rabbit or an angry grandchild—is a comical, risk-taking fool. Although anyone who reads the Beaulieu-Vizenor stories is likely to make choices more consciously than Naanabozho does, he or she is bound to be confronted at some point with the confusing double role of creator and destroyer that human beings must fulfill even in the "transformations" of everyday life.

After his brush with Giizis Manidoo, Naanabozho revives himself through sleep. Then he feasts on food Nookomis has prepared, afterward entertaining the two of them by making speeches. His heated discourse leads Nookomis to disclose the truth of the circumstances of Naanabozho's birth, which, in turn, launches Naanabozho into his next adventure. The demigod trickster always has another scheme hatching. If he were as careful and calculating as someone entirely mortal—like his grandmother or the Beaulieu-Vizenor reader—he would never set out on such risky journeys into the natural and supernatural worlds. But Naanabozho lives on the threshold between worlds, neither belonging fully nor living solely in just one, possessing neither human common sense nor the dignified omnipotence of the manidoog (spirits). Because he is both human and spirit, like any living creature Naanabozho can be hurt, but like the manidoog he cannot die. Since he belongs in part to each world, both affect him, but neither has full control over his person, spirit, or destiny, and, significantly, in neither is he in full control of himself.

After hearing the truth about the circumstances of his mother's death, the enraged Naanabozho is determined to take control of the situation by exacting vengeance. Impetuous as always, the trickster goes on the "war path" to destroy his manidoo father, who was indirectly responsible for his mortal mother's death in childbirth. However, in the next installment of the series, "Naanabozho and His Father," Naanabozho arrives at the "fourth fold of the skies," where his father talks him out of revenge. The manidoo of peace, Naanabozho's twin brother who died with their mother at their birth, further appeases Naanabozho by telling him that the council of manidoog are now "giving him the full control of the earth, as sovereign lord and master" (Summer). When they had seen Naanabozho coming, the council of manidoog hurriedly had decided on this action, because they knew Naanabozho was invincible to the manidoog as well as to human beings (Summer).

In the Beaulieu-Vizenor series, although he is given stewardship of the earth and now has the grave responsibilities of a mature, compassionate leader, Naanabozho is, in some respects, still the same obstinate risk-taker he has always been. As a steward who is sometimes heroic, sometimes selfish, he is a mediator who may intercede for good or to stir up trouble; in other words, he promotes all facets of life. Naanabozho intercedes between the people and their earthly environment, and between the Anishinaabeg and the evil spirits who threaten their lives. The culture-hero trickster in these tales is also a mediator between the late nineteenth-century Anishinaabeg and the U.S. government, in that he ultimately inspires the people to act on their own behalf. Most fundamentally, in the complex way that he is sometimes hero, sometimes villain, and as that reflects the paradoxical human condition, for the Beaulieu-Vizenor storytelling audience the trickster is also a mediating force between active aspects of the self.

In "Naanabozho and His Father," after he has been given stewardship of the earth Naanabozho tells Nookomis he is planning to set out on an extended tour of his realm. She is alarmed and tells him that no one has been known to return who "got within" the power of the assorted evil spirits that "infest" the land (Summer): "They first charm their victims by the sweetness of their songs, then they strangle and devour them," she continues. "But your principal enemy will be the gichi nita ataaged, the great gambler, who has never been beaten and who lives beyond the realm of the niibaa giizis, darkness, and near the shores of the happy hunting-ground." Nookomis ends her warning by saying, "I would beseech you, therefore, not to undertake so dangerous a journey." But Naanabozho is feeling cocky after his recent confrontation with his father: "With the increasing laurels of conquest, naanabozho felt that he was brave and as such, should know no fear." He continues to prepare for his journey and the warning words of Nookomis seem to go unheeded (Summer).

One does begin to wonder how Nookomis, a mortal woman, has come to know so much that she can warn her grandson in specific terms about the dangers that lie ahead. She is, at the very least, a wise woman; we know earlier in the series that she is one who, in dream, receives information from the manidoog (Summer). Even though Naanabozho does not heed her warning to stay home (since the people are in need of his help, this may not have been what she had intended, anyway), he is forewarned and hence thoroughly readies himself for a successful journey by making "all necessary preparations" before setting out (Summer). Possibly because Nookomis—along with sympathetic animals and manidoog—have made him aware of what lies ahead, Naanabozho now knows "the place where the great gambler consigned the spirits of his many victims" (Summer). Based on this foreknowledge, his purpose becomes clear, and he vows "that if he ever destroyed the gichi nita ataaged, he would liberate the victims who were being tortured" (Summer).

In a brief introduction to this installment of the continuing trickster story in The Progress, Beaulieu says that "the great spirit gambler" is destiny. The gambler's prisoners, the Beaulieu-Vizenor text states, are the "victims of sin and shame" (Summer); they are Naanabozho's Anishinaabe relatives who have gambled with destiny by risking interaction with this overpoweringly evil creature (Summer) or, simply, have "gambled" by having faced their destiny fearfully. In Naanabozho's game with the great evil gambler, "one chance remained, upon which depended the destiny of naanabozho and the salvation of the anishinaabe people" (Summer).

Beaulieu's late nineteenth-century Anishinaabe readers were dealing with their own harsh fates, their worst fears repeatedly having been realized. But, judging from the Beaulieus' criticism of white manipulation of their lives, the Anishinaabeg were not placing themselves in the role of helpless victims—and the trickster story would have served to remind them of their cultural resources. Some Anishinaabeg, like Theodore Beaulieu, were helping the people help themselves, in much the same way as Naanabozho takes an active, dangerous role when he decides to face the gambler. One hundred years later, Vizenor's readers, too, face a risk-filled destiny (environmental pollution and general lack of respect for life in the seemingly unending race for material gain), and, like the readers of The Progress, are challenged to choose between apathy and action. Both native and nonnative audiences can relate to Naanabozho as culture-hero and can understand the idea of people caught in servitude or addiction to destruction.

In the gambler tale, the images are as grizzly as any that life might offer. The great gambler's front door is a mat of human scalps. Showing Naanabozho the hands of his "relatives who came here to gamble," the gambler tells Naanabozho, "They played and lost and their life was the forfeit…. Seek me and whoever enters my lodge must gamble" (Summer). Naanabozho the culture-hero has come not because he has an addictive, self-destructive urge to gamble with his destiny, as the previous Anishinaabe victims may have had. He is risking his destiny by using his power to resist and disable the gambler and hence to liberate/empower his human relations, including the reader—liberating simultaneously that angry human part of himself that the manidoog had hurried to try to appease by making him earth's steward.

Without his human relations, who provide him his role of liberator and teacher, Naanabozho's risk is pointless; only because of them is he a redemptive and instructive figure. For Beaulieu's Anishinaabe audience, Naanabozho's interposing as their never-dying agent is original, ancestral. For both Beaulieu's and Vizenor's readers, the model of risk for potential acquisition of power and restoration of a balance between good and evil is archetypal.

To reintegrate ancestral story/history—especially given the instructive elements of trickster texts—is, for the Anishinaabe reader, to reaffirm the roots of Anishinaabe purpose, liberating the socially oppressed reader from purposelessness and victimization. With varying degrees of personal apathy, the members of both Beaulieu's nineteenth-century and Vizenor's twentieth-century audiences come from spiritually splintered communities that face uncertain futures; for each the present, and hence the future, is set against a background of their own century of intensely violent and psychologically devastating past. For Beaulieu's and Vizenor's readers, strength of will bolstered by the trickster narrative may help to fortify the spirit in the face of community fragmentation. Confrontation in the story offers a model for action against the forces threatening to destroy. The message is that it is better to take a potentially fatal risk than to remain a passive victim.

The trickster's confrontation with the gambler is also significant in that this tale is set in the afterlife. For the Anishinaabeg, loss to the gambler means relegation to Anishinaabe hell. Winning means eternal salvation. The individual's preparation for entrance into either a peaceful or a troubled afterlife is a familiar spiritual dichotomy for both native and nonnative audiences. Vivifying clarification, or "salvation," of personal and communal sense of purpose—along with the reminder to replace one's fears with strength or faith—helps not only to ensure strength in living but to earn peace in the afterlife (or at least a more peaceful contemplation of one's mortality).

Status in the afterlife is generally seen as dependent on one's behavior in life. The variety of good and bad in any individual's behavior reflects the human-divine dichotomy of heaven and hell. Like the multiple aspects of the human personality, different parts of the trickster also exist at once, even within the same story. Naanabozho's father is "a powerful manidoo for good or evil," Nookomis tells her grandson (Summer). Similarly, Day Dodge explains in The Progress that when, at the onset of menses, a girl went into isolation and fasted for her life vision, she was a "strong … spirit for good or evil", she was on the brink of deciding the major course of her life's journey. Representing the individual's power which, over a lifetime or at a given moment, can work for both good and evil, Naanabozho and the great gambler are simply aspects of one being. Thus the model for choice is brought to an intensely personal level for the reader of this tale.

The Anishinaabe trickster is also known as the Great Hare or the moon, the Great Light, the Spirit of Light, or the Great White One. In "Naanabozho Obtains Fire," discussed above, the trickster changes himself into a rabbit in order to obtain fire from the sun spirit; his own body catches fire in the course of bringing this source of warmth and light into the dark of the earthly night. The trickster performs this feat by drawing the sun to himself, which, in a sense, is similar to the way the moon "steals" sunlight to send down to, or reflect onto, the earth at night. In "Naanabozho and the Gambler," the last tale included in the Beaulieu-Vizenor narrative series, the evil gambler is the polar opposite of the compassionate trickster, or compassionate human self. The gambler is "a curious looking being" who "seemed almost round in shape" (Summer); in his dwelling out beyond the vast darkness, the gambler is, in other words, the almost-full moon. The gambler is the trickster in his greediest, most evil mode. In a human being, such selfish, destructive behavior may be beyond the person's control, because it is an aspect of his/her behavior that the individual is "in the dark" about. However, the gambler story shows that the courageous part of oneself that seeks clarity can bring such negative behavior into the light, as the trickster does by confronting the gambler. In this story, neither aspect of the trickster—neither Naanabozho nor the gambler—possesses a full range of human physical or psychological characteristics; they complement one another in form, purpose, and behavior. Here the gambler, who is not human, pursues a completely selfish and evil intent, while Naanabozho operates in human form as an altruistic hero whose goal is the liberation of his people.

The story is not tragic, however; it is comical. Trickster absurdity is at work when the fate of an entire people rests on the outcome of a game of chance. Only someone as ridiculously overconfident as Naanabozho would calmly step in to gamble with others' lives, not to mention risking his own destiny in the bargain. Common sense—and a concerned grandmother's warning words—would be enough to convince most human beings not to undertake such a huge risk. But the trickster does not possess a human conscience, not in the ordinary sense of weighing proposed action against probable outcome.

After the gambler explains what has happened to Naanabozho's relatives who have come before him—a speech meant to terrify Naanabozho and thereby render him incapable of winning the game—Naanabozho "laughed long and heartily. This was unusual for those who came there to gamble and the great gambler felt very uneasy at the stolid indifference of his guest" (Summer). The gambler's discomfort offers comic relief in the midst of what has been, for the gambler's previous visitors, the most hopeless of situations. Encouraged by the trickster story, readers of the Beaulieu-Vizenor text thus may discover that laughter is possible even within what they had previously thought were impossible situations in their lives.

Naanabozho's humor and strength are possible only because he has properly prepared himself for the journey and has confronted and dismissed his fears. To fear the enemy or oppressors (in this story comically depicted as an Anishinaabe weakness for gambling) is to lose footing as one passes through a paralyzing limbo to make the final gamble with one's destiny. To be fearful, to lose one's command or sense of purpose while in this depressed/oppressed state, is to fall, to be already lost. On his way to confront the great evil gambler, Naanabozho walks through the darkness where the gambler has "consigned the spirits of his many victims." Naanabozho overcomes his fear because he has the power of the manidoog with him: "For the first time in his life he experienced the chilly breath of fear, and wished that he had listened to the counsel of nookomis. But just then a voice whispered in his ear saying: I am with you. You should never fear. At this his fears were dispelled and he boldly walked on" (Summer).

In his typically obtuse way, which Nookomis had surely anticipated, Naanabozho had heeded his grandmother's counsel by consulting "friendly manidoog" and animals before undertaking his adventure (Summer). On his journey, he finds he has the power of the Anishinaabe spirits with him. He passes through the darkness, the owl his eyes and the firefly his light, until he arrives again in the daylight, where the great gambler's wigwam is visible in the distance. He overcomes that dangerous period of his fear and then, with his greatest challenge clearly illuminated before him, he can dismiss his helpers, their assistance no longer needed. Readers are being reminded that ancestral and animal spirit assistance, always available, can bring them strength of will and clarity of purpose.

The narrative continues, "When he was very near the wiigiwaam, he saw that there were numerous trails coming from different directions but all leading towards the wiigiwaam" (Summer). The other visitors to the gambler's wigwam may not have been so well prepared as Naanabozho. Because they had no spiritually bolstering assistance for the journey, when the imminent challenge came—that is, confrontation with the weakest part of oneself, which emerges at that lowest psychological point, the final gamble for one's survival—their fear and limited sense of communal and spiritual resources had already set them up to lose.

The risk theme works for both Beaulieu's and Vizenor's audiences in that, by identifying with the trickster—his ability to challenge destiny creatively, to exert his free will—readers are given a model of behavior that can help them overcome their propensities toward apathy. The consequences of white encroachment have put a pall over native lives for generations. Through his essential liminality and his comic ability to make the story audience laugh at itself, the trickster—always on the threshold between worlds, adventures, behaviors, and aspects of personality—reminds both Beaulieu's and Vizenor's readers that life requires choices, even if the only choice is whether to meet impossible situations with fear or with resolve.

Vizenor's series ends as Beaulieu's does, with Naanabozho ready to take his turn in the game after the gambler has tossed the bone figures and Naanabozho has called upon the wind to knock them down. Naanabozho is not frightened when he seizes the dish, telling the gambler, "It is now my turn, should I win, you must die" (Summer). In The Progress, Beaulieu adds that the tale is "to be continued," but, as in the Vizenor text, the narrative is left hanging.

The trickster story itself does not end, however; the reader must bring it to closure. The point of the open-ended story is to intimate that the risk goes on and on and on, just as the traditional—and archetypal—story itself is sure to be retold, in some form, as long as life exists. The game—Anishinaabe life and history/story—is not over. Beaulieu is reminding his audience not to give in or give up. "Open-ended" means open to change, able to adapt to the developing needs of a situation by permitting spontaneous and unguided responses. Beaulieu's readers were faced with tremendous change. For their own survival, they needed to be able to formulate wise and creative solutions to the difficult challenges of their situation.

Vizenor's intention for his audience may be a similar awakening to the possibility of human endurance, as well as an appreciation for the idea of free will in terms of active rather than passive responses to texts. He argues that "no critical closures, representations, or essential cultural conditions could hold" these trickster stories (Summer). Vizenor wants to assure scholars that the native story—with its balance of humor and struggle—is a tradition that has resisted colonization. Trickster tales and other Native American stories continue orally; in addition, as is evidenced by the Beaulieu and Vizenor texts, for more than a hundred years now they have taken to a wider intercultural life in print.

Alan Velie points to several interesting problems in the Beaulieu-Vizenor text as a written form of traditional, orally presented narrative. Velie implies that the "highly solemn and formal English" in which Beaulieu originally casts the texts—and that Vizenor retains—is somehow inappropriate to traditional performed narrative and that Beaulieu and Vizenor have taken further editorial liberties in their presentation of Saycosegay's and Day Dodge's texts.

Storytellers invariably cast their tales in language that they believe best suits the intended audience. Beaulieu's English was the educated English of the late 1800s—the same English, we can assume, used by his educated Anishinaabe audience. As an editor who decides how to present the material, what text to keep and what to excise—forming his own version of the stories—Beaulieu is operating in the role of storyteller, only this time telling the story through the medium of print and in English. The care that attended preparation of the narrative series and the overall mission of the newspaper to provide tribal members with critical discussion of pertinent issues—both intentions clearly stated in The Progress—indicate that Beaulieu's choice of vocabulary would have been just as carefully tended.

This formal turn-of-the-century English also works for Vizenor's academic audience, whose literary expectations are honed to appreciate the language of oral tradition as recorded in legend and folktale. Even though he makes minor editorial changes, Vizenor's text nearly duplicates the carefully prepared narrative in The Progress. As mentioned above, Vizenor's changes include his renaming "Wainahboozho" as Naanabozho. Highly conscious of the semantic impact of language, Vizenor also italicizes the Anishinaabe words and makes them lower case in order to emphasize "the values of the oral language rather than a total imposition of the philosophies of grammar and translation" (Summer) and to call attention to "semantic blunders" (e.g., "indian"). In addition to these revisions, Vizenor does omit or change certain words and phrases in the text.

An example of one of the more significant and yet still subtle changes occurs in the translation of Day Dodge's comments on traditional Anishinaabe rites for a girl during her first menses, discussed briefly above. The Progress text reads, "My grandson, you cannot properly understand without an illustration, how strong a spirit for good or evil a girl is during this period." Vizenor changes the text in this segment to "My grandchild, you cannot properly understand without an illustration, how strong the manidoog, spirits, are during this period" (Summer). Assuming that the text he edited represents Beaulieu's point of view, even though Beaulieu may not have translated the narrative himself, Vizenor's version may indicate shifts in thought concerning this particular topic. In Beaulieu's text, the pubescent girl is the spirit ("how strong a spirit for good or evil a girl is") and therefore the active agent, whereas, in Vizenor's version, the spirits, existing seemingly both inside and outside the girl, are the agents of the action ("how strong the manidoog, spirits, are"). Also, Beaulieu describes the girl's spiritual power in terms white readers would be likely to respond to as signifying specific polar extremes—"good or evil"—while Vizenor withholds that opportunity for judgment by indicating only that the spirits become strong at this time. The personal example that Day Dodge goes on to relate in the Progress text, and that Vizenor retains, is an illustration of a menstruating girl's awesome power. As a young man, Day Dodge had gone to a girl's hut during her first menses in order that she cure the warts on his hands, which she/her power did accomplish.

Dropping the "good or evil" phrase that his largely non-Native American academic audience might perceive as dichotomous could mean that Vizenor simply wants readers to come to their own conclusions—based on Day Dodge's illustration—of what this female power indicates. Vizenor's omission of the phrase could also come from an awareness of his academic readers' cultural filter, which, in a discussion of women's power, might lead them, consciously or unconsciously, to associate evil with the biblical fall and woman's alleged part in it. Beaulieu's edition of Day Dodge's discussion of the first menses does not indicate that the girl herself may use her power toward a willful or evil end; the Beaulieu text simply explains that males had to be careful and conscious of heightened female metaphysical strength (equated with women's physical power to create new life) during this period. That Vizenor's changes may come from a feminist awareness can be supported by the fact that he also changes the "grandson" address of the Day Dodge-Beaulieu text to "grandchild"—the genderless term encouraging a wider readership that includes women. In his subtle editing of the cultural information and trickster tales from The Progress for a twentieth-century audience, Vizenor does not, however, seem to intend a radically different reading of the Beaulieu text.

Velie implies that both Beaulieu's and Vizenor's "re-expressions" of the Saycosegay and Day Dodge text are inappropriate—that the Midéwiwin teacher-storytellers' earlier versions of the mythic texts have been compromised in some way. But as Vizenor points out, there are as many versions of tribal stories as there are tellers, listeners, and readers. In fact, the text has proven its essential viability by its reemergence in the textual repertoire of those generations succeeding the Midéwiwin elders to which Beaulieu and Vizenor belong.

Velie's biggest point of contention in regard to Beaulieu's and Vizenor's series is that both end the trickster text in the middle of the narrative; he claims that this is not "traditional." Naanabozho has not yet acted and has not yet won—or lost—his battle with the gambler.

He was not frightened, and when the great evil gambler prepared to make the final shake, naanabozho drew near and when the dish came down on the ground he made a whistle on the wind, as in surprise, and the figures fell. Naanabozho then seized the dish saying: It is now my turn, should I win, you must die.

Velie states that "the traditional ending in Anishinaabe myth, as well as the tales of other tribes, is for the trickster to win and the gambler to die." In other versions of the Anishinaabe trickster recreation cycle, after Naanabozho has finished recreating the land and has completed his task of killing the evil being, the stories end with his "roaming about." However, as nineteenth-century anthropologist Basil Johnston points out, Anishinaabe stories he recorded "are not to be interpreted literally; but freely, yet rationally according to the Ojibway views of life. Readers and listeners are expected to draw their own inferences, conclusions, and meanings according to their intellectual capacities." Even if the trickster completes a task and wanders off, the text is left up to each story participant/audience member to conclude and possibly later to retell as the particular version of the story that person has apprehended. Leaving the text in medias res may represent, to Velie, a lack of aesthetic and thematic sensitivity, but to an Anishinaabe reader (and to contemporary literary scholars accustomed to ambiguous endings), it may not be so jarring; in fact, it may elicit an entire body of cultural text—other versions and other tellings of this trickster story, as well as other related texts and events in the reader's life.

Jarold Ramsey says that "myth evokes a mood of self-conscious expectancy." Because he is a powerful trope or unit of cultural performance, the tribal trickster is particularly capable of conjuring up, within the culturally knowledgeable listener/reader, the entire traditional cultural "tapestry" or semiotic context. The mythic trickster and his stories then become much more than "merely functional instruments or mediating mechanisms" engaged in a symbolic process. Much more than a comforting symbol, Naanabozho, in his many aspects and adventures, is an active element in the Anishinaabe reader's life—as he can be even in the life of the culturally sensitive non-Anishinaabe reader.

Velie further suggests that Beaulieu's tagging of the last installment of the series, the confrontation between Naanabozho and the gambler, with "to be continued" may be the played-out limit of the series project for Beaulieu and his collaborators or simply a literary "trick." Actually, "to be continued" establishes an expectant, enjoyable tension. Even if the story is not continued—and even if the story continues and the trickster does die—the call to the greater continuing body of Anishinaabe oral literature has been made in the mind of Beaulieu's audience. Additionally, Beaulieu's Anishinaabe readers, and Vizenor's mainly nonnative academic audience familiar with the pan-Indian qualities of the trickster figure, know that Naanabozho does not die—or, if he does, he can always come back to life. Also, when the tale is told again in the future—in whatever version—the unending story of the trickster, and the people, continues.

The ambiguous ending may have been unintentional on Beaulieu's part, but the truncation of the series at this suspenseful point would ultimately not have mattered much for the tribal audience, who could construct their own outcomes and call up their own remembered texts. On the other hand, Vizenor clearly intends the ambiguous ending; he deliberately stops the action at a place where readers unfamiliar with the culture are forced to participate in the narrative—to learn more about Anishinaabe lives and texts (his informative and interpretive sections framing the narrative series indicate that this is what he wants) or at least to allow his readers the opportunity to engage actively enough with the text to produce their own conclusions. The courageous hero has at his command the power of the manidoog (Naanabozho whistles for the wind, which then knocks over the figures left standing after the gambler's loss [Summer]) and is on an altruistic mission to save his people. The trickster's demonstrated supernatural power and the righteousness of his mission are ingredients Vizenor's primarily non-Indian academic readers are likely to expect will lead to a "happy" ending.

However, the nonnative reader who is familiar with American Indian texts will realize that happily-ever-after is an oversimplification, that the trickster is not simply hero or villain but both, his actions akin to the ongoing struggle of human existence. In yet another version of the Beaulieu story in the prologue to his book The People Named the Chippewa, Vizenor the storyteller says that, even if Naanabozho does not win, "The trickster had stopped evil for a moment in a game", even if only for a moment, Naanabozho has successfully mediated between good and evil.

Similarly, the Beaulieus and then Vizenor have offered a mediating moment to their readers through their published versions of the trickster text. Participation in the storytelling moment offers the reader the opportunity to mediate events along with the trickster and to mediate between aspects of the trickster's complex self. The threshold inherent for the listener/reader in tribal texts, specifically here the never-ending trickster story, is a liminal stance, a rite of passage that transports the actively involved story participant/reader through what Victor Turner has dubbed a "moment in and out of time"; this moment homogenizes differences between the sacred and the secular, between individuals from different social levels, between past, present, and future, and between aspects of self. In the suspension of real time is a moment of breathing space or inspiration in which all things are possible.

Comedy, especially trickster humor that deals with human interactions ranging from the mundane to the taboo, is a vehicle for serious as well as light concerns that mediates and brings into balance contradictory aspects of human life. The storytelling moment that facilitates imaginative engagement in narrative choices could serve the listener/reader whose life surely involves choices—action considered and taken. To operate as an objective actor or intermediary in one's life is to retain freedom of choice in thought and action. Most importantly, an intermediary, by definition, is one who acts as an integrative force, bringing two seemingly opposed elements together in order to reconcile differences. Both the trickster and the storyteller, as the mythic and real-life agents of the stories, offer the reader models for reconciling and hence integrating oppositional forces.

The traditional multifaceted and multifaced trickster figure—a communal, many-voiced sign—and the open-ended narrative each offer what Vizenor calls "narrative chance." The unfinished nature of the Beaulieu-Vizenor text is appropriate to the trickster genre of tales, as it is, in fact, appropriate to oral literature, which relies on the quality and principle of open-endedness. "Sentiment and sensation and worldview of the Gambler story denies closure," Vizenor states. It is more about "balance," he suggests, "but it's not balance"—not really balance because that is a rigid delineation. "We're all good and evil," he says. The tug of war between the two aspects of being is, at the level of the individual or at the level of societies, a game of constant rebalancing. The game between the trickster and the gambler is also never-ending—the story can always be retold. "The game never ends," Vizenor says, and language, including storytelling, is a game, too.

Beaulieu and Vizenor, as storyteller-editors publishing their interpretations of these trickster tales, are cultural historians. Beaulieu offered his audience text that was already their own story and, through that publication, reminded his people of their strength, pride, and hope as Anishinaabeg. Vizenor intends the Summer in the Spring series of trickster texts to be a point of open-ended engagement with Anishinaabe culture, and the readers' structural interaction with textual open-endedness is an additional gift intended to remind them of the possibility of spontaneous engagement with life.