SOURCE: "Follow the Trickroutes: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor," in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Sun Tracks and the University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp. 287-310.

[In the interview below, Vizenor discusses his ideas on language, the role of storytelling in Native American culture, and the role of the trickster in Native American literature.]

Since his first publications, Gerald Vizenor has been recognized as a multifaceted writer. His books include collections of haiku poetry, short stories, a novel, reworkings of Anishinabe traditional tales, and several nonfiction works. A member of the White Earth Reservation, his teaching has taken him to the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Berkeley, the Southwest and, just prior to this interview, China.

The interview with Gerald Vizenor took place on one of those cool but sunny days which characterize Berkeley, California. There Vizenor and his wife, Laura Hall, were living while he taught for a semester at the University of California. Just back from mainland China, Vizenor and his wife were staying in a small apartment piled high with books—some on shelves, some as yet unpacked. As we drank tea and talked, 1 thought how much Vizenor is like his trickster heroes, a man always in motion, rooted and rootless, his eyes flashing with wry humor as he speaks.

     "Auras on the Interstate"
 
     follow the trickroutes
     homewardbound in darkness
 
     noise tired
     from the interstates
 
     trucks whine through our families
     places of conception
 
     governments raze
     half the corners we have known
 
     houses uprooted
     sacred trees deposed
     municipal machines
     plow down our generation vines
     tribal doorsteps
 
     condominium cultures
     foam low
     stain the rivers overnight
 
     thin auras
     hold our space in dreams
     cut the interstates
     from the stoop
     bedroom window ruins
 
     noise tired
     we are laced in dark arms
     until morning
 
     —Gerald Vizenor

[Bruchac:] I'm pleased you began with that poem. It leads into a question I feel is central to your work—migration and the sense of movement. There are references to motion, roads, travels, and even pilgrimages throughout your writing. Why is this so and what do those motions and migrations mean to you?

[Vizenor:] Life is not static. Philosophically, I think we should break out of all the routes, all the boxes, break down the sides. A comic spirit demands that we break from formula, break out of program, and there are some familiar ways to do it and then some radical or unknown ways. I suppose I am preoccupied with this theme because the characters I admire in my own imagination and the characters I would like to make myself be break out of things. They break out of all restrictions. They even break out of their blood. They break out of the mixture in their blood. They break out of invented cultures and repression. I think it's a spiritual quest in a way. I don't feel that it's transcendence—orescape as transcendence. That's not the theme I'm after, but I'm after an idea of the comic, that the adventures of living and the strategies of survival are chances. They're mysteries because they're left to chance. Life is a chance, all life is a chance. And that's a comic spirit. A tragic spirit is to trudge down the same trial, try to build a better path, make another fortune, build another monument and contribute it to a museum and establish more institutions to disguise our mortality. I consider all of that a formula to control and oppress—not evil, not in an evil manner, but it does control. So, I feel this need to break out of the measures that people make.

That's interesting to me because, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned the importance of a sense of place. A sense of place is still meaningful despite the motion?

Well, the place is in imagination, an imaginative landscape. The place isn't really on the earth because it'll change. But I think you need a place to attach to in moments of fear and detachment and confusion, a place that's familiar, a dream place. I think it's an oral traditional place, which means that it's greater than reality and it's greater than a material place you would find on the earth—this is more than just an intersection. It's a universal place. If you turn your back on the earthbound place, it will change. The seasons will change it. And surely human beings are going to alter anything you ever want to remember as a sacred place. So we take it into imagination, and I don't ever expect any place I've ever been in a spiritual way will ever be the same except in my imagination. So I see the permanence of things in a kind of oral traditional visual place. Now, there is, I think, a spiritual and a political risk in this. It is very impractical. The bulldozers can come and if you're off imagining, you can ignore it. I don't carry this as a life philosophy, but in response to your question.

You have to strike a balance between an actual physical connection to a physical life on this physical earth and the imaginative connection which, in some ways, sustains you even when the physical reality changes or breaks down—or is taken away by the bulldozer. What is the physical and emotional reality you proceed from and what is the place on earth you carry about with you now in your imagination?

That's very nice. Let me get there slightly indirectly. My father moved from the reservation to Minneapolis. I went around to hang out for a few minutes at all the places I had ever lived in the city. When I went to do this, less than ten years ago, I found that the places I had lived up until I went to college at the University of Minnesota, more than half were under cement. They were interstates, they had been razed. I thought, "My God, my past doesn't exist." I don't exist with respect to a geographical place. I saw this in myself and I've also written about in other people. Marleen American Horse, for example, a fictional name but a real person who comes from North Dakota. Her place is under the reservoir. She doesn't have a home place anymore. But they exist, our past intersections, in my imagination. And anyway, I say to myself, everything out there is like television. They'll change the channel and it will be a different place, they'll redesign it. I have to separate what is mine by way of connections to the earth and what is "television." Most of what I've seen in the world is television—I mean, the world is television.

In the most romantic sense, there's a small grove of cedar in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota that is a very special place. I can't tell you why. There's no particular genealogical or geographical significance to it other than the fact that cedar is significant to religion in the tribal sense. But I found that cedar on a walk, a lovely place. I think of it often and I am connected to it. Somebody may have cut it down, conceivably, but it may still be there. Physically, I haven't been there for two years. There's another place at White Earth Reservation. It's on a hill right outside of White Earth, the St. Benedict Catholic Cemetery. That's a genealogical connection, historical, tribal-historical, a family place. There are family members buried there, Vizenors and Beaulieus, and right at the top of the hill there's a plot with several Beaulieus. It's the end of rolling woodlands and the beginning of the plains. From that hill you can see infinity. That's special place; it represents, obviously, the Catholic Church Mission, conflicts of culture, religion, blood, geographies, everything, and that tension is not debilitating. That kind of tension in blood and in history is a stimulation, a chance to survive and prevail in good humor. I'm not oppressed by that. I'm stimulated. And that's special place. And most bodies of water, being on most bodies of water is a stimulation.

Some questions have come to me as a result of reading your work and thinking about it for a number of years. The first has to do with certain words or phrases you've coined. I think of these as they show up in the titles of some of your books: "Tribal Histories," "Wordarrows." What do you mean by terms such as these. Why do you coin them and how do they work?

I like to imagine words, imagine metaphors not theories, so that the ideas and images are not stereotyped. The word "indian," for example: I try to avoid it in almost all of my writing. Where I've used indian, I've identified it as a problem word in some writing or italicized it in others. I think it ought to be lower-case italicized everywhere. It is one of those troublesome words. It doesn't mean anything, it is a historical blunder, and has negative associations. So I try to avoid the word in writing by referring the reader to the tribal people or "tribal histories" rather than indian histories to try to avoid some of the problems. So, some of the words I imagine or invent or combine are ways to avoid the traps, the historical traps. "Wordarrows" is an obvious metaphor for the cultural and racial tensions between tribal and European cultures and it's a verbal device. "Socioacupuncture" is another one of my words, or neologisms, as the critics might say. I'm rather pleased with that, borrowing an Asian theme. That's the right pressure at the right place at the right time and tricksters are marvelous at that, especially tribal tricksters. You apply just the right humor and the right pressure at the right moment to convince or persuade or to achieve something. I used that as a theme in my filmscript Harold of Orange. He actually has a school of socioacupuncture. What they learn in that school is how to raise foundation money and how to play it right to the foundations. The problem is that, while I may be able to write about this, I've been an absolute failure at getting any foundation money myself. Perhaps what I've done is so advanced that foundation people don't trust me and say, "Oh no, we're on to his game." That's a good question. I like playing with words and I think part of it is a mixed blood tribal effort at "deconstruction." I want to break the language down, I want to re-imagine the language. It's the same as breaking out of boxes. I still haven't broken very far out of grammar. I've broken out of the philosophies of grammar, English language grammar, but haven't broken out of the standard grammatical structure. I guess I don't feel a powerful need to do that and I also think that if I broke that far I just wouldn't have any reading audience at all. I don't have much as it is! The more unfamiliar it becomes, the less possibility of finding a reader. But I do break out of the philosophy of the grammar by trying to avoid most modifiers. If the noun or action is not clear in itself I won't modify it with "l-y's." I also like to run on images when pursuing an idea with mythic associations. When there is action, most of my sentences are short and direct. When a scene is associated with dream and with transcendence, with a shift in time, something magical, or mysterious, or mythic, or when I'm drawing upon traditional sources, the sentences are compound, they're run on. I try to dissolve all grammar, any interruptions in the imagistic flow.

I had a sense of that in your work but I hadn't seen it as clearly as you've just expressed it. The idea of the shaman, the trickster, the medicine person, appears to be central to your work. What is the place of the shaman-trickster-medicine man in your writing and how does that character work as a symbol of the writer?

I think a number of people have pointed out before that the writer can be a shaman and trickster. I think that writers in general are tricksters in the broadest sense of disruption. I don't think it's worth writing, for myself, unless you can break up a little bit. I don't think it's worth the energy unless the formulas can be broken down, unless the expectations of the reader are disrupted, because I think writing is revolutionary, radical in behavior. It's radical in action, it's disruptive in the social and cultural values. That's trickster's business. The tragic risks all humans run are associated with their terminal creeds. They focus too narrowly, they derive too much pleasure and comfort from simple verbal formulas, simple rituals of transportation and movement and direction. So, as a result, I believe people who control their lives in such terminal ways are vulnerable, highly vulnerable to oppression, to violence, to totalitarian and authoritarian systems, colonial administration, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So, the tricksters in all my work, everywhere, and, in one character or another, disrupt the ambitions of people, contradict, unsettle, and unglue the creeds. No trickster I have ever written about is evil, no trickster I've written about has ever taken advantage of weakness; my imagined tricksters are compassionate and comic.

When the Trickster confronts the Gambler, for example, and defeats him, it is not through becoming like him?

No, he doesn't take anything from him, doesn't gain anything. It's not a competitive act. And I have tricksters who make fun of themselves. Now that's a little more complicated because that's a form of masturbation. How can you be controlled by something and then break it down yourself? That's probably the highest development of humans, when individuals see their own folly.

Having just been in the Southwest, I think of the way sacred clowns make fun of themselves even as they act out an important role. I see that in your trickster characters—the clown crows, other central actors in the journeys which take place in your poems and stories.

Let me borrow two ideas: in a tragic worldview people are rising above everything. And you can characterize Western patriarchal monotheistic manifest-destiny civilizations as tragic. It doesn't mean they're bad, but they're tragic because of acts of isolation, their heroic acts of conquering something, always overcoming adversity, doing better than whatever, proving something, being rewarded for it, facing the risks to do this and usually doing it alone and almost always at odds with nature. Part of that, of course, is the idea of the human being's divine creation as superior. The comic spirit is not an opposite, but it might as well be. You can't act in a comic way in isolation. You have to be included. There has to be a collective of some kind. You're never striving at anything that is greater than life itself. There's an acceptance of chance. Sometimes things just happen and when they happen, even though they may be dangerous or even life-threatening, there is some humor. Maybe not at the instant of the high risk, but there is some humor in it. And it's a positive, compassionate act of survival, it's getting along. Now there's good and bad philosophical and economic considerations to both points of view, but tribal cultures are comic or mostly comic. Yet they have been interpreted as tragic by social scientists; tribal cultures have been viewed as tragic cultures. Not tragic because they're "vanishing" or something like that, but tragic in their worldview—and they're not tragic in their worldview. Only a few writers among the social scientists have seen this, say Karl Kroeber and Denis Tedlock, people who understand stories real well, who understand the comedy, the play, the chance, the ritual and festive connections to things universally. So I make that distinction, that the trickster is in a comic world, surviving by his wits, prevailing in good humor. He's in a collective, hardly ever in isolation. When he is in isolation, he's almost always in trouble, in a life-threatening situation he has to get out of through ritual or symbolic acts. Through reversals he has to get back to connections to imagination, to people, to places.

For example in the Anishinabe story when Manabozho is swallowed by the great fish and then helped by Chipmunk who chews the way out?

Yes, you have to restore some connection. You can't just rise above that by yourself like the tragic hero would without any help.

These days the tragic hero dies in the whale's belly after giving a great speech.

That's it! (laughs)

I like the way this conversation is flowing.

It almost makes sense. We are at some risk here of actually making sense!

What about the various animals which appear in your writing? It seems that in your poems and stories animals and people not only intercept each other and interact, but in some ways they are almost interchangeable.

Yes. It is the obvious tribal connection. That animals are not lower in evolutionary status. In all the woodland stories animals are significant beings. A language is shared, some humans remember the language, especially shamans, and there are many stories about intermarriage or relationships between humans and animals. Notice what happens to the language: children, contemporary children, use metaphors about animals in a very affectionate and humanistic way. They're in the family, all kinds of animals, even imaginary ones. But as soon as they become rational, in school, when they're obligated in their intellectual growth and the emphasis upon a philosophy of grammar, cause and effect, time, logical and rational, they start using negative metaphors for animals. We all do that. "Bird-brain" and so on. Almost all the references to animals we have make it appear as if we must be incredibly self-conscious and insecure about our status as humans, that we must deride all other life. "Like a snake," "like a chicken," "like a pig," all these negative references.

The thing I'm getting at, in Bearheart, to choose an example, is seen in the woman who has sex with two boxers. Now some readers find that pornographic, extremely obscene and disgusting. Bestiality. Well, it is none of those. What I am doing is simply saying—though there is nothing simple about it—that there isn't anything wrong, is there, with a human being expressing some love of a physical and emotional kind for animals. There are tribal stories everywhere and I use some variations of those stories. Characters tell those stories within my writing about those relationships with animals.

Animals that are very important to me are bear, squirrel, dog, and several birds. Crow. Cedar Waxwing is a very special kind of totem. I have felt in my life a kind of communication with Cedar Waxwing and Crow and Squirrel and Bear and Dog. These are either animals that I have felt tremendous fear or tremendous love for an emotional attachment, involvement, conversation, at one time or another. In all of my writing you'll see that Bear appears.

What does the bear mean to you? Does the bear fit into your work as a metaphor, or perhaps not as a metaphor but as the protean character of the person at the center of your vision, your imagination, as a sort of shape-shifter?

Oh yes, it is the great interior darkness of everything. It is the greatest power. We must all want to be bears. If we could be anything it should be bears. I say that, too, intellectually, knowing as most tribal people did that bears are skeletally and in muscular structure more like humans. And they play like humans. They chatter and talk. They're unpredictable and quick-witted. They even masturbate. They're like us and they're in us and we're in them. We're in the bear. We're in the bear's maw. Galway Kinnell has this fantastic poem, "The Bear," where the persona crawls inside the bear to sleep and be warm as it freezes overnight.

Certain other things turn up frequently in your work. One of those is cedar itself What is the role of cedar for you? Why is it so important?

It's a ceremonial, burning cedar. The center of the idea of cedar is that it purifies and protects, and the smoke will restore a balance. My experience with it comes through culture, linguistics, and practice. I can't answer scientifically about cedar smoke, but I have heard someone say that it has something to do with ionization, rather like standing near a waterfall where there is higher negative ionization so it is more relaxing. So there may be properties in the environment which are altered by it, but it has drawn us all to it. There's a power in the word and it's good word. It works everywhere and I draw people together with it, use it as a sacred reference. It doesn't require any iconography. It requires no symbols. It requires nothing. You don't even have to say anything. You just burn a little of it and it'll do the rest. To be truly comical about it, it's the ultimate in deconstruction. (laughs) It's a little puff of smoke. You don't need any language about it. So, if I draw upon it between characters, you can explain a lot of things about people in the way they use it or abuse it. In Cedarfaire, for example, people have made a business out of it. But it doesn't make any difference. You can sell it as they do. They don't understand anything about it, but it still works. Unlike icons. Do you suppose it could be the same as a plastic crucifix, or a figure of Mary has equal power? These are symbols, they don't have any aromatic power. But it's close. You can market all that stuff and make a lot of money about it, even have it glow in the dark. But if you believe in it, it still works. It's irresistible. But the powerful part of it for me is that it can be a ceremonial without icons and language. There isn't very much else you can do. You can bleed yourself, you can have a vision. It's possible to sing without ceremony and words. Sound things, you can sound as animals. But there isn't very much else we can do that has such a powerful ceremonial connection to so many people in this country, tribal people. So you can't abuse it. It works without the language and the ritual and the icons.

Lance Henson told me that burning cedar as the sun rises is the first ceremony a Cheyenne child is taught.

Is that so? I was told a wonderful story by a woman while I was teaching classes at the John F. Kennedy University. They were very earnest and eager to be saved by somebody. One woman got very angry and told a story about Rolling Thunder organizing a sunrise ceremony in the Santa Cruz mountains. They all paid about fifteen or twenty bucks to go to this ceremony—in advance. They all got there before dawn in the dark and climbed up the mountain in the fog and the cold. They waited and waited and Rolling Thunder didn't show. And that was the end of her story. She had finally unburdened herself of this terrible thing that was done to them and she felt cheated. I said, "So?" She said, "He didn't show!" I said, "Well, did the sun rise?" She said, "Well, of course." And I said, "Well, it just goes to show that you didn't need him."

The same thing goes with cedar.

That's a great trickster story. (laughter) Can you tell me a bit about your own Chippewa background, how your knowledge of Chippewa practices and beliefs has come into your writing?

Mostly through stories. I've never, in any way, lived anything like a traditional life, whatever that might have been. My contact with that is through elders. The closest would be my great-uncle Clement Beaulieu, John Clement Beaulieu, and my grandmother who is a good storyteller. I wouldn't characterize her as being traditional, but she's a wonderful storyteller. Clem, or John Clement, was not only a fine storyteller with a trickster's imagination, but there was a calmness and a great generosity about him. He lived at many places, White Earth and Cass Lake, and he lived at Red Lake for a time. He had several little shacks at Bena. He would buy one, fix it up, and give it away—and go get another one. He would do this because people around him had greater need. He never talked about it. These are stories I heard around him. He didn't boast about it. Part of the way he looked at it was that he was getting bored with the place anyway. So it was just as well to give it away. He had more interesting things to do. Clem was an introduction to language, to an imaginative resolution between mixed blood. A rich imagination about everything—women, animals, conflict, governments. He served in the First World War in Europe. I would say that of any one person, I was more stimulated by the possibilities of imagining things in a certain way because of Clem. He directed me … no, I shouldn't say he directed me. I was directed by things he said to pursue some loose ends of things that he understood pretty well. As a result I met a lot of people and found out things. I found out things about shamanism—I'm not a shaman, but I understood the energy. I wasn't afraid of people and I think that was helpful because practically every healer I talked with was pleased that I wasn't. Although I am sure they also had great fun playing with people who were afraid, too. Those were ways in which I found things out. I must say I found out a tremendous amount of things about this tension from non-Indians who have lived with, been around, admired, hated, married, divorced, been with, about, and engaged directly with Indians. I don't know how to say how much I learned, but the picture would never be complete for me without their view.

I had another insight into that in reading some stories about a woman who is Rumanian, becomes an American citizen, a Yale Ph.D. in Chinese. She's one of the first scholars to be in China in the late '70s. She was talking about the indirect way you have to learn about China. You can't learn about it directly. You have to learn about it partly through the way non-Chinese respond to the Chinese. I see that has been an insight for me, too. I have learned a lot from the way people have responded to me. I still do. I think I may have tremendous insight into that. I think that part of my insight is a bit cruel because I turn it into kind of a counter ideology.

What is storytelling itself?

Well, there is storytelling without the pen, the book. That is probably easier to explain than storytelling. My own feeling is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. When it does, I notice that teller and listener-participant are either willing to be surprised—they have subscribed to a surprise, they are present and loyal participants ready to be surprised—or, knowing that the story will lead them nowhere, they accept it. They're not audience and that's important. The story doesn't work without a participant. There are a lot of people who walk around Berkeley and they're crazy. They haven't found a listener in ten or twenty years. And it's sad because there are stories, but those stories are now just floating loose. You bump into everybody and try to shed yourself of the stories because they're really burden stories. The humor is gone from them—they're desperate stories and you don't want to listen to that any more. So there has to be a participant and someone has to listen. I don't mean listening in the passive sense. You can even listen by contradiction. You can even listen by saying "Bullshit!" if that's in good humor and not in a negative sense. So that's really critical in storytelling. The storyteller's properties have to tie in metaphorically to some kind of experience. And now I have to borrow from Hymes and Tedlock in observing Zuni storytellers, and I really celebrate their work so much and praise them so highly for making the simple observation that the storyteller is an artist. Right? Not, as Tedlock says, just a conduit of tradition. And the stories vary—now who would have though that? Of course all stories vary! There's not two stories alike and that's the tragic thing which has happened to stories. They have been published and appear standardized. So young people come to these stories, especially in tribal areas where there's not a rich and centered traditional life as there is in the Southwest. In most of the woodlands states there's little traditional connection and oral tradition left and there's a lot of mixed bloods. There a lot of young people are offered these published stories in classrooms through well-meaning teachers who want to do a good curriculum on Indians and to help their Indian students discover themselves and their traditions. But they do it through a kind of standardized liturgy, as if it were scripture.

Static?

Yes, there's no life in it. It's just memorization, it's no story at all—and I think that stuff kills imagination because it's leading to people believing if you depart from the stories you depart from the scripture. So they don't listen to you anymore, and they believe you're cheating them or you're dishonest or you have some ulterior motive or purpose that's not honorable. That's shame because imagination is so rich there shouldn't be any story that's limited by the text. And even a published text is not a limited story. The healthiest way to read is to look upon this as a possibility of the story.

You've pointed out something very interesting here—the spiritual nature of the story itself. By "spiritual" I mean a carrying of a kind of power so that a person can be burdened by a story when that story can't be told because the participant audience has disappeared. I think that's a very crucial point.

I don't know where we find the audience now. Once in a while I find it as a teacher. When I'm around nonstudents, people I trust and I'm familiar with, we always exchange stories. You're just ready for it. And I say, give me your best story! You know that. People call you long-distance late at night just to tell you a story. You're a wonderful participant.

Can you remember any particular stories your Uncle Clement told which were particularly significant to you?

He had a lot of stories about priests and the way people responded to priests, the tricks they pulled on them. Feeding them wild game they wouldn't eat themselves. I'm a little reluctant to …

I'm not asking you to retell a story here and now. Just asking about the sort of content and the context.

Oh, I see! I was getting a little nervous about repeating one.

I get nervous about such things, too. I should have asked the question a bit better.

No, no, I understand it. Two general contents. One is the stories of magic and faith healing and how things just mysteriously happened, how people appeared and disappeared. He'd have lots of those. Stories about people going hunting who would disappear and reappear. There would be mythic events taking place in unusual circumstances. Severe weather, for example. Somehow people would do remarkable things in this. They would come through or appear in half the normal time and show no physical wear and tear.

A seven-days' journey in a day or something like that?

Exactly. Time would be dissolved. The dissolution of time and out-of-body possibilities. He didn't tell these, though, in emphasis of this being unusual. This was just built in as ordinary circumstance. It was just after the story you would have to ask a few questions. The other category was stories of resolution of tensions and the play between the colonists—and I would include the government and the Church—and Indians. Then, the tension also between fullbloods and mixed bloods. Though that tension was different. There was much more play, much harder play in the best sense of the word between mixed bloods and fullbloods.

That rough sort of teasing?

Tease and put down—which I would characterize as more affectionate. Whereas the tension between colonists and Indians, mixed blood or fullblood, didn't lack compassion, but it was manipulative. You wanted to outwit. That was the motivation in imagination. You wanted to outwit either restrictions and bureaucracies or impositions. Whereas with mixed blood and fullblood, it was a duel and had a different character. It was a duel in the tribal sense, a compassionate duel. It wasn't competitive to win or outwit, but it was duel. Actually it was a leveler in a sense.

The competition was as important as who came out on top.

Um-hmm. For example, there's a story—one of my favorites, which I recently retold in a different sense—about the young priest who would thrust his head into a rain barrel. People wondered about that. But some people understood that. You put you head under water and thump the sides and there's a tremendous sense of distance. You could stand up and look across the prairie, but you put your head in a rain barrel and you can go farther. You can thump your way all the way to Asia in a rain barrel. So some people were taking bets on how long the priest could hold his head under. It was related apparently to the priest's imagination and what he was thinking at the time. The point was that, if the priest was concentrating on some imaginative event while his head was under water, he didn't need as much oxygen. So they timed him and took bets, spread it out over a few days and got an average and then took bets on him.

I think one of the reasons I wanted to have you describe the kinds of stories your Uncle Clem used was to get a description of the kind of stories you use. I see a very direct connection between his categories and yours. Miraculous journeys, conflicts between white and native, mixed blood and fullblood.

That's true. That's true. I have to say something else, though. Sometimes the interactions and the connections between people tell their own stories. I'm thinking of a little community named Bena. It's a mixed community, Indian and white. It's on Lake Winnebigoshis. Clem lived there, and I spent a fair amount of time visiting him and made some other friends there. The most incredible things went on in that place. Even if you weren't a storyteller you would be made one if you paid attention. You would have to be an absolute idiot not to—if you weren't arrogant and just holding yourself above them. Crazy things that went on there. There was a deputy sheriff, for example, who lived in a house trailer. He was the only law enforcement person in this village and he wasn't Indian. When I visited him he had dogs around the place and a dozen broken-down machines from snowmobiles to tractors. I knocked on the door and he opened it and dogs rushed out. None of them were angry, they were all friendly lap dogs of various sizes. So I felt pretty good about this sheriff. I knew this was going to be an unusual sheriff. Nice looking, balding man with a half-ass smile as if he wasn't really there, as if he was already ready to tell you it was a joke. He invited me in and I swear to god there were hundreds of pounds of chicken bones everywhere. I crunched on them as I walked across the floor. That was his primary diet. I'm just leading up to one sentence which focuses on this man. I said, "Well, didn't they call you that I was coming?" And he said, "I don't have a phone." And I said, "But you're the sheriff, the law enforcement officer here, and you don't have a phone?" He said, "Naw, I tried one for a while. But I had all these people calling me up with domestic problems, and I couldn't do anything about people's personal problems. So I figured if I took the phone out I wouldn't be bothered. If somebody wants to drive way back here, crawl through the dogs and the chicken bones to talk to me about it, it's probably serious." He also said, "I don't make many arrests around here." Now you have to understand this area has the highest arrest rate in the state. They called it the "Little Chicago" of Minnesota. But he said, "I don't like to arrest people. Most of the people I'd have to arrest around here are drunk." He wasn't just referring to Indian, he meant Indian and white. And he said, "If I have to arrest them, I have to put them in the back of my car and then I have to drive them twenty miles to Cass Lake and half the time they throw up in the back seat and the county won't pay me anything to clean up my back seat. So I won't arrest anybody." My point is that the sheriff was a wonderful human being who had worked out his own comic trickster resolutions to life. He was a living story. You'd have to be totally blind not to see some of these stories.

I like the term "living story." It relates strongly to what you do with your characters. There's a direct connection, in many cases, between your characters and real-life people. You draw people you know—people I know—into your stories. How did you come to that?

Part of that is just the way I tell stories. You put each other down in that playful trickster way and that's mutual. The difference is that I'm a writer and most of my friends aren't. So I have a slight advantage. We exchange the same kind of subtle trickster put-downs, but I figure out a way to put it into print. Yes, there's satire, of course, name a work that doesn't have satire. Any work that's worth a shit has got to have some satire. If I was just getting even with somebody, I already was even in play. And even is a good thing. That's a problem, because people suggest getting even is not a good thing. But it's just part of the give and take in the play. It's part of breaking down the terminal beliefs, so I don't look upon "getting even" as a negative thing. I know the term has negative associations and I don't like to use it much, but "getting even" is really positive energy. It's an honest, direct, playful engagement. You can go ahead and get into print and knock me down if you want—but that's not what I'm about. I really celebrate people I love in what I write. I don't have enemies that I get even with in my work. Not in my imaginative work.

I sense a lot of objectivity in your journalistic pieces. People are allowed to speak with their own voices, events are allowed to unfold without a lot of editorializing.

Yes, I've done that with the AIM leaders, for example. Even though I've been very critical of some of them and been uneasy about a number of things, I let them speak for themselves and don't try to snooker it or hoodwink or trick in the worst sense of the word—manipulate things so I have the power and control.

I think it's difficult to write with the sort of clarity you use. I notice, too, you have a way of layering images and experiences. Things keep building up, almost by accretion, like sediment. How did you come to that particular form?

Hmm, let me think out loud about that. I think in writing, when I come to say it directly, usually the first noun or verb in this layered scene or image, the first reference to action or description, is usually the obvious or categorical one. Then, I think, I break it down by additions or expand on it. I make it broader, expand the possibilities of it or even contradict it, which, I believe, expands it. Rather than simply modifying it. I think then you reduce it. Ah, here I'm close—if I write something which is categorical there's clarity in that on the printed page. There's clarity in that as a sentence, but it isn't clear, there's more to it. Now you could say in expository writing, "for example" or "on the other hand" there are exceptions. You could quote someone, you could line up other points of view. But in imaginative prose I think I want the mind to go visually, so there's a category, comma, then even a few phrases or words which are variations, contradictions, or expansions of the category. So that the image, the event, the action, or description is broader than what is grammatically allowed.

I think it's exemplary of some of your best work. I also wonder, too, how much effect the writing of the Far East has had on you. I know you have written haiku and been published in major anthologies of haiku. I know some people think of you as one of the better haiku writers in the United States.

Really? I'm pleased to hear that.

How does haiku affect your sort of image?

Oh, I see! The haiku is the subtlest image. No need to break down the doors here because the house is open to dreamscapes. I have a new book of haiku, Matsushima. I think it is some of my best in a long while, a few of the images there are the best I've ever done. In it, for the first time, I've written an introduction on what I think haiku is. It's the first time I've ever done that, because I don't think we ought to get critically involved in explaining haiku. Either it works or it don't! But I've gone against that and decided to make my own statement because I don't think I want to come back to think like that again. In it I fool around with ideas from some deconstruction critics and structuralists. I say that haiku may be an unusual form of deconstruction. You reduce it to the briefest brush stroke and you don't conclude anything. Everything is open. What happens, if it happens, is that the reader takes it in and the words disappear. It becomes a visual event, which of course is the heart of a storyteller. The power of a storyteller—the words disappear in visual memory through metaphor, gestures, animals, birds, seasons, tropisms trip the visual memory and your own imagination. The haiku does that, if the haiku does that in one image and the listener-participant makes that a personal experience-event from his or her own experience, it's deconstructed. The words disappear.

I think you've already answered the question I was going to ask about why you came to haiku and what relation the haiku has to your consciousness as a Native American poet.

Yes. Well, I came to it physically in Japan when I was in the Army. I was delighted with haiku. It wasn't until I got back and was in the University of Minnesota that I studied Asian Civilization and ultimately ended up in graduate school in Asian Studies. I had a wonderful teacher, Edward Copeland, at the University of Minnesota. I want to tell this story because it is very brief and it was a remarkable experience with a teacher. I'm sure everyone has had one lesson, one sensitive profound experience with a teacher. I took his class on Japanese Literature in translation. It was in the spring term and the trees were budding outside the window. Obviously, the trees and birds were more interesting than the subject, much as I liked the subject. Copeland, about the third or fourth week of class—a very sensitive and gentle scholar—wrote a note and left it on my desk as he concluded class and walked out. I opened it up and he'd written: "The past month during class period you've been looking out the window. What do you see?" I read this as a real criticism; obviously, he'd caught me daydreaming and we're in this business for grades and I liked the subject and I liked him and I'd disappointed him. So I wrote him a haiku, a very risky thing to do, though I didn't think of it as that at first. But when I left it on his desk and walked out the door and was halfway down the stairs, I was in terror. I was totally vulnerable. I'd made a stupid error. Can you imagine trusting a university teacher with a subtle poem? Aggh! I was so disgusted with myself that I had done such a dumb thing. I was embarrassed and humiliated and I wanted to grab it back, but I didn't. I suffered through the weekend and next Monday tried to be an attentive student to overcome this vulnerability. He left a note on my desk and answered my poem in a linking haiku! It brought tears to my eyes, this wonderful sensitive man. I still love him and speak of him and see him. That trust and loving relationship led not only to A's in class, but we put a book together, my first publication in haiku. It had a preface of seasonal Japanese poems translated by Copeland, and then my original haiku. Raising The Moon Vines was the title of the book.

Was that your first book?

No, just a few months before that I had worked as a social worker at the state reformatory and I published—they had a print shop—for about $35 two hundred copies of a small saddle-stitched haiku book, Two Wings The Butterfly. But Raising The Moon Vines was the first serious book from a publisher, and it was reissued a couple of times.

What do you see going on now in Native American writing?

In prose writing, I see there's much more sophistication in reference to traditional events and experiences. By that I mean it's not drawn idealogically any more—although that was not so in Momaday and Silko. I think now any theme is open, any theme, any structure, any style, and it can still be seen and felt as Indian literature. I've been developing some other ideas and critical thinking about Indian literature. What is Indian literature? How can you tell the difference? So what's the difference that you can perceive with a critical theory and write about in some way that is Indian literature and that would suggest it is different from other literature? I'm calling it "mythic verism." Mythic truth. Not just myths. There are myths everywhere. But mythic verism. Here I'm talking about my own work, also. There is something alive in the work which gives it a truth. Now that is something which comes from a metaphorical use of traditional energy and references. Momaday has it. Silko has it. You can do it through symbols, you can do it allegorically, you can do it through dialogue, you can do it in all kinds of ways. There's no limit to the ways you can make reference to traditional events, tribal events. That doesn't make it, though. It is the attitude of the characters which gives it the mythic verism and that attitude is comic. That's my theme. It is something that is alive and that is what makes the myth a truth, the way time is handled and resolved, the tension in time, and the sense of comedy or comic spirit through imagination and a collective sense that people prevail and survive, get along, get by. They're not at war with the environment, they're not rising above, and there are no subtle references to manifest destiny, monotheistic superiority. All of that's very subtle, but it's there and I think you can find it and I think we can focus on it and I think we can make a theory of it. There are people who appear to be white but they aren't. You can see in their language and their own conflicts, the way they resolve their conflicts or avoid resolving them that there is a comic spirit. You won't find that in much other writing. You can find a comic spirit in other non-Indian literature, but it won't have the same characteristics.

Where are you going with your own writing now?

I'm just about finished with a novel bringing together the Woodland trickster whom I think I understand very well and the Chinese Monkey King whom we met in China. So I have a mixed-blood trickster character who's teaching in China and the only way the Chinese can understand him—because he is in conflict with the bureaucracy and everything—is that he is the Monkey King and they really celebrate this Monkey King who disrupts everything. They love this character. The title is Griever: An American Monkey King in China.

The Monkey is also one of the most effective of the styles in the martial arts.

That's right! It's a trickster style. That's very good. I hadn't thought about that. So I draw together the ideas from Chinese opera in it and my character is in conflict and a number of good things come from this—but only because the Chinese can understand him in their own cultural terms as the Monkey King. So what it suggests is the universality of the trickster character. In the future I hope to work on more stories out of Minnesota, trickster things, a collection of stories. One will be in New America and one will be in the North Dakota Quarterly—the same issue you're going to be in?

Yes.

The character in the story in New America is a much wilder trickster. "Monsignor Missalwait's Interstate." The main character has bought up a section of an interstate on the reservation and he sets up toll booths.

Roads—and again you're going forward by going backward.

Yes. It begins with a quote. I was horrified when I read that Hawthorn Dairy near Chicago is printing photographs of lost and stolen children on their milk cartons. Now several are doing that, but I was just horrified at the whole idea. A civilization in which children are stolen, what awful energies. These people are so vacant in their connections to other human beings that they have to steal it! They're carrion crow, they're vultures, they don't have any connections left. It has to be the leading worst primary response to the worst experiences of materialism and capitalism. Anyway, I quote that and my Monsignor, a pretend Monsignor—the Tribe gave him that name because he has a vision and consecrated himself—Monsignor Missal wait says in response to this stolen children Hawthorn Dairy thing, "Listen, when milk cartons bear the pictures of stolen children, then civilization needs a better Trickster. Look, white people drink too much milk before they come out to play anyway." Listen and Look reversed.