[In the following essay, Ruoff discusses the major thrust of all of Vizenor's work, whether poetry, drama, or prose, as being an examination of relationships between tribal and non-tribal worlds.]

Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) is one of the most prolific Indian authors writing today. To have published so extensively in so many genres is a remarkable achievement for any author, Indian or non-Indian. Now primarily known as a prose writer, Vizenor began as a poet, publishing early in his career such volumes as Raising the Moon Vines (1964), Summer in the Spring (1965), Empty Swings (1967), Slight Abrasions (1966; with Jerome Downes). His Seventeen Chirps (1965; unpaged) has rightly been praised by Louis Untermeyer as Haiku "in the best tradition" (book cover). Divided into poems on the four seasons, this collection contains such strikingly beautiful images as "Spider threads / held the red sumac still / Autumn wind" or "The quick wind / Drags the leaves like sled runners / Down the tin roof."

The major thrust of Vizenor's work—whether poetry, prose, or drama—is the examination of the interrelationships between the tribal and non-tribal worlds. His commitment to the traditional origins of his own Ojibwe heritage is reflected in two books: anishinabe nagamon (1965) and anishinabe adisokan (1970). The former is a collection of traditional Ojibwe songs that Vizenor reinterpreted, using Francis Densmore's literal translations and incorporating Ojibwe words. His delicate rephrasing is exemplified in these lines from a dream song: "sound of thunder / sometimes / i pity myself/ while the wind carries me / across the sky, across the earth / everywhere / making my voice heard." Vizenor focuses the reader's attention on the beauty of individual lines by placing each stanza on a separate page. Both anishinabe nagamon and anishinabe adisokan, reprinted in 1981 as Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories, are accompanied by notes, Ojibwe pictographs, and vocabulary.

anishinabe adisokan is a collection of traditional stories about Ojibwe life, customs, and religion originally published in the White Earth reservation newspaper The Progress (1887–1888), edited by Theodore Beaulieu, Vizenor's great uncle. A valuable collection in itself, anishinabe adisokan is also important because it introduces several myths Vizenor incorporates into his own creative work. Among these is the myth about the origin of the most sacred Ojibwe rite, the midewiwin ceremony, that elucidates Vizenor's frequent references to the bear, cedar, and task of the culture hero. Another myth Vizenor uses in his later work is "Manabozho (The Ojibwe culture hero) and the Gambler."

Much of Vizenor's work deals with the struggles of the Ojibwe and other tribal peoples to cope with the dominant society. His poems published in Voices from the Rainbow (1975) and Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back (1983; hereafter Songs) voice themes that dominate his prose. In "Indians at the Guthrie," Vizenor vividly portrays the lives of contemporary urban Indians: "Once more at wounded knee / sniffing glue in gallop / sterno in bemidji / cultural suicides / downtown on the reservation" (Voices from the Rainbow; Songs). As "Tribal Stumps" reveals, Vizenor's own father was destined to become one of these cultural suicides: "My father returns / with all the mixed bloods / tribal stumps / from the blood soaked beams of the city" (Voices from the Rainbow).

Vizenor vividly describes these struggles in four collections containing his news articles, essays, and stories: The Everlasting Sky (1972), Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies (1976), Wordarrows (1978), and Earthdivers (1981). The first two books consist primarily of Vizenor's news articles about contemporary Indian life on the reservation and in the city. The last two are fictional accounts of Indian-white relations organized around specific themes. In Wordarrows, Vizenor describes the "cultural word wars" in which "the arrowmakers and wordmakers survive the word wars with sacred memories while the factors in the new fur trade separate themselves in wordless and eventless social and political categories." In Earthdivers, he focuses on the modern earthdivers, descendants of the mythic earthdivers who dove below the waters to find a bit of earth to place on turtle's back. By blowing on the earth and casting it about, the Ojibwe culture hero created the world. For Vizenor these modern earthdivers are mixedbloods, "tribal tricksters and recast cultural heroes, the mournful and whimsical heirs and survivors of that premier union between the daughters of the woodland shamans and white fur traders." These earthdivers "dive into unknown urban places now, into the racial darkness in the cities, to create a new consciousness of coexistence."

These four books contain memorable portraits of real people who defied yet finally were overcome by the dominant society. In "Buried in a Blue Suit," from The Everlasting Sky (reprinted in Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies), Vizenor pays tribute to John Ka Ka Geesick, traditional Ojibwe trapper who was both humiliated and immortalized by a white society that dressed him in a blue suit, turkey feather headdress, and green blanket for an official souvenir postcard photograph and, after his death at age 124, insisted that he be buried in the same suit and given a Christian funeral service.

Especially moving is "Sand Creek Survivors" from Earthdivers, which describes the circumstances surrounding the death of 13-year-old Dane Michael White (Sioux), who hanged himself in a Minnesota jail. White had been jailed as a runaway for 41 days because the courts denied his request to live with his grandmother and could not decide where to put him. To emphasize the continuing assaults on tribal people by the dominantsociety, Vizenor intersperses his account with passages describing the massacres of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek and the Blackfeet at the Marias River and Black Elk's vision of destruction.

The case that fascinates Vizenor most is that of Thomas White Hawk, a Sioux premedical student originally condemned to death and then sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering an elderly white man and raping his wife. Vizenor suggests that White Hawk was driven to violence by cultural schizophrenia. White Hawk, neglected by his Indian parents and orphaned at 12, became the foster son of a rigid white guardian who set high goals for the young Sioux and abandoned him after his arrest. In Thomas White Hawk (1968) and Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies, Vizenor reprints his news articles on the case. In the "White Hawk and the Prairie Fun Dancers" section of Wordarrows, he recreates his investigation, providing vivid portraits of White Hawk, haunted by his crimes; the sheriff, determined to protect his prisoner from mob violence and his country from such communist-front organizations as the Civil Liberties Union; and the minister's wife infatuated with the imprisoned White Hawk. These portraits are some of Vizenor's best work.

Satire, however, is the genre Vizenor most frequently uses to convey the conflicts between tribal and non-tribal worlds. (Vizenor uses the word tribal rather than Indian because it suggests a "celebration of communal values which connect the tribal celebrants to the earth" (Earthdivers). The closer Vizenor's satire is to reality the more effective it is. His stories in the "Downtown on the Reservation" section of Wordarrows effectively chronicle the word wars between tribal people and the dominant society, wars Vizenor understands as a mixed-blood Ojibwe who was raised both in Minneapolis and on his father's White Earth Reservation, and as a former director of a Minneapolis Indian Employment and Guidance Program. "Laurel Hole in the Day" vividly depicts the futility of such programs. The well-meaning director, presumably Vizenor, finds jobs and an apartment for an Ojibwe family newly arrived from White Earth, only to realize that his action has started them on the road to failure in the big city. Realizing that their tribal friends and neighbors are eating them into the poorhouse, the couple moves to a white neighborhood, where loneliness drives them to the tribal bar for companionship. The wife, abandoned by her husband who has been fired for absenteeism, returns to her tar-paper shack on the reservation, where she is reunited with her husband and gives up her dream of urban paradise.

Vizenor's descriptions of the cultural wars ring true because he accurately depicts both the underlying causes of these wars and the nature of the wounds suffered by tribal people. Many of these wounds are self inflicted, as Vizenor makes clear. In "Sociodowser" from Earthdivers, Vizenor describes the efforts of an Indian Center to locate its vans, purchased with federal funds to transport Indians to industrial education classes but impounded by the state because they were used by Center staff and clients for travelling to bingo games and other businesses. Rallying to the cry of "Give us back our land and our vans," the Center board hires a shaman to help in the search. For Vizenor the center has become "more like a colonial fort dependent on federal funds, than a place for visions and dreams in the new tribal urban world."

Such self destructiveness is not limited to tribal centers, as Vizenor demonstrates in his stories about the fate of tribal studies programs in academe. One of Vizenor's best stories in Earthdivers is "The Chair of Tears," which describes the efforts of Captain Shammer to auction the Department of Tribal Studies for sale to the highest bidder. Hired without interview, application, or academic credentials because the department wanted an unknown mixed blood, Shammer is renowned as the founder of the Half-Breed Hall of Fame. Vizenor deftly satirizes the blood-quantum issue in such departments by describing Shammer's plan to hire Old Darkhorse as skin-color consultant. Founder of the California Half Moon Bay Skin Dip, Darkhorse darkens light-skinned mixed bloods by dunking them in his Skin Dip.

Shammer is first to realize that rumors "about tribal troubles in higher education are the structural substitutes for adventures on the mythical frontier." The charactertypes who mount the assault are those who led the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s: Sarah Blue Welcome, a self-named white feminist and the first uninvited guest speaker at student protests for control of the tribal studies department; Four Skin, her full-blood Indian male hand puppet; Bad Mouth; Touch Tone, famous for long-distance calls to reservations; Fine Print; and Token White. Vizenor all too accurately depicts the administrative and student pressures that have led to the destruction of many such departments.

Entrepreneurship is not limited to tribal studies programs. Ingenious mixed bloods establish business empires in the city and on the reservation. One such entrepreneur is Martin Bear Charme, a Turtle Mountain Ojibwe from North Dakota, who hitchhiked to San Francisco to study welding under a federal relocation program. After he abandoned welding, he hauled refuse to a worthless mudflat, where he established his own Landfill Meditation Reservation, now worth millions. A philosopher as well as businessman, Martin also teaches a seminar on Landfill Meditation.

In Vizenor's unpublished screenplay Harold of Orange, Harold Sinseer exhibits similar enterprise. Previously successful in persuading a foundation to finance his miniature orange grove (a potted orange tree), Harold now seeks $200,000 to grow a coffee grove (a potted coffee tree). Harold predicts that coffee will revolutionize the tribal world. He persuades his warriors that reservation coffee beans will saturate the world market and disrupt international coffee markets, and he convinces foundation board directors that coffee will both block the temptation of tribesmen to drink alcohol and foster radical political discussions in reservation coffee houses. Harold has cast off the role of street radical and speaker in church basements: "The money was good then, but the guilt has changed, so here we are dressed in neckties … The new tribal entrepreneurs of the oranges and pinch beans,…" Harold asks only that the foundation give him funds to "market pinch beans in peace."

As one of the foundation directors realizes by the end of the play, Harold, with his fry bread, oranges, and coffee, is really in the traditional break fast business. Vizenor's screenplay won the Minnesota Film-in-the-Cities award and has been made into a 30-minute film starring Oneida comedian Charlie Hill in the title role.

The most complex of Vizenor's works is Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), a satirical and allegorical epic cycle that combines elements of classical and Western European epics and American Indian oral narratives. The protagonist is the culture hero/shaman Proude Cedarfair. In his quest for ritual knowledge, Cedarfair journeys across the United States, whose culture has been destroyed by the disappearance of energy resources. Cedarfair moves backward in time to achieve harmony with nature. Vizenor's descriptions of the four worlds of Indian people combine the emergence and migration myths of Southwestern tribes with the flood myths of the Algonkin-speaking tribes. Cedarfair begins his journey in the third world, which evil spirits have filled with contempt for the living and fear of death. He must reach the fourth world, in which these spirits will be outwitted through using the secret languages of animals and birds. Accompanying Cedarfair on his journey is a bizarre collection of followers that represent various figures from Indian mythology as well as human vices and virtues. Episodes in the novel denote stages of the ritual quest and incidents occur without explanation, as they do in American Indian hero cycles.

In his books and in his screenplay, Vizenor uses many other aspects of American Indian oral tradition. He embeds traditional myths in his novel and his stories. For example in Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, the epic battle for life waged between Belladonna Winter Catcher and Cedarfair and the evil gambler Sir Cecil Staples, monarch of unleaded gasoline, is an updated version of the Ojibwe myth "Manabozho and the Gambler" that Vizenor includes in anishinabe adisokan. Vizenor uses an animal-husband myth in his stories of Lilith Mae Farrier's sexual relationship with her boxers included in both Wordarrows and Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart.

Vizenor also uses the traditional Indian motif of transformation; this is exemplified in his novel by Bishop Omas Parasimo's penchant for wearing "metamasks" of other pilgrims' faces. Animal, especially bear, transformation appears more frequently than any other form. Vizenor makes clear the significance of this to his work by citing Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere, in which A. Irving Hallowell states that animals are believed to have essentially the same sort of animating agency as man: "They have a language of their own, can understand what human beings say and do, have forms of social or tribal organization, and live a life which is parallel in other respects to that of human societies'" (Quoted in "Sociodowser," Earthdivers). Vizenor's emphasis on bear transformation is explained by that animal's role as the renewer of Ojibwe life in their mide ceremony. In Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, two characters possess bear power: Cedarfair, who speaks with the voice of the bear and takes on bear form permanently after he reaches the fourth world, and Zebulon Matchi Makwa (Wicked Bear), a talking writer and drunken urban shaman who offends everyone with his foul stench. In Earthdivers, those with this power are Martin Bear Charme and Father Berald One, the shaman who dreams of blue birds and bears, dresses as a priest, and wears an overshoe on one foot.

The trickster/transformer figure from Indian oral literature pervades Vizenor's recent work. Although the trickster as mixed-blood entrepreneur is one of Vizenor's favorite subjects, Vizenor also creates characters that reflect other aspects of the trickster. For example, in Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, Beneto Saint Plumero (also known as Bigfoot) possesses the enormous genitals and sexual appetite of the traditional trickster. Vizenor even portrays himself as a compassionate trickster. In both Earthdivers and Wordarrows, the author often appears as Clement Beaulieu, wise fool, truth speaker, and story teller, or as Erdupps MacChurbbs, "Shaman sprite from the tribal world of woodland dreams and visions."

Vizenor prefers to appear in his work as an observer rather than as central character. An exception to this is one of Vizenor's best works: "I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors" in Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods, edited by Chester Anderson (1976). Vizenor reveals episodes from his childhood and adolescence that provide insights into his sensitivity to the plight of urban Indians who suffer and sometimes die (as did his father) in the back alleys of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Because so little has been written about the problems of Indian children in the city, the essay is an important contribution to our understanding of how an urban mixed-blood survives youthful traumas. The essay also reveals Vizenor's early ability to create characters to act out his fantasies. The advice to Vizenor from his imaginary companion MacChurbbs captures the author's stance in much of his prose: "You have given too much thought in your life to the violence of terminal believers! Show more humor and give your self more time for the little people and compassionate trickery."

Vizenor's work demonstratesconsiderablerange. The strength of his work is his ability to depict with accuracy and humor the contrarities in Indian-white relations. In Vizenor's view, whites invented "Indian" as a new identity for tribal people in order to separate them from their ancient tribal traditions. To survive this cultural genocide, tribal people responded by inventing new pan-Indian creeds, ceremonies, and customs that have blinded them and whites to their true tribal heritages. Only through the visions and dreams of tricksters and shamans can both tribal people and whites be led to truth. As a compassionate trickster, Vizenor sees his literary role as that of illuminating both the sham of contemporary "Indianness" and the power of vision and dream to restore tribal values.