SOURCE: "History and the Imagination: Gerald Vizenor's The People Named the Chippewa," in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 49-54.

[In the following review, Ainsworth argues that in The People Named the Chippewa, Vizenor challenges contemporary beliefs about Native American culture]

It is perhaps a truism of modern history that they who control the past control the future. According to this maxim, those in control have the power to shape memory to suit their own requirements of the future, naively or uncaringly expecting those without control to pay homage to this vision. Official history is most credible then when all those people who remember a different story have been robbed of their memories.

Thinking that in large part the Native American population had been robbed of its memories, nineteenth-century ethnographers hurried into the field to document what were generally acknowledged to be dying cultures. Many of these ethnographies record in gruesome detail the condition of peoples stripped of their land, stripped of their language, without many of the implements of their material culture, and without any memory, or only vague memory, of the past. Kindly intentioned as they were, these documents nevertheless offer testimony to the accuracy of the official history, which depicts the "redman" as the loser in a battle for land.

Because the most telling yardstick was control of the material wealth of this country, it was widely held that Native American culture could not survive. Moreover, there was a tendency to eulogize the passing of a largely unknown but uncorrupted culture and to lament, if it were to survive at all, the coming of an acculturated and assimilated Native American. There has been a tendency to view most cultures in such either/or terms. One either "clings to" an unworkable past or gets swept away by the tidal wave of modern life.

The ability to view the Native American fairly and honestly has been hampered, therefore, by the role he has been assigned in American history, as well as by the definitions of culture. Gerald Vizenor's The People Named the Chippewa challenges on two fronts, first that his own Chippewa are to be identified with the Indians who populate American history textbooks, and second that the continuance of Chippewa culture rests on adherence to a set of inflexible rules governing behavior.

To do so, Vizenor turns to what has been most long-lived among his own Chippewa: he looks to the oral storytelling tradition. There he finds not the repository of tribal traditions that can be reconstituted whole, without change, in the present, but evidence that something vital has never been lost The figure that best represents this vitality is Naanabozho, the "compassionate woodland trickster."

In the "Prologue" to The People Named the Chippewa, Vizenor tells the story of the creation of the first earth. Naanabozho travels the earth searching for his mother who has been abducted by evil spirits. After traveling great distances, Naanabozho comes upon the wigwam of the great gambler. The gambler challenges Naanabozho to a game; if the trickster loses the tribal people will lose their lives and their spirits will be consigned to the flesh eaters in the land of darkness. The great gambler misjudges his opponent, however, and Naanabozho, using some deception of his own, wins the game.

The trickster is such a compelling figure for Vizenor because he is an embodiment of "the realities of human imperfections":

More than a magnanimous teacher and transformer, the trickster is capable of violence, deceptions, and cruelties…. The trickster is comic in the sense that he does not reclaim idealistic ethics, but survives as a part of the natural world; he represents a spiritual balance in a comic drama rather than the romantic elimination of human contradictions and evil.

It would be wrong then to reduce the Chippewa story of Naanabozho's meeting with the great gambler to its simplest terms: good triumphs over evil. Indeed, the story ends as Naanabozho takes one last turn; if he wins the great gambler loses his life. Turning again and again to the idiom of comedy rather than to that of tragedy, Vizenor disallows such a simplistic view of history as well.

Along these lines, Vizenor tells us that the Chippewa themselves can accommodate several different versions of their own beginnings. Nineteenth-century anthropologists tended to see variations as evidence of the corruption of a "pure" culture that existed some time in the past. Vizenor quotes from the recent work of Krocber, Tedlock and Ong to argue differently. They, along with Vizenor, challenge some of the assumptions inherent in discussions of so-called "corrupted" variants. They question whether such assumptions apply to works from primarily oral traditions. They tend to emphasize the artistry of the storyteller, rather than quibble about the authenticity or accuracy of the text. Vizenor says:

The teller of stories is an artist, a person of wit and imagination, who relumes the diverse memories of the visual past into the experiences and metaphors of the present…. The tribal creation takes place at the time of the telling in the oral tradition; the variations in mythic stories are the imaginative desires of tribal artists.

Notice that Vizenor does not say that the storyteller retrieves or recaptures or testifies to historical facts; instead he relumes, rekindles, re-illuminates.

And thus we come to one of the key terms for Vizenor: imagination. If we can concede that colonial America won the political struggle over land rights, Vizenor cautions us against such a concession regarding the tribal identity. In the stories the Chippewa tell about themselves he finds the true strength of his people. They did not relinquish the ability or freedom to imagine themselves when they relinquished their lands, Nor do their imagined selves conform to the "official" view. Speaking of the differences between tribal views and those of anthropologists and historians, Vizenor says:

Traditional tribal people imagine their social patterns and places on the earth, whereas anthropologists and historians invent tribal cultures and end mythic time. The differences between tribal imagination and social scientific invention are determined in world views: imagination is a state of being, a measure of personal courage; the invention of cultures is a material achievement through objective methodologies. To imagine the world is to be in the world; to invent the world with academic predications is to separate human experiences from the world, a secular transcendence and denial of chance and mortalities.

The term "culture" itself imposes boundaries, restricts freedom and is the ideological equivalent of the reservation. Liberated from theoretical categories, the Chippewa can get out from under the weight of either "preserving" the past or "adopting" the ways of the white man.

Having said as much, we can confront the irony imbedded in the title to this book. "Chippewa" and "Ojibway" are the names given to the people of the central woodlands by the colonists. The word that tribal people used to refer to themselves was Anishinaabeg. For Vizenor, the distinction between Anishinaabeg and Chippewa is not one of mere semantics. The "collective name [Anishinaabeg] was not an abstract concept of personal identities or national ideologies." The "family" and not the "nation" was the "first source" of personal identity. The collective identity came through sharing a language with other families and by sharing the dreams and visions expressed in the myths and stories.

The identity of these tribal communities was, therefore, more fluid than we can perhaps understand. Without the restrictions imposed by a "scriptural" past, the Chippewa's identity was fixed and constrained by nothing but the circumstances governing the present of individual lives. It is in the present, after all, that the stories are told and for the present that they have meaning. Tribal traditions may help to reinforce tribal identity but they do not necessarily add up to circumscribed culture and history.

In writing the history of the people named the Chippewa, Vizenor must take pains to clarify such distinctions between history and identity. The history of the Chippewa is one of resistance and capitulation to the "historical identity" invented and imposed by the invading whites. The people named the Chippewa about whom anthropologists and historians have written are not to be confused with the Anishinaabeg of the woodlands nor should they be equated with the people who live on the reservationsof Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada. The woodland tribes did not bear many of the allegiances attributed to them, and the present-day Chippewa, long separated from the woodland, can not live out but only "express romantic instincts, dreams and visions of the wilderness."

Vizenor would seem to be arguing that unless and until the people named the Chippewa can accept that they can not be the Chippewa and the Anishinaabeg at the same time, they will not be able to exercise the control over the past that will allow for a vision of the future. The Chippewa can not hold onto romantic dreams about the past without continuing to conspire in the victimization of traditional cultures.

There is in all of this a fierce honesty that comes from living on the edge, perched somewhere between despair over how well the Chippewa have learned the lessons of the dominant culture's history and a kind of free-spirited zaniness over having reasoned out for oneself that none of the rules apply. Freed of invented cultural restraints, he can take a critical look at the histories written by cultural conspirators William Whipple Warren, George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), and Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby). He can also assess the aims of the American Indian Movement in less than favorable terms:

The poses of tribal radicals seem to mimic the romantic pictorial images in old photographs taken by Edward Curtis for a white audience. The radicals never seem to smile, an incautious throwback to the stoical tribal visage of slower camera shutters and film speeds. The new radicals frown, even grimace at cameras, and claim the atrocities endured by all tribal cultures in first person personal pronouns.

Some militants decorate themselves in pastiche pantribal vestments, pose at times as traditionalists, and speak a language of confrontation and urban politics. The radical figures were not elected to speak for tribal reservation people, nor were they appointed to represent the interests and political views of elected tribal officials.

Such self-appointed saviors as Dennis Banks would seem to pose as big a threat to the survival of the Anishinaabeg as do the racist policies of the U.S. government.

The vast majority of the Chippewa get lost in the cracks and crevices created by these ideological word wars. These are the ones for whom Vizenor may well have written this book. They include the students at a private college who "were asked to define the word Indian during a special program on tribal cultures." Among their definitions we find the following:

     Indian is a cultural nationality.
     Real Americans.
     A member of the mongolian race.
     A human being.
     A wild savage.
     Indian means man.

They would include, too, the estimated half of the tribal population that is chemically dependent on alcohol. There is, as well, Cora Katherine Sheppo, who "smothered her grandchild because he had been 'spawned by the devil'." Trapped between some vague knowledge of tribal religion and Christianity and a psychiatric diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, Cora Sheppo will live out what remains of her life in a state mental hospital.

Neither pan-Indianism nor radical politics will do much to help the Cora Sheppo's of this world. These factional ideologies depend in their own ways upon the acceptance of the historical identity imposed from without. Traditionally, the Anishinaabeg did not predicate the present reality on a past reality. Survival then depends in large part on their willingness to forego a historical identity. Ironically, those who seek a historical identity gamble away all claims to an Anishinaabeg identity.

Vizenor is, of course, less polemical than this review makes him sound. Identified as he often is with the "compassionate woodland trickster," he does nevertheless prefer to live in the realm of the possible. Freed of the trappings of an imposed identity, either from within or without the tribal community, he is free to imagine himself and the world of which he is a part.

In the "Epilogue" to The People Named the Chippewa, Vizenor includes a narrative, originally translated by Peter Jones, an anthropologist killed by tribal people while doing research in the Philippines.

Something else I will relate concerning what the people of old have said. Whenever any one died, it was common for him to rise from the dead; and so he would give an account of what it was like at the place where the dead go. A very large road leads to the place where go those who have died. A great many one saw walking straight west where leads the road….

In various forms appeared they who danced, even upon their heads they stood when they danced. And this was why the people of old used to say whenever anybody died: "Don't ask anybody to accompany you." They pointed out to one the way straight towards the west….

And then there at the grave they sometimes kindled a fire and cooked food, when they were mindful of one that had died. Food, tobacco, and fire they placed there. And then over there at the place where the ghosts were arrived the food.

There was one great ghostly person who watched over the ghosts, for such as what I have heard people of old say. Sometimes the great ghostly man sent one back to the earth. "Not yet is your time up to come to this place." And this was the occasion when one sometimes came back to life.

Having read Vizenor's book, we may well agree that it is not yet time for the Chippewa to die.

Throughout his career, Gerald Vizenor has exhibited a willingness to experiment with and to work in a variety of forms—he was a reporter, he has written poetry, a novel, and a filmscript. It should come as no surprise then that he has ventured into another arena. The People Named the Chippewa is not just "revisionist" history though. Instead it poses some serious historiographical questions. The "Indian" of American history, largely a creation of the colonist, has had such a damaging effect on the Native population itself that we can only wait to see if its influence can be eradicated.