[In the review below, Loudon praises The People Named Chippewa as a witty and imaginative discussion of current Native American culture.]

Gerald Vizenor's writing began in a boldly experimental mode and has moved steadily toward more conventional prose, but even in his most recent nonfiction, he has never once left the battlefield of his "word wars." In the prologue to the "narrative histories" of The People Named Chippewa he deconstructs the unconscious conspiracy of the either-or fallacy that dominates the view which many Native Americans have of themselves and with which they are frequently viewed by others. Nineteenth-century ethnologists and revisionist historians unwittingly fashioned an academic attitude, eventually popular, that tribal peoples must either assimilate or, suffering the loss of a "pure" culture, die. Vizenor, referring to the work of Kroeber, Tedlock, Ong, and others, shatters the romantic stereotype, however well-intentioned, of an uncorrupted, pristine "culture" that existed before the invasion of the whites. The consequent "historical identity" that results from theoretical categories of culture casts the "Indian" as an eternal loser. Thus the irony of Vizenor's title: the passive reception of a cultural designation bestowed from without and accepted from with in. The Chippewa or the Ojibway were never such; they were the Anishinaabeg.

To rekindle and renew the spirit—not to retrieve the facts—of the past lives of the Anishinaabeg, Vizenor turns to the present "Chippewa" and begins with Naanabozho (not Nanabush), "the compassionate woodland trickster." To liberate the Chippewa from the ideologies of culture and history, Naanabozho represents the immediacy of storytelling to the present circumstances of individuals and their first source of identity, the family. Naanabozho affirms not a rigid set of rules for behavior (or even kinship), but flexible, nurturing principles of change that address the present in order to sustain the future. Wit and tribal imagination survive longer than a colonially inspired yearning for a conquered wilderness.

Although Vizenor's polemic is clear, it also displays the same wit and imagination he attributes to Naanabozho. His critique of the American Indian Movement is a satirical attack mounted precisely on the ground that the movement lacks humor and postures a false collective identity: the archetypal victim, colonial in its origin. Only a trickster could see Dennis Banks and Ronald Reagan in the same face. Through some very funny moments, Vizenor raises serious questions for the pan-Indian movements and "radical" academics. (His bibliography will direct scholars to further, similar points of view.) A teacher and scholar wishing to avoid and to correct the mistakes of twentieth-century scholarship in discussing "Indians," "Native Americans" or "Amerindians" would do well to begin with these stories; they are the strength of the Anishinaabeg.