[In the following brief review, Warrior asserts that in Vizenor's novel The Heirs of Columbus, the author takes shreds of a "tragic history and claims them as property of the liberating liberal trickster."]

The Heirs of Columbus, Gerald Vizenor's fourth novel, is a compelling and rewarding contribution to the cacophonous chorus of voices in this quincentenary year. The wild fable [de]centers on the exploits of a group of this continent's Natives who claim to be direct descendants of the famed Genoan explorer. Columbus, in Vizenor's telling, was actually the son of Mayans who traveled from the New World to the Old. Christopher raised money from the crown of Spain to make his way back home. His heirs now live at the headwaters of the Mississippi and are looking for a way to bring the bones of their ancestor to find final rest among family.

With this narrative Vizenor takes what he sees as the tragic shreds of a tragic history and claims them as property of the liberating tribal trickster, who is able to take even the most deadly stories and gain from them healing and liberation. In place of the already worn-thin clichés of quincentennial revisionism, Vizenor offers a comic path of imagination and survival. On that path the story's unlikely heirs manage to spirit the bones of Columbus away from the Brotherhood of American Explorers (a veiled reference to the American Bureau of Ethnology). Doric Michéd, a self-proclaimed Native and member of the elite group of grave robbers, is the villain of the novel.

Michéd, ashamed when he brings dishonor to his fellow grave robbers, masks his identity and induces Felipa Flowers, one of the heirs, to London. There, he promises, he will give over the bones of Pocahontas for a proper reburial alongside the Mayan Columbus at the headwaters of the Mississippi. In her desire to repatriate another set of bones and stories, Felipa does not realize that she is walking into peril.

Through the various twists and turns, Vizenor, in vintage form, uses digressions and other devices to comment on a wide variety of issues that affect the lives of American Indian people and communities. Native Americanist Arnold Krupat, Métis rebel Louis Riel, Antonín Dvorák's New World Symphony, some separatist feminists, Shakespeare's Caliban, and lots of others also make appearances. Such digressions and veiled references require quite a bit of knowledge about contemporary American Indian, Native Americanist, and other letters and may tax those without background, but they yield rich rewards for those who keep up with such currents.

Even those uninitiated in the imaginary landscapes of Vizenor's universe, though, will feel the real power of Heirs of Columbus in its final section. There the heirs discover that the genetic code they carry from their Mayan explorer ancestor holds the secret of healing the wounds from these last five centuries of oppression and tragedy. After withdrawing from the corruption-ridden realms and terminal creeds of tribal governments, they declare sovereignty and set about the task of building a community.

Amid a fantastic and apocalyptic narrative, Vizenor reminds his readers of what is really at stake in Indian America: the lives and futures of Indian children and grandchildren. In doing so, the trickster is never far from view (or at least earshot), waiting to overturn our expectations and forcing us to look for liberation in places we had not thought to look.