SOURCE: Review of Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1994, pp. 313-18.

[In the following review below, Churchill argues that when Vizenor relies on his journalistic talents, Manifest Manners provides useful insights but Vizenor's use of postmodern vernacular creates a sterile, unsuccessful work.]

Gerald Vizenor's Manifest Manners is a book one can love to hate. It combines the very worst of postmodernism's vernacular-driven plunge into cliquish obscurantism with its author's already hyperinflated sense of self-importance. The result is largely sterile where it is not opaque to the point of sheer meaninglessness.

I mean, really. What, exactly, is survivance? How does it differ in substance from preexisting terms like survival? If it does not, where then may we find the necessity—or even the propriety—of Vizenor's having cloned yet another buzzword with which to encumber the long-since overloaded (but underclarifying) language of literary / cultural criticism?

Or, to take another tack, what does the author actually mean when he classifies the contemporary indigenous population of North America as "postindians?" In his first chapter, Vizenor offers the notion that the term is appropriate insofar as we have all, in his opinion, been reduced to acting out charades of our tribal past, mostly for the edification of the dominating Euro-American culture that has come to overwhelm and negate it.

This is an intriguing concept, to be sure. But it is one that opens up at least as many questions as it can purport to answer. How, for example, is our situation today dissimilar in principle from that of Pocahontas during her stint at the Court of St. James? Or Squanto or Joseph Brant or John Ross? Or how about those of our ancestors who were among the initial batch of In Dios Columbus spirited away to Iberia at the end of his first voyage?

Were the Great Navigator's Taino captives of 1493 somehow converted into "postindians" by the very fact that they were ripped bodily from their own setting and compelled to adapt themselves to a wholly alien one? Or did they remain "Indian" despite the grotesque deformity of circumstance imposed on them? And more or less so than the supposed postindians upon whom Vizenor focuses five centuries later, amidst the sociocultural environment of 1993?

Are the distinctions between those of us alive today and those who have gone before quantitative, qualitative, or both? How are such differentiations to be drawn? By whom? For what purpose and to what extent? These would seem fairly obvious concerns, matters requiring a fullness of consideration and response if Vizenor's analysis of topical phenomena were to be more than superficial. Yet, in the end, he begs them all, consistently glossing over the inadequacy of his approach with a transparently de liberate resort to obfuscatory word play. "Manifest manners," he says, "are the simulations of dominance; the notions and misnomers that are read as the authentic and sustained representations of Native American Indians. The postindian warriors are new indications of narrative creation, the simulations that overcome the manifest manners of dominance." Again,

Native American Indians have endured the lies and wicked burdens of discoveries, the puritanical destinies of monotheism, manifest manners, and the simulated realities of dominance, with silence, traces of natural reason, trickster hermeneutics, and interpretation of tribal figurations, and the solace of heard stories…. The various translations, interpretations, and absence of tribal realities have been posed as the verities of certain cultural traditions. Moreover, the closure of heard stories in favor of scriptural simulations as authentic representations denied a common brush with a shimmer of humor, the sources of tribal visions, and tragic wisdom…. In other words, the postindian warriors of postmodern simulations would undermine and surmount, with imagination and the performance of new stories, the manifest manners of scriptural simulations and "authentic" representations of the tribes in the literature of dominance.

And again,

The postindian warriors and posers are not the new shaman healers of the unreal. Simulations and the absence of the real are curative by chance; likewise, to hover over the traces of the presence in literature is not an ecstatic vision. The turns of postindian remembrance are a rush on natural reason. Some simulations are survivance, but postindian warriors are wounded by the real. The warriors of simulations are worried by the real more than other enemies of reference. Simulations are substitutes of the real, and those who pose with the absence of the real must fear the rush of the real in their stories.

Yeah, sure, you bet. The construction of such impenetrable prose is meant not to illuminate and explain but the precise opposite. Its function is mainly to cast an aura of profound importance over thoughts that are trivial at best or, more usually, utterly barren. It also serves to lend a shallow veneer of intellectual significance—"I've read this thing three times, still can't understand it, so I can only conclude that the author must be smarter than I!"—to those with little or nothing consequential to say.

One is tempted at this point to simply consign Manifest Manners to that ever-growing pile of tomes representing nothing so much as a vulgar genuflection to the more puerile impulses of academic pretension. Still, a few elements of genuine utility do manage to peek from time to time through Vizenor's swirling clouds of otherwise irredeemable verbiage.

Perhaps predictable, these shining moments occur whenever he drops his guise as a deep thinker and reconnects to the solidity of his roots in journalism. More accurately, such moments come when Vizenor himself steps aside, allowing working journalists to do his job for him. Thus, he finally lays bare whatever kernel of honest outrage might have motivated his writing in the first place.

Here, Vizenor proceeds by concrete example to explore the sordid realities attending the activities of several individuals embraced by the dominant society as "radical Indian leaders." It is plain that he sees those discussed as no more than instruments used by the status quo for purposes of confusing and usurping the legitimate aspirations of native people to continuity and liberation. Notable in this connection is the author's reliance on the accounts of reporters Kim Ode, Joe Geshick, Kevin Diaz, and Randy Furst in dissecting the case of Clyde Bellecourt, self-ordained "National Director" of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Bellecourt was discovered by the media and established as a leader by foundations and government institutions. He could have been historical in the banal sense of time, causation, and aesthetic melancholy; instead, he became one of the kitschymen of resistance enterprises…. Bellecourt is a kitschyman, one of the most contumacious cross-blood radical simulations in the nation. He is a word warrior on commission, a man who has abused the honor of tribal communities to enhance his own simulations of pleasure….

Vizenor then goes on to interweave the various journalists' work in elaborating how Bellecourt used his position as a famous AIM leader to profit from the peddling of drugs—LSD, cocaine, marijuana, angel dust—to the children attending his Heart of the Earth Survival School and/or living in his Little Earth Housing Project (both in Minneapolis), among other native groups.

Furst's writings indicate that this pattern of behavior eventually resulted in Bellecourt's arrest in March 1985 on nine counts of drug distribution. Ode, Furst, and Diaz point out that in April 1986 the defendant was allowed to negotiate a plea bargain in which he accepted a reduced sentence on a single felony. This was after a number of non-Indian community leaders testified as character witnesses, urging the court to show leniency because of Bellecourt's supposed "dedication to his people."

Meanwhile, Bellecourt himself meekly "pleaded guilty in the courtroom" even as he loudly, publicly, and repeatedly "claimed entrapment outside it." Far from penalizing him for these active attempts to evade the sociopolitical onus of his confession, federal district judge Paul Magnuson capped things off by stressing his "great respect for what Bellecourt had done for the Indian community and society as a whole." Indeed, the convict was rewarded for his documented lack of contrition when the good judge deferred his punishment so that Bellecourt might desecrate the 1987 Big Mountain Sun Dance with his presence before entering his cell. This, at the height of the Reagan administration's "War on Drugs!"

Small wonder that Vizenor at one point ponders "why law enforcement agencies did not investigate and arrest [Bellecourt] sooner" and whether he could "have been protected [by the police or FBI] in his enterprise of resistance." Be that as it may, Joe Geshick next reveals that when Bellecourt was released from prison, having served less than two years of his five-year term, he quickly began to employ violence and intimidation against the Minneapolis Indian community in order to reassert his position of "centrality" within it. Quoting Ode in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Vizenor notes that, since his incarceration,

Bellecourt may have changed, but not everybody is buying it. Those who dislike him refuse to speak on the record, saying they fear reprisals. Word of [Ode's] newspaper article ignited the grapevine and the telephone rings with anonymous voices, all of whom identify themselves as American Indians, urging caution.

Taken as a whole, this is a devastatingly penetrating portrait of a man who is still hyped as a sort of benchmark "Indian militant" by an astonishingly broad sector of the Euro-American Left; a man who, despite his status as an admitted "drug kingpin," continues to receive—by his own estimate—federal funding in the neighborhood of S4.5 million per year and well over $3 million annually in major corporate dollars, with which to run his "community service" operations in Minnesota.

Unquestionably, some of the material incorporated in Vizenor's handling of Clyde Bellecourt and others he accuses of embodying the shabby phenomenon of postindianism is important and deserving of the widest possible reading. Thus his ineptitude in attempting to place such information within the trendy and culturally totalizing abstractions of postmodernism is not just unfortunate but tragic. What is most striking in this respect is how avoidable it all was. Had Vizenor opted to employ the readily available and relevant framework of anticolonialist analysis developed a generation ago by theorists Frantz Fanon (Black Skins, White Masks) and Albert Memmi (Colonizer and Colonized), Manifest Manners might have lived up to its potential as a coherent and useful book. Instead, he chose to squander this prospect, indulging himself once again—as he has several times previously—in the glitzy pose of professional literati.

We are left with a paradox, an irony of the sort in which postmodernism delights. Manifest Manners is largely an empty husk, a miserably failed promise. Yet we can ill afford to ignore its relatively meager content. In that he may be said to have intentionally orchestrated this outcome, Gerald Vizenor himself should be seen as the very epitome of the type of trickster charlatan he claims to detest so vociferously. He is, by this standard, the most wretchedly postindian of us all.