The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor

By Deborah L. Madsen

The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America’s most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of Vizenor’s related works. Contributors discuss Vizenor’s philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor’s poetry and his prose writings.

Throughout his poetic career Vizenor has returned to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor’s novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition but can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780826352514

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE TRIBAL TRAJECTORY OF VIZENOR’S POETIC CAREER

Deborah L. Madsen

The trajectory of Vizenor’s poetic career resists a linear teleology in favor of a tribal circling, a return to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. In each of the genres in which he works, Vizenor’s poetic language works to subvert fixed inherited meanings and the worldviews supported by, and lent reality by, these linguistic epistemologies. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor’s novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition, but it can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return. Contributors discuss Vizenor’s philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and also the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor’s poetry and his prose writings. The book brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of related Vizenor texts. In this introduction, I outline some of the patterns of return that characterize Vizenor’s career as an Anishinaabe poet and storier, and that are developed in the essays that follow.

Vizenor published his first volumes of haiku poems after his military service in Japan and the completion of his degree in Asian Studies. His first volume was Two Wings the Butterfly (1962); followed by Raising the Moon Vines (1964, 1968); Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku, with Jerome Downes (1966); Empty Swings (1967); and Seventeen Chirps (1964, 1968). Vizenor has continued to return to this poetic genre, as evidenced by the publication of Matsushima: Pine Islands (1984), Water Striders (1989), and Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes (1999). Vizenor’s retellings of Frances Densmore’s translation of traditional tribal dream songs in volumes such as Anishinabe Nagamon: Songs of the People and the four editions of Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories offer an important poetic source for the hybrid haiku/dream-song form that Vizenor develops. The formal fusing of haiku with dream song produces the symbolic dreamscape to which Vizenor refers as the tribal consciousness into which good poetry leads the reader. A volume of longer haiku-inspired poems, Almost Ashore, appeared in 2006, and the epic narrative poem Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point was published in the same year.

Vizenor’s poetic career is characterized by reimaginings, revisions, and returns—to earlier texts, to the haiku form, to events, images, people, and places. Some of Vizenor’s individual poems have been republished in a way that punctuates his career; Adam Spry discusses the various revisions and republications of an entire poetry volume: the four versions of Summer in the Spring that Vizenor published between 1965 and 1993. Spry notes Vizenor's return in these different versions to particular issues such as the trickster; the relationship between orality and writing, and between haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs; and the importance of literature as a strategy of Native survivance. In Spry’s reading, all four versions participate in the same project: Vizenor’s recovery from the historical archive, represented here by Frances Densmore’s transcription of Anishinaabe songs, published as Chippewa Music I and II, and Theodore Beaulieu’s publication in the Progress, the White Earth Reservation newspaper, of his retellings of Anishinaabe stories. This recovery project, as Spry presents it, is part of Vizenor’s effort to bring Anishinaabe oral culture into English-language print. Both the English language and print culture were, as Spry notes, politically freighted and therefore compromised modes of expression for tribal people.

Vizenor has explained his discovery of haiku and its proximity to Anishinaabe dream songs as a key to his poetics of survivance. Haiku is the poetic form to which Vizenor returns throughout his writing. Linda Lizut Helstern discusses the importance of Vizenor’s sustained use of haiku to his creation of survivance stories through the individual portrait poems of Almost Ashore. The ephemerality that is at the heart of haiku is identified by Helstern as central also to Vizenor’s concept of survivance in the tragic wisdom and awareness of loss that underpins the assertion of active presence in survivance. The images inspired by the natural world that are characteristic of haiku also appear in these poems that concern Paul Celan, John Berryman, and a Native woman addressed only as Pearl. These poetic portraits each concern a suicide but in these latest retellings of the poems, victimry is again muted and Vizenor emphasizes ontological transformation, such as Pearl’s avian transformation as death takes her into a different reality. The bridging of realities through a poetics inspired by the conjunction of haiku and Anishinaabe dream songs is discussed by Katja Sarkowsky. The openness of haiku, which tends to refuse active verbs in favor of imagistic juxtapositions that transfer the burden of creating meaning to the reader, is complemented by a thematic focus on the natural seasons (related to what Vizenor calls natural reason) and the Native presence that is implied by natural environments and the logic of seasons. Drawing on Kimberly Blaeser’s foundational work on Vizenor, Sarkowsky shows how haiku influences his prose in novels such as Dead Voices and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. These influences range from the structure of individual sentences to the quality of the imagery, the absence of narrative commentary on the action, and the natural scenes in which the narratives are set. This combination creates moments in which experience and words describing experience become identical. These are moments of ontological transformation, such as those noted by Blaeser in her essay in this volume. The influence of haiku in Bear Island, Blaeser argues, works to promote not only the visual experience that Vizenor describes as the inspiration and effect of haiku but also to promote visionary experience.

Linda Lizut Helstern, in one of the several essays in this collection that addresses Vizenor’s constant return to specific life events, considers the violent death of Vizenor’s father, which is engaged in the poem Family Photograph. The poem, included in Almost Ashore, is the latest iteration in a sequence of four versions of the poem, published in 1974, 1975, 1990, and 2006. This latest poem, as Helstern notes, is prefaced in the volume by two poems that contextualize the poet’s loss in terms of the persistence of natural life, symbolized by the rhythm of the ocean, and the transformative power of nonhuman life, symbolized by the ritualized celebration of the sandhill crane, the totem of Vizenor’s clan. Thus, Helstern argues, in this revisioning of survivance, Vizenor extends Native survivance to embrace a fundamental planetary refusal of and resistance against dominance. Helstern shows, through a close analysis of the four versions of the poem, how Vizenor’s strategies of representation have developed in the manner of oral storying. The same degree of attention is then directed toward the poems Guthrie Theater (versions of which were published in 1975, 1978, 1983, and 2006) and Raising the Flag (1975, 1978, 2006). Helstern notes that in each revision of these poems Vizenor removes associations with victimry and so emphasizes the warrior resistance and survivance attitudes of this Anishinaabe man, in Guthrie Theater, and woman, in Raising the Flag. Helstern notices that in this poem the woman recalls the historic military victory of her Anishinaabe people over the U.S. cavalry: a Native victory that Vizenor makes the subject of his epic poem Bear Island, which was published in the same year as Almost Ashore.

The murder of Clement Vizenor is referenced in a series of texts that Katja Sarkowsky discusses in terms of the shared trope of the Crane Clan, membership to which Vizenor inherited through his father: a haiku in Empty Swings, the dedication of Summer in the Spring (1984), the passage in Interior Landscapes concerning his father, and the conclusion of Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 are repetitions that cross literary genres, transcend individual texts, and by remaining in the mind of an attentive reader, become part of the reader’s memory. Each successive text calls on this readerly memory to use what is already known and to invest it, as something known, with a reality that is independent of individual texts. Clement Vizenor, Keeshkemun, the Anishinaabe Crane Clan—all gain reality in the lived experience of the reader through Vizenor’s strategy of revisioning and retelling.

The killing of a red squirrel is another life event to which Vizenor returns in a succession of texts. Susan Bernardin refers to this repetition, but the three essays by David Moore, Arnold Krupat, and Michael Snyder engage in detailed responses to I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs, Crows Written on the Poplars, Interior Landscapes, and Dead Voices. Moore includes in his account of Vizenor’s rhetorical technique of mythic verism an analysis of Crows Written on the Poplars that links the loss of his father with the killing of a squirrel. Life and death, presence and absence, loss and recovery—these are the substantive concepts on which Moore focuses. In his reading of this autobiographical essay, Moore traces the development of a dialogic understanding of the relationship between myth and history. Personal identity is gradually redefined from a static to a dynamic perception of the significance of Vizenor's crossblood status, of his location between the reservation and the city, tribal and colonial environments, and of his discursive position that empowers him to see clearly the contingent relationship between linguistic signifiers and signifieds. In his shifting relations with the squirrel he has shot, the autobiographical narrator moves from a false romantic vision of his location in the world to a loss of the illusion of unmediated experience and finally to a compassionate understanding of the importance of imaginative identification, of imaginative epistemologies, projected through the contingent medium of language.

Michael Snyder’s reading of Vizenor’s continuing return to the story of the red squirrel focuses on Vizenor’s changing attitude toward, and compassion for, animals. Through haikus published in Two Wings the Butterfly, Raising the Moon Vines, Seventeen Chirps, Empty Swings, Matsushima, Envoy to Haiku, and Almost Ashore, as well as Crows Written on the Poplars, in addition to the chapter Death Song to a Red Rodent in Interior Landscapes that he reads as a prose poem, and the chapter Squirrels in Dead Voices, Vizenor traces the trope of the dying squirrel as an occasion for Vizenor’s critique of one of the controlling binaries of Western civilization: nature versus culture. The squirrel, as Snyder interprets it, signifies a liminal condition that subverts easy conventional distinctions between the human and the animal, the rural and the urban, the earth and the sky. This subversion is located in an Anishinaabe epistemology that reveals knowledge based on this binary to be the product of Western culture, capitalism, and Christianity. For Snyder, the squirrel offers a textual focalization that enacts an indigenous perspective on the interconnectedness of all created beings, noting that the autobiographical figure of the hunter is closely identified with the squirrel through shared stories and unspoken communication. Indeed, this episode told in Crows Written on the Poplars and Death Song to a Red Rodent functions as a birth of the author story when the hunter declares that he will never hunt an animal again but will instead engage in linguistic battle, using wordarrows as his ammunition in the word wars: wars fought against the Western epistemological framework that separates humans from other animals and relegates those animals to the category of the less valuable, just as settler-citizens are separated from less-than-fully-human Indians. It is against the worldview that enables the killing of the squirrel that the hunter-narrator determines to struggle. Snyder reads the rejection of the squirrel-hunt as part of Vizenor’s rejection of the synecdochal status that is risked by all writers categorized as Native authors. Vizenor refuses to be a synecdoche of the White Earth Anishinaabeg, a token representative of this Native community. By rejecting the Anishinaabe tradition of squirrel hunting, Snyder argues, Vizenor asserts his individual intellectual sovereignty.

However, Arnold Krupat’s reading of the squirrel figure in Vizenor’s three autobiographical texts and the novel Dead Voices produces a rather different interpretation of the tribal dimension of this particular motif. Krupat’s interest is in the lyrical and elegiac quality of these writings as expressions of mourning and loss that are not simply personal and individualistic but also speak to the grief of whole communities. Elegy in this context works not only as an expression of loss but also as the basis for strategies of continuance and regeneration: for the individual and for the People. It is the developing relationship between the individual and community that Krupat traces in Vizenor’s return to the dying red squirrel, moving from the experience on which Snyder focuses, an experience that defines the hunter-narrator’s subjective position in the world and his vocation as a writer, to a narrative description that emphasizes a future in which his identity and vocation will serve the Native interests of the community by sustaining the oral tradition of storying and the survivance strategies that depend on tribal cultural traditions, ways of knowing, and forms of being.

From repeated volumes of poetry to repeated poems, poetic forms, and life events, the repetition of tropes has become Vizenor’s signature phraseology. Kimberly Blaeser, for example, remarks that Vizenor’s use of particular words and images—in the context of Bear Island, phrases such as tricky shamans, bearwalkers, and pillagers of liberty—gains significance through the echoes of his previous usages, accumulating meaning through the reader’s remembered associations. Importantly, she observes, these echoes throughout Vizenor’s stories provide the basis for an assertion of survival. However, the association of the Pillager Clan with The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, through the phrase pillagers of liberty, signifies more than clan survival and endurance; the historical association between Vizenor’s novel and his signature phrase endows the Pillagers with the status of heirs and thus with survivance.

Vizenor’s phraseology and his distinctive use of grammar and syntax are mentioned in all the essays in this volume as constituting a poetic challenge to the power of denotation in favor of indeterminate suggestiveness and open texts. Spry remarks on the revision of punctuation and vocabulary that characterizes Vizenor’s reimaginings of Densmore’s transcription of traditional Anishinaabe songs in Chippewa Music, which similarly introduces the potential for multiple readings by rendering ambiguous the meanings that can be attributed to individual words, phrases, and poetic lines. This ambiguity poses a particular challenge for translators of Vizenor’s work, evidenced by the essay written by the Catalan translator of Almost Ashore, Carme Manuel. Manuel explains that Vizenor’s use of a vocabulary rich in multiple meanings, combined with his preference for enjambment and minimal punctuation, produces a text that would be unintelligible if translated literally into another language. The power of these poetic methods, however, is to empower the reader of his poetry to take an active role in the production of meaning. The extensive use of allusion and the subversion of formal grammatical structures promote resistance to epistemological limitations and open the poems to meanings grounded in the presence of Anishinaabe worldviews. Grammar is a strategy of separation, division, and exclusion that Vizenor resists on the formal level of syntax, (non)punctuation, and lexicon. The ambiguity created by Vizenor’s refusal of capitalization and punctuation in favor of enjambment and rhythm makes possible a fusing of word, self, and world. But the influence of haiku on the poems in Almost Ashore is such that any epiphanic intersubjective fusing is always transient and only of the moment.

Susan Bernardin explores this dynamic quality of Vizenor’s haiku-inspired language in relation to his evocation of presence and absence in time and space. What she calls the symbiosis of motion and location is linked to concepts of being and becoming both in the substantive dimension of the poems in Almost Ashore and in the positioning of the reader. Even the title of the volume highlights process and movement rather than arrival and stasis, as Linda Lizut Helstern remarks. The title of the book, almost ashore, defers in the sense of Derrida’s différance, locating itself in the transitional moment that brings together presence and absence.

David Moore also references Derrida’s theory of différance to initiate an analysis of Vizenor’s reworking of the dominant English language to create linguistic accesses to Native epistemologies. Through the use of neologisms and his innovations in syntax and vocabulary but primarily by applying semantic pressure (what Vizenor terms socioacupuncture) to the contingent relation between signifier and signified (described by Saussure and developed by Derrida), Vizenor deconstructs meanings that serve the interests of the settler nation and creates occasions to signify Native presence. As Moore points out, Derrida’s theory of the supplement, which describes the uncontrollable linguistic excess produced by every act of signification, serves Vizenor’s tribal purpose of exposing the enduring Native presence that is erased but not annulled by colonialist discourses. Moore takes this seemingly paradoxical situation—where presence and absence, inside and outside, conjunction and separation coexist—further to indicate the ways in which Vizenor engages the excessive Native presence in narratives of history, especially the U.S. story of Manifest Destiny. Indeed, Moore argues that this semantic and historical excess demonstrates a complete separation between the myth of Manifest Destiny—predicated as it is on the savagism versus civilization paradigm—and an autonomous narrative of indigenous America that, for Moore, is crystallized in the trope of the postindian. Moore approaches these issues through his analysis of the classical rhetorical categories of ethos, referring to the writer/speaker; grammar, signifying the formal quality of the text; logos, signifying the substantive dimension of textual content; and pathos, referring to the reader/listener, although Moore nuances these categories by noting that one may analyze a grammar of ethos or pathos as well as logos and much of his essay engages with the concepts festive time tricks, mythic verism, and tribal satire as grammatical functions of Vizenor’s writers/speakers, textual content, and readers/listeners.

Vizenor’s unique way of working with the technicalities of poetic language in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary presents a particular challenge in the context of translation. This issue is addressed by a number of essays, from the varying perspectives of cultural translation, the translation process from oral to written forms of expression, and the foreign-language translation of Vizenor’s work. As Adam Spry points out, the translation of Anishinaabe songs and stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a complex issue, on the one hand providing the opportunity to preserve elements of traditional culture, while on the other hand risking the fundamental transformation of these cultural elements on which Anishinaabe identity is based. Vizenor’s response to this enduring problem is to acknowledge that while the oral tradition cannot be translated, oral stories can be reimagined, as he does in Anishinabe Adisokan (1970) and Anishinabe Nagamon (1970), and the three editions of Summer in the Spring (1965, 1981, and 1993). Spry argues that, in contrast to Densmore’s literal ethnographic transcriptions, Beaulieu’s retelling of oral stories in the Progress represented a reimagining of these narratives that captures their performativity and vitality. Thus, Beaulieu’s example has served as a model for Vizenor’s strategy in relation to the use of tribal materials and his ongoing efforts to modify written English so the language can accommodate the oral tradition. Spry shows how Vizenor’s reimagination of Densmore’s transcriptions draws on Beaulieu’s model by rewriting the dream songs, not to bring them more into line with Anglo-American poetic genres, but to embrace the indeterminacy and openness that he discovered in the haiku form.

Kimberly Blaeser discusses translation in the context of cultural translation, specifically Vizenor’s juxtaposition of incompatible settler-colonial and Native epistemologies in Bear Island. This is the issue with which Carme Manuel begins her essay: the comparability of her situation as a native speaker of Catalan, the language outlawed under Francisco Franco’s regime, and that of Anishinaabe-speakers in the dominant English-language culture of the United States. Manuel observes that the criminalizing of Catalan in public spaces was a political strategy designed to repress Catalan national identity. Thus, for her, the translation of literary texts into Catalan is an act of ongoing liberation and cultural empowerment. She positions herself, as a translator, as a mediator who does not write but rewrites texts—much as Adam Spry’s essay positions Vizenor in relation to traditional Anishinaabe texts. Thus, in translating Almost Ashore, Manuel aimed not at a literal translation of the poems but a re-expression of the spirit of these texts. However, among the most fascinating elements of her essay are the excerpts from her correspondence with Vizenor as he explained the significance of particular images and tropes.

For a writer of English-language texts who is inspired by the Anishinaabe oral tradition, the relationship between script and speech is proximate to translation. Vizenor’s work is characterized by his use of mythic tribal elements of language to evoke the reality of a Native ontology. Kimberly Blaeser points out that the oral contrasts with the linear temporality, static, individualized, author-focused qualities of writing by foregrounding the communal, cyclical, dialogic, mythic, and contextual elements of dynamic engagement between storier and listener. In Bear Island, Vizenor creates a form of written English that incorporates the cyclical and mythic into the historical, and the tribal into the language of colonialism. The use of Anishinaabemowin as another linguistic code within his primary English lexicon continually reminds the reader of Native presence and, she notes, at the same time undermines the binary division between insiders and outsiders. On the one hand, this use of Anishinaabe words, phrases, and names emphasizes all that the English language cannot represent of Native experience and, on the other hand, Vizenor’s inclusion of translations in close proximity to his use of these tribal words allows nonnative speakers to access the sense of tribal presence that the words conjure. But in his essay, Adam Spry notes that the inclusion of the Anishinaabe stories and songs from Anishinabe Nagamon and Anishinabe Adikosan in the single volume Summer in the Spring has the effect of locating Vizenor’s reimagining of Densmore’s transcription of tribal dream songs very clearly in an Anishinaabe cultural context, in particular through the tropes that are carried over from Theodore Beaulieu’s prose retellings into the dream songs: the power of the Midéwiwin, the tribal significance of dreams, and Anishinaabe understandings of the permeable relationship between humans and animals. Indeed, Spry sees Beaulieu’s stories as interpretive guides to the enduring tribal quality of the dream songs and, in this recovery of Anishinaabe terms—a recovery that has been continued by his descendant or literary heir, Gerald Vizenor—there is a reconnection between Native people and their heritage that serves the interests of survivance.

The work of recovery is, for Vizenor, not simply a tribal issue but also a clan issue. His work is characterized by the use of totemic images that invoke clan significances as a means to recover tribal memory. Images like the bear as a clan animal, for example, is symbolic of the mythic and tribal, as is Vizenor’s own crane totem. The evocation of tropes derived from Anishinaabe culture is part of Vizenor’s recovery of historical memory and the preservation of tribal cultural heritage. However, Susan Bernardin’s essay reminds us that all of indigenous North America provides a stance from which revisionary U.S. historical narratives can and must be critiqued. David Moore works from this critical perspective as he discusses Vizenor’s reworkings of history. Moore argues that Vizenor’s rhetorical technique of mythic verism brings together tribal myth and verisimilitude in which the latter signifies the ideological discourses from which dominant narratives of history and other terminal creeds are constructed, and which are the frequent targets of Vizenor’s trickster satire. Tribal myth, in contrast, arises from the oral tradition and is fundamentally metaphorical; mythic verism is the signifying excess of acts of verisimilitude. It is emphatically not magical realism because of its origins in the Anishinaabe oral tradition. Mythic verism is a linguistic access to the tribal ontology silenced and obscured by dominant practices of verisimilitude.

Many essays in this volume engage with the issue of literary genre and Vizenor’s practice of subverting the conventional separations among fixed generic forms. In her essay, Kimberly Blaeser references Dean Rader’s term epic lyric to describe the subversion of poetic genres at work in Bear Island: the poem is subjective, historical, and focused on emotion, yet it preserves cultural traditions; it is individualistic and nationalistic at the same time. Blaeser sees the tensions arising from this challenge to generic integrity as a strategy for creating a bicultural text that is designed to encourage transformation in the reader. Lisa Tatonetti also reads Bear Island as a Native epic that is invested, formally and substantively, in issues of nationalism: through the concern with history and particularly the historical origins of a nation, as well as the cultural bonds that unite that nation such as religion or language. The problem with which Vizenor so brilliantly engages in this epic poem is the encounter of two fundamentally opposed national narratives: the U.S. settler myth of Manifest Destiny and the Anishinaabe assertion of tribal power, authority, and autonomy. These opposed national stories are grounded in opposed claims to the land and the identities that emerge from and are grounded in that land.

The territorial geographies of Vizenor’s career, primarily Minnesota and California, are addressed by Susan Bernardin, who focuses her essay on indigenous presence in California. She explores the interplay of Vizenor’s critique of European imperial claims to possession and the presence of Native communities and cultures in California through his invocation of San Gregorio in the poem Almost Ashore and his sustained interest in the figure of Ishi. The word traces of Minnesota’s natural environment and the Californian coast signify, in Bernardin’s reading, the shared project of survivance across Native nations. In this context, Ishi becomes an important trope that will not allow us to forget the enduring Native presence that inheres in these places and contests settler-colonial narratives of origin. Indeed, Kimberly Blaeser notes the indigenous quality of the environment that sustains Hole in the Day and his Anishinaabe descendants in Bear Island. Ishi’s museum home at the University of California fixes him as an Indian in time and space; in contrast, Vizenor’s images of seasonal change evoke the presence of an alternative kind of space and time. Bernardin highlights the interconnection between place and memory that is shared by the poems in Almost Ashore, poems that construct an imaginative cartography of survivance and sovereignty in Native America.

Chris LaLonde, in his discussion of Bear Island as one of Vizenor’s Minnesota texts, notes the rootedness of the story, which takes place on treaty land and specifically the territory of the Leech Lake Reservation. LaLonde’s essay gestures to a double embeddedness: the intricate interweaving of event and historical moment, and the intrinsic relationship between subjectivity and place-time. In both cases, place is identical with a Native ontology or understanding of reality together with a tribal epistemology. Bear Island is an epic poem firmly located in Native space but also a space under U.S. colonialist assault. As Jace Weaver explains in his detailed account of the historical contexts of the poem, the Third Infantry, the regiment sent to fight the Pillagers on Sugar Point, had served in the Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War. This detail underlines the political environment of U.S. imperialist expansion in which the last of the Indian Wars took place. Both Weaver and Lisa Tatonetti cite contemporary newspaper reportage of the conflict, reportage that forms another of LaLonde’s modes of embeddedness: the presence of journalists among the U.S. military contingent. Native stories are embedded in tribal lands, but in Bear Island, the popular media stories that reported the war were written by journalists who were embedded in the U.S. military. Drawing on Vizenor’s writings (fictional as well as factual) about his own experience as a journalist with the Minneapolis Tribune, LaLonde makes the parallel with the U.S. Department of Defense’s contemporary practice of embedding the journalists with the troops serving in the second Gulf War; this parallel between the Indian Wars and the War Against Terror also concludes Weaver’s essay.

How these stories are told enacts a particular epistemology that constructs the reality, or ontology, of the narrative that is told; Vizenor exposes to view the hermeneutic operations at work in settler-colonial and neoimperialist stories, while at the same time, offering a Native narrative that instantiates a tribal hermeneutic. Thus, Adam Spry analyzes the ways in which Vizenor reworks Frances Densmore’s transcription of Anishinaabe songs and Theodore Beaulieu’s retellings of Anishinaabe stories in order to transform the ethnographical nature of Densmore’s work into imaginative works akin to Beaulieu’s retellings of oral stories. Spry refers to Beaulieu’s strategy as a new tribal hermeneutics that empowers Anishinaabe survivance through the tribal modes of knowing that are promoted by Vizenor’s reimaginings of Anishinaabe cultural materials. Like his descendant, Spry argues, Theodore Beaulieu was intensely aware that the conflict between the Anishinaabe nation and the U.S. settler-nation would be a struggle for control of representation. This is what Vizenor later called the word wars. The U.S. claim to power is based on a claim to cultural superiority that can only be effectively countered by an effort on the part of Native nations to represent the equal value of their own cultural and political authority, on which rests claims to treaty rights, territorial sovereignty, and self-governance. Consequently, Beaulieu published stories that would sustain Anishinaabe cultural pride