{i}

Coffee House Discourse
        Rodney Simard                 .                  .                   .                  .         1

The "Person" in Postmodern Fiction: Gibson, Le Guin, and Vizenor
        Patricia Linton                  .                  .                   .                  .         3

Chance and Ritual: The Gambler in the Texts of Gerald Vizenor
        Nora Barry    .                 .                  .                   .                  .         13

Gerald Vizenor's Shadow Plays: Narrative Mediations and Multiplicities of Power
        Juana María Rodríguez    .                  .                   .                  .         23

Textual Stimulation: Gerald Vizenor's Use of Law in Advocacy Literature
        Irene Gonzales                  .                  .                   .                  .         31

Suppressive Narrator and Multiple Narratees in Gerald Vizenor's "Thomas White Hawk"
        Winona Stevenson            .                  .                   .                  .         36

"I Defy Analysis": A Conversation with Gerald Vizenor              .         43

Harold of Orange: A Screenplay
        Gerald Vizenor                  .                  .                   .                  .        53

FORUM
        Calls for Papers               .                  .                   .                  .        89
        Notice             .                  .                  .                   .                  .        90

REVIEWS
On the Translation of Native American Literatures. Ed. Brian Swann
        William Bright                   .                  .                   .                  .        91

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 7.2 (Fall 1992). Guest Ed. Hertha Wong
        Helen Jaskoski                   .                  .                   .                  .        98

{ii}
Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. David Murray
        James Ruppert                  .                  .                   .                  .         101

Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives. Ray A. Young Bear
        Robert F. Gish                   .                  .                   .                  .        105

another distance: new and selected poems. Lance Henson
        Norma C. Wilson              .                  .                   .                  .        108

CONTRIBUTORS                   .                  .                   .                  .       110

Coffee House Discourse

Rodney Simard         

        The increasing prominence of Gerald Vizenor in American Indian literary study is indicated by this issue, unintentionally "special," focused on his work. The genesis was sparked on May 1 at the MELUS Conference in Berkeley after a special session on his "Thomas White Hawk." Juana María Rodríguez, Irene Gonzales, and Winona Stevenson, each Vizenor's former student, presented brief papers that attempted to come to terms with that compelling piece, originally published as an advocacy pamphlet and later reprinted and contextualized with "Commutation of Death" in Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports; in Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, Vizenor expanded the story with the four additional contributions in his "White Hawk and the Prairie Fun Dancers" section: "No Rest for the Good Sheriff," "Daisie and Beacher on the Prairie," "Word War in the Partsroom," and "Prosecutors and Prairie Fun Dancers." (The case retains its hold on his imagination, for he is currently at work on yet another narrative.) Betty Louise Bell moderated the session, and Vizenor himself served as respondent; the three essays are included here. Strolling away from the Conference building to a coffee house across from the University of California campus, Vizenor the trickster commented that "I defy analysis," despite the engaging efforts of the four women in the previous two hours. Indeed, the ensuing conversation, also included here, did much to confirm the validity of his remark.
        At the core of these discussions are many key questions that not only apply to the Vizenor canon, expanding at an astonishing and unrivaled rate, but also to all Native Literatures, not least important questions about genre and the nature of narrative. Tellingly, some of this material will also appear in a special issue of the journal Genre, guest edited by Vizenor and Alan Velie. Just what is "Thomas White Hawk"? Journalism or short story? Fact or fiction? Is it an independent narrative (of whatever nature) or a segment of a larger and {2} evolving cluster? Is it reportage or autobiography? All are questions that have been asked of much of Vizenor's work, and the contribution in this issue illuminate an evolving examination.
        Shortly after the MELUS Conference, two essays arrived at the SAIL editorial offices that contributed to this exchange. Nora Barry's discussion of the gambler transcends the usual boundaries of literary criticism by embracing key aspects of cultural and personal biography. Further, Patricia Linton contextualizes Vizenor by juxtaposing him against William Gibson and Ursula K. LeGuin, asking important questions about the nature of person, self, and subject. Ironically, while Vizenor's production seems to increase exponentially, his audience seems still contained by the traditional boundaries of Indian literary studies; readers seem to be becoming more aware of him but also seem to grow proportionately puzzled by his work. Perhaps by placing his efforts in wider and more varied contexts, such as CyberPunk, and by examining the position of the writer in his writing, not just in Interior Landscapes, we can more fully appreciate this monolithic figure.
        Finally, this issue also includes Vizenor's own contribution, the screenplay of his Harold of Orange, certainly a non-traditional genre. While many have seen the fine film, few have had the opportunity to examine the text, published here for the first time. Just as this issue was sparked in a coffee house, it concludes in one as well--here is an afternoon's material for stimulating discussion and irreverent debate, a multifaceted discourse that includes the word warrior himself.

The "Person" in Postmodern Fiction: Gibson, Le Guin, and Vizenor

Patricia Linton         

One of the strong currents in postmodern fiction is a changing notion of what constitutes a person. Challenges to the existence and the importance of the independent, coherent "self" have led critics to label postmodern works "anti-humanist" or, more accurately, "post-humanist" (for example, analyses of postmodernism by Linda Hutcheon and Veronica Hollinger). Jane Flax has observed that postmodern discourses are all "deconstructive" in that they seek to distance us from beliefs that are taken for granted in Western culture and to make us skeptical of them (624). The idea that only human beings are capable of consciousness and agency is one of those core beliefs that have been placed in question.
        In Discerning the Subject, Paul Smith has analyzed both the terminology employed to articulate this concept and its use in the discourses of contemporary criticism. He demonstrates that terminology poses problems because the words person, individual, self, and subject have been so weighted with implications that are false or partial that they can never be used safely. Person, individual, and self imply an undivided core that is the seat of perception and conscious action. Smith calls this a "misleading description of an imaginary ground" (xxxv) where multiple seats of consciousness are gathered and integrated. Subject, on the other hand, suggests something not self-contained but determined and dominated by forces outside itself. Subject, too, is inaccurate in its suggestion of stability; it is unable to take into account the multiplicity of provisional positions that anyone may occupy as he or she interacts with the world. The features that comprise a person's identity are inevitably unstable, not only in their make-up, but in their relative power and the dynamics of their interactions. Some features are contradictory; a person can be white and female, a teacher and a student--in each dyad, one element is a {4} position of power and one element is a position of powerlessness. These elements sort and rank themselves differently on different occasions.
        According to Smith, what tends to be lost in all of these formulations of personhood is the concept of "agency"--a provisional cluster of subject-positions that establishes a ground for action, both resistance and assertion. Smith emphasizes three crucial points that other critical discourses often neglect: (1) the cluster of features we have been accustomed to referring to as the "self" or the "person" is provisional rather than stable, multiple rather than unitary; (2) these negotiated subject-positions--what Patrick Murphy terms "pivots" rather than centers (1-2)--are neither wholly independent nor wholly determined by external social forces; (3) although the liberal humanist notion of an undivided core is inaccurate, there is "singularity" in the sense that every one has a unique history--in other words, each of us comes by a different route to the ground on which we stand at this moment.
        Postmodern fiction presses the boundaries of personhood not only by decentering the idea of identity or individuality, but also by suggesting that personhood is not exclusively human. It is important to recognize, however, that this perception is only postmodern when viewed within the continuum of the dominant Western traditions of literature. Set within a broader framework, one that gives due attention to other cultural perspectives--notably, Native American traditions--an inclusive concept of personhood is not postmodern at all but actually pre-modern. In fact, Arnold Krupat has suggested that postmodernism has had a salutary effect on the reception of Native American literature because it has accustomed readers to more varied literary insights and strategies (323).
        In the postmodern novel, consciousness and agency can be exercised by machines and animals as well as by human beings. Ironically, it may be easier for many readers to relate to machines (especially computers) as persons than to animals as persons. Mixed with the sense that machines are inadequate or flawed because they lack genuine emotions is awe and fear of their often superior potential for rationality and concerted action. Machines can exceed humans in capacities we have been taught to respect--linear thought, decisive action, control--rather than in capacities we have been taught to dismiss--emotion, intuition, unpredictability. Machines are aliens or "others" that may be better than we are in ways we take seriously. Donna Haraway points out in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" that science fiction about the union of human and machine in the cyborg offers "potent myths for resistance and recoupling" (179). Although we have been accustomed to thinking of cyborg unities as "monstrous and {5} illegitimate," they have successfully undermined our secure sense of what counts as nature. Human conceptions of "nature," Haraway stresses, are historically contingent; they can be changed (Penley and Ross 2).
        In his discussion of cyberpunk fiction, stories of the high-tech culture of the future that he calls "the vanguard white male art of the age" (267), Istvan Csicsery-Ronay comments that cyberpunk is "fundamentally ambivalent about the breakdown of the distinctions between human and machine, between personal consciousness and machine consciousness" (275). This ambivalence can be seen in William Gibson's striking novel entitled Neuromancer. Csicsery-Ronay has hailed the novel as "one of the most interesting books of the postmodern age" (269). Veronica Hollinger has called Neuromancer the "quintessential cyberpunk novel," the cyberpunk "limit-text" ("Cybernetic Deconstructions" 30). She discusses it as fiction that illustrates the "potential of cyberpunk to undermine concepts like `subjectivity' and `identity'" (35).
        Like much cyberpunk fiction, Neuromancer deals with efforts by corporations to use their vast technical resources to create new beings, artificial intelligences that would be more powerful, more reliable (and more profitable) because they would eliminate the defects of the human. However, the formula has been altered in interesting ways. In the first place, the myth of origin in Neuromancer emphasizes the feminine, the role of the mother, rather than the role of the patriarch as creator. As the protagonist, Case, gradually uncovers the history of his employer, Wintermute, an artificial intelligence operative of the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation, what comes to light is a family tragedy in which the crucial issue is the status of illegitimate "children."
        Wintermute is what one expects an artificial intelligence to be--coolly rational, unemotional, oppressively competent. Early in the novel, Wintermute has communicated an image of himself (itself) to Case in a dream--a nightmare image of a wasp's nest, "hideous in its perfection" (126). But Wintermute's objective, instilled by Marie-France Tessier, is to unite with Neuromancer, his brother and shadow, whose "medium" is personality (259). Glenn Grant reads Marie-France Tessier as a "mad corporate matriarch" whose objective is personal immortality (47). Yet it is her husband, Ashpool, the patriarch of the corporation, whom the novel describes as a mad king (203). According to their daughter, Ashpool killed his wife because "he couldn't accept the direction she intended for [the] family" (229):

She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. . . . Tessier-Ashpool would be {6} immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. (229)

        The novel sets the goals of the matriarch and those of the patriarch against one another. The patriarch Ashpool kills to defend the status quo; he defends autonomous human consciousness and a hierarchy in which all of his operatives, human and artificial, keep to their places. On the other side, Marie-France Tessier's vision is certainly disturbing. There is no question that she has sought to abandon individual consciousness as we understand it: "She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness. . . . Only in certain heightened modes would an individual--a clan member--suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness" (217).
        Yet the end of the novel does not support apocalyptic fears of the loss of human agency. Hollinger has commented on the way the cyberpunk novel "decenters the human body, the sacred icon of the essential self" ("Cybernetic Deconstructions" 32-33). Neuromancer's conclusion also decenters our obsession with the inviolability of independent consciousness. Wintermute, the computer mind, the "cybernetic spider," succeeds in uniting with his shadow, Neuromancer, who is all personality, and "becomes" the matrix. But in response to Case's question, "How are things different?" Wintermute responds "Things aren't different. Things are things" (270). When Case remembers his vision of the "community mind" Wintermute represents, he understands why Wintermute portrayed it as a nest but feels "no revulsion" (269):

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer. (269)

The new being Wintermute has become is not preoccupied with humans, but rather with relationship to other like beings: "I talk to my own kind" (270). If Wintermute is Marie-France Tessier's demon offspring, her illegitimate child, his interest at the end of the novel seems to be the feminine concern for relationship rather than the patriarchal concern for control.
        A similar portrayal of a machine-being is offered in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home. In this remarkable postmodern novel, a futuristic world is rendered in a variety of different kinds of discourse, including narrative, poetry, ethnography, and journal writing, blurring the distinctions between reader, author, and character {7}(Cummins 162). In this world, a society of cybernetic beings coexists with human society: "Some eleven thousand sites all over the planet were occupied by independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings--computers with mechanical extensions" (156). The language of the novel makes it clear that these beings represent a form of life and consciousness: "The business of the City of Mind was, apparently, the business of any species or individual: to go on existing." Its activity was the collection and interpretation of information of all kinds, plus "the improvement and continuous enhancement of . . . the network as a whole--in other words, conscious, self-directed evolution" (157). Like Gibson's novel, Le Guin's suggests that advanced machine intelligence, although far more powerful than human intelligence at certain kinds of linear thinking, would not concern itself with manipulation or control of human life. And as the artificial intelligence in Neuromancer can be seen as the offspring of a human matriarch, so the artificial intelligences in the City of Mind recognize the lineage they share with humankind. Human consciousness represents "a primitive ancestor or divergent and retarded kindred" (159). In the view of the human inhabitants of Le Guin's world, "the two species had diverged to the extent that competition between them was nonexistent, cooperation limited, and the question of superiority and inferiority bootless" (159).
        However, in Always Coming Home, the greater challenge to the privileged position of human consciousness arises from the status of animals as persons. The Valley people, called the Kesh, the society at the heart of the novel, have a sense of community and reciprocity with all living entities. According to Le Guin, the Kesh have no concept of higher and lower values; rather they articulate values in terms of concerns that are central or less central (Dancing 187). The Kesh concept of conscious life includes all elements of the ecosystem: animals, plants, other features of the biosphere such as rocks, mountains, fields, and streams, as well as human beings. The putative narrator of the novel comments, "It is very hard for me to keep in mind that `people' in this language includes animals, plants, dreams, rocks, etc." (181). An explanation of kinship within the Houses (or clans) of the Valley people begins:

Relatives . . . included creatures other than human beings. . . . To call an olive tree grandmother or a sheep sister . . . is behavior easily dismissed as "primitive" or as "symbolic." To the Kesh, it was the person who could not understand or admit such relationship whose intelligence was in a primitive condition and whose thinking was unrealistic. (451)

{8} Human interrelationships with animals are particularly close and complex because these two kinds of "people" live together and provide food for one another. It is important to offer ritual words of respect before killing an animal. When Stone-Telling, a central character in the novel, accompanies her Condor father (a member of an alien society) on a journey out of the Valley, she is shocked at the indifference to life shown by him and his men: "Along the way they sometimes killed cattle or sheep grazing on those high hills. They did not ask me to, but I came and gave the person they killed my words" (201).
        When she lives with the Condor people, Stone-Telling is situated between two value systems (Roberts 146). The indifference of the Condors to animal life is an index of the hierarchical and exploitive attitudes that characterize their culture. They are contemptuous of women and of "hontiks"--members of foreign cultures and lower castes. To be told that she is half-animal is a deadly insult. On the other hand, when she finally returns to the Valley, her companion Esiryu comments, "Here people are animals" (390); in the Valley context, this identification of human and animal life is an affirmation, a recognition that the Kesh "live softly," in harmony with all elements of their environment.
        The movement from one value system to another highlights alternative conceptions of an "individual" or a "self." Readers for whom the Kesh conception of animals as persons is exotic or strained find themselves identifying uncomfortably with the "wrong" culture. In the Condor culture where animals are not persons, most humans are not persons either. Readers who do not wish to share the sickness of the oppressor must rethink the conviction that human consciousness is privileged. Thus in the course of the novel readers may feel themselves occupying different subject-positions, grounding their perceptions of themselves and their interactions with the environment in different definitions of "self."
        A final example of the postmodern novel's disruption of the secure sense of what constitutes a person is provided by Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart. Louis Owens has written of the novel, "To read Bearheart is to take risks, for no preconceived notion of identity is safe, no dearly held belief inviolable" (141). The novel chronicles the migration to the Fourth World of a group of Native Americans displaced by corporate greed and the disintegration of American high-tech culture. It challenges the autonomy and priority of human selfhood in a variety of ways, some fundamentally disquieting.
        In this novel, animals have shamanistic power. The tribal pilgrims are guided on their journey by seven clown crows. A dog named Pure {9} Gumption is a healer. The central figure in the novel, the trickster Proude Cedarfair, joins his consciousness with that of a vision bear. The mythic significance of these animal figures is not readily paraphrasable; nevertheless, their function as actors in the narrative begins, in Donna Haraway's terms, to "break down the notion that only [human] language-bearing actors have . . . agency" (Penley and Ross 3).
        More difficult to assimilate is an incident, realistically presented, in which a woman has sex with two dogs. Vizenor asserts that the scene is not "pornographic, obscene, or bestial" because in tribal culture "animals are not lower in evolutionary status" (Bruchac 296). He argues that reception of the passage is essentially a question of worldview--readers who are offended are incapable of accepting mythic truth as concrete and real. He points to a cultural tradition in which all creatures are regarded as exercising consciousness and agency. Responding, in an interview, to questions about the passage, he mentions tribal stories in which there is sex or marriage between humans and animals:

You can accept that on a kind of folk level, mythic level, but here it is, now what do you do? Is it too real? Has it lost its mythic power or is myth just make-believe? Is myth just for fairy-tale movies or is myth a powerful reality, a truth that can be experienced? (Coltelli 175)

By offering myth as reality, Vizenor challenges readers' certainties about who is a person and who is not, what is fitting and what is not. It is almost inevitable that a reader reacting to such a scene will feel the "self" ungrounded, poised on several positions at once, failing to negotiate a single stance.
        All three of these postmodern novels--Gibson's Neuromancer, Le Guin's Always Coming Home, and Vizenor's Bearheart--prompt readers to confront their fears of loss or diminishment if other entities are acknowledged as persons. In the recent past, our myths have projected a human loss of autonomy if machine-beings achieve selfhood and a loss of dignity if animals are recognized as subjects. Such fears exist because we are too anthropocentric to recognize any other kind of agency except our own. Donna Haraway has argued that regaining a conception of nature that permits us to imagine "genuinely social and actively relational" exchanges with a variety of actors would permit us to "refigure the kinds of persons we might be" ("Actors" 21). The "fantasies" of postmodern fiction may help to reinstate that vision.

{10}

Bruchac, Joseph, ed. "Follow the Trickroutes: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor." Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Sun Tracks 15. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987. 287-310.

Coltelli, Laura, ed. "Gerald Vizenor." Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 155-82.

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism." Mississippi Review 47/48 (1988): 266-78.

Cummins, Elizabeth. "The Land-Lady's Homebirth: Revisiting Ursula K. Le Guin's Worlds." Science-Fiction Studies 17.2 (1990): 153-66.

Flax, Jane. "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (1987): 621-43.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Grant, Glenn. "Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson's Neuromancer." Science-Fiction Studies 17.l (1990): 41-49.

Haraway, Donna. "The Actors Are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to `Cyborgs at Large.'" Technoculture. Ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. 21-26.

---. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the l980s." Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 173-204.

Hollinger, Veronica. "Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism." Mosaic 23.2 (1990): 29-44.

---. "Feminist Science Fiction: Breaking up the Subject." Extrapolation 31 (1990): 229-39.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

---. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Krupat, Arnold. "An Approach to Native American Texts." Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 323-38. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. Boston: Hall, 1985. 116-31.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. New York: Bantam, 1987.

---. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove, 1989.

Murphy, Patrick D. "Pivots Instead of Centers: Postmodern Spirituality of Gary Snyder and Ursula K. Le Guin." Paper presented at The Shadow of Spirit: Contemporary Western Thought and Its Religious Subtexts Conference. King's College, Cambridge UK, July l990.

Owens, Louis. "Ecstatic Strategies: Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart." Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native {11} American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 141-53.

Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway." Technoculture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. 1-20.

Roberts, Robin. "Post-Modernism and Feminist Science Fiction." Science-Fiction Studies 17.2 (1990): 136-52.

Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St Paul: Truck, 1978. Rpt. as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

Nora Barry         

        Manabozho, the Anishinabe (Ojibwa/Chippewa) trickster, enters a dwelling through "a mat of scalps" to meet the gambler, "a curious looking being" who is "almost round in shape." Hanging in his wigwam are the hands of those who lost their lives in games of chance. Yet Manabozho laughingly plays with this sinister being as they toss the figures of the four ages of man in a dish game. The gambler wins three tosses of the figures, who all remain standing:

But one chance remained, upon which depended the destiny of manabozho and the salvation of the anishinabe people. He was not frightened, and when the nita ataqed prepared to make the final shake, manabozho drew near and when the dish came down on the ground he made a whistle on the wind, as in surprise, and the figures fell. Manabozho then seized the dish saying: it is now my turn, should I win you must die. (Summary and quotation are taken from the retelling of Theodore Beaulieu's version by Gerald Vizenor in anishinabe adisokan: Tales of the People 147-49)¹

        The myth of the gambler occurs in Native American traditions as a test for a trickster and/or culture hero, who must win the game in order for the tribe or something valuable to it to survive. All of the gambler's victims must wager their lives, and Gerald Vizenor's contemporary texts imply that this mortal game is still being played.
        Indeed, on an everyday level, games of chance are endemic to Native American cultures with 382 pages of games of chance described by Stewart Culin in Games of the North American Indians. He points out that many of the games he records were "played ceremonially," often including music and dance as accompaniment, and are mentioned in several origin myths (32-34). Dish games, in which carved figures {14} are tossed, and the moccasin game, where players try to track a playing piece, are familiar to Vizenor's readers and described as part of several cultures by Culin (65-67, 339-45). Nor are games of chance a thing of the past, although they may have lost their ceremonial function, as Seminole and other tribal bingo games as well as the apparent success of the Pequot's Foxwood Casino in rural Connecticut attest.
        Vizenor's texts reflect the mythic, ceremonial, as well as secular aspects of games of chance connected often with the gambler figure. Although his work is associated most often with Trickster, variations on the gambler story loom as a constant threat to the trickster's ability to "balance the forces of good and evil through good humor in the urban world" (Wordarrows 30). In Vizenor's vision the gambler would destroy the comic, yet sacred, survival strategies his texts celebrate. If the woodland trickster is a "comic trope; a universal language game" (The Trickster of Liberty ix-x), then the mythic gambler is a potentially tragic trope in Vizenor's language game, a threat to, but also a test of, balance for the compassionate trickster.
        Although the gambler appears in Vizenor's texts through very different narrative strategies, the myth represents in all of the texts a struggle against spirit-killing absolutes, what Vizenor calls "terminal creeds." When narrative chance finds certain characters facing the gambling test, they survive because of an undogmatic, even casual, adherence to rituals that reflect tribal values. Yet narrative chance as random event appears as quite positive and reflects what Louis Owens calls the "infinite proliferation of possibility" (Other Destinies 234). Chance brings together an evolving, not static, world of ritual with the postmodern world of possibility. Vizenor sees the postmodern condition as "an invitation to narrative chance in a new language game . . ."(Narrative Chance 4). Indeed, in works such as Dead Voices, he rejects the "romantic revisions of the tribal past" and associates his heroine Bagese with "tribal chance" (6). Bagese lives her life through a wanaki game and becomes bear, beaver, squirrel, crow, flea, praying mantis, or trickster with the turn of a card (17).
        Vizenor refers directly to gambling and indirectly to the gambler in several texts. In Earthdivers, Father Berald One is accused of losing money for the tribe through meddling with the outcome of bingo. However, he plays for tribal men and women who "were responsible for the care of others" (155). He wins through a variation on tribal vision when he pictures "the numbers and letters in his mind and concentrate[s] on the numbers to complete a row in favor of the person he chose to win" (155). Also, Slyboots Brown, one of a family of tricksters in The Trickster of Liberty, makes a fortune with a game called tribe--a name adapted to avoid a confrontation with the {15} government, but obviously a form of bingo. Through this game, Slyboots gains a college scholarship and the financial betterment of his community.
        Bingo can have dubious results, however. In Crossbloods, bingo earned millions for a small tribal community near Red Wing, Minnesota. Yet Vizenor, in his journalistic mode, notes that:

The enormous cash returns, according to some critics, have attracted organized crime. Behind the wild cash and instant fiscal power in tribal communities, a serious concern has been voiced by several scholars; should tests of tribal sovereignties be tied to games of chance? (19-20)

Is the mythic gambler in charge of bingo? Or is the mob the gambler? Or is the game the economic and entrepreneurial answer to tribal ills? Vizenor leaves the questions open. However, while bingo as chance might be open to scholarly or journalistic criticism, when played through ritual (Father Berald One) and for generosity (Berald One and Slyboots), gambling and chance are positive forces.
        Gerald Vizenor uses the gambler myth directly and often in many of his texts. In The People Named the Chippewa, he adds dramatic details to Theodore Beaulieu's version when he tells how Manabozho ignores his grandmother's warnings against "the great gambler who has never been beaten in his game and who lives beyond the realm of darkness" (4). However, Trickster travels through this hellish underworld (People 4) where he hears "the groans and hisses and yells of countless fiends gloating over their many victims of sin and shame . . . and he knew that this was the place where the great gambler had abandoned the spirits of his victims who had lost the game" (5). When he meets the gambler and defeats him on the fourth toss by "making a teasing whistle on the wind" (6), the tribes are saved temporarily from losing their spirit to the land of darkness, for "the trickster had stopped evil for a moment in a game" (6). Now Manabozho will toss and, should the figures remain standing, the gambler will lose his life. Vizenor ends the story as Manabozho "cracks the dish on the earth" (6).
        In Vizenor's texts the game is never finished and neverending. He makes this clear in his autobiography, Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, when he retells a portion of the traditional story but ends at the beginning of the game (27). He then says that his father, Clement William Vizenor, who was murdered in Minneapolis, "lost the game with the evil gambler and did not return from the cities" (27). Later in the autobiography, Vizenor retells the complete story of Manabozho and the evil gambler to the point of the {16} last toss but adds, "that game, the four ages of man, continues to be played with evil gamblers in the cities" (180).
        An example of the gambler's urban presence occurs in Wordarrows, when Laurel Hole In The Day comes for aid to tribal advocate Clement Beaulieu, who finds her a landlord: ". . . a despicable overweight slumlord who smoked stout cigars, the reincarnation of the evil gambler from the tribal past, [who] agreed to provide a six-month lease . . ." (51). Laurel's dreams evaporate in the gritty realities of urban life and she returns to the reservation. Her confrontation with the reincarnation of the gambler is not the immediate cause of her retreat but is representative of the many confrontations that lead her back to a tribal, and open, if difficult, world--in other words to "tribal chance."
        Vizenor's most extensive direct representation of and variation on the gambler myth appears in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (previously titled Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart). Although the gambler episode in the novel is only one of many tests for Proude Cedarfair, the pilgrims who travel with him, and their animal helpers, this confrontation is narratively and philosophically at the center of Vizenor's text. Vizenor does not retell the traditional story here but instead creates a fully realized modern equivalent of the evil gambler in the character of Sir Cecil Staples, who:

. . . dreams in themes of great rivers dark and deep. Coiled stoutwhite on a leather chair behind his heart shaped desk he is dressed in a shortsleeved tan uniform. Small silver birds are pinned to the epaulets on his shirt. He wears a translucent obsidian pendant on a beaded chain and a diamond ring on his little finger. His bald head, marked with dark pigmentation like tracks from small birds, droops forward on his chest. His upper lip twitches like that of a sleeping desert animal. (101)

Echoes of the myth are apparent here. The traditional gambler has a door of scalps; the cut off hands of his victims decorate the wigwam. Sir Cecil has two skeletons on his wall "near the entrance," "their white-bones touching in fleshless passion" (101). He is associated with realms of darkness yet appears round and white like the figure in the myth. But Vizenor's description also associates Sir Cecil with contemporary images of the military, with the accoutrements of a pimp or a drug lord, as well as endowing him with the name of an English aristocrat. Metaphorically and physically, he also bears a resemblance to Joseph Conrad's corrupt, empirical culture hero Kurtz with his bald and "bony head" who appears as "an animated image of death carved out of old ivory" (Heart of Darkness 59). Like Kurtz, Sir Cecil {17} presumably hoards, not ivory, but that most essential of all commodities to the industrial world--gasoline.
        Sir Cecil is a corrupted trickster, what Trickster could become through greed and through lack of tribal values. He possesses trickster qualities in his creation of many identities for himself. Stolen as a child, he is encouraged by his stepmother in guiltless murder and incest as well as in aristocratic pretensions. He is, like Trickster, a wanderer who finds his truest identity in tricking people, but he does not trick to liberate or to balance good and evil through humor. Yet he is a necessary figure because Proude/Manabozho is tested by him. In Vizenor's novel, Sir Cecil and the other characters are given free and independent voice. As Maureen Keady says, "on the whole the Gambler's philosophy is utterly perverse, but within it there are kernels of truth" (62) about guilt-making family, corrupt government, and terminal creeds. Sir Cecil reminds us that chance means all the possibilities that the compassionate trickster must face.
        In order to play the traditional game, the pilgrims find themselves embroiled in choosing a good gambler to confront Sir Cecil and lose life or gain the promise of gasoline, but Proude Cedarfair, the trickster/ culture hero of the novel, says "chances are terminal creeds" (111). As Owens sees this and other episodes in the novel, "Chance, random event, would deny the responsibility of individuals for the world they inhabit, a denial not part of the traditional tribal world view" (Narrative Chance 147). Possibilities remain open as the pilgrims base their choice on an elaborate word game won by Lilith Mae, who becomes the good gambler yet who "did not know the rituals of spiritual balance and power" (116). Lilith Mae wins the second round against the gambler "driven with a perfect power"; however, she "took personal pleasure in winning and lost her place in the energies of sacred time" (118). She succumbs to fear and loses the ceremonial moment and the game.
        Proude Cedarfair is left to save the pilgrims by playing with the gambler. Entering the trailer, he smells "The pungent odor of false civilizations, foolish terminal creeds and the bare visions of death. Living smells sweet and gives other lives breath. Death has the smell of cities and machines and plastics" (120). As Culin notes about games of chance among North American Indians, the games "appear to be played ceremonially, as pleasing to the gods, with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, expelling demons, or curing sickness" (34). Alone with Sir Cecil, Proude ceremonially faces "eastward. He smiled and roared in a low bear voice at evil" (131). In Proude's confrontation with the gambler, Vizenor appears to allude to the sacred Ojibway rituals of the Midewiwin (Ruoff 67).
{18}
        Manabozho, with whom Proude is parallel in this variation on the myth, is associated with the origins of the Midewiwin for he was sent "with the gift of medicine" (Johnston 80, Coleman 58) to the Anishanabeg by Kitche Manitou and remains the principal figure in the Great Medicine Lodge (Coleman 56). In Ojibway Heritage, Basil Johnston describes initiation into the four orders of the Midewiwin. During each initiation, the candidate is met by four bears "emblematic of all that is good in life" (Johnston 86). In each succeeding initiation, the candidate is obstructed by various malevolent spirits (reminiscent of the "coiled" gambler in Bearheart). The initiation is also a test of whether the candidate is on the correct path in life as he makes four journeys, analogous to the four stages of life (parallel to the four figures in the gambler's dish game), around the "Midewigun before gaining admittance into the inner sanctum. On and along the way he must not falter and yield to forces of evil" (86).
        When he and Proude toss the figures representing the four ages of man, the gambler serves as an obstruction similar to those in the ceremony. He would tie himself to Proude through chance:

At the end, the end of all games, when we both have the power to balance the world and raise the four directions, we will find a new game because we are after all bound to chance. . . . Evil will still be the winner because nothing changes when good and evil are tied in a strange balance. (Bearheart 131)

Sir Cecil also claims that he and Proude are equals "at this game of good and evil" (132). But Proude will not accept an equality, a common vision, a "power adverse to living" (132); he will not accept the gambler's voice as his. He argues that "Death is not the opposite of living, but you are the opposite of living" (132). This association of life and death is apparent in the initiation to the Fourth Order of the Midewiwin, when the candidate intones, "I come / To die. / I come / For life." The members respond, "It is easy to die. / It is hard to live" (Johnston 92). When Sir Cecil Staples picks up the dish for the third and final toss, "confident that good and evil were in a strange balance," like Manabozho, Proude makes "a teasing whistle on the wind," the four figures fall, and the evil gambler must die (132). Vizenor's variations on the gambler myth always include the wind motif, associating his protagonists clearly with Manabozho, whose mother was impregnated by wind, and, in some versions of his life, Manabozho is the east wind or helps finish off the world through blowing on sand.²
        The certainty of the gambler's death in Bearheart shifts the emphasis of the myth. There is no fourth round eternally caught in narrative openness when Proude/Manabozho might win or lose.{19} Proude's association with bears, who appear prominently in the Midewiwin ceremonies, which include the priest and the candidate impersonating bears (Dewdney 116), as well as his association with Manabozho's whistle on the wind, make this confrontation with the gambler and with chance highly ritualized to show Proude Cedarfair's real powers to transform life.
        Most of Proude's fellow pilgrims do not have his power, indirectly associated with breaking through barriers in the Midewiwin ceremonies. The death that the Gambler represents lives on to take the lives of those characters who bow to "terminal creeds" (Keady 63). At the end of the novel, few of the pilgrims have survived to make the ascent, the metamorphosis into the Fourth World. But Proude Cedarfair and Inawa Biwide "flew with vision bears ha ha ha haaa from the window on the perfect light into the fourth world" (243). Also, Proude's wife, Rosina, follows the animal helpers, the clown crows and luminescent mongrel Pure Gumption, "to the top of the north mesa where the sacred road led to rainbows and the sunrise" where Rosina "found bear tracks in the snow" (245). Hereafter, Rosina is associated with the Pueblo stories of Changing Woman and vision bears as the mythology of the woodlands and the mythology of the deserts meet.
        The Heirs of Columbus provides Vizenor's most elaborate variation on the gambler motif when a handsome blond wiindigoo takes on the role of the gambler. In Anishinabe stories a wiindigoo is an icy cannibal monster associated with starving in winter (Barnouw 120, Dewdney 124, Landes 13). In Vizenor's variation, the wiindigoo cannot be beaten in a moccasin game and his winning will destroy all humans and leave only robots and the wiindigoo gambler.
        The demon wiindigoo insists that "The tribe is a game, the children are a game, but evil and fear are chances, and nothing in the world is more real than the moccasin game. . . . This is your last chance to save the game and the real" (21). The tribal players are saved by an ice woman who blows a cold wind--a variation on the whistling on the wind motif--and freezes the wiindigoo as he makes his last move. She holds the wiindigoo and the accoutrements of the game in the back of her cave (22) until he is unfrozen by government agents. While the heirs of Columbus and their new world at Point Assinika seem doomed, the wiindigoo withdraws over the threat of a war herb, associated with the Lakota mystic Black Elk, and revealed to Stone Columbus in a dream. Here Vizenor uses variations on the tribal rituals of dream/ vision and herbal medicines to outwit the gambler figure.
        The wiindigoo insists that the game never ends (183) and that no chance is his last chance (180) when Vizenor leaves his text, once again, open ended. As "The children danced on the marina, and their wounds were healed once more in a moccasin game with demons" {20}(183), one is reminded that children are particularly talented at destroying a wiindigoo (Barnouw 129). The "whistling on the wind" motif appears as a tune from the New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak when Vizenor asserts the power of old and new world "winds" to create balance. Also, the moccasin game is accompanied traditionally by ceremonial drumming and singing (Culin 339). Combining the wiindigoo and gambler figures in a new variation on traditional myths and rituals reflects the evolution of traditional texts and traditional ceremonies. Vizenor presents the social and spiritual cannibalism of the dominant culture as it intersects with these new variations on tribal ritual and chance.
        Even in the most postmodern of Native American texts, ongoing and always renewable narrative traditions and tribal rituals remain powerful. Gerald Vizenor creates worlds where traditional myths and everyday reality are interwoven in new variations. In his work the mythic process is a part of that everyday reality; it is simultaneous with it in ways similar to the vertical chronotope Mikhail Bakhtin envisions in chivalric romance where one must see ". . . this entire world as simultaneous" (Dialogic Imagination 157). However, in Vizenor's texts, mythic reality is always in the process of evolving: it is never finished; it is not an absolute. The myth of the gambler used as a direct text, as an indirect subtext, or as a variation on the traditional materials creates the evolving simultaneity of mythic and everyday realities and establishes a test of balance. Even though Vizenor's trickster novels are comic and satiric, the gambler is there to remind us that the comic text might deconstruct itself at any time through narrative chance to become tragic. Characters who face the gambler must take risks, must submit to narrative chance; however, through variations on tribal rituals, they often restore, momentarily, the balance of good and evil.

        ¹Another version of the Chippewa gambler story can be found in Radin and Reagan (61-62). The gambler figure appears also in the Southwest. See Franz Boas' Keresan Texts (76-82, 253) and Frank Hamilton Cushing's Zuni Folk Tales (385-97). Diné Bahane' includes a gambling god "descended among the Pueblos" (Zolbrod 99f). Also out of the Pueblo tradition, Leslie Marmon Silko retells a great gambler story in Ceremony (170-76).

        ²Radin and Reagan note that wind impregnates Manabozho's mother (107) and associate him with the east wind (84). Ruth Landes describes Manabozho {21} as being created by winds out of the body of Mother Earth's daughter (24). Sister Bernard Coleman says that the four corners of wind killed the trickster's mother (63).

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Barnouw, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.

Boas, Franz. Keresan Texts. Part 1. New York : American Ethnological Society, 1928.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Source Criticism. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988.

Culin, Stewart. Games of the North American Indians. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992.

Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Zuni Folk Tales. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1988.

Dewdney, Selwyn. The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1975.

Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.

Keady, Maureen. "Walking Backwards Into the Fourth World: Survival of the Fittest in Bearheart." American Indian Quarterly 9 (1985): 61-65.

Landes, Ruth. Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1968.

Owens, Louis. "Ecstatic Strategies: Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart." Narrative Chance. 141-53.

---. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies 3. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992.

Radin, Paul, and A. B. Reagan. "Ojibwa Myths and Tales." Journal of American Folklore Society 41 (1928): 61-146.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. "Compassionate Trickster." American Indian Quarterly 9 (1985): 67-73.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Vizenor, Gerald. anishinabe adisokan: Tales of the People. Minneapolis: Nodin, 1970.

---. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. N.p.: Truck, 1978. Rpt. as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

---. Dead Voices. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992.

{54}
---. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1981.

---. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991.

---. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

---. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989.

---. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

---. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

---. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1978.

Zolbrod, Paul G. Diné Bahane': The Navajo Creation Story. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984.

Juana María Rodríguez         

At first encounter, "Thomas White Hawk" is a straightforward narrative of murder in post-colonial¹ America, another Bigger Thomas caught in the web of someone else's nightmare. Gerald Vizenor enters in the role of narrative mediator who, acting through the authority of the text, intervenes to effect communication and renegotiate the terms of the discourse. A life is at stake. The immediate goal is having White Hawk's death sentence changed to one of life imprisonment. Through the publication and dissemination of the story, this goal is attained: White Hawk's sentence is commuted to life imprisonment without parole. Both the life of Thomas White Hawk and the right of whites to hunt other game in South Dakota, free of Indian protests and controversy, are preserved, but the story and the storyteller remain to unravel the fabric of relations that constitute power.
        In Vizenor's narrative, multiple relations of power compete within preexisting narratives, entangling the ways in which these discursive spaces are defined and the various ways in which power is exercised within them. Foucault challenges the paradigm that defines power as a "general system or domination exerted by one group over another." Instead, he writes, "Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (History of Sexuality 92-93). The texts that comprise the case of Thomas White Hawk can be explored in several ways, such as the means by which the multiple subject of White Hawk acts, reacts, and is acted upon within an interwoven system of power relations. Power within this context consists of both individual and institutional power. In this case, institutional power extends to encompass the reservation, the courts, fosterage and guardian systems, educational systems, prisons, churches, families, and psychiatric institutions. Also important are the ways in which the story of this multiple subject is written, negotiated, and inscribed by a multitude of discursive systems,{24} including psychiatry, law, feminism, and an American Indian national liberation movement, as well as the ways in which different narrative styles Vizenor employs illuminate and shadow elements of the story.
        In "Thomas White Hawk," Vizenor begins the story with the last details of James Yeado's life. It is an intimate portrait: the narrator tells us that Yeado was a Virgo, a gardener, the father of two children, and a member of the Vermillion Chamber of Commerce. On the opposite page is a copy of a handwritten note with the words "Notes Pertaining to My Case" scribbled across the top. Its author is not identified, but we know it is Yeado's murderer. Vizenor first introduces us to Thomas James White Hawk a few paragraphs later, identified as a freshman premed student. He writes, "Yeado had sold a good many engagement rings to University students, but this one was different. He knew them both. They were Indians" (102). The last two lines are short and deliberate, and the sequence seems noteworthy. The narrator does not refer to these Indians by tribe or speculate about the nature of Yeado's knowledge. The sentences seem somewhat connected, yet the connection is never stated. By beginning from the perspective of Yeado, the narrator creates a sense of textual distance and neutrality from White Hawk and compassion for the murder victim.
        Vizenor's construction of White Hawk seems slow and deliberate. Bits and pieces of his life are interspersed between vivid details of the crime and the ensuing events of the trial. White Hawk the murderer, the rapist, the Indian becomes layered with other vestments of identity: a Dakota born on the Rosebud reservation, an orphan who had lived under the care of white people for most of his life, a football player and track star who had suffered an injury to the head many years back, a young man who dreams of being a doctor. The omniscient narrator never hints at the source of his construction. Some of the details are mundane, others more profound. Many incidents are only suggested in the text, yet the suggestions are revealing, beginning with the possible murder of his mother. "Friends have told him that his mother died in childbirth, but he has dreams that she died some other way" (111). Later, White Hawk's guardian is introduced with the portentous line "Phil Zoubek . . . is Tom's guardian and a lot more. Each of these two men is half of a warm human adventure" (115). Zoubek's name and the words "a lot more" are italicized in the text, as if to make explicit the homosexual relationship they shared. The source of this knowledge is again kept hidden, creating a textual silence and raising further questions as to the actual nature of this relationship between a white foster father and his teenage Indian son.
        Other instances of italicized text point the reader to discursive contradictions, phrases such as "cultural norms," "uncontrolled {25} discretion," or Judge Bandy's euphemism for capital punishment, "I am removing him from the world." This selective glossing visually marks the text with authorial intention and disrupts the illusion of journalistic objectivity and distance. Vizenor exercises his authorial power through the coded text and its dissemination, and ultimately this power "saves" White Hawk from the death sentence. Already the relationships of power have begun to breed--White Hawk's power over James Yeado and his wife, Zoubek's power over White Hawk, the power of the fosterage system, the courts, the educational system, and of course the authorial power of the text--a Foucaultian nightmare of competing discourses acted out on the body of Thomas White Hawk.
        In much of his writings, Foucault demonstrates the interdependence of the penal and medical systems in terms of creating mutually supportive discourses on criminality, deviance, and delinquency. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault delineates the history of the penal system in the West. He argues that it is the person, not the crime, that is judged and punished. He writes:

Certainly the "crimes" and "offenses" on which judgement is passed are judicial objects defined by the code, but judgement is also passed on the passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity; acts of aggression are punished, so also, through them is aggressivity, rape, but at the same time perversions; murders, but also drives and desires. . . . For it is these shadows lurking behind the case itself that are judged and punished . . . and which, behind the pretext of explaining an action, are ways of defining an individual. (17-18)

White Hawk's trial inevitably becomes dependent on the sanity of the defendant. The judico-psychiatric discourse surrounding the trial is perhaps the most verbose in its depiction of him. Terms such as "psychoneurotic," "sociopathic," "passive-aggressive," and "personality defect" with a "poor prognosis in treatment" are all used to describe and define White Hawk. The legally imposed binary of guilty or innocent becomes dependent on the psychiatric binary of sane or insane. Psychiatry helps to create the narrative of victim turned victimizer, the result of "environmental contacts." A "personality disturbance [that] appears to be his ambivalence concerning his psychosexual development." This White Hawk, constructed through a psychiatric discourse, seems to take on the characteristics of an odd sort of Oedipus, murdering the figure of the white paternal father and sleeping with the forbidden mother.
        Other preexisting narratives have already circumscribed White Hawk's story.² Each represses aspects of the subject's positionality and {26} tries to reinscribe the story within a specific narrative that is always already written in binary opposites. These arguments are in turn instrumental in reconstructing the binary of victimization and agency, innocence or guilt. They include:
        1. The colonial narrative that inscribes the story in terms of civilization/savagery, Christian/heathen. Within this narrative, White Hawk's crime is etched into the dominant psyche as an act of treason against the purity of a white social order and must he punishable by death. How would the trial and the sentence have been different if the Yeados were Chinese, African American, Indian?
        2. The cultural nationalist narrative that presents White Hawk as a victim of the hegemonic powers that seek to destroy him. This anti-colonial narrative challenges the occupying state's authority to define criminality, sanity, and jurisdiction. His act is thus inscribed as an act of rebellion against the dominant culture. However, in this narrative the male nationalist fantasy of ultimate revenge thus becomes coded as murdering the white man and sleeping with his wife: Indian vs. White Man.
        3. An unwritten radical white feminist narrative that would present White Hawk as a victimizer of women. The act of rape is written as purely an act of male violence, the ultimate expression of patriarchal power. White Hawk is thus written as a agent of male power. The white woman is then revealed as a pawn between the Native man and the white man: Man vs. Woman. However, these terms are already racialized: Native man, white woman, obfuscating the figure of the white man. In both this and previous scenarios, the Native woman is totally written out of the story.
        Vizenor draws on these competing discourses to construct the complexity of social forces impacting the fate of the multiple subject. The origins of these narratives are as old and as new as the binary of "us" and "them." They circulate like viruses, infiltrating the body politic. In contrast, Vizenor deconstructs the tyranny of these preexisting binaries by presenting a multiplicity of voices and power relations. Nowhere in the text is it suggested that White Hawk views himself as a colonialized subject, or as an agent against cultural hegemony, or white womanhood. These narratives have been constructed by others for their own ends, and White Hawk is merely caught in their web.
        White Hawk's participation in the crime is never contested; instead the text attempts to challenge absolute definitions of agency and victimization. In order to do so, the multiple subject must then be repositioned within a legion of oppressive localities. White Hawk as colonized male subject, childhood victim, murderer, and rapist is {27} already racialized and gendered within existing systems of power. These factors exist simultaneously, even as they contradict and contest each other's power to define. This is where Foucault's theories of power as omnipresent and capillary are most productive. Rather than seeing power as something that is possessed by a centralized force (state or patriarchy), it is something that is fluid and dynamic, something that is exercised rather than possessed:

The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. (History of Sexuality 93)

Foucault's work does not deny or minimize the power of the state and its institutions; however, he sees this as only one form of power. By recognizing the fluidity of power, he is also able to acknowledge the swarm of power relations that operate on the microlevel of society.
        By presenting the case in its fullest complexity, Vizenor is able to capture these subtleties of power and use them to mediate between the several narratives that I have delineated. Vizenor puts flesh on the multiple subject and attempts to reposition White Hawk as a Dakota Indian within post-colonial occupied America. He gives us pictures of White Hawk, of downtown Vermillion, photographs of each of the central characters in the trial in an attempt to make them something more than the individual roles they play. There are no photos of Yeado and his wife. They are incidental characters whose actions appear offstage and are only alluded to in the text; they have no agency and no voice in this new story of crime and punishment. Instead, Vizenor's narrative remains focused on White Hawk. His discursive power lies in his ability to reframe judicial and psychiatric discourses in terms of colonialism and power. This would include the diagnosis of White Hawk as suffering from cultural schizophrenia and the coding of Zoubek as homosexual. Throughout the court transcripts, Vizenor again inserts italicized text that is at times White Hawk's memories, dreams, and thoughts and at other times the thoughts of Judge Bandy and others. These glossed phrases suggest an excess that cannot be expressed discursively within the prefigured legal framework.
        Vizenor's investment and fascination with White Hawk, beyond the goal of commutation, hints at motives within the shadows of the lines. The question mark that is intent curves ambiguously around each sentence and textual silence. Each time the story is told it becomes transformed. The story becomes multiple, radiating out to encompasses the other stories circulating around White Hawk. With each new {28} telling, the position of the narrator shifts. Vizenor is first and foremost a storyteller. In his writings, the man slips in and out of the shadows he projects. In a recent piece, "The Ruins of Representation," Vizenor uses the term "shadow survivance" as a means to understand tribal consciousness and literatures:

The shadow is that sense of intransitive motion to the referent; the silence in memories. Shadows are neither the absence of entities nor the burden of conceptual references. The shadow is the silence that inherits the words, shadows are the motions that mean the silence, but not the presence or absence of entities. (7)

These shadows inhabit his own texts.
        The story is first told in "Thomas White Hawk" as a seemingly nonfictional piece of journalism, printed as a pamphlet and later reprinted in the collection Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. In the piece, Vizenor assumes the role of omniscient narrator. He withholds the political intent of his text, which is clearly the commutation of White Hawk's death sentence. Intent is also related to Vizenor's masking his own subject position. Like White Hawk, Vizenor is a tribal mixed blood survivor of cultural schizophrenia, the foster care system, and childhood abuse and neglect. Vizenor's naming himself as a survivor would have further implicated White Hawk's own agency: Good Indian vs. Bad Indian. By cloaking his role as writer and investigator, as well as his connection and insight into White Hawk's past, he veils the sources of his knowledge. After the immediate goal of commutation has been achieved, other stories can be told.
        In Crossbloods, this first telling is directly followed by "Commutation of Death," a short polemic on the limits of justice in occupied territories. In this essay, Vizenor writes:

. . . the story will not end because White Hawk has become a symbol of the conflicts and injustices of many dakota people living in a white-dominated state. And the dominant white people on the plains will not forget the savage demon who twice raped a white woman while her husband was dying of gunshot wounds in the next room. (152)

In this addendum, the narrator is unrestrained by the limits of advocacy journalism and the subsequent problems of audience and authorial motivation. He is able to point directly to the intent of the text, without the concern of alienating many of the white liberals it was intended to sway. Once the immediacy of commuting White Hawk's {29} sentence has been achieved, the narrator is free to move outside the specificities of the case and address the larger issues of justice and cultural domination.
        In Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, the story is retold in a series of veiled, fictionalized accounts that allow for details, previously marginal, unspeakable, or unsubstantiated to be told under the guise of fiction. As the story moves farther away from the scene of White Hawk's crime, the image of the author and his own investment and attraction to the stories become clearer.
        In the series of stories in Wordarrows, Vizenor inserts himself in the text under the name of Clement Beaulieu, a "liberal tribal writer." Clement is also the name of his father, who was himself the victim of a seemingly senseless murder. The intertextuality that exists between these stories adds credence and depth to the original story of the trial as they explicate the complexities of Indian identity.
        By creating himself through the character Beaulieu, Vizenor gives voice to the tribal identity that he shares with White Hawk. Through trickster discourse, Vizenor transforms himself through this character to escape representations of the author. Fiction allows for the articulation of this Native voice that would have further complicated the initial narrative of White Hawk's trial. Yet, even here, Beaulieu is one character, one voice, among many. The position of both the narrator and the author remain shadowed.
        The stories in Wordarrows have as much to do with the writer's search for a way to understand White Hawk's story as with the case itself. Here, Vizenor delves even deeper into the microlevel of power relations circulating throughout the trial. Among the stories woven around the figure of White Hawk is the illicit affair between the minister's wife and the condemned man through the bars of a prison cell, a Pine Ridge Indian law student who testifies for the prosecution as an expert on tribal justice in support of capital punishment, and Beaulieu's invisibility as a tribal person, which allows others to speak uncensored about the Indians in their midst. The characters he invokes are marginal at best to the narratives I have delineated, yet they reveal the many ways in which Native peoples are made savage, exotic, invisible, insane within the dominant culture.
        In a third, and as yet unfinished future telling of the story, Vizenor plans to reinsert himself through the use of first person narration. Yet even from within this posture, the "real" author remains in the shadows. Even within the genre of personal testimony through autobiography, the author remains the fictive construction of authorial imagination, as evidenced by the subtitle of Vizenor's own autobiography: Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphor. In a recent work, Vizenor writes, "first person pronouns have no referent. {30} The other is a continuous pronoun with no shadows" ("The Ruins of Representation" 23).
        Through narrative, Vizenor is able to deconstruct binary representations of subjectivity. By presenting a range of competing discourses, he challenges the authority of others to define, and hence to judge. By occupying the shadows, he makes sense of the multitude of discursive statements and silences surrounding the case. Narrative ultimately allows him a way to mediate between the vestiges of language that exist between the binaries.

        ¹I use post-colonial here in the sense of after the onset of colonialism. See The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989).

        ²For another example of how pre-existing narratives frame political arguments, see Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception," Feminist Review 35 (Summer 1990): 24-39.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

---. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Mani, Lata. "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception." Feminist Review 35 (Summer 1990): 24-39.

Vizenor, Gerald. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

---. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.

---. "The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance." American Indian Quarterly 17.1 (Winter 1993): 7-30.

---. Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978.

Irene Gonzales         

Winona Stevenson         

The following conversation between Gerald Vizenor and Rodney Simard, Lavonne Mason, and Julie Abner took place on 1 May 1993 at an outside table of a coffee house in Berkeley, California, shortly following a MELUS session on his "Thomas White Hawk." The preceding three essays were the presentations on that panel, chaired by Betty Louise Bell, who joined the conversation in its last minutes.

SAIL: The question I'm itching to ask you--everybody in the room was really amused when you were talking about linking Oedipus and Columbus [Vizenor: Yeah], and, aside from implying that Columbus was a motherfucker, what's at work? [Laughter]
Vizenor: He's blind.
SAIL: He's blind?
Vizenor: Yes, he's blinded by Western civilization. That's the tragic reversal of fortune.
SAIL: Scholars today have made much about authorial intent, but of course this gets us into the intentional fallacy, and, when we're talking about your work, it gets us into a quagmire of unlimited dimensions. The famous remark Harold Pinter made when he first came to the academy's attention, when he said that his work is about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, produced a generation of scholarship, very much a trickster event. All in all, are you more amused by these attempts to explicate, particularly something that's dealing with historical fact? How do you treat people interpreting your intent?
Vizenor: I thought their critique [the three panelists'] was very fair in trying to discover where I was and was not and what strategies that appear to be in the text. You can't treat fiction that way, but "White Hawk" employs fictional style because it's a narrative. It's also journalistic; it's also testimony and that's cited directly from the {44} transcripts, a sort of superstructure; it is official documentary. I thought a really brilliant insight was that I have deliberately written myself out of the narrative by creating Clement Beaulieu as my persona.
SAIL: What about The People Named the Chippewa?
Vizenor: No, I'm not in there, except the AIM thing. I wrote myself out of that. Not that I was a member of AIM, but I was in all of that in the beginning, so, in fact, I preceded my subject in that work.
SAIL: Then why are you writing yourself in now in the new work about White Hawk that you have proposed?
Vizenor: Well, my purpose at the time was capital punishment. It seems self-serving to say that it was to oppose capital punishment to save this kid's life and for all kinds of reasons: one, because the state has no right to do that; second, it is a double not right to do that because it's tribal; and third, they can't do it because they've acquitted people who have committed far worse crimes, and there are more reasons than that. But my interest was to oppose capital punishment, which I hadn't done before but which I continue to do. I was a member of the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union, not that membership is an automatic position, although it probably is. It would be hard to be an ACLU member and support capital punishment, not that that's the acid test, but it's one of them. It is part of the philosophy that the state doesn't have the right, but the state has no right to kill any Indian and never has for any reason, and this is a constitutional issue. My interest was to show this, not to put myself in as the noble rescuer.

I think Winona [Stevenson's] use of narratee theory is good because obviously I'm present as narrator. There's the author who is omniscient and then there's a narrator present who is taking positions; she points out at the end that I am editorial, but I'm also editorial in the selection of material. I don't work with material to serve ideology. Actually, each of the papers emphasizes that I concentrate on all the contradictions and that I don't choose one voice over another.
SAIL: After the session, Winona said, "Damn, he's hard to read."
Vizenor: Yep. She likes saying that, too.
SAIL: What about your polemical and historical and journalistic writing for which most of the critical attention seems less directed at your material and more toward trying to discover you in it, a search for you rather than an examination of your material?
Vizenor: Betty [Louise Bell, panel moderator] brought together the autobiography with the White Hawk text, and, in another place, she has discussed White Hawk and Dan White as two cases that I wrote about as a journalist. In a similar way as I did with White Hawk, I wrote {45} about White in Earth Divers where I create the journalist, who is me. I get a little distance that way. Then I can omnisciently observe the journalist and I don't have to get caught up in "I," which is also a very limited perception. It's extraordinarily limited and I don't like the "I." Even in my autobiography I don't use "I" very much. I speak of myself as a person in different contexts, which makes me a different person all the time.
SAIL: Creating self in the process?
Vizenor: Yes. Obviously I created self, but I create a complex self that I don't understand, that I dare not understand. Other people can understand me as a text, but I dare not create myself as an understanding text. The reason that I'm going first person on the new White Hawk thing is because the case is long over; twenty years is good enough. It's been published twice, first as a pamphlet, the advocacy; second, it was in a collection of essays, which is historical, more than advocacy, but I've got a lot more to say and in both first and third person--a lot more to say. I've got documents I couldn't touch for their difficulty.
        I don't agree that the White Hawk piece is a hidden Vizenor, except in the sense that my rage is present, and I think Winona and Betty and also Irene [Gonzales]--well, actually, they all touched on my presence in the selection of material and its emotional intensity. I wish someone else had come upon White Hawk. Wouldn't it be interesting to have had a couple of different narratives on this. I really would have liked someone to take seriously a conservative point of view, but in the first few months of working on this we could hardly find an Indian who would support him. I want to write about these things in a way that's not White Hawk anymore; he's the text now. I want to write how this text got to be. I mean . . .
SAIL: Moving from journalism to history and making a leap into literature?
Vizenor: Yes. I want to write about the hotel I checked into to research the case. Because I'm phenotypically an eastern liberal, I said I was a journalist, which I was, and that's also a better identity than saying I'm a rights activist or something. Happily, white people everywhere told me evil shit about Indians. I remember telling some good friends, who were darker and appeared more Indian, about the insights that I get out of this twist of typical identity, for people who appear Indian are closed out from this kind of perverse discourse. I want to know and hear the perversities. It's important and I feel a commitment and dedication as a writer to make that my business. It's a silent text and I don't want it silent. I want all those conservative racists to have their say in my context, and I'm the writer. They can write if they like and then I will write about what they have written.
{46}
SAIL: You're not going to approach the new book as journalism, yet it has a historical dimension and I know that you're interested in the nexus between history and literature, or literature as it has been traditionally defined in the European American sense. Can literature then embrace history as literary texts according to aesthetic standards?
Vizenor: That's one of those keen aesthetic questions. Let's see-- aesthetics are sentimental, and aesthetic texts can be romantic and sentimental. They serve a dissociation of life experience rather than an existential engagement, and I choose the complexities and contradictions of existential engagement over the aesthetic text; however, a first person is an aesthetic presence because it doesn't exist. "The" first person isn't--it's a contradiction. A pronoun is a pinch hitter and we don't even know what the game is except language, so we've got a substitute voice in the first person in a language game, and we don't know the rules of the game. We don't even know where we are. So this first person is playing out the voice of someone, as a pronoun, and first person has no referent, except itself. First person doesn't exist.
SAIL: Is that social narcissism?
Vizenor: That's good--yeah--thank you.
SAIL: Indian history has largely been written by the victors. Is it a subversion of that history by aesthetizing it or rendering it in a tribal voice?
Vizenor: I suppose you could say I'm the victor--and so is White Hawk--in his case. It's clear that the writing of the text had a lot to do with saving his ass. I don't have to pretend false modesty after twenty years, although I haven't talked about it for that long. I'm now talking about it because I'm going to write about it. I can get back to it without modesty.
SAIL: Earlier you said that you had had a lot more to say in both the first and third persons. How is the third person going to work in?
Vizenor: I have a lot of documents, additional documents, about the lawyer, the legal proceedings, the characterization of other players, aspects of their lives and interests that were not known at the time. Their lives are complicated by other factors now that are brought back into the story.
SAIL: You have always been critical of activists, or suspicious of activism.
Vizenor: No, you're wrong. Some activists are self-serving; a lot of them made a lot of money.
SAIL: Coke De Fountain, Homer Yellowsnow?
Vizenor: Yes, we know who these people are, don't we? You want me to say who they are, don't you?
SAIL: Yes, we really would.
{47}
Vizenor: They are fictional--any resemblance to real people . . .
SAIL: Can't you speak to yourself through that window over there?
Vizenor: If a fictional character coincidentally suggests in some metaphorical way the identities of people we know in literature and public affairs, I can't be accountable for that. If their lives, unfortunately, resemble fictional characters, it certainly is beyond me. Why anyone would want to appear to be fictional . . .
SAIL: If they maintain their lives in such a way as to appear to be comic stereotypes . . .
Vizenor: They have complexity--those characters. They are emblematic, but they have some complexity, even contradiction.
SAIL: A point our students inevitably make.
Vizenor: Well, I found a case that was as complicated as my fiction.
SAIL: I thought Betty's autobiographical shadowing was suggestive. Were you struck by White Hawk as an interesting case or a paradigmatic case? Was he a fluke or is he an "every-Indian"?
Vizenor: It's the "every-tribal-person," the rage that can result in violence. It's a disservice to those kind and good people--the Yeados--it's a terrible thing that they end up in this paradigm as the victims, a terrible thing. Some people have observed that White Hawk might have been killing his keepers, symbolically. I just don't buy that. White Hawk was too smart. He has no explanation for this crime, you know. He doesn't speak of it, doesn't understand it. He may have to disguise this, but I don't think so. I don't have access to that, only to the official document he wrote. I don't have access to their conversations. My interest was not in whether White Hawk approved of me or not, although once published, I was curious. I wanted to ask him directly "What do you think?" I didn't even know if he had read it. At first, I didn't care--that wasn't my interest; I wasn't writing to him.
SAIL: Do you know now?
Vizenor: Yes, I asked and he wrote. I quoted him at the end of that introduction to Crossbloods where he said he wouldn't change a word of it for a presentation. Imagine from his point of view--so many people exploring your life because of a horrible thing you have done. It happens all the time and he's probably more celebrated in a text than a lot of people who have done terribly evil things. And it was evil what he did. He's memorialized in a text, not as a generous person but as a contradiction.
SAIL: To broaden out a bit, what happens, from your perspective, when contemporary event reportage translates itself into history, which has been treated as if it were a literary text?
Vizenor: I'm a very good writer. Journalism contained the power of my imagination and the demands of history; I had to break out of {48} journalism. I had to do the best of what is postmodern. I had to be eclectic. I had to add the following postmodern exclamation to every paragraph of history about Native Americans. I had to say at the end of every paragraph by Francis Parkman and other historians that it's not enough. That's aesthetic and I had to perform an existential act of disobedience, resistance, and postmodern eclectic recreation of a context.
SAIL: Subverting your profession?
Vizenor: Yes, and I was a good journalist. I can't say I was frustrated by not being able to write the whole thing because I knew you couldn't do that. It was enough to reach so many people with just the stories, but I had good editors who honored this and honored my presence there and knew that I could do this and wanted me to do it because no one else had and they haven't since. It was the White Hawk pamphlet and another incident that brought me to the attention of the editors [of The Minneapolis Tribune]. I had been writing for magazines, but it was that White Hawk work that brought me to the executive editors' meetings, where they wanted to know how to get into all of this based on what I had written. They actually couldn't take that because it wasn't their style, but I provided them with the whole story. I also provided NBC news with the whole story. They did a special on this, a one hour news program, First Tuesday. I provided photographs and the skeletal structure. I estimated that I might have saved them $25,000 in research costs.
        This is an irony: I advised NBC not to include in the White Hawk piece this cruel irony of Baxter Berry's shooting of Norman Little Brave in the back. Little Brave was Berry's employee on a ranch there. He was shot in the back by Berry, who was indicted by a coroner's grand jury. Now get this, a white rancher kills an Indian by shooting him in the back, unarmed. The white guy hires the best lawyer in the state, who was an Indian, and is acquitted.
SAIL: There's something bitter there.
Vizenor: Yes, that's the contradiction of legal precedence. If White Hawk had had the money to hire Roubideaux he might have gotten a lesser charge, but he got the death penalty because he entered a plea of guilty. That's also extraordinary; you understand that he was sentenced to capital punishment without a trial. There was no trial and he never has had a trial. He's serving on a confession, not on a trial. Now, you cannot confess to capital crimes. You must be tried--it's not accepted--and the judge shouldn't have accepted it either. Anyway, I urged NBC not to include that Baxter Berry thing at the end because they didn't need it. White Hawk's case was strong enough; they didn't need to show the irony and be awkward about it. But they did it {49} anyway. Baxter Berry was acquitted. Baxter Berry sued NBC News and the Indian lawyer, Roubideaux, who handled the suit, for libel; NBC settled for $25,000. Baxter Berry killed the Indian, made some money on it, and lived happily ever after. Contradictions--I want to write about all of these things in the first person because I was present and did these things and acted in this way.
SAIL: Is this going to be creating a fiction maybe because it's necessarily from your perspective or a perspective of yours?
Vizenor: Well, I have the documents; I'll cite them, wherever they are, but it'll be in part fiction style. I'll make descriptive comments, editorial interpretations--I hope this will be a better way to write the story.
SAIL: But no dialogue, no imagined dialogue?
Vizenor: No, not in cases like that because that's implying that I'm transcribing. No, I don't do that. I can create a fictional scene and create dialogue, but I wouldn't attribute dialogue unless I had notes. That's pretty risky. I've never done that.
SAIL: Truman Capote got away with it.
Vizenor: Yes, he sure did, and I didn't like that book much. In Cold Blood is another irony. My view is, how could an author take up such a serious case and also be credited with a new form of journalism-- "faction." It was reviewed as a kind of new journalism. Capote was no advocate; he was a dilettante and he just hung around. He actually witnessed the hanging and he spoke of their fear and how it sounded--he pissed in his pants. What a gruesome, pathetic figure is this Capote that he could stand around, never having opposed the death sentence, dared not oppose it, dared not be an advocate for fear that he wouldn't be able to witness the most gruesome act because they wouldn't have admitted him as a witness if he had. What a deception. What a cruelty. What a degrading thing to be a part of his life history, and what I oppose in that text is that it's an exploitive text. It's not an advocacy case and that's where tensions are important.
SAIL: You don't see it as testament to his objectivity?
Vizenor: Not at all. There's nothing objective in it. He exploited all of the sensations. And he did know. He took no generous creative interest in any of the players. He served aesthetics and simulation as sort of a marketing text, and that happens all the time. Not surprising, but to credit that book with something is reprehensible. It's a disservice to the seriousness of all these issues and especially the cause against capital punishment. He sensationalized it. It's part of the agency that perpetuates the fantasy of hanging people for crimes.
SAIL: Does the Peltier case attract you?
Vizenor: No.
SAIL: Why not?
{50}
Vizenor: It's too highly politicized. From the beginning, it was highly politicized. I'm really impressed, though, with the movie Incident at Oglala. It's so good because it doesn't obligate you to take a stand on whether Peltier did it or not. It isn't taking any ideological position; it's just pointing out the improper procedures and the contradictions of his indictment and conviction, raising all of the serious questions of a breech of judicial process--very good ones.
SAIL: It is reportage; it is documentary in the best sense of the word, but at the same time that particular film, I think, reaches an aesthetic dimension.
Vizenor: It does, especially in sound. I think if you took the sound out you might not be able to say that so convincingly.
SAIL: Without the quality of the sound altogether, we might have Nanook of the North again, the first documentary.
Vizenor: And when they added sound to it, in my mind, they damaged the power of the film. The sound is very aesthetic, as well as the editing and cutting.
SAIL: The same thing that you do in fiction? [Vizenor: Yes.] It is a visual equivalent then of your work?
Vizenor: No, because you are obligated in film and editing to a linear message into which you cannot enter any discourse until after. The purpose is to be convincing from beginning to end, and with narrative film you're passive. A text is not passive. It can be, and some people make a text passive. I don't think anybody can make a text that I engage in passive. You were close though; wasn't he sneaky. Boy, I thought he had me there. That's a good point, and, actually, I learned something out of your question: that the kind of montage of voices or talking heads is not the same. Film holds us passive. We can't engage the discourse. There's no imagination either, we're told how to imagine it as a linear story.
SAIL: You said, "I'm a very good writer." Do you consider yourself a storyteller or a writer?
Vizenor: Both. Storytelling is different, different than writing. In storytelling we're present. It's discourse; I can read everything that is going on--play a little bit. When writing, I have to create a whole new context because it isn't there.
SAIL: Of your generation, you're just about the only writer who hasn't really experimented with the visuals of the text, crafted a book as artifact, and tried to get the experiential dimension in; why not? We think about The Way to Rainy Mountain and what Momaday did there, or Storyteller and what Silko did with her work [Vizenor: Yes. Prose poems]. I mean such techniques as the horizontal format and mixing in the photographs--a variety of effects that could be subversive and {51} make a reader interact with the text in so many different ways.
Vizenor: I don't think it's subversive at all. I think it's clichéd. It's a consumer gesture if people design books to capture a consumer's interest. I don't see what's subversive about it. You can plainly see what somebody did. They put a photograph here and a caption over there and they turned half the page upside down. There's nothing very mysterious about it.
SAIL: Her photographs do not necessarily match the text.
Vizenor: Well, then you can see that plainly. What's subversive about that?
SAIL: She can be describing an elder woman from her family, but not the one being discussed at that point in the narrative; you have to go to the back of the text to fully uncover her associations and meanings.
Vizenor: I don't see that as subversive. It's tricky. It's dickering with the contents.
SAIL: So the content should be the experience all by itself?
Vizenor: That's where the story is. The story is not in the typeface. Italics are important and you can do a lot with ellipses and paragraph structure, double space--those are important to cue a reader and those are very conventional. There is nothing unique about them. We need some time break.

Gerald Vizenor        

                INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM

                Harold and the Warriors of Orange
                are descendants of the great trickster
                who created the new earth after the flood.

                But the trickster was soon word-driven
                from the land by the white man,
                who claimed the earth as his own
                and returned to the trickster
                only what he couldn't use.

                Now, Harold and the Warriors of Orange,
                tribal tricksters determined to reclaim
                their estate from the white man,
                are challenging his very foundations.

{54}

                              TRICKSTER SONG

                In the great tradition of faith and con,
                The trickster's way is the magic one.
                If you can believe, then it can be done.

                Trickster Hi! Hi! Lo! Trickster Hi! Hi! Lo!

                Let's reroute some of that money green,
         &nb