In this anthology, eighteen scholars discuss the themes and practices of survivance in literature, examining the legacy of Vizenor's original insights and exploring the manifestations of survivance in a variety of contexts. Contributors interpret and compare the original writings of William Apess, Eric Gansworth, Louis Owens, Carter Revard, Gerald Vizenor, and Velma Wallis, among others.

The classic autobiography of the famous Indigenous writer and critic Gerald Vizenor The classic memoir by one of the most celebrated Indigenous writers of the modern era, Interior Landscapes offers an unforgettable glimpse of the life and world of Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor writes about his experiences as a tribal mixedblood in the new world of simulations; the themes in his autobiographical stories are lost memories and a "remembrance past the barriers." The chapters open with natural harmonies and the premier union of the Anishinaabe families of the crane and the first white fur traders. The author bares his fosterage, his ambitions, his contentions with institutions and imposed histories; his encounters as a community advocate, journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, university teacher, critic, and novelist. Vizenor celebrates chance, or "trickster signatures" and communal metaphors in these pages: he was hired to teach social sciences at Lake Forest College, his first experience as a teacher, because the head of the department admired his haiku poems; he toured the armorial emblems at Maxim's de Beijingwhen it opened on October 1, 1983, in the People's Republic of China; he wrote about the suicide of Dane White and the murderer Thomas White Hawk; he rescued his dreams from the skinwalkers at the Clyde Kluckhohn house in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and, as an editorial writer, he followed the American Indian Movement from Custer to Rapid City, from Calico Hall on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Teasing, revealing, and irresistible, Interior Landscapes charts the fascinating life of a brilliant Anishinaabe writer. The new edition contains a wealth of new photographs and information on the journey of Gerald Vizenor. Gerald Vizenor, a member of the White Earth Anishinaabeg, is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His many books include Fugitive Poses, Manifest Manners, Hiroshima Bugi, and Survivance. He is the editor of the series Native Traces (SUNY) and Native Storiers (Nebraska). "The Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor is at once a brilliant and evasive trickster figure. . . He is perhaps the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century." -- N. Scott Momaday "Instead of trying to walk the thin, often invisible line between art and politics, history and future, Vizenor dances on both sides, knowing all too well that in our time politics can become myth and vice versa."--San Francisco Review of Books

Bearheart, Gerald Vizenors first novel, overturns OC terminal creedsOCO and violence in a decadent material culture. American civilization has collapsed and Proude Cedarfair, his wife, Rosina, and a bizarre collection of disciples, are forced on a pilgrimage when government agents descend on the reservation to claim their sacred cedar trees for fuel. The tribal pilgrims reverse the sentiments of Manifest Destiny and travel south through the ruins of a white world that ran out of gas."

Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenor's concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She details Vizenor's efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment, and invites political action and explores the place of Vizenor's work within the larger context of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory.

Gerald Vizenor counters the cultural notions of dominance, false representations, and simulations of absence, and, by documents, experience, and theories, secures a narrative presence of Native Americans.

"Weaving together strands of myth, memory, legend, and history, Bear Island lyrically conveys a historical event that has been forgotten not only by the majority culture but also by some Anishinaabe people - bringing back to light a key moment in Minnesota's history with clarity of vision and emotional resonance."--BOOK JACKET.

Native sovereignty, Gerald Vizenor contends, is not possessed but expressed. It emerges not from practicing vengeful and exclusionary policies and politics, or by simple recourse to territoriality, but by turning to Native transmotion, the forces and processes of creativity and imagination lying at the heart of Native world-views and actions. Overturning long-held scholarly and popular assumptions, Vizenor offers a vigorous examination of tragic cultures and victimry.

Gerald Vizenor was a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune when he discovered that his direct ancestors were the editor and publisher of The Progress, the first Native newspaper on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Vizenor, inspired by the kinship of nineteenth century Native journalists, has pursued a similar sense of resistance in his reportage, editorial essays, and literary art. Vizenor reveals in Native Liberty the political, poetic, visionary, and ironic insights of personal identity and narratives of cultural sovereignty. He examines singular acts of resistance, natural reason, literary practices, and other strategies of survivance that evade and subvert the terminal notions of tragedy and victimry. Native Liberty nurtures survivance and creates a sense of cultural and historical presence. Vizenor, a renowned Anishinaabe literary scholar and artist, writes in a direct narrative style that integrates personal experiences with original presentations, comparative interpretations, and critiques of legal issues and historical situations.

Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities-the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals-fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor’s central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominate culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.

Two Native American brothers serve as soldiers in World War I in this “emotionally wrought, finely crafted historical novel” (Karl Helicher, ForeWord). Blue Ravens is set at the start of the twentieth century in the days leading up to the Great War in France. It moves from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota into the bitter and bloody fighting at Château-Thierry, Montbréhain, and Bois de Fays. Through this journey, author and poet Gerald Vizenor returns to the cultural themes central to his writing—the power and irony of trickster stories, the privilege of survivance over victimry, natural reason and resistance. After serving in the American Expeditionary Forces, two brothers from the Anishinaabe culture return home. They eventually leave for a second time to live in Paris where they lead successful and creative lives. With a spirited sense of “chance, totemic connections, and the tricky stories of our natural transience in the world,” Vizenor creates an expression of presence commonly denied Native Americans. Blue Ravens is a story of courage in poverty and war, a human story of art and literature from a recognized master of the postwar American novel and one of the most original and outspoken Native voices writing today.