Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature

3. Trickster Leads the Way: A Reading of Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 Trickster Leads the Way A Reading of Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles We have occupied this building in the name of the tribes and the trail of broken treaties, she says, and the government will answer all of our demands or else we have come here to die together for freedom. She smiles, proud to hold freedom in terminal creeds. Theirfreedomisyoursuicide. | GeraldVizenor,Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles The Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor begins his groundbreaking 1978 trickster novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart at the heart of a colonial struggle, during the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington dc. In the epigraph above, a dialogue between Songidee Migwan , an American Indian Movement activist, and Saint Louis Bearheart highlights one irony in the Native American political struggle against the United States. Willingly becoming 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1| trickster leads the way 96 a martyr, the aim activist Songidee would die for a concept of freedom controlled and defined by her relationship to a colonial power. The last stop on the Trail of Broken Treaties , the occupation of the bia was an event in which Indian people literally and symbolically confronted a technology that had been used to manipulate them from the time of first contact with Europeans: the written word. In Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior discuss the violence the occupiers released upon the bia building: “The ferocity of the vandalism could not be explained only by the fear of imminent attack. The looting and trashing was so widespread, so deliberate, that it pointed to a hatred on the part of many Indians for the documents because they were documents; records that must be destroyed because of what they and the building that housed them represented” (1996, 162). Both the real-life events that occurred during the bia takeover in 1972 and the opening pages of Vizenor’s novel demonstrate that the treatment of tribal documents is central to our understanding of American Indian culture, politics, and survival . For hundreds of years written discourse—treaties, court rulings, contracts—have been used by Europeans and Americans to whittle away tribal national land holdings and rights. Bearheart asserts that this implicit dominance of the graphic impulse has slowly insinuated itself into Native worldviews. When Bearheart states “The heirship stories are hidden in a metal cabinet with other tribal documents,” he is claiming that both the liberative and the constraining words have been locked away together. Through his story in the form of a novel-within -a-novel titled “The Heirship Chronicles: Proude Cedarfair and the Cultural Word Wars” he hopes to liberate those who 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 trickster leads the way | 97 believe in the “terminal creeds” that government documents represent (Vizenor 1990, vii). Bearheart functions as a critical intervention in the history of the graphic domination of Native existence, the political bureaucracy and word deceptions of which the bia building is a symbol. Trickster stories enliven the critical impulse in Bearheart, subverting common assumptions regarding Native colonial resistance. When stories and government documents reside in the same space, the novel asserts, there is an imbalance on the textual continuum . Bearheart actively seeks to reestablish balance between the oral and graphic impulses. In his “Letter to the Reader,” which precedes the narrative , Vizenor foregrounds Bearheart as a story with real-world, political impact. Published at the end of the Red Power era, the novel should be contextualized within this politically charged period and its uncertain outcomes. The “Letter to the Reader” sets the stage for Bearheart to be understood as a novel of ideas and introduces neologisms such as “terminal creeds,” “word wars,” “visions,” and “trickeries to heal,” all of which are central to the arguments Vizenor poses. The “Letter to the Reader” immediately implicates the reader in the ensuing conversation between Saint Louis Bearheart, “an old man who works in the Heirship Office...