Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

Nine. Liberation and the Land: The Environmental Ethos of Gerald Vizenor

This is our sovereign nation. These trees are the families of the earth here. —Gerald Vizenor, Bearheart C HAPT E R N I N E Liberation and the Land The Environmental Ethos of Gerald Vizenor After his keynote address at a conference in Eugene, Oregon, in May 1997, Gerald Vizenor was asked by a member of the audience to recommend what one might do in order to understand his writings. The lecturer by the window chuckled spontaneously, paused a moment, then said “Read my haiku.” Everything he had written, he said, could probably be compacted into a haiku. Perhaps into this one from “Seasons in Santa Fe”: mountain snow warblers search the apricots no apologies. (74) But I don’t trust the trickster lecturer on this point. Rather—just as the “salamander earth must hear many great stories to regenerate our survivance in a chemical civilization” (“Tragic” 209)—the reader must hear (or read) many stories (and poems) in order to understand and appreciate the writings of Gerald Vizenor. Where he first seems inaccessible or where an individual trickster story seems to resist or even defy analysis, in aggregate the stories, poems, and essays seem to take thematic shapes. And one of the themes, which becomes apparent, addresses the issue of a specifically Native American affinity with the natural environment. 165 166 Liberation and the Land In the haiku above, coupled with stories, for instance, a theme might emerge from the warblers’ search, especially if understood in the context of the wisdom of a salamander trickster, or, in another form, of the liberation of fleas or the mantis, or understood through Clement Beaulieu’s meditations , Bear Charme’s tricks, or even from Belladonna Winter Catcher’s talk on tribal values. Regardless of the shapes of the speakers (or the shapes of the stories themselves), ultimately, Vizenor reminds the reader that the “postindian warrior is the simulation of survivance in new stories” and that “[t]rickster stories are the postindian simulations of tribal survivance” (Manifest 15). Vizenor implies that, like Bagese the bear woman in Dead Voices, we must come ever “closer to stones, trickster stories, and tribal chance” (Dead 6). Or as in his essay “The Tragic Wisdom of Salamanders,” the characters in Vizenor’s stories must become “the tribal tricksters of the mundane, the traces of the marvelous, and the solace of an escape distance. These trickster stories are aired to creation, natural reason, human unities, and the earth in the wild literature of survivance” (“Tragic” 196). “The native world,” writes Vizenor in Fugitive Poses, “is actuated in anishinaabe totems and stories of survivance. The totem is a native metaphor, a literary connection with creation, shamanic visions, and natural reason” (Fugitive 123). As one reviewer of the novel Dead Voices puts it, Vizenor’s “characters are far from alienated from the earth or from nature. They luxuriate in the challenges posed in the modern world” (Clements 247). According to Jace Weaver, throughout Vizenor’s writings characters “recur from book to book, and their stories are retold, becoming in the process new tribal myths” (Weaver, That 143). Vizenor’s challenge is thus to claim and reclaim, tell and retell the stories and at the same time avoid reductive stereotypes. Ever changing, ever new, ever challenging, the stories must be told and retold; they must not become static. In the face of numerous assertions about a general Native American affinity with the natural environment by such readers and writers of Indian culture as N. Scott Momaday, Winona LaDuke, and Vine Deloria Jr.—Gerald Vizenor argues against overgeneralization, essentialism, and reductionism. In the context of a human relationship with the earth, however , he does insist that “[w]e have misused the narratives of natural reason as we have the environment; we have abused the names of the seasons, the weather, salamanders, bears, crows, and ants in our creation stories. . . . The Environmental Ethos of Vizenor 167 The salamander is the new signature of the earth because we must learn to hear once more the tragic wisdom of natural reason and survivance” (“Tragic” 208). The phrase “once more” certainly suggests that “we” once did hear the wisdom of natural reason. In a satirical call for paying attention to the landscape, by which I mean the natural environment, Martin Bear Charme, a character in “Landfill Meditation,” insists that “[w]e cannot separate ourselves, clean and perfect, from the trash...