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205 205 CHAP TER T WELVE BEING EMBEDDED Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point Chris LaLonde White Earth Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor writes phrases, sentences , lines, and passages that are stunning in their richness and aptness, their capacity to produce or invoke an image, and to capture moment, place, sentiment, and intelligence. By way of opening, then, let me offer what to my mind are the most poignant lines in Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point: “only stories / stand on treaty land” (46). Six words capture the pain, heartbreak , and suffering that came with the treaties between the People and the U.S. government in Minnesota. Those six words also sound the possibilities of story to inform, to reveal, and to teach. Such is the case with Vizenor’s 2006 book-length poem, which tells the story of an event little remembered and less remarked upon in contemporary America: the battle between troops of the U.S. Army Third Infantry and Leech Lake Pillagers on October 5, 1898, nearly eight years after the massacre at Wounded Knee and the oft-characterized “end” of the Indian Wars in the United States. The soldiers had gone to northern Minnesota from Fort Snelling in St. Paul in an effort to apprehend Bug-o-nay-ge-shig, an Anishinaabe of the Pillager Band sought by authorities as a witness in a trial to be held more than one hundred miles to the east in Duluth, Minnesota. Alan Velie reads the war at Sugar Point, rightly I think, as the “anti–Wounded Knee”: rather than a story that offers up the indian as victim—helpless men, women, and children gunned down on a cold December morning in 1890—we have a story of Native triumph and, thus, of Native survivance (“The War Cry of the Trickster,” 149).1 Like Velie, Helmbrecht Breinig reads Bear Island in terms of survivance, which is not surprising given that these essays are in a collection edited by Vizenor devoted to survivance, and both critics attend to the word itself and the importance of writing in articulating what the word embodies. Velie quotes from Vizenor’s Manifest Manners early on to make the point: “The postindian warriors encounter their enemies with the same courage in literature as chris lalonde 206 their ancestors once evinced on horses, as they create their stories with a new sense of survivance” (qtd. in “The War Cry of the Trickster,” 147). Breinig closes his essay with the proclamation that while survivance “may mean different things [to Natives in the Americas] . . . it is language, the spoken and written word, through which survivance becomes real” (“Native Survivance in the Americas,” 57, emphasis added). Thanks to writing, the outrages and atrocities committed by non-Natives against Natives, and Native resistance to and in the face of those wrongs, can be inscribed, to quote Vizenor’s Bear Island, “forever in the book” (16). Stories that stand on treaty land in Bear Island and indeed the story that is Bear Island do so in place of and to mark the trees that have been cut by “greedy timber barons” who “with empty eyes / scorched the pine” (46). As supplement and testament, the stories are, as were the trees, rooted in land, in the particular place that is the Leech Lake reservation; hence the title of my essay. Indeed, Bear Island reveals that Native being in the text is embedded in place and Anishinaabe worldview, and I will tease this out by attending to particulars of the poem. At the same time, the text also compels us to think about being embedded in relation to writing, to stories by nonNatives , and to American imperialism by reminding us that not only were there soldiers, Indian agents, law enforcement officers, and Natives at Sugar Point in early October 1898, there were journalists as well. First, then, to the journalists and journalism. Vizenor had a career as a journalist in Minnesota, of course, and he has spoken in interviews about his deep fondness for the profession, his time as a practicing journalist, and those he worked with at the Minneapolis Tribune. He has remarked about how writing under pressure, writing quickly, and striving for clarity helped him as a writer (“Mythic Rage and Laughter,” 90). What he has termed his nostalgia for journalism, moreover, stems from “the wit and pleasure of contradictions, the tease of manners, and the insecurities of tough love” he found in the newsroom (Postindian Conversations, 43...

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