Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans

PROLOGUE: Conversation with Gerald Vizenor

PROLOGUE Conversation with Gerald Vizenor, series editor, poet, novelist, and art critic Joëlle Rostkowski: You have made your reputation as one of the most prominent Native intellectuals of your generation, as a journalist, essayist, poet, novelist, and university professor. Having covered so much ground, and, as you have so much experience in Native communities, could you explain the accomplishments of your eclectic career? Gerald Vizenor: Native American consciousness and the traces and stories of natural reason are mostly in the blood, innate, and sometimes visionary. Native descent can be a prominent source of confidence, along with cultural and family stories, and yet the politics of blood is never easy to unravel in Native associations. This bloody liquid arithmetic is not enviable or clearly acknowledged by anyone, and certainly not as a specialist on Native subjects. Looking back to the major events that have marked my generation, clearly the most productive course was to be eclectic, to acquire a wide experience in various fields. I had no career plan, in other words. I was ambitious, driven by curiosity, and with a certain potential to establish myself as an author. I was ready to take on any duties and jobs connected with native issues and consciousness. My accomplishments, and everything that happened to me in the first thirty years of my life, was by coincidence, clearly by chance associations, rather than through any deliberate preparation for a career. On the other hand, maybe it was inevitable that I became a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune in the late 1960s. I had returned from military service in Japan, studied at New York University for one year, graduated from the University of Minnesota, and found myself at the center of radical movements. I organized a protest against the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Minneapolis, and that was the start of my active service in the native urban community. XXXVII XXXVIII CONVERSATIONS WITH REMARKABLE NATIVE AMERICANS I resisted the patrons of sympathy, those who found personal pleasure and authority in working with Natives as victims. I wanted to develop at the time some sense of survivance, and community structures that could help poor people in the area. Yes, my idea and philosophical sense of survivance was appreciated very early in my life and matured in the military and during my time as an advocate on the streets. I wanted to create a place where Natives could count on an advocate to find medical care, jobs, and simply assistance in finding a place to stay for the night. Many Natives arrived in the city with ambition and ideals only to be discouraged by the customary social service agencies. I volunteered as an advocate for several years in the Elliot Park community and on Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. That area of the city had an estimated population of some five thousand Natives, and was referred to as the largest reservation in the state. I raised money for a social service center, but did not accept any salary during my years as an advocate. My sense of duty as an advocate was an act of conscience, and was not a source of income or a career choice. Advocacy in a poor, broken, and desperate community should never be a source of income or pleasure. I was there because my father and grandmother had once lived in the area, and because my grandmother struggled to keep the family together and to overcome the extreme experiences of poverty and cultural disrespect. Gerald Vizenor (Photo by Laura Hall) GERALD VIZENOR XXXIX I was a child when my family, grandmother, aunts, and uncles left the reservation and moved to a dilapidated downtown apartment a few blocks from Elliot Park. My father worked as a house painter and was active in a union, at the time, and was probably murdered because of his political associations with a labor union, and for his participation in the truckers’ strike in Minneapolis. My service as an advocate was difficult, to say the least, but not without humor and irony. Natives can deliver a tricky, ironic, and memorable story in the very bowels of poverty. So, you see, my service was heavy, but every day the most desperate and tragic situations were transformed by marvelous native stories and irony. I learned about survivance as an advocate on the streets at this time. There were no direct or immediate rewards for my advocacy...