Elaboration Therapy in the Midewiwin and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus

The purpose of this article is to use the Midewiwin conceptual framework of stories and apply it to Gerald Vizenor's novel The Heirs of Columbus (1991). Elaboration therapy is based on three major concepts within the Midewiwin: stories can house spirits; stories can heal; and the power to heal directly coincides with the ability of the healer to elaborate on the story. I will first discuss elements of the Midewiwin creation story and then apply them to the novel. Kimberly Blaeser, in Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, makes reference to elements of the Midewiwin in several of Vizenor's early works. She states, "His use . . . of vocables, then, works to place his own writing in the oral tradition of the midewiwin songs and alludes in a broader sense to the belief system inherent in that religious society" (23). I should mention that Arnold Krupat, in The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, argues, "In view of the intercultural formation of these writers' texts, only an intercultural criticism, some variant of an ethnocriticism, has any hope of providing insight" (63). While I agree that an intercultural approach to Vizenor's text is valid and worthy of exploration, I disagree that an Anishinaabe reading of the text will fail to provide insight. I will argue that by using the Midewiwin framework of stories, the story of Columbus can be seen as the creation story of European dominance in America. Vizenor's novel is a level of elaboration to the Columbus story. Before he can elaborate the story he must capture it. He does this by not setting the novel up as an opposition to the dominant narrative. The dominant narrative is very much alive in his novel; it is the levels of elaboration that make it a story of healing. My contribution to this topic is to tie all these elements together to reflect the complexity of a changing narrative and to show how elaboration acts to reshape the dominant narrative of Christopher Columbus.

Midewiwin Conceptual Framework for Story

Before I begin I should explain that my interest in the subject of the Midewiwin medicine society began while I was a camp participant in the Future Teachers Institute at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. The program was designed to encourage Native American students to become teachers. Students and counselors came from the reservation of Lac Court Orielles in Wisconsin and the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota. During the program I met a student who was being initiated into the Midewiwin medicine society. He wore a miigis shell on his shirt, which symbolized his status as a Midewiwin initiate. At the time I didn't know what the miigis shell meant. Edward Benton-Banai, who is from Lac Court Orielles, says "Gitchie Manito . . . took four parts of Mother Earth and blew into them using a Sacred Shell. From the union of the Four Sacred Elements and his breath, man was created" (2–3). The shell that the creator blew into was the miigis shell. Benton-Banai also states, "The Miigis was to appear and reappear to the Ojibway throughout their history to show them the Path that the Creator wished them to follow" (4). The shell is a signifier that the initiate is on the path the Creator has made for her or him to follow. After camp ended I returned home and asked my mother about the Midewiwin. She replied, "They are medicine people." She added, "Your aunt was Mide; she was taken aside at a very young age. They kept her out of school. They hid her from social workers that would have taken her away for sure." The conversation ended there, and we haven't talked about it since. My point is that although I'm Yankton/Anishinaabe, I want to situate myself as having an outsider's view of the Midewiwin.¹

Growing up I was taught that stories can house spirits. I was told that they are like people. Stories should be treated with respect and never...