Genetic Crossing: Imagining Tribal Identity and Nation in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus

Gerald Vizenor’s 1991 The Heirs of Columbus uses crossing as a simultaneously material and narrative pose to imagine tribal survivance as the heirs’ matrilineal inheritance of Christopher Columbus’s healing genes. Written shortly after Vizenor’s first published work in postmodern theory, the edited collection Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature (1989), Heirs incorporates Vizenor’s signature theoretical concerns. The novel writes back to the common cultural representations of Indians he terms “manifest manners” in a play on the phrase “manifest destiny,” coined to describe the colonization of Native peoples and lands figured in Columbus himself. The heirs are what Vizenor would call “postindian” in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994): “The postindian warriors bear their own simulations and revisions to contend with manifest manners, the ‘authentic’ summaries of ethnology, and the curse of racialism and modernism in the ruins of representation” (5). Though the novel refuses a scientific account of the number of heirs, they include Columbus’s namesake Stone; his “shouter” maternal grandparents with the same names, Truman Columbus; and Felipa Flowers, the fashion-model lawyer trickster poacher and mother of his daughter Miigis; as well as Memphis, a black panther; Caliban, “the great white mongrel” (Heirs 14); and the black bear shaman hand talker Samana, namesake descendant of Christopher Columbus’s New World lover. This mongrel cross-genus, cross-gender, cross-time group embodies Vizenor’s representation of Columbus himself, which deliberately crosses out—while leaving legible traces, since “he is not a separation in tribal consciousness” (185)—Columbus, the death-dealing racist, along with Columbus, the heroic explorer. This cross-motion is productive, much as in the process of weaving cloth, a patrilineal textual thread connecting Stone to Christopher Columbus but also to the executed métis resistance leader Louis Riel (127).¹

We argue that the novel as a whole expresses the genetic code(x) of Christopher Columbus, producing tricky displacements, reversals, and complex oppositions that imagine tribal identity. Far from a potent original thinker or the carrier of civilization, Vizenor’s Columbus is an “obscure crossblood,” probable Jew cursed with a clubbed penis who responds to “a summons to the New World” to bear Mayan civilization back to the Old World (3).² Far from the tragic end of the New World in disease and death, Columbus’s blood bears the beginning humors, the healing gene signature activated by Samana.³ The well-known dark humor of crediting Columbus with discovering America echoes in the erronies and ironies of the historical stories of the search for the headwaters of the Mississippi River, the novelistic location of the heirs’ stone tavern, and the discovery of the structure of DNA.⁴ Heirs’ elaboration of “cross” in all of its play conveys meanings in both content and structure, as do genes and bingo cards. As Stephen Osborne has pointed out, much of the negative reaction to the novel derives from the application of a mimetic representational standard to a text better read as “methectic”: “In a series of characteristic postmodern tropes, the representation in language becomes more real than the material ‘presence’—or, more accurately, the distinction itself is deconstructed. Genes are metaphors for stories, and vice versa.” While Osborne is surely right that “Vizenor is neither describing nor advocating tribal abandonment of traditional lands and modes of production for bingo, genetic therapy, and international waters” (125), this article insists on the materiality of genes and thus the breakdown of the distinction by exploring the “vice versa,” which focuses attention on the details of the novel’s representation of genetic science.⁵ This approach shows how Vizenor’s rewriting of the Columbus story puts his theory into play formally, offering a model of American identity rooted in body and science studies that challenges the historical fantasized objective neutrality of both science and political philosophy.

Heirs imagines both individual and national identity as the coded antinomies of genes, but crucially this identity is not a postmodern invention. The “postindian arises from the earlier inventions of...