Native Storiers: Five Selections (review)

Readers familiar with the University of Nebraska Press's Native Storiers series, edited by Gerald Vizenor and Diane Glancy, may be surprised to find that selections from all five of the series book-length publications have already been gathered together in one volume. Those readers who have spent time with Diane Glancy's Designs of the Night Sky (2002), Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), Eric Gansworth's Mending Skins (2005), Stephen Graham Jones's Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories (2005), or Frances Washburn's Elsie's Business (2006) will find nothing new here, save for an illustrative reminder of the series editors' sense that these authors are forging innovative paths of expression that eschew conventions of "commercial literature" by Native writers, particularly the "cryptic representation[s] of cultural victimry" and the "simulation of cultural representation" (6).

What all readers—those familiar with the series as well as those newcomer readers—will gain from this slender volume is the challenge to find continuities among diverse formalistic styles and thematic emphases. Vizenor's brief introduction to the collection provides a snippet from most of the writers with a gloss on how each example embodies "the actual practices of literary art" rather than merely securing "literature as liturgy" (7). At the close of his seven-page introduction, Vizenor sternly claims that "Literary theorists and historians who endorse imperative representations of traditions to secure literature as liturgy ignore, and at times, inhibit the actual practices of literary art . . ." (7). Implicitly, thus, Vizenor calls on his readers to find his work and that of Glancy, Gansworth, Jones, and Washburn "performances" that actuate "a sense of native presence" (7), narratives that are "imagic instances of the actual creation in stories; natural reason; visual memories; dances; ceremonies" (6), what he also suggests is a "visionary motion of liberty" (6).

I have cited these phrases meticulously because Vizenor's introduction frames the value of these five writers in such terms, not because each of these writers—save for Vizenor himself in Hiroshima Bugi—plainly or directly exhibit these aesthetic tendencies or obviously embody these fictive-theoretical claims. This is not to say that Vizenor's colleagues fail in their attempts, among other things, to resist "simulations of heroic tragedy." Quite the contrary. In short, their works, set alongside Vizenor's, demonstrate the multiple paths of resistance to such simulations. What we have in this collection is an expanded illustration of so many of the theoretical tenets that Vizenor has fictively explored in his narratives. The press's decision to collect these diverse writers makes an important assertion about the multiple ways of being Native storiers. Collected together, read sequentially, selectively, or out of sequence—at any rate, discursively—these series' "bed-fellows" acquire different resonances, tonalities, and so on by their very juxtaposition.

Thus, the ultimate value of this collection is a sustained meditation on the very notion of "Native storying" and "Native storiers." The immediate beneficiaries of this sustained meditation, of course, may very well be instructors who wish to introduce students to the complex of debates about American Indian literary studies. Instructors—or all unfamiliar readers—will have immediate access to a grouping of five must-read authors, rather than choosing only one example from this emergent strand of Native American Indian literature. Readers of this journal know these writers well, but in all honesty, they too infrequently make their way onto course reading lists.

That contribution notwithstanding, in looking only at the pieces selected for inclusion, I found myself wondering if readers' puzzlement about gaps, elisions, ellipses introduced by segmentation, and so forth would disrupt the sincere attempt to look at aesthetic aspects of the work as well as the means by which each becomes part of the creative motion of action, ceremony, and liberty. The original works—save for Graham's collection of short fiction—do make use of fragments and narrative jump cuts, but this is hard to identify...