Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity by Gerald Vizenor (review)

in native provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, Gerald Vizenor contemplates the shimmer of storytelling and framing new entry points for literary motion. Naanaagadawendaan ezhi-dibaajimowaaseziwaad (He seeks to understand the way stories have been used to illuminate). Returning to familiar terms, events, artists, and authors, he invites readers to imagine a wide array of divers bringing earth up from the depths to a timeless trickster who creates from it a world of relational theories. The essays gathered in this collection sprang from rhetorical events spanning several continents, and the extended conversation is one that will satisfy those who have been following Vizenor's critical cartography and ironic interventions from Griever de Hocus to Dogroy Beaulieu.

"Transmotion" and "survivance" are two of Vizenor's most often stolen/ deployed/mimicked neologisms, and he rewards readers with further iterations of these thick and useful concepts. He reminds us that "survivance is as complex as the notions and course of dominance" (31), and "transmotion is the creative perception of the seasons and the visual scenes and tropisms of motion in native art and literature" (132). These and other ideologies offer a framework for Native American literary criticism that leads to his statement: "Native American literature, for the first time in literary history, can be clearly reviewed, discussed, and compared in four narrative categories: translated native stories and dream songs, early conversion and resistance literature published by natives educated at mission schools, native literary art and popular native commercial fiction" (119). Discussions of gossip theory, Native irony, pictomythology, tropisms, metaphorical gestures, and cosmototemic art all trace a continuous creative aesthetic. By clarifying the diverse directions of Native American artistic and narrative tradition, he challenges story traders of all origins to reexamine the right to creative representation and expression of totemic harmony.

Vizenor has always worked as both editorial bard and poetic journalist, alternately retelling real events through veils of fiction or salting imagined dramas with real characters and historic events. In Native Provenance he writes about the major military events experienced by Anishinaabe warriors from the Montreal Treaty of Peace in 1701 to the creation and implementation of the New Constitution of the White Earth Nation in 2013. Taking this collection as a whole, it is clear that one of Vizenor's aims is to lay bare the comedy and irony of America's original and current identity crises by explaining the dialogic of sovereignty as the recognition of virtual and actual Native presence contrasted with the modern legal apparatus required to maintain a collective identity. The struggles experienced by Native North Americans are the result and the predictions of transmotion derailed and stalled by fundamental flaws in colonial logic.

The search for a definition of cultural creativity is centered on the work of various artists and authors. Vizenor writes about the provenance of works by George Morrison, Daphne Odjig, and many other visual artists. He also offers an Anishinaabe reading of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and explains how Karl May thrived in an era that was progressive for some but repressive for others. He critiques May's Winnetou novels as part of the period of vanishment after the Wounded Knee Massacre and Dawes Act, when the Bureau of American Ethnology and Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows were the world's window to Native American identity. He curates lists of authors with a "tricky sense of consciousness" who are able to overturn the monotheistic separation of humans and animals. These are not topics readers expect to find in volumes of Native American literary criticism, but Vizenor makes clear why they should be included.

Perhaps the most powerful gesture of this volume is a litany of names that appears in several essays: "Samson Occom, William Appess, Joseph Brant, George Copway, Black Elk, Charles Eastman, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Luther Standing Bear, White Cloud, William Warren, and many other native diplomats, published authors, and restive [resistive] storiers" (79–80). I want to include in that list Jane Schoolcraft, Gertrude Bonnin, and...