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Addressing Matters of Concern in Native American Literatures: Place Matters

Chris LaLonde

SUNY Oswego

Living History

Walking into Pinehurst, sunburned, smelling of fish,

Big Indian man paying for some gas and a six pack,

Looking at me hard.

Dreamer, I think. Too old for me.

Heads right toward me.

“Jeez,” he says, “You look just like your mom-

You must be Marlene’s girl.”

Pinches my arm, but I guess it’s yours he touches.

Hell, wasn’t even looking at me.

Wonder if I’m what they call living history?

Kimberly Blaeser, “Living History”

Odd though it may seem, a US college or university can be, often is, a foreign context for the teaching of Native American literatures. That is to say, most of the students in most institutions of higher education without a significant Native student population and/or proximity to Native communities will be both non-Native and at best little aware of both the literatures being taught and the Native histories, cultures, and worldviews informing and grounding them. Therefore, the students are like as not to resort to what they know, or rather what they think they know: an understanding of Native Americans rooted in indian stereotypes with which the students are familiar and comfortable.

Italicized and lowercase, indian was first deployed by White Earth Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor to designate the construction created and perpetuated by the dominant society. In order to move beyond that construction, to replace absence with Native presence, a project of deracination must be undertaken, if you will, pulling the stereotypes from the ground from which creates and nurtures them in order that they might be replaced by Native representations in all their richness and complexity: social, cultural, historical, political, spiritual, and so on. In what follows, then, I want to use as our example of unmaking and unmasking a course on literary works by White Earth Anishinnabe writers in order to show how transforming the classroom into a foreign context for the students is a vital move if we are to teach beyond the stereotypes, undoing them in the process. Such a transformation of the classroom is not without risks of course, significant ones, but the stakes are incredibly high, and thus the risks are worth running. How high those stakes? I dare say we already know, pledged as we are to helping students apprehend the importance of Native artistic expression, written and otherwise. Still, bear with me, please, while I take liberty in order to situate the stakes in relation to both Gayatri Spivak’s “transnational literacy”—her voice and phrase used in the Call for Papers that led to this collection of essays—and Vizenor’s thought—specifically what he labels continental liberty and a literary Ghost Dance.

Spivak coined “transnational literacy” in an address entitled “Teaching for the Times” that was subsequently published in 1992. In that address, Spivak holds that such literacy affords us the possibility of particularity, of the chance to, in her words, “distinguish between varieties of decolonization on the agenda, rather than collapse them as ‘post-coloniality’” (16), and with that collapse fall prey to generalization, appropriation, fuzziness. Thus, she continues: “If we were transnationally literate, we might read sections that are stylistically non-competitive with the spectacular or experimental fiction of certain sections of hybridity or post-coloniality with a disarticulating rather than a comparative point of view. Native American fiction would then allegorically intervene in reminding us of the economic peripheralization of the originary communist pre-capitalist ethnicities of the Fourth World” (16). In short, Spivak imagines transnational literacy as a way for teachers and students, readers all, to take apart hegemony, and she turns first to Native American literature as an example of such an articulation.

Scarcely five years later, when the address is revised and published in a collection of essays entitled Dangerous Liasons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Spivak adds a preface to her piece, one that sounds a note of urgency: “Now more than ever it seems right for good teaching to turn from an emphasis upon our contingent histories to the invention of a shared and dynamic present—as the continuous unrolling of an ungraspable event with consequences that might as well be called ‘global’ in its minute detail” (409). With her Wellek Lectures three years later, published in 2003 as Death of a Discipline, urgency seems to give way to elegy, for, although still with hope, Spivak acknowledges “I will remain caught in the scandal of Comparative Literature, unable to access First Nation orality … Postcolonialism [remains] … caught in mere nationalism over against colonialism … [and] transnational literacy may remain confined within a politics of recognizing multiculturalism or of international aid, in the interest of a ‘Development’ of which the promise of cyber-literacy is increasingly a part” (Death of a Discipline 81).

“Let the ghost dance” (Death of a Discipline xii)

The phrase is Spivak’s, from Death of a Discipline very near the end of her “Acknowledgements”—a curious and revealing section given that although it runs for five paragraphs there are only two acknowledgements, one to Jonathan Culler and the other to Henry Staten. The bulk of the section is devoted to her story of how long the subject of the book has occupied her thoughts. It is as though that story comes unbidden here, that it must arrive; that it must arrive now. This makes sense, for Death of a Discipline is a haunted text: small wonder that, it sounding death after all. That is not so much a reading as an observation. Spivak too is haunted, and she knows it, confronts it. Author and text are haunted by Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This is obvious. Not immediately obvious is the ghost that is the Ghost Dance: one has to turn to her earlier “Ghostwriting” (1995), where she turns to the Ghost Dance in order to get to the ghost that, in her words, “has been with Derrida a long time” (70). In Spivak’s reading, the Ghost Dance, the pan-Native nations movement of the late 19^th century, was born of a desire, and now I quote her, “to be haunted by the ancestors rather than treat them as objects of ritual worship” (70). For Spivak, such a haunting, a ghost from the past, neither leads to nor invokes the future present; rather, its “end,” and again I quote her, is to “make the past a future” (70, emphasis added), not the future, and for her it is the combination of possibility and undecidedability that makes possible and indeed necessitates action.

In Death of a Discipline the pages on which the phrase “ghost dance” appears, save curiously for p. xii, are indexed under the heading “ghost dance metaphor.” Would that the heading sounded another revenant come to Spivak, that being the haunting figure of White Earth Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor, from another time that functions now as (an) other time, (dare we say Indi’n time) 1992. For in the spring of that year Vizenor published an essay in World Literature Today (you can’t make this up) entitled “Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance.” Spivak’s phrasing cannot be uncanny, surely; rather, what she seems not to have known is that Vizenor affords her a way forward, one that offers a supplement to Spivak’s planetarity. Vizenor, writing in the early 1990s, which is to say at precisely the time Spivak invokes Native American fiction to help make her case for the need for transnational literacy, concludes his brief survey of the current state of Native American literary production and the booklength scholarship devoted to it by yoking Native literature and the Ghost Dance:

English, the coercive language at federal boarding schools, has carried some of the best stories of endurance and tribal spiritual restoration, and now that same dominant language bears the creative literature of crossblood writers in the cities. The characters dance as tricksters, a stature that would unite tribal memories. The language of tribal novelists and poets could be a literary ghost dance, a literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance. (8)

Vizenor sounds a note of caution here, to be sure: Native American literature becomes a literary ghost dance when it rouses and animates tribal survivance, which is to say when it inspires and encourages not victimry but survival and resistance; survival and appearance, that is to say presence; survival in the name of continuance for both individual(s) and the group, be it band, tribe, or nation.

In 2009, Vizenor links Wovoka and the Ghost Dance to a Native continental liberty, and with that linking a Native American literature of liberation implicitly and explicitly inscribes and calls for the People to have once again the freedom to move throughout their ancestral homelands across the continent. While Spivak’s planetarity is a reasonable way to escape the implications and meanings of globalization that come along unbidden when one thinks in global terms, Vizenor’s continental liberty keeps the land, sovereignty, and Native rightful claims to both squarely before us. Place matters, after all. So too words: apt words, words stitched together well, artful words. To wit, “a literature of liberation”: the phrase balanced perfectly, its rhythm carrying the lower case “l” to the heart of the heart of the clause and then beyond so that we can arrive just where writer and reader need to be—survivance.¹

Let the literary ghost dance, indeed.

Native texts teach us. In turn, we teach students and each other to see what has not been seen concerning Native Americans and Native American literatures. This is no easy task, as White Earth Anishinaabe Kimberly Blaeser’s “Living History,” the text with which we began, makes clear. “Living History” asks readers to recognize the trap the majority culture would have the indian be caught in. That is, the poem’s closing words repeat the title, and in doing so frame the dominant societies’ efforts to leave the Native no way out, nowhere to go to save an endless reenactment of the indian—frozen in the past, at best an actor in some commodification of some version of American history: call it a wild west show, a pageant, frontier town.

If not simply consigned to the past, the indian of today is assailed by groups such as the Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA) and All Citizens Equal (ACE) for clinging to treaties between Native nations and the United States Government that those groups abhor. Elaine Willman, a past chair of CERA, declared at a meeting of Montana Agri-Women, “One of the games being played is using terms that are a couple of hundred years old, that are dead. It’s dead language being revitalized. For example, you hear an awful lot these days about aboriginal rights, an awful lot about pre-constitutional and pre-European. These are terms that are just invalid. They are absolutely invalid, but they are being propagandized across the country” (“Montana Human Rights Network” 9-10).

Of course, contemporary Native Americans are also trapped by the stereotypes of the spiritual/mystical indian, the environmental indian, the warrior, the drunk. This is not to say that Natives are not spiritual, do not care about the environment and its degradation, do not serve in the armed forces, or have not succumbed to the seductive poison of alcohol: some are, some do, some have. The point is that the stereotypes make it easy for members of the dominant society to forego so much as an awareness of the issues faced by contemporary Natives, much less think about those issues and their root causes and take action. More than fifty years after the American Indian Movement was born to patrol the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota in response to police harassment, Alcatraz was occupied by Native Americans, and Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, it would seem that most in North America still tend not to think about the Indigenous people of the continent, comfortable with the figure of the indian unexamined and unchallenged. Meanwhile, a 2019 Canadian government commission declared violence against First Nations women to be genocidal, US. FBI statistics indicate that 4% of the identified hate crimes in 2016 were committed against Native Americans, incarceration of Native Americans is disproportionate to their percentage of the total US population, Indigenous youth on both sides of the US-Canada border suffer from a higher rate of suicide than non-Natives, and poverty and health problems abound. Such is the seductive power of the stereotype.

The references to Momaday and Silko are deliberate, for it is via literature that the stereotypes can begin to be undone. From title to last words to title, “Living History” inscribes a closed circuit. Or so it would seem. As educators, our task is to help students move beyond that with which they are comfortable, the stereotype, so that they can see a way out of the trap set by those in power and articulated by Blaeser’s poem. Here, too, place matters, and by that I mean the classroom; thus, we turn there now.

“Indian people don’t teach their children, they story them.”

Kimberly Blaeser in Women from White Earth

Given what I have said so far you might think my theoretical predilections would be toward poststructuralism and more specifically deconstruction, which is fair enough. When I teach Native American literatures, however, I keep continental theory well in the background, operating for the most part soto voce if at all, in favor of a tribal—or nation-based approach to reading works from a particular group of Native literary artists. In short, I am following the call of Blaeser and others for a “tribal-centered” literary criticism. Such a critical center does not reject western approaches to texts, mind you, but it does ask us to let the texts in question teach us about specific Indigenous ways of knowing, ways of being, culture, and history. In order to best have the texts teach us, moreover, it is important to call into question the classroom and how it operates.

Thus, I begin my upper-division undergraduate course in the literature by White Earth Anishinaabe writers not with the syllabus or with general remarks about the course and what we hope to accomplish; rather, from the back of the classroom I voice for them Blaeser’s poem and then ask them to write down what they heard. The move from spoken to written mirrors the connection between orality and writing that Blaeser highlights in her book on the work of fellow bandmember Vizenor and sounds what will be our effort to identify the traces of orality in the written works we will read throughout the course: “Recognizing the vitality of the oral, Vizenor’s effort is to write in the oral tradition, to invite or require an imaginative response similar to that required in the oral exchange, one that will move the reader beyond the ‘dead voices’ on the page” (Blaeser Gerald Vizenor

29-30).²

More must be done than that, of course, and toward that end we talk about what the students noted—typically the smell of fish, the six-pack, a “big Indian man,” and the pinch. We talk about why they remember “Indian” and six-pack as a way to begin to get them to think about the insidiousness of stereotypes and stereotypical thinking. When conversation begins to flag, I offer them again the poem, this time beginning with the title and identifying the author and her band and changing my inflection of “Dreamer” from dismissive derision to that which sounds a degree of wistfulness. They then write what stuck in their ear and mind this time. Here then we have highlighted dreams and dreamers, which takes us to the Anishinaabe creation story, as offered by Basil Johnston, and the importance of both to the People. In Johnston’s rendering, Kitche Manitou, the Great Spirit, made humans last and “though last in the order of creation, least in the order of dependence, and weakest in bodily powers, man had the greatest gift—the power to dream” (Johnston 13).

From there to the pinch, we get the students to think about what that signifies. Why not “brushes my arm,” say, or “touches my arm,” either of which would maintain the rhythm and the series of soft endings that are features of the line? A pinch startles us, makes us jump, shocks us without intending to do harm. Recognizing this enables the note of trickster to be sounded and to conjure a trickster pinch, an act that startles us into thinking and seeing anew, that enables the possibility of adopting a different perspective. Such a trickster move, one neither born of malice nor of appetite, destabilizes us in order that we might take the measure of our footing, the ground upon which we stand, and, one hopes, adopt a new stance, stand on ground newly and differently understood.³

Eventually we get around to what they do not remark, upon either first hearing or second, and cannot get to from what has been said so far: the poem’s opening move: “Walking into Pinehurst.” The first word emphasizes both movement and verbs, the former a critical element in Anishinaabe history, culture, and lifeways, and the latter a distinguishing characteristic of Anishinaabemowin, the language of the people. Anishinaabemowin is a language of verbs more than of nouns, a rich and evolving language of action, that is, as Anishinaabe writers as seemingly different as Vizenor and Louise Erdrich have noted, rooted in the place the language was and is spoken. It is a language connected to the land itself.⁴

Pinehurst, moreover, is more than just a place-name, for knowing where it is located on the White Earth Reservation gets us thinking about White Earth and why the reservation came to be located in this particular spot in Minnesota back in 1867.

Back when State leaders imagined a place to which all the Anishinaabeg of Minnesota would settle, so the story goes, they first pictured a reservation around and to the east of Leech Lake, a huge sheet of water in the north-central part of the state some fifty miles east of what would become the eastern border of the White Earth Reservation. It did not take them long to realize that the land east of Leech would not do, for the soil was too poor and there was not enough easily clearable ground to be had. What would become White Earth, on the other hand, had the right mix of ecosystems: tallgrass prairie dominating to the west, conifers and hardwoods like aspen and birch to the east, and a mixed zone in between. Pinehurst, a resort situated between north and south Twin Lakes, is in that middle zone, tending toward the boreal to the east.

What was planned failed, and there are seven Anishinaabe, or what the state and federal government call Chippewa, reservations in Minnesota today, but White Earth, situated as a contact zone where multiple forest-types and ecosystems meet and mingle, is a fitting location, for band members who are writers can turn to the contact zone that is the literary text, a place where we might unlearn the classroom so that we can begin to learn something about White Earth, the people, their literary texts, and indigeneity.

In the effort to unlearn so that we can then learn about White Earth and its people on and off the reservation, one might expect a turn from Blaeser’s “Living History” to texts rooted in history such as William Warren’s 19^th century History of the Ojibway People (1885), John Rogers’ Red World And White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood (first published in 1957), or Winona LaDuke’s historical novel Last Standing Woman (1999). Because unlearning the classroom and the academy goes hand in hand with our efforts to learn together, however, we next turn to Vizenor’s Chair of Tears (2012), a seriously playful critique of Native and Indigenous Studies programs in general and the contemporary university in particular. The novel is a seriously playful critique of Native Studies programs in general and the contemporary university in particular. In it, an academic dean with nowhere else to turn and nothing left to lose after a run of six previous chairs had failed to lead the Department of Native American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota opts for the least qualified candidate, non-academic Captain Shammer. Indeed, Shammer had never attended university, much less earned a degree. Prior to his appointment, the department had been without vision, a Native sense of irony, or a survivance story (Chair of Tears 27). Shammer, the narrator tells us, is not “a romancer,” not someone interested in either the romantic image of the indian or victimry; rather, “he was a teaser of manners, missions, and conventions, and more clearly sensitive to chance and situational conscience than to customary academic practices” (Chair of Tears 34). In his first semester as chair, Shammer proclaims a number of radical edicts and makes a series of radical moves, from changing all the incompletes accumulated by the department’s students to passing grades to involving the Native community in the Twin Cities in the department’s transformation. Perhaps most radical of all, at least in terms of university space, he terminates the policy of an individual private office for each faculty member, moves the faculty to the shared space of a conference room, and changes the private offices into spaces “for specific visions and distinctive Native actions and practices” (Chair of Tears 41).

Bringing trickster to bear early on links the course’s second text with “Living History” and its unsettling, awakening pinch, of course, but that could be done with any text by Gerald Vizenor. So could highlighting the importance of context and chance to Anishinaabe worldview and lifeways, and indeed I would go so far as to say Anishinaabemowin as well. Thus while Shammer affects transformation by trick and tease, sensitive always to “chance and situational conscience,” we turn to him and his efforts where and when we do in order to emphasize our tease of the major, the university, and learning. Beyond beginning in the dark, at the back of the room rather than the front, with the spoken rather than the written word, we play the moccasin game, 21, and, particularly, wiindigoo six card stud⁵: students are either picked by their peers or volunteer to be part of a team that plays for them all in games where what is at stake are grades on particular assignments. In the spirit of Shammer’s stray visions seminar, where the blank pages of the seminar book would be filled over the semester’s course by the students in their capacity as storiers committed to natural reason and stray vision building on what had already been written, students come to shared conclusions for the answers to quiz questions. Motivating all of this is the desire to get the students to think of themselves as, if not a community, at least a collective and to recognize that they share in the responsibility for what happens to them in and outside of the classroom.

By the time we get to Gordon Henry Jr.’s The Light People, the penultimate text read in the most recent iteration of the course, students have come together in an engagement in the history of White Earth, traditional cultural practices and contemporary issues, and matters of sovereignty. With The Light People our engagement culminates in and with the text’s appropriation in its last section, by far the longest of the novel, of the opening phrase of the Constitution of the United States in order to have it sound and resound in the service of another nation and people: White Earth and the White Earth Anishinaabeg. There, Oskinaway, back home to the Fineday reservation, a fictionalized White Earth, after his efforts to heal an injured bird led him to neglect his studies and fail his veterinarian school courses, attempts to engage the bird’s mind while its wing heals. Moved by an ad, he buys an audio program designed to get birds to talk via recordings of the Preamble of the U. S. Constitution broken into words and phrases and accompanied by a European largo of stringed instruments (The Light People 200). All the bird is able to learn and recite, however, is the opening phrase, “We the People,” because, it turns out, the program is a scam.

Reflecting on the meeting at which the people of Fineday learned of and decided how to deal with the crisis of their vanishing children, Oskinaway, we read, “felt the power of the unity of community decision still living in him” (The Light People 223) as he arrives home at the novel’s end, saves the bird from choking to death, and then, as it is now clearly capable of flight, releases the bird and watches it glide over the treeline and disappear. From his bed, between sleeping and waking, he hears, away in the distance and its source out of sight, “We the people, we the people, we the people, we the people” (The Light People 226). Oskinaway would carry that experience and those words with him throughout his life, hearing them and speaking them; so too should the students, recognizing that they reference the Anishinaabeg, yes, and more generally, the Indigenous peoples of North America, and beyond. This need not be an either/or construction, mind you, either the United States or White Earth, either Euroamerica or Native America, but a both-and construction wherein the latter functions as a supplement, undoing the country as nation in order that, another way forward might be imagined and created.

That other way forward, an Indigenous way that we be prepared to follow once freed from the hold of stereotypes, is rooted in particulars of place and community. Cree/Dene artist and scholar Jarrett Martineau and his co-author Eric Ritskes begin their essay “Fugitive indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of decolonial struggle through Indigenous art” with a simple, stark proclamation: “Indigenous art is inherently political” (I). For them, Indigenous art is much more than simply a response to and/or taking a distance from the majority society and its dominant ideology. Rather, because Indigenous art is tethered to land and community, and vice-versa, it should be seen as particular “localized sites of creative engagement” that are rooted in place and the quotidian, the lived experiences of Native people (II). Martineau and Ritskes would have scholars “re-center Indigenous land, communities, and cultures as the force that energizes decolonization and provides fugitive possibilities for movement and creative expression” (II).

We find instances of just such localized creative engagement in Blaeser’s poetry, with which the course ends as we effectively inscribe a circle that is the opposite of the containing and constraining enclosure that is the stereotype indian. The prose poem “Studies for Migration” from Absentee Indians and Other Poems, for example, begins with an echo of the beginning of “Living History” from Trailing You, “Pulled into Joe Olson’s landing” (Absentee Indians 30). It is a fitting and powerful opening, indicating both that one enters and that one is drawn into a place. Moreover, the plural pronoun at play in the poem makes clear that the place has this effect on more than just the narrator. So people return: “Each year someone comes home” (30) the second stanza begins, Pat next to her father, Von on his grandma’s old land, Laurie back as well. The land is waiting for them, “Each space held for years in stories” (30) the poem tells us; it tells us, too, that “Clouded titles fill courthouse files” (30), a stark reminder of how so much of White Earth land was taken from the people. Still, maple sap runs in the spring, sugarbushing connects people to place, place to people, people to each other, as does ricing, powwowing, kitchentable cribbage. In recognition and in the spirit of connection, the poem’s short final stanza opens with a conjunction: “And flight the birds could tell us is a pattern. Going. And coming back” (30).

Trumpeters come back; so too pelicans, “filtering in for seven summers. Today they fill the north quarter of South Twin. The evening lake black with birds” (30). Likely they can be seen from Pinehurst. It is not just birds. Sturgeon are back at White Earth now, have been for several years. As is true of migratory birds, sturgeon range widely; theirs is continental liberty, or so it should be, but it took dam modification and dam removal by the state to enable the fish to swim in and through White Earth waters again as they once had and should.

Theorizing, teaching, Native American literatures, world literature, the world: again, the stakes are so very high. Early on, I asked you to “bear with me,” the phrase a conscious invocation of Vizenor and specifically the “Letter to the Reader” in his first novel, Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles. One of the Anishinaabe clans dedicated to defense, to have the bear with me, as with Vizenor, is to signal that people and place are threatened and must be defended. Understanding and appreciating the connection between Indigenous people and place is critical to an understanding of their literature. What holds for the White Earth Anishinaabeg and White Earth holds for other Natives and their traditional homeland, as well.

The bear is with me because this is no laughing matter. Spivak closes Death of a Discipline with a call for planetarity; acknowledging that “The planetarity of which I have been speaking in these pages is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet” (101) and that “The ‘planet’ is here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility” (Death of a Discipline 102).⁶ Blaeser too ends with a recognition and celebration of Native literary artists from across the continent, using phrases from their works, the first being Gordon Henry Jr.’s “outside White Earth,” as part of her articulation of what it means to be a “Y2K Indian” “writing the circle / of return” (Absentee Indians 131). A pantribal nations collective of voices, resounding.

Shared voices, shared responsibility. A world literature committed to the world, to the earth and all living things. Imagine that. Trumpeter and pelican, sturgeon and bear; the species fittingly correspond to the Anishinaabe clans traditionally associated with leadership, teaching, and defense. Imagine this: we use our position as leaders to teach students such that they learn what Indigenous literatures reveal about our shared responsibility, and that we and they act in defense of the earth, of the human and the more-than-human, each and every one. That is a story worth telling, worth sharing.

Works Cited

Blaeser, Kimberly. Absentee Indians and Other Poems. Michigan State University Press, 2004.

———. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

———. “Kimberly Blaeser.” Women of White Earth. Ed. Vance Vannote. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 3-7.

———. “Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Center.” Looking at the Words of Our People. Theytus, 1993.

———. Trailing You. Greenfield Review Press, 1994.

Bowers, Neal & Charles Silet. “An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” MELUS 8.1(Spring 1981): 41-49.

Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. National Geographic Society, 2003.

Henry, Gordon, Jr. The Light People. University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

LaDuke, Winona. Last Standing Woman. Voyageur Press, 1999.

Martineau, Jarrett & Eric Ritskes. “Fugitive indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of decolonial struggle through Indigenous art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3.1 (2014): I-XII.

Montana Human Rights Network. “The Case for Categorizing Anti-Indian Groups as Hate Groups.” Helena, Montana (July 2018): 1-13.

Rogers, John. Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood. University of Oklahoma Press, 1974.

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World. Dirs. Catherine Bainbridge & Alfonso Maiorana. July 2017.

Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, 2003.

———. “Ghostwriting.” Diacritics. 25.2 (Summer 1995): 64-84.

———. “Teaching for the Times.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 25.1 (Spring 1992): 3-22.

Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

———. Chair of Tears. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

———. Dead Voices. University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

———. “Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance.” World Literature Today 66.2 (Spring 1992): 223-228.

———. The People Named the Chippewa. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Warren, William. History of the Ojibway People. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984.

¹ So too does song, as the reenactment at the beginning of Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World of Frances Densmore recording an Anishinaabe singer, circa the 1920s, makes clear. The singer walks right out from another time, one figured by Densmore, by her project, by her fellow anthropologists, by America, as (an)other time, one fast fading away. The singer will have none of it. Instead, he carries into the future, circa the 1950s, an Indigenous beat and tempo, striking a chord that still resonates today: the power chord. The guitarist is Link Wray, Shawnee. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World is bent on having its audience see what they have never seen, the all-too-often unknown or little told influence Native artists had and have on rock, blues, jazz, folk, and hip-hop.

² Dead Voices is the title of a 1992 novel by Vizenor. In order to enliven his prose, to bring the oral to and through the written, Blaeser argues that Vizenor uses Anishinaabe storytelling techniques, elicits audience participation, and deploys a number of literary techniques in order to counter losses inevitable when moving from the oral to the written, including “abrupt transitions, unusual juxtapositions, pronoun shifts, repetitions, self-conscious or metaliterary devices, understatement, and lack of closure” (Blaeser Gerald Vizenor 33).

³ White Earth Anishinaabe writer Gordon Henry Jr. makes clear the link between words, writing, and a trickster turn early on in his 1994 novel The Light People when describing how Arthur Boozhoo has a child at a party rip apart “his parent’s most important correspondence,” the sodden bits of which are made whole after Boozhoo sings over them words that highlight the playful potential of the sign: “Sleep, peels, angles of angels sing of sign, sword of words, elm smells concrete, encore on the corner, a northern ornithologists, jest in case, sends a letter which ends in ways to sway opinion to slice the union onion with a sword of words, without tears” (Gordon Henry Jr. The Light People 2021). Words well used can make whole and thus serve as a weapon to be wielded against the correspondence, the words, of authority.

⁴ In 1983, Vizenor wrote, “The words the woodland tribes spoke were connected to the place the words were spoken. The poetic images were held, for some tribal families, in song pictures and in the rhythms of visions and dreams in music: timeless and natural patterns of seeing and knowing the earth” (Vizenor The People 24-26). Twenty years on, Erdrich writes that Anishinaabemowin’s (she uses the word Ojibwemowin) “philosophy is bound up in northern earth, lakes, rivers, forests, and plains. Its origins pertain to the animals and their particular habits, to the shades of meaning in the very placement of stones. Many of the names and songs associated with these places were revealed to people in dreams and songs—it is a language that most directly reflects a human involvement with the spirit of the land itself” (Erdrich 85).

⁵ In typical Vizenor fashion, a tricky game found in Chair of Tears: “Each player receives two cards down and four rounds of cards up with bets after each card is dealt. At the end, after the final round of cards and bets, the deck is shuffled, cut twice, and then the dealer turns over the card on the top of the secured deck. This is the wiindigoo card, the last card, and if that card is a king, queen, or jack, the same face cards in any hand of a player are dead and obsolete” (54).

⁶ Such is the note Rumble ends on, taking us to those standing with Standing Rock in 2016 and marching in the name of the planet and all its creatures at the People’s Climate March in 2014.