“The Last Lecture on the Edge”: American Indians are not Invented for Public Consumption

“The Last Lecture on the Edge” is a chapter from American Indian writer Gerald Vizenor’s novel The Trickster of Liberty. The chapter tells a story which happened on the edge of the White Earth Reservation where anyone who wanted to drop over the edge can deliver a last lecture. This article mainly analyzes the lectures delivered by the first three lecturers Marie Gee Hailme, Coke De Fountain and Homer Yellow Snow. This article explores how the chapter satirizes those who utilize Indianness and Indian identity for public consumption. It is argued that Marie Gee Hailme overemphasizes the purity of Indianness and Indian values in Indian school education. She is stubborn to stick to her opinions towards education and tries to consume the education of the Indian kids. Coke De Fountain is considered in this article as a selfish mixblood who consumes Indian kids by selling drugs to them for his own interests. It is also pointed out that Homer Yellow Snow is a a pretend Indian author who consumes his spurious identity and readers’ trust.

The Dirty/Earthy Mother

This chapter explores the ways that undoing the Anthropocene means rejecting misogynist and biophobic meanings of Mother Nature-Earth and reclaiming much of what has been made obscene and “dirty.” This includes reclaiming the word cunt and cultivating a “dirty mind,” able to see through oppressive hierarchical dualisms. The Anthropocene manifests Man’s attempted mutilation and rape-murder of Earth. It relies on a fusion of sex and violence as well as an invidious dualism that falsely opposes nature and culture, soil and spirit, dirty and clean, black and white, earth and sky, female and male. Refusing this artificial opposition, Nature-Earth appears as the active and autonomous “Mutha’,” one who thinks, who decides, who gives, who takes, who comes, and who also can go. Human beings have long invoked Nature-Earth as “Mother,” not only to recognize our dependence on and connection to Nature-Earth, but also, perhaps, to remind Nature-Earth of their relationship to us.

Indigenous Destinies

Gerald Vizenor displays his playful wit and provocative theorizing of Indigenous creativity in Native Provenance (2019), a collection of essays adapted from material that appeared in other forms between 2004 and 2019. He uses familiar concepts (survivance, transmotion, gossip theory) to drive discussions of familiar topics (World War I veterans from White Earth, the White Earth constitution, Indigenous abstract expressionist painters). Devoted readers of Vizenor will appreciate but also wonder about the persistence in his work over many decades of certain topics and critical emphases. A decreased interest in crossbloods as trickster figures represents one of the most significant shifts in emphasis from the middle to the later part of Vizenor’s career. Louis Owens admired Vizenor’s work on crossbloods, and he lived an experience fundamental to his view of the world that he called, similarly, “mixedblood.” Yet, as many of the contributors to Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy (2019) demonstrate, Owens consistently recognized distinct Native and non-Native worlds in his scholarship and drew upon tribal nation-specific beliefs and practices in his novels. His characters often struggled to understand their connection to Indigenous histories, communities, and families, all of which Owens valued, even when they remained inaccessible, either to him or his characters.

“The Recovery of the People Is Tied to the Recovery of Food”: Food Sovereignty and Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman

This essay turns to LaDuke’s literature and activism to explore ways in which contemporary Native American writers center their work around issues of food sovereignty, environmental protection, and economic self-determination as essential platforms for community regeneration, renewal, and survival. I argue that Last Standing Woman (1997), Anishinaabe writer Winona LaDuke’s first novel, dramatizes many of these concerns at the heart of her activist and political work. Central to the novel Last Standing Woman is the significance of wild rice for the White Earth Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) people of Minnesota. In Last Standing Woman, wild rice is not only a traditional and sustainable crop but also one that can ensure the livelihood of the community. At the heart of a feminist and activist novel like Last Standing Woman – as well as Winona LaDuke’s activist work, more broadly – is a twofold challenge, which resonates across much Native American writing: on the one hand, the challenge to preserve (existing resources, cultural practices, etc.); on the other, to recover the losses Native communities have suffered historically through colonization and its many consequences, such as the enormous loss of land suffered by the White Earth community. The turn to literature provides Winona LaDuke with a powerful site of political engagement, where she foregrounds issues of gender, tribal politics, and the environment at the same time as she tells a powerful story about Anishinaabe continued resilience.