Zig Jackson: Postindian Warrior of Fine Art

The article is a discussion of contemporary photographic works featuring Native Americans. The argument is framed through references to the conventions of representations of Native people in photography, on the one hand, and the critical discourse of Gerald Vizenor and the notions of the “Indian” and “Postindian,” on the other. The article focuses on the artist, Zig Jackson, who is described as a Postindian “warrior of survivance” and whose practice is analyzed as an attempt at the deconstruction of the popular image of the “Indian.”

American Indian Identity in The Heirs of Columbus

The present study aims to explore the identity construction in The Heirs of Columbus. The Heirs of Columbus exhibits the chronic representations of primitive inferior Indian constructed by the Euro Americans through the exercise of colonialism. These representations have been spread on both conscious and unconscious levels to maintain power and colonial hegemony. Gerald Vizenor deconstructs the stereotype Indian through his writings hence refute the eurocentric notion of stereotype native. He unveils the Eurocentric ideology by rewriting history in a subversive ironical way, records the construction of Indian thus reconstructs him in his narration.

Hacking Colonialism

Listen: Dread, panic, and horror are the great teasers, and tragic wisdom is our best chance in a dangerous world.—Gerald Vizenor, Postindian ConversationsUntil that day . . .Until all are one . . .Continue the struggle . . .—Optimus Prime, in The Transformers: The Movie“American people are being pushed into new social forms because of the complex nature of modern communications and transportation, and the competing forms are neotribalism and neofeudalism,” the Standing Rock Sioux thinker Vine Deloria, Jr., wrote in 1970 (14). That insight was inspired in part by the work of Marshall McLuhan, which also led Deloria to suggest something even more provocative:Indian people are just as subject to the deluge of information as are other people. In the last decade most reservations have come within the reach of televisions and computers. In many ways Indian people are just as directed by the electric nature of our universe as any other group. But the tribal viewpoint simply absorbs what is reported to it and immediately integrates it into the experience of the group. . . . The more that happens, the better the tribe seems to function and the stronger it appears to get. Of all the groups in the modern world Indians are best able to cope with the modern situation.

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.

Gerald Vizenor. Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity.

This is a critical moment for those who care for Native American and Indigenous archives. After much discussion, debate, and years of tireless advocacy, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials has finally been endorsed by our leading professional organizations. The Association of College and Research Libraries, following the request of the Rare Books and Manuscript Section (RBMS), endorsed the Protocols in August 2019. In 2018, the Council of the Society of American Archivists unanimously endorsed the Protocols, accompanied by an apology for the many years of inaction. Following these endorsements, the next step for us is not only to continue its promotion and implementation, but also grow our understanding of what it means to be responsible stewards of items in our care. The Protocols articulate foundational concepts for our professional practice, including notions of cultural sensitivity and reciprocity. We can further expand our thinking and practice in this area by engaging with the works of prominent thinkers. Among these is Anishinaabe cultural theorist, writer, and scholar Gerald Vizenor’s most recent book, Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity.

Reader-Response Theory and Dialogic Analysis of Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus

This article has employed the theory of Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) dialogism, and Wolfgang Iser’s (1926–2007) reader-response theory to examine the socio-political, and historical implications of Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus. The Heirs of Columbus (Heirs) was written to dismantle the historical oppression of Native Americans (NA) throughout the post Columbian era. Dialogism is an umbrella term that creates difference between historical and Native American discourse, providing new passages to comprehend the marginalized silenced other; in other words, it helps create a voice for the vanishing Indian. We have systematically identified the use of dialogic techniques like subversion, carnival, polyphony and heteroglossia in Heirs while, at the same time, analyzing his text through the framework of Iser’s reader-response theory. We have come to the conclusion that Iser’s theory is not enough to analyze Vizenor’s revolutionary text since Vizenor provokes his readers to draw their own conclusions rather than conforming to set of fixed ideals of author.

Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich

This essay examines Anishinaabe pictography in contemporary legal contexts, challenging the notion that the law must necessarily inhere in alphabetic isomorphism, let alone in the colonialist inscriptive norms of the nation. Explaining how pictography elicits a loosened relation between sign and signified, this essay develops a semiotic theory of nonisomorphy to analyze uses of pictography in the work of several Anishinaabe scholars and writers: in John Borrows's advocacy of “jurisgenerative multiperspectivalism,” in Gerald Vizenor's conception of social irony and ironic constitutionalism, and in Louise Erdrich's figuration of ecological literacy and reciprocity. Focusing in particular on the trope of metonymy in pictographic writing, this essay elucidates the perspectival shifts and contextual metamorphoses of metonymy in the native poetics of the Americas, forming and transforming historical experience while offering colonial situations ample room to trip themselves up on their own contradictions.

World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels

This article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of travelling men and women in The Sojourn (2003) by Canadian writer Alan Cumyn, The Daughters of Mars (2012) by Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally and Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (2014) by North American indigenous author Gerald Vizenor. These three novels explore the cliché of colonial loyalties, illustrating the diverse motivations that led individuals from North America and Australia to volunteer for the war. Cumyn, Kenneally and Vizenor undermine the stereotypical location of the colonial traveller in an uncultured space; in their fiction the war provides a pretext to expose imperial ideologies, to redefi ne collective identities, as well as to rethink the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan. As a result, the First World War is reconfi gured in terms of border crossing, contact and/or transcultural exchange, which result in radical shifts in consciousness, a critique of imperialism, as well as aspirations for cultural/political autonomy.