Trickster in the Front Yard: Still Semi-Native

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It is in fact, this comic spirit that makes cultural survival possible. It does that by immediately catching the attention; it helps the people forget their petty little concerns about the routines of daily life. It shocks them out of that. Secondly, once that awareness, that alertness and openness, has been achieved through the initial shock, then it is possible to communicate on another level through the use of humor I see it as a technique to translate the formal rite or to break through it into an area of deeper meaning and deeper awareness on the part of the participant.

It is you might say a shattering of the structure of the rite in order to get at the essence of the rite. It seems to ridicule, thus destroy, but it does this so that deeper truths contained within the rite can come forth and reveal themselves. She writes Comedy may be a spiritual shock therapy which breaks up the patterns of thought and rationality that hold us in bondage and in which the given and established order of things is deformed, reformed, and reformulated; a playful speculation on what was, is, or might be; a remark on the indignity of any closed system.

The clown "creates a reflexive and ironic dialogue, [and] an open space of questioning," she As a 42 Cree artist, Jane Ash Poitras, offers a remarkably similar description to Brown's—albeit, more personalized and impassioned—of the way in which sacred knowledge is accessed through humour. Once again, it seems that "cultural confidence and ironic competence are intertwined" Hymes So too for the sacred clowns, who represent "each of us at our worst moments and what we might become during our best.

Delight Makers [as archaeologist Adolf Bandelier named the pueblo clowns almost a century ago] embody human contradictions and frailties while epitomizing our greatest spiritual aspirations" McCoy Hopi poet Ramson Lomatewama Like mirrors, they reflect all aspects of life, the good as well as the bad, the joy as well as the sorrow, the courage as well as the fears. They reflect life as it is, particularly its choices and consequences. For a survey of the anthropological literature on humor in religion see Apte These abilities, King believes, have made the clown an ideal role model for leaders of revitalistic and nativistic movements.

I would argue that many contemporary Native artists possess these same abilities to interact with nonorder through humour and irony , and likewise, can, and do serve as leadership role models, for their ability to combat ignorance and imagine other ways of "human being. The Heirship Chronicles The tricksters and warrior clowns have stopped more evil violence with their wit than have lovers with their lust and fools with the power and rage.

In an interview with Joseph Bruchac, Vizenor They are major practitioners of what anthropologist Michael M. But then, that's hardly surprising. After all, "that's a trickster's business" in Bruchac Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Scott Momaday [Native] people are going to have to start using their imaginations Shelley Niro As argued earlier, the principal task of a postmodern inquiry is to undermine the authority of signs to show "how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference" Hutcheon For those who view art as a site of ideological struggle, issues of self-representation, self-determination and political empowerment loom large in the foreground.

It is the sign "Indian," that resonates down through the years in travelers' journals, dime-store novels and Hollywood films; in countless images of feathered braves and savage warriors, solemn chiefs and mystical shamans, lusty maidens and sombre matrons, 51 alternately imagined as primitive, noble, fearsome, admired, captured, conguered, vanguished and ultimately—vanished.

We are not allowed to interpret our own reality, the way our communities respond to everyday life. We are regarded as living museum pieces.

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This is perpetuated by even the most lavish, most knowledgeable, professional representations of our cultural heritage. Over the last decade and a half, Canadian Native artists have become particularly skilled at re-presenting cultural stereotypes in humorous and ironic fashion to reveal, not only their ideological underpinnings, but the way in which historical misconceptions have hindered cross-cultural understanding and interaction.

Ideology aside, there is also great satisfaction to be derived from merely portraying the ironies of everyday life and revelling in the element of "pure play. This was followed in with "Stardusters: I 50 and Home of the Brave fig. At craft shows and gallery exhibitions where his works are displayed he particularly enjoys watching the faces of non-Natives who are unsure how to react—unsure whether or not a piece is supposed to be humorous, unsure whether or not they are allowed or expected to laugh or smile. This is obviously one of the pleasures of creating this kind of work.

As Fraser Pakes All is grace and beauty and order. Indicative of the pervasiveness of this imagery is the fact that, in , a visitor to Rome on viewing the Apollo Belvedere exclaimed, "My God, how like it is to a Mohawk warrior" [Coen He is standing in front of an English woodland backdrop and wearing his blanket in the style of a toga. About his own painting, Powless interview, simply says, "At first glance you see it as being this stately kind of thing, but then as you look at it you see it's just going to the beachi" 51 Powless says that his love for punning and wordplay, and his desire to say things differently in the titles of his work, derive in part from his background as a commercial artist in the field of advertising where he developed a keen interest in the actual look and feel of words together.

Yet, both also foreground visually, and textually in the titles lingering stereotypes that prevent non-Natives from fully appreciating and accepting such participation. Home of the Brave. The crux of the problem: So powerful and overwhelming is the sign "Indian" both visually and metaphorically that the only apparent indication of the individual's Iroquoian affiliation is an easily overlooked pattern on the beaded cuffs. In this painting, then, Powless 56 reflects not only the complexity of contemporary Native identity but the difficulty in affirming it as well.

Envisioned by a Native artist, however, the same image can be recuperated as a healthy symbol of communal imagination and self-deprecating humour. In cartoons drawn for the local Six Nations newspaper, Tekawennake figs. Addressing issues of local concern and community interest—in particular, educational funding and band council politics— they not only feature the Plains Indian stereotype as a generic "Indian Everyman," but a variety of other characters defined as "Native" by their narrow faces, high cheekbones and large noses.

This, in fact, is part of their appeal, imbuing them with a sense of immediacy and playful spontaneity. Despite the generally demeaning status of "man-servant to the White man" accorded this character throughout the two hundred and twenty episodes of the series, Silverheels is recognized for founding "the Indian Actors Workshop in Hollywood in an effort to get more Indian people on the screen and change the negative film image of Indians" Woodland Cultural Centre In Counting Coup fig.

In a whimsical update of an old cultural maxim or is it ethnographic observation? The deed is registered here in "Cinemascope" framing and captured in "Technicolor" hues. For example, Michael Valpy He thinks that there are things in the country that are actually funny This [show] is great.

You have something that at once is funny, bridges and draws together two cultures and with the help of the catalogue is educational without making the head hurt Someone, someday, will write an acceptable history book for Canadian schools and be smart enough to include Mr. McMaster's paintings and catalogue notes. The incident not only recalls Hutcheon's postmodern "critical revisiting of the past," but Vizenor's identification of "the way time is handled and resolved" as a defining aspect of contemporary Native literature.

The point here is that the soldiers didn't know what the hell these Indians were all about. War games were to annihilate people not to play tricks on them. For the Indians part of the humour in these old war games was in humiliating your opponent. So here's the subtle humiliation. Now I'm saying Indians can also see "the Other. In What becomes a legend most? The warrior's glory was in the enemy's humiliation. It was tribal teasing on a grand scale. In contemporary usage the word "coup" has political connotations that give this painting added dimension.

McMaster interview, says, "When I showed this to some people they said 'Coup! This is no less true of Ojibwa artist Carl Beam's ironically titled print, becoming a stamp and all the thrills thereof McMaster interview explains I had just come back from Santa Fe where I had an opportunity to look around at the galleries. It had been ten years since I had been back to Santa Fe. I was in school there [at the Institute of American Indian Arts]. One of the reasons I was there was to talk with other artists who had gone through the same experience.

The issue was the school itself. What responsibility did it have in teaching the artists? People went there with expectations of purchasing something identifiable with the area. What was encouraged at the school was They can't be hanging around on the The dubious benefit to Native peoples of such an "honour" is conveyed in the sardonic title handwritten in white ink across the face of the dark print.

The "Santa Fe" painting style which developed there is characterized by nostalgic themes and pastoral scenes, executed in a highly stylized manner emphasizing ethnographic detail, precisely drawn contour lines, sterile decorative elements, and the flat application of harmonious and emotionally neutral colours.

Perhaps, as a result, the content of Studio pictures is remarkably idealized and asocial.

Transmotion

For a critique of the Institute's emphasis on personal expression at the expense of maintaining continuity with viable Native traditions see Gritton and There was a power in the market. It drew students downtown because tourists were there and it was an opportunity to sell. The students and artists from the region began to be drawn into the vortex of the market.

There was not too much experimentation because there was no concern about it. They weren't pumping out artists who were very critical of the material, they were just pumping out artists who could create stuff. It all looked like work that was geared to be picked up and carried away. The point [in this painting] is a double-edged thing. What is the legend? Is it the style of painting or the image on it? This is a critique of the Santa Fe style and the image of the Indian.

There are a lot of artists who do this image, this Indian on horseback. What does it say? It doesn't say anything except "an Indian on horseback. In the diptych Shaman explaining the theory of transformation to cowboys fig. It is a pivotal act of cultural affirmation that inscribes Native identity as spiritual and intellectual, in contrast to the secular and shallow cowboys.

The absurdity of the premise set out in the title merely 62 This piece recasts the theoretical inquiry first seen in How do you explain the theory of relativity to a game winner and still expect him to keep his concentration? In both cases the artist expresses a concern for communication, dialogue and understanding. McMaster interview says To me a cowboy is a very simple kind of person—he's got a job in life, maybe to break horses and to round up cattle. It's not too difficult a life to understand.

To be a cowboy isn't necessarily to be an intellect. It's a skill that doesn't require too many degrees. You have to have a good knowledge of what you're dealing with but it's still pretty limited—"cow boy. He was the protagonist, I guess, and the antagonist, of course, was the Indian. Now, that is simple.

It's a simple equation. But to try and understand the Indian They just don't compare. The Indian, in this case, was supposed to be from the prairies, but when you start looking at what an "Indian" is it's much more complex. The Indian—whoever "the Indian" is—is made up of several tribes and families and lifestyles.

It's a whole society. So you have this gigantic society equated with a group of people who were just a small segment of Euro-American society. To try to equate an Indian with a job is just not the same. But Hollywood films and books tend to do just that. The point is that it's so incongruous. What I did here was to show the incongruity. The life of a cowboy is generally quite profane. Cowboys sit around the campfire and sing songs. The notion of intellectual conversation and bantering isn't really there.

On the other hand, scholars and Native peoples and so many others have tried to understand what a shaman is and nobody can. We get an idea of what he does and who he is. It's so complex a field—to begin to understand what a Native person is as represented by the shaman.

You take one aspect of that—the religious aspect—and then you take a notion of transformation which not too many people understand. The joke here [in this painting] is "What is happening with the shaman? There's belief and non-belief playing here. Can an Indian do this? Like all societies, they had their own special ways of doing things They were a special society of cowboys. I was thinking of that particular society. Perhaps it does exist There is [ethnographic] reference made to the society," but most of these societies no longer exist.

Somehow they were changed forever. Somehow the laws, the outlawing of the religion, effectively meant that these societies would forever be only in our memories. Perhaps someday the Kaupois-uk may return again. Does anything ever really disappear? I think that there is a notion that things do reappear, that things can reappear in the future in another form, in another way. Something may have a death but it doesn't mean that it can't come back.

Their appearance in 63 In the "Artist's Statement" to this show Ryan Still, haven't we seen white people dressing up as Indians in Hollywood movies for years? Yet the image is compelling. Who or what are these ghostly cowboy-like figures rising from the landscape and silhouetted against the night sky? Were it not for the artist's commentary in the catalogue, and his desire to break down the barriers of ignorance, most viewers would remain mystified.

As it is, the piece hints at cultural knowledge that can never be accessed. Nor, perhaps, should it be. And that may be the most important lesson of this painting. Interviewed several months later he cited some of the reasons for this. He laughed at the things I did [and] he didn't laugh at some of the things I didn't laugh at He's got the wildness [of the Plains Cree] in him, but he's refined it [And] Gerald has the coyote spirit in him. I recognized it in him. So he's a trickster, he has some trickster in him.

In Plains Cree, too, maybe it has something to do with 65 Some years earlier, in , McMaster addressed the historic reality of the "Indian cowboy" in Mamas. The playfully ironic title is taken from a popular country and western song often performed by Native singers at local talent nights on northern Saskatchewan reserves.

It feels at times we have an inside joke about something The thing too with the Plains Cree is riddles, riddles our people used to do. We've lost a lot of that. The riddles teach you to think, to figure things out for yourself. That's what I like about some of his stuff I still try to do that humour with riddles and stuff. Some will get it right away, others won't, they just scratch their heads.

I want people to think, to figure things out, not always have the punchline, create their own punchline, figure out the mysteries of life. Humour is one of the very important parts of the mystery of life. And that's where I identify with him, he has the ability to see things and feel things with humour. But also, he likes to challenge people and that's what I liked about his work.

I picked up on that challenge. That's another thing Indians like to do—challenge each other. A lot of us have been dispirited, but when we get our spirit back we always like to challenge ourselves, not in a macho sense, but in a creative [sense] I think the humour that came with me that night [of the opening] made it magical.

That's why it was so good, it came so well, it was magical Some of the non-Native people came after and said to me just off to the side, "Thank you for the healing. So it was the humour that was the healing. The fact that you're open, you got it. I see Gerald's work and the way he looks at things, as a healer. Like many others of his generation, cowboys have fascinated McMaster since childhood.

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He in Ryan I'd fantasize about being a cowboy. Having a horse and dressing up as a cowboy was all I needed. Somehow my mother had managed to save enough money to buy me the proper attire —boots and all. Owning a gun, to shoot the bad guys, BANG! Who were these bad guys? Bank robbers, horse thieves, I guess, and ah yes, 'Indians'!

Ojibway artist, Carl Beam, similarly infatuated with cowboys, critically recalls this period in his own life in the print, Self-Portrait as John Wayne, Probably fig. While provisional in meaning, its inscription in the title is deliberate, affirming in memory a widely shared experience. Ojibway artist, Rebecca Belmore interview, draws inspiration from Wayne's Academy award-winning performance as Rooster Cogburn, the tough and crusty frontier lawman in the film True Grit, for the title of her absurdly giant self-portrait-as-a-souvenir-cushion, True Grit A Souvenir fig. Created as an angry response to the Ontario Arts Council for using her as a token "Native woman artist from one of the regions," it symbolizes what she learned from the painful experience: You can't let your guard down because you gotta be careful in the political art arena.

It is an apt visual metaphor; the play between signs is a discourse on identity, yet some signs have been vested with more authority than others. Beam interview, b says People may say, "He knows now that he didn't know who he was when he was five years old. I didn't want to be the guy getting shot off the horse, dragged through the fucking mud.

You had to choose one or the other. For example, in Green Grass, Running Water Thomas King writes By the time Lionel was six, he knew what he wanted to be. Not the actor, but the character. Not the man, but the hero. The John Wayne who cleaned up cattle towns and made them safe for decent folk.

The John Wayne who shot guns out of the hands of outlaws. The John Wayne who saved stagecoaches and wagon trains from Indian attacks. When Lionel told his father he wanted to be John Wayne, his father said it might be a good idea, but that he should keep his options open. Warriors, chiefs, councillors, diplomats, spiritual leaders, healers. I ever tell you about your great-grandmother? As a work of "Indian art" it is as cheeky and brazen as the image of the artist it features. Beam interview, recalls It seemed the thing that Native people didn't do.

Native artists were still doing the grand themes,71 not autobiographical self-portraits. I like the little personal things, the sketches and experiments of Van Gogh and Rembrandt, and the informal experimental work of Gaughin. The handwritten script said, "What have you done? Have you written any poems, music, anecdotes?

Have you ever done anything unusual, ordinary or extraordinary? Particularly pervasive in central and eastern Canada in the late s were the brightly coloured "legend paintings" and serigraphs created by and in the style of Ojibway artist, Norval Morrisseau, whose work was influenced by ancient pictographs and sacred birchbark scroll designs. Morrisseau's surprising market success spawned a number of imitators—"the Woodland school of painting" as it was called by its devotees, "the Woodpecker school" by its detractors—who hoped to share in the benefits of the interest in the "new Indian art.

As far as I'm concerned I'm the artist among other things so this is my work. They offer advice on your art career—where to market this.. It was made purposely not to sell in the current Indian art market as we know it. I don't consider it to be a great watercolour. It's loose and kind of competent. It was whipped off in an afternoon. In spite of Beam's typical assessment of his own abilities, this painting helped redefine the parameters of contemporary Native aesthetic practice in Canada.

The portrayal of "Indian myths" was rejected in favour of portraying the "myths of the Indian. In this piece, Beam vigorously reclaims the mythic image of the naked savage, infusing it with his own brooding persona and considerable bravado. Clad only in chic designer trunks, in a mocking gesture that calls attention to mainstream society's preoccupation with celebrity, the artist adopts a defiant warrior's stance.

Long gone is the John Wayne-pose. Angry eyes engage the viewer directly, exuding absolute confidence. I am marking time thru my work if it serves no other function to anyone else and if I do this I will say tomorrow, "I was around yesterday, and here's the fucking proof", "Where's yours? They can be sarcastic, almost intelligent at times. That's a scary feeling. Anytime, they'll be demanding equality—political equality.

Beam interview, speaks passionately of the need for other artists to create their own images of lived experience: In Canada we have Native artists but I haven't seen anywhere an individual—where a microscope has been taken to a Native individual We need to show that a Native person could in fact be an individual. This requires a fine focus. Instead of showing "the Indian" again, we need to see the wider focus of being Indian. These were exhibited together in their collaborative exhibition, "Hard and Soft" at the University of Sherbrooke Cultural Centre see Anderson Affixed to the vertical backboard is a full-length mirror surrounded by postcards of tropical beaches and Indians and Mounties.

I can't fit mine! You're an inspiration but you cause such consternation. Compared to Noganosh, "I was very discreet," she adds. So someone suggested making it into a self-contained case. And I thought, that makes sense because it's like the baggage you have with you, that you carry with you all the time, whether they're [thoughts that are] part of your culture or they're not.

They're always thoughts that are part of you. While Gray's critique of the mainstream beauty myth is easily recognized, even if her shadow may not be , the reference to Beam's painting is oblique at best and very much an in-joke. The same can be said for Noganosh. Knowing this, the two artists position their twin parodies across from each other in the exhibition gallery to suggest a symbiotic relationship all its own.

In February, , Beam had only heard of, but not yet seen these pieces. He nevertheless said, "I might do another piece myself in response to theirs! The straight and narrow is indeed "straight" and "narrow. Viewers are invariably drawn into a dialogue on matters of global and cultural concern. Like few other artists, Beam confronts the viewer in a manner that demands a response.

The image in fig. The general direction of the plotlines from left to right across the picture plane is progressively downwards. About this particular piece Beam interview, b says, The title works two ways: It's useful to look back in the past to consider the imposition of charts, order and other peoples' ideas, [but] how do you identify with a superimposed grid system and assess the impact of information and charts? In an earlier conversation with Ian McLachlan Native people are always seen as being back there in an anthropological past.

If that's where they get placed, anything contemporary can't be authentic. It's paradoxical that the more linear you are in your thought processes, the 73 less effective you are at thinking. Well, I don't want that linearity. In typically understated fashion Beam McMaster and Martin Mounted on the wall to the left of his three-panelled version of Burying the Ruler, the complete statement read: After five hundred years people should realize the world is round.

The "cabinet version" of Burying the Ruler fig. Since more people buy furniture than art, Beam interview, b reasons, then perhaps he should make his art appear more accessible, more functional! He is of course only half-kidding, viewing the absence of Native design in Canadian furniture as a symptom of a broader cultural malaise and xenophobia.

We need to get rid of the fear of "Native" and incorporate it into the overall fabric of the country, then Canada would be a more exciting place to live in. It could affect architecture, interior design, landscape, dress. Right now, everybody's the poorer for its absence. Those people never meet, even though some woodworkers swear they're artists! The connection between colour, line and sculpture is still made in Mexico and New Mexico. This is especially true where humour has been used to present a more accurate and naturalistic image. A case in point is the wonderfully whimsical painting Indians' Summer fig.

Unlike the pieces by Powless examined earlier Figs. Undoubtedly, it is a particularly thorough inversion, viciously undercutting many of the well-known hallmarks of heroic Indian portraiture. In their stead is a vaguely phallic summer confection. Despite such comic turns and transformations, a basic human dignity, and even "nobility" still abide. Divested of all manner of exotic trappings, this 77 The image of this umbrella beanie must have made a lasting impression on Powless.

It reappears five years later on the "Indian brave" directing traffic in fig. At least that was the intention. But romantic fantasy dies hard—and not only in the non-Native community. Witness the following exchange that took place in the pages of the local newspaper, Tekawennaker between "An offended Indian" and Tom Hill, Director of the Woodland Cultural Centre: May 29, , Obese is Sick! Art is beautiful in many ways, shapes and forms, but the advertisement for Art '85 falls way short of humor creativity suitable only for a freak show.

I see nothing but disgust every time I see this dumb looking Indian with his belly blown up like a balloon and his boobs hanging and this stupid umbrella hat on his head. The Indians through the years have been stereotyped as being fat, lazy, illiterate and just plain stupid, even in cartoons.

In conclusion, what is this artist trying to prove? This is , the human body is beautiful but obese is sick. You're right with your headline "Obese is Sick. The poster image is taken from an original work of art painted by Bill Powless and is included in the Indian Art '85 Exhibition. The painting titled "Indians' Summer" is taken from an original sketch of 76 an Indian gentleman Bill Powless met last summer at the Festival of Sharing [on Manitoulin Island].

No doubt, Bill Powless took artistic liberties with the portrait by exaggerating the massiveness of the character, highlighting the umbrella hat and melting popsicle and painting the portrait in colours which are unnatural—but all for a reason. By presenting such a grotesque and irreverent image, the artist is asking the viewer to consider a number of questions. Has our contemporary Indian culture deteriorated to an Umbrella Hat "Indianized" with an eagle feather, an earring and long black flowing hair?

The obesity of the gentleman and the melting popsicle are also visual symbols for the viewer to consider. We are so blinded by negative stereotypes which have been created by non-Indians that we ourselves have difficulty looking at ourselves as Indians. For example, some Indian viewers have been convinced that the obese gentleman in the poster is actually holding a bottle of beer as opposed to a melting popsicle.

Our Indian artists have come a long way in by being confident in presenting paintings in exhibitions which are filled with ideas for the viewer to consider as opposed to pointless images of "Indians in Sioux war bonnets riding off into the sunset. It should be noted, some of the world's greatest art, such as Picasso's anti-war painting titled, "Guernica," [was] so filled with ideas and its image so disturbing to the viewers that Picasso had to leave the country for fear of his life.

Art is not always beautiful. Art reflects reality which is not always beautiful. Bill's painting, which became our poster, is his way of painting reality and pointing out to us our constant[ly] changing contemporary Indian culture. Bill sold the original painting to a prominent art collector in Ottawa and the Indian Art '85 poster was the most sought after poster at the recent Canadian Museums Association Conference in Toronto. The poster is now a collector's item.

I met with people here in person. There was a great deal of concern that maybe the piece was perpetuating the stereotype —an unflattering stereotype. I was quite surprised". The kids were telling him that their mother and dad didn't like it [because] it made people think all Indians were fat. It was like they wanted the stereotype of the "noble warrior", slim and trim and nothing else. I could see them.

I just liked to stand Some people just broke out [in laughter]—you know, they couldn't help it. And some people weren't sure whether they were supposed to laugh or not. I could see them trying to hold it back. I like to watch the reaction to some of these things. The artist adds that a poster of the painting was hung in the local nursing home to remind residents of what they did not want to look like!

Around the same time Powless created the pencil sketch for Indians' Summer he also did a drawing of a Native woman, but it was several years before he converted it into a painting. He remembers I showed [the sketch] to my wife and she didn't like it at all. She says, "Women have a different feeling when they see something like that.

I thought, "Well, this guy's comfortable with himself, maybe a woman too [would] be comfortable. She had these spandex pants on Native peoples from across Canada were now involved in a high-profile struggle for self-determination and self-government, and asserting a renewed cultural confidence at the same time. The woman in this painting is bubbling over with self-assurance and energy; secondly, self-deprecating humour and ironic reference to contemporary subjects appeared more frequently in the Centre's annual art shows; and thirdly, local residents had become more accustomed to and accepting of Powless's humour through his newspaper cartoons.

Still, he interview, a was apprehensive: I thought the Native women would be upset with it. They just kind of panned it I guess, "Let it sit there and it will go away. She said, "People aren't going to like this. Six Nations was not the only reserve where the fitness craze took hold. The premise was simple: And the Spandex is up to date.

I don't know where the stripes came from—the zebra stripes just happened to appear on her as I was working on it The boobs were kind of small at first so people were saying it looked like Tom [Hill]. So I made the boobs bigger and put lipstick on her. The mongrel-hybrid trickster with his "harsh laughter" is a "central and unifying figure in Vizenor's art," an "imaginative weapon," that seeks "to shatter static certainties," to "overturn all laws, governments, social conventions," a trope that "soars to freedom in avian dreams and acrobatic outrage" Other Destinies Fourth Proude and Rosina liberate themselves from their now lethal homespace through trickery; the slide between refuge and entrapment is also emphasized in Jones's The Fast Red Road in Pidgin's trailer home encircled by bomb shelters rented out to random sojourners.

Pidgin's mother Marina died right before his birth and, following his father Cline's death by suicide in the adjacent shed, Pidgin's uncle Birdfinger, his father's twin, moves into the trailer and appropriates both the space and Pidgin himself, along with having claimed Marina's preference. The adolescent Pidgin temporarily escapes for seven years, but finds himself back in the wretched, foul-smelling trailer when he returns for the interment of his father's corpse, which has been used in scientific experiments for a decade.

The majestic marijuana plant that has grown through the roof of the trailer, the fast-food trash, and the countless empty beer cans attest to the consumption of drugs, unhealthy food, and alcohol that lame the inhabitants of the trailer. In the nearby field is buried an unlikely landlocked submarine, pointedly named the USS TommyHawk, in which Pidgin seeks refuge before returning to the trailer and in which he later finds himself imprisoned for days unable to open the hatch, desperately "licking wetness off relict fiberglass" It is in one of the bomb shelters that a traveling salesman named Litmus Jones gives Pidgin the sepia photograph showing Pidgin's parents with their band of s postal outlaws posed in front of the adobe wall of their hideout.

Pidgin hopes to locate this elusive hideout, which we could call the "cedar circus" of his heritage and which might provide a more satisfying psychological sanctuary than the trailer home of devouring and death. As an overall pattern, the colonial exploiters and settlers, whom Wolfe rightly insists on calling invaders, [16] disrespected the spatial territories, intruding upon the 'sanctuaries' of Native American groups, and subsequently aimed to enclose, often at a distant location, these groups, fixing them spatially, temporally, legally, and identitarially in what the settlers saw as—for themselves—safe enclaves.

Through the protagonists' peripatetic, back-and-forth experiencing of safe spaces and traps, Vizenor and Jones strikingly demonstrate the two-way, negative and positive slippage between sanctuaries and prisons. Despite the overarching historical pattern of the colonizing consumption of Native land, food sources, and environmental resources, Fourth Proude and his narratorial inventor Bearheart and to a certain extent Pidgin can stand for the agency of Native individuals and groupings to instrumentalize this slippage in their favor as they seek or create their "cedar circuses.

The town of Clovis provides a second comparative venue. During their pilgrimage to the ancient cultures of what is now the American Southwest, the pilgrims of Bearheart join a so-called Freedom Train in New Liberty, Oklahoma, traveling to Santa Fe, "the place where the new nation and government would be declared" by dangerously right-wing "whiterulers" When the train with its illegally hoarded fuel crosses the Texas-New Mexico border near Clovis, it passes by impoverished, uprooted migrant hordes wandering west, pursuing the faint shadow of the outdated paradigm of "Go West" to seek economic opportunity: The Bearheart train stops at nearby Fort Sumner in what was the parched Bosque Redondo reservation where, as Vizenor tells us, 8, tribal people were incarcerated for five years, with Kit Carson having forced "the tribes on the long walk to Bosque Redondo where thousands died" The juxtaposition of post-apocalyptic, displaced, walking persons with the Southwestern Native 'trail of tears' against the background of the nomadic prehistoric hunters breathtakingly creates, within a few sentences, a narrative cross-section of the past and future history of mankind as one of developing oppression with crescendos of violence.

This impression is reinforced when the freedom train turns out to be an unconscionable trap to import slaves into the revitalized government seat in Santa Fe: The cedar pilgrims' story moreover exposes the constructedness of the imposed geographical borders, which cut up the Indigenous homelands into straight-sided federal states and in doing so displaced Native peoples. The protagonists, a number of whom are based in Clovis, constantly arrive in and leave the town; their journeys north to Utah, east to Texas, west to the Pueblo areas, for instance, always return to the node of Clovis.

While looking for the clandestine Goliard hideaway, Pidgin damns stifling Clovis for being geographically and culturally nada , and thus the source of his own insecurities: The narrative contrasts Pidgin's underselling of Clovis with the venue's archeological importance. One of the law-breaking Goliards, the Native "skunkheaded" Larry , whose tribal identification seems to be Laguna 90 , at other times Acoma e.

Now an economic opportunist, he attempts to sell, for the highest immediate price, the gigantic snail fossils that his bulldozers uncover. Yet this devious "skunk" Larry is also a masterful tale-teller, recounting a tribal myth that references the Clovis Man crafting arrows with "knapped" points. Larry describes how the Indigenous "Knapping Man" wants to free his people from the darkness of a solar eclipse, shooting an arrow that "leaves a hole of light in the sky" This strong image weaves the Indigenous strands of the novel with the Goliard outlaw band, who are associated in the narrative with such apocalyptic typology as a glowing disc of atmospheric light, and the 'Clovis comet impact theory' that has given rise to such science fiction novels as Aliens in Clovis Narrow-sighted Pidgin does not realize that Clovis, for him the "Unemerald City" of childhood frustration and pain, is not a dead-end dungeon, but rather hovers in the liminal space between worlds and borders.

Light can be cast on Pidgin's discomfort in Clovis by considering the affective component of imprisonment, including the relationship of the prisoner and the prison with its dialectic between 'inside' and 'outside' addressed by Moran and Turner. Society's valuation that those 'on the inside' of the prison are 'outsiders' seeps through the porous walls of the heterotopia to the inside—along with articles of consumption, notably drugs "Displacing Criminal Bodies" 11 —and adds to the prisoner's disorientation.

For Native Americans, not only the settler and military revenge of open warfare but also painful physical displacement—which Vizenor evokes with the references to Fort Sumner and Bosque Redondo—as a solution to Native resistance to land-grabbing and destruction of environmental resources such as the buffalo transitioned to less visibly punitive but confounding strategies like the land allotments and boarding schools.

Both venues incorporate the five hundred years marked by the controversial quincentennial. The misnamed "freedom train" brings Vizenor's starving pilgrims to the historic Governors' Palace in Santa Fe, where they are enslaved by the white leaders striving to replicate post-Columbus imperial history; those dangerously ambitious leaders claim: To declare a new nation from the old ruins" , Vizenor's ellipsis.

To eliminate incipient transgressive behavior, these new "captain generals" interrogate the pilgrims one by one, physically and psychologically torturing them, slicing off ears, pulling out eyeballs, asserting betrayal of one pilgrim by another. A climax of ingenious transmotion—as we will see—enables their escape, ushered in by the seven "clown crows" and encouraged by the intake of a Native halogenic plant drink: In a spectacular exemplum of visualizing the intertwining of "the incarcerated self and landscape" Carceral Geographies , the group imaginatively moves back through the many generations of the users of the Palace in a swirl of time and space to reveal a formerly used fireplace and smoke hole, through which all of the surviving cedar pilgrims but one escape.

In Jones's novel fragments of the quincentennial constantly resurface. The grotesque opening chapter of The Fast Red Road portrays ravenous travelers engorging at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Clovis. Only two of them realize, however, that the cuts of meat are human, for instance a "tawny forearm" with the word "punta" tattooed on it, or, at second narrative glance, the word "pinta," the name of one of Columbus's three original ships This beginning chapter with its "horrorshow buffet" 17 of cannibalization as well as the final chapter in the book are narrated largely from the third-person point of view of Litmus Jones, the white vacuum-cleaner salesman who, oddly enough, of all characters most effectively engages in ethnic practices, performing a sweat lodge ceremony, drawing pictograms, winning dog-fight bets, leaving a red "coup" handprint on Pidgin's shoulder, and winning a blues contest.

In a commentary on The Fast Red Road , author Jones has written that the character Litmus Jones "was getting to kind of be the Puck [in the novel]" Faster, Redder Road 7 , a jester-trickster figure who significantly propels the narrative and initiates transformations and insights. Litmus Jones mouths " Not again, please, not again " 17 , whereas Seth relives a wartime survival event 34 years previously in which he traumatically ate "human flesh in bite-sized portions" 17 —while trapped in that now landlocked submarine TommyHawk where "man ate man ate man, according to rank" Furthermore, it is traveling salesman Jones, not Pidgin, who joins the expert car-stealer, Native Charlie Ward, wheeling out of the novel in Pidgin's dubious inheritance, the beloved Ford Thunderbird that belonged to Pidgin's deceased father Cline and was the location of Cline's suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Columbus's presumption, as recorded in his writings, of cannibalism being practiced by the Native Caribe people is referenced in author Jones's horrific smorgasbord and then dramatically reversed in Litmus Jones's 'hallucination' to imply the colonizers' 'cannibalism' of Native cultures, part and parcel of the conquering and settling of the American continent to fulfill the supremacist political ideology of Manifest Destiny. Stratton perceptively takes his reading of the cannibalism image a step farther, seeing that "the colonial narratives of discovery and conquest [that led to] the theft of land, to the warfare and massacres that inescapably form the backdrop to American frontier history and the West [were] fed back to Native people as a hegemonic form of sustenance" Shoshone Seth's participation in World War II, probably as a code talker 17 , and the trauma of the trapped crew could not begin to change the fixed hierarchies and internalized prejudices of the participants after the soldiers "filed [back] into this [unchanged] world through a hole," the submarine hatch Of the many 'horror shows' in both novels, the abject events taking place in Vizenor's Bearheart on the freeways "where millions of lost souls were walking to nowhere" 98 , might remain most vivid in the mind's eye of the reader; I pair these interstates with the public space of the rodeo in The Fast Red Road , both peopled with cannibals and clowns.

The actions "walking and visualizing" that theorist Moran suggests as ways to transcend the boundaries of incarceration become a visceral free-for-all on the freeways in Vizenor's novel as a plethora of deformed humans, body parts eaten away by toxic rain or congenitally missing because of chemically poisoned nutrition, wander along the interstates; a group of them attacks and gnaws one of the pilgrims to death.

In other cases, victims are routinely but viciously murdered and cut swiftly into pieces, their flesh devoured or bartered. The "Witch Hunt" restaurant captures women it marks out as witches, and, after torturing them and hanging them from the rafters, sells their ground-up bodies in takeaway orders. The cannibalistic wiindigoo figure of Anishinaabe oral telling appears to have become 'everyman. Surely the self-serving and literally blood-oriented human consumption by the interstate stalkers in Bearheart denies any form of solidarity or affiliation that is non-binarily "community-mediated and practice-based" In contrast to the brutally exploitative freeway cannibals, the clown figures in Vizenor's novel play a systematically more positive role: Proude appears to recognize it as "the ancient place of vision bears"; "the tribes traveled from here with bears" The impertinent clowns and fools serve to subvert fixed order, using raucous laughter as a key tool.

Vizenor has asserted the significance of these figures: Hungry Pidgin eats all the leftovers of "beef-fed-beef"—hawked as "double the flavor" —that he finds in the stands as he watches the star attraction end in bloody death for both horse and rider. Despite his compulsive gobbling, Pidgin is as horrified by the vision of the "solipsistic food chain, self similar at every link" as he is by the gruesome battle in the rodeo ring. His discomfort at having been pursued by taunting heyoka clowns and pinned down by a face-painting woman is increased when he realizes that he himself appears as an incongruous postmodern clown; Pidgin is dressed in overly large stolen clothes, his face not painted Native style but rather like the hard-rock icon Paul Stanley with Stanley's signature white face and black star surrounding one eye Pidgin has come to the rodeo in the hopes of finding the Mexican Paiute who exhumed and carried off his father's corpse, but the ineffectiveness of Pidgin's foolish and erratic behavior prevents him from confronting the Paiute.

Rather than 'tricking' others through self-confident laughter, Pidgin is himself the butt of others' scams and mocking; as such he is vulnerable to the assimilative and controlling power of wiindigoo-suction. As jeopardous as the interstate and rodeo are in the two novels, the fifth and final venue of comparison with its double historical resonance is even more chilling: The Wounded Knee Massacre on 29 December has become the marker in the national imaginary of the closing of the American frontier, the presumed subduing of the Native people, and the supposed justification of the federal government's at least two major violations , of the land settlement agreed upon with the Sioux in the Treaty of Fort Laramie; each violation drew smaller and smaller circles around the Sioux nations' allotted living space.

Second Proude "fell forward on the stiff prairie grass and moaned his last vision of the bear into death" Surely, for many readers the searing iconic pictures of the Native people murdered at the historical Wounded Knee massacre in come to mind, literally frozen in the December snow in postures of motion as they fell, mowed down by the 7 th Cavalry's rifles. I believe that Vizenor, with this strong visual image of Second Proude's death, wants to both underscore the blatant and inhumane injustice of the federal government's actions leading up to and during the 19th-century Wounded Knee Massacre and to criticize the American Indian Movement's 20 th -century strategies, including adherence to the rhetoric of "tragic victimry," which Vizenor has always abjured.

Surely it is no coincidence that Second Proude is shot by a tribal policeman, recalling the murder of Sitting Bull by Indian police on 15 December , just days before the first Wounded Knee. But trickster Fourth Proude manages to dismantle the association of Wounded Knee with the end of free-living Native Americans and to reject the cloak of "tragic victim" through his besting of authorities who seek to eliminate him. He outwits his pursuers, including Jordan Coward, when he leaves the cedar circus on his ancestral lands in Minnesota, and indeed through his connection with the tribal cosmos and a "teasing whistle on the wind" [25] he outplays the powerful Evil Gambler in a central confrontation in the novel in Good Cheer, Iowa.

After ceremonial preparation, he manages to enter the fourth world via the "vision window" during the winter solstice and to leave tracks in the snow for Rosina to follow. Biwide "practiced walking in darkness and listening to escape distances and the sound and direction of the winds" The other pilgrims have fallen prey to the dangers along the way, exacerbated by their own weaknesses of greed, one-sided lust, fear, and adherence to fixed stances detrimental to Native vitality, what Vizenor calls "terminal creeds," such as the hegemony of the official written word over tribal orality, essentialist notions of Native identity, or belief in an inevitable vanishing of Native culture.

I have subtitled with a skeptical question mark the Wounded Knee venue with Jones's ironic refrain of "the Indian always loses"; Jones alternates this with a bawdy version that Pidgin, as a Native porn-film actor, finds particularly relevant: The semantically passive form "gets it" is of significance, since Pidgin is remarkably passive and indecisive throughout the novel. Things happen to him; his momentum is that of inertia, not proaction.

He views himself as a cinematic victim: In an ominous situation Pidgin adopts the mask of Moran's incarceral "blank 'yard face'": His most trenchant action is to pull the trigger on a threatening Custer morph, but ironically he shoots the wrong person. At the end of a long chapter in the novel stressing Pidgin's incapacitating inner struggles with its title "Pidgin Agonistes," he follows the Mexican Paiute, who is carrying the remnants of Larry's corpse, to a quonset warehouse in Clovis; Pidgin discovers that the corpses of all the Goliard outlaws are half buried in an expanse of white Styrofoam, with a "mummified arm reaching up" , restaging one of the photos taken the day after the Wounded Knee massacre in with the frozen bodies partially covered by snow.

The narrative implies that the Paiute locks Pidgin in the quonset hut with the appalling scene, in perpetual incarceration. It is difficult to imagine a more graphic narrativization of a life-denying "terminal creed": Pidgin's consuming obsession with his parents' past leads him to the fatal statis of a grotesque Wounded Knee tableau, which, if allowed to have the last word in the novel, could connote the final enclosure of the last free Natives, in which Pidgin is permanently bound.

Still, the novel continues on for two more chapters and the Mexican Paiute, who escapes through a secret trapdoor, carries an enigmatic "canvas roll" with him , here and at other points in the novel. The reader of the two novels at hand could speculate that this is a ceremonial medicine bundle, like the one that Fourth Proude carefully keeps by his side and draws strength from throughout his travels until his movement into the transmundane fourth world. By himself Pidgin cannot find energy in totemic ritual or in imaginative action or in bear-clown laughter, but through his connections with story-telling Atticus Wean, ethnic boundary-violating Litmus Jones, joy-riding Charlie Ward, and possibly the ritual-staging Mexican Paiute, he can be viewed as having the potential to do so in a bizarre team, along with Vizenor's narrator Bearheart and his protagonist Fourth Proude Cedarfair.

Vizenor wrote Bearheart before he had verbalized his powerful and productively slippery theory of "transmotion," which encodes border crossing and imagination on a number of levels. I venture to say that writing this novel and subsequent ones, as well as his early volumes of haiku poems, urged him to amalgamate the prongs of his concept of "transmotion. The ledger paintings by the imprisoned Plains Natives in Fort Marion on the coast of Florida serve in "Native Cosmototemic Art" and elsewhere in Vizenor's writings as exemplary of this combination of movement, vision, and continued Native presence, [26] as do other cultural products—both material and oral—which encode vital "creases of motion": These material and oral products are listed in chapter 5 of Fugitive Poses called "Native Transmotion," probably Vizenor's first complete essay on the topic.

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The first one was great and this one well out of this world pun intended. I cant wait to read the third book. This book explores the multi universes and other dimensions but in itself is multi dimensional. There is story of what its like to be First Nations, there a coming of age story, there is a manual to healing and getting clean.

I have learned so much from this book.

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