Gerald Vizenor - Non-fiction

Non-fiction

Vizenor has authored several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses, and in addition has edited several collections of academic work on Native American writing. He is the founder-editor of the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies series at the University of Oklahoma Press, which has provided an important venue for critical work on and by Native writers.

In his own full-length studies, Vizenor is concerned with deconstructing the semiotics of Indianness. For instance, the title of Fugitive Poses relates to Vizenor's assertion that the term indian is a social-science construction that replaces native peoples, who become absent or "fugitive". Similarly, the term "manifest manners" refers to the continued legacy of Manifest Destiny, especially the way native peoples are still bound by narratives of dominance that replace them with "indians". In place of a unified “Indian” signifier, he suggests that Native peoples be referred to as tribal, and always where possible put into their own particular tribal context. To discuss more general Native studies, he suggests using the term "postindian," which would get across the idea of disparate, heterogeneous tribal cultures unified only by Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them. Among his many other neologisms is “survivance”, a cross between the words "survival" and "resistance," which Vizenor uses as a replacement for “survival”, saying that it carries an implication of an ongoing, changing process, rather than the simple continuance of old ways into the modern world, and pointing out that for tribal peoples, the act of survival is based in resistance.

He continues to be critical of both Native American nationalism and Euro-American colonial attitudes.