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Overview
Gerald Vizenor is one of our era’s most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.
This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor’s innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay “Harold of Orange,” winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.
Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 479 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THANK YOU, GEORGE RAFT
George Raft was an inspiration to my mother and, in a sense, he was responsible for my conception. She saw the thirties screen star, a dark social hero with moral courage, in the spirited manner of my father, a newcomer from the White Earth Reservation.
"The first time I saw your father he looked like George Raft, not the gangster but the dancer. He was handsome and he had nerve," my mother told me. "The first thing he said to me was, 'I got lots of girls but I always like new ones.' He came by in a car with one of his friends. Nobody would talk like that now, but that's how we got together."
I was conceived on a cold night in a kerosene heated tenement near downtown Minneapolis. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been inaugurated the year before, at the depth of the Great Depression. He told the nation, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My mother, and millions of other women stranded in cold rooms, heard the new president, listened to their new men, and were roused to remember the movies; elected politicians turned economies, but the bright lights in the depression came from the romantic and glamorous screen stars.
George Raft appeared in four movies that year: he danced with Carole Lombard in Bolero; as a paroled convict in All of Me, he and his lover leapt to their death from a hotel window; in Limehouse Blues, he played a mixedblood Chinese racketeer; and he portrayed a Mexican bullfighter in The Trumpet Blows and received some of the worst reviews of his career. My mother might have seen him in three movies the year before she met my father and became pregnant: Raft was a romantic detective in The Midnight Club; in Pick-Up he was a taxicab driver who gave a paroled women shelter in bad weather; and he was a nineties neighborhood gang leader in The Bowery. The Italian mixed-blood actor and my father were swarthy, and they both wore fedoras. My father must have smiled on screen; he might have flipped a coin and overturned the depression in the winter tenement of my conception. My mother remembers the romantic dancers in the movies; that night she might have been Carole Lombard.
LaVerne Lydia Peterson, my mother, was seventeen years old, a white high school dropout. Lovey, as she was known to her best friends, was tall, thin, timid, and lonesome that winter. She was the eldest daughter of Lydia Kahl and Robert Peterson of Minneapolis. Her father was a bartender on the northside.
Clement William Vizenor, or Idee, a nickname and a tribute to his eyes, was twenty-four years old, a reservation-born mixedblood in dark clothes; he was a house painter and lived with his mother, two sisters, and four brothers. Everett, or Pants, the youngest, was seventeen, the same age as my mother. Idee, Lawrence, whose nickname was Tuffy, Jeek, and Bunny, who had been paroled from the reformatory, worked as painters for the same contractor. When they could not find work as mixedbloods, they presented themselves as Greeks; at last they were hired as Italians. They were told then that Indians did not live in houses and would not know how to paint one. Later, they corrected their identities; their employer was amused but not convinced.
My parents were married in the spring at Immanuel Lutheran Church. My father was a Roman Catholic and my mother was three months pregnant. I was born October 22, 1934, on a clear balanced morning at General Hospital in Minneapolis. LaVerne remembered the labor and pain of my birth under the sign of Libra that Monday. She was in the hospital for ten days. She said: "My feet tingled when I got up to leave, I could hardly walk. Funny how I can still remember that feeling." My first name was recorded on the certificate of birth, but my second and surname were not entered, for some reason, until eighteen years later. Adoption may have been a consideration, but no one would admit to that now.
George Raft was the inspiration of my conception; he gave his best performance that night, but he was not there for the burdens and heartache that came later. "Clement was a womanizer," my mother confessed to me. "I was out for a walk and there he was at a local bar between two women. Al Jolson was singing 'About a Quarter to Nine.' Whenever I hear that song I still think about what I saw then. I walked home, sat outside, and cried. I wished someone loved me that much." The song, which was a top hit on Your Hit Parade in 1935, ends with these words: "The world is gonna be mine, this evening, about a quarter to nine." My mother and father lived together for about a year.
My mother believed in the love that was promised by families, but her father was an alcoholic and there were harsh memories at home. "We waited in our winter clothes," she remembered, at night with her brother and sister. When her father came home drunk and violent, she said, "we would run out the other door to escape him." I heard these stories, but he was never drunk around me. My mother said he loved me. "He was tolerant in a way he was not with his own children."
Robert, my maternal grandfather, tended bar at the 305 Club, a tavern on East Broadway. I was there several times with my grandfather; the bad breath, of course, but those patrons in the booths were so generous to a child. They gave me their brightest coins, and peanuts to feed the squirrels out back. I remember that tavern, the warm people and rough boards on the porch, and the tame squirrels that ate from my hand. Robert Peterson hated the world when he turned to alcohol, but he cared for me. I might have been the one last courteous measure of his mortality. A decade later, and a few months before his death, I was able to care for him in a way that brought us both pleasure. Lydia, my grandmother, had locked his clothes and other properties in a trunk as punishment. I opened the trunk one afternoon, when the coast was clear; he carried the clothes away in brown paper bags. I walked two blocks with my grandfather and paid his last fare on the streetcar. He pawned his rings and sold his clothes, but he never asked me for money. Robert died a pauper in a transient hotel downtown, poisoned with alcohol. Lydia never knew the trunk was empty when she gave it to the Salvation Army.
LaVerne was insecure and sensitive to trickster stories. She did not understand my grandmother, and she could not appreciate the critical nature of tribal humor. "Alice Beaulieu kidded me about my skinny legs," she told me, "and at that time I was very self-conscious." My grandmother cared for me then; we lived in a tenement downtown. My father painted houses by day with his brothers, and gambled at night; he played poker and other games in backrooms at taverns and cocktail clubs. Some relatives believe that my father gambled at clubs that were owned by organized crime families. Was my father murdered for his bad debts? My mother said that the detective who investigated the crime told her to forget about the whole thing. "You're a young women, better not look into this." LaVerne took his advice and never said a word about the death of my father. She told me he had died in an accident. My mother had been taught to bear her wounds and burdens in silence. She was worried, curious, and bound to please; these common leads in the depression restrained her memories, a nuisance in the rush to decadence.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the popular novel of tragic hedonism, alcoholism, mental harm, and moral descent, was published in the year of my birth. Fitzgerald, the most gifted writer of his generation, was born in Saint Paul, about ten miles from our crossblood tenement, but he lived in a world removed by economic promises, a natural decadent paradise. The common social pleasures of his characters would have been felonies on the reservation. My uncles were convicted of crimes that would have been comedies of the heart at white parties on Summit Avenue and Crocus Hill.
LaVerne loved the music of the time; she matured in the depression. Some of her memories were tied to the sentimental phrases in popular songs. Alice, my grandmother, would remember the depression on the reservation, almost with humor. Her children and grandchildren lived with her, and her envies in a tenement were comic. My father, and his brothers, told better stories than the nabob novelists. The tribal tricksters in their stories were compassionate, crossbloods, and they liberated the mind.
CHAPTER 2MEASURING MY BLOOD
Alice Beaulieu, my grandmother, told me that my father was a tribal trickster with words and memories; a compassionate trickster who did not heed the sinister stories about stolen souls and the evil gambler. Clement William must have misremembered that tribal web of protection when he moved to the cities from the White Earth Reservation.
Nookomis, which means grandmother, warned her trickster grandson that the distant land he intended to visit, in search of his mother who had been stolen by a wind spirit, was infested with hideous humans, "evil spirits and the followers of those who eat human flesh." Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the earth. He was comic, a part of the natural world, a spiritual balance in a comic drama, and so he must continue in his stories. "No one who has ever been within their power has ever been known to return," she told her grandson. "First these evil spirits charm their victims by the sweetness of their songs, then they strangle and devour them. But your principle enemy will be the great gambler who has never been beaten in his game and who lives beyond the realm of darkness." The trickster did not heed the words of his grandmother.
Naanabozho paddled by canoe to the end of the woodland and took a path through the swamps and over high mountains and by deep chasms in the earth where he saw the hideous stare of a thousand gleaming eyes. He heard groans and hisses of countless fiends gloating over their many victims of sin and shame. The trickster knew that this was the place where the great gambler had abandoned the losers, the spirits of his victims who had lost the game.
The trickster raised the mat of scalps over the narrow entrance to the wiigiwaam. The evil gambler was inside, a curious being, a person who seemed almost round; he was smooth, white, and wicked.
"So, Naanabozho, you too have come to try your luck," said the great gambler. His voice was horrible, the sound of scorn and ridicule. Round and white, he shivered. "All those hands you see hanging around the wiigiwaam are the hands of your relatives who came to gamble. They thought as you are thinking, they played and lost their lives in the game. Remember, I demand that those who gamble with me and lose, give me their lives. I keep the scalps, the ears, and the hands of the losers; the rest of the body I give to my friends the wiindigoo, the flesh eaters, and the spirits I consign to the world of darkness. I have spoken, and now we will play the game."
Clement William Vizenor lost the game with the evil gambler and did not return from the cities. He was a house painter who told trickster stories, pursued women, and laughed most of his time on earth. He was murdered on a narrow street in downtown Minneapolis.
"Giant Hunted in Murder and Robbery Case," appeared as a headline on the front page of the Minneapolis Journal, June 30, 1936. The report continued: "Police sought a giant Negro today to compare his fingerprints with those of the rifled purse of Clement Vizenor, 26 years old, found slain yesterday with his head nearly cut off by an eight-inch throat slash.
"Vizenor, an interior decorator living at 320 Tenth Street South, had been beaten and killed in an alley. ... He was the second member of his family to die under mysterious circumstances within a month. His brother, Truman Vizenor, 649 Seventeenth Avenue Northeast, was found in the Mississippi river June 1, after he had fallen from a railroad bridge and struck his head.
"Yesterday's slashing victim, who was part Indian, had been employed by John Hartung, a decorator. One pocket had been ripped out of the slain man's trousers. His purse lay empty beside him. Marks in the alley showed his body had been dragged several feet from the alley alongside a building."
The Minneapolis Tribune reported that the arrest of a "Negro in Chicago promised to give Minneapolis police a valuable clue to the murder of Clement Vizenor, 26-year-old half-breed Indian, who was stabbed to death in an alley near Washington avenue and Fourth street early June 27. Vizenor's slaying was unsolved." The murder was never solved, and no motive was ever established. Racial violence was indicated in most of the newspaper stories, but there was no evidence in the investigations that race was a factor in the murder. My father could have been a victim of organized crime. There was no evidence of a struggle; he had not been robbed; the police would not establish a motive for the crime. There were several unsolved homicides at that time in Minneapolis.
The picture of my father published in the newspaper was severed from a photograph that shows him holding me in his arms. This is the last photograph, taken a few weeks before his death, that shows us together. Clement wore a fedora and a suit coat; he has a wide smile. We are outside, there is a tenement in the background; closer, a heap of used bricks. I must remember that moment, my grandmother with the camera, our last pose together.
The Minneapolis Tribune reported later that the police had "arrested a half-breed Indian in a beer parlor near Seventh avenue south and Tenth street and are holding him without charge for questioning in connection with the slaying, early Sunday, of Clement Vizenor. ... The man who, according to police, was drunk, was picked up after making statements that indicated he might know who Vizenor's assailant was. He is alleged to have claimed knowledge of who Vizenor's friends were, and of many of the murdered man's recent activities. ... The murder was blamed by police upon any one of a growing number of drunken toughs roaming the Gateway district almost nightly, armed with knives and razors. The killing of Vizenor climaxes a series of violent assaults upon Gateway pedestrians in recent weeks by robbers who either slugged or slashed their victims."
In another report, the police "sought the husband of a former New York showgirl for questioning in connection with the knife murder of Clement Vizenor. ... The man sought is believed to be the same who left with Vizenor from a cafe at 400 Tenth street south about five hours before the murder. Alice Finkenhagen, waitress at the Tenth street cafe, gave police a good description of the man who called Vizenor to come outside. Detectives partially identified the showgirl's husband as that man. Also they learned this man had resented Vizenor's attentions to his showgirl wife.
"Vizenor was called from the cafe at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday. Later he appeared at his home, then left again. His body was found at 5:30 a.m., his throat slashed, in an alley near Washington and Fifth avenues south. Police also were holding three half-breed Indians for questioning, in the case. Vizenor was a half-breed."
The report continues: "A former New York showgirl and her husband were released by Minneapolis police Thursday after questioning failed to implicate them as suspects in the knife murder. ... Police learned that Vizenor's attentions to the showgirl had been resented by her husband. But that difference was amicably settled long ago, detectives found out."
The Minneapolis Tribune reported later that "Captain Paradeau said he was convinced Clement had been murdered but that robbery was not the motive. The slain youth was reported to have been mild tempered and not in the habit of picking fights. Police learned he had no debts, and, as far as they could ascertain, no enemies."
The Last Photograph
clement vizenor would be a spruce on his wise return to the trees corded on the reservation side he overturned the line colonial genealogies white earth remembrance removed to the cities at twenty three
my father lived on stories over the rough rims on mason jars danced with the wounded shaman low over the stumps on the fourth of july
my father lied to be an indian he laughed downtown the trickster signature to the lights
clement honored tribal men at war uniforms undone shadows on the dark river under the nicollet avenue bridge
tribal men burdened with civilization epaulets adrift ribbons and wooden limbs return to the evangelists charities on time
catholics on the western wire threw their voices treaties tied to catechisms undone in the woodland
reservation heirs on the concrete praise the birch the last words of indian agents undone at the bar
clement posed in a crowded tenement the new immigrant painted new houses pure white outback in saint louis park
our rooms were leaded and cold new tribal provenance histories too wild in the brick shoes too narrow
clement and women measured my blood at night
my father holds me in the last photograph the new spruce with a wide smile half white half immigrant he took up the cities and lost at cards
Clement Vizenor was survived by his mother, Alice Beaulieu; his wife, LaVerne Peterson; three brothers, Joseph, Lawrence, and Everett; two sisters, Ruby and Lorraine; and his son, Gerald Robert Vizenor, one year and eight months old. When my father was murdered, I was living with my grandmother, aunts, and uncles in a tenement at 320 Tenth Street South in Minneapolis.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Shadow Distance"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Gerald Vizenor.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction by A. Robert Lee,
AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
Thank You, George Raft, from Interior Landscapes,
Measuring My Blood, from Interior Landscapes,
Haiku in the Attic, from Interior Landscapes,
Envoy to Haiku, from Chicago Review,
Avengers at Wounded Knee, from Interior Landscapes,
FICTION,
Miigis Crowns, from The Heirs of Columbus,
Victoria Park, from Griever,
Shadows, from Dead Voices,
Terminal Creeds at Orion, from Bearheart,
STORIES,
Almost Browne, from Landfill Meditation,
Ice Tricksters, from Landfill Meditation,
Tulip Browne, from The Trickster of Liberty,
Trickster Photography, from Exposure,
Separatists Behind the Blinds, from Wordarrows,
ESSAYS,
Double Others, from Manifest Manners,
Unnameable Postindians, from Genre,
Ishi Obscura, from Manifest Manners,
The Tragic Wisdom of Salamanders, from Sacred Trust,
Casino Coups, from Manifest Manners,
Reversal of Fortunes, from Caliban,
Crossbloods, from the introduction to Crossbloods,
Sand Creek Survivors, from Earthdivers,
Terminal Creeds, from The People Named the Chippewa,
Shadows at La Pointe, from The People Named the Chippewa,
SCREENPLAY,
Harold of Orange,
Selected Bibliography of Works by Gerald Vizenor,