Waiting for Wovoka: Envoys of Good Cheer and Liberty

by Gerald Vizenor

Overview

Native puppeteers from the White Earth Reservation travel to the 1962 World's Fair

In the summer of 1962, a group of young Native American puppeteers travel in a converted school bus from the White Earth Reservation to the Century 21 Exposition, World's Fair in Seattle, Washington. The five Natives, three young men and two young women, have endured abandonment, abuse, poverty, and find solace, humor, and courage with a mute puppeteer—a Native woman in her seventies who writes original dream songs, and creates hand puppets and ironic parleys that mock the ghosts of authority. Dummy Trout, the mute puppeteer, also figured in Native Tributes and Satie on the Seine. The troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and they create a puppet parley for Wovoka, the inspiration of the Native American Ghost Dance Religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819500427
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2023
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

GERALD VIZENOR (Naples, FL) is a citizen of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. He is a prolific and versatile author and editor of more than forty books, including Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: SLIGHT HESITATIONS • Chapter 2: LITERARY MERCY • Chapter 3: ROYAL LIBERTY • Chapter 4: SNOW GHOSTS • Chapter 5: MADAMA BUTTERFLY • Chapter 6: POSTCARD HEARSAY • Chapter 7: HEART STORIES • Chapter 8: WHITEY DWIGHTY • Chapter 9: STRAY SHADOWS • Chapter 10: NOAH LE GROS • Chapter 11: CASTLE BRAVO • Chapter 12: TUMBLE NAMES

Editorial Reviews

03/31/2023

In the early Sixties, near Spirit Lake, MN, sits the Theatre of Chance, a roomy, ramshackle cabin serving as a crucial refuge for abused and lost young Indigenous runaways from government reservation schools or poverty-stricken homes. Here they find humor, solace, and courage from a nonspeaking puppeteer named Dummy Trout, an opera buff and well-read elderly Indigenous woman. She guides the youngsters in creating dream songs, poetry, and hand puppets to perform puppet parleys. These creative diversions counter 300 years of treacherous federal agents, well-meaning missionaries, and the mercenary fur trade slaughtering their totemic animals. An Indigenous troupe based in Paris sends Dummy Trout a postcard alerting her to their return to the United States, asking to meet up in Seattle at the World's Fair. Arriving in an old, brightly painted school bus, the troupe attends a performance of Waiting for Godot and, influenced by Beckett's themes of absurdity and nihilism, prepares a puppet parley between Sitting Bull and Samuel Becket with overtones of a powerful Paiute shaman Wokova to mock authority. VERDICT Of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, the award-winning Vizenor (Native Provenance) here fictionalizes his great-uncles as he constructs a powerful portrait of the Indigenous condition through innovative setting and characters.—Donna Bettencourt

Library Journal

"A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture."—Kirkus Reviews

"[Gerald Vizenor's] novels are a masterful foray into a new language of Native novelists and poets, a 'literary ghost dance, a literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance.' In turns poignant and ironic, Waiting for Wovoka suffuses a profound humanism."—Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today

"Part novel, part haiku/Anishinaabe dream song, part puppet show, part autobiography, part travelogue = an all-Vizenor bushel of 'trickery queries and spontaneous mockeries;' 'heart songs, dream songs, and tumble names.'"—Kenneth M. Roemer, Co-Editor, The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature

"Gerald Vizenor is a master of the postmodern narrative. No other Native writer does exactly what he does, and certainly no one does it with his verve and panache. This is an immensely talented and original novelist at the top of his game. Every recent novel by him surpasses the last, and this is no exception."—Jace Weaver, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies, University of Georgia

From the Publisher

2023-03-22
Vizenor’s novel celebrates Indigenous culture and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.

On the White Earth Reservation, Truman La Chance is a young orphan who creates poetic dream songs to understand the world around him. Adrift from others, he finally finds a sense of belonging at the Theatre of Chance in his local community. The theater, a “curious sanctuary for runaways,” is the brainchild of Dummy Trout, a puppeteer who has not spoken in over 50 years, since the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, in which, at the age of 18, Dummy lost her family and loved ones and was consumed by grief. Decades later, following the Second World War, Dummy and her pet dogs preside over the theater, where she makes puppets and encourages the runaways and strays on the reservation to present stories to each other and the community. Over 12 chapters, the author uses the connections that a diverse range of Indigenous characters have to the theater to illustrate the building of a community amid the difficult circumstances on the reservation. Vizenor presents, in the context of puppetry performances, imagined conversations between historical figures such as Sitting Bull and President John F. Kennedy, Aristotle and James Baldwin, and Sacagawea and Tallulah Bankhead, which are the novel’s most intriguing feature. He also links Western cultural works, such as the opera Madama Butterfly, to the feelings and experiences of his Indigenous characters. The short novel is curious and winding and is at times hard to follow. But the author’s background as a poet is obvious in the lyrical prose (“He described the slight hesitations of his speech as the unexpected silence between a flash of lightning and crash of thunder”), making much of the language so beautiful that the meandering threads of the storyline do not detract from the reader’s enjoyment.

A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.

Kirkus Reviews