a bare minimum of laws

Manifest Manners is a book written through interpretation. It is a translation of reality into colonial English. Vizenor demonstrates trickster hermeneutics by employing definitions in multiple dimensions at once. To thoroughly diagram the web of meaning he creates would take a lifetime, perhaps two. Reading his book has been a joy and a trial.
I reached out to a friend with a PHD in Art History. He is an Indigenous scholar who works as a silversmith and, it turns out, he is familiar with Vizenor. I asked him what he thought about Vizenor. He responded:
I don’t remember references to real estate law. I do know that he’s particular about his use of words. I think in that book he draws more from postmodern cultural theory than post structuralism but you’re in the right framework. I think the use of words or repetition is a good device, but it’s more about the end meaning (context) than twisting the English language or deriving more complex meaning out of “relatively simple” words. IE. his use of absence/presence. Or erasure. He’s dropped plenty of Easter eggs in his writing, but you have to unfurl the theory and context (John Paul Rangel).
I considered myself gently reminded not to use the word “simple” carelessly. So I choose the word “familiar” instead, because that is closer to my meaning. Many of Vizenor’s words appear familiar, though the context demands interrogation from all angles.
If I were to say what the book is about: it points to the ability of language to limit our thinking. Especially in translation, words lose their wholeness and become blunt and flat. The differences are world-breaking. The Western form of argument and debate is one of closure, of dominance. The humor and irony in Trickster hermeneutics unveils a perspective where story is embodied as more complex than belief, chance encloses causality in a brief bubble while opening outward into an infinite unclosed branching, and reality is unmasked from the screen of objectivity while simulations are troubled by teasing. The book is about how we were all colonized, by words, ideas, and simulations, that lack reference in reality. It’s about the tragic wisdom we all might gain, and about the ways our tenuous grasp on sovereignty can be expanded. But, it’s only a beginning. It is but a glimpse, a vision, and visions are precarious. The book is also about the unbroken succession of land in the United States, this is one of the multiplicitous faces of the word survivance.
The ownership of land is something that feels wrong to me. My identity arrives through an intersection of many elements, one of which is “unhoused.” I have lived most of my life either at the mercy of housed friends, or in vehicles and other structures which afford me some comfort. Briefly, when I first got sober, I spent the majority of my time “affording a place to live.” As one does in that mindset, it became an obsession, which led me into bankruptcy, due entirely to my own absence in my own life.
I have found that the only way I can banish that absence is through being present in ways which do not afford full concession to a system of ownership. I occupy places and I use things, observing the bare minimum of laws to keep from being jailed or otherwise hindered. I long for privacy, yet I do not expect to see it in my lifetime. I am far more at peace, far more present in my life with my feelings in the space I occupy with the mice in a derelict vehicle on a mesa, and I always have been.
Vizenor writes with a speculative heart. He has used his gift honorably. This project has left me with a stronger interest in both the books by postmodern cultural theorists and in Indigenous perspectives on knowledge. I will be studying in IDST 202 over the summer semester. I look forward to the chance that I will learn something unpredictable. I hope that this sense of presence continues to shape my writing, and my stories.