shadows and stories on one patch of earth

A postindian is a person formerly referred to through the caricature of manifest manners as an Indian. The postindian is a presence. There is nothing to believe here.
Postindian warriors can be honorable or dishonorable and anywhere in between. The only distinction made is that, “postindian warriors create a new tribal presence in stories” (Vizenor 12). They do not cater to beliefs about made up identities, though they sometimes play against those beliefs for ironic or trickster value.
The connotations in the culture of the cult of individual responsibility of the word: precarious, are largely negative. Contemporary mores in the United States dictate that one should expunge chance and dependencies from one’s life, lest these be one’s downfall. A person living a precarious life has either chosen (or less often through no fault of their own) to live a life balanced on a pinpoint, wavering over a chasm, moments away from catastrophe.
The legal definition seems closer to the root: “depending on the intention of another” (wiktionary.org). This brings Vizenor’s connotations back in line with the rest of his ethos. He is not the kind of finger-wagging philosopher to lament a lack of foresight in causal planning and machinations. Causality fits inside his rhetoric in a confined locus, surrounded by a sea of chance. So, it is unlikely that Vizenor is complaining about anything being “dangerously insecure.”
It is far more likely he is using the word in terms of the relationality between people and the real within a tribal setting. Inter-subjective experience is precarious, by definition. This is not a judgement of quality, simply a statement of fact. One of the trickiest things I’ve had to unlearn to read Vizenor is the deflation of some of the connotations given to contemporary language.
There is a part of me that is always already present. A part of me exists in the real. He is buried under mountains of simulations. I don’t need you to believe in me; I am standing in front of you.
Privacy is the right to be free of the unreal. Privacy is freedom from being believed in.
The use of the word pronoun is very literal. It is more than a part of European grammar. It is a part of the grammar of survivance. It means literally: instead of name. A believed label, not a name, not a story.
Racialism: a form of causality designed to ascribe causal order and a simulation of reason to political and culture phenomena; to seek closure on why some people suffer more than others, to ascribe traits to people based on superficial qualities. Racialism is looking at the surface of people and claiming to see into their depth. Racialism is a set of beliefs in a web which includes ideas like polygenism, essentialism, genetic predeterminism, and many other concepts which are focused on deriving destiny from surface traits or otherwise creating a false probing of a person’s internal characteristics from how they present externally.
When something is real, reality does not require any belief. Simulations require belief. Anything that requires belief to perpetuate its existence is unreal.
I went to Patrick Smith Park today. I lived there for the first two years of my time in Santa Fe. This is not an exaggeration. If the sun was up, and I wasn’t in school, I was probably at that park. I haven’t been back there in about ten months. When I got out of the car, I was hit with the presence of the place. The smell of the trees and the river. This one dog named Ruby who always barks at me. The inevitable lost dog tag at the base of the farthest tree. The chewed sticks in the grass. The sunlight, brighter and greener than anywhere else in Santa Fe. The sound of the swollen river, nearly a foot deep and rushing. The memory of that water on my skin every day. The people who came there and who were still there. There is too much in the real to be listed. If I had Borges’ Library of Babel, there would not be enough letters or images. The subtleties and relationality of the real and the differánce, the traces, shadows, and stories of one patch of Earth are endless.
The reference is a referent. It is real. Signifiers refer to signifieds. Simulations have no reference in reality. The reference carries back language to reality.
Not always a pleasurable sensation, sometimes a cold clammy neck awaits posers in the presence of the real.
Savagism literally means: of the forest. This in itself would not be slander, now would it? When it becomes a simulation of something else, an other that colonists can be taught to fear and hate, the word becomes a mirror reflecting back on those who utter it, their own true barbarism.
Shadows always implies a presence. A color, dark, dusky, an image, a reflection, a fog. They often play the part in literature as that which is unseen or hidden. In psychiatry the shadow has been a realm of self which is unknown, even hated. Vizenor employs multitudinous meanings for the word. It’s all in the context of his sentences. When his shadows are contextually tribal, as they often are, they point to the presence behind the simulation. Most importantly, shadows are a part of the real. They are relational, positional, and ubiquitous. They are instransitive, meaning they do not act upon a specific object directly, however, they can be felt.
Silence was imposed. People were silenced. Silence is unnatural. Contemporary people bombarded with noise from devices and technology may think that silence is what happens when all the obnoxious noises stop, but that is not silence. Silence is the deverbative. The root is the verb sileo, meaning: I am quiet. It was not about the silence of nature. Then it was still, windless, quiet, slow, slow flowing water, but not the absence of sound.
So from this silence, this pause, come the next stories.
The word simulation can be traced back to the philosophical text of the same name, written by Jean Baudrillard; to whom a simulation represents a severing of human perception from reality. The hyperreal is a recreation of reality which may be indistinguishable from the real in most ways, other than it is produced from a model and has no referent in reality.
Vizenor uses Baudrillard’s simulation to endless effect in Manifest Manners. To the point where it becomes necessary to read Simulations in order to not miss out on 99% of his meaning in using the word. This is another example of holophrasticism.
The philosophy of Baudrillard seems a natural fit into what Vizenor is doing. Baudrillard questions the very nature of what we take for granted as real, and so does Vizenor. Baudrillard writes about native persons discovered, kidnapped, studied, before being placed back into the jungle to once more carry on the task of being what they no longer are, but used to be without trouble. Simulations always require belief.
A song is a song is a song. Its etymology is endlessly recursive, but what does Vizenor mean by it? In the context of the sentence above he uses it to differentiate from stories. The chance of the casinos is in stories without community. In this sense it is implied that songs are of a community, a dream, of something hidden, as well as of keeping stories, not losing them.
I think that the definitions listed above all fail to meet the needed meaning. In looking to my community at IAIA, I have observed songs on many occasions. I have heard songs used as medicine, yet I resist making any one-to-one equivalence with prayer. Though the association comes to mind, again, Vizenor explicitly warns against translation. Even the early settlers had songs, up into the twentieth century members of a settler household played instruments and sang together. Now we have Spotify, and before that, cassette tapes. Contemporary music, whether commercial or artistic leaning, is not the same thing as a song. A song is participation, not performance. Native songs are real.
A song comes from a body, whether that is a person or a group.
To Vizenor, sovereignty is a responsibility, not a consolation for genocide. He insists that it is the most powerful tool available to tribes, and that it is largely squandered in the pursuit of impotent wealth.
Who writes the stories, who defines the grammar, by whose manners the storytelling is done means everything. Stories are the creation of reality or the forgery of simulation. Stories are not beliefs. To hear a story is to hear the presence of the place and the people. There isn’t a word more important to the arc of Manifest Manners and the wisdom of Vizenor.
A story comes from the imagination, whether from a person or a group.
There is the sense of all three definitions in use at once. It is at the minimum, a survival. This is followed by a succession and the responsibility concomitant in that passing. And an ironic teasing of national identity, as the word survivance was once a cultural rallying cry of Francophones being overrun by Anglos. Vizenor turns the word around on both the European colonizers, essentially using a word with emotional resonance to impart a message.
Just a great word. A rapid gallop; used as a hunting cry.
When Vizenor teases, he uses the word in the sense of tugging at or pointing to, sometimes as enticing. He uses tease also in the manner of invoking the trickster, the biggest tease of them all. When tease is read, the shadow of the trickster is present. Teasing upends fragile beliefs.
Something about simulations and models, their perpetuity is unnatural. Misrepresentation through pronouns and nouns crystalizes the vibrant flow of living life into a calcareous fossil.
A trace is a “mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present” (wikipedia.org). Traces are inherent in meaning. Just as shadows are implied by light, only the relationship isn’t quite the same. Vizenor doesn’t use trace and shadow interchangeably. Both are familiar words to English speakers, and Vizenor’s meaning brings some of the sense of the familiar with it. The most obvious distinction between a shadow and a trace is that a shadow is evidence of a presence, while a trace is evidence of an absence.
Tragic Wisdom is a counter to victimry. Vizenor advocates for acknowledgement of atrocities committed in the name of civilization, but he cautions against victimry. This sense of taking wisdom from even attempted genocide is a fence guiding the emotional response to the present.
Therefore, implying an object as necessary to complete a thought or statement. Grounding the action in the object of closure.
The second of four postmodern conditions affecting the critique and discourse of native and postindian lit is the unbodying by translation. A written text does not live in a human body the same way an oral story does. The hermeneutics of survivance accounts for translation as being deeper than the mere going between of vocabularies and grammars. Translation is a transfer of meaning, and mistranslation is the destruction of meaning, the creation of simulation, and the absence of stories. Translation is a linguistic fallacy, the mere transposition of the elements of language can ameliorate the differences in cultures. Translation is also a transfer of place.
A word that is seemingly defined as itself. tribe roots in tribus (Latin): tribe. Perhaps the meaning comes from the reference to the number three, as in a tribe is more than two people, or two people make a third, making a tribe. This is loose conjecture on my part, and I am reading into the etymology and its mystery overmuch. I take Vizenor’s meaning as a descriptor for a way of life which was impacted by colonization, and which survives, fractured by a literature of dominance and manifest manners.
In AA, we have a group conscience. It’s not the same thing, but I think it’s not entirely unrelated. Tribal consciousness is a much bigger phenomenon. It is a trans-subjective experience of reality as well as simulation. There is a sense that it is also a character of perspective, a fundamental way of being that is infinitely larger than the frame of the colonizing work of manifest manners and the literature of dominance. Tribal consciousness, being composed of “wonder, chance, coincidence” encircles postwestern culture. It is not a collection of beliefs, but a body of stories and songs.
When is a contradiction not a contradiction? The trickster seems like they would be at home in the zen koan. A trickster might have been the first to ask, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” If trickster is a language game, trickster itself is untranslatable in English, because similar to humor, irony, and imagic presence, trickster exists in a heard space which is beyond the mere apprehension of a causal, deverbative, transitive system of closure, but unlike humor and irony, contemporary settler descended American speakers of English are not trained to Hear the trickster. If one were to feel the presence of trickster, perhaps it would feel a concealment, a game, a dragging or scraping or pulling. One might have to dodge or search for detours. There is nothing to believe here.
Trickster hermeneutics is the third of four postmodern conditions reviving the discourse and critique of native and postindian lit. It encapsulates liberation, uncertain humor, shimmer of survivance, against the obscure maneuvers of manifest manners, tragic transvaluations, incoherent cultural representations (Vizenor 66).
The tribal consciousness will not be represented.
A highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Also: Russell Means. If you believe this, you have been tricked.
I have heard Vizenor described as circuitous. I don’t think he would oppose that reading. It feels to me that I have been trained from birth to accept linear, causal stories and explanations with closure, and to feign confusion at anything greater or more complex. It is difficult from this framework to follow the unfamiliar structures of logic and language that Vizenor builds using familiar words. It takes a lifetime to change one’s own mind.
I would love to take this glossary and work it into a visual Language poem. Manifest Manners bears some resemblance to the Language poetry movement in their postmodern roots. It is, no mistake, a serious scholarly book. Vizenor exiles closure; this opens many of the words he uses to multiple meanings and a web of interpretations. In this way he exemplifies one of his main arguments, that meaning in native stories is complex beyond distillations of “lessons, translations, or beliefs.” It is curious that in an expository behemoth like Manifest Manners a reader can find a form of demonstration, showing not telling, that operates on the level of the linguistic subconscious.
Vizenor creates a web of meaning. His prose is specifically designed to demonstrate his framework for processing reality. It is grammatically and structurally onomatopoetic demonstrating the sound of the heard and trickster hermeneutics.. His extensive quotation of other writers provides clarity without closure and demonstrates his ethics concerning community and stories, as he examines the community of philosophers and writers in and adjacent to Native Literature through their words and actions. Meaning is relational; there is no individual, only personal.
Manifest Manners is a book about healing written with no quarter for just how deeply it challenges the reader and the reader’s framework. It is not an in-between, not a translation; it resonates with a presence which swallows up the meager framework for thought we have been given by the colonizing force that has overwhelmed out planet. In comparison to the postmodern text from which he draws much of his language around simulation and differánce, Vizenor does seem to write more accessible language. It is tough, but fair, given that he cannot say some of the things he says any other way without compromising his meaning.
Manifest Manners is not a perfect book. One doesn’t get much warmth from reading it. In many ways it suffers from Vizenor’s directness and intellectual poetics. He is a postindian warrior of postmodern cultural poetics, and as such, places himself outside the pale of a discourse where beliefs rule thoughts, and stories are translated as dearly held misrepresentations. He attempts to navigate a new discourse, and it is alienating in many ways to the communities he writes for. His work is redundant in some ways. He is not representing or explaining Tribal culture but exclaiming its presence and demanding accountability. this can be emotionally challenging or triggering for people who may feel so challenged by survival that survivance can come off tone deaf. I hope this isn’t always the case. If Vizenor’s work seems out of touch, I believe it is because it is fundamentally aspirational. I wonder that we could use more aspiring prose that dares to take what is indispensable in language and challenge it to do