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a texture of belief

c}{imps 8 my ears

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The double other is a construct of the literature of dominance. Native persons are cast as characters, pronouns which describe opposite ends of savagism and salvation. Colonizers then seek to inhabit these imagined native others, and replace the simulated native by becoming the simulation.
It is a texture of belief.

Vizenor mentions envy many times. It must be a wholly destructive emotion to both sides, the envied and the envious. It seems a lighthouse to Vizenor, who points to the idea of wealth without power as radical to the feeling of envy. If a person or tribe with great wealth does not do anything powerful, such as take restorative action as a political power in constructing the postwestern world, they are envied, not for their wealth, but for their weakness and shortsighted use of that money.
Games constitute education; wellness; the sharpening of intuition. There are no inscribed rules. Rules are agreed upon through conversation; they are a part of the heard. Games are chance in the presence of the real. Play is learning. Games may be simulations, but they occur in the presence of the real. The action of play informs the player that belief is temporary; and that intuition and chance are eternal.
The heard is the first of the four postmodern conditions Vizenor finds valuable in critique and discourse on native and postindian literature
To be heard requires presence at a place and belonging. Heard is a familiar word to English speakers, but it is used in a novel way. The assumption by a reader that Vizenor merely means that a story was transmitted from a mouth to an ear must be abandoned. Interrogation of this familiar word and the ways it is transmuted throughout Manifest Manners leaves a reader asking, “what else is in this container?”
What differentiates a heard story from an inscribed one is that the heard story must come from a human being, within a larger context of a community, within the context of a natural world, while the inscribed story is flat by comparison. Its worlds are mostly internal to the reader. Associations are made to larger contexts, but they are assumed, guesses, where the context of a heard story is alive and immediate. In this sense it is unique, irreproducible, real. The word hear comes from the same root as the word here. When so many of our more familiar words etymologies end in circular dead ends of self-reference, this feels like an opening into a clearing, the clearing of the real.
When you hear a story, you aren’t asked to believe it; that is a choice you make on your own.
Hermeneutics carries with it a sense of translation, but not of a mere translation of words as signifiers for signifieds, but in the sense that ways of thought can be very different and can be translated using familiar words in novel ways, and unfamiliar words in place of familiar ones, to expand the sense of not-knowing, interrogating one’s assumptions is foundational to Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics. It goes back to the root of encounters between settlers and natives. Native persons encountering settlers told them stories. At that point in their cultural evolution, settlers no longer had stories, they had beliefs. These are not the same, beliefs are not stories.
Vizenor uses many holophrastics to be sure. Differánce, postindian, survivance, imagic, heard, and many other words used in Manifest Manners contain more than mere translation or synonym. His use of the word holophrastic in the sentence above points towards the actions of the trickster in tribal stories as holophrastic, which take the term beyond its typical use as a construction in written grammar. In translation, the action is read as linear, causal, closed. Using trickster hermeneutics a scholar might hear what was heard by tribal communities as imagic humor, natural reason, and the ironies of nicknames.

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