A Study Of Postindian Survivance Writing By Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Vizenor(1934-),one of the most significant and most influential writers in the American Indian Renaissance,has won American National Book Prize twice.He is a prolific writer combining cleverly American Indian traditional culture with post-modern writing techniques to focus on the destiny of American Indians.Famous trickster characters such as Griever,the Prude family and Almost Brown have been created in his writing to reveal how American Indians fight for survival.Vizenor's works have been discussed from various perspectives including but not limited to post-modernity,“Indianess”,tricksters,poetics and Indian identity abroad.The studies have demonstrated the variety of Vizenor's writing.As an American Indian writer,he writes for rectification of Indian images while never hesitating to sneer at the hypocritical Indians.His writing career begins with haiku which is adopted to mix the language of English and Indian traditional culture for innovation.He enjoys both sticking to American Indian culture and challenging all rules at the same time.His works are of truth and fictionality as well.Chinese critics have already paid attention to his writing but few special research achievements which can be found in academic journals have been published in public yet,let alone systematical research.The range of researches on Vizenor and his writing is expected to be expanded and there is absolutely a need for more special studies.No stress has been put on “postindian” and “survivance” which are new vocabulary created and emphasized repeatedly in his writing.The doctoral dissertation,based on American Indian history and American Indian Renaissance,with understanding of texts,combines the basic theories including those of culturology,anthropology and history to conduct an overall research on creation ideas and works of Vizenor.Internal text studies and external studies of history,culture,mainstream writing and his contemporary writers shall be conducted to explore the writing of postindian survivance by Vizenor as a modest spur to induce further discussions.The term “Indian” was put forward by Christopher Columbus who is believed to be the first European to discover the American Continent but mistook it for Asia.The term has been doubted and challenged so much to arouse debate on naming the people since 1960 s.The last two competitors are “Indians” and “Native Americans”.Vizenor,a vocabulary creator,inspired by post-structuralism,creates the term “postindian” to refer to original inhabitants on the continent and puts forward the method of identity verification of postindians by inheritance of spirits and tradition instead of blood quantum.The resistance consciousness of American Indians has been sparked by American Indian Renaissance.Vizenor,remarkably influenced by his personal experiences and social circumstances,has realized the significance of quest of survivance in the society dominated by the white and thus adds new meaning to the word survivance to emphasize the initiative resistance for survival of American Indians.Columbus' s discovery of America by sea exploration started the exploitation of America offering wider development space and capital accumulation market for Europe.Unfortunately,the peaceful life of American Indians was interrupted by it.In the following centuries,Indian cultivation has been invaded by white colonists who came in great numbers.Indian nightmare has become the stepping-stone of American Dream of the white race.Columbus has received positive and negative comments,yet considered to be heroic by the majority.In his fiction The Heirs of Columbus Vizenor subverts the heroic image of Columbus,compares European cultivation to death culture and breaks the previous binary opposition of so-called “European cultivation” and “Indian barbarousness” to correct the ruined image of Indian culture.Vizenor keeps a watchful eye on the lost survival space of Indians.Indians worship harmonious conception of nature.The land is sacred from Indian point of view.They lived and farmed in the vast land to enjoy the integration of man and nature.However,Indians have lost most of their land after the whites came and their population has declined sharply.Different from his contemporary writers who would like to take the writing mode of “home-returning” and to advocate the returning to Indian land and traditions,Vizenor,as a mixed-blood writer,acknowledges the significant power of traditional memories inherited from ancestors in American Indian writing but resists following the popular writing mode.He insists that the tracking of Indian tradition is to some extent returning to the Indians invented by the white man and might lead contemporary Indians to be trapped in the other situation set by the mainstream literature.Instead he depicts how Indians survive in the third space and make their pilgrimage to the fourth world to inspire Indians to seek new survival space initiatively.Along with enforcement of Assimilation Policy and population of English,Indian languages have disappeared gradually.The initiative Indian traditional literature is oral literature without written recording.The weakening of Indian literature from mainstream literature to marginal literature is the portrayal of the loss of Indian discourse right.After exfoliation of Indian discourse right,the images of Indians are twisted to be barbarous and unenlightened red race.Ameerican Indian literature refers to written English literature by contemporary Indian writers concerning American Indian lives while Ameerican Indian literatures include oral literature.Vizenor's writing has inherited the oral tradition in the aspects of oral storytelling,dialogues,construction of scenes.The passive acceptance of Indian race,tribes and even individuals reveals the loss of discourse right.The initiative resistance by telling stories is the right way to make the dead voices alive back to the center of the history and therefore the effective approach to returning to self and regaining the discourse right.The trickster stories of the tribe where Vizenor comes from are told afterwards.It also explores how Vizenor creates tricksters in his writing and their cultural reflection.As Christians believe that God creates human beings and the world,American Indians tend to hold the belief that tricksters exist before human beings and creates Indians and the world.It is no hard to find tricksters in contemporary American Indian writing,who are ambiguous in gender and personality.Tricksters are created to observe and have an insight into the variety of life and the society,to resist kinds of pressure and look forward to a bright future on behalf of contemporary Indians.Tricksters created by Vizenor are postindian warriors,most of whom are mixed-blooded,conducting survivance in the world created by Vizenor,on and off the reservation,home and abroad.Indianess and international view are both indicated in his writing.They also reflect the worship of harmonious views of nature of American Indians.American Indians have encountered miseries in history,but Vizenor is never favor of the identity of victims of them,let alone cheer for it.He is absolutely not a casual optimist,but he certainly believes that as long as American Indians liberate themselves from the simulative framework of “Indian” they are able to construct their own psychological sovereignty and thus succeed by initiative survivance.