Gerald Robert Vizenor

A retired journalist and former altar boy on the Anishinaabe reservation in northern Minnesota, confesses his experiences as one of three altar boys abused by Father Meme, and the steps they took to rid themselves of the problem.

"Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 is a kabuki novel that begins in the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a new Rashomon Gate. Ronin Browne, the humane peace contender, is the hafu orphan son of Okichi, a Japanese boogie-woogie dancer, and Nightbreaker, an Anishinaabe from the White Earth Reservation who served as an interpreter for General Douglas MacArthur during the first year of the American occupation in Japan." "Ronin draws on samurai and native traditions to confront the moral burdens and passive notions of nuclear peace celebrated at the peace memorial Museum in Hiroshima. He creates a new calendar that starts with the first use of atomic weapons, Atomu One. Ronin accosts the spirits of the war dead at Yasukuni Jinga. He then marches into the national shrine and shouts to Tojo Hideki and other war criminals to come out and face the spirits of thousands of devoted children who were sacrificed at Hiroshima."--Jacket.

"Postindian Conversations is the first collection of in-depth interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today. These lively conversations with the preeminent novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples in the late twentieth century. Readers gain crucial insights into the genesis of Vizenor's fiction and its imagery, characters, and plots. The book also casts new light on his sometimes controversial ideas about contemporary Native identity, politics, economics, scholarship, and literature. These conversations are particularly valuable for their clarification of concepts and terminology central to Vizenor's work."--Jacket.

In this collection of eleven linked stories, Gerald Vizenor brings back one of his most popular characters, Almost Browne, in full trickster force. Born in the back of a hatchback, almost on the White Earth Reservation, the crossblood storyteller sells blank books - some autographed (by him) with such names as Isaac Singer, Geoffrey Chaucer, N. Scott Momaday, and Jesus Christ; projects laser demons over the reservation; lectures in the Transethnic Situations Department at the University of California; is crowned Indian Princess of the University of Oklahoma by posing as the "mature" senior Penny Birdwind (who majors in native animations and simulations) and delivering a heartstopping, lip-synched rendition of Peggy Lee's "Fever"; and much more. The stories feature many members of the Browne family, including Grandmother Wink, who can drop an insect in flight with a single puff of her poison breath, and great-uncle Gesture, the acudenturist who creates false teeth with tricky smiles from the Naanabozho Express, the free railroad train he runs on the reservation.

Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.--pub. website.

Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities--the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals--fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor's central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominant culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.

Collection of stories about the tribal trickster.

"In traditional tribal creation myths, the earthdiver brings up dirt form the primal water to form the earth ... Now they dive in unknown urban areas connecting dreams to earth in the same way that these stories connect metaphor to realities."--Jacket.

Seventeen narratives about real and imagined characters on an urban reservation and the author's experiences reporting the murder trial of a young Indian student.