Indigenous Destinies

Gerald Vizenor displays his playful wit and provocative theorizing of Indigenous creativity in Native Provenance (2019), a collection of essays adapted from material that appeared in other forms between 2004 and 2019. He uses familiar concepts (survivance, transmotion, gossip theory) to drive discussions of familiar topics (World War I veterans from White Earth, the White Earth constitution, Indigenous abstract expressionist painters). Devoted readers of Vizenor will appreciate but also wonder about the persistence in his work over many decades of certain topics and critical emphases. A decreased interest in crossbloods as trickster figures represents one of the most significant shifts in emphasis from the middle to the later part of Vizenor’s career. Louis Owens admired Vizenor’s work on crossbloods, and he lived an experience fundamental to his view of the world that he called, similarly, “mixedblood.” Yet, as many of the contributors to Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy (2019) demonstrate, Owens consistently recognized distinct Native and non-Native worlds in his scholarship and drew upon tribal nation-specific beliefs and practices in his novels. His characters often struggled to understand their connection to Indigenous histories, communities, and families, all of which Owens valued, even when they remained inaccessible, either to him or his characters.