Interior Landscapes

Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors

Gerald Vizenor

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781438429823, 9781438429830
• eBook ISBN: 9781438429847
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The classic autobiography of the famous Indigenous writer and critic Gerald Vizenor

The classic memoir by one of the most celebrated Indigenous writers of the modern era, Interior Landscapes offers an unforgettable glimpse of the life and world of Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor writes about his experiences as a tribal mixedblood in the new world of simulations; the themes in his autobiographical stories are lost memories and a "remembrance past the barriers." The chapters open with natural harmonies and the premier union of the Anishinaabe families of the crane and the first white fur traders. The author bares his fosterage, his ambitions, his contentions with institutions and imposed histories; his encounters as a community advocate, journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, university teacher, critic, and novelist. Vizenor celebrates chance, or "trickster signatures" and communal metaphors in these pages: he was hired to teach social sciences at Lake Forest College, his first experience as a teacher, because the head of the department admired his haiku poems; he toured the armorial emblems at Maxim's de Beijingwhen it opened on October 1, 1983, in the People's Republic of China; he wrote about the suicide of Dane White and the murderer Thomas White Hawk; he rescued his dreams from the skinwalkers at the Clyde Kluckhohn house in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and, as an editorial writer, he followed the American Indian Movement from Custer to Rapid City, from Calico Hall on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Teasing, revealing, and irresistible, Interior Landscapes charts the fascinating life of a brilliant Anishinaabe writer.

The new edition contains a wealth of new photographs and information on the journey of Gerald Vizenor.

Gerald Vizenor, a member of the White Earth Anishinaabeg, is a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His many books include Fugitive Poses, Manifest Manners, Hiroshima Bugi, and Survivance. He is the editor of the series Native Traces (SUNY) and Native Storiers (Nebraska).

"The Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor is at once a brilliant and evasive trickster figure... He is perhaps the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century." — N. Scott Momaday

"Instead of trying to walk the thin, often invisible line between art and politics, history and future, Vizenor dances on both sides, knowing all too well that in our time politics can become myth and vice versa."—San Francisco Review of Books

Table of contents

• INTERIOR LANDSCAPES
• Contents
• 1. Families of the Crane
• 2. January 1934: Thank You, George Raft
• 3. June 1936: Measuring my Blood
• 4. March 1938: Crossing the Wires
• 5. June 1941: The End of the War
• 6. October 1943: Silence in the Third Grade
• 7. December 1946: Saturnalia at Dayton's
• 8. July 1947: Many Point Scout Camp
• 9. August 1948: The Titan of Green Lake
• 10. May 1949: The Trickster and Libertina
• 11. July 1950: Masturbation Papers
• 12. June 1951: One More Good Home
• 13. December 1951: Death by Elevator
• 14. September 1952: The Pink Flamingo
• 15. April 1953: The End of an Alphabet
• 16. September 1954: The Trees of the Emperor
• 17. March 1955: When the Mist Clears
• 18. June 1955: The Moon over Matsushima
• 19. January 1956: King Lear in a Wheelchair
• 20. June 1956: Return to Salvation
• 21. October 1957: Death Song to a Red Rodent
• 22. June 1960: Haiku in the Attic
• 23. April 1966: The New Fur Traders
• 24. June 1968: The Second Coming
• 25. May 1970: Water Striders at Lake Forest
• 26. March 1973: Avengers at Wounded Knee
• 27. January 1980: The Russians and Jack London
• 28. June 1986: Santa Fe Skinwalkers
• 29. September 1989: Honor Your Partner