Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence

Gerald Robert Vizenor

U of Nebraska Press, Jan 1, 1998 - Social Science - 238 pages

"Gerald Vizenor demonstrates once more how and why he is at the absolute forefront of American writers and critical thinkers. The essays offered here gather past, present, and future into brilliantly disturbing ways of understanding how we articulate our selves and our worlds as Native Americans, postindians, indigenous peoples, human beings. Simply put, Fugitive Poses underscores the ever more evident fact that Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has no equal in American critical writing."-Louis Owens. "A puzzle and a provocation, a burr under the seat of the imagination, Fugitive Poses is challenging new work from an American Daedalus very much alive."-Arnold Krupat. "Fugitive Poses is suffused with wide-ranging intellectual energy. It journeys in revelatory ways into social and literary history. . . . Vizenor has written a number of excellent books. This is one of his very best." -Brian Swann. Native peoples today are best known to others, and often to themselves, through their fugitive poses: textual and graphic depictions preserved by scholarship, consumed by the dominant culture, and steeped in a modernist aesthetic of romantic victimry, tragedy, and nostalgia. Because such representations do not easily convey the immediacy and distinctiveness of Native cultures, they effectively celebrate the absence rather than the presence of the Native. The fugitive poses captured in photographs, portraits, translations, official documents, New Age stories, blood-quantum counts, captivity narratives, and museum objects simulate Native peoples rather than reveal them. Native sovereignty, Gerald Vizenor contends, is not possessed but expressed. It emerges not from practicing vengeful andexclusionary policies and politics, or by simple recourse to territoriality, but by turning to Native transmotion, the forces and processes of creativity and imagination lying at the heart of Native world-views and actions. Overturning long-held scholarly and popular assumptions, Vizenor offers a vigorous examination of tragic cultures and victimry. Gerald Vizenor is a professor of Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the American Book Award winner Griever: An American Monkey King in China.

What people are saying

User Review -

Sadly I give this a low rating, I really object that people write about my ancestors as if they know everything about them. Keeshkemun is my fifth great grandfather. I wish people would not tell stories that are repeated stories, from a history source then it becomes so distorted and that is what most of what I get from this book it looks like the author has read many history books and formed his own story. Sorry I would not waste my money on second hand opinions and mentions of Warren, Henry Schoolcraft. For Gods sake I read alot of these history books too, but I have had oral stories passed down in our family which in fact are not mentioned in Henry Schoolcrafts books nor Warrens. I just think alot of these stories were told from their (Warren, Schoolcraft) point of view these chiefs did not sit down and wrap their whole life out to them. Henry was an Indian Agent Look what he did to Tanner. He also tried to take away one of my great great great grandmothers sons, he said " Let me take your son I will give him a good education" She said in Ojibwe no thanks, he my son still hunts birds for me he gathers and supplies food. Same thing with Waubojeegs children they were forced to get educated and it was all about reform and assimilation. I could go on and on but I know alot of the true facts and not someone elses romaticized version. ogemageeshig52 

Contents

• Tragic Wisdom: 1
• Penenative Rumors: 23
• Wistful Envies: 61
• Literary Animals: 119
• Fugitive Poses: 145
• Native Transmotion: 167

About the author

Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American studies and Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Griever: An American Monkey King in China, winner of the American Book Award.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence; Bison books; The Abraham Lincoln lecture series
• Author: Gerald Robert Vizenor
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: U of Nebraska Press, 1998
• ISBN: 0803246641, 9780803246645
• Length: 238 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / Native American; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies