Trickster Gone Golfing
Vizenor's "Heirs of Columbus" and the Chelh-ten-em Development Controversy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4038739 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stuart Christie (0000-0002-4901-5452, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1997 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 359 |
| Publication date | 1997-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1185513 |
| OpenAlex | W2322669935 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 2 |
In his articulation of trickster discourse, Gerald Vizenor asserts the inventedness of any static or artifactual basis for American Indian identity. Describing the postmodern language game of the trickster sign, Vizenor calls trickster communal, an erotic shimmer in oral traditions; [where] the narrative voices are holotropes [shimmering, shape-shifting signs] in a discourse.' In this essay I seek to dialogue with the Chippewa writer's notion of the trickster sign in its postmodern context as well as to interrogate the praxis of trickster discourse as a politics, through a reading of Vizenor's novel Heirs of Columbus (1991). Specifically, I argue that one can invoke the positive and elastic trickster sign only in terms of what Stuart Hall has referred to as the determinations of culture and identity by both and factors.2 The omission of any mention in Heirs of the local, Lummi nation trickster tradition in the Coastal Salish region ofWashington, called Chelh-ten-em (a.k.a. Point Roberts), where Vizenor situates his novel, or of the Chelh-ten-em golf course development controversy in which multinational corporate interests in the northern Puget Sound continue to endanger traditional Lummi Indian salmon fishing practices, threatens to confuse Vizenor's liberatory, trickster signifying practices with the global masternarratives of New World discovery he is trying to contest. In his book Ethnocriticism (1992), Arnold Krupat lauds Vizenor's trickster discourse as an practice on the literary borders of American Indian expressive culture.3 According to Krupat, the ethnocritical text presents local tribal values to its readers as a politics of placement (115) that engages
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Sociology · Trickster · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology
| Citations per year | 0.05 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2007 - 2007 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |