Gerald Vizenor
Gerald Vizenor (born
1934) is a
Native American (
Chippewa) writer. He calls himself "post-Indian" and has stated that he has more in common with the French than with many other Native Americans:
- "For instance, is it any surprise that I could say to an interpreter of my work that I have more in common with the French than I do with the Lakota?"
- (quoted after Hartwig Isernhagen. 1999. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong. Conversations on American Indian Writing. University of Oklahoma Press, p. 86)
He views the term Indian as a white construct. As a postmodernist writer, he likes to deconstruct white notions of Indianness which he also sees for example in the work of James Welch, another Native American writer. In his collection of short stories Word Arrows. Whites and Indians in the New Fur Trade he also ridicules
Carlos Castaņeda's view of native culture and other white images of the "Indian".
- "America embraces romantically not the _absence_ of real people, but the _simulated_ spiritual presence of the Indian om a kind of new age movement."
- (quoted after ibid. p. 83)
Vizenor is also critical of Native American nationalism.