Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent

216 Pages·1977·8.89 MB·English

by  Gerald Robert Vizenor

EARTHDIVERS
The author expresses his gratitude
to the Graduate School
of the University of Minnesota
for research funds to complete this book.
EARTHDIVERS
Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent
Gerald Vizenor
with illustrations by
jaune Quick-to-See Smith
University of Minnesota Press • Minneapolis
Copyright © 1981 by Gerald Vizenor
All rights reserved.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press,
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55414
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-8166-1048-7
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
In memory of
John Clement Beaulieu
and
Clement Vizenor
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Contents
Preface . . . ix
Earthdivers in Higher Education
The Chair of Tears . .. 3
Bloodline Tribal Survivors
Sand Creek Survivors . .. 33
Retake on Colonialism . .. 47
Tribal Tricksters and Shamans
Blue Moon Ceremonial . .. 67
Mouse Proof Martin . .. 77
Natural Tilts . .. 88
Paraday Chicken Pluck . .. 95
Rubie Blue Welcome . . . 105
Sorrie and the Park Fountain . . . 113
The Decembers . .. 125
Earthdivers at the Indian Center
The Sociodowser . . . 141
Five Scenes:
Indian Circle Circle . .. 144
Wild Rice Refuge Refuge . .. 146
Dowsing the Students . .. 148
Blue Bearald in the Brush . . . 149
Blue Bearald on the Board . .. 150
Earthdivers at the Word Cinemas
Spacious Treeline in Words . .. 165
Four Scenes:
Classroom Windmills . . . 167
Satirical Stallion . . . 168
Urban Shamans . .. 174
Terminal Creeds . .. 183
No matter how well educated an Indian may become, he or she
always suspects that Western culture is not an adequate repre-
sentation of reality. Life therefore becomes a schizophrenic
balancing act wherein one holds that the creation, migration, and
ceremonial stories of the tribe are true and that the Western
European view of the world is also true . . . the trick is some-
how to relate what one feels to what one is taught to think.
Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence
The emphasis on individualism and liberal institutions, more-
over, placed Indian tribalism in direct opposition to Americanism
even more under democracy than under republicanism. Indians
must join American society as individuals in the liberal state and
economy rather than as tribes. Cultural assimilation, likewise,
must proceed according to the values of individualism and not
those of tribalism. What the proper White individual should be and
therefore what the proper Indian individual must be represented
an absolute antithesis to how Americans assumed Indians lived
as tribal members. By definition, the tribal Indian lacked the
industry, the self-reliance, and the material desires and success
appropriate to the good American. Throughout the nineteenth
century, missionaries and philanthropists, government officials
in Washington and on the frontier, military officers and Western
settlers measured the tribal Indian by their standard of American-
ism and found him wanting . . ..
Robert Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian
Preface
The fictional half-blood, like the fictional Indian, embodied
both fact and myth, but in contrast to the Indian, he was not so
readily depicted as either a "noble savage" or the barbaric antithe-
sis to civilization. By his very nature the half-blood epitomized the
integration . .. of the red and white races, provided a dramatic
symbol of the benign possibilities or malign probabilities inherent
in this encounter.
William Scheick, The Half-Blood
Earthdivers, the title of this book of tribal narratives on mixed
descent, is borrowed from a traditional theme in tribal creation
myths and dedicated here as an imaginative metaphor.
The earthdivers in these twenty-one narratives are mixedbloods,
or Metis, tribal tricksters and recast cultural heroes, the mournful
and whimsical heirs and survivors from that premier union between
the daughters of the woodland shamans and white fur traders. The
Metis, or mixedblood, earthdivers in these stories dive into un-
known urban places now, into the racial darkness in the cities, to
create a new consciousness of coexistence.
Metis is a French word which means mixedblood in current
usage, or a person of mixed Indian and French-Canadian ancestry.
The Spanish word mestizo means a person of mixed Indian and
European ancestry. The words Metis and mixedblood possess no
social or scientific validation because blood mixture is not a mea-
surement of consciousness, culture, or human experiences; but the
word Metis is a source of notable and radical identification. Louis
Riel, for example, one of the great leaders of the Metis, declared a
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