Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance

by Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Vizenor counters the cultural notions of dominance, false representations, and simulations of absence, and, by documents, experience, and theories, secures a narrative presence of Native Americans.

Genres: Indigenous, Nonfiction, History, Grad School, Native American

191 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1993

About the author

Gerald Robert Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for the massive amount of insight, information & sources used, 3 stars for the style of arguing.
I read Heidegger's Being and Time; I felt Vizenor's theoretical language and arguing is far more difficult to grasp than his and I wonder if Vizenor makes things more obscure than they are by his way of writing. Complexity does not have to equal a lack in transparency....

[Hollis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and usually confounding trial run of postmodernism meets (post)colonial studies. I wouldn't be surprised if Vizenor was very much at the back of Jodi Byrd's mind for their first scholarly text. Vizenor opens with express interest in the invention of the "Indian" as a figure in American thought, and the rest of the text juxtaposes examples of Indian poses and "postindian" survivance, or the Indigenous writers who manage to evade pervasive attempts to dominate and corner Indigeneity into a small book of references. As the preface lays things out, if If the indian is a “primitive simulation” then postindians “observe natives, the chance of totemic associations, conversions, and reversions of tribal cultures, as postmodern survivance and vivancy” (viii). The nature of postindian observation is, for Vizenor, usually the nature of humor and irony.

In the third chapter, Vizenor describes irony as a play with the wrong set of words given to an individual (68), which feels vital, given all that could be said (and this text has much to say) for the nature of writing vs. speaking and the use of English vs. tribe-specific languages. Other chapters spend time on photography, dynamics of representation, casinos, pretendians, and the American Indian Movement (Vizenor is very critical of some of its most notable figures). In general, Vizenor's approach to writing can come across as equal parts confusing and yet-still generative. A lot of my confusion may be due to unfamiliarity with many postmodern sources mentioned. Nonetheless, I loved Vizenor's juxtaposition between interrogations of contemporary scholarship, historical records, and events in popular memory. It is the first full book I've read by him, and I'm curious to see how his fiction compliments his reading of fiction(s).

[CORSAK fan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book overall and found it insightful and eye-opening. However, there are some things that prevent this earning a five-star rating.

Vizenor goes into a lot of detail about postmodernism, which I admittedly have not read enough of/about to to really appreciate this as a source of influence. However, with that being said, some of the terms here seemed to be either made up by Vizenor, or if not made up by him, require that I read a lot more academic writing ASAP for my paper due in August 2025 to grasp where they came from, as they're very specific to the contexts he's writing about.

Survivance is a combination of survival and resistance, both of which Native Indigenous peoples have done a lot. However, some of the ways this got described felt difficult to wade through.

[emily ✿ · Rating 3 out of 5]

✩ 3.0 ✩

Decidedly, the stories that turn the tribes tragic are not their own stories.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

vizenor is an anishinabe postmodern theorist who admires derrida, which really shows. I haven't read something like this since college and it was definitely challenging. as postmodern theorists do, he has created some of his own terminology. he also really stresses the oral culture of native america, pointing out "the printed word has no natural evolution in tribal literatures".

this was a lot like reading I did for college, in that it was often impenetrable, for me. it's extremely difficult to pinpoint what he means by each term when there are multiple terms like that in a sentence. here are some examples:

"The postindian is the new simulation in the postwestern salvation of the antiselves in the movies."

"The postindian warrior is the simulation of survivance in new stories."

"The postindian warriors and the missionaries of manifest manners are both responsible for simulations; even that resemblance is a simulation that ends in silence, or the presence of an original referent to tribal survivance."

"The postindian warriors of simulations are not the insinuations of either humanism or “radical empiricism”. Postindian simulations are the absence not the presence of the real, and neither simulations of survivance nor dominance resemble the pleasurable vagueness of consciousness."

"Postindian simulations are the absence of shades, shadows, and consciousness; simulations are mere traces of common metaphors in the stories of survivance and the manners of domination."

like derrida, he gets very into linguistics and there is a lot of talk about pronouns (usually "I", not gender pronouns) and nouns and verbs. there is a lot of talk about simulations, absence, presence, shadows. between the straight utterances of theory I've quoted above, he gives a lot of examples from the lives of various native americans - often writers, but also people like russell means, and quotes people from derrida to susan sontag to hannah arendt. this is what made the book readable for me.

I did come away with a deeper feeling for the predicament of native america - after the invasion, decimation, war, forced relocations, forced cultural assimilation of children at boarding schools, there is a very unnatural position to work from, to continue lives and cultures always in the shadow of a dominant culture that is constantly positioning native americans in inaccurate ways, projecting onto them, lumping a multitude of nations into one ethnic identity, pretending native americans don't have a contemporary - or individual existence.

I particularly liked the discussions of native americans being caught up in the western world's own struggle with the transformation of its own cultures by modernity, the way native americans were not seen as themselves, but as symbols of the colonizers' own premodern past. after the western modernist separation of "the human mind, as the source of meaning, and nature", native americans - inarguably human - are left by western thought on the premodern side of things, inseparable from nature. "Disquieted thinkers, however, and 'entire schools of thought critical of the modern fragmentation have attempted to reverse the effects by returning to premodern premises.' Natives, then, were the curious, colonial prey of this pastorly return to the cruces of premodernism".

this also comes up in the concept of antiselves - white america projecting their own supposes antithesis on native americans: "The Western movies, of course, are not cultural visions, but the vicious encounters with the antiselves of civilization, the invented savage." he then talks about how the cultural upheavals of the sixties and the vietnam war modified that representation to become "melancholy antiselves in the ruins of representation; the tribal others are now embraced" as in dances with wolves.

vizenor is also very wary of casino wealth and feels strongly that wealth without power is dangerous and that casino money should be used to establish embassies and bring refugees of other colonized peoples (tibetans, haitians, kurds) to live on reservations. he is also very crititcal of AIM, in part due to the panindian identity it operates from and also the fact that leaders of groups like AIM arose in urban settings and are recognized by non-Natives rather than being tribal leaders. at one point he really goes after clyde bellecourt (who comes from the same white earth indian reservation in minnesota as vizenor) for his drug use.

in the end, it was an interesting reading experience. I definitely didn't understand all of it, but I do think I got some value from it.

[LL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vizenor is always great. Definitely one of the top three native literary theorists.