Chancers: A Novel

by Gerald Vizenor

Centered on the volatile issue of the repatriation of Native American skeletal remains, Chancers follows a group of student Solar Dancers who set out to resurrect native remains housed in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Possessed by the demonic wiindigoo, a mythic monster, the Solar Dancers, in a gruesome ritual, sacrifice faculty and administrators associated with the collection and storage of native remains. The Dancers replace stored native skulls with those of the academics, and the resurrected natives become the Chancers.

The Round Dancers, humane and erotic trickster figures, are natural opponents of the morbid Solar Dancers. The war between the two groups comes to a comic conclusion at a graduation ceremony attended by Pocahontas; Phoebe Hearst; Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist; Ishi, the native who actually lived and worked in the university museum; and many Chancers.

Genres: Fiction

166 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

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

[Gemington · Rating 3 out of 5]

CW: human remains, sexual exploitation, colonialism, murder, sacrifice

This book enjoys the experience of sacrificing provosts to help repatriate the human remains of indigenous people in a university museum. The question of who belongs in what role comes up frequently. Its take on academia is grim suggesting that indigenous people simply can’t and will not fit in its spaces. Through satire and trickster behaviour, instead they subvert and challenge those spaces. This book also explores sex and sexual appropriation as acts that can resist an and reinforce colonialism. This is a complex short novel meant to challenge and tease.

[Brian Washines · Rating 3 out of 5]

A satirical conflagration across campus racial politics and identity. Vine Deloria by way of MAD magazine, Vizenor's iconoclastic Chancers takes a look at cultural appropriation and colonial thinking in an academic backdrop as a Native group subverts the acquisition of Indigenous remains at the hands of anthropological throngs. A brief and comical Native perspective that brings to mind the mire surreal aspects of Burroughs and Vonnegut.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

A group of mostly Native American Berkeley students take on the personas of trickster Solar Dancers, beheading oppressive faculty, and substituting those skulls for repatriated native remains from the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UCB. A Minnesota Chippewa, Vizenor's highly sexualized satirical novel in short stories lyrically evokes tribal myths.