The Columbian Moment: Overturning
Globalization in Vizenor's The Heirs of
Columbus
David
J. CARLSON
I. The Columbian Moment and the Meanings
of Globalization
At
the end of Gerald Vizenor's 1991 novel The
Heirs of Columbus, one of the aforementioned heirs, Admire, punctuates a
deadly game of chance (a moccasin game) played against a cannibal Wiindigo by
whistling a tune from Antonin Dvořák's New
World Symphony (Heirs 183). Not
surprisingly, for readers familiar with Vizenor's work, this is not the only
reference to that particular piece of music in the novel. Admire whistles the
same tune earlier in the narrative to commemorate the founding of the sovereign
tribal nation of Point Assinika (located in the Strait of Georgia between
Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia), which forms the primary
setting for the novel's second volume (123-4). Former international model and
repatriation expert (the book designates her a "trickster poacher") Felipa
Flowers also whistles Dvořák as she enters a churchyard at Gravesend on a
mission to recover the remains of Pocahontas (115). This takes place just
before she is murdered by a vengeful mixedblood artifact collector, Doric
Michel. And the symphony is also played over casino loudspeakers at the end of
a successful hearing concerning the repatriation of remains (90), a
hypothetical example of what Vizenor has termed elsewhere a "Bone Court." In
these ways, then, Dvořák's masterwork provides a leitmotif to Vizenor's
subversive meditation on the Columbian quincentenary.
As
one might expect from Vizenor, however, the repeated invocation of Dvořák
in Heirs goes well beyond some form
of playful narrative ornamentation. I would suggest that we view the New World
Symphony as a keynote figure that introduces us to a central tension in the
novel, one that will be the focus of my discussion here. The Heirs of Columbus is a meditation on the ambiguous nature of modern globalization for American Indian
people. In making this distinction between "modern" globalization and a more
general definition of the concept, I am influenced by both economist Amartya
Sen's and political philosopher Giacomo Marramao's writings on this topic. In
his 2006 book Identity and Violence, Sen
has argued that today's globalization is, in fact, part of a larger historical
movement or pattern that can take different forms. Much contemporary
scholarship on globalization, of course, holds that the phenomenon is essentially
a product of Western capitalism and modernity and thus should be viewed
either (1) positively, as a marvelous contribution of the West to the rest of
the world or (2) negatively, as an extension and continuation of Western
imperialism. In contrast, Sen maintains, globalization is neither particularly
new nor necessarily Western. This qualification makes considerable sense, if
one understands globalization to refer to the emergence of networks of exchange
where goods, ideas, and symbolic systems circulate in ways that bring about an
intensified consciousness of the interpenetration of the local and global.
When
seen in that broader perspective, as Marramao's work suggests, globalization
can be reimagined as a force structuring human experience in a manner not
necessarily overdetermined by the exploitative mechanisms and systems of
capitalism and imperialism. (This is not, of course, an authorization to
blithely ignore the ways that such systems have in fact functioned in such a
manner.) Globalism, for Marramao, can involve a "passage to the Occident of all
cultures," by which he means, not an experience of universal colonial
absorption into a hegemonic west, but rather the radically transformative
experience of a mutual penetration of "alterity" that affects all cultures in
more positive ways (14). A similar utopian sensibility regarding the political
and artistic possibilities of a retheorized globalization appears in much of
Vizenor's work, particularly in The Heirs
of Columbus. At two specific points in Heirs,
Vizenor deploys Dvořák's New World Symphony in a manner that suggest his
awareness of the kind of tensions surrounding the concept of globalization that
we can track through the work of thinkers like Sen and Marramao. At the start
of the book, he incorporates the piece into the fabric of the novel and the
collective history of the Anishinaabeg trickster-heirs by reimagining its very
composition. Vizenor places the genesis of the work "at the headwaters" of the
Minnesota River (a sacred place for his own Anishinaabeg people) and notes
further that the Czech composer "heard tribal music in the stones" as he
brought his great work into being (10). In this way, he reinscribes the
symphony as a highly positive (albeit fictionalized) image of transcultural
inspiration and artistic production, one reflecting a dynamic of mutual
recognition between Europeans and indigenous people coming into contact in a
"global" setting.[1] In the
epilogue to Heirs, however, Vizenor
also offers us a rather different take on Dvořák's masterpiece, one that
is grounded in the actual historical experience of colonial modernity rather
than in imaginative fancy. There, he reminds us both that Dvořák was the
director of the Conservatory of Music in New York City when he composed the New
World Symphony and that the work was written expressly for the 1893 Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. That event, of course, stands as one of the more
retrograde examples of the history of cross-cultural mediation and
representation of American Indian people in the United States (187).[2]
In pointing out the historical link between Dvořák's piece and an
exhibition that trumpeted the cultural and technological superiority of
American modernity while offering sad tableaus and patronizing recognition of
the "vanishing" Indian tribes in the United States, Vizenor highlights the fact
that there is no guarantee that the moments of mutual discovery and reinvention
characteristic of globalization (Vizenor sometimes calls these "imagic
moments") will lead to reciprocal altruism.[3]
The history of western dominated modernity often suggests, quite to the
contrary, that such moments lead to colonial domination, cultural
appropriation, and genocide.
The Heirs of Columbus is not about
Antonin Dvořák, of course; it is about Columbus. But much of the same dynamic and tension that I have been
discussing thus far also pervades the novel's treatment of the "Admiral of the
Ocean Sea" and his Indian heirs. In that treatment, I would argue, Vizenor
tries to open up an imaginative space between (1) the historical reality of a form
of globalization overdetermined by colonization and conquest, and (2) a
fantastic reimagining of the encounter with the other that offers alternative,
utopian possibilities for what globalization could mean. In the end,
then, I would refine my earlier statement and suggest that it is the "Columbian
moment" of mutual discovery between Europeans and indigenous peoples that is
Vizenor's primary subject matter. Columbus, in this respect, becomes the
central signifying figure in the novel (as opposed to merely a historical
personage) standing in some sense for the divergent meanings and functions of
globalization.
Vizenor
makes his intention in this regard fairly explicit at several key points in the
text. In the epilogue, he
indicates that Heirs is not to be
read as a direct study or literal critique of the historical Columbus:
"Columbus arises in tribal stories that heal with humor the world he wounded;
he is loathed, but he is not a separation in tribal consciousness. The Admiral
of the Ocean Sea is a trickster overturned in his own stories five centuries
later" (185). "Overturning" here represents something different from parody,
and in my reading Vizenor is engaged in something much more complex than merely
mocking the explorer. Having been remade as a trickster in this particular
"tribal story," Columbus the man is available to be allegorized or transformed
in other ways. Lappet Tupis Brown, a private investigator hired by the tribal
government within the novel, speaks for Vizenor in this regard when she
testifies at the "Bone Court" hearing that tricksters are not real people, but
"figures in stories" or "language games" (80). Remade by Vizenor into an
element in a fictional language game, then, Columbus becomes a tool for the
analysis of the ideology of discovery, which initiates the modern phase of
globalization that turns away from the more positive possibilities of global
encounter. Quoting Steve Woolgar's book Science:
The Very Idea in the epilogue to Heirs,
Vizenor notes that "the sense of discovery is mediated by social conditions,
[persisting] as a 'process rather than a point occurrence in time.'"
Significantly, too, "the discovery process extends in time both before and
after the initial announcement or claim'" (188). Following this line of
thinking, "the Columbian moment" of discovery is not represented in Heirs as a discrete one, something
limited to a specific set of events taking place in 1492. 1492 is one
particular instantiation of a much larger force moving through human history
and imagination, in other words. Vizenor's contribution to the quincentenary,
then, is not to create another monument to conventional western history and its
linear sense of time, nor is it to offer a simple critique and deconstruction
of that history. Instead, he
engages his readers in a mediation regarding the ongoing structural and
imaginative effects that not only did, but hypothetically could,
both emerge from the experience of mutual discovery and from the
interpenetration of the global and the local.[4]
The Columbian moment represents an archetypal experience of encounter and
"glocalization" (the interpenetration of local and global self-awareness
described by Roland Robertson in his 1992 book Globalization) rippling through time. And Vizenor's narrative
techniques of reiteration, irony, and inventive signification provide a
mechanism both to critique its instantiations and to explore its effects. When
read in this manner, we can better make sense of what might otherwise seem a puzzling
decision made by a major American Indian writer—the decision to observe
the Columbian quincentenary, in part, by reimagining a figure largely reviled
throughout the indigenous new world as somehow, himself, being "Indian."
II. The
Globalizing Mirror: The Columbian Indian/The Indian Columbus
The Heirs of Columbus abounds with
narrative threads that establish a pattern of resemblance linking Christopher
Columbus, his Anishinaabeg trickster-heirs, and other indigenous figures. The
first of these appears right away, in the opening chapter's initial
introduction of the contemporary Anishinaabeg trickster, radio host, and
political leader Stone Columbus.[5] Christopher
Columbus, we are told, began his life as an "obscure crossblood," whose fame
was based on his efforts to found and extend an empire (3). One might note,
here, that the narrative takes seriously the hypothesis advanced by some
scholars that Columbus might have had Jewish ancestry, while also presenting
his nomadic career as a kind of archetypal diasporic experience. In this, he
and his modern namesake Stone resemble each other, for the latter is a typical
Vizenorian "crossblood" trickster with a similar career path. Stone achieves
his own renown through the founding of, not one, but two "nations," which
stand, at least for a time, as extensions of Anishinaabeg sovereignty. These
are the "Santa Maria Casino" of the first half of the novel and "Point
Assinika" (part casino and part genomic research facility) of the second. We
might also take note of other coincidental details, such as Stone's wearing of
a golden-eyed, blue mask of Columbus and Columbus's own record of his delight
at receiving a golden mask from a local Taino leader when he founded his first
settlement in what is now Haiti on Christmas day in 1492, La Villa de la
Navidad. Through these, and other examples, Vizenor makes clear that he is
interested in exploring a connection between these two figures that goes well
beyond a mere nominal echo. The strong parallels between the modern trickster
and the early modern explorer make it difficult, then, to read Stone simply as
a parody of his ancestor, and to read the novel simply as a piece of satire.
Put in typical Vizenorian parlance, Heirs
represents not mockery, but rather a tease
of Columbus. And teasing, for Vizenor, always emerges from, and expresses, a
deeper sense of relationship.
It
is worth remembering, in this context, that Vizenor has frequently written of
his sense of the existence of a pan-Indian or indigenous inclination toward
exploration, discovery, and reinvention through encounter. Vizenor opens his
essay "Ontic Images" with the following claim: "Native American personal and
cultural identities have always been strategic maneuvers, and in that sense, modernist,
names and singularities that arise from and are created by both communal
nominations, collective memories, and by distinctive visionary experience"
(159). This modernist "maneuver" of identity formation is effected through the
processes of "analogical thinking," a term Vizenor adapts from Barbara Maria
Stafford's book Visual Analogy.
Analogical thought may be characterized by both its "uncanny visual capacity to
bring divided things into unison or span the gap between contingent and
absolute" and its "move to tentative harmony" in that process (159).
This "tentative," transformative, gap-spanning process is "modernist" in so far
as modernity signifies any moment in which our reality is altered as a
result of an encounter that induces a shift in our paradigms for organizing/thinking
about it. In this respect, the "Columbian moment" represents an archetypical
example of modernity, provided we understand that the latter term has been
transformed from a chronological marker into a signifier of a transhistorical
structure of human experience.
Vizenor
sees the modernist impulse of globalization as deeply embedded in native
traditional cultural practices, noting that Indian stories "have always been
the imagic moments of cultural conversion and native modernity" ("Ontic" 161).
He makes this point explicitly through the example of Crazy Horse. In the
spirit of Crazy Horse, Vizenor notes, Native storiers have always evinced an
openness to encounter the new and to move towards a "tentative harmony" with it
in a way that allows for a perpetually modernizing sense of self. Most
suggestively, Vizenor grounds this claim in a general ethnographic assertion
regarding the customary globalization of tribal peoples: "natives have always
been on the move, by necessity of sustenance, and over extensive trade routes.
Motion is a natural right, and the stories of visionary transformation are a
continuous, distinctive sense of sovereignty" (162). Significantly, here, we
begin to see how Vizenor indexes sovereignty to the ability to create one's stories/identity
through a process of analogical encounter with others. The phrase "Native
identities are stories that arise from the common tease of cultures" becomes a
Vizenorian creed (163).
With
this critical context in mind, it is less surprising to find that the numerous
connecting threads between Christopher and Stone Columbus in Heirs, including actual bloodlines
linking them, consistently interfere with the reader's ability to maintain an
entirely comfortable sense of imaginative distance between them. Indeed, Heirs offers a number of details that
emphasize Christopher's "Indianness" and his Indians descendants' "Columbian"
natures. One of the most striking of these is the depiction of Columbus's
relationship to the Mayan people. "The Maya created Columbus," Stone declares
matter-of-factly, though this assertion can be construed in a number of ways
(20). Stone could be suggesting that the Maya foretold Columbus's coming
through their own prophetic traditions. Taken further, he might even be
suggesting that those stories made Columbus happen, in a ritually performative
manner. This would not be surprising in a text that clearly takes seriously and
represents the power of story and storytelling, tellingly represented in the
novel through the figure of "stones." But in another sense, the novel also
suggests that the Maya begat
Columbus, in both figurative and literal senses, through their own prior
migrations to Europe.
Vizenor
imagines that in the ancient past Mayan shamans and "hand talkers" actually voyaged
to the Old World, providing evidence of a pattern or structure of global
migration and encounter (of indigenous modernism) dating far back into ancient
history. The novel imagines a long historical trajectory of globalization and
"Columbian moments," in other words. Readers of Heirs are also told that the Mayans produced a "Bear Codex"
describing themselves and their journeys. This book came into the possession of
the Emperor Ptolemy, who ordered it to be translated and included in the
collection of the Great Library of Alexandria. From there, before it was lost
in the great fire that destroyed that ancient wonder, we are led to suppose
that it exerted an imaginative influence on the thought of the ancient western
world. Perhaps the Bear Codex was co-influential, along with the ancient Greek
authorities referenced by explorers of Columbus's era, in reshaping the western
understanding of the spherical world and their place in it? In this way the
novel implies that the self-awareness and self-understanding of Old and New
World peoples were entwined from the earliest periods of history.[6]
And even if those connections became muted or forgotten over time, a potent
enough trace of them remained to reappear in future manifestations of
globalized consciousness. In this way, Vizenor recontextualizes and reimagines
the significance of the way that Columbus writes in his own journals of the
inspiration of ancient authorities (like Ptolemy) who reinforced his own
intuition that a passage to the east could be found by traveling west. The fact
that the Mayan "radiant presence" is also linked in the novel to the global
spiritual cause of Christ (as an aspiring world religion) and, later, to the
diasporic movement of the Sephardic Jews serves to reframe the seemingly discrete
moment of Columbian exploration as a manifestation of a larger force and
pattern in human history (28).
As
the preceding discussion suggests, then, like all of the other major elements
in Heirs, the Maya function in the
novel as a figure, offering evidence of an earlier phase of globalization that
is intended to liberate our thinking to allow us to reconceive its nature and
possibilities. Vizenor's Maya represent one indigenous instantiation of the
"Columbian moment" that is meant both to structurally resemble and also
literally plant the seeds for future imaginative manifestations of the impulse
for discovery. The novel's assertion of a Maya-Sephardic genealogical line that
includes Columbus himself is suggestive in this respect. The book presents Columbus
as being maternally Mayan, with his mother, Susanna di Fontanarossa, as the
bearer of a "signature" of survivance—a "blue radiance" passed down to
her through her Mayan ancestors. There is a clear intimation, here, that the
echoes of the globalizing impulse of his Mayan past represented a key driving
force behind Columbus's own aspirations and journeys, influencing him through
this line of blood memory. Columbus recalled the New World before he had even
seen it, through dreams. In this respect, he appears to have inherited the Maya
gift for prophetic storytelling and imagination. And this trace of a Maya past
within him literally guided Columbus toward the fulfillment of his ancestor's
prophetic anticipation of him. The novel opens by quoting from, and then
reinterpreting, a passage from the Journal
of the First Voyage as evidence
of these traces of Maya cultural memory. Columbus remembers seeing a blue light
in the west, though "'it was such an uncertain thing,' as he wrote in his
journal to the crown, 'that I did not feel it was adequate proof of land'" (Heirs 1). Vizenor characterizes
Columbus's perception in that moment as a half-formed insight that he is, in
fact, part of a larger world historical process whose meaning and trajectory he
only vaguely understands. "That light was a torch raised by the silent hand talkers,
a summons to the New World" (3). The historical tragedy that subsequently
unfolded, though, was tied directly to Columbus's only partial recognition of
the significance of the experience in front of him.
It
is at this point, then, that we need to step back from a discussion of how Heirs works systematically to depict
strong lines of connection between the indigenous world and the western world,
in order to also acknowledge that Vizenor does not collapse all sense of
difference between them. Indeed, if I am correct in seeing part of the novel's
subject matter to be an exploration of the manifestations of a globalizing
impulse that can be mutually and positively constitutive, it is nevertheless
clear that Vizenor also wants readers to be aware that not all forms of
globalization are equal. The different forms that the Columbian moment takes in
historical time must be considered critically, in other words. We can turn back
to the connections between Stone Columbus and Christopher Columbus to begin to
illustrate this point, for these two central figures in the novel are presented
as imperfect replicas of one another, as opposed to being pure dopplegangers.
Frequently the patterns of repetition and coincidence in Heirs are slightly off.
This sometimes creates a sense of dissonance, and at other times a
literal form of mirroring built on reversal. Take, for example, Columbus's
founding of La Villa de la Navidad, mentioned earlier. Columbus was forced into
that act—the first moment that fully transformed his voyage of trade and
exploration into a voyage of colonization and conquest—when his flagship,
the Santa Maria, was wrecked on a reef, due to the inattentiveness of a
crewman. With much of the foundering ship's goods and material saved, largely
through the assistance of a local Taino leader, however, Columbus interpreted
this apparent disaster as an act of providence. He chose to cannibalize his
vessel in order to build a permanent settlement, in which many of its crew
would reside until he was able to make a return voyage. La Villa de la Navidad
failed to survive the period between the first and second voyages, however,
owing in large part to the acts of violence and predation on the part of its
Spanish occupants toward the local Indian population. They elected to manifest
the globalizing impulse in an early form of colonialism, imperialism and
incipient genocide, rather than experiencing imagic moments of analogical
recreation.
Looking
forward, we find that Stone Columbus has his own "Santa Maria," too, and that
this also experiences a wreck. His floating casino, a replica of the Spanish
carrack that Columbus sailed, lies anchored at the international border between
Minnesota and Ontario, near Big Island in Lake of the Woods. Stone presides
over the Santa Maria Casino from its sterncastle and cabin, like the "Admiral
of the Ocean Sea," and he watches the decks for signs of exuberance that mark
the discovery of sudden wealth (another echo of Columbus' long wait for signs
of the rich lands of Cathay). Stone's "flagship," too, is wrecked, in this case
by a violent storm that causes it to crash on a reef and sink near the Big
Island. But unlike the earlier disaster off the coast of Haiti, Stone's
shipwreck marks only the temporary collapse of a legitimate space of
sovereignty, as opposed to the founding or extension of an imperial one. The
loss of the Santa Maria casino brings to an end four summers of casino
operation (echoing the four voyages, perhaps?) carried out "in the name of the
great explorer" (11). Significantly, though, where Columbus's accident
represented the inauguration of a global system of violence and depredation,
the modern wreck of the trickster's casino-state leads to a peaceful
reiteration and extension of the Anishinaabeg nation, this time into the
Pacific Northwest (with the founding of Point Assinika). The trajectory of
Stone's career (and of that of his fellow heirs) suggests that it is possible
to experience a de-territorialization, extension, or relocation of tribal
sovereignty that somehow avoids Columbus's path towards empire. The vector of
the Columbian moment is fundamentally different in each case. As readers,
though, we are encouraged to ask why this is the case.
III. Global
Survivance versus Global Empire
As I have suggested, Columbus bears the mark of an
indigenous (Maya) past that represents one form that the globalizing impulse
might take, but in his historical enactment of that impulse he clearly turns
towards another form, with dire consequences for the indigenous peoples of the
new world. Vizenor's novel seeks to analyze these two forms of globalization
with an eye toward developing a critical sensibility that allows the positive
to overcome the negative. To fully illuminate this point, we need to look a bit
more closely at the novel's depiction of these two instances of the "Columbian
moment," beginning with the Maya-indigenous one. Heirs represents the spirit of Mayan globalization through a series
of repeated symbolic figures—among them "blue radiance" and the moccasin
game mentioned above. Throughout the novel, the color blue stands in general as
a sign of the power of "survivance."
Many people bear its "signature," including the Maya, the Sephardic
Jews, the Moors ("once a nomadic people"), as well as the modern Heirs/tricksters
(34). But what does it mean to be marked by "survivance" in the context of a
narrative focused on voyages of discovery and global encounter? Despite being
one of Vizenor's most familiar neologisms, "survivance" is a word that defies
straightforward definition. As I have argued elsewhere, though, one of the
central meanings embedded in the concept is the ability to be "recognized" (see
Carlson, "Trickster"). In this respect, we might understand those who carry
with them the "blue radiance" of survivance as those who are able to endure
over time and whose endurance is tied both to their assertion of autonomy and
their ability to have that autonomy acknowledged by others—a process that
involves mutual or reciprocal recognition which allows for change and growth.[7]
Survivance, in this respect, is an integral component of sovereignty. And for
Vizenor, interestingly enough, the moments that seem to provide both the
clearest indices of survivance, as well as their most vigorous tests, are
journeys of exploration and mutual encounter (along with the stories that
commemorate and disseminate them). We might remember how, in the opening lines
of his essay "Postindian Warriors," Vizenor describes the journals of the Lewis
and Clark expedition of 1804-6 as "the most notable literature of tribal
survivance" (1).
Developing
an awareness of these kinds of associative links surrounding the "blue
radiance" of survivance allows us to perceive another interesting pattern
underlying the novel's symbolic use of the mocassin game. Felipa Flowers's
signature blue moccasins set up a basic link between that symbol and the
concept of survivance through mutual recognition. Felipa's work as a negotiator
who effects the repatriation of tribal remains is an expression of this sense
of survivance, for that work is built on negotiations that only succeed when
they take place in legal, cultural, and personal frameworks that allow for
mutual recognition and respect that also acknowledges cultural difference. The
theft of Felipa's moccasins from her own body when she is murdered by agents
working for Doric Michel (the artifact poacher and member of a colonialist
"Brotherhood of American Explorers" that meets regularly in a "Conquistadores
Club" in New York City) is deeply suggestive in this regard. For that criminal
act represents quite clearly a distinction between two models of how the global
human encounter might take shape. For one heir of Columbus, Felipa, the
experience of globalization is built on the reciprocity of survivance. For the
other, Doric Michel, it is built on exploitation, dehumanization, and
colonialism.
The
novel's use of the moccasin game as a recurrent plot motif goes even further in
elaborating this idea of contrasting forms of the Columbian moment. Here,
again, we see Vizenor using a recurrent symbol to explore two different sides
to the global encounter with the other. On the negative, imperialist side,
interestingly enough, we have a figure from inside the tribal world, the
Wiindigo, whose ongoing predatory game against the Anishinaabe forms the
centerpiece of one of Vizenor's most frequently invoked traditional cultural
narratives. (Vizenor relates the story of the contest between the Wiindigo and
tribal tricksters in many of his books, both fictional and nonfictional.) The
Wiindigo, of course, might be thought of as a person who has become a monster
through the failure to recognize his commonality with other people; this is one
of the symbolic meanings of his cannibalism. Consequently, his encounters with
tribal peoples, in relation to whom he has become an alien other, take the form
of predatory games—attempts to dupe, defraud, and destroy the people in
whom he should see "relation."[8]
If
the Wiindigo's moccasin game metaphorizes the dark side of the Columbian moment
(its negative instantiation), Heirs
also includes a suggestive counter-example in the 'Bone Court' hearing in the
novel. The Bone Court is presided over by Judge Beatrice Lord, a character
whose sympathetic responses to tribal claims of sovereignty and autonomy and
whose ability to fully imagine the Indian other suggests a great deal about the
utopian potential of the experience of mutual recognition. During the hearing,
which focuses on the ongoing contest between Doric Michel and the heirs over
the right to possess the remains of Columbus (a trope for Vizenor's own
engagement with the legacy and meaning of the Columbian moment, perhaps), the
trickster and technologist Almost Browne offers Lord the chance to experience a
"Virtual Moccasin Game." Putting on a pair of electronic moccasins and other
equipment enables Lord to "enter the shadow realities of tribal consciousness"
(84). Figuratively, then, this section of the novel offers an illustration of
the way that an openness to the direct realization and experience of the power
of stories of the other creates the possibility for the mutual recognition of
commonality and difference that would characterize a positive encounter between
differing localities within the framework of global space. In the virtual global
environment of Almost's technological system, Lord is able to bring a range of
narratives, localities, and perspectives together in a manner that enhances her
respect for tribal sovereignty without leading her to totally abandon or
repudiate her own traditions. As she plays the game, she comes into contact
with an intense experience of Anishinaabeg locality (visiting the sacred
headwaters), feels the power of intersubjective identification (observing
shamanic bear-to-human transformations), and gains insight into the larger
political and colonial contexts surrounding the criminal issues involved in the
specific repatriation case before her (witnessing a reenactment of the
disappearance of Columbus's bones from Doric Michel's vault). Through this process,
she discovers that "the legal issues of standing in federal court could be
resolved through simulations," and she thus learns deeper lessons about the
importance of the interpenetration of imagination and of mutual recognition in
ensuring that the Columbian moment becomes one of survivance (87). The
experience of a moment of global encounter becomes, for Lord, an opportunity
for ethical breakthrough and a chance for self-reinvention.
My
reading here of the figural presentation of the elements involved in overcoming
the imperial form of the Columbian moment is also reinforced, I believe, when
we consider Vizenor's reimagining of Columbus' initial moment of encounter with
the New World. Building upon those elements discussed earlier regarding the
traces of blue radiance within him, Vizenor tellingly depicts Columbus as
having been presented with an opportunity to choose between different paths in
the first phases of his career as an agent of globalization. And by allowing us
to re-read that moment against the matrix of symbols and figures that run
throughout the text, Vizenor encourages his readers to view that choice as a
paradigmatic one that speaks to the broader history and potentiality of global
encounter. Traces of the potential for Columbus's New World encounter to mimic
and recreate the positive legacy of his indigenous ancestors are thematized in
the form of a series of references to blue puppets. Early in his life, Columbus
witnesses and is moved by a group of Sephardic Jewish women puppeteers he sees
on the Island of Corsica. He is haunted by this memory, which the novel ties to
his early experiences of the call of the ocean. That relationship is further
explained as an older Columbus encounters the blue puppeteers again, this time
at the Convento dos Santos in Lisbon. This is the place where, historically,
Columbus first saw a well-born nineteen-year-old, Felipa Moñiz, whom he would
later marry, but Vizenor transforms that fairly mercenary encounter with an
other into something more prophetic and potentially transcendent. It is at this
stage, too, that Columbus discovers that the blue puppets have been carved out
of the wood of trees carried from the New World before wild storms, washing up
on the Azores. Echoes of blood memory and the pull of a voyage promising
self-recognition through an encounter with the other thus lay the foundation
for what might have been in those
fateful months and years after Columbus boarded his Santa Maria.
The
moment of truth in the novel is marked by the third appearance of the puppets,
which by this point in the narrative clearly represent the trace of something
hidden underneath the bloody actuality of the history of conquest, something
that might be recovered through an act of imagination. Columbus hears the voices
of the puppeteers at the moment of his encounter with "Samana" (37). Here is
another complex and interesting example of linguistic and imaginative play on
Vizenor's part. At this point in the novel, the literal event he (through
Stone) is reimagining is Columbus's landing on October 28, 1492, at Bahia de
Bariay in what is now Cuba, the first moment he set foot on New World soil
(10). Vizenor changes this history in a variety of suggestive ways. He plays
with the historical controversy regarding whether Columbus first landed in Cuba
(which he called San Salvador) or at Samana Cay (an island sixty five miles
south of there). For the novel both names his landing place Samana Cay and
posits an erotic meeting between Columbus and an Indian woman of the same name (whose
descendant, not surprisingly, is one of the moderns heirs). This represents
both a witty joke evoking the notion of Columbus's fundamental lack of
understanding of his location as a global subject and an imaginative means of
opening up a space to reconstruct an alternate history. Vizenor multiplies that
effect by having Stone immediately change the date of the event he has just
described, because "Columbus is ever on the move in our stories" (10). In the
end, we have a series of potential Columbian moments, some historical, some
imagined, that took place somewhere between October 28, 1492, at Bahia Bay or
Samana Cay, and October 29, 1492, at Rio de la Luna (11).
Wherever
and whenever Columbus landed, Heirs
does maintain that his encounter with the Indian woman Samana represented a
historical crossroads and a choice between two types of globalizing moments.
Samana, who is also described as a tribal hand talker (both an imaginative link
to the earlier blue puppeteers and a clever evocation of the likely dynamics of
communication that persisted between Columbus and los indios in this period of first contact when they spoke "through
signs") swims out to the Santa Maria and makes love to him. Part of Vizenor's
intent here, of course, may be satirical, playing with standard iconographic
depiction of the New World as exotic Indian woman in European travel literature
and the later colonial trope of Virgin land. In this case, though, both a
figure of the Indian subject and the land (she pulls together both the human
and cartographic elements of global encounter), Samana has considerable agency
and a capacity for survivance (5). The novel explicitly suggests how Columbus's
brief encounter with her represented a missed opportunity for an experience of
mutual self-discovery that might have been justly celebrated by both worlds. It
is worth recalling that, generally in Vizenor's fiction, sexual and erotic
pleasure also signifies the imagination, imaginative pleasure, and liberation.
Clearly, then, Columbus's night with Samana can be read allegorically.
Columbus's family curse of a "twisted penis" makes perfect sense in this
context (30). The novel suggests that it is a curse laid on (old world) men as
revenge by women who were burned along with the bear codex in Alexandria. That
burning, within the narrative framework of the novel, would represent a
blindness to the existence and equal subjectivity of the other, a denial of key
parts of the universality of human experience (for example, the fact that the
globalizing impulse can manifest itself in others besides western man), and a
foolish castration of imaginative capacity.
Columbus's
twisted penis, then signifies more than persistently painful erections. It
represents the move by western man to define himself through the subordination
and then the erasure of the indigenous world. This fundamental act, which
underlies the colonialist form of globalization, represents a colossal failure
of imagination, one that in the case of our novel costs Christopher Columbus
dearly as well. His night with Samana represented a moment of breakthrough
where the mental structure of colonialism gave way to an alternative form of
global encounter. Columbus experienced release with Samana, whom the novel
(recalling the Codex) describes explicitly as a bear shaman possessing a
healing touch and as characterized by that familiar symbolic blue radiance
(12). The text repeatedly references the idea that she healed Columbus.
Regrettably, though, the healing did not last (19). Despite the emotional and
existential pull he feels towards her (Vizenor invokes the Journals' most
positive and enraptured descriptions of both the people and land of the new
world at these points in the novel), Columbus turns away from this type of
modernizing encounter of self-recreation. Instead, he soon founds his first
colonial settlement (Navidad), initiating a system of slavery and murder while
continuing to chase gold throughout the Caribbean. In a touch of wonderful
lyricism, though, Vizenor notes that Columbus hears the voice of the blue
puppeteers one last time on the deck of his ship during the stormy winter
return to Europe at end of the first voyage (44). He will remember them many
times after that, up to his death, by which time most of his honors and wealth
had been stripped from him by his own people.
So
what might have happened if the Columbian moment of 1492 had taken another
shape, the shape it takes, imaginatively, in the indigenous world of this
novel? We get a hint of an answer to this in Stone Columbus' reenactment of his
ancestor's career. It is significant that Heirs
presents Stone's nation-building activity, both at the Santa Maria Casino and
at Point Assinika, as expressions of tribal sovereignty built on reciprocal
altruism and expansive networks of cross-cultural relations. Initially, it
would seem, Stone opens his casino as a kind of provocation and a parody of the
European law of discovery. He asserts his "right to operate a casino as a new
reservation moored to an anchor as long as the waters flow in the New World,"
in a manner that clearly plays off of the language used by Ferdinand and
Isabella in granting title to his ancestor Christopher at the time of the first
voyage (7). This is an absurd claim, of course, but its very absurdity raises
the obvious point that the basis for non-Indian title claims under the law of
discovery is equally strange. In the end, though, I think the key point to
realize is that Stone's act of global legal consciousness here leads to the
kind of liberating reinvention characteristic of Vizenorian survivance.
It
is no surprise that Stone's initial formulation of, and claim to, sovereignty
would be challenged, but the end result of that challenge is to trigger some
important reformulations of the concept, with positive implications for both
tribal and non-tribal peoples. On July 4th, three years after the
first launching of casino, Stone is arrested for violation of state tax and
gambling laws. Subsequently, the
question of the nature of the sovereignty of the Santa Maria Casino ends up in
federal court, in a case presided over by Beatrice Lord. In the end, Lord
sanctions the "reservation on an anchor," in no small part because she admires
the imagination involved in its creation. Even more suggestively, though, in
announcing her decision from the casino's sterncastle (on Columbus Day), she
redefines tribal sovereignty in a way that detaches it from formulation of
title rooted in discovery law. "The notion of tribal sovereignty is not
confiscable, or earth bound," Lord writes. "Sovereignty is neither fence nor
feathers. The essence of sovereignty is imaginative, an original tribal trope,
communal and spiritual, an idea that is more than metes and bounds in treaties"
(7). Following this logic, "The court...ruled that an anchor and caravel is as
much a tribal connection to sovereignty as a homestead, mineral rights, the
sacred cedar, and the nest of a bald eagle" (7).[9]
In this way, Lord signals that, despite its western legacy and baggage, the
concept of sovereignty remains valuable because it can be stretched and
adapted, imaginatively, in a way that takes it out of the realm of possessive
property law (the reference to "metes and bounds") and into a larger sense of
relation and intersubjectivity.[10]
Lord's
experience of legal globalization (her opportunity to preside over a Columbian
moment of contact between the U.S. legal system and Stone Columbus's innovative
assertions of tribal autonomy) allows her to continue forward with the process
of deterritorializing and reframing the concept of sovereignty. She recognizes,
of course, that Stone's sovereignty claims exist in a political framework that,
at present, limit them. In a nod to U.S. Indian law and the Marshall Court's
use of the law of discovery in defining Indian communities as "domestic
dependent nations," she comments that "The Santa Maria and the other
caravels are limited sovereign states at sea, the first maritime reservations
in international waters..." (8-9). And yet, the fact that Stone has created a
"sovereign casino" that does, in fact, function surely highlights the idea that
a tribal nation need not be synonymous with a sovereign state in the
post-Westphalian sense of the term. The "new casino tribe" is more like what
political scientist Nina Caspersen calls an "unrecognized state," a kind of
sovereign entity that relies on support from outside of itself and is
characterized by its economic and cultural permeability (8). A "casino nation,"
in other words, cannot exist without a constant dynamic of exchange between
itself and those outside of it. It cannot stand alone or imagine itself in a
way that cuts it off from the broader totality that surrounds it. It must
embrace the dynamic of global encounter in a way that sends its people down a
very different historical and political path from that of the Europe of
Christopher Columbus. And in doing so, Vizenor suggests, with his
characteristic hopefulness, indigenous people might offer guidance on how the
modern world can redeem the Columbian moment and overcome the bloody legacy of
its instantiation five centuries ago. Judge Lord's observation regarding the
wisdom and imagination that led Stone to placing his sovereign casino on an
international border is wonderfully suggestive, for it urges the reader to
consider how currently emerging international legal norms and a redefinition of
the relations of power between local and global bodies are becoming
increasingly important tools in the work of decolonization. Through Lord, Vizenor teases us into a
recognition that the imaginative relocation of the "nation" and its claims to
sovereignty into a globalized space might, in fact, be liberating. Reimagining
the nation as something constituted in the exchange between global and local,
then, can create the political conditions that allow for new definitions of
legal status, new claims of sovereignty, and new ways in which those claims
might be recognized. Indeed, Vizenor's work on the recently ratified revised
Constitution of the White Earth Nation highlights the "real world"
applicability of that idea (see Carlson, "Trickster"). If such change can be
broadly achieved, the Columbian moment might indeed be worthy of global
commemoration.
Notes
[1]
This idea,
incidentally, forms a central theme in Vizenor's more recent novel Shrouds of White Earth, in its depiction
of a narrative triptych composed of Marc Chagall, the fictional Anishinaabeg
painter Dogroy Beaulieu, and Vizenor himself.
[2]
For a general overview of the Columbian Exhibition, see
Bolotin and Laing.
[3]
See Vizenor, "Ontic Images." Examples of other critics who
have begun to take up Vizenor's terminology would include Martinez and
Schweninger.
[4]
This idea can be usefully connected to Jodi Byrd's concept of
"transit." Byrd explicitly links her work with Vizenor in The Transit of Empire.
[5]
There are
many other versions of this pattern of imperfect reiteration and echoing
throughout the novel. The part of the plot focused on Felipa Flowers, for
example, makes a great deal out of the similarities between her experiences and
those of Pocahontas, down to the fact that both meet their end at Gravesend.
Stone is also compared to the Métis leader Louis Riel, who is likewise recalled
in the form of another character, a retired military intelligence officer, now
turned private-investigator and double-agent named Chaine Riel Doumet. American
Indians are compared to the Sephardic Jews, who are, in turn, linked to the
Mayans. However, in order to contain the complexity of the narrative a bit, for
the purpose of the present argument, I want to maintain a narrow focus on Stone
Columbus as the primary heir and to consider, through him, what the
significance of this representational patterning in the novel might be.
[6]
In this respect, Vizenor gives readers an imaginative
extension of historical realities explored recently by Jace Weaver in his book The Red Atlantic.
[7]
Vizenor
offers another formulation of this idea in the second half of the novel, in his
discussion of the (metaphorical) work being done at the Genome Pavilion at
Point Assinika. There he writes that "...the chemical of genes can be touched
in meditation and memories, that blue radiance is a wondrous instance in human
creation, and those who can imagine their antimonies and mutations are able
to heal with humor" [my emphasis] (Heirs 134).
[8]
It is no
wonder that many contemporary indigenous writers invoke the Wiindigo-figure as
a trope for colonialism and empire. Louise Erdrich does so in her novel Tracks in her characterization of
Pauline Puyat, who turns on herself and her own people in a fury of
misrecognition and assimilationist-driven self-hatred. Joseph Boyden explores
wiindigo sickness in his WWI novel Three
Day Road. Jack Forbes has also suggestively linked the Wiindigo with the
origins and spread of imperialism and colonialism in Columbus and other Cannibals.
[9]
Vizenor
clearly signals the importance of this definition by reiterating it later in
the book. When Almost Brown is
celebrating the repatriation of Columbus's remains with a laser show, the
loudspeakers on the casino mask boom out the following words: "The notion of
sovereignty is not tied to the earth, sovereignty is neither fence nor
feathers...The very essence of sovereignty
is a communal laser. The Santa Maria and the two
caravels are luminous sovereign states in the night sky, the first maritime
reservation on a laser anchor" (Heirs 62).
[10]
On this type of dialectical transformation of sovereignty,
see my forthcoming book Imagining
Sovereignty (2016).
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