Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015)
GERALD VIZENOR
Yet
the erudite taxonomies and literary practices of commercial literature weigh
the obvious sense of natural motion, and empire names and doctrines become at
times more significant than the irony and tropes of literary natural
motion. The learned botanical name
cypripedium acaule, for instance,
inadvertently denatures the exquisite poetic blush of a moccasin flower in the
moist shadows, and other more common names and comparative similes lessen the
motion of images, such as the heavy breath of bears, the marvelous shimmer of
early morning dew, twilight favors on a spider web, ravens tease of hunters in
camouflage, stray shadows lean over the fence, or the perfect dive of a water
ouzel in a mountain stream.
The
most memorable native stories are ironic, and the scenes of natural motion are
sometimes parodies. Native
ceremonial clowns, cultural and communal teases are ironic because the original
sources are not rubric sacraments, and never certain, and the spirit,
imagination, and hearsay of the moment are never the same in the continuous
imaginative recount of stories.
Likewise
the printed scenes in literature are ironic by the selection of names and
teaser words. The definitions of
words are inconclusive, no more precise that tropes, and the connotations of
words are deferred to yet another situation and literary act of writers and
readers. The literary scenes and
notions are shelved in libraries, and wait for readers to hear the natural
motion in the books.
The
means of natural motion are easily grasped in the singular tropes and gestures
of innovative literature, but the pleasures of ironic motion are hardly perceived
in ordinary comparative similes, such as, walks like a duck, eats like a dog,
or dumb as a donkey. Comparative
similes are facile, and cynical similes sideline the spontaneous imagination
and tropes of natural motion.
"Overhanging
clouds, echoing my words, with a pleasing sound, across the earth, everywhere,
making my voice heard," and, "the first to come, epithet among the birds,
bringing the rain, crow is my name," are ironic dream songs and tropes of
natural motion by a nineteenth century native Anishinaabe (Densmore 15).
Kobayashi
Issa, the generous haiku poet of eighteenth century Japan, created a poignant
image about the death of his young daughter, "the world of dew, is the world of
dew, and yet. . . and yet" (Issa 103-4). The imagistic scene creates a natural sense of motion, a world of dew,
and at the same time a trope of memory and impermanence. The scene is elusive and in motion, not
a descriptive contrast or closure.
Stephen
Addiss in The Art of Haiku provided a
rather reductive interpretation that the image "captures the moment when
sincere religious understanding meets the deepest feeling of the heart." The natural motion of that concise
image of sorrow and a world of dew was not a captured scene, instead the scene
continues as a visionary motion of memory (Addiss 260).
Literature
is a tricky voice of the past, and customarily omniscient in style. Native stories tease a sense of
presence, an ironic presence, and create an elusive consciousness that is more
than the mere simulations of similitude and sincerity, or the editorial
investments of culture, intrigue, adventure, and petitions of conceited reality
in commercial narratives.
Native
stories are not priestly liturgies. The stories of creation and the marvelous scenes of trickster
transmotion and transformation are related in motion and visual memory without
recitations, storyline or plot resolutions, shibboleths of character
development, or the denouement of commercial literature.
Consider,
for instance, the concept of transmotion and the literary perception of other
words with the trans prefix such as
transcendentalism, the spiritual sense of natural motion and cultural
survivance, or notions of transpacific, transhistorical, transracial,
transsexual, and the common practice of transactions. The trans prefix
initiates a sense of action or change, a literary and unitary motion, and a
wider concept of the motion in images and words.
The
literary inspiration and spirited totemic portrayals of birds, animals, ocean
waves, and whales are transmotion, more than mere denotation, or simile. Scenes of transmotion are not
syntactical clauses or closure, not simulations, and not an outline of absence,
of want or scarcity of motion and presence.
The
stories of native survivance are instances of natural motion, and transmotion,
a visionary resistance to cultural dominance, the practices of monotheism,
policies of federal reservations, and the heavy loads of industrial
conversions. Regrettably
commercial literature about natives has often been structured with the familiar
themes of classical, heroic tragedy, and modern victimry, but scarcely
classical irony or comedy. Native
stories, however, are imagined and related with a sense of natural motion and
survivance, not cultural denouement and victimry. The publishers of the most saleable themes of romantic
victimry have obligated many native storiers and writers to convert a native
sense of survivance to absence and victimry, including the popular Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt, and
unfortunately The Surrounded by
D'Arcy McNickle.
The
discussion of transmotion, a spirited and visionary sense of natural motion,
has evolved in my critical studies as an original aesthetic theory to interpret
and compare the modes, distinctions, situations, and the traces of motion in
sacred objects, stories, art, and literature.
Native
literary artists, those who pose in the emotive shadows of natural motion and
totemic cultures, are clearly obligated, in my view, to create innovative
narratives and poetic scenes that tease and reveal the fusions of native ethos,
transmotion, and stories of survivance. Commercial editorial dominance, and crave of cultural victimry, must be
outwitted, ridiculed, and controverted in the chance and future of native stories
and innovative literature.
Native
transmotion is directly related to the ordinary practices of survivance, a
visionary resistance and sense of natural motion over separatism, literary
denouement, and cultural victimry. Survivance and transmotion are original critical philosophies and
ethical convictions derived from personal experiences of ceremonies, critical
examination of sacred objects in museums, and relative observations of natural
motion and totemic associations in native art, stories, and literature.
Leslie
Silko encircles the reader with mythic witches, ironic creation stories, and a
sense of natural motion in her novel Ceremony. "That is the trickery of the
witchcraft," said the old man. "They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. They will look no further to see what
is really happening. They want us
to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch
our own destruction. But white
people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can
deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white
people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place"
(Silko 132-3).
The
witches contrived a customary binary structure of race, a mythic colorant of
cultural separation. The literary
witchery is ironic, of course, a lively trace of transmotion in a contemporary
novel.
Toni
Jensen creates a sense of transmotion and native survivance in "At the Powwow
Hotel," a short story published in From
the Hill. The story starts
with the natural motion and visionary presence of corn. "When the cornfield arrived, I was
standing in our hotel's kitchen, starting Lester's birthday cake. It was raining outside, foggy too, for
the sixth day in a row, and there was flour all over my blue jeans. . . . We
live in West Texas on a three-hundred-acre cotton farm at the edge of Blanco
Canyon. We own the Blanco Canyon
Hotel, all twelve rooms, though everybody in town calls it the Powwow Hotel on
account of Lester and me being Indian" (Jensen 55-7).
Other
natives arrived at the Powwow Hotel that day and the conversations continued
with gestures to the miraculous arrival of corn, a field of corn. The Navajos "talked about why the corn
had skipped them, had set its course east of their tribes."
"But
tonight," the narrator declares, "there was the sound of feet, moving
counterclockwise, the smell of coffee and bread and the raw, greenness of the
field. And tonight, there were my
legs, still at first, but surprising me by doing anything at all, and then
there I was, part of it, moving." Jensen creates marvelous scenes of natural motion, corn, greenery, and
cultural survivance. The arrival
of the corn is a crucial and memorable scene of totemic and visionary
transmotion at the Powwow Hotel (Jensen 67).
"I
have no state but my visionary portrayals in art, no native nation but a
sensual, totemic landscape of memories, and the unreserved resistance of
dominance and nostalgia," declared Dogroy Beaulieu, the native artist and
narrator of my recent novel Shrouds of
White Earth. "Does anyone ever
experience a native state, a secure place of stories, solace, and sentiments
that never torment the heart and memories? Yes, of course, my friend, you create marvelous literary
scenes and stories of the reservation, and yet your characters are always in
flight from the mundane notions of reality. You write stories not to escape, but to evade the tiresome
politics of native victimry.
"I
create traces of totemic creatures, paint visionary characters in magical
flight, native scenes in the bright colors of survivance, and you create the
same scenes by the tease of words and irony" (Vizenor, Shrouds 3; 5-6). Dogroy relates that the name Beaulieu, his surname, is a visionary
place, and an actual township on the White Earth Reservation. He creates shrouds of animals and
birds, the traces and shadows of natural motion.
"The
books have voices. I hear them in
the library," writes Diane Glancy in the first scene of native poetic motion in
Designs of the Night Sky. "I know the voices are from the
books. Yet I know the old stories
do not like books. . . . I hear the books. Not with my ears, but in my imagination. Maybe the voices camp in the library
because the written words hold them there. Maybe they are captives with no place to go" (Glancy
5).
N.
Scott Momaday, the novelist, points out in The
Way to Rainy Mountain that his grandmother "lived out her long life in the
shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay
like memory in her blood." Aho,
his grandmother, told stories about the great native migration, a visual
journey that continued for some five hundred years. "I wanted to see in reality what she had seem more perfectly
in the mind's eye" (Momaday 7).[1] The stories of that memorable native
migration are inadvertent sources of the theory of transmotion, or visionary
motion, clearly a trace and presence of native continental liberty.
Yes,
transmotion, the presence of visionary narrative voices and stories are
overheard at universities, libraries, in the book, and with the same sense of
natural motion in nature. Many
readers are creative, truly inspired by literary scenes, and enriched by a
sense of presence with native voices on great migrations, and the visionary
motion of birds and animals. The
most memorable stories are in natural motion, but not, of course, with the
literary construction of denouement and victimry, or the commercial guidance
that writers must turn visionary scenes and natural motion into mere
descriptive characters with ideologies and wearisome representations of
motivation and development. Native
trickster stories start with motion, visionary transmotion, but not the closure
of descriptive nominations.
Trickster
was going along, and the listener or reader can easily sense and imagine the
motion and the visionary transmotion of the story. Some listeners and readers have lost the capacity to
appreciate the transmutations of time, gender, water, myths, ironic scenes, and
the many mutations of trickster figures by gesture, word, imagination, and
tricky maneuvers. These trickster
gestures create a sense of visionary motion. The stories of native creation and trickster scenes were
seldom told in the same way, and visionary characters must elude simulations,
description, causation, denouement, and cultural victimry. These commercial nominations, along
with facile comparative similes, would never inspire or provide a native sense
of visionary presence and survivance.
"Call
me Ishmael," an ironic biblical name, and the first sentence of the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, is one of
many first person voices that are overheard in libraries, trickster stories,
and in literary adventures. Melville
creates a truly memorable sailor of natural motion and spectacular survivance,
and pursues the ironic visionary and moral transcendence of a crippled sea
warrior and transmotion of a mighty white whale.
Ishmael
is an everlasting trope and trouble of natural motion and transcendence, and
the very tease of reality and mortality. "But this deepest fear is not death; he fears that there is nothing
beyond our shell of existence; there is no ideal reality beyond the material;
there is nothing," observed John Bryant in "Moby-Dick
as Revolution." Nothingness is a
paradox, of course, but nothingness is a "universal constant with no higher
reality" (Bryant 73).
Herman Melville is a master of the tropes of
motion, and he creates an essential sense of visionary motion, or transmotion
in almost every scene of Moby-Dick, but his mastery and perceptions of
natural motion are more direct and descriptive in the chapter "The
Tail." He is noticeably more representative than visionary, and
describes five specific motions of the tail. The fifth motion is
"the ordinary floating posture" (Melville 373).
Melville's descriptions of the motions of the
tail are knowing and necessary, and yet he declares, "The more I consider
this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At
times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of
many, remain wholly inexplicable." The motion of the tails may be
"mystical gestures." He concludes the chapter with references
to signs and symbols, an ironic conversation "with the world" (374).
The cetology and whale tail discourse in this chapter mimic the creative
transmotion or the visionary scenes of motion in the novel Moby-Dick.
Ishmael
related in the first scene of Moby-Dick
that when he was sidetracked on a dreary day he paused at "coffin warehouses"
and then "quietly took to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this," and "almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the
ocean with me" (3).
That
portrayal of sentiments of the ocean is an obvious invitation to stories of
natural motion, and no matter the tease or chance of a whaler, the crease,
thrust, and surge of waves, the natural motion of the sea always provides a
sublime transcendence of sorrow, cultural closure, and victimry.
"So
ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of
the world," Ishmael declared, "that without some hints touching the plain
facts, historical or otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick
as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more deplorable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory" (204-5).
The
reference to an "intolerable allegory" is a literary gesture that respects the
natural motion of the great whale, and not the mere parable or moral stories
that reveal an obscure and covert sense of absence and literary closure. Moby Dick is a trope of transmotion,
and the menace of the mighty white whale outmaneuvers the similes of literary
whalers and the missionaries of enlightenment.
Natural
motion and transmotion are portrayed in the scenes of the ocean, and sailors in
search of whales. Moby Dick, the
great white whale, however, is an obscure presence in the novel, and the
outcome is not an unbearable or mere nihilistic allegory of vengeance or
victimry.
Natural
motion is a heartbeat, ravens on the wing, the rise of thunderclouds and the
mysterious weight of whales. Transmotion is the visionary or creative perceptions of the seasons and
the visual scenes of motion in art and literature. The literary portrayal and tropes of transmotion are actual
and visual images across, beyond, on the other side, or in another place, and
with an ironic and visionary sense of presence. The portrayal of motion is not a simulation of absence, but
rather a creative literary image of motion and presence.
Ishmael
related that he would paint "without a canvas something like the true form of
the whale," and announced that it was time to prove that some pictures of
whales were wrong. It may be that
the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the
oldest" sculptures of the Hindus, Egyptians, and Grecians (261-2).
"The
French are the lads for painting action," Ishmael declared, and the "natural
aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be
particularly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their
whaling scenes. With not one tenth
of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandths part of that of
the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale
hunt."
The
French portrayed scenes of whales with a visionary sense that conveyed
transmotion and the surge of the ocean. The "English and American whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with
presenting the mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the
whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about
tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid" (268).
The
portrayals of whales that Ishmael so admired were in natural motion, a
visionary image that transcended the closure of a "mechanical outline" and
created a sense of the presence of whales. He favored the painterly show of transmotion, the surge of
the ocean, and likewise revealed the same sense of motion in narratives.
Moby
Dick, the great white whale, is a spectacular portrayal of literary
transmotion, a spirited and mysterious image of natural motion in the ocean, in
the book, and in the imagination of the reader.
"One
often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject," declared
Ishmael. "How then, with me,
writing of this Leviathan?" The
"mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me
faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the
whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of
empire on earth and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs"
(Melville 447-448).
Rightly
so, the great portrayals of whales are in natural motion, the transmotion and
"panoramas" of the universe. Likewise the notable diction of the narrator and his astute manner and
maneuvers of words created images of the natural motion of science, ideologies,
and history. Ishmael created a
figurative sweep of humans and whales, and a distinct sense of motion in a
narrative of irony and chance.
Moby-Dick
is a "mediation on democracy" declared Stephen Zelnick in "Moby-Dick: The Republic at Sea." Consider the scenes of equality in the novel, "the exalted
imagery of common workmen. . . ." Ishmael "tells us more about the embattled American experience in
liberty and democracy than most have chosen to recognize" (Zelnick 691;
703).
Melville
created contentious characters in natural motion, and the scenes of visionary
transmotion, political ideologies, moral transcendence, and vengeance were
carried out in the spectacular pursuit of the mysterious white whale.
John
Bryant asserted in "Moby-Dick as
Revolution" that the novel "depicts the struggle to understand the relation
between the promise of transcendental thought and its abnegating opposite, the
fear of nothingness." Moby-Dick, "at first glance. . . seems a
revolution almost exclusively in its aesthetic modernity. The long, rhythmic lines, the prose
poetry, the mixture of genres and multiplicity of voices, the experiments in
point of view, symbolism, and psychology," however, the "novel's radical
politics seem strangely submerged. Surely, we can extract from the novel's veil of allegory a prophetic
warning that the American ship of state is heading toward the disaster of Civil
War" (70).
The
narrative structure, chase of whales, luminous waves, and figurative portrayals
of the ocean, create a literary sense of natural motion. "Ishmael knows the transcendental
problem. He begins in crisis,
seeing death," but "his deepest fear is not death; he fears that there is
nothing beyond our shell of existence" and the absence of a reality. "Ishmael takes to sea democratically to
confront his fear of nothingness, just as Ahab takes to seas autocratically to
kill that fear in the form of the white whale" (Bryant 72).
The
Whale by
Herman Melville was first published in London in 1851, and later in the same
year Moby-Dick was published in New
York. Melville, once a neglected
author, was not widely recognized or celebrated as a literary artist until the end
of the First World War. The secure
cultural representations of the enlightenment were in ruins at the time, and
the breakdown of rational structures and institutions turned many young
survivors into extremists, creative storiers, and innovative artists. Moby-Dick
was discovered in the context of the ruins of empires, rational governance, and
the rise of modern abstract art at the end of the First World War.
Melville created a wild
whaler, and a direct, expressive narrator of survivance. Ishmael was a sailor portrayed in
natural motion, a storier of great ocean waves and exotic scenes of
liberty. Ishmael was a sailor of
resistance, inspired by chance and transcendence, and he became the sole
survivor and storier of the mighty whale Moby Dick, the demise of the tormented
and crippled captain Ahab, and the absolute visionary destruction of the
whaleship Pequod.
Natural motion and the
literature of survivance create a vital and astute sense of presence over
absence in stories, art, and literature. "The nature of survivance creates a sense of narrative resistance to
absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over
historical absence" (Vizenor, Native
Liberty 1; 162).
Herman
Melville clearly conveyed the natural motion of sailors and the sea, and he
portrayed the tease, trouble and havoc of whalers. Ishmael created a sense of presence and situations of
transmotion with tropes, diction, character expressions, irony, and comparative
scenes. Consider these selected
scenes of natural and visionary motion from various chapters of Moby-Dick.
But Queequeg, do you
see, was a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor
butterfly. He was enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. (29-30)
Queequeg is seen as a
creature in "transition," or natural motion, change, and the evolution of an
incredible and memorable character of literature.
Thou shalt see it
shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic
dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God.
(114) The description of the
action is direct, the trope wields and drives, and the visionary motion is
"democratic dignity." God surely
"radiates" a constant course of eternal splendor and the steady oceanic ironies
of whalers.
While their masters, the
mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their jaws, the harpooneers
chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report. (150) This ironic scene favors the natural
chewing sounds of harpooneers over the manners of the masters at sea on the
Pequod.
The Sperm Whale blows as
a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this
fish from other tribes of his genus. (214) The Sperm Whale is distinctive and the
natural motion of breath from a blowhole is a reliable count. Melville frequently creates scenes of
motion with precise and singular similes, or with comparative images that are
common, such as "blows as a clock ticks."
Now, sometimes, in the
Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences," Melville
writes in Moby-Dick. "That
unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's
immeasurable burning-glass. The
sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this
nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's
throne. (487) Melville created some scenes with ornate words, such as
"freshets of effulgences" and "unblinkingly" to enhance the image of motion, or
visionary transmotion of the sun and sea near Japan.
Upon the stranger's
shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered plans, of
what had once been a whaleboat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly
as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a
horse. (526) Consider the words "shattered" and "splintered" to recount the
whaleboat. These two words create
a concise scene of breaking that lingers as an image and then the narrator
turns to a comparative phrase, "as plainly as you see," a verbal gesture to
create a new trope, and a sense of motion in the point of view, the peeled and
"bleaching skeleton of a horse."
And thus, through the
serene tranquilities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clapping were
suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from
sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched
hideousness of his jaw. (534-35) Moby Dick was a presence in natural
motion, and the clapping of waves on a serene tropical sea was "suspended" by
"rapture." The image creates a
crucial convergence of natural motion, and the sense of visionary transmotion
continues in memory.
Moby Dick swam swiftly
round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. . .
. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in
the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to
swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool
as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least
chance shock might burst. (537) Moby Dick was in natural motion and the
narrator portrays the scene with a direct, ordinary, poetic, and rhythmic
phrase, "round and round the wrecked crew." The first image is common, "round and round," and then the
water churns in a vengeful scene.
So suddenly seen in the
blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky,
the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like
a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from the first
sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale. (544-45) The "blue plains of the sea" is a
magical poetic scene in the natural motion of memory. Bluer yet against the sky, and then in visionary transmotion
"glittered and glared like a glacier" and faded away "to a dim mistiness of an
advancing shower in a vale."
Suddenly the waters
around them slowly swelled in broad circles; they quickly upheaved, as if
sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. .
. . Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the
rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters
flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower
of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
trunk of the whale. (555) Melville once again creates the natural
motion of the ocean. Ishmael the
narrator was a master of these images, and mainly when he observes the
uncertainty of an expansive sea slowly swelling in "broad circles." The poetic images and visionary
transmotion of this scene are magnificent, the shrouds and veils of mist and
"rainbowed air" are the mysterious motion of Moby Dick. The rise of the great white whale
"crushed thirty feet upwards" and with "heaps of fountains" leaves the surface
of the sea "creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale."
Herman
Melville portrayed the marvelous character Ishmael as a painter might have done
with natural hues of visionary motion, with memorable scenes and tropes of
transmotion, and with a sense of survivance over victimry.
Gerald Vizenor,
September 21, 2014.
Notes
1. A fuller discussion in Manifest Manners, 57.
Works
Cited
Addiss, Stephen. The Art of Haiku. Boston: Shambhala,
2012. Print.
Bryant, John. "Moby-Dick as Revolution." The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville,
ed. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge University Press, 1998. 65-90. Print.
Densmore, Frances.
Chippewa Music. Minneapolis: Ross
& Haines, 1973. Print.
Glancy, Diane. Designs of the Night Sky. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Print.
Issa, Kobayashi. The Year of My Life. Ogara Haru,
translated by Nobuyaki Yuasa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Print.
Jensen, Toni. "At
the Powwow Hotel." From the Hilltop.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 55-68. Print.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
Print.
Momaday, N. Scott.
The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Print.
Silko, Leslie
Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking
Penguin, 1977. Print.
Vizenor, Gerald. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural
Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Print.
----. Shrouds of White Earth. Albany: State
University of New York Press, Excelsior Edition, 2010. Print.
----. Ed. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian
Survivance Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Print.
Zelnick, Stephen. "Moby-Dick: the Republic at Sea." Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, ed. Mary R. Reichardt. San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 2011. Print.