Editorial
"Canterbury," announces the narrator of Hotline Healers, "was the start of my
stories, the place where my parents met… and the actual place of my conception"
(40). Standing in for his cousin, Almost Gegaa Browne, the narrator's arrival
at the University of Kent to guest lecture at the invitation of Professor
Robert 'Bricky' Lee, represents the briefest of forays into England—a
country the author knows well. Only in The
Heirs of Columbus does the UK feature to any greater extent in Gerald Vizenor's
work, when Filippa Flowers appears in Gravesend (also in Kent) on her quest to
find the remains of Pocahontas. These two brief excursions to the country and
indeed county of Transmotion's host
University reveal only the most tenuous of connections between that site and
the genesis of this journal's inspiration. Nevertheless, they fold Canterbury,
Gravesend, and Kent more generally, into the multiply storied world of
Vizenor's fiction—part of a transnational landscape that threads
connections between the lakes and woodlands of the Midwestern USA, France,
China, Japan, and more. Kent's part in that world may be small, but as a node
in the intellectual and physical odyssey of the Vizenorian traveler, it has its
own significance, taking the brunt of a parodic beating as its status as the
seat of the Anglican Church is positively unsettled, and ironic home of homes
to the narrator's origins and thus, of course, to the narrative itself.
The contributions to this, the second issue of Transmotion, speak in a variety of ways
to the broader theme of travel and transmotion, whether in terms of transport,
(dis)location, intercultural influence and exchange, transitional and
transformative space, or the broader arcs of globalization. So, in "'By My Heart': Gerald
Vizenor's Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point,' Molly
McGlennen takes specific starting points in linguistic, historical, and
geographic locations to analyze the conceptions of nationhood Vizenor's recent
poetry constructs that, while forging a distinct—and distinctly Anishinaabe—sense
of nationhood, resists the hierarchical and dichotomous archetypes that term
connotes. Thus, she demonstrates a key unsettling in Vizenor's work of the
binaries of 'urban' and 'reservation' community, showing ultimately that
relocation does not necessary equate to dislocation. In "The Columbian Moment:
Overcoming Globalization in Vizenor's The
Heirs of Columbus," David J. Carlson moves beyond the nation, to consider
the transnational nexus forged by and through the "Columbian moment"—a
moment that is increasingly, urgently, put under scrutiny through the recovery
of Indigenous histories. Where Carlson shines a light on an often-neglected
novel, Billy J. Stratton introduces us to the vivid but under-appreciated
poetry of Nora Marks Dauenhauer in "'Carried in the Arms of Standing Waves:'
The Transmotional Aesthetics of Nora Marks Dauenhauer". Drawing aptly and
invigoratingly on Kim Blaeser and Vizenor's own work on, and in, the haiku form,
Stratton's article opens the lens on the "transmotional fidelity" between the
Tlingit aesthetic sensibility Stratton discerns in Dauenhauer's poetry and the Japanese
Zen poetic tradition.
Taking a lead from the deft transitions Vizenor himself
makes between different forms of writing and tones of discourse, we include a
more reflective piece of non-fiction in each issue—work that, whether
implicitly or more explicitly ruminates explores the nature of American Indian
writing, the place of Native writers in the world, representations, landscapes,
and any other theme that may catch our invited writer's eye. In this issue, Kim Shuck's
poetic-road piece "Going Home," provides just such a function. In it, Shuck
brings a variety of questions—from identity and community, through
(mis)identification and expectation, to the importance of place whether "there"
or elsewhere—to bear on the experience of taking a road trip from her San
Francisco home to the family homeland in Oklahoma. An affective journey in
space and memory, the road-trip—as all good road-trips do—catalyzes
meditation on the histories and geographies of here and now. In our final,
creative piece, meanwhile, Denise Low offers a wildly funny parodic sketch of a
reading by a certain Anishinaabe intellectual in a certain well-known art
gallery next to a certain bookshop in a certain city. Why the evasive attempt
to generate mystique? Read the story to see spaces transform from 2D
representations to actual spaces producing actual crows to irritate an audience
already entranced and baffled by a speaker-come-bear-in-waiting… Curious? We
hope so.
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Transmotion is open access, thanks to
the generous sponsorship of the University of Kent: all content is fully
available on the open internet with no paywall or institutional access
required, and it always will be.
We are published under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, meaning in
essence that any articles or reviews may be copied and re-used provided that the
source and author is acknowledged. We strongly believe in this model, which
makes research and academic insight available and useable for the widest
possible community. We also believe in keeping to the highest academic
standards: thus all articles are double-blind peer reviewed by at least two reviewers,
and each issue approved by an editorial board of senior academics in the field
(listed in the Front Matter of the full PDF and in the online 'About' section).
David Stirrup November
2015
James Mackay
David Carlson
Laura Adams Weaver