Gerald
Vizenor's Transnational Aesthetics in Blue Ravens
DANNE JOBIN
More than any of Gerald Vizenor's
previous work, Blue Ravens deploys a transnational aesthetic which
playfully explores potential avenues for Native[1]
sovereignty, a space of self-determination opened up by artistic production
that juxtaposes an Anishinaabe sensibility onto French war scenes and the urban
environment of Paris, thus imprinting Native presence onto the land. It enables
like-minded individuals to find refuge and create a new order in which Native
voices are heard and artistic influence is mutual as Indigenous artists
participate in the thriving cultural scene of interwar France. Indeed, Vizenor's
fiction explores mobile forms of citizenship, which do not attempt to regulate
subjects but allow a celebration of communal as well as individual identities.
The novel showcases a Native relationship to space transformed by Indigenous
art into inventive, transnational forms of aesthetic citizenship. It also
outlines dynamic maps of transnational networks that nevertheless retain their
Indigenous, tribal-specific focus even as they open up the field for new
exchanges with global spaces. The focus on Anishinaabe art and writing
demonstrates that tribal national specificities, when entering transnational
space, can adapt and evolve without compromising their integrity. As this
article will show, instead of breaking its ties to White Earth, the protagonists'
art transposes Anishinaabe aesthetics onto Parisian locales, thus exploring new
forms of Indigenous sovereignty that transcends political borders.
In order to situate the critical
contribution of Blue Ravens within
transnational Indigenous studies, I will call on hemispheric and transnational
theories to help articulate international and global intersections, and I will
also explore questions regarding the sharing of Native space and the regulation
of Indigenous identities. To begin with, the novel underscores Native American
peoples' participation in transnational spaces by drawing from the experience
of Anishinaabe World War One soldiers. Blue Ravens is one of two recent novels
to retrace the history of Native North American participation in World War One,
with Joseph Boyden's The Three Day Road providing a Canadian
counterpart.[2]
When Gerald Vizenor researched the engagement of his family members in the
Great War, he discovered that two of his forebears were drafted to France,
simultaneously coming across other names from the region and more specifically
the White Earth Anishinaabe Reservation in Minnesota. He then used these facts
as a basis for his fictional narrative, which is partly biographical and thus
offers insight into what the experience of fighting might have entailed for
Indigenous soldiers. However, the scope of Blue Ravens is much wider
than a war narrative or an account of the legacy borne by war veterans, and in
this respect differs markedly from other Native novels focusing on combat or
its aftermath. The narrator, Basile Hudon Beaulieu, is a storyteller—or
to use Vizenor's term, a storier—who travels alongside his painter
brother Aloysius and narrates their encounters as well as Aloysius's evolving
portfolio. The narrative moves beyond a mere focus on mobility to illuminate
art as a spatial practice that enables a dialogue between Indigeneity and
spatial practices in a foreign land. Art is the center of focus, in the form of
both Aloysius's visual production and Basile's writing, the novel itself. Once
the war is over, the Beaulieus move to Paris where they meet prestigious
artists and achieve recognition within the art scene themselves. All the while,
their connection to White Earth is maintained through aesthetic transmotion, an
assertive sense of movement tied to sovereignty through "native motion and
an active presence," as Vizenor defines it in Fugitive Poses:
The connotations of transmotion are
creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance; transmotion,
that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis
sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not
a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the
creases of transmotion and sovereignty. (15, italics in the original)
Art, therefore, enables international
connections and exchanges through unrestrained mobility as the brothers create
art pieces based on Anishinaabe aesthetics in various spaces. These aesthetics
refer back to White Earth as a central node, which shaped the Beaulieus'
artistic sensibilities and goes on informing their artistic production. Thus,
Vizenor imbues art with the potential to transmit and transform Native modes of
creative expression in innovative ways that speak to transmotion and ensure
survivance. Padraig Kirwan more specifically articulates the potential of art
forms to assert relationships across and beyond boundaries as a way of
reclaiming Native space outside the reservation through "aesthetic
sovereignty," which he defines as a "spatially-informed
aesthetics" (Sovereign Stories, 27). Kirwan reads Native American
texts as "expressions of tribal sovereignty" (23) that bear an
"aesthetic" which not only expresses but also produces tribal
autonomy (23), and thus articulates a critique of tribal nationalism in
relation to the "artistic, political, and cultural sovereignty" (37) found
in literary works. The sovereign aesthetic which emerges can link
"rhetorical sovereignty" with the current "political and legal
debates" taking place in Indian country (17) by providing "a deeper understanding
of both the means by which political movements are supported by the discrete
mobilization of spatialized metaphors in fiction as well as critical theory,
and an appreciation of the ways in which Native American fictionists create
multifarious narrative spaces" (17). This helps conceive of a model in which
the Beaulieus are not merely transposing Native artists into a foreign
environment but actually engaging with the new urban space as promoting their
Indigenous sensibility through their artistic, imaginative engagement with
particular locales. Paris becomes an Indigenised space as the Beaulieus develop
their artistic vision of White Earth through their presence in the City of
Light, in turn inspiring international artists through their own production.
One morning in Paris, for instance, Aloysius paints "a throng of blue
ravens at the entrance of Le Chemin du Montparnasse" with "abstract
wings," "cubist beaks," and "baroque talons" in
reference to Apollinaire, Picasso, and Vassilieff (163). He thus adds his own
Indigenous art, with a touch of Japanese rouge, to the street where
international artists have their ateliers, referencing some of the masters who
inspired him.
As Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart
point out in Global Indigenous Media, maintaining a "local
cultural distinctiveness" while also establishing a "transnational
affiliation" allows an artistic support network to develop on a global
scale and produces "works that question dominant worldviews while at the
same time promoting a strategic, internationally conceived Indigenism"
(31). Blue Ravens provides a fictional example of the ways in which such
a model might work. In a similar line, the first chapter of Indigenous
Cosmopolitans by Maximilian C. Forte also asks what happens to indigenous
culture and identity when being in the "original place" is no longer
possible or even necessary, and whether displacement signifies a negation of
Indigeneity. Forte wonders how being and becoming Indigenous is
"experienced and practised along translocal pathways", and how philosophies
and politics of identification are constructed in translocal settings (2).
These productive questions are key to a transnational reading of Blue Ravens
as a narrative that creates a space for Indigenous art in Europe and
encourages mobility for Native subjects. Vizenor's novel offers imaginative
answers by staging an Anishinaabe painter and a writer who employ aesthetic
sovereignty to inscribe Indigenous meanings onto spaces situated beyond the
reservation, thereby re-envisioning them as Native spaces where new kinship
networks between similarly-minded artists and war veterans become possible.
Vizenor has progressively been working
towards transnational Anishinaabe characters who use artistic expression to
apprehend new spaces. His previous novel, Shrouds of White Earth (2010),
also features an Anishinaabe artist whose art is showcased not only in other
states but in Europe as well, thus crossing international boundaries in
addition to artistic ones. Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987)
already manifested Vizenor's international vision for Native transmotion by
showing how a White Earth English teacher finds a place for himself as an
Anishinaabe trickster within Chinese culture by embodying the mythological
Monkey King. Griever, however, is based on the trickster tradition
rather than the artistic, cosmoprimitivist angle increasingly developed in the
author's recent work. In his article "Wanton and Sensuous in the Musée du Quai
Branly," James Mackay argues that, in Shrouds of White Earth, for
instance, "Vizenor is primarily concerned with challenging the colonially
inflected power balance assumptions inhering in the word 'primitivism'" in
order to move away from a simple idealisation of the primitive (171). Mackay explains
that the main protagonist envisions a "new art theory, Native Visionary
Cosmopolitan Primitivism, or Cosmoprimitivism" to redress the assumption that
although ledger art emerged decades before Chagall came to be known, "the
native artists are seen more as representative of ancient Plains traditions
while Chagall alone is the innovator and colourist" (177). Blue Ravens,
then, pursues this thread in its representation of a painter and a writer from
White Earth who become active participants in the avant-garde movement. In this
novel, Vizenor's cosmoprimitivism transforms Indigenous aesthetics into a form
of political subversion that inscribes a sense of Native presence onto
transnational locales as a way of side-stepping U.S. settler rule over
restrictive reservation policies. Enabling more inclusive models of sovereignty
to move beyond such containment, the novel gestures towards a mobile, even
international, vision of Native space. As an illustration, when posted in
France, Aloysius paints "one, three, four, and seven blue ravens [...] in
the back of trucks on the rough roads to war, at meals, and even in the beam
and roar of enemy bombardments" (126), thus inscribing a sense of Native
presence onto locales and events. This aesthetic Anishinaabe space is constituted
by the artist's relationship to a place as a form of self-definition re-enacted
through art rather than a prescriptive model of enclosure within a static
tradition. Cosmoprimitive Native art is both mobile and capable of asserting
tribal sovereignty throughout the world while conversing with other art
springing from compatible perspectives. Indeed, Vizenor extends Native
sovereignty far beyond the reservation through a literary aesthetics that showcases
art as a vessel for Native transmotion, which envisions new forms of artistic
citizenship—ways of belonging that are established through artistic
practices rather than strict notions of membership. At a gathering of artists
and writers in Montparnasse, Basile tells the stories of "native totems
and animals, and the presence of animals and birds in art and literature,"
aiming to inspire others to reflect on "the visionary presence of
animals," while Aloysius discusses mongrel healers in the spirit of the
fur trade, invoking a common history of exchange in order to stimulate the
imaginative potential of the listeners (164). By so doing, the brothers not
only call Native presence into the Parisian setting but inform the vision of
other artists and writers around them and create a community of influence. In
his review, Jay Whitaker comments on the autobiographical background of the
novel, which is dedicated "to the memory of Ignatius Vizenor, the author's
own great-uncle" and is "reminiscent of Vizenor's early years,
including the extended family and community contributions to his upbringing in
the absence of a paternal figure, his military service, and his work as a
newspaper writer" (228). Whitaker also emphasises the author's
contribution to Indigenous politics through "transnational and transcultural
interactions" that occur during the war when the brothers "meet and
learn from Oneida warriors on the front line" before making a place for
themselves in Paris:
[T]he brothers, in their role as
veterans, acknowledge that France is the place for them to explore and create
their identities because the French soil and the French people remember the
specific local traumas of World War I battles; the United States and the White
Earth Reservation are in many ways too disconnected, despite the
disproportionate ratio of casualties many Native American communities endured
during the war. France becomes the place where these brothers can best
cultivate their Native cultural productions and, in so doing, continue to form
their Anishinaabe identities even apart from their homeland. (229)
France facilitates a particular
relationship to place, as the events of the war impress themselves upon the
land, and thus enable the Beaulieus to bridge place and memory in accordance
with "a naturally reasoned existence in relation to a specific surrounding"
that is "inherently Native" (229). As Billy Stratton points out, this
perspective shares similarities with "what N. Scott Momaday terms 'the
remembered earth,'" a feature which Vizenor transposes from Minnesota to
other states and Europe as well as Japan and China (112). Thus, the setting of Blue
Ravens allows its main protagonists to demonstrate "the active
presence of Native people in urban spaces" while maintaining "their
storied connection to the lands emanating from the White Earth
Reservation" (112). The Parisian setting also provides a visual and
imaginative freedom that contrasts with the federal stronghold established on
the reservation (113), thereby envisioning a Native relationship to foreign
lands that reasserts mobile Indigenous practices. Vizenor's "movement from
hyperlocal to global sources of knowledge" is congruent with transmotion
(Eils et. al. 214).
Furthermore, in Eils, Lederman and
Uzendoski's interview article "You're Always More Famous When You Are
Banished," Vizenor expands upon his vision of Native transmotion in
relation to his entire corpus, as well as Blue Ravens more specifically,
saying that more than being a geographical movement, transmotion allows a
visionary, imaginative motion that participates in the "sentiment of continental
liberty" for Native people (225):
You can live anywhere and have a story
of presence on this continent, have a connection to the stories that created
this continent—this hemisphere, actually—not just the metes and
bounds and treaty borders and territorial boundaries. This is particularly
critical for Natives—especially in border states, where in the past they
could cross. Physically you had the motion to ignore territorial boundaries
because your culture transcended it, but then with security problems, now you
can't. My argument is straightforward: Native transmotion is visionary motion,
and transmotion creates a sense of presence. (Eils et. al. 225-226)
He goes on to argue that new language
is required to convey this notion, a language "that allows history to
include theory and emotive possibilities for which there are no documents and
that are critical in understanding a people" (227). This quote describes
the Blue Ravens project very accurately. Through the Beaulieu brothers'
artistry, Vizenor invents new literary possibilities that express transmotion
as a way of piecing together the forgotten histories of war. For Indigenous
peoples, that imaginative creativity is foundational to a way of interacting
with the land as well. Vizenor extends this notion to sovereignty, stating:
"I've only written about transmotion in the context of sovereignty—which
is an abstract sovereignty—and literature," and explains that for
pre-contact Native peoples, sovereignty must have resembled transmotion, in the
sense of visionary presence, more closely than contemporary political
sovereignty, which is territorial. Native relationship to the land was made of
"reciprocal relationships" (226) and did not acknowledge borders:
"Natives had extensive, dynamic trade routes throughout the hemisphere:
north to south, usually along rivers but also trails [...] There were extensive
trade networks" (227). Therefore, although transmotion is not
intrinsically territorial, but rather visionary, it also offers a lens through
which to apprehend a Native relationship to space that manifests itself
dynamically in the land, according to principles of reciprocity and presence
instead of ownership. These elements are key to a transnational reading of Blue
Ravens because they underscore movement as an intrinsic part of Native life
across centuries. The novel maintains continuity with such mobile practices by
foregrounding more recent developments such as the First World War, thus
demonstrating that a narrative centred on the White Earth reservation can also
be transnational in its scope.
The transnational elements of the novel serve to illuminate the
common oversight of Native studies in American studies. For instance, in their
introduction to Hemispheric American Studies, Caroline Levander and
Robert Levine propose a radical shift from regarding the United States as a
somewhat unified and concrete entity by "moving beyond the national frame
to consider regions, areas, and diasporic affiliations that exist apart from or
in conflicted relation to the nation" (2) in order to approach American
locales as "products of overlapping, mutually inflecting fields—as
complex webs of regional, national and hemispheric forces that can be
approached from multiple locations and perspectives" (3). Indeed, just as
America and the Western hemisphere are inventions –politically and
ideologically strategic ones (4), it is possible to see borderlands not just as
restricted to the Mexican-U.S. border but as moving throughout many locales in
the U.S., Canada, and South America (15). This latter point seems fairly
obvious from an Indigenous perspective that recognises that settler borders not
only exist within the U.S. but also create arbitrary separations with Canada
and Mexico that have direct implications for everyday life. However, while Hemispheric
Americans Studies aims to "chart new literary and cultural geographies
by decentering the U.S. nation" (3) and "contextualiz[ing] what can
sometimes appear to be the artificially hardened borders and boundaries of the
U.S. nation or for that matter, any nation of the American hemisphere"
(2-3), the volume gives little attention to Native American viewpoints.
Indigenous peoples are marginally addressed in some of the volume's chapters
but the introduction tends to inscribe Native Americans within an
undifferentiated flow of discourses and movements. Thus, although the book
redirects critical attention toward a hemispheric frame of analysis, it does
little to correct the oversight of Indigenous perspectives pervasive to
American Studies. Furthermore, as a counter-nationalist project, hemispheric
studies also pose a threat to the Native effort to centre tribal perspectives
as a critical methodology.
In order to disrupt
and displace American Studies as a monolithic site that perpetuates a colonial
outlook, another more radical proposal would be to recenter Indigenous
perspectives instead, for instance by considering Lisa Brooks's questions in
her introduction to The Common Pot. She asks, "What happens when
the texts of Anglo-American history and literature are participants in Native
space rather than the center of the story? What kind of map emerges?"
(xxxv). In her response to the tribal nationalist project, Shari Huhndorf also
attempts to correct this particular oversight in Mapping the Americas by
inscribing Native studies within hemispheric and transnational perspectives. As
she points out in her critique of literary nationalism, "Although
nationalism is an essential anti-colonial strategy in indigenous settings,
nationalist scholarship neglects the historical forces (such as imperialism)
that increasingly draw indigenous communities into global contexts" (3).
The challenge is therefore to consider global issues without decentring
Indigenous Studies but instead to examine the questions that arise from the
frictions of gender, culture, the nation state, and their geographical
implications (4). This is why the nationalist project was followed by a
transnational turn, prompted also by a new focus on urban Indians and global
tribal relationships (12-13). Indeed, Robert Warrior's article "Native
American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn" promotes an articulation
of transnational theory that emphasises how "the effects of capitalism,
which were once contained and constrained by the sovereignty of nations, now
supersede and trump the power of states" with a reduced focus on the
national boundaries of settler states (119), thus opening up the field of
enquiry beyond boundaries: "At best, the transnational turn describes the
reality of what we often seek in looking for ways to reach across borders and
oceans in search of consonance and [...] perspective" (120). Warrior does
not, however, decry Native Studies' rejection of transnational theory (120),
although the contradiction between cultural studies' view of "nationalism
as a pathology" and Native studies framing it as survival (Womack in
Warrior 121) can seem disorienting. For Warrior, "a resistance to [or
against] ideas like transnationality" is not only "intellectually
defensible" but can provide "fruitful theoretical insight"
(122). It is their very refusal to engage with the terms of transnationalism
that has enabled Native scholars to articulate a nationalism "born out of
native transnationalism, the flow and exchange of ideas and politics across our
respective nations' borders" (125). Although "the discourse on
nationalism remains [...] the domestic and international language in which Native
struggle is waged" and provides "a primary vehicle for fuelling
Indigenous imagination," there is scope to develop the field "toward
a sense that encompasses not just North America, but the Indigenous world more
broadly" (126).
Huhndorf offers
Silko's Almanac of the Dead as an example of a Native American novel in
which global connections lay the basis for an anticolonial revolution in order
to demonstrate how an Indigenous agenda might reclaim worldwide networks. Such
shifts test parameters that are at the heart of contemporary American Studies,
where "[I]ndigenous transnationalisms in particular have extended existing
American Studies critiques of national identity and imperialism as they
radically challenge the histories, geographies, and contemporary social
relations that constitute America itself" (Huhndorf 19). In her insistence
on the use of visual representation as a central factor in colonisation as well
as a tool for resistance to it, Huhndorf includes maps as visual
representations that can be subverted and recreated to support land claims and
thus become the visual technologies of Native politics (22). Such maps extend
far beyond reservation boundaries and surrounding mis-appropriated/occupied
land to constitute highly dynamic maps of transnational Indigenous networks
that extend across the continent and hemisphere and run throughout the globe.
Just as tribal nations have always practiced movement and relationship, they
continue to develop and recreate them in ways that mediate Indigeneity across
the world by asserting a sense of Native presence in unexpected places. In Blue
Ravens, a group of Native men meet at Café du Dôme, calling it their
"commune of native stories" and stating that the stories they tell
each other in Paris become "more memorable than at any other native
commune" (240). This instance stresses not only the possibility of
transnational Native spaces but their vitality—in this case mediated
through oral literature and Basile's later recording of the encounter in
writing. As a geographical extension of Brooks's "common pot"—a
space where resources are shared (3)—these connections create
commonalities based on Indigenous perspectives that maintain awareness of their
roots in tribal traditions while opening dialogues with the inhabitants of
markedly different spaces, from America to Europe. Brooks demonstrates that the
frameworks developed by tribal nations were adapted to negotiations with the
settler and still constitute a useful tool to redefine land use and
sovereignty. Art is well suited to communicate in such a dialogical space.
Chadwick Allen remarks that Indigenous intellectual and artistic
sovereignty is global in its scope (xviii), as is indeed the case in Blue
Ravens where Anishinaabe art writes meaning onto transnational spaces. In
Trans-Indigenous, Allen suggests that the prefix trans moves beside,
through and across (6), thus representing movements susceptible
to disrupt colonial order. Allen also insists that local work is of global
importance not in opposition to but rather because of its relationship to a
particular place (135-136). Although rooted in Indigenous locales and their
specific histories, Indigenous art production speaks to global issues and
enables the establishment of wider networks. However, he also remarks that there
must remain a centre for art production to talk back to, even as other nodes
emerge through exchange. Critics, therefore, need to postpone the urge to
generalise from the local to theorise an aesthetic (141), instead adopting a
more mobile framework that sees the local in movement through a range of
spaces, just as when the Beaulieu brothers transpose Anishinaabe artistic
imagination onto transnational spaces. There is a notable difference between
the pan-Indian focus of Allen's Trans-Indigenous, which describes
exchanges between Indigenous peoples across the globe, and the transnational
scope of Vizenor's work, where Anishinaabe art is transposed onto
non-Indigenous spaces. As mixedbloods, the protagonists of Blue Ravens
attempt to rethink France as a place of origins as well as a site that bears
the traces of colonialism.
The novel also
tackles the question of belonging: leaving the reservation to establish
themselves as artists in Paris, Anishinaabe characters suggest different
networks of connection and kinship. Besides sharing stories about their
experience of growing up on White Earth reservation, Basile and Aloysius do not
refer to themselves as Native American. Instead, they rely on their art and
storytelling to convey their particular outlook and sensibility as Anishinaabe
subjects. This refusal to converge with the discourse of identity politics
suggests alternatives for Native identities and relations. Mohawk scholar Audra
Simpson argues that on the Kahnawà:ke reserve, people have recourse to their
knowledge of a kinship network that enables them to recognise one another as
tribal members regardless of official regulations regarding membership:
"This archive of social and genealogical knowledge operates as an
authorizing nexus of identification that also can and sometimes does refuse
logics of the state" (15). The question of consent, of individuals and
groups accepting the state citizenship offered to them, is at the forefront of
conversations concerning membership (17). In effect, the granting of
citizenship asserts the state's power (18), which tribal members can refuse to
comply with "based upon the validity and vitality of their own
philosophical and governmental systems, systems that predate the advent
of the settler state" (19). When it comes to overlapping claims to
territory, Simpson argues that "[r]ecognition is the gentler form,
perhaps, or the least corporeally violent way of managing Indians and their
difference, a multicultural solution to the settlers' Indian problem. The
desires and attendant practices of settlers get rerouted, or displaced, in
liberal argumentation through the trick of toleration" (20). However, far
from being benign, these tactics nevertheless conform to "settler logics
of elimination" (12). In Blue Ravens, the Beaulieu brothers never
identify as American, and in fact often behave in ways that challenge federal
regulations regarding Native Americans; for instance, they routinely cross
reservation boundaries without asking for the agent's permission. What is more,
the freedom they find in Paris is positioned against restrictive reservation
politics, suggesting that transnational practices correspond more closely to
Anishinaabe identities than the negotiation of Indigeneity as limited to a
reservation home base. The novel instead outlines a fluid relational
network that starts by blurring the logic of blood relations as the only family
model, history versus fiction and Indigeneity as tied to the reservation. The
first chapter establishes partial genealogies and a brief history of the
Vizenor and Beaulieu families—Gerald Vizenor's ancestors (9-10/134). The
past is thereby reimagined in ways that create new possibilities for the
present and future. In Blue Ravens, family is not restricted to direct
descendency and blood ties. The Beaulieu brothers, it turns out, are not real
twins since Aloysius was adopted by Basile's parents, who raised them as
"natural brothers" (3). Namesakes likewise share common
characteristics, as though it constituted a kind of kinship (9). Basile describes
their identities as "steadfast brothers on the road of lonesome warriors,
a native artist and writer ready to transmute the desolation of war with blue
ravens and poetic scenes of a scary civilization and native liberty" (8).
There is a sense that artistic engagement provides a new type of family,
created by the meeting of aesthetic sensibilities.
Geographical
Movement
The novel stages a series of movements:
out of the reservation, across the Atlantic Ocean, and in the brothers' art
itself, increasingly demonstrating the importance of mobile aesthetics in
engaging with the French capital. From the start, the novel explores
connections between the White Earth Reservation and other places, showing
characters' mobile practices on the American continent. Movement is at the
forefront in Blue Ravens, not only in terms of aesthetics but also more
pragmatically as a form of geographical curiosity, which manifests in the
brothers' refusal to be bound to White Earth exclusively. Early on, the
Beaulieus are connected to the world outside the reservation by the railway
that brings travellers from Winnipeg and Saint Paul, and takes the brothers
from Ogema Station to Minneapolis as they hawk newspapers (15). Train rides
enable the brothers to touch upon the essential quality of freedom, which
motivates their art:
The slow and steady motion of the train
created our private window scenes [...] We were eager captives in the motion and
excitement of railroad time [...] We decided then that we would rather be in the
motion of adventure, chance, and the future. (27)
The names and possibilities of other
places stimulate their imagination and artistic sensibilities, seemingly
offering alternatives to the constraints of life on the reservation. When the
Great White Fleet leaves San Francisco in 1908, Aloysius paints blue ravens on
the ship masts and renames it the Great Blue Peace Fleet in order to represent "a
greater sense of peace than the voyage of dominance around the world by sixteen
white battleships of the United States Navy" (22). Already, Aloysius's art
expresses a sense of Native motion that counters federal attempts to establish
dominance both on the reservation and internationally, while allowing the
brothers to travel in imagination far beyond the boundaries of their known
environment along with the painted ravens to "Australia, New Zealand,
Philippine Islands, Brazil, Chile, Peru" (22) years before they are
drafted to Europe for the war. From the beginning, a tight relationship between
movement, art, and politics is cultivated. Art is created in motion and, in
turn, motion is represented through art, shaping the movement of Aloysius's
blue ravens. Manifesting the impression of movement onto art, Aloysius also
uses the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi as a setting for "a row of
three blue ravens [...] with enormous wings raised to wave away the poison
coal-fire smoke" raised by the train (28). Abstract art documents the
artist's presence and is further reflected by Basile's ekphrasis as he
describes the scenes, writing his brother's art on to the landscape. Movement
prompts them to create and is then captured onto their creation, which remain mobile
through their suggestive power. The brothers also visit Minneapolis (39) to
enable Aloysius to meet other artists and show his own work.
The Beaulieus spend several formative
years on the reservation before being drafted to France. Once they arrive in
Europe, the narrative reimagines the stories of White Earth veterans to stage
an active native presence in the war. Basile's narrative also shows a tendency
to romanticise the French and stresses a particular sense of kinship due to the
entanglements of Anishinaabe and French fur trade histories. The brothers
express reverence towards "our distant ancestors, the fur traders"
(107), and Basile describes French officers as "courteous" but
"firm," in contrast to the "arrogant poses and manners" of
the British (101). The brothers paradoxically experience the approach of France
by ship as a "magical return and at the same time a discovery" (107)—the
magical return to the land of their French ancestors, and a Native discovery of
a different continent.
Three transatlantic crossings suggest
longtime connections between Europe and Native America. Jace Weaver's The
Red Atlantic traces the history of crossings in the Atlantic, starting with
Viking settlements. Weaver takes into account not just geographical journeys
across the ocean but also traces the various ways in which these affected the
wider Native American population through economic and cultural exchanges. He
shows that trans-Atlantic relations are not limited to travels across the ocean
but soon involved inland inhabitants via trade networks, forming a
"multi-lane, two-way bridge across which traveled ideas and things that
changed both Europeans and American indigenes" (30). Far from compromising
authenticity, "the cosmopolitanism and hybridity of Indians" actually
demonstrates that "Natives and their cultures had always been highly
adaptive, appropriating and absorbing anything that seemed useful or
powerful" (30). In short, "The Red Atlantic is part of a larger story
of globalization and the worldwide movement Western Hemisphere indigenes and
their technologies, ideas, and material goods" (32). Weaver exposes many
of the biographies that have been obscured, forgotten, or mis-remembered,
revealing the erasure of Indigenous political actors and especially women, and
representing them as active agents. Recentring the map across the ocean reframes
the narrative of Blue Ravens as a series of crossings: in and out of the
reservation, across the ocean to France, back to Minnesota and to Paris again,
while also emphasising the continuous history of such migrations as reflected
in the histories of French trading ancestors and Indigenous movement and
exchange throughout the hemisphere. Basile and Aloysius repeatedly affiliate
themselves with their fur trader ancestors to designate France as a place of
origin as much as a new land for them to explore, which playfully destabilises
binary notions of settler discovery in opposition to Indigenous fixity.
War
does not prevent the Beaulieus from practicing their arts but, rather,
motivates them to develop in new directions. They re-imagine their direct
environment through their artistic production, which provides a means to shape
stories and heal people and place from the events of the war, while also
shaping their experience. Basile's war stories are published on the
reservation, which prompts him to write and send his pieces regularly (97).
Basile also reads a translation of Homer during training and service (103),
inserting passages from The Odyssey into his wider narrative, thus
establishing constant parallels between the epic and the brothers' lives as
soldiers (108). Basile's book (and Blue Ravens), like The Odyssey,
is written in twenty-four sections (90). By reading Homer in the trenches, he
transposes another imagination onto the landscape, which provides another
example of transnational exchanges, where an Indigenous American in France is
inspired by Ancient Greece and, through literary aesthetics, weaves these
elements together seamlessly. Reality is to be reinvented through art, storied
imaginatively, in order to maintain a sense of presence and movement. Traumatic
events are re-imagined through visual aesthetics to convey resilience, and
scenes are often depicted as paintings themselves (116). Aloysius's use of woad
blue, from a plant that was used to produce blue paint in Europe before indigo
was imported, shows that his development, or adaptation, of Native knowledge in
his new locale, creates connection between geographically separated forms of
Indigenous knowledge. Its "elusive blues" produce "subtle hues,
and the scenes created a sense of motion and ceremony" (126). The plant
becomes part of the artist, whose blue tongue, acquired by mixing paint, earns
him the nickname of Blueblood (126). It integrates history when he paints blue
wing feathers on the cheeks of seven soldiers for combat (129). The scenes they
witness turn into art themselves, albeit without being romanticised: "The
war was surreal, faces, forests, and enemies" (130). Again, colours play a
crucial role in Aloysius's rendering of war scenes, each of them possessing
special significance. As mentioned above, his blue ravens are associated with
memory and remembrance, whereas black has more macabre connotations. In
Aloysius's palette, even "the night is blue" (2). During the war, the
painter uses black in a painting for the first time to represent apartment
buildings ravaged by German bombing (116-117). Used as war paint, charcoal also
washes away faster than the blue paint (132), the latter leaving more durable
and stable traces. The trace of rouge in the paintings, first suggested by the
Japanese artist Baske, is reminiscent of "the red crown of the totemic
sandhill crane" (120). War paint is also used on the reservation when a
French Banquet is reproduced by John Leecy for war veterans (179), and later at
the Parisian art gallery exhibition, when Aloysius paints a blue raven on his
hand and another on Basile's face (276). Depictions of French war scenes both
transpose reservation symbols and images onto the European landscape and act as
signifiers of Indigeneity in the Parisian artistic milieu where they come to
stand as a symbol for the mutilés de guerre. Basile likewise travels in
spirit through his descriptions: "I [...] imagined that the war was over and
we had returned to the livery stables at the Hotel Leecy. The maple leaves had
turned magical and radiant in the bright morning light that brisk autumn on the
reservation. The sandhill cranes were on the wing, ravens bounced on the leafy
roads, and the elusive cedar waxwings hovered in the bright red sumac"
(135). This scene reveals similarities in the Beaulieu brothers' imagination,
where the sense of aesthetics, colour, and vision is largely shared. Basile's
depictions often look like paintings: "I might have become a painter
instead of a creative writer [...] with a sense of color, tone, touch, style, and
a choice of literary brushes" (205). The return to the reservation,
inversely, brings the presence of French war scenes back to White Earth:
"The First World War continues forever on the White Earth Reservations
[sic] in the stories of veterans and survivors of combat. We were the native
descendants of the fur trade who returned with new stories from France"
(140). Continuity is thus maintained, even as the ocean is crossed for the
second time, through the imaginative power of visual art and stories. Of
course, the veterans suffer from the violence that their participation as
soldiers has subjected them to: "The allied casualties sustained to
recover these common country scenes have forever [...] haunted the memories and
stories of war veterans on the reservation" (138). Although it ends
abruptly, the war leaves tangible traces on both the soldiers' psyches and the
land.
France,
memory, and Freedom
Following the war, France becomes a
place of connection while the brothers experience rupture with reservation
experience. Even when warfare finally ceases, places are marked and will keep
memories of the war, transforming human matter into life-sustaining food: "The
native forests and field would bear forever the blood, brain, and cracked bones
in every season of the fruit trees and cultivated sugar beets" (141); a
sense of active remembering and processing is missing from their home in
Minnesota, where it is replaced by the patriotism, the "hoax, theatrical
and political revision" (169) promoted by post-war U.S. politics. Finding
that their capacity to create has been affected by the war, they obtain
furlough and leave for Paris to pursue the "vision of art and literature"
(144), where they encounter disfigured soldiers wearing masks and Aloysius
paints ravens with abstract masks (147) that counter the somewhat grotesque
realism of the soldiers' prosthetics. He deems the hornbeam leg a soldier
carved for himself "a work of art" (149), emblematic of Aloysius's
desire to create an "abstract work of art" rather than an
"aesthetic disguise" (150). War provides a productive site to engage
with remembrance in the face of the absences created by conflict and loss, in
that respect not unlike the ongoing experience of colonisation on the
reservation. The need to envision a different future thus creates a bridge
between the Anishinaabe brothers and post-war French. Ravens are painted on
diverse Quays and bridges, such as the Pont des Arts raven, which reveals
"a native presence in our names, blue paint, and in my [Basile's]
stories" (151). Thus, during their visit to Paris, the brothers establish
their presence as Native artists through art, visiting the favourite meeting
places of artists, such as Café du Dôme (152) and painting ravens in those
locations (153) to act as "visual memories" (250). In Café de Flore
one morning, the Beaulieus envision their possible future as artists in the
City of Lights (153/154), and La Rotonde becomes one of the few "sovereign
cafés" where artists meet and discuss politics (157), and argue somewhat
extravagantly, manifesting similar behaviour to the "native conduct on the
reservation" (159). Nathan Crémieux's[3]
gallery provides a space where Aloysius's art is admired and respected.
Knowledgeable about Native art, Nathan is moved by the blue ravens (155) and
deems the art avant-garde (162), offering to frame and sell some of the
paintings in his gallery (163). Thus, he does not participate in "[t]he
French romance of natives and nature [which] excluded the possibility of any
cosmopolitan experiences in the world" (161). Similarly, the Musée
d'Ethnographie is criticised for abandoning native arts and sanctioning the
theft of sacred artefacts (166), without mentioning "the voices of native
artists," the "cosmototemic voices," thus adding a second crime:
"the abuse of precious cultural memories" (166). France provides a
space in which Indigenous presence can take hold, provided it is tied to
remembrance. There is a strong relationship between land and memory as the
former carries indelible markers of the latter. For instance, by dying in
combat, Ignatius's spirit "returned to the earth of his fur trade
ancestors" (164); showing that to the Anishinaabe protagonists France is
not an exile, but a return, a coming home of sorts. Scenes of war cling to
them, making the return to White Earth difficult for the writer and artists:
"Aloysius painted nothing on our return to the reservation. He could not
paint the reversal of war" (169). In sharp contrast with the freedom found
in avant-garde Paris after the war, their homeland is under strict
supervision: "We returned to
a federal occupation on the reservation [...] neither peace nor the end of the
war" (170). The gap between "federal and church politics on the
reservation [...] and the generous cosmopolitan world of art and literature
revealed the wounds of my spirit" (170) is hard to heal. Despite
recovering a "basic native sense of survivance," near Bad Boy Lake,
they know that there is no "truce of remembrance" or "reversal
of war memories" (172) on the reservation, and long for the freedom found
in France: "the anthem of fraternité, égalité, and liberté was necessary
on the White Earth Reservation" (176). Published under the title French
Returns: The New Fur Trade (177), Basile's latest stories focus on Native
veterans, thus manifesting his will to bear the memory of France but also his
hope to return to Paris in the near future. Considered the "best of the
outsiders" on the reservation (183), they no longer fully belong to the
community and cannot lose memories of the war (190) that generate fear and
weaken stories (191). Just as Aloysius is determined to move to Minneapolis
"to meet with other artists, and encounter a new world of chance"
(196), Basile agrees that "for my brother and me, the reservation would
never be enough to cope with the world or to envision the new and wild
cosmopolitan world of exotic art, literature, music [...]" (197). The letter
from Nathan Crémieux telling them he has sold most of the raven paintings at
his gallery (208) reveals a receptivity to the brothers' art, unequaled outside
of Paris, where their aesthetics of motion as Natives intrigues and moves
people. Applying for passports (211), they embark on their "return voyage
to France" (215), again framing it as a homecoming that recalls the
"premier union" of French fur traders "with our ancestors the
native Anishinaabe" (255). James Mackay has drawn attention to a tendency
in Native American literature to represent Europe in a positive light,
indicating that it serves the purpose of building an alliance against U.S.
power by drawing on "the deep-rooted sense of tradition shared by indigenous
and European peoples" (170). Referring to Vizenor's previous novel Shrouds of White Earth, he notes that
"the novel's invocation of France must be understood as a subtle countervailing
force to what might otherwise be a simplistic anti-colonial screed" (173).
However, even as Vizenor aims to "overturn the negative associations that
inhere in the word 'primitivism,'" he nevertheless "celebrates notions of
shamanism and native visionary art" (177) that may end up "reifying the
category" (171) and its colonial undertones. Thus, once the war is over, what
Paris offers to the Beaulieus seems to conveniently side-step the reality of
colonisation; in opposition to the occupied space of the reservation, the city
is largely idealised despite the protagonists' critique of ethnographic
practices.
Transnational
Aesthetics
Finally, Blue Ravens suggests
that an Anishinaabe artistic practice can establish strong ties with Paris as
well as create networks based on its aesthetic sensibility. Art provides and
maintains connection with Paris by enabling an Indigenous relationship to the
urban space. In Paris, Nathan provides a safe environment for the brothers,
becoming their promoter and protector as he denounces "the primacy of the
primitive" as a product of "fascist sentiments" (221), believing
that "natives had always been modernists" (222). In an echo of the Paris
school of art, Nathan calls their art Ecole Indienne (225). Rather
than framing this patronage as problematic, the narrative describes the gallery
as a dynamic space of openness that makes Aloysius's art available to
like-minded people and enables connection with other artists. Writing in cafés
and enjoying food provides another kind of home for the Beaulieus. Basile often
writes in cafés, finding the freedom that was missing from White Earth and
meets up weekly with other Natives at the Café du Dôme, the latter becoming a
"new commune of native storiers that had started many centuries earlier on
the Mississippi river" (240). They establish a "commune of river
veterans" who tease the two artists, a "native sanctuary" (246).
These many parallels with life on the reservation demonstrate that, far from a
rupture from their Indigenous background, Paris represents a fuller realisation
of their artistic sensibilities while they retain their particularities as
Native artists. In some ways, the capital becomes an artistic reservation for
the Beaulieus, whose aesthetic heritage is honoured. Audra Simpson describes
how in tribal contexts, the definition of membership can become a point of
contention as to what the "terms of recognition" are: memory, blood,
participation (40), or simply claims of belonging (41). Simpson proposes the
term of "feelings citizenships" as a means to describe the
"alternative citizenships to the state that are structured in the present
space of intracommunity recognition, affection, and care, outside of the logics
of colonial and imperial rule" (109). Distinct from membership (171), they
represent "the affective sense of being a Mohawk [...] in spite of the lack
of recognition that some may unjustly experience" (173). Although not
formally recognized by institutional structures, these living citzenships are
narratively constructed, linked politically and socially to "the
simultaneous topography of colonialism and Iroquoia," creating "a
frame of collective experience" (175) that functions in more fluid ways
than institutional regulations of tribal membership. Simpson's research speaks
from the perspective of Kahnawà:ke, where Mohawks strongly resist Canadian
citizenship as it constitutes a direct threat to their sovereignty. In Blue
Ravens, the Beaulieus never identify themselves as American but, rather, as
coming from White Earth specifically, implicitly claiming Anishinaabe
citizenship as distinct from the settler state. What is more, they use their
connection to France and its avant-garde scene as a way of circumventing U.S.
settler rule on the reservation in order to find free artistic expression.
Thus, despite emerging from a very different tribal context, and being less
place-bound, the narrative also reexamines notions of belonging that are tied
to citizenship, in this case through aesthetics.
Formative of the
brothers' capacity to create networks around them, chance associations also
carry over into the artistic process. First painted on newspaper print, Aloysius's
ravens are distinctively blue, a colour tied to memory and imagination. Basile
describes the blue ravens as "traces of visions and original abstract
totems, the chance associations of native memories in the natural world"
(1). Whereas black "has no tease or sentiment," shades of blue
"are ironic, the tease of natural light" (2). Aloysius's ravens also
stand out due to the types of paint he uses, "only natural paint
colors" which his mother "made with crushed plums, blue berries, or
the roots of red cedars" and by "boil[ing] decomposed maple stumps
and includ[ing] fine dust of various soft stones to concoct the rich darker
hues of blue and purple" (7). Later in Paris, he mixes natural pigments
and honey (267). While Aloysius experimented with his blue ravens, Marc Chagall
was also creating "blue visionary creatures and communal scenes" (2).
The same summer, Henri Matisse painted Nu Bleu, Souvenir de Biskra (1); and Aloysius shared avant-garde,
impressionist and expressionist features with Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (8) long before
they met in Paris. Thus, the Anishinaabe painter's production is synchronistic
with other innovative artists of the time, reflecting aspects of their genius
even as it maintains local characteristics such as the
paint he uses. While the Beaulieus grow up as Natives on an Anishinaabe
reservation, their creativity lets them participate in another community with
which they share certain aesthetic sensibilities simultaneously, and without
any contradiction. Transmotion, it appears, can also entail that meeting of
spirits across space.
Indeed, the brothers'
claim to belonging to White Earth, although confirmed by blood and kinship,
develops a rhetoric that asserts their attachment to the homeland but also
encompasses a sense of Paris as a space compatible with their own Indigenous
heritage. Indeed, the Beaulieu brothers are not alone in perceiving the world
through an Anishinaabe lens: other non-Native characters are open to different
points of view and understand the Beaulieus very well, perhaps fulfilling the
notion that they have ancestors in common, a heritage to share—ties that
are paradoxically stronger in France than in the U.S., where the reservation is
described as politically corrupt, in contrast with "the liberty of
France" (253). Aloysius creates many paintings of memory in Parisian
locales ("memorial bridges were portrayed in natural motion" (220)),
as well as ironic re-presencing of Natives from stolen stories: painted totem
scenes (270), counterpoints to Exposition Universelle—the International
Exposition—and Delacroix's Natchez, thus indigenising the city as
well as incorporating transnational influences. Among them, Basile calls
Apollinaire his "poetic totem" (213) while Aloysius borrows from the
Japanese floating world tradition (226), echoing Hokusai in his ravens merging
with waves. This Japanese influence on Aloysius's painting was initiated years
before, in Saint Paul, when the Japanese artist Yamada Baske (44) invited the
brothers to his studio. Baske admired Aloysius's ravens and understood them as
"native impressionism, an original style of abstract blue ravens"
(46). Before parting, he gave "a tin of rouge watercolour paint" to
the Anishinaabe artist, advising him to add "a tiny and faint hue of
rouge" to the blue scenes (47). This "master teacher" is the
first artist who directly intervenes in the painter's technique, evaluating it
with sensitivity and helping Aloysius move forward with his art. The sense of
movement manifested by Japanese art is shown as compatible with the aesthetic
transmotion of the Anishinaabe painter, and reflects Vizenor's longstanding
interest in Japanese art and literature. Indeed, while serving in the US
military, the author was posted in Japan in 1953 and borrowed from the haiku
tradition, which he described in "Envoy to Haiku" as "an
overture to dream songs" (26), implying that certain aspects of Japanese
culture are highly compatible with his own Anishinaabe background. The 2003
novel Hiroshima Bugi also bears testament to the enduring influence of
Japan in the author's work. Such convergences manifest the transnational
connections which artistic expression makes possible in Vizenor's work. In Blue
Ravens, Basile's stories are likewise connected to Parisian locales (284),
ascribing meaning to those locales and affirming the artists' ties to place,
thus suggesting a sense of belonging that is akin to Simpson's "feelings
citizenship" but no longer attached exclusively to a reservation
community, an "aesthetic citizenship" which the brothers transpose
through art onto transnational spaces that become indigenised. Basile's
statement that "the stories never seemed to really end that night"
reasserts the sense of memory established by this coming together of artists
and veterans in a "secure sense of presence", "a natural sense
of solace" (285). The novel ends with a quotation from the last book of The
Odyssey: "never yet did any stranger come to me whom I liked
better" (285) so that the scene ends in perfect transnational harmony, a
meeting of souls around visual art and story.
Conclusion
Blue Ravens
turns towards France to situate the White-Earth-based Beaulieu brothers as
artists at the heart of the modernist movement in Paris. Gerald Vizenor's novel
thus proposes a model for the creation of transnational network of aesthetic
affiliations that refers back to a tribal centre even as it explores other
places. This model creates cross-Atlantic pathways that in some ways reiterate,
and in other ways reverse, the spatial practices of the protagonists'
ancestors. Juxtaposing Anishinaabe perspectives onto new territories through
aesthetics and exchange as the brothers' art finds an appreciative audience in
Paris, the novel envisions a kind of Indigenous space where artists and other
art afficionados develop affinities with Aloysius's paintings and Basile's stories.
Non-Native characters manage to eschew the trappings of authenticity and
acknowledge the fluidity of blue raven paintings as participating in the
avant-garde scene of Paris as well as emerging from White Earth in distinctive
ways. The novel thus encourages readers and critics to rethink notions of
Indigeneity as bounded in place and provides useful elements towards a more
transnational model for Native Studies; a shift that could bear particular
importance for the many registered tribal Nations without an official land base,
as well as Indigenous individuals who live away from their traditional
homelands and/or communities. Blue Ravens thus asks productive questions
about the significance of calling oneself Anishinaabe when living in global
spaces, arguing that the category holds meaning far beyond containment within
reservation—or even continental—borders. Instead, aesthetic
practices that convey transmotion enable Indigeneity to write itself upon
transnational spaces and establish new networks of belonging.
Works Cited
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Minnesota Press. 2008.
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[1]
In this article, I use the
terms "Native" and "Indigenous" interchangeably to avoid
repetition. While "Native" always refers to North American Indians
specifically, "Indigenous" can apply to global Indigenous subjects
more broadly. For more precision, I prefer to employ the term
"Anishinaabe" where relevant.
[2] Bearing in mind that there is now a serious controversy regarding
Boyden's claims to Indigenous identity.
[3]
Nathan is a French gallerist who admires Aloysius's art and promotes his work
by organising openings (where Basile also reads his writing) and selling his
paintings. He becomes the brothers' protector and introduces them to other
artists, thus helping to establish their reputation in the Parisian scene.
While the narrative presents this relationship in a positive light, it
nevertheless carries unsettling colonial undertones.