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In his discussion of Kimberly Blaeser 's 1996 book, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (part of the long bibliographic essay that opens the collection titled Reasoning Together), Craig Womack raises significant questions regarding the meaning and value of Vizenor's own writing. While insisting that Vizenor is "a writer I greatly admire," Womack's survey of his work is, in fact, more full of "worry" than praise. Womack questions Vizenor's use of poststructuralist theory and registers anxiety about the implications of that theory for indigenous cultural and political self-definition ("Single Decade" 65). He suggests that the seeming open-endedness of meaning in Vizenor's texts makes it more "theoretically difficult . . . to mount an argument for prioritizing Indian readings of Indian literature" (67). He questions whether Vizenor's signature "trickster" discourse is, in fact, indigenous.1 He wonders whether Vizenor's penchant for neologism is merely "annoying" (69). Finally, and most significantly in light of his own view (forcefully expressed in Red on Red) that "Native literature, and Native literary criticism by Native authors, is part of sovereignty," Womack doubts the "relevance of an inaccessible prose style toward intervening in the real world, where every year Native people face issues of land loss, threats to jurisdiction, new calls from redneck politicians for the federal government to end the trust relationship with tribes, and so on" (72).2 At the end of all this, of course, one might wonder what is left in Vizenor's work to admire, especially at a moment in Native American studies where pragmatic political concerns are increasingly driving the scholarly agenda. Indeed, if Womack's assessment is accurate, there would seem to be little place for Vizenor in an increasingly praxis-oriented field.
Many scholars have mounted compelling defenses of Vizenor's writing against skeptical criticism, of course, but those defenses have often been primarily literary in focus, exploring Vizenor's aesthetic achievements rather than responding to the kind of political challenge Womack delivers.3 In this essay I begin with the presumption that debates about whether political concerns should trump aesthetic ones in critical assessments of Vizenor are, in fact, misguided; his aesthetic is, in my view, deeply political. Vizenor's recent foray into the "real world" (his work as the principal drafter of the proposed new constitution of the White...