Native Tributes

by Gerald Vizenor

  The other services on the six-day journey included a huge chapel with gothic style pillars, a shooting gallery, a gymnasium, and curved wooden deck chairs. Yet, despite the favors and comforts we looked back a few times and told stories to overcome the culture and demeanor of the cruise, stories about our shanty of liberty, reveille, retreat, moody veterans and the camaraderie of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.

  Ritzy motion was a natural native tease.

  Our tourist cabin station restricted access to some decks and sections of the ship, of course, but we managed to tour by invitation and by stealth most of the premier outposts of social status. The Terrace Café was reminiscent of Le Dôme Café in Paris, a classy imitation, but not with the envy and steady tease of artists and poets on the run, and never with the constant stench of bodies, perfume, paint, cigarettes, and house wine.

  Thomas Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel were hardly the subjects of casual conversations in the salons or on deck, so my mockery of southern nostalgia was sidelined by the steady chitchat about cuisine and the wine terroir, political factions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the nomination of Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York for president of the United States.

  Mostly the weather was clear the first few days, and in the afternoons nearly all of the passengers were reclined on deck chairs with only a few unread cruise books at hand. The most common were The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, and Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes.

  Practically every woman on deck wore a cloche hat, and most of the men wore ivy or newsboy caps. Our gray fedoras were rolled and out of shape, and might have blown away on the windy decks, but we wore the creases with pleasure at the very poses of high cruise customs.

  The wind and waves were deceptive and treacherous, and our best stories were moored, out of class, and yet every season, storm, disease, and war became our duty in native stories. We were at sea with a distant but lenient culture that would never survive the reservation or the lusty stories of winter with the Ice Woman.

  I was out early every day, selected a deck chair at the stern of the ship, and created scenes for more stories about the Lower East Side, Jack Biblo, Eda Lou Walton, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, the Bonus Army, William Hushka, and By Now at the Federal Triangle and Anacostia Flats. The ocean waves were wide and steady, hardly noticeable, and traces of the wake continued at a great distance behind the ship. The constant rush of the screw and vibration of the engines were more obvious at the stern. The sensation of the steady sounds set me afloat in dreams, not sleep, but that discrete sense of reverie, a natural source of native dream stories.

  Natives were created in dreams and truth stories, the tease and chance of creation, and the natives we admired were never on the road in any season without a sense of chance and stories. Natives were hardly secure with mere names, not even the tease of worldly surnames of ancient fur traders, but dream names were always changeable in stories about creation, the winter, war, art, literature, and deadly poverty.

  We pretended that most natives were dreamers and teachers, hunters and traders, creative painters and storiers, and better storiers because not many natives at the time were commercial farmers or shopkeepers, mechanics, railroad engineers, sailors, mercenaries, missionaries, butlers, professors, doctors, and yet natives outlasted the constant turns of economic depression, forecasts of poverty, and, of course, the corruption of federal policies. We created original and ironic dream stories of the Depression and the chance of native feats in the early cruise liner class of the enemy way.

  The family newspaper, exotic traders, railroads and hotels, telephones and radios, art and literature, the last great war, diva mongrels and the tricky hand puppets were the sources of our circle of knowledge, the chance of spirited encounters, and once more the mighty ocean was another chance of native dream stories.

  Blue Raven was a nickname, not a sacred or given dream name. Aloysius wondered if he might have been a dream or sacred name of a nun at the mission. “My name might have been one of the blanket dream names of priests and saints, Ignatius and Aloysius.”

  My brother dreamed of ravens as a child, told dream stories about ravens, and he imitated the chatter and shouts of ravens in the bare winter birch. He was inspired with the dream flight of a great blue raven over the mission and hospital, and the blue drifts of a winter storm were the shadows of blue ravens in his dream stories. There were no clouds, only the great shadows of blue raven wings over the White Earth Reservation.

  Dream stories were original, of course, and no two natives ever told the same dream stories. Debwe truth stories were never mere recitations or repetitions. Even creation stories were related with a sense of chance, not memorized or constant and studied as liturgy. The truth stories were creative and ironic, as truth stories must be ironic because the last story has never been told, and always with the native tease of sincerity.

  The ocean waves inspired dream stories.

  Truth stories were necessary to stay afloat.

  Clergy Dust, a small woman of the cloth, arrived one spring afternoon on a horse from the east some thirty years ago. She may have been born native, and the stories she told about dream treaties were quirky and conceivable as stories once told by shamans, but the treaties she dreamed and preached were terminal, end of the road stories, and the outcomes were scriptural salvation, not a native sense of chance in creation stories.

  Not many natives on the reservation ever trusted the preacher or her treaty dreams. She was mocked, and that was our fun as boys, but even so we were wary and only once or twice dared to shout out the names Dirt Talker or Dream Cheater.

  My mother was very direct about the dream cheaters and never hesitated to mock the preacher, “What was the tense of your dream treaty?” My favorite story was the night at the Leecy Hotel when my mother saw the dream cheater in the lobby and asked her, “Dream me the native pronouns of your peace treaty.” The hotel visitors burst into laughter, but the constant teases never seemed to worry Clergy Dust.

  The dreams we cared about were creative stories that were told and recreated with many versions. No one would listen to the last stories, because only the despots told final stories. The old condition of the words, verbs, and nouns of treaties and the many treaty promises and hesitations of federal agents were ironic, but never, never dream stories.

  Shamans and the great native visionaries would, as a game, only reveal in stories the catch and release words of a new daydream, or delight and mock a treaty on a summer night. Likewise no sober citizen, lawyer, poet, or president would pretend to own the many dream stories and circles of knowledge that created the Declaration of Independence.

  Clergy Dust was dedicated and at times admired with sympathy for her awkward resistance to the steady and cruel teases of natives. So many other dream cheaters had arrived in the worst of times and tested natives, our family and friends, and then moved on to a better scene of treaty conversions.

  Dummy Trout created only one dream cheater hand puppet, but she could not mimic the gestures of fake treaty promises, or the terminal shows of priests and missionaries. Dream cheaters were persistent and foreseeable, and present in every word and sentence of the past and future, and that was the natural motion of native irony. The spirit of native doubt, contradiction, and irony has already overturned the dream treaties of the most obvious cheaters. Native trickster stories, however, revealed the dream cheaters with demon masks, hand puppets, and the tender hoax of faint praise. The White Earth Reservation sustains contradictions and traces of irony and truth stories.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gerald Vizenor is the author of more than twenty books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He attended college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the armed forces for three years, mostly in Japan, and studied at New York University, Harvard University, and the University of Minnesota. He is Anishinaabe and a citizen of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota.

  bsp; Gerald Vizenor, Native Tributes