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October 19, 2001
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By Jean Pagano Author and White Earth enrollee Gerald Vizenor recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Vizenor, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe from White Earth, is a prolific writer and author of works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, textbooks, and a contributor to numerous anthologies. He has been a professor at Lake Forest College, Bemidji State University, University of Minnesota, University of Oklahoma, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Vizenor also received the PEN Oakland, Josephine Miles Award, Excellence in Literature for the anthology Native American Literature in 1996, and the New York Fiction Collective Prize and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1988 for his novel entitled Griever: An American Monkey King in China. The Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas (NWCA) provides a database of Native American writers’ addresses, a library of works by Native authors, the maintenance of three annual literature prizes – the Lifetime Achievement Award, the First Book Award, and the Theresa Palmer Award. The NWCA contains a broad cross-section of Native peoples, and is maintained through the Native American Studies program at the University of Oklahoma. In Gerald Vizenor’s acceptance speech, he described his art, his métier, as follows: “Literature has been my fantasy and practice for more than fifty years, and for most of that time, literature has been my solemn, wordy, ironic trouble, and my profession as a journalist and teacher.” (Vizenor’s Acceptance Speech is reproduced in its entirety in this week’s issue) Vizenor’s works of fiction include Chancers, The Heirs of Columbus, and Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Non-fiction titles include Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, The Everlasting Sky: New Voices from the People Named the Chippewa, and Touchwood: A Collection of Ojibway Prose. Poetic works include Empty Swings (Haiku in English Series), and Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories. He has also authored a screen play Harold of Orange which won the Film-in-the-Cities national competition, Robert Redford Sundance Film Institute, 1983, and the film also won Best Film at the San Francisco Film Festival for American Indian Films. |
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