29 Facts About Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Robert Vizenor was born on 1934 and is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation.

Gerald Vizenor was born to a mother who was Swedish-American and a father who was Anishinaabe.

Gerald Vizenor was raised by his mother and paternal Anishinaabe grandmother, along with a succession of paternal uncles, in Minneapolis and on the White Earth Reservation.

Honorably discharged before his unit went to Korea, Gerald Vizenor joined the army two years later.

Gerald Vizenor served with occupation forces in Japan, as that nation was still struggling to recover from the vast destruction of the nuclear attacks that ended World War II.

Gerald Vizenor followed this with postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota, where he undertook graduate teaching.

Gerald Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor.

Gerald Vizenor investigated the case of Thomas James White Hawk, convicted of murder.

Gerald Vizenor's perspective allowed him to raise difficult questions about the nature of justice in a society dealing with colonized peoples.

Gerald Vizenor's work was credited with enabling White Hawk to have his death sentence commuted.

Gerald Vizenor later satirized the academic world in some of his fiction.

Gerald Vizenor worked and taught for four years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Provost of Kresge College.

Gerald Vizenor had an endowed chair for one year at the University of Oklahoma.

Gerald Vizenor next was appointed as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gerald Vizenor is professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Gerald Vizenor was influenced by the French post-modernist intellectuals, particularly Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.

Gerald Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays, and many novels.

Gerald Vizenor has been named as a member of the literary movement which Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance, a flourishing of literature and art beginning in the mid-20th century.

Gerald Vizenor is killed with poisoned cookies, purportedly for her promoting racial separatism.

Frequently quoting European philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Gerald Vizenor has written a fiction that is allusive, humorous and playful, but deeply serious in portraying the state of Native America.

Gerald Vizenor has refused to romanticize the figure of the Native and opposes continued oppression.

Gerald Vizenor's major theme is that the idea of "Indian" as one people was an "invention" of European invaders.

Gerald Vizenor has written several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses.

Gerald Vizenor has edited several collections of academic work related to Native American writing.

Gerald Vizenor is the founder-editor of the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies series at the University of Oklahoma Press, which has provided an important venue for critical work on and by Native writers.

Gerald Vizenor's title, Fugitive Poses is derived from Vizenor's assertion that the term Indian is a social-science construction that replaces native peoples, who become absent or "fugitive".

Gerald Vizenor wrote that native peoples were still bound by "narratives of dominance" that replace them with "Indians".

Gerald Vizenor coined it to imply a process rather than an end, as the ways of tribal peoples continue to change.

Gerald Vizenor continues to criticize both Native American nationalism and Euro-American colonial attitudes.