NATIVE
TRIBUTES
GERALD
VIZENOR
NATIVE
TRIBUTES
‹|› HISTORICAL NOVEL ‹|›
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown CT 06459
2018 © Gerald Vizenor
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed and typeset in Fairfield LH by Kate Tarbell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
NAMES: Vizenor, Gerald Robert, 1934– author.
TITLE: Native tributes: historical novel / Gerald Vizenor.
DESCRIPTION: Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2018008567 (print) | LCCN 2018014228 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819578266 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819578259 (pbk.)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Indians of North America — Political activity — Fiction. | Veterans — Political activity — United States — Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction
CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3572.I9 (ebook) | LCC PS3572.I9 N38 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008567
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Painting by Rick Bartow, Crow Magic. Courtesy of the Froelick Gallery.
IN MEMORY OF NATIVE VETERANS
of the Bonus Army
‹|›
CONTENTS
‹| 1 |›
DUMMY TROUT
Dummy Trout surprised me that spring afternoon at the Blue Ravens Exhibition. She raised two brazen hand puppets, the seductive Ice Woman on one hand, and the wily Niinag Trickster on the other, and with jerky gestures the rough and ready puppets roused the native stories of winter enticements and erotic teases.
The puppets distracted the spectators at the exhibition of abstract watercolors and sidetracked the portrayals of native veterans and blue ravens mounted at the Ogema Train Station on the White Earth Reservation. The station agent provided the platform for the exhibition, and winced at the mere sight of the hand puppets. He shunned the crude wooden creatures and praised the scenes of fractured soldiers and blue ravens, an original native style of totemic fauvism by Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu.
The puppets were a trace of trickster stories.
Dummy was clever and braved desire and mockery as a mute for more than thirty years with the ironic motion of hand puppets. Miraculously she survived a firestorm on her eighteenth birthday, walked in uneven circles for three days, mimed the moods of heartache, and never voiced another name, word, or song. She grieved, teased, and snickered forever in silence. Nookaa, her only lover, and hundreds of other natives were burned to white ashes and forgotten in the history of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.
Dummy stowed a fistful of ash in a Mason jar.
Snatch, Papa Pius, Makwa and two other lively and loyal mongrels lived with the mute native puppeteer in the Manidoo Mansion, a shack covered with tarpaper near the elbow of Spirit Lake on the White Earth Reservation.
The lakeside house and place name were overstated in mockery, and yet that shack with a slant roof and two small windows became a monument of native memories, of the endurance of a gutsy native voyageur who tutored soprano mongrels and revived the magic of native puppets. The mongrels were natural healers and devoted to the motion of hand puppets, caught the sleight of hand, the tease, crux and waves of gestures, and retrieved the murmurs, wishes and whimsy of the silent stories and mercy of memory.
Dummy Trout mimed, cued, teased, and signaled at ceremonies, parties, parades, and reservation events, and forever doted on that eternal native spirit in the bounce, jiggle, and conscious sway of the hand puppets.
Dummy was a silent storier of truth.
Snatch, a blotched blond spaniel and retriever, was the only migrant mongrel from outside the woodsy reservation, and the nickname described a moody manner at meals, as he snatched food and ran away to eat. Snatch and hundreds of other mongrels were abandoned with horses, pets, and even houses, barns, chapels of ease, and costly machinery during the Great Depression. The land was timeworn, farm families were evicted, even grease monkeys were suspended, and for thousands of veterans railroad boxcars became homes.
The mongrels avoided the vagrants and roamed in packs to survive, but most of the twitchy mongrels, once favored as escorts in the outback, slowly died of hunger, or were tracked down as puny prey by other animals. Snatch was enticed by the voice of a coloratura soprano, as stories of his rescue were told many times, and wandered with caution to the recorded sound of opera music at the Manidoo Mansion.
Papa Pius was nicknamed in honor of the succession of popes, an ironic gesture of pagan mongrels and spirited hand puppets. Makwa, the native word for bear, was a noisy mongrel terrier, forever teased with a hefty name. Miinan, the word for blueberry, named for the color of her heavy coat, and Queena, a rangy reservation basset hound and golden retriever mongrel, nicknamed in honor of the famous coloratura soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, were the two musical mongrels at Manidoo Mansion.
Dummy saluted opera sopranos with two handsome hand puppets, and marvelous truth stories were told about the great performances of mongrel singers.