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Landfill Meditation
Crossblood Stories
Sales Date: 1991-11-22
211 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
Fourteen stories by the man N. Scott Momaday has called "the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century."
In these fourteen stories Gerald Vizenor leads his crossblood characters out of romantic thickets into a new tribal world of psychotaxidermy, laser holograms, and urban ceremonies. Dancing with tricksters, animals, and language is never dangerous in this collection. With the comic pleasures of tribal tricksters, Vizenor's fantastic characters arise from the burdens of racialism and noble savagism. Martin Bear Charme, in the title story, owns a reservation and conducts seminars on refuse meditation, pantribal fantasies, and animal languages. He restores the sublime connections between the refuse and the refusers, and earns a fortune at the same time. Almost Browne, another crossblood transformer, was born in the back seat of a hatchback, matured with computers, and projects laser demons over the reservation. Other crossbloods win a summer ice sculpture contest, own sovereign sections of interstate highways, and discover instant coffee.
Gerald Vizenor is a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. In his career, Vizenor has written over 40 books in a variety of genres, including 16 novels and innumerable essays. His novels, poetry, and short story collections from Wesleyan University Press include Waiting for Wovoka, Satie on the Seine, Native Tributes, Treaty Shirts, Favor of Crows, Blue Ravens, The Heirs of Columbus, Landfill Meditation, Shadow Distance and Hotline Healers. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the American Book Award and PEN Oakland's Josephine Miles Award. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace prize 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award, for his work as a professor, writer and scholar on discussing peaceful resolutions to cultural differences. Vizenor was also awarded the 2022 Mark Twain Award from The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, which recognizes extraordinary work and contributions to Midwestern Literature. He was a delegate and principal writer for the White Earth Reservation Constitutional Convention, ratified in 2009.
"Vizenor is one of the premiere Native writers, a Coyote armed with a word processor. His stories are not just entertainment. They are magical charms with which Vizenor creates, destroys, and re-creates the world. If you know anything about Coyote, this alone should scare the hell out of you."
~Thomas King
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