ABSTRACT
Gerald Vizenor has emerged as one of the leading Native American writers of our time. He has published three novels, three collections of short fiction and essays (the categories tend to merge in Vizenor), and ten books of poetry. His 1987 novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the Fiction Collective/ Illinois State University Prize for 1986. Vizenor is a mixed-blood Chippewa or, as the Chippewa prefer to call themselves, Anishinaabe. His family is originally from the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Clement Beaulieu, a paternal ancestor whose name Vizenor often uses as a nom de guerre, was a halfblood who served as lieutenant colonel in the Minnesota State Militia. Clement’s son-in-law Theodore Beaulieu was founder and editor of the reservation newspaper, The Progress. Vizenor has recently reissued in Summer in the Spring (1981) the Nanaboozho stories that Theodore Beaulieu ran in The Progress in 1886.
