Introduction

In Gerald Vizenor’s 2012 campus novel Chair of Tears , a new chairman is put in charge of the bleak and unproductive Department of Native American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Captain “Carbon Six” Shammer is a true trickster: having never “applied, auditioned, or petitioned for the position” (23), he finds particular pleasure in his own definition of the new job. He walks around on campus disguised as other faculty members; he decides to remove all senior faculty from their offices by termination policy, and he arrives at the first faculty meeting in the uniform of General George Armstrong Custer.