ABSTRACT
In Gerald Vizenor’s stories and storied theory, innovative concepts and images transcend the state of both contemporary society and contemporary science, and work to create a possible future world. In Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles , the revised edition of Vizenor’s 1978 novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart , a group of men, women, dogs, and clown crows, as well as one parawoman, travel through the remainders of what Deborah Madsen has described as “a dying chemical civilization” (129). Scholars such as Bernadette Rigal-Cellard or Alan Velie have suggested reading Bearheart as generic parody of Christian and medieval allegories, or as an “inversion of the Anglo-American genre of ‘frontier gothic’” (Madsen 121). However, the description of a society that is addicted to progress, running out of energy and, as a consequence, descending into chaos and destruction is also reminiscent of dystopian narratives and science fiction movies. Unlike Bunyan’s pilgrims, who travel through an allegorical landscape, Vizenor’s tribal pilgrims move through the actual United States in a possible future. As Karl Kroeber notes, Vizenor’s “fictions characteristically take place in a future emerging out of the present in order to cast serious events into a comic mode that welcomes the unexpected at the expense of the supposedly predetermined” (28). In Bearheart , consumerism, egotism, and relentless industrial development have triggered the end of gasoline, economic collapse, ecological disaster, famine, and the breakdown of democratic governments. In this sense, the novel qualifies as Indigenous science fiction : a narrative, in Grace Dillon’s sense, of “Indigenous science and sustainability,” which depicts “Indigenous
scientific literacies” (7). Proude Cedarfair’s knowledge of nature-the magic of the cedar, his understanding of the seasons and of the landscape, but also of animal and human nature-enables his survival after the economic and ecological apocalypse, which affects both Natives and non-Natives alike, takes place on and off reservations: “Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart implicitly criticizes the awe-struck neoshamanism that views Native people as impervious to the very real dangers of nature” (Dillon 8). To apply another one of Dillon’s categories, Bearheart may be called an Indigenous science fiction narrative of contact-a vintage science fiction plot with a Native twist. As John Rieder notes in a book-length study, the genre of science fiction itself is deeply embedded within the imperialist experiences of the Western world. The encounter with and dominance over other cultures, as well as the fascination with and fear of the Other have become metanarrative patterns that structure science fiction narratives of first contact-stories in which humans encounter an alien race-according to the “colonial gaze” that “distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at” (Rieder 7). 4 While the plot of science fiction narratives, such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) or Edgar Rice Burrough’s At the Earth’s Core (1914), as well as popular movies such as Alien (1979), Independence Day (1996), or Avatar (2009), follow the colonial logic of a survival of the fittest, Bearheart digresses from generic conventions: much like Isaac Asimov’s science fiction narrative The Gods Themselves (1972), Vizenor’s novel shows two different worlds, a Native and a white one, the encounter of which has become destructive to both since egotism and greed (for sex, money, or social status) reign supreme, and Indigenous cultures as well as Western scientific progress have sold out to capitalism. Ironically, however, this time it is Western society that is cast as the Other instead of the secluded Native tribe.
