ABSTRACT
Scholars have described Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor’s various forays into life writing as “serial autobiography,” “autocritical,” “life studies,” and even, “elegiac reflections.” 1 Vizenor himself has characterized his work in this vein many times, perhaps most memorably in his essay, “Crows Written on the Poplars: Autocritical Autobiographies” in which he describes his work as “a mixedblood autobiographical causerie and a narrative on the slow death of a common red squirrel,” and-speaking of himself in the third person-explains, “Gerald Vizenor believes that autobiographies are imaginative histories; a remembrance past the barriers; wild pastimes over the pronouns” (101). The stated and enacted intentions in the broadly conceived acts of re-membering in Vizenor’s writing inevitably involve liberation and survivance, or, as the opening epigraph to this essay notes: remembrance is a “landscape of liberty.”
