Tricksters, Captives, and Conjurers: The "Roots" of Liminality and Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart

Since the publication of Gerald Vizenor's first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) later retitled Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (199o) the figure of the trickster and tricksterism itself has been central in understanding Vizenor's work. Whatever else the trickster might be thought to be shapeshifter, goad, wit, disturber of the status quo in Native American culture as elsewhere s/he is also a dissembler of meaning in narratives, one who "uncovers distinctions and ironies between narrative voices" (1993: 192). Vizenor invokes a kind of subversive postmodernism through the tricksters in Bearheart, which has various antecedents rather than only Native American or postmodern ones. I connect Vizenor's Bearheart to two examples from early America, texts that are replete with ironies and peculiarities in narrative voices and whose creators rely on what I define as "trickster tactics" to produce these texts. Further, the authors of these texts survived execution and captivity through these trickster tactics, which Vizenor shows is the only way to survive Bearheart's post-apocalyptic terrain. This essay seeks to give a lineage to this particular trickster role found in Bearheart by invoking two antecedents: The Soveraignty and Goodness of God: Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the