SOURCE: "'Ecstatic Strategies': Gerald Vizenor's Trickster Narratives," in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, pp. 225-54.

In the following essay, Owens considers the role of the trickster in Vizenor's work.

Born in 1934, Gerald Vizenor has devoted an incredibly prolific career to exploring the place and meaning of the mixedblood in modern America. With more than twenty-five books and scores of essays, poems, and stories published, in addition to a movie (Harold of Orange, 1983), Vizenor is one of the most productive as well as one of the most radically imaginative of contemporary American writers. At the heart of Vizenor's fiction lies a fascination with what it means to be of mixed Indian and European heritage in the contemporary world—in Vizenor's terminology, a "crossblood." And out of this fascination arises the central and unifying figure in Vizenor's art: the trickster. In Vizenor's work the...