SOURCE: Review of Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 871-72.

In the review below, Roemer argues that while Manifest Manners is at times repetitive, it is nonetheless a powerful book.

Manifest Manners comes to us with particular authority. Gerald Vizenor is a literary-cultural critic who is an insider literarily and culturally: he is a respected novelist, an Anishinaabe, and a member of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Vizenor is also a master creator of tricksters in film and fiction.

All this makes for tricky reviewing. Should Manifest Manners be evaluated as a Whitmanesque self-analysis/promotion (his comments on trickster hermeneutics illuminate and privilege his protagonists) or as provocative announcements of Native American viewpoints or as a trickster narrative (including a fictional dialogue with a salamander man) or as a wide-ranging series of literary-cultural meditations and vignettes? Though all four approaches...