SOURCE: Review of Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1994, pp. 313-18.

In the following review below, Churchill argues that when Vizenor relies on his journalistic talents, Manifest Manners provides useful insights but Vizenor's use of postmodern vernacular creates a sterile, unsuccessful work.

Gerald Vizenor's Manifest Manners is a book one can love to hate. It combines the very worst of postmodernism's vernacular-driven plunge into cliquish obscurantism with its author's already hyperinflated sense of self-importance. The result is largely sterile where it is not opaque to the point of sheer meaninglessness.

I mean, really. What, exactly, is survivance? How does it differ in substance from preexisting terms like survival? If it does not, where then may we find the necessity—or even the propriety—of Vizenor's having cloned yet another buzzword with which to encumber the long-since overloaded (but underclarifying...