SOURCE: "'The Game Never Ends': Gerald Vizenor's Gamble with Language and Structure in Summer in the Spring," in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1995, pp. 85-109.

In the following essay, McNeil argues that Vizenor continues the work of the original editor of the stories—Theodore Hudon Beaulieu—by bringing them to a general readership.

The trickster myths in Gerald Vizenor's Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories come nearly verbatim from a series of tales in The Progress, the first newspaper published on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. Appearing in the late 1880s, the series was originally edited by Theodore Hudon Beaulieu. From the standpoint of the contemporary literary scholar, the series might simply seem an historical collection of tribal lore and a useful collection from which to develop a source study for Vizenor's works, but for Beaulieu's Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) audience or Vizenor's...