SOURCE: "History and the Imagination: Gerald Vizenor's The People Named the Chippewa," American Indian Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 55-59.

In the essay below, Ballinger discusses the vehicle for the "imaginative metaphor" presented in Earthdivers.

"Earthdivers," says Gerald Vizenor at the beginning of Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), is "an imaginative metaphor." The vehicle for this metaphor is a culture hero (sometimes trickster, like Wenebojo in the Ojibwe story Vizenor cites in his preface) found extensively in native American myth. This figure directs animals to dive into the great flood until one finally returns with grains of dirt from which the hero magically creates the present earth mass. The tenor of the metaphor is Vizenor's protagonists, the "mixedbloods, or Métis, tribal tricksters and recast culture heroes, the mournful heirs and survivors from that premier union between the daughters of the woodland shamans and white fur...