Fugitive poses

Native peoples today are best known to others, and often to themselves, through their fugitive poses: textual and graphic depictions preserved by scholarship, consumed by the dominant culture, and steeped in a modernist aesthetic of romantic victimry, tragedy, and nostalgia. Because such representations do not easily convey the immediacy and distinctiveness of Native cultures, they effectively celebrate the absence rather than the presence of the Native.

The fugitive poses captured in photographs, portraits, translations, official documents, New Age stories, blood-quantum counts, captivity narratives, and museum objects simulate Native peoples rather than reveal them.

Native sovereignty, Gerald Vizenor contends, is not possessed but expressed. It emerges not from practicing vengeful and exclusionary policies and politics, or by simple recourse to territoriality, but by turning to Native transmotion, the forces and processes of creativity and imagination lying at the heart of Native world-views and actions. Overturning long-held scholarly and popular assumptions, Vizenor offers a vigorous examination of tragic cultures and victimry.