Gerald Vizenor Critical Essay | Critical Review by Linda Ainsworth

SOURCE: "History and the Imagination: Gerald Vizenor's The People Named the Chippewa," in American Indian Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 49-54.

In the following review, Ainsworth argues that in The People Named the Chippewa, Vizenor challenges contemporary beliefs about Native American culture

It is perhaps a truism of modern history that they who control the past control the future. According to this maxim, those in control have the power to shape memory to suit their own requirements of the future, naively or uncaringly expecting those without control to pay homage to this vision. Official history is most credible then when all those people who remember a different story have been robbed of their memories.

Thinking that in large part the Native American population had been robbed of its memories, nineteenth-century ethnographers hurried into the field to document what were generally acknowledged to be dying cultures. Many of...
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