1The question raised by my title, one in keeping with the spirit of Gerald Vizenor and his work, seems, perhaps, a misdirection: how do we read the apostrophe? What does it signify? Possession or absence? Do we read it as indicating what White Earth Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor is given to do, driven to do? If so, where does the call come from? What does it say? What does it mean to hear it and to heed it? Or do we read it as indicating that Vizenor is calling? If so, a number of the same questions spring to mind: from where has he placed the call? what is he saying? We can add another question, perhaps: to whom is the call addressed? Quickly, then, other questions: is the call to us? if so, should we answer? how are we to ensure that the line is open and remains so? And so it goes, as question begets question begets question, until we long for a panic hole. Or do we long for Panic Hole, nickname for the Baron of Patronia, given the name Lackluster by the Roman Catholic priest at the White Earth mission, the name Brownie by the Episcopals on the reservation, and the full name Luster Browne when “the two clerical nicknames were connected by chance on government allotment records at the General Land Office” (Hotline Healers 12)? Father of Shadow Box Browne, grandfather of Eternal Flame, great grandfather of Almost Browne, Panic Hole “became a nobleman in a land allotment hoax” (Heirs of Columbus 23).

2Knowing Gerald Vizenor and his work, we know that my first question begs a question—why must it be one or the other? Why can’t it be both? After all, the either/or takes us directly to the world of terminal creeds, Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher’s understanding in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles of what it means to be an Indian comes to mind immediately, whereas the both/and takes us to the heart of Vizenor’s trickster discourse and survivance even as it suggests that there is a relationship between Vizenor’s calling and the calls he is making. By paying attention to telephony and, more broadly, information and communication technologies (ICT) in Vizenor’s work, putting a trace on the calls and getting a fix on their position if you will, we can see how the technology is used to articulate place, critique the dominant culture’s party line, and reimagine community—even at a far remove from White Earth.

3In the Prologue to The Trickster of Liberty, entitled “Tricksters and Transvaluations,” Vizenor writes that “The trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (xi). If we are to follow that lead as we get a fix on telephony and communications technology in Vizenor’s work, we must triangulate using the historical, the personal, and the textual as our points of reference. Information on early telephone service on the White Earth reservation is scarce, to say the least. The Ponsford Connection, a compilation of news articles and reminiscences of the town just south of the southwest corner of the reservation and the area outside the community, for instance, twice recounts mentions of phone calls. The February 12, 1904 issue of the Detroit Record reports that Indian agent Simon Michelet telephoned to Detroit (later to be known as Detroit Lakes, the major rail and business community just to the south of White Earth) from the Agency and Adolf Latto writes that in 1920 a neighbor called a farm to let them know that the Latto house was burning. A history of Callaway, a town on the southern border of the reservation in its southwest corner, published to commemorate the town’s 90th-anniversary, notes that 1906 saw the beginning of the Callaway telephone exchange with lines stretching south, west, and east. Ogema, some six miles North of Callaway up the rail line, had an exchange beginning two years later, in 1908.

4Detroit [Lakes], Minnesota, on the other hand, saw its first phones in May of 1884 and its first phone company, the Detroit Telephone Company, in 1895. In 1897 the exchange had thirty-nine subscribers; six years later the number of subscribers had grown to 164 and by 1915 there were approximately 300 telephones in the town. Osage, thirty miles to the east, and nine miles south-east of Ponsford, extended lines to Detroit in 1908. In that same year, the Detroit Telephone Company was purchased by local businessmen and renamed the Becker-Mahnomen Telephone Company. That company linked Detroit and Mahnomen shortly after the decade’s turn, but the reach of that exchange, and of the exchanges at Callaway and Ogema, did not extend very far (“Telephone History Folder”).

5The White Earth reservation suffers from a lack of phone service at a time when the rural market for phone service in the United States was growing faster than the urban market and the Midwest and its farmers in particular were experiencing rapid expansion in telephone service (Fischer 86-96). Bell and the large independents tended not to pursue the rural market unless competition dictated it, so small, local concerns filled the gap. Local independents and cooperatives proliferated, particularly in the Midwest, in the 1900s and 1910s. There were 18,000 operations of this type by 1907, with “1.5 million rural telephones” (Fischer 94). Those phone users, in turn, were customers for businesses in town (Fischer 95).

6According to Claude Fischer, Bell and the large independents did not aggressively pursue the rural market for three reasons: “they saw no profit in it,” they “claimed. . . that rural people did not want or appreciate the telephone enough,” and they were prone to “some measure of cultural prejudice” (96). Far from being a space-transcending technology, then, as it is sometimes imagined, telephony is a space-shaping technology that can function to pass certain places by. Like transportation technologies, communication technologies can isolate as easily as join. Kenneth Hill’s piece on the old Crow Wing settlement that Vizenor includes in Escorts to White Earth: 100 Year Reservation, 1868-1968 makes this clear with its conclusion:

Even with the lack of records, one can gain relationships of the importance of Crow Wing during the period of 1800-1880. Crow Wing was an inception of fur trade, then lumbering, and finally was dead due to the advancement of the railroad.
It is ironic that a settlement is important in a day and age of limited travel and communication, but with progress it slowly is deteriorated and its importance is no more. (30)

7The Northern Pacific line came in north of the village and trading post that made up old Crow Wing, despite the efforts of one of Vizenor’s relatives, and Vizenor notes that “when businesses moved to the new station at Brainerd, the scenic and historic settlement near the Crow Wing and Mississippi rivers declined” (The People Named the Chippewa 77). A victim of “the expansion of new economics in the state” (People 77), Clement Beaulieu is removed to White Earth as Old Crow Wing and its trading post fails. As Vizenor remarks in Interior Landscapes, “Colonel Clement had underestimated the power of the banks, corporations, and politicians” (9).

8The references to phone service in the early newspaper reports and the family history that Vizenor recounts in Interior Landscapes and The People Named the Chippewa make clear that geographical space is socially produced and that new technologies do not simply substitute one space and time for another or allow space and time to be transcended. As Stephen Graham argues in his examination of the relationship between geography and ICT, “the development of new telecommunications infrastructures is not some value-neutral, technologically pure process, but an asymmetric social struggle to gain and maintain social power, the power to control space and social processes over distance” (“The End of Geography or the Explosion of Place” 176). Vizenor notes that “Indian agents were the colonial agents for the federal government on reservations” (People 87) and Melissa Meyer, author of The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Reservation, re-enforces the point when she writes that “Agents frequently regulated access to individual accounts [containing proceeds from the sale of land and timber] as a means of social control” (87) on the reservation after the turn of the century. Meyer adds that “‘Competence’ to manage one’s funds became secondary to compliance with U.S. Indian policy directives in determining which requests gained approval” (87). Control extended to reservation leaders as well (Meyer 96). Small wonder, then, that Agent Simon Michelet would have a direct phone line from the Agency at White Earth village to Detroit, for he needed access to and control of a technology that would help him control and disseminate information and policy.

9In short, ideology is carried on the wire. Vizenor’s poem “The Last Photograph” reveals an awareness of this when it moves from the specific story of his father Clement Vizenor, murdered in Minneapolis at the age of twenty-six when his son was twenty months old, to the general context within which his father’s life and death should be read:

catholics on the western wire
threw their voices
treaties tied to catechisms
undone in the woodland
(Interior Landscapes 30)

10Church, state, and communication technologies are linked in the stanza, a succinct concatenation that phrases how political and religious ideologies came together and were brought to bear on the native by the nation. The first section of Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, a book-length poem recounting the battle between Pillagers and U.S. soldiers on the Leech Lake reservation in 1898, articulates the relationship between church and christianity, Indian agents, and the government. There, “pale indian agents/heave an empire/of stray discoveries/over the dock” (29) within the context of the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. The actions of the “colorado militia” in the former “wasted forever/the stars and stripes” (31) while the slaughter of Big Foot’s people in the latter is

the cruelest
constitutional festival
a prairie genocide
and celebration
of jesus christ
the son of god
born again
that snowy morning
at wounded knee (32-33)

11What are nothing short of the “missions of genocide” (30) have been conducted by the treaty makers, the “godly triumphalists” who “crown the conquest” (29), the indian agents, and the soldiers of the federal government.

12Doctrine does not stand uncontested in the stanza from “the Last Photograph,” however, any more than agents and the soldiers come to arrest Pillager band leader Bugonaygeshig and haul him away are uncontested by the Anishinaabe at Leech Lake, however. In typical Vizenor fashion, the combination of a lack of punctuation and slippery signifiers produces the indeterminacy and uncertainty that runs in contradistinction to the fixity produced and desired by a colonial ideology.1 Are the treaties undone in the woodland? the catechisms? both? How and why is it or are they undone?

13For Vizenor, and thus for us, the historical and the personal come together in Callaway in 1906, nearly thirty years before he was born, for in Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors we learn that one of his relatives, Truman Beaulieu, moved to White Earth, started a family with Josephine Turpin that eventually grew to include six children, and “Later, the family lived in a large house in Calloway [sic], a small town on the reservation, and served as the first telephone exchange in the area; the switchboard was located in the house” (15).

14This exchange is critical because it links telephony, stories and the oral tradition, and place. Vizenor writes that John Clement, youngest son of Truman and Josephine and “a great story teller, one of the best on the reservation” (Interior Landscapes 15), knew “both where the best stories lived and were remembered” and “even remembered some of the first telephone conversations on the reservation” (Interior Landscapes 15). John Clement passes on to Vizenor the important truth that stories are rooted in place when together they “drove around the reservation to visit friends he had not seen for more than twenty years,” “looked over some of the best stories” there, and even “found one of his best stories at a small farm on a warm afternoon” (Interior Landscapes 15). Vizenor, in turn, passes on to his reader that technology serves the People insofar as it is used to help stories circulate. Vizenor’s phrasing emphasizes people over technology, moreover, by saying that the family served as the exchange.

15One way to write in the oral tradition, to borrow Kimberley Blaeser’s wonderfully apt phrase, is to write in such a way that stories circulate and go beyond the original teller. Unpacking the reference to telephony in Interior Landscapes helps us see why communication technology would resonate with Vizenor and the oral tradition for it too indicates that stories circulate and do so beyond their original tellers. John Clement could have remembered some of the early telephone conversations on the reservation even if his family had not been the exchange because the service would have offered users only a party line (Art Schweigart, personal conversation). Indeed, the Callaway telephone company featured party lines until the mid-1980s. On a party line, one’s story becomes, potentially at least, a story for everyone linked by the technology. Once on the line, the story is free to circulate, both on and off the line. A connection can be drawn between this circulation of stories and Vizenor’s interest in the re-expression of stories and songs from the Anishinaabe oral tradition; his use of historical, critical, and theoretical sources that circulate throughout the body of his work; and the re-expression of his own stories in later work.

16The “catholics on the western wire” and the other agents of the dominant culture would use their voices to define and delimit the Native as indian. Throughout his career, Vizenor has labored to reveal and counter the indian, the “simulation” that is “the absence of natives” (Fugitive Poses 15). The orality explicit and implicit in the party line helps Vizenor to combat the party line that constructs and perpetuates the native as indian, the indian as other. One more word, then, on the wire in Interior Landscapes that helps Vizenor counter the western wire that transmits a colonial ideology before we turn to particulars of telephony and ICT in the fiction. Art Schweigart, whose father owned the Callaway Telephone company beginning mid-century, reports that at the turn of the century “everything was iron-wire” (personal conversation 13 January 2006). This means that the circuit was completed through an earth-ground. For a voice to be heard on the wire, then, it must be rooted in place.

17The connection’s nature brings together early telephony and panic holes. It is unlikely that Luster Browne, dawn protestor of the 1905 allotment of White Earth land presided over by Agent Michelet (Trickster of Liberty 3), had access to a telephone. He certainly did not need telephony to overturn the “colonial hoax” (Trickster of Liberty 5) played on him by the Federal Government as penalty for his protest: the supposedly worthless land “became a virtue in one generation” (5). A panic hole served Luster just fine. According to tribal stories, Luster “shouted into a hole in the earth” (Hotline Healers 12) when he was worried and that action led to his nickname. At least in part what worries him and leads him to start shouting is captured in the first of the three Anishinaabe words that, poorly translated, produced his nickname: wanaki or “to live in peace” (Hotline Healers 11), “to live somewhere in peace” (Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies 190), “a chance at peace” (Dead Voices 17). Given that the federal agents have come to White Earth to complete the process of allotting reservation land, it is small wonder that Panic Hole “threw his words at the white posse on the back porch of the mission” (Trickster of Liberty 3). In taking a whole and dividing it into bits which are then further undone by the sale of timber and land, the allotment process jeopardizes the possibility of living somewhere in peace.

18When a whole is threatened you turn to a hole and apply your voice. My playful emphasis on indeterminacy born of orality is meant to accentuate how the party line of the West, featuring “tragic closure, essential last lines, and the cultural romance of a denouement” (Hotline Healers 5) as it does, is undone by voice in a panic hole and the voice of stories on a line. Panic Hole fills a hole with his voice and wild blooms are the result. Voice brings life, voice brings renewal; as Luster’s grandson Ginseng Browne tells the Chinese delegation to the Barony, “The Baron of Patronia, my grandfather, grew these flowers with his wild voice” (Trickster of Liberty 135).

19Voice also heals and counters the desires of the colonizers, provided it is connected to and makes a connection with place. This is the legacy Luster Browne passes on to his children, that their children receive in turn, and that Vizenor passes on to us. Early in Hotline Healers, the narrator, son of Father Mother Browne, writes that “To this day some natives continue to shout at holes in the world, on natural meadows in his [Luster Browne’s] name, and even into the concrete. They shout, and shout, and shout, to land their memories, to be healed, and to tune the tempers of the earth” (Hotline Healers 12). The panic hole might be in the earth or not, on reservation or not, in the United States or not, but provided it offers a chance to ground voice and to adjust to the frequency of the earth and adopt the message it is transmitting, one can become and stay well.

20Tune Browne’s tease, the New School of Socioacupuncture, was “aroused under colonial psalms on the reservation and nurtured in wild panic holes on the baronage” (Trickster of Liberty 51). The trickster whose nickname asks us to complete a phrase—“Tune In, Tune Out, Tune Up, Call the Tune, and a Different Tune” (Trickster of Liberty 15)—asks us to tune out the old school of socioacupuncture, “founded on a tragic worldview, ‘domination,’ and territorial wars where both sides lose” (Trickster of Liberty 50-51), and tune in the New School, “an active word war with a comic temper” (Trickster of Liberty 51). Tune calls and offers a different tune, is never out of tune as he reminds his audience that “socioacupuncture is our means of survival on the wire,” a “high wire between the woodland and the cities” (Trickster of Liberty 46). Like his relative, Almost Browne turns to panic holes in order to counter dominance (Hotline Healers 7). With Almost and his hotline, telephony and panic holes come together so that we see how the former is used to overturn the romantic and racialist views of the dominant culture and connect people to place and stories.

21Almost Browne, born in a station wagon almost on the White Earth reservation, is thought by Shadow Box and Eternal Flame to have “inherited the tricky spirit” (Hotline Healers 29) of Luster Browne. In the spirit of his great grandfather, Almost tells stories that counter authority by denying closure (Hotline Healers 29). He also turns to voice rooted in place in the name of healing and renewal. His 1-900 hotline to native healers is dialed by those “who have lost their stories and natural memories of nature” (Hotline Healers 108). Shadow Box for one positions his phone over a panic hole for the shouters who call. Those who get on the line expecting the same old story, however, are in for a surprise. Panda Radio’s host Panda Man, for instance, has some “native romance in mind” when he asks Almost Browne’s cousin the name of his reservation, imagining “a place of great nostalgia and tragic suffering” (Hotline Healers 111), and thus is “deceived by his own romance of native landscapes and traditions. He missed the obvious, the real victimry” (Hotline Healers 112). Colin Samson distinguishes between the italicized and unitalicized real in Vizenor’s work. The former is “that which is demonstrated through the inventions and conventions of empirical methodologies, such as those found in the natural and social sciences” (“Overturning” 285). It privileges and prizes certainty and closure (Samson 287) over chance and the teases and turns of trickster and trickster discourse. The Barony, “a real landscape of native ceremonies and tricky stories” (Hotline Healers 4) is victimized by the romance, as are native people. The native healers attempt to counter that victimization by offering real, tricky stories.

22Almost tells a report for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Listen, stories are the real starts, the best native starts. . . and the end has never been more than another start” (Hotline Healers 108). What Almost admonishes the reporter to do, listen, is what Luster’s children learned from him while being told creation and trickster stories and coached to shout in panic holes: “the children learned apace to listen and then to imagine their connections to the earth” (Trickster of Liberty 11). The people ringing the hotline also need to listen. They hear tricky stories that upset their romantic notions of natives and place. Panda Man is not happy with the hotline to the Bald Eagle man because he does not get the answers he wants. The reader, however, gets an exchange that playfully asks us to think about position, perspective, and place, that hints at a story cautioning against greed, and that reminds us that when you make a connection with the natural world you had best be prepared for the real thing, the whole figuration, black flies and all.

“Kafka, are you there?” shouted the host.
“Your there is my here,” said Berasimo.
“Where might that be?”
“The orthodox slipstream, who are you?”
“You’re on the air,” said the host.
“Never, not out here,” said Berasimo.
“What’s happening out there?” asked Panda Man.
“The black flies are vicious.”
“Tell our listeners about the bald eagles?”
“Right, the eagles invented these flies,” said Berasimo.
“How is that?” asked the host.
“Humans, you see, were taking too many fish.”
“What about the bald eagles,” said the host.
“Listen, for one thing, bald eagles are not really bald.”
(Hotline Healers 120)

23Panda Man “shouted” “are you there” to Father Berasimo as Bald Eagle Man because he is worried about making a romantic connection to stories and to place. Berasimo does nothing to assuage that worry, of course, but he does attempt to trick and tease the radio talk show host into thinking about and re-imagining place. Humor, “a hotline healer not a cultural curse” (Hotline Healers 113), and chance are key for Vizenor on the hotline and off.

24When Panda Man asks one of his callers “where is your telephone located” (Hotline Healers 117) his question accentuates the connection between telephony and place. The caller has to shout her literal reply, “On my ear” (117), because she is calling from a highway construction site. Here, telecommunications and transportation infrastructure come together and, lest we should miss their connection to authority and control, the narrative tells us that the caller “control[s] traffic at a highway construction site” (117). In the tension that develops between fixity and mobility, as production sites are dispersed around the globe and goods and services need to get to the sites of consumption, geographers have taken note of the need for “ever more sophisticated and globally stretched transport and communication infrastructures” (Graham 176) which are far from “value-neutral” (176); rather, these infrastructures and the technologies they support and enable “play a clear role in accentuating social divides and favoring pre-existing authority structures” (Adams & Glose 416).

25Vizenor’s narrative, however, takes a relatively new telecommunications technology, mobile telephony, and bends it to its own ends rather than those of the dominant culture. This is anticipated in the exchange between Panda Man and the caller from the highway construction site both by what she is saying and by the highway she is working on. Her claim that chimpanzees taught her how to write, how to love, and how to fly is critical not for its particulars but in general terms, because it stands in contradistinction to the voice of authority that follows it, a caller who takes umbrage with “the notion that chimps can learn how to read and write” because his “research activities in animal behavior would not support the notion that chimps demonstrate an inner capacity for human languages” (Hotline Healers 118). Similarly, as we have seen, Vizenor’s narrative uses the hotline, staffed by natives with cell phones both on and off the reservation, in order to counter the authorized romantic vision of the Indian and the natural world.

26The caller rings Panda Radio from Interstate 580 in northern California. Using structuration theory, which pays attention to social structures and how they shape and are shaped by people, Paul Adams argues that “the impact of communication and transportation technologies. . . has resulted in a progressive stretching out, or ‘distanciation’” (“Network Topologies” 95) and a “disembedding” of persons and their actions from place. For Adams, the new technologies can enable one to avoid real places and thus avoid having to think about place and its relationship to us. Place, then, loses its moral influence on us (Adams 95). Insofar as it is a spur rather than a bypass, however, Interstate 580 asks us to go into rather than around a place, and therefore, within the context of the story at least, suggests that place can still exert a moral and shaping force on us.

27The cellular phone and the Interstate 580 construction site do more than bring together transportation and telecommunications, both of which have been lauded for their ability to transform space, time, and our relationship to both. They tacitly emphasize motion as well. This, too, is critical, for Vizenor links motion, specifically what he terms transmotion, to sovereignty. In his words, “transmotion, that sense of native motion and active presence, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty” (Fugitive Poses 15). What Vizenor is doing is using motion and, in this case, the highway construction site in Hotline Healers, to construct a different sense and sort of sovereignty. Vizenor’s idea of sovereignty, to quote Colin Samson, “is much more” than a “Nationalism [that] tethers sovereignty to land and nationhood” (“Overturning” 291). Vizenor’s sovereignty is grounded in nature, in place, and in material and symbolic practices, but not at the expense of active presence and motion. Beginning with Panic Hole, then, his descendents and we “learn apace” as he “was in motion when he told stories, never at rest; he worked with cedar, or he walked and talked, and waved his beaver stick between phrases” (Trickster of Liberty 10).2

28As is true of his hotline, Almost Browne’s virtual reality is grounded in place, in motion, and in chance. He “noticed the obvious, the virtual reality of native histories” (Hotline Healers 30) when one autumn he looked at the water to see the crows in the birch as he journeyed to the headwaters. When years later he sees a “simulated poker machine in a casino” (30), the native mizay laser is created. With it, Almost can create images that “beam and shimmer the tricky traces of our histories, and the traces over the river stones are almost the same as the laser characters over the barony” (30). It bears remarking that Vizenor’s narrative says Almost recognized “the virtual reality of native histories,” not indian histories. The latter would be a representation of a damning representation, of course, whereas the former is the representation of the native to be found in native stories.

29Almost’s “signature hologram of virtual memories” (Hotline Healers 30) is used to create a virtual presence of that which was previously “heard and seen in stories” (30). He offers “stories of survivance” with “characters cast wiser, wittier, and more humane than natives have ever been presented in other stories and histories” (32). These virtual reality laser light shows, then, offer a counter-narrative to that told and championed by the dominant culture. Thus, it makes perfect sense that Almost would offer a new laser light show to commemorate the new nation created by Stone Columbus and that his creation would appropriate and transform Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the new world, and George Washington, the father of the nation. In bringing the pair together with Crazy Horse and Louis Riel—“the adventurer, the general, the warrior, the crossblood” (Heirs of Columbus 125)—before the Trickster of Liberty, the narrative reinforces for us that a crossblood trickster tease is Vizenor’s way of overturning things.

30Geographers paying attention to ICT have noted that which Vizenor’s texts make clear: that telephony, multi-media events, and VR can be used to produce “‘counterhegemonic discourses’” (Adams and Ghose 417). As is true of telephony, the virtual reality of Almost Browne is grounded in place, and most often the particular place that is the Barony on the White Earth reservation: it is the first scene he creates for Judge Beatrice Lord at a hearing on “ownership and legal standing, jurisdiction, and circumstantial evidence” (Heirs of Columbus 64). In both The Heirs of Columbus and Hotline Healers the virtual reality hints at the diversity of flora that is a characteristic of White Earth and the surrounding area. In both a bear is present, that figure that as Blaeser notes has personal and cultural significance for Vizenor because of its connection to his time in Japan and to totems and spirituality for the Anishinaabe (213). The bear totem is also one of the clans associated with defense, and we can think of that figure as a marker of what in Vizenor’s work VR and telephony can do for the People.

31We would do well to move from the telephone at a construction site in Hotline Healers to telephones at a construction site we find again and again and again in Vizenor’s work: the phones outside the Last Lecture. Father Mother Browne “renounced the priesthood and returned to the baronage” (Trickster of Liberty 107) where, after a winter of mourning,

on the summer solstice he was moved in a dream to ordain a tavern and sermon center; the Last Lecture was built on a watershed below the scapehouse at the south end of the baronage. The urban mixedbloods who had moved to the reservation were summoned to carve a stone precipice behind the tavern, named the Edge of White Earth. There, seven modern telephone booths were mounted in a row with double doors, one opened over the precipice.
(Trickster of Liberty 107)

32The passage subtly invokes native transmotion with the phrase “moved in a dream” and emphasizes points, solstice and watershed, that should be seen both as marking a dividing line or transition and the point in place where things come together in time and in space.

33The Last Lecture is “a tavern for those tired of their poses and native identities” (Hotline Healers 22). There, the posers can divest themselves of their identities publicly before going to the telephone booths, making a last call, and dropping off the edge to a new identity. The telephone booth is part of Vizenor’s tease, of course, for when one thinks of the phone booth and identity in American popular culture one thinks of Superman. Such a phone booth, Vizenor’s narrative tacitly suggests, is where one goes to take off a costume, a disguise, in order to reveal another costume: there, on the Edge, is where “Cherokee charlatans walked over the edge as Irish, Blackfeet impostors turned Greek, Hopi peace fakers studied to be Italians, and Chippewa posers turned back their identities to be French” (Hotline Healers 22-23).

34More must be said, however. Telephone booths are curious spaces. There the public becomes private, in plain sight. More critically, phone booths create a space in the public for the personal, for connections on the wire, the communal, and for chance. The phone booth is at once a personal space and a shared space. And when the phone inside rings, it is by chance that it is picked up, by chance who picks it up, by chance who is on the other end of the line. Finally, and most critically for our purposes, the adjective Vizenor uses to describe the telephone booths on the Edge, “modern,” is telling insofar as it helps us recognize that he takes a modern technology, telephony, gives it a postmodern, postindian turn, and uses it to make connections on and off the wire that undo the colonialist ideology that is, itself, rooted in modern thought, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing.

35Given that for Vizenor the margin or border, often metaphorized as the treeline, is the space of his trickster discourse, the name given to the site of the telephone booths, the Edge of White Earth, is revealing. The question, then, is how to bring White Earth into relief from the edge. The answer is contained in a single word, written on a coaster and left with the child abandoned in the last phone booth: minwaajimo, or “tell a good story” (Hotline Healers 22). That good story is a tricky one, of course, one that counters the dominant culture’s construction in writing of the reservation. If, in Vizenor’s words, “the White Earth Reservation was instituted by concessions, coercions, and a treaty, a caricature of native sovereignty” (Fugitive Poses 53), if, in the words of one of his ideological agents offered to another (reservation priest to federal boarding school teacher), “the beginning of this tribal place” was a plan “submitted to unite the scattered tribes” (Landfill Meditation 77), then Vizenor would have us see and hear that White Earth “must be a collection of every changing trickster story” (Landfill Meditation 79).

36In turning to a native word, moreover, Vizenor is subtly accentuating place, for “Tribal words have power in the oral tradition, the sounds express the spiritual energies of woodland lives. . . . The words the woodland tribes spoke were connected to the place the words were spoken” (People Named the Chippewa 24). His description of the place that is the barony, then, helps him to move beyond the dominant culture’s damning construction of the Reservation. In The Trickster of Liberty, Patronia is “a wild crescent on the White Earth Reservation northeast of Bad Medicine Lake. The shallow creek at the treeline carries the last rumors of glacial rivers that once tumbled the huge granite boulders down the hollows; there, the greens are tender in the spring” (5). Later, in Hotline Healers, that description is repeated and elaborated:

Patronia is a natural wide crescent north of maazhi mashkiki, Bad Medicine Lake. The madoodoo ziibi, or sweat bath river, rushes at the bend of the crescent south to the lake, and carries the ancient scent of cedar, birch, white pine, and willow. The riverbank bears the eternal rumors of glaciers and the great granite boulders that once tumbled out of creation stories. There, at a turn in the river, the greens are tender, and the beaver noses the curves and traces of the seasons. The rare moccasin orchids bloom in the moist shadows of an eternal summer near the river. (13)

37Both descriptions take White Earth, and us, beyond historical time to geological time and, broadly speaking, calendrical time. The period when the Wisconsin glacier receded, shaping the landscape as it went, is emphasized, as are the seasons. We need to see, hear, and smell White Earth beyond the constructed boundaries which seek to define and delimit. What is more, we need to move beyond fixity and certainty, as “rumors” reminds us, in favor of stories and their circulation. Indeed, the latter description refers to creation stories to reinforce the relationship between language, stories, and place.

38In “The Last Photograph” “the last words of indian agents” are “undone at the bar” (Interior Landscapes 31) by “reservation heirs on the concrete” who “praise the birch” (30). Treaties and/or catechisms undone in the woodland are joined to the words of Indian agents undone by natives giving their voice in praise to the woodland. Just as “cedar cones/tumbl [ing] in a mountain stream” constitute “letters from home” which necessarily invoke home (Matsushima np) in a Vizenor haiku, praising the birch, a tree fundamental to the material and symbolic culture of the Anishinaabe, conjures and invokes home. The Anishinaabe voices in the bar trump the voices of the missionaries and the agents. Critical as it may be, for the power and potential of the act of praise to be fully realized, it must move beyond the bar. Minwaajimo on a coaster in a phone booth at the Edge nicely brings together the oral and the written. Just as Vizenor stresses place and motion, so too does his work stress orality and writing. For his work to circulate as widely as possible beyond the bar, of course, meant and means a turn to writing in the widest variety of forms: fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction, journalism, and screenwriting. And embedded in that body of work are instances of telephony and information and communication technologies that help Vizenor, a trickster on the wire, undo the ideology that has been transmitted for so long.