Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors

The classic autobiography of the famous Indigenous writer and critic Gerald Vizenor.

The classic memoir by one of the most celebrated Indigenous writers of the modern era, Interior Landscapes offers an unforgettable glimpse of the life and world of Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor writes about his experiences as a tribal mixedblood in the new world of simulations; the themes in his autobiographical stories are lost memories and a “remembrance past the barriers.” The chapters open with natural harmonies and the premier union of the Anishinaabe families of the crane and the first white fur traders. The author bares his fosterage, his ambitions, his contentions with institutions and imposed histories; his encounters as a community advocate, journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune, university teacher, critic, and novelist. Vizenor celebrates chance, or “trickster signatures,” and communal metaphors in these pages: he was hired to teach social sciences at Lake Forest College, his first experience as a teacher, because the head of the department admired his haiku poems; he toured the armorial emblems at Maxim’s de Beijing when it opened on October 1, 1983, in the People’s Republic of China; he wrote about the suicide of Dane White and the murderer Thomas White Hawk; he rescued his dreams from the skinwalkers at the Clyde Kluckhohn house in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and, as an editorial writer, he followed the American Indian Movement from Custer to Rapid City, from Calico Hall on the Pine Ridge Reservation to Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Teasing, revealing, and irresistible, Interior Landscapes charts the fascinating life of a brilliant Anishinaabe writer.

The new edition contains a wealth of new photographs and information on the journey of Gerald Vizenor.

“The Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor is at once a brilliant and evasive trickster figure … He is perhaps the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century.” — N. Scott Momaday

“Instead of trying to walk the thin, often invisible line between art and politics, history and future, Vizenor dances on both sides, knowing all too well that in our time politics can become myth and vice versa.” — San Francisco Review of Books