Trickster's Way Vol 2

• Main Authors: Yvonne Owens, Doctoring Divinity, Jim Logan, The Classical Canon
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.689.2572; http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1067%26context%3Dtrickstersway

This paper sets out to establish a Trickster pattern of paradoxical symbol inversions, visible in the iconography of visual artist, Jim Logan. Set against literary selections from various contemporary Native writers, Logan's pictorial lexicon serves to illustrate this dynamic iconographic pattern in First Nations rhetorical imaging. I propose to track Trickster down some uniquely liberating, deconstructive pathways, supported by artistic reproductions from the study of Trickster dynamics in contemporary Native art undertaken by Dr. Allan Ryan in his comprehensive work, "The Trickster Shift. " Targeting the cultural barrage mediated by Colonialism against indigenous religiosity and collective values, my selections from Native art and literature demonstrate a cunning reverse assimilation of cultural meaning. Juggling cultural signifiers into paradoxical relationships, such canny inversions reverse the considerable pay-load of meaning constructed in historical European artistic conventions. In the hands of master artificers, reverse appropriation, radical revisionism and subversive iconographies (among other tools), furnish the bag-of-tricks for