"By My Heart": Gerald Vizenor's Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Gerald Vizenor's 2006 publications Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point illuminate Anishinaabe nationhood, citizenship, and self-determiniation through an ironic transnational framework constituted from a particular landscape, set of stories, relationships, and memory. Through...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: McGlennen, Molly S.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: University of Kent 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/124
https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.124
Description
Summary:Gerald Vizenor's 2006 publications Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point illuminate Anishinaabe nationhood, citizenship, and self-determiniation through an ironic transnational framework constituted from a particular landscape, set of stories, relationships, and memory. Through the apparatus of poetry, and specifically through the lens of "by my heart" (a phrase that echoes through Vizenor's collections), Vizenor reveals Anishinaabeg determining the locales and ideals of the nation, despite discourses of dominance that would preordain and reduce Anishinaabe experience to an urban/reservation dichotomy and normalize colonial conquest.