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

• Main Author: McGlennen, Molly S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Kent 2015
• Subjects: Native American; Poetry; Transnationalism; Bear Island; anishina*
• Online Access: http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/124; https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.124

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.