# Gerald Vizenor [Wikipedia Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Vizenor) ( 1934 – ) ## Description Anishinaabe (White Earth Nation) writer and scholar whose fiction, poetry, and criticism coined "survivance" — an active, ongoing Native presence that refuses the roles of victimry and disappearance imposed by settler narrative — and developed a trickster-centered theory of Native American literature. ## Key Tags #theorist #indigenous #decolonial ## Essential Works - *Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance* (1994) - key theoretical statement of "survivance" against settler narratives of Native victimry and vanishing - *Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence* (1998) - extends the critique of representational absence/presence in dominant depictions of Native life ## Details A prolific novelist, poet, and academic (professor emeritus at UC Berkeley), Vizenor's trickster-inflected fiction and criticism run alongside a sustained theoretical project — "survivance" — that has become a widely used term across Native American and Indigenous studies more broadly, distinguishing an active, self-authored survival from mere survival-as-victimhood. ### Concepts and Theories %% none yet %% ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Collaborators %% none yet %% ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements %% none yet %% ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography Vizenor, Gerald. *Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance*. Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Foundational statement of "survivance" theory. ### Secondary Sources Bibliography Madsen, Deborah L., editor. *Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence*. State University of New York Press, 2008. Collected essays engaging Vizenor's survivance theory.