Native American Myth of Liberty in Gerald Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage

Abstract

This paper examines various structures of society through characters who are at once mythic and realistic and investigates how the traditional ways of knowing function in a multicultural world with references to Gerald Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988). He suspends all that human beings have taken for granted about language, reality and the possibilities of human experience. In The Trickster of Liberty, Vizenor presents a whole family of trickster figuration. The novel represents contradiction and reversals. Even though the characters are associated with classes and identities which are representative and recognizable in a contemporary world, they all transform constantly in a state of contradiction. The novel emphasizes the power of storytelling by focusing its attention on a family of tricksters descended from the mixed-blood Luster Browne. Through the character of Eternal Flame, Luster’s daughter and former nun, the power of stories to heal wounded psyches is illustrated.