Customer Reviews

Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (Indigenous Americas)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A poem in six parts this piece relates the war at sugar point's impact on the Anishinaabe and their role of in it. Using vivid imagery without the classic constrictions of complete clauses Vizenor explores and explains what has been lost and how. By juxtaposing the wildlife with the battle, we see the true depth of the brutality.
In this complex master piece Gerald Vizenor discusses a major turning point in native and western relations.
This book though beautiful and powerful can be at times hard to follow. The preface, which tells both the history and some of the significance of the battle described, is a must read if you are to have any hope of understanding it. Once you have read this you are freer to enjoy the beauty of the poem itself.
In a brilliant rhetorical move Vizenor uses what I have seen described as a traditional Anishinaabe story telling style and thus he reclaims rhetorical sovereignty while describing another step in the loss of national sovereignty.
The realistic imagery and meandering style that make this work so beautiful also make it nearly impossible to comprehend. At times is there not only no transition but apparently no relationship between the ideas expressed. therefore although I find this book both instantly beautiful and mechanics to have been installed in many cases with such finesse and such detail that it, to be cliché, leaves me breathless the effort required to get to the meat of it is such that one must be intensely interested to follow through with it. In conclusion this easy is the proverbial "enter if you dare" outside a booby trapped treasure trove, if you succeed the rewards are rich, but there is a risk to it.

Bear Island: The War At Sugar Point by Gerald Vizenor (Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico) is the history of the battle in 1898 at Sugar Point Minnesota when the Anishinaabe people's sought to protect their land from the U.S. soldiers who set about to attack them. Written in the format of a narrative poem based on an extensive research which draws from myth, memory, legend, and history, Bear Island vividly depicts a succinct episode in Native American history. "Hole in the day/returned to the bears/by natural reason/heard the cause/manners of court/ordered in english/clever comebacks/in anishinaabe/always misconstrued/falsely summoned/then abandoned/by the court..." --Gerald Vizenor, (Bear Island, P.43)