DEFINING ANISHINAABEG TRICKSTER

 “We are what we imagine,” says N. Scott Momaday “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves...The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”  As a welcoming quote that opens Gerald Vizenor’s book, The People Named the Chippewa, this becomes a compelling opening to the story he tells of the Anishinaabeg, with the beginnings of Naanabozho, the woodland trickster on first earth.  My culture doesn’t have a happy hero trickster, but instead harbors an evil malevolent scoundrel ready to drag me to an eternity of pitiful sorrow and fire.  There are reasons for this that probably doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that my culture might feel deserving of the fate it imagines for us.  On the other hand, just maybe our fate is exactly what we think it is.  If we look at our concept of evil just a little askance, we might see their Winnebego.  Not the insensitively named recreational yuppified vehicles I see on the highways, but the flesh eating ice monster hiding behind the next snow covered obstruction just to devour me.  It might be possible, though, to use a Anishinaabeg language seeped in mythic relevance to realign anthrocentric perceptions of good and evil and reweave instead a cultural healing that realigns a guardian, teacher, challenger – with a bonefied American trickster.