Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles

Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles is a 1990 novel by Gerald Vizenor; it is a revised version of his 1978 debut novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. The novel is a part of the Native American Renaissance and is considered one of the first Native American novels to introduce a trickster figure into a contemporary setting, even as he drawn on trickster traditions from various Native American tribes, such as Nanabozho (Anishinaabe) and Kachina (Pueblo).^[1][2]

The novel follows the adventures of Proude Cedarfair as he leads a group of mixedbloods on a pilgrimage across a postapocalyptic, postindustrial United States that has run out of gas.^[1][3] This novel demonstrates several of Vizenor's key concepts: his use of trickster figures; his use of mixedblood (or "crossblood") Indian characters in a non-tragic way;^[3] his version of magical realism—what he calls "mythic verism";^[1] and his conception of "postindian" identity;^[3] and his use of parody, as in the way the novel parodies both Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis".^[3]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} "Gerald Vizenor", Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, by Jennifer McClinton-Temple and Alan R. Velie, Facts on File, 2007, pp.376-378
2. ^ "Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles", Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature, by Jennifer McClinton-Temple and Alan R. Velie, Facts on File, 2007, pp.50-51.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} Mixedblood messages: literature, film, family, place, by Louis Owens, University of Oklahoma Press, 2001, pp.83ff.