WAITING FOR WOVOKA

Vizenor’s novel celebrates Indigenous culture and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.

On the White Earth Reservation, Truman La Chance is a young orphan who creates poetic dream songs to understand the world around him. Adrift from others, he finally finds a sense of belonging at the Theatre of Chance in his local community. The theater, a “curious sanctuary for runaways,” is the brainchild of Dummy Trout, a puppeteer who has not spoken in over 50 years, since the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, in which, at the age of 18, Dummy lost her family and loved ones and was consumed by grief. Decades later, following the Second World War, Dummy and her pet dogs preside over the theater, where she makes puppets and encourages the runaways and strays on the reservation to present stories to each other and the community. Over 12 chapters, the author uses the connections that a diverse range of Indigenous characters have to the theater to illustrate the building of a community amid the difficult circumstances on the reservation. Vizenor presents, in the context of puppetry performances, imagined conversations between historical figures such as Sitting Bull and President John F. Kennedy, Aristotle and James Baldwin, and Sacagawea and Tallulah Bankhead, which are the novel’s most intriguing feature. He also links Western cultural works, such as the opera Madama Butterfly, to the feelings and experiences of his Indigenous characters. The short novel is curious and winding and is at times hard to follow. But the author’s background as a poet is obvious in the lyrical prose (“He described the slight hesitations of his speech as the unexpected silence between a flash of lightning and crash of thunder”), making much of the language so beautiful that the meandering threads of the storyline do not detract from the reader’s enjoyment.

A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.