The gullibility of cultural studies departments is an easy target for satire and, after a long and distinguished career of activism and teaching, Gerald Vizenor has surely earned the right to poke as many academic eyes as he wants. In the wacky yet insightful Chair of Tears, though, the former director of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley goes beyond merely tweaking egos, aiming instead to blow up the very concept of "Native American Studies"--and the practice of passing native experience under the Euro-American lens for inspection and appraisal along with it.
Vizenor's hero, Captain Shammer, was raised on a Lake Itasca houseboat and, in the sort of magical irony rampant in this short novel, becomes the department head of Native American Studies at the University of Minnesota. A trickster in the classic folklore sense, Shammer immediately turns the department on its head, introducing spurious cultural practices the credulous faculty members swiftly embrace as authentic Native traditions. Vizenor fires on multiple targets with wicked glee--one moment, he'll address the lack of Native Americans in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon; the next, he'll introduce dogs trained to bark when they detect the absence of irony.
Vizenor has made a career of warring against the norms and paradigms that have created an "American Indian" identity and has little interest in cultivating a popular readership. Chair of Tears is a heavy read, full of complex cultural references, but it's often bitterly funny, proving once again that this seasoned provocateur has the irony dogs well under his command. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic