The trickster myths in Gerald Vizenor’s Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories come nearly verbatim from a series of tales in The Progress, the first newspaper published on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. Appearing in the late 1880s, the series was originally edited by Theodore Hudon Beaulieu (Summer, 15-16). From the standpoint of the contemporary literary scholar, the series might simply seem an historical collection of tribal lore and a useful collection from which to develop a source study for Vizenor’s works, but for Beaulieu’s Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) audience or Vizenor’s interested non-Anishinaabe academic audience engaged in the study of the dynamic function of open-ended trickster discourse, these narratives offer insight concerning the function and enduring value of native texts.
A brief review of the publication history of the tales offers Vizenor’s contemporary audience insight into their original intention. Twenty years before Beaulieu’s publication of the narrative series in The Progress, Anishinaabe families had begun to experience another in a series of removals, this time from their homes in different parts of the state to the newly organized White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. One hundred years of the gradual stripping away of Anishinaabe land and natural resources, as well as the threat of further erosion of tribal sovereignty, compelled Gus and Theodore Beaulieu to establish The Progress.
