Artifact of an In-Between World : INTERIOR LANDSCAPES Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors <i> by Gerald Vizenor (University of Minnesota Press: $17.95; 300 pp.; 0-8166-1848-8) </i>

Native American autobiographies and personal narratives often reach non-Indian readers only after negotiating their way through a thicket of translators and writers. The classic “Black Elk Speaks,” for instance, was written by John G. Neidhart as told to him by Roger Black Elk by way of two translators. But in “Interior Landscapes,” Gerald Vizenor, a “tribal crossblood,” tells his own story, in his own words.

“Interior Landscapes” is a curio, a chronicle of the in-between world where that White Red Man, the mixed-blood writer, must dwell. It is a world of pain and grief, of acting out and acting as if, of being lost and found in all the many ways that a male American of Native descent can be lost and find himself again in the 20th Century.

Vizenor’s “Interior Landscapes” is an artifact of a dual reality, and his way of dealing with his circumstance is to transform duality into ritual by way of “trickster signatures,” as he terms them; his transformations are deconstructions, which in themselves reconstitute identity.

Presenting himself as a mixed-blood voyager through postmodern scenes of adventure and dissection, Vizenor becomes a traveler whose journeys and perspectives belie the befeathered, buckskinned, long-vanished stereotypes Americans are weekly pelted with on television.

Moving beyond stereotype, Vizenor presents an Indian American who lives in the modern world, fighting in World War II, having drinks with Russian intellectuals on a university campus, writing for newspapers, marrying an Englishwoman, traveling to China, working as a social worker--in short, being a citizen of the contemporary world.

In his deconstruction of Native American identity, Vizenor performs a truly tricksterish feat, one worthy of a child of Naanabozho, trickster par excellence and creator of the White Earth Chippewa, Vizenor’s people. “Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the Earth. He was a comic, a part of the natural world, a spiritual balance in a comic drama, and so he must continue in his stories,” Vizenor writes.

He takes his identity as mixed-blood tribal trickster from his father: “Alice Beaulieu, my grandmother, told me that my father was a tribal trickster with words and memories; a compassionate trickster who did not heed the sinister stories about stolen souls and the evil gambler.”

Clement William Vizenor, Gerald’s father, was a mixed-blood Chippewa from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, and his mother, LaVerne Lydia Peterson, a 17-year-old “white high school dropout.” Clement was murdered under mysterious circumstances, shot in an alley when he was a bare 26 years old; his son was just 2.

Born the same year F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” was published, Vizenor characterizes the book as “the popular novel of tragic hedonism, alcoholism, mental harm and moral descent” and comments that “Fitzgerald, the most gifted writer of his generation, was born in Saint Paul, about ten miles from our cross-blood tenement, but he lived in a world removed by economic promises, a natural decadent paradise. The common social pleasures of his characters would have been felonies on the reservation.”

The story Vizenor tells about his own childhood resembles his characterization of Fitzgerald’s work: His portrait of LaVerne is one of tragic hedonism and moral descent, if not of alcoholism. LaVerne was ever restless, always seeking life as portrayed in the movies. Years later, having remarried and reclaimed her son, she decided to leave her husband of eight years and go to California with a new man. “My mother chose to be lonesome in the movies, in her marriage, even in her own home. The scent of her sweet perfume lingered in the bathroom for several weeks.”

In 29 chapters, Vizenor details his family genealogy from its progenitors the Cranes (he is of the Crane clan), presents snapshots of Midwestern American life in the ‘30s and ‘40s, takes us to World War II aboard a troop carrier and beneath the moon over Matshushima, Japan, and moves us through the decades since. We discover some of the background of the founding of the American Indian Movement and events at Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973, and meet the frightening “skin-walkers” in Santa Fe. We glimpse Vizenor’s development as a writer from his earlier news stories and from fiction incorporated into the text.

At times, the work is precious: his inclusions of earlier works often reading like filler, and his almost gratuitous quoting of a variety of writers to no purpose other than to indicate that he’s read them, interfere with a narrative that could be compelling. Indeed, it often is compelling, particularly when he abandons his terse, journalistic deconstructionist pose and writes with true power and elegance:

“My tribal grandmother and my father were related to the leaders of the Crane; that succession, over a wild background of cedar and concrete, shamans and colonial assassins, is celebrated here in the autobiographical myths and metaphors of my imagination, my cross-blood remembrance. We are cranes on the rise in new tribal narratives. . . . One generation later the soul of the crane recurs in imagination; our reversion, our interior landscapes.”