Theatre of Chance: Native Celebrities of Nothing in an Existential Colony

Native puppeteers from the White Earth Reservation search for the meaning of life

Theatre of Chance is the final novel in the series that started with Blue Ravens and continued with Native Tributes, Satie on the Seine, and Waiting for Wovoka. A group of native puppeteers from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota resume their adventures, traveling from White Earth to an existential colony: the urban reservation in Minneapolis. Basile, the native elder, has become an editorial writer, and the stowaways continue their creative puppet parleys in the context of the historical moment, including the election of Richard Nixon as president. Dummy Trout and the other stowaways secure a houseboat and, with the loyal mongrels, return to French Portage Narrows in Lake of the Woods, the birthplace of Dummy. There, for the first time in more than seventy years, she whispers a few words, ending the shamanic silence of her marvelous encounters on the White Earth Reservation and in the native existential colony of Minneapolis.

GERALD VIZENOR is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. He received the 2022 Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature. His novels Shrouds of White Earth and Griever: An American Monkey King in China won American Book Awards, and the latter also earned a New York Fiction Collective Award.