Vizenor’s Calling: Panic Hole and Party Line

“Vizenor’s Calling: Panic Hole and Party Line” argues that telephony and, more broadly, information and communication technologies (ICT) in the work of Gerald Vizenor are connected to and reveal the importance of place and motion, storytelling and oral tradition, and trickster discourse in the texts. Situating telephony in the fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in relation to the early history of phone service on the White Earth reservation helps the reader see how ideology is carried on the wire, how Vizenor takes that technology and uses it to help produce a critique of the dominant culture and its construction of the indian, and how voice is connected to place. Vizenor’s extended family history, moreover, establishes the relationship between telephony, orality, and connections that we see throughout Vizenor’s work. Those connections are made, in a trickster fashion typical of Vizenor and his work, in an effort to heal.