01/09/2021
NEW VIDEO: Bearheart: The Gerald Vizenor Chronicles
Write Place is a nonprofit dedicated to literature and the environment and we are pleased to announce the release of our new documentary, Bearheart: The Gerald Vizenor Chronicles. The film explores the prophetic vision of the Anishinaabe author through his novel Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, published in 1978 during the rise of OPEC and the subsequent gas crisis when long lines at US filling stations were nightly images in national and local news. This post-apocalyptic story reveals the implications of a society and economy based on a finite energy source as tentative as it is lucrative. The film travels the US interstates the novel's characters take on a pilgrimage from the headwaters of the Mississippi River to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Along the way, it offers a blueprint for survival.
Using Vizenor’s first novel, Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, as a framework, we are visiting sites around the country to use as the stages for exploring his later works and his ability to, as he says, “re-mythologize the land.”
