Tricksters are real in stories but not in the flesh. Tricksters are not blood or material, but imagination. Tricksters are the kind of thought that raises hope, that heals, that cures, that cannot be traced. The power of a trickster would be diminished, even abolished, by human representations. Humans are not tricksters, but tricksters can be human. Tricksters are not moral but live forever in imagination. And the trickster is not immortal either. Tricksters liberate the mind, and they do so in a language game. Tricksters do not represent the real or the material. Tricksters are not alive in tribal imagination to prove theories of the social scientists. Tricksters have become anthropologists, but no anthropologist has ever understood a trickster. Tricksters have become anthropologists if only long enough to overturn their theories and turn them into cold shit. But tricksters are not moral or functional. Tricksters are not artifacts. Tricksters never prove culture or the absence of culture. Tricksters do not prove the values that we live by, nor do they prove or demonstrate the responses to domination by colonial democracies. Tricksters are not comsumables. Tricksters are not breakfast cereal. Tricksters are ethereal. Tricksters only exist in a comic sense between two people who take pleasure in a language game and imagination, a noetic liberation of the mind. . . . 

                                                    ~ Gerald Vizenor, 1993

___. ATrickster Discourse: Comic and Tragic Themes in Native American Literature@ in Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History, and Spirit, ed. Mark A. Lindquist and Martin Zanger, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994 (originally published 1993): 67-83.