Gerald Vizenor examines the conscription, deployment, and combat casualties of Native American Indians soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. More than twelve thousand Native Americans served in regular infantry units with the British and Australian forces on the Hindenburg Line in Picardy and with the French Army in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Vizenor will discuss the research undertaken for his new book, Blue Ravens, the first historical novel about Native Americans in the First World War, in which he portrays scenes of actual soldiers in combat (drawing on his own family’s service in the conflict), crucial cultural stories, and the ironies of war.

Gerald Vizenor is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabe in Minnesota. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the American Book Award and the New York Fiction Collective Award.

This event is supported by the US Embassy, London.