Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation.

He served with occupation forces in Japan, with that nation was still struggling to recover from the vast destruction of the nuclear attacks that ended World War II.

His work with homeless and poor Natives may have been the reason Vizenor looked askance at the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM), seeing radical leaders such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt as being more concerned with personal publicity than the "real" problems faced by American Indians.

[citation needed] Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor.

He investigated the case of Thomas James White Hawk, convicted of a 1967 Vermillion, South Dakota murder and sentenced to death.

[7][8] His investigative journalism into American Indian activists revealed drug dealing, personal failings, and failures of leadership among some of the movement's leaders.

Beginning teaching full-time at Lake Forest College, Illinois, Vizenor was appointed to set up and run the Native American Studies program at Bemidji State University.

Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays, and many novels.

He has been named as a member of the literary movement which Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance, a flourishing of literature and art beginning in the mid-20th century.

[10] Vizenor has written several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses.

In order to cover more general Native studies, Vizenor suggests using the term, "postindian," to convey that the disparate, heterogeneous tribal cultures were "unified" and could be addressed en masse only by Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them.