Father Meme

by Gerald Vizenor

Father Meme, a sleazy priest, abused three altar boys at the Indian Mission Church of the Snow, located on an Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. The sexual abuse evolves at the mission, at Saint John's Abbey, and on a houseboat at Lake Namakan in the Voyageurs National Park. The altar boys refuse to be victims and stage various strategies of resistance, simultaneously ironic, tricky, and grisly, including the Fourteen Torments founded on the Stations of the Cross. Father Meme is justly sacrificed by the altar boys in a winter fish house on Wiindigoo Lake. This modern fable of wicked priests, sin, sacrifice, and survivance is told to a visiting lawyer and cultural historian from France, a bygone association of the Fur Trade and the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa, Indians of the Great Lakes. Father Meme is a singular, memorable novel that confronts clerical sexual abuse and denounces the reluctance of the Catholic Church to punish pedophile priests.
"The Benedictine Monks at Saint John's Abbey first touched my heart by choral music, and then the priest silenced me by his greedy touch and sexual abuse."--from Father Meme

128 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2008

About the author

Gerald Robert Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not crack the code of this novel: the frame baffled me, the character the narrator talks to is unrealistically open and patient with a very uncomfortable and explicit story, and the narrator himself seems not quite in touch with reality even though sophisticated and learned. I trudged along, however, until the bestiality and sexual references became too much...and then I was even more confused about what Vizenor is trying to accomplish. whatever it is, the sight of a priest masturbating while being beaten to death will stay with me, sadly.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anishinaabe altar boy Red Dawn. Actually a little tame for Vizenor. Possibly a great novel here if Vizenor wanted to expand the narrative a bit.