Treaty Shirts. Gerald Vizenor

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      treaty shirts

      gerald vizenor

       TREATY SHIRTS

       October 2034 — A Familiar Treatiseon the White Earth Nation

      Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      © 2016 Gerald Vizenor

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Typeset in Sina

      Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7628-6

      Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7629-3

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

      Data available on request

      5 4 3 2 1

      Cover illustration: Rick Bartow, Voices III (2015). Acrylic on canvas. Artwork courtesy of the Artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR.

      IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER

       Alice Beaulieu Vizenor

      AND MY FATHER

       Clement William Vizenor

      The ideal of a mode of government that mirrors the

      values of a single community is dangerous because it

      implies that plural identities are pathological and

      univocal identities normal.

      John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism

      In America today our great divide in many ways

      comes down to a feud between the repressions of

      correctness, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other.

      Were correctness to prevail, its know-nothingism and

      repressiveness would surely lead to cultural decline. Even

      if freedom offers no guarantee of something better, it is

      at least freedom, and the possibilities are infinite.

      Shelby Steele, Shame

      A man of imagination has an advantage over other people,

      in that an actual experience is almost always less intense

      than his expectations of it. An actual misfortune is almost

      always less painful to him than his fear of it, just as, of

      course, his actual experience of joys is almost always less

      stirring than his hopes and anticipations of them.

      Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France

      Finally there is a justice, though a very different kind

      of justice, in restoring freedom, which is the only

      imperishable value of history. Men are never really willing

      to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they

      do not believe in dying completely.

      Albert Camus, The Rebel

       CONTENTS

       1 Archive 1

       2 Moby Dick 36

       3 Savage Love 49

       4 Gichi Noodin 61

       5 Hole in the Storm 72

       6 Waasese 84

       7 Justice Molly Crèche 99

       8 Archive 114

      treaty shirts

      1

       ARCHIVE

      The Great Peace of Montréal became the mainstay of our visionary and catchy petition that autumn for the right of continental liberty. Seven native exiles resumed that singular treaty of peace in tribute to thousands of our native ancestors, the ancient voyageurs and coureurs de bois of the fur trade, and citizens of New France.

      That theatrical peace treaty was plainly signed forever and has continued in native stories as a trustworthy entente after more than three centuries of diplomacy, territorial wars, colonial turnabouts, separatism and reservations, and the many obscure resolutions of sovereign nations.

      Seven native exiles teased the former colonial regimes to restore that great peace of the continent and recognize a singular seat of egalitarian governance at Fort Saint Charles on Manidooke Minis, the island of native liberty, mercy, and spiritual discretion near the international border of Lake of the Woods.

      Archive is my nickname, one of the seven exiles.

      The Constitution of the White Earth Nation, once our chronicle of continental liberty, was created with moral imagination and a distinct sense of cultural sovereignty, the perseverance of native delegates, and a certified referendum of citizens, but the duties of our democratic government were carried out for only twenty years.

      The rightfully elected government, related community councils, and judiciary were abandoned overnight when the original treaties and territorial boundaries of the White Earth Reservation were abrogated by congressional plenary power on October 22, 2034.

      The exiles were sworn delegates to the constitutional conventions, and then with the defeasance of treaties and governance the seven exiled natives turned to the irony and tease of native stories, and a chance that the great union of peace would overturn in spirit the course of termination and native banishment.

      The Constitution of the White Earth Nation would continue as an autonomous native government in exile, we resolved that autumn, with the recommenced ethos of the Great Peace of Montréal at Fort Saint Charles.

      Native traditions were turned into kitschy scenes at casinos, the conceit of culture, vain drumbeats, and with a bumper cache of synthetic narcotics, but native stories, the rough ironies of our liberty, and creative starts and elusive closures, outlasted the treachery, clandestine chemistry, the empire warrants, and the monopoly politics of entitlements.

      Natives have forever escaped from the treachery of federal treaties, ran away to adventures, love, war, work, and money, broke away from reservation corruption, but we were the first political exiles with a constitution. Liberty has never been an easy beat, tease, or story.

      The seven exiles and a native soprano in her nineties were steadfast that any history must be envisioned with native stories, and our ancestors were rightly saluted, an easy gesture to more than two thousand native envoys who gathered three centuries ago on the Saint Lawrence River near Montréal and entrusted forty orators and chiefs to sign by name and totemic mark the great peace union with the royal province of New France.

      Justice Molly Crèche, one of the native exiles of liberty, naturally praised the sentiments and native signatories of that historic