Treaty Shirts. Gerald Vizenor

envisioned and animals and bats have always been the reserved traces in our stories and the precedent of courts.”

      “Names, machines, death, empty, no meaning, nothing, death nothing, names nothing, words are not an absence and not a salvation or memory, words are created and last only in the moment of a tease or shout,” said Savage Love.

      Maybe, but the stories of the exiles in Treaty Shirts were eternal, and in the same way the articles in our constitution have always had meaning. The words were in the clouds that love to hear a native dream song. We were banished, seven constitutioneers with exile nicknames, outside of the federal sectors, and yet the ironic stories of our names, and posted notices of our exile, have meaning and significance.

      “Nothing more than native nostalgia, no significance,” declared Savage Love. She smiled, and raised one hand in silence, a gesture of patience and respect as one of the seven exiles, and then turned and walked away with five great exiled irony mongrels, Wild Rice, Sardine, Mother Teresa, Mutiny, and White Favor.

      Savage Love earned her nickname as a tribute to the crusty mother of the poet and novelist Samuel Beckett of Dublin and Paris. Savage Love was an innovative novelist, and actually better suited to exile than a commune. She was the direct descendant of Chance, the sensitive and honorable native healer who taught dozens of mongrels how to detect the absence of irony. That has been an eminent practice, and more significant than any prayers for deliverance or the promissory politics of the federal government.

      Chance and Savage Love were born on treaty land, but were never connected to a community. They lived with the artist Dogroy Beaulieu and several mongrel healers on the Pale of the White Earth Reservation and were ridiculed in stories. Chance, Savage Love, and the mongrels moved with Dogroy to the Gallery of Irony Dogs in Minneapolis.

      Chewy and the seven exiles were banished along with sex criminals, dogs, and domestic pets. The federal sector banned the mere possession of dog food, and imposed work fines for those who were caught feeding birds, cats, or dogs. Mongrels, the great healers of natives, were abandoned in the hundreds on the sector, and were driven to search the overnight casino trash for food with the rowdy crows. The mature mongrels truly protected the weaker and dependent designer breeds on the sector. Three abandoned and dirty white Bichon Frisé, and several other catchy named terriers, learned how to carry on with the pure mongrels, and with the tricky manners of sector survivors.

      The abandoned mongrels ran in packs and rehearsed their lonely nightly howls near the treelines. The timber wolves disregarded the mongrel howls. The wild distance of so many domestic generations could not be overcome even with a practiced bay. The renounced miniature sleeve dogs were thwarted with the genes of insider pedigrees, but they ran happily with the pure mongrels, forever burdened with a shallow, anxious, and inane yelp, yelp, yelp.

      “Mongrels never abandon their young, or any young dogs, pedigree or not, deformed or not,” said Moby Dick.

      Mongrels have never forgotten their origins and easily grasped the meaning of irony and abandonment on the sector. The mongrels were healers, and have endured the curses, sorrow, and endearment of humans for thousands of years.

      Savage Love worried that the five mongrels at her side would only appreciate the words abandonment and rescue in ironic stories, and bark at the absence of irony. Mongrels at casino dumpsters, and the creepy poses and declarations of sector toadies and politicians, were obtuse and truly ironic and the absence deserved a bark, but mongrel barks were banned and dangerous.

      Savage Love declared that “only a cruel and benighted separatist would abandon our healers and great pointers of the absence of irony, or name a mongrel Cracker, Custer, Cur, Crud, Abandon, or Renounce, without a native tease and astute sense of irony.”

      The mission priests created mundane and descriptive nicknames of mongrels in the early years of the reservation, White Paws, Big Spot, Bud, Joe, Kim, Gordy, Catch, Pickle, Manypenny, and Bear Heart. The mission sisters shunned the mongrels and wild animals, but demonstrated their love of native children and tolerated the redeemed mongrels, the shy mongrels that never nosed a holy crotch. Luckily the ecclesiastic nicknames of mongrels on the reservation were never Vice, Shame, Salvation, or Black Devil.

      I was a novelist in the generous literary shadow of my great-uncle who wrote the constitution, and more than thirty books about natives. Most of the natives who returned to the reservation that first year of the constitution were trained and experienced teachers, lawyers, athletes, medical doctors, corporate accountants, an electronic engineer, a pirate radio broadcaster, an artist, fireman, musician, and a holographic artist and scientist. Rightly, we were always teased as constitutional newcomers and earned our nicknames based on manner, habits, diversions, and we sometimes earned more than one. The newcomers were commonly known on the reservation by their nicknames.

      Surely our loyalties and constitutional allegiance were not cultural crimes that deserved banishment or termination. The principles of governance were abused and discredited by sleazy sector autocrats, and yet we could not deny that arbitrary decisions and policies were common for more than a century and sometimes celebrated in the modern ruins of continental liberty.

      The visionary stories, treaty deceptions, and cultural ruins were never the same from one generation to the next, and the cultural conversion of casinos was only a proem to the extreme political narratives of national endorsements and the strange revisions of penalties and justice.

      La Maison de Torture Extraordinaire, for instance, a reversal in the national practice of torture, would surely be more bearable than archaic political evictions, religious torture, and secret rendition strategies. The outcome would be the same but the new torture of solicitude caused no nightmares, psychic scars, or political crises. Separation with compassion, or banishment with no body trauma, was nothing less than removal and exile. There was no virtue in the cruel irony that our native ancestors endured arbitrary and malicious separation carried out by federal agents in the early years of the White Earth Reservation.

      The exiles were descendants of the fur trade, and our ancestors once declared their loyalty to the French in the empire wars. Today, with loathsome stories and dreadful memories of the fur trade, we bear the surnames, totemic nicknames, and cultural distinctions of native exiles, and to create a new union with the spirits of animals we initiated totemic associations and constitutional councils to advise the new government. The original totems were created in the spirit of the animals, in ancestral stories of natural reason, the turns of seasons, eternal migrations of birds, and the common array and motion of wolf spiders, cicadas, bobcats, bats, kingfishers, carpenter ants, cedar waxwings, moccasin flowers, praying mantis, and coywolves.

      Clément Beaulieu was a delegate and the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. Article Five provided that “freedom of thought and conscience, academic and artistic irony, and literary expression shall not be denied, violated or controverted by the government.”

      The Anishinaabe told great trickster stories of creation and enticement, teases and quirky mercy, and scenes of visionary motion. These memorable stories were never translated rightly in the book, but natives have the moral imagination, the lure of totemic associations, the natural justice of stories and literary irony forever in the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and in the ancient legacy of the Great Peace of Montréal.

      Only a native constitution would include a clear and direct reference to artistic irony. My great-uncle wrote that the constitution must encourage ironic stories and art, create new totems, more than the mere imitation of the traditional birds and animals, and he specified that the totemic and community councils should “strengthen the philosophy of mino-bimaadiziwin, to live a good life, and in good health, through the creation and formation of associations, events and activities that demonstrate, teach and encourage respect, love, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty and truth for citizens.” That good life, however, would never absolve the cruelty and spiritual abuse of animals in the fur trade. The cultural memory of dead totemic animals was unforgiven, never a constitutional clemency.

      The new totems and cultural burdens of natives were hardly significant when compared with the decimation of animals, and demise of the original totemic associations in the furious continental