Treaty Shirts: October 2034-A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation
148
Treaty Shirts: October 2034-A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation
148eBook
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Overview
Gerald Vizenor creates masterful, truthful, surreal, and satirical fiction similar to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. In this imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations; they pursue the liberty of an egalitarian government on an island in Lake of the Woods. These seven narrators, known only by native nicknames, are related to characters in Vizenor's other novels and stories. Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and this novel is a rich and critical commentary on the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867, and a vivid visualization of the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, in 2034.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576293 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 148 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
GERALD VIZENOR is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg 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. He lives in Naples, Florida.
Gerald Vizenor is a citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. In his career, Vizenor has written over 40 books in a variety of genres, including 16 novels and innumerable essays. His novels, poetry, and short story collections from Wesleyan University Press include Waiting for Wovoka, Satie on the Seine, Native Tributes, Treaty Shirts, Favor of Crows, Blue Ravens, The Heirs of Columbus, Landfill Meditation, Shadow Distance and Hotline Healers. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the American Book Award and PEN Oakland's Josephine Miles Award. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace prize 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award, for his work as a professor, writer and scholar on discussing peaceful resolutions to cultural differences. Vizenor was also awarded the 2022 Mark Twain Award from The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, which recognizes extraordinary work and contributions to Midwestern Literature. He was a delegate and principal writer for the White Earth Reservation Constitutional Convention, ratified in 2009.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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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 peace treaty, the first colonial empire to honor native sovereignty and continental liberty. She declared that native stories were survivance and diplomatic trickery, and our petitions to continue that peace treaty entailed ironic reversals of the colonial cession to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris.
La Grande Paix de Montréal has never been abrogated in tact or forsaken in diplomacy. Yet, that historical union and memorable peace treaty was directly connected to the decimation of totemic animals in the empire fur trade and has never been forgiven in the court of shamans, or revised with irony in the native stories of colonial enterprise and the shakedown of liberty.
Come closer, listen to the steady crack of totemic bones, trace the bloody shadows and getaways, endure the steady wingbeats of scavengers, and count out loud the seasons and centuries of peltry stacked in canoes, the gory native trade and underfur treasure of two empires, and the everlasting agony of the beaver.
The beaver and native totems were sacrificed once in the empires of the fur trade and orders of courtly fashions, and then totemic animals were converted into tawdry casino tokens, the new crave of peltry and games of chance.
The animals of cagey casino cultures were considered more as a nuisance and the sources of new diseases than the traditional inspiration of survivance totems and continental liberty.
Native storiers and artists portrayed the outrage and cruelties of cultural memory, and recounted in words and paint the ruins of native totems and haute couture of the fur trade, the fancy curtains, carpets, and maladies of casinos. Native creation stories were derived from totemic visions, and the course of our survivance must relate to that natural motion of continental liberty.
Hole in the Storm painted a series of grotesque casino gamers aboard a giant luxury yacht on Lake of the Woods. The cheeky triptych, Casino Whalers on a Sea of Sovereignty, portrayed the great waves, backwash, and bloated gamers hunched over rows of watery slot machines with beaver and totemic animals in place of the cherries, numbers, and bars on the reels of regulated chance.
Hole in the Storm was one of the seven exiles, and the nephew of Dogroy Beaulieu, the renowned native artist who was exiled almost twenty years earlier for his shrouds of totemic creatures and scenes of decrepit casino gamers.
The White Foxy Casino commissioned seven original paintings by Auguste Gérard Beaulieu, or Hole in the Storm, a painterly native nickname, and at the same time casino curators organized an atonement exhibition to celebrate the distinctive and once traduced portrayals of his great-uncle Dogroy Beaulieu.
Douglas Roy Beaulieu, a visionary artist, created a sense of native presence and abstract portrayals of animals, birds, and totemic unions of creatures. His avian shrouds were acquired by museums around the world. Yet, the revered painter was menaced by the tradition fascists and banished from the reservation because of the portrayals he created of casino gamers connected to oxygen ports on slot machines, and because of his evocative images of totemic visions. The miraculous traces of natural motion, the spirits and shadows of dead animals and birds were revealed on linen burial shrouds.
The Midewin Messengers, a scary circle of blood count connivers, coerced several native legislators to disregard the specific article in the Constitution of the White Earth Nation that clearly prohibited banishment. The political ouster was reversed several years later, but the abuse and disrespect of a great native artist could not be undone with a customary tease, turnabout gossip, casino drumbeats, or generous waves of cedar smoke.
Dogroy actually thrived as an artist in exile, and, with the mongrel healer, Breathy Jones, earned a prominence he could not have achieved in the crude casino culture on the Pale of the White Earth Nation.
Dogroy connected with other painters and established the marvelous Gallery of Irony Dogs in the abandoned First Church of Christ, Scientist located near Elliot Park and the historic Band Box Diner, a distinctive native quarter in Minneapolis. Some fifteen years later a heroic bronze statue of the militant poseur Clyde Bellecourt was erected on the corner near the Gallery of Irony Dogs.
The best native trickster stories were teases of creation, traditions, marvelous contradictions, and ironic enticements of weird and visionary flight. The stories were never about the abstract patois of treaties, entente cordiale, or native sovereignty. Now our stories must tease and controvert the capitol promises and betrayals as much as the sex, creation, and hardy escapades of lusty tricksters. Some stories were risky, erotic hyperbole, and with no sense of shame because the sex conversions, masturbation, and other seductive adventures started with our ancestors. Candor was natural and the fakery of literary denouement was not necessary.
Newcomers, fur traders, missionaries, and the course accountants of reservation enlightenment seldom weathered the teases or survived the mighty twists of trickster mercy. Truly, the new sector governor deserved no greater standing in native stories than federal agents of the past century.
The United States Congress abrogated more than three hundred native treaties in a special session that Sunday, October 22, 2034, and at once substituted federal sectors for reservations and state counties to manage the burdens of social security and hundreds of other national strategies, entitlements, and endorsements.
The Congress considered but could not enact more reasonable measures to decrease the enormous national cost of covenants and entitlements, so the political outcome was only promissory, a compromise that ended native treaties, the entente cordiale of native sovereignty, and, at the same time, the legislators voted to commence with the national endorsement sectors.
Congressional plenary politics once more downplayed and then abrogated as a mere compromise native egalitarian governance, continental liberty, and cultural sovereignty. The national political cuts, causes, and economic enactments were never more than the revels of dominion and monopoly agencies, and the remnants of treaty reservations were at most the caretaker remains of deceptive sovereignty.
The poses of entente cordiale and native sovereignty were bureaucratic ruses, and yet some weary natives were encouraged, other natives, storiers, literary artists, and painters, resisted the political maneuvers, and many others capitulated, once, twice, more, and then came the inevitable reversal, the plenary abrogation of our continental entente, treaties, and native liberty.
Godtwit Moon was nominated the sector governor straightaway and the very next day he posted an order to banish seven natives from the reservation and sector. The order indicated only our nicknames, Archive, Moby Dick, Savage Love, Gichi Noodin, Hole in the Storm, Waasese, and Justice Molly Crèche.
The Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and other native nations, were denatured by the plenary abrogation of the entente and treaties. The territorial domain of native sovereignty had been erased, and the precise constitutional prohibition of banishment was not enforceable.
Seven natives resisted the demise of governance, but we were immediately renounced and rebuked as extremists and exiled. The constitution was our only native trace of sovereignty, at the time, so we resorted to a diplomatic strategy of continental native liberty provided by the great and everlasting peace treaty with New France.
Forty native nations were signatories to La Grande Paix de Montréal in 1701, and for about sixty years the treaty provided peace for natives, fur traders, and the citizens of New France. The exiles were eager to double back with stories of earlier treaties and continental liberty because our native constitutional governance had been denied by the plenary power of the United States Congress.
The Great Peace of Montréal recognized by name and formal negotiations, empire cues, signatures, and totemic marks the unmistakable sovereignty of native nations in New France, New England, and the Great Lakes.
Hole in the Storm seemed to envision scenes of native exile, but the situation of our banishment was not the same as Dogroy Beaulieu or the renunciation of the spectacular triptych. The Casino Whalers on a Sea of Sovereignty portrayed the mighty motion of waves, the sleaze of casino overseers, grotesque gamers over slot machines, and the catastrophe of native sovereignty.
The abrogation of the reservation treaty, rescission of the constitution and native governance, and our exile that autumn resulted in an escape cruise on the Baron of Patronia, that marvelous houseboat of survivance and native sovereignty. We became the new native expatriates of continental liberty on Lake of the Woods.
Justice Molly Crèche, Moby Dick, Savage Love, and the other exiles told memorable treaty tales, the tease and ironies of princely names, workaday mockery, and the giveaway contingencies of government. Federal treaties were always hazy but the stories of the exiles were buoyant, a mirage of birthrights, bogus advances of civilization, and the steady comic teases and parodies of federal agents for more than a century. The new treaty tales were easily derived from the new regime and obscure duties of the endorsement sectors.
Waasese was an innovative storier with lasers, those beams, shimmers, and emission of radiation but not words or paint. She created incredible holoscenes, the precise projection of light, the haunted scenes and figures over the reservations, lakes, and cities. Most of the laser images were familiar, George Washington, Geronimo, Mae West, John Wayne, Sitting Bull, Bob Dylan, and Neighbor Smithy who wore a Vine Deloria Peace Medal, for instance, were seen several times in natural motion with Diane Glancy, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, George Morrison, David Bradley, and many other native writers and painters over the White Foxy Casino.
Waasese earned her nickname, a flash of lightning, in a laser laboratory as a graduate student, and created a laser scene of presidents and prominent natives that reached over the Mississippi River near the University of Minnesota. The holoscenes were in motion, faded, and then vanished in the night sky.
Waasese was constantly teased, of course, and given several nicknames, Tree House, Laser Carpenter, Crazy Beam, Chicago, Timber Maven, and at last the native word Waasese. The Chicago nickname was a historical reference to the reservation white pine that had been cut to build the city. Some natives converted that nickname to zhingwaak, white pine, but Waasese, a wild flash of lightning, outlasted the other nicknames.
Chewy Browne, a native soprano in her nineties, a truly catchy treaty storier, was honored as a senior exile on the very night of our departure from a boat dock near the ruins of the Seven Clans Casino in Warroad, Minnesota. Chewy chanted the names of her nine fancy chickens that night, and then told stories about how the chickens had scurried and crapped on the roulette tables and outsmarted the security agents with elusive clucks, magical cackles, and crow boasts in the casino.
Native creation stories were visionary, never the same as treaty tales. The contrasts of creation, and the totemic union of animals were never counted down to the territorial metes and bounds of separatist reservations and the ruse of sovereignty. Fancy chickens, however, were both creation and treaty stories, and memorable scenes at the casino.
Chewy was a shaman with fancy chickens.
Justice Molly Crèche, a prudent storier of creatures and treaties, counted ancient natives by diseases, grieved over the agony of pared animals in the wild fur trade, and created a poignant metes and bounds of lethal outpost pathogens, that decimation of natives, and, at the same time, the ghastly estates of peltry.
"Natives once envisioned totemic associations, bears, wolves, sandhill cranes, but our ancestors were never the honorable escorts of animals in the fur trade. We are the storiers of conscience, cast aside, and yet natives must continue to nurture totemic associations, the auras, spirits, and shadows of animals," declared Justice Molly Crèche.
Homer Drayn, vice chancellor of the William Warren Community College, announced in a formal statement, "Justice Crèche might have become a high court justice, but the hearsay of wild sex with animals and conversion of the tribal court to beaver rights and bear necrostories regrettably ended an eminent judicial career."
Drayn was an edgy native lawyer and constant rival to serve on the constitutional court. He had actually initiated the vicious rumors that Justice Crèche was having sex with mongrels and wild animals.
"Justice Molly Crèche always honored the standing of beaver, bear, moles, gypsy moths, juncos, spiders, and little brown bats in court," chanted Moby Dick.
"Crèche was right, she was always right about the rights of animals and their day in court," said Gichi Noodin, the steady voice of Panic Radio. "The trouble was, most natives worried more about the casino than about totems, mongrels, or fur trade animals, and the honorable justice was burdened with more cases and testimony about casino sleeve dogs than abandoned and abused children."
The White Earth Reservation was created by treaty on March 19, 1867. Minnesota had been a state for almost nine years when the federal government carved out a section of woodland and lakes for a reservation. That thorny episode of state separatism has never been a pleasurable source of native memories or stories, and for more than a century the treaty has never been a reliable warranty, never a true celebration of democracy, only a mockery of sovereignty and continental liberty.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Treaty Shirts"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Gerald Vizenor.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Archive
Moby Dick
Savage Love
Gichi Noodin
Hole in the Storm
Waasese
Justice Molly Crèche
Archive
What People are Saying About This
“Treaty Shirts presents a masterful exhibition of the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason, as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights, and political sovereignty. Perhaps the most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his goals, not through condemnation but through the humor of tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers.”
"In writing that's full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be."
—Diane Glancy, author of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education
"Treaty Shirts masterfully exhibits the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights and intellectual sovereignty. Most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his aims, not through condemnation and animus, but by the humor and tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers."—Billy J. Stratton, author of Buried in Shades of Night
“In writing that’s full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be.”
“Treaty Shirts masterfully exhibits the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights and intellectual sovereignty. Most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his aims, not through condemnation and animus, but by the humor and tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers.”