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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
© 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
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.
