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  • Introduction
  • James MacKay (bio)

Constitution is a country's youth.It's a turbulent brook and its quaking banks.

It's an idea, an outlook and a vision;A boat and its continuous journey.

Don't tell me it's just a book.

Shailendra Sakar, "Constitution"

Gerald Vizenor's name calls up some by now familiar associations, whether postmodern textual play or ironic political contrariness, controlled imagistic compression or exuberant trickster excess. The cannibalistic, violent, dog-sex shock tactics with which he burst onto the literary scene may no longer have such power to disrupt expectations of what an indian might write, but his teasing ability to make words and meanings kaleidoscope before your very eyes means each new text still carries an intellectual and aesthetic frisson few if any other writers approach. Still, his newest production, the "Proposed Constitution of the White Earth Nation," might just be the most shocking turn yet.

Asked to participate in a constitutional convention, then invited to become the principal writer, Vizenor (along with his co-framers) confronts some of the most fundamental questions facing Native nations. What is the purpose of a nation? What does it mean to be a citizen of that nation, and who has the right to be such a citizen? [End Page 3] How is authority vested in the nation's officers, and what checks and balances exist to insure against corruption and abuse of power? How can tradition inform governance, without running the danger of theocracy? What motivates interest in the future of the nation? How should the nation's finances be structured? How is the land base to be managed? How is sovereignty to be asserted, protected, and projected? How will the nation treat with other sovereign powers, including but not limited to the settler state that surrounds and enfolds it? How is the judicial system to be arranged, and quis custo-diet ipsos custodes? How does a nation want to imagine itself? What is the language of the nation? How can the constitution be written so as to fulfill its triple responsibilities of being inspiring to those who would hear its idealism, precise for those who need to use it to make judgments, and clear enough so every citizen feels included in its embrace? At the time of writing, the answer to this last is uncertain: the proposed constitution has been ratified by tribal delegates but awaits a full citizen referendum.

As can be seen from the questions above, to participate in the creation of a constitution is to engage in a profound act of national imagination. Marilyn Nicely writes (on the homepage of the Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project): "Tribal constitutions and codes are the heart of self-government for over 500 federally recognized tribes, and are the lifeblood of Indian sovereignty."1 A skeleton for law and practice, the constitution provides an invisible structure for the citizen's interaction with the state. And constitutions, as Lisa Brooks reminds us later in this issue, are not some foreign import into Indigenous American affairs. Written constitutions pre-date Columbus; Native constitutions may have inspired the American founding fathers. Just as the continent's "discoverers" were met on the beach by others who had "discovered" it first, when the Tribal Organization Committee of Felix Cohen set out to help tribes create foundational documents, they found more than fifty examples already on file, created with or without the help of the federal government (Richotte 485).

Indian Reorganization Act paternalism lies behind the contempt with which many constitutions and codes are now discussed. David [End Page 4] Wilkins quotes from a memo Cohen wrote to John Collier in 1935—"I have, as you know, from the start, opposed the idea of sending out canned constitutions from Washington" (xxvi)—providing evidence to oppose Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle's assertion that "homogeneity rather than usefulness subsequently became the virtue" (101-2). Nonetheless Wilkins agrees that sample constitutions, templates, and outlines provided by the central government ended up being adopted wholesale, or almost wholesale, on too many occasions. A further injustice in 1934, the first year of the act's implementation, was a creative interpretation of democracy...

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