The Constitution of the White Earth Nation: A New Innovation in a Longstanding Indigenous Literary Tradition

Imagination is a state of being, a measure of personal courage; the invention of cultures is a material achievement through objective methodologies. To imagine the world is to be in the world; to invent the world with academic predications is to separate human experiences from the world, a secular transcendence and denial of chance and mortalities.

Gerald Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa

Following James Mackay's thought-provoking theorization of constitutional criticism and David Carlson's important and insightful analysis of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation (CWEN) within the context of principal author Gerald Vizenor's critical, literary, and political oeuvre and debates about the political and practical implications of his work, this essay seeks to locate the CWEN within the broad ground of a long "continental" literary tradition of constitutional literature and, in doing so, perhaps provide a foundation for the practice of constitutional criticism that Kirby Brown performs in the essay that follows, a skillful reading of John Milton Oskison's novel Black Jack Davy through the critical lens of Cherokee constitutionalism.¹ A respectful interloper in Vizenorian territory, I had the fortune of teaching the White Earth Constitution this semester in a class on Native American literary traditions, which was held in a renovated one-room chapel. We read it halfway through the semester, and the living text emerged as a touchstone to which we constantly returned, inviting new questions about the classical indigenous texts we read before it, and generating conversations about the role of irony and political critique in texts as diverse as colonial-era petitions, nineteenth-century political prose, and "hot off the press" twenty-first-century fiction. In this essay I dwell on some of those earlier literary traditions, with which we began the course, and then shift to the question of irony, which dominated and sparked the later conversations, to consider how Gerald Vizenor and the other collective authors of the White Earth Constitution might engage new innovations on longstanding indigenous literary traditions.

The course began with imagination, place, and the word. We read classic essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko,² and then we launched right into an intertextual reading of one of the first works of indigenous constitutional literature recorded in the Roman alphabet, the Quiché Maya Popol Vuh. We paired two translations with a "reading" of Mayan imagistic and glyphic writing, visiting an exhibit called "Storied Walls" at Harvard's Peabody Museum that included representations of murals from San Bartolo, Guatemala, and Bonampak, Mexico, with an interpretive tour hosted by Marc Zender, a specialist in the glyphs.³ This allowed us to pair image with word, imagistic evocation with artistic representation, a "mythic" text with a historical people and place. Figures from the Popol Vuh came to life before our eyes, while the people who read and participated in the text became real historical persons, who slept in particular places, celebrated significant days, and formed stories about each other.

To some extent, this pairing represented an attempt to restore some of the original context for the Popol Vuh, which was likely based on a hieroglyphic and image-based codex that was wedded to an oral narrative. As translator Dennis Tedlock relates, the Popol Vuh was "an ilb'al, a 'seeing instrument' which "the lords of Quiché consulted . . . when they sat in council." It governed their political affairs, grounded them in their collective history, and guided their deliberations and decisions. It was a vehicle through which they could "envision" the "thoughts and actions of the . . . sacred ancestors" and a map, "a complex navigation system for those who wished to see and move beyond the present" (Christensen 21; Tedlock 29). The Quiché name for this instrument, according to Tedlock, translates to "Council Book" (21).

The opening words of the Council Book invite deliberation. In Tedlock's poetic translation: "This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiché. Here we shall inscribe, we shall implant the Ancient Word, the potential and source for everything done in...