The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution

2. Constitutional Consent: Native Traditions and Parchment Rights

9 2 Gerald Vizenor Constitutional Consent native traditions and parchment rights The American Wild West was a cruel, creepy, and venal entanglement of conquest, discovery, diseases, outright extortion, separatism , and genocide of Native American Indians. Most Native cultures resisted the imperious waves of occidental invasions but were decimated by lethal pathogens and then coerced to negotiate national treaties that actually sanctioned the very contradictions of a constitutional democracy, the generation of federal partitions, exclaves, and reservations. These plenary sanctions never were unequivocal inducements, however slight and crude, to participate in the new democratic manner and solemn federal equity of individual property rights and a Native constitutional polity. Later, the hasty and arbitrary allotment of treaty land was carried out by national surveys and the obscure metes and bounds of a pervasive, gratuitous, and unjust doctrine that favored immigrant homesteaders and independent yeomen landowners. These devious property rations and reductions of communal Native land obstructed traditional Native sovereignty and governance. 10 Vizenor Partition, despotism, and decadence, but not the conventions or chancy covenants of a promissory democracy, followed the brutal dominions, territorial crusades, mercenary capture and abuse, military removal, and genocide against the cultural traditions and continental liberty of Native American Indians. Yet the stories of Natives in these centuries of colonial occupation are about Native survivance rather than cultural victimry. “Democracy stirs in the wake of American armies,” declared Jacques Rancière in Hatred of Democracy. These beats and spurs of democratic ironies are more extensive in Native recollections of the past than in the current critical context of armies and corporations in the Middle East and Central Asia. The analogies of democratic anticipation in the wake of armies, traders, the fury of missionaries, and capricious federal agents are manifest in Native communities and on reservations. Rancière pointed out that the “arguments used to back up the military campaigns devoted to the worldwide rise of democracy reveal the paradox concealed by the dominant usage of the word today.” Democracy, he observed, “would appear to have two adversaries. On the one hand, it is opposed to a clearly identified enemy—arbitrary government, government without limits—which, depending on the moment, is referred to either as tyranny, dictatorship, or totalitarianism. But this self-evident opposition conceals another, more intimate, one. A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.” A good Native government of natural reason and survivance must control the “reign of excess,” and must certainly do so in the political turns and tease of a constitutional democracy. Rancière stressed that “good democracy must be that form of government and social life capable of controlling the double excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent in democratic life.” Constitutional Consent 11 The misuse of Native land and the capitalization of resources, minerals, water, and natural stands of timber, was a corporate strategy, not the tender mercies of yeomen landowners. The nature of birds and animals was elusive, and Native totemic visions and associations were shied by the greedy commerce of democracy. Still, in spite of the ironic scenes of democratic encounters, duplicity, and betrayal, the tribute of natural reason and totemic associations, cultural sovereignty, sentiments of survivance, and reminiscence of continental liberty are appreciated in Native narratives. Native liberty, natural reason, and survivance are concepts that originate in narratives, not in the mandates of monarchies, papacies, severe traditions, or federal policies. Native liberty and survivance are implicit in the savvy ridicule and ironic stories about nationalists, emissaries, and autocrats. Nonetheless democracy is about property, security, and governance, and not always about discrete liberty. The conventions of survivance create a sense of Native presence over nihility and victimry. Survivance is an active presence: it is not absence, deracination, or ethnographic oblivion, and survivance is the continuance of narratives, not a mere reaction , however pertinent. Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry. The dynamic concepts of political and cultural liberty are not only conceived in monotheistic scripture, but in the creative, sacred, dicey, and tricky narratives of Native survivance. Memorable Native narratives are clever and strategic. No traditions, no cultural or political practices dominate the creative chronicles of Native resistance, survivance, and liberty. “Narrative is always strategic, both for teller and listener, in ways that can range from the callously selfish to the generously prosocial,” observed Brian Boyd in On the...