Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (review)

With Native Liberty, acclaimed White Earth Ojibwe novelist and literary critic Gerald Vizenor ventures deeper into American Indian law and policy than before. As the head of a recent commission tasked with drafting a new tribal constitution with the White Earth Band of Chippewa Indians, Vizenor's views on law and policy have become that much more relevant. Native Liberty is a collection of essays and speeches, many of which touch upon Vizenor's personal history and views as the leading theorist on American Indian literature. But it is law and policy that frequently detains Vizenor here—and his warnings, couched in the terms of a Native literary and cultural critic, are worth a great deal more than yet another gaming compact extension.

Vizenor's most direct involvement with the law, ironically, was as a defendant in a contract claim related to fundraising for the establishment of a courtyard dedicated to Ishi located at the University of California, Berkeley. Ishi, as is well known, was the Indian (supposedly "the last of his tribe") who had lived for years at the university's Museum of Anthropology under Alfred Kroeber. Vizenor recounts that he had originally proposed to rename a building on campus after Ishi in 1985, but the Berkeley administration had rebuffed his efforts until Congress enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in the early 1990s. Only after being embarrassed by this federal statute and its requirement that the university repatriate much of its holdings, including thousands of American Indian remains and funerary objects, did the administration agree to dedicate Ishi Court. The ceremony in which Ishi's remains (most particularly, his brain, removed for baffling pseudoscientific reasons and held by the university) were repatriated and then reburied involved a character Vizenor describes as a kitschy fraud who claimed to be able to feel Ishi's spirit move though him as he touched the urn housing Ishi's remains. It is this man, Harkin Lucero, who unsuccessfully sued Vizenor for money damages.

One can't help but think Vizenor's experience as a defendant in a suit decided in a state court before a non-Indian jury affects his views on law and policy. He reserves special contempt for American Indian tribal gaming, referring to "the rise of casinos" as a "crafty union of avarice and mercenary sovereignty" (22). Vizenor juxtaposes Indian gaming with traditional potlatches, where tribal leaders gained authority and influence through the act of giving away their personal possessions, not in the act of acquiring the possessions of outsiders, and then sharing those resources with states and local governments. This juxtaposition implies that Indian leaders of gaming tribes are more influential among outsiders than they are among their own people. The experiences of tribal leaders at election time often demonstrate this irony.

Vizenor's views would irritate sovereignty warriors all over the nation, even many of those fighting for the tribes without lucrative gaming operations. Indian nations share at least one thing in common—the quest for tribal governmental revenues for purposes of funding critical public services from health care to public safety to education, services all too frequently denied Indian people from early times. This "mercenary sovereignty" is encapsulated in the regulatory and taxation exemptions from state and federal law; or, in other words, what Indian nations utilize to generate economic activity in Indian Country absent a tax base. In fact, Vizenor's critique is exactly what the US Supreme Court has been telling Indian nations for decades: that federal Indian law and policy has created enough space for tribal sovereignty to exist, and that space does not include economic advantages over non-Indians. While the Supreme Court can speak only in the archaic language of federal Indian law and in Nero-like "thumbs up" or "thumbs-down" orders, Vizenor recommends that Indian nations get down to the business of governing.

But Vizenor has bigger fish to fry. He raises the...