Part Three: Governance, Irony, and the Intellectual Arena
Questions by Thomas Dayzie
1. At IAIA we received a hard lesson when Trump zeroed out IAIA’s yearly budget. Thankfully, IAIA successfully lobbied to return most of the budget, but the crisis made clear how precarious the support system of Native artists is and how dependent we are on the federal government. As a writer who has imagined Native self-determination and Native futures, what do you think are the most pressing problems facing indigenous nations’ and indigenous artists’ self-determination today?
The most relevant response to this first question about native futurity and resistance is an obvious and necessary reference to Vine Deloria, Jr. His critical observations are as necessary and urgent at the moment as they were more than fifty years ago with the publication of Custer Died for Your Sins.
Deloria was one of the most respected native activists, lawyers, university professors, and the author of several books. “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical,” he declared on the second page of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. “In this book we will discuss the other side--the unrealities that face us as Indian people. It is this unreal feeling that has been welling up inside us and threatens to make this decade the most decisive in history for Indian people. In so many ways, Indian people are re-examining themselves in an effort to redefine a new social structure for their people. Tribes are recording their priorities to account for the obvious discrepancies between their goals and the goals whites have defined for them.”
Deloria died twenty years ago, and his critical observation that natives are perceived as “unreal and ahistorical” continues with only slight revisions of the dominion course of treaty separatism and victimry. My insistence on the word native is an obvious resistance to the spurious discovery name, indian, and in my essays and literary stories the word native and indian are printed in lower case italics, a necessary style to avoid the dominance of capitalization, and the same resistance to other invented native cultural names. Casino cultures and commercial native literature have counted, for the most part, as a more current course of unrealities and cultural histories of separatism.
“Deloria invited me to record an interview with him at his suburban home in Denver, Colorado. His comments that early autumn more than fifty years ago were direct and heartfelt about native resistance, education, organizations, reservation politics, and always with a generous sense of humor and native irony. The discussions were casual, more conversational than academic or journalistic, and lasted for about an hour in the dim light of his basement office with the scent of laundry soap,” is the first paragraph of my interview “Waiting for Crazy Horse: Vine Deloria, Native Ideologies, Irony, Survivance,” scheduled for publication for the first time in the online biannual journal, Transmotion, early in 2026.
Deloria “leaned back in his heavy chair, smiled, and then teased me for arousing the wrath of Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt,” and other pretentious indians in the American Indian Movement. I was a staff writer for the Minneapolis Tribune at the time and reported the obvious in an editorial article that the name Chippewa Indian was a misconception. A troupe of radical indians convened at the Minneapolis Star Tribune building for several hours to protest my commentary and then vanished when they apparently learned that the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe had been wrongly named the Chippewa. The tease was relevant at the time but now the word indian and many other cultural nominations are more fully explained in standard dictionaries, but the fabrications of natives continue in popular culture.
My first question that afternoon in the basement was about his singular book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, published a few months earlier in 1969. He responded that “we really need the younger generation to come in and take over the whole structure of Indian Affairs.” Vine was thirty six years old at the time of the interview, and in the next five years he inspired thousands of young natives to engage in politics and governance, participate in national organizations, and study treaty law and literature, and at the same time he graduated from the University of Colorado Law School, taught at Western Washington State University, advocated native fishing rights, and published five more books, We Talk, You Listen; Of Utmost Good Faith; God is Red; Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; and The Indian Affair.
Vine responded with praise for the younger generation of natives and for the National Congress of American Indians which he served as executive director from 1963 to 1967. His generous notice of other natives and organizations was characteristic of his liberal sense of public service, native ethos, and dedication to education. He wrote in Custer Died for Your Sins, “Ideological leverage is always superior to violence,” and native problems “have always been ideological rather than social, political or economic.”
Native humor and irony are other admired attributes of his literary style as a storier in conversations and publications. “The current joke is that a survey was taken and only fifteen percent of the Indians thought that the United States should get out of Vietnam. Eighty-five percent thought they should get out of America,” he wrote in Custer Died for Your Sins. Vine declared that “irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research,” and concluded that “until we can once again produce people like Crazy Horse all the money and help in the world will not help us.”
Vine Deloria Jr. conveyed native irony and humor on every occasion, in conversations, at conventions, and lectures, and he practiced the communal tease, once customary in many native communities, mainly with native political leaders, lawyers, and academics. Natives easily “come together by sharing humor of the past,” he wrote, and the most common ironic stories in the past fifty years alluded to anthropologists, federal agents, treaties, General Custer, and Christopher Columbus.
Vine encouraged native movements that were progressive, clever, and embraced an ethos of governance, and celebrated the right of resistance in the ruins of civilization. He declared that it was crucial that natives “pick the intellectual arena as the one in which to wage war. Past events have shown that the Indian people have always been fooled by the intentions of the white man. Always we have discussed irrelevant issues while he has taken our land. Never have we taken the time to examine the premises upon which he operates so that we could manipulate him as he has us.”
VIZENOR: Vine, your book has been in print four months now. And one of the reasons you state for writing the book is to involve more indians, more young people, tribal organizations, and tribal governments. How successful has that been?
DELORIA: I don't know how successful it's been, Gerald. But one of the things that I see is we really need the younger generation to come in and take over the whole structure of Indian Affairs. Work in the organizations, do a lot of the hard field work. And it seems there is so much emphasis today on demonstration and spectacular activism. I'm sympathetic to the new left ideas, but a lot of the techniques they use, to give an example, were at the convention of the National Congress of American Indians.
2. Last year, I taught an Introduction to Critical Theory course in the IAIA undergraduate English program. My undergraduate background focused heavily on critical theory from the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Walter Benjamin. While teaching such texts in the IAIA course, the question of “what can these classic critical theory texts teach us Native writers?” never left my mind. As a seminal Native creative and critical writer who engages with the European Critical Theory, what is your take on the continuing relevance of writers like Benjamin to us?
German Marxism and Critical Theory at the Frankfurt School first focused on cultural materialism, communism, and the politics of fascism and consciousness. Critical theories are creased and complicated by expositions, analytical translations, violence, political and cultural events, and creative perceptions. Shamanic favors and the recognition of critical theories become a clever chase of native consciousness. The consideration of native totemic shadows, trickster cosmology, the chance of irony and mockery on separatist reservations and in existential colonies, are seldom the subject of critical theories.
My critical contention about monotheism, the mercenary fur trade, treaty reservations separatism, casino cultures, the politics of existential native colonies, the conversion of communal stories of survivance to victimry in commercial novels, and the digital depictions and artificial intelligence, continue to broaden critical theories and other interpretations of native literature. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were more instructive at the time about storiers, essays, and literature than the other distinguished scholars and philosophers of the Frankfurt School.
“Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly,” observed Walter Benjamin in “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” More “often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” The original essay was first published almost ninety years ago.
Native storiers have never been easy to consider in the anonymity of existential colonies in cities or at universities, but a grand theory of totemic sensations of mockery, chance of healers, and elusive totemic shadows created by oral storiers continue in some native nations that are not casino cultures. The native grand theories of mockery and irony easily deconstruct digital images and artificial intelligence as nothing more than evasive agency decoys and analogue simulations of futuristic reservations of victimry. The sense of presence and ironic manner of native storiers is elusive and never a digital memory. Digital depictions and other enactments of artificial intelligence depose the native novels that have not created totemic shadows and the ironic presence of storiers. Benjamin would surely salute the grand theories of mockery and irony as restorations of the last native stories of shamanic hesitations and liberty on the continent.
“The earliest symptoms of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times,” declared Benjamin. “What distinguishes the novel from the story. . .is its essential dependance on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing.”
The native essays of resistance, and the grand theories of mockery and survivance, are not traditions. The native essay is contention not a meditation, not separatism, not cultural absence, or the mastery of natural motion. The essay is an ironic venture, a tease of creation stories, and the native essay is a tease of Theodor Adorno and his theory of the essay cited in a collection of my essays, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 1998. The “essay retains, precisely in the autonomy of its presentation, which distinguishes it from scientific and scholarly information, traces of the communicative element such information dispense with,” observed Adorno in Notes to Literature.
“The essay is what it was from the beginning, the critical form par excellence; as immanent critique of intellectual constructions, as a confrontation of what they are with their concept, it is critique of ideology,” declared Adorno. The essay “wants to heal thought of its arbitrary character by incorporating arbitrariness reflectively into its own approach rather than disguising it as immediacy.”
3. Few creative writers have also co-authored a constitution, as you did in 2009 for the White Earth Nation. Could you speak to the experience of writing a constitution and how writing novels of Native self-determination informed that process? After writing the constitution, did continuing your creative and critical writing change in any significant ways?
I was a sworn delegate at four Constitutional Conventions over two years. Erma Vizenor, Chief of the White Earth Nation, a distant relation by marriage, invited reservation communities to nominate eligible citizens to serve as delegates. Forty delegates were legally sworn to represent the diverse population of native citizens on the reservation and in other areas, and later she named me the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation.
The delates were seated at five large round tables, eight at a table, and were invited to consider, discuss, and record the critical content of a constitution. Each table named one delegate to summarize the discussions, and late that morning of the first convention the native delegates considered native sovereignty, rights and justice, banishment, community youth and elder councils, and the principle of communal reciprocity. The ideas and specific principles were presented and later the recorded discussion notes were transcribed and discussed by the entire delegation. The notes and principles discussed at the conferences were the basis of my duty as the principal writer, to consider the actual content of the articles of the constitution and present every proposed article for final consideration at the last convention. The Constitution of the White Earth Nation has twenty chapters and one hundred and eighteen articles. The United States Constitution was not an easy structure to consider as a model to declare a native ethos and principles of governance. Luckily, my graduate studies included a critical review of the Constitution of Japan created by senior officers of the military occupation who served General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.
“The Constitution of Japan provided uncomplicated chapters that clearly described the modern practices of governance,” I wrote in The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012. “I adapted the chapter style with thematic divisions, such as executive, legislative, judiciary, advisory councils, elections, citizenship, native rights, and the duties of elected representatives. My adaptation of this forthright and uncomplicated structure made it much easier for me to consider and organize specific chapters on independent governance.”
The Preamble proclaims that “The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the successors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native constitution of families, totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor, spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and native cultural sovereignty.”
The forty sworn citizen delegates were mostly elders, and not one lawyer. More than half of the delegates had completed college courses, and twelve delegates had earned one or more academic degrees. Two delegates were college teachers, one was a retired fireman, two worked in health services, one a musician, one a head start teacher, one a casino worker, and seven delegates worked for various federal agencies. Compare the delegates of the White Earth Constitutional Convention to the fifty-five delegates of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. More than thirty were lawyers or had legal experiences, thirteen were merchants, six land speculators, eleven securities investors, twelve plantation slavers, two farmers, two scientists, three physicians, and one college president. The delegates considered the power to collect taxes, impose excises, borrow money, and regulate commerce and Indian Tribes.
I introduced one last article in the chapter of Rights and Duties that had not been discussed by the delegates. The article was a surprise, and after a moment of hesitation and a second reading the delegates unanimously approved the adoption of the article in the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. “The freedom of thought and conscience, academic, artistic irony, and literary expression, shall not be denied, violated or controverted by the government.”
4. Native American literature, historically and today, is closely tied to Native activism. One thing that surprised me when first reading your work, The Heirship Chronicles, was the satirical characterization of AIM as word-warriors, activists who focused too much on publicity and playing Indian. What do you see as the legacy of AIM, and how may Native activists today act similarly or differently to address the serious problems facing our people?
The American Indian Movement in Minneapolis was operational almost overnight with the opportunism of recent native parolees from the Minnesota State Prison. The first leaders of the movement had been convicted of crimes against people and property, and none of that criminal history seemed to concern the romantic citizens and liberal church leader who supported the organization with sympathy, promises, and money. The native traditions the leaders espoused were acquired from other natives in prison.
My dedication as a native advocate on the streets of the existential colony started about three years before the parolees appeared in expensive automobiles to monitor the abominable police abuse of natives on Franklin Avenue. I was determined in the early nineteen sixties to establish a native center, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied our application because it was not the defined duties of the agency to serve urban natives. The congressional intent, we were told, was to serve natives on or near reservations. The largest population of natives in the city at the time was estimated to be more than five thousand, by far the largest population of natives in Minnesota. I refused to accept the service limitations and asked the local congressman, Donald Fraser, and Senator Walter Mondale for some confirmation of native services. Fraser reported after congressional research that there was no such intent to serve natives only on or near reservations, and Mondale directed the Bureau of Indians Affairs to support our dedication to establish a native service center. The prison troupe of natives had not yet been paroled.
Ronald Libertus, Mary Thunder, George Mitchell, James Sayers, and many other dedicated natives, and seventeen eager Volunteers in Service to America, worked closely with me in the community as advocates to provide basic services, housing, child support, medical assistance, and to locate employment for natives in the existential colony, and assisted me in the organization of a native protest at the regional office of the Bureau of Indians Affairs on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Douglas Hall, an extraordinary liberal and activist lawyer, resolved many legal obstacles that were used to distract the native advocates.
Dennis Banks, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and narrow necktie, told me to stop picketing the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Demonstrations are not the Indian Way,” he told me and other advocates. He had been selected for management training at an international corporation as part of a minority program. Later his parole was revoked for another felony, and he was released at the end of his original prison sentence. Banks and many other natives, “trouped across the country from Plymouth Rock to Alcatraz, dressed in century old tribal vestments, demanding recognition of treaty rights, equal justice and sovereignty,” I wrote in an editorial series for the Minneapolis Tribune in 1973. “The American Indian Movement is an urban revolutionary movement whose members have in recent years tried to return to the reservations as the warrior heroes. . .To some they are the heroes of contemporary history, but to others they are the freebooters of racism.”
My five-part series and many other critical articles about the native movement in Rapid City, at Calico Hall on the Pine Ridge Reservation, at Wounded Knee, and later as defendants in federal courts, never revealed the use of illegal drugs that seemed to be necessary for the movement. Even so, the leaders ordered petty native mobsters to harm or assassinate me because of my accurate critical articles. I had obtained a permit to carry a handgun and widely broadcast my intent to neutralize any wannabe native warriors who attempted to menace me. I was an instructor and director of native studies, at the time, at Bemidji State University.
“The American Indian Movement, two decades after the occupation of Wounded Knee, is more kitsch and tired simulations than menace,” I wrote in Manifest Manners: Native Postindian Manners, University of Nebraska Press, 1996. “The leaders are as close to retirement as those who funded their resistance enterprises and adventures. The church and state contribute to other causes now, and the media covers casinos, tribal sovereignty, and tribal court decisions with more interest than the activities of urban radical leaders and the kitschymen of the resistance enterprises.”
Special agent Michele Leonhart of the Drug Enforcement Administration “testified that she had been involved in the investigation of drug trafficking activities of Clyde Bellecourt” and made arrangements to purchase five thousand hits of the synthetic drug LSD at the Perkins Restaurant near Riverside and Frankin Avenue in Minneapolis.
Clyde Bellecourt was indicted by a grand jury on nine felony counts in December 1986, and “charged with the sale of hallucinogenic drugs worth thousands of dollars. He pleaded guilty to one count of drug distribution as part of a negotiated plea bargain.” Bellecourt was sentenced to five years in federal prison and persuaded the judge to allow him to attend “a sun dance ceremony in Arizona before he surrendered to federal authorities to begin his prison sentence.”
The coureurs des bois of the mercenary fur trade and the kitschymen of the media, casino cultures, and digital simulations are the merchants of resistance with no natural hesitations or memorable stories. The considerations are casual and repetitious, at best, and the stories are the mere enterprise of resistance. The kitschymen are the simulations of natives with no sense of an actual presence, only the objects of mockery. The kitschymen are noted as a native pretense not a presence, and with no gestures of imagination, no native mockery, or recognition of irony.
