Vizenor Concordance: On TREATY

“Natives and suicide are two words that forever burden my memories with the sentiments of misery, the separatism of treaty reservations, casino cultures as sardonic salvation, and reveal the mockery and weary stories of native continental liberty in the ruins of civilization.  One crucial story that has haunted me for more than fifty years is my report on the suicide of Dane White, an abandoned and lonesome thirteen year old native who had been confined in a county jail for more than six weeks for the crime of truancy from a public school.  My story about the funeral services and burial was published on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune on November 21, 1968.” (1.1)

“In the early nineteen seventies the country encountered an energy crisis, a critical shortage of gasoline.  Hundreds of automobiles waited in lines at service stations around the country, and the lines were longer in California.  The country was out of gas and the culture was based on the critical mobility of automobiles and gasoline.  The only cultures of endurance were native, and, in my view at the time, that ironic reality would become envy and another colonial seizure of timber and other native resources on treaty reservations.” (1.1)

“The devious political structures of separatism on treaty reservations once denied natives the ordinary right to publish books or newspapers.  My direct relatives published the first independent newspaper on a treaty reservation on March 25, 1886, and the federal agent seized the press and ordered the native publisher and editor to vacate the reservation.  They refused to leave and a year later a federal court judge ruled that The Progress could be published anywhere in the country and on the White Earth Reservation.  The separatism of natives was once equally devious in the translation of native stories as cause and effect and with no sense of natural motions or totemic associations.  Native storiers continue the resistance of separatism and the cultural romance of discovery and victimry with mockery and characters of survivance.” (1.4)

“The literary designation of “authentic” native authors should not be determined by the fascist actions of pretendian agents or commercial publishers but instead editors and readers should be more critical of the way authors create characters in natural motionand reveal the presence of animals and birds and critically evaluate the use of pronouns and references to totemic associations that have a distinct presence in the novels of many native authors.  Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and many other authors, for instance, create animals in their stories that have essential associations and a sense of presence.  Native mongrels and other animals are teased with nicknames as personal relations in my creative stories.  Other critical considerations of native literary empathy would include the distinctive narrative scenes of survivance and critical mockery of treaty separatism and victimry.” (2.4)

“My stories at the time were never decided with possessive pronouns and certainly not the consciousness of singularity in the ruins of civilization.  My sense of native presence and recognition in a world of literary envy and trickery was never secure in a dominant monotheistic culture.  Treaty reservations and native existential colonies in cities revealed cultural separatism but not a “specific civilization.”  The communal pleasure of mockery and irony in trickster creation stories and the elusive native stories of chance, totemic shadows, shamanic mockery and irony are not comparable to “metaphysical preconditions.”  Gusdorf declared that “Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions. . .humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered into the perilous domain of history.  The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future.”” (2.5)

“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.” (3.1)

“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.” (3.1)

“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.”” (3.4)