Transmotion Vol 1, No. 1 (2015)
We
are nowhere near the "end of history," but we are still far from free from
monopolizing attitudes toward it. These have not been much good in the past
[...] and the quicker we teach ourselves to find alternatives, the better and
safer.
-
Edward Said
As
its title suggests, this is an essay about apparent absurdities. It is a
hopeful pursuit of contradiction, a straightforward affirmation of irony. Among the scholarly debates it observes is the enduring tension between
perspectives that continue to see nationhood as the paramount paradigm of
societal orientation and those that emphasize the ascendency of globalization.
This terrain is both well trodden and continually trafficked. In 1966,
international relations theorist and frequent U.S. government consultant Hans
Morgenthau wrote, "Modern technology has rendered the nation-state obsolete as
a principle of political organization; the nation-state is no longer able to
perform what is the elementary function of any political organization: to
protect the lives of its members and their way of life" (9). While the cold war
angst of nuclear destruction would slowly recede across subsequent decades,
many scholars would continue sharing Morgenthau's sense that nation-states were
waning in geopolitical importance. In 1990, Eric Hobsbawm speculatively
characterized the world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as
"a world which can no longer be contained within the limits of 'nations' and
'nation-states' as these used to be defined, either politically, or
economically, or culturally, or even linguistically. It will [...] reflect the
decline of the old nation-state as an operational entity" (191). A few years
later, French diplomat Jean-Marie Guéhenno similarly observed, "Too remote to
manage the problems of our daily life, the nation nevertheless remains too
constrained to confront the global problems that affect us. Whether it is a
question of the traditional functions of sovereignty, like defense or justice, or
of economic competences, the nation appears increasingly like a straitjacket,
poorly adapted to the growing integration of the world" (12-13). Looking back
at these twentieth-century declarations, Anthony Smith sees the emergence of a
"constructionist" critique of nationalism asserting "that nationalism and
nations have fulfilled their functions and are now becoming obsolete in an era
of globalization" (92).
The
general strain of the constructionist critique endures in the twenty-first
century. For Jayantha Dhanapala, "the nation—along with its associated
ideology, nationalism—continues to provide a formidable obstacle to
constructive international cooperation on an enormous variety of common global
problems" (34). Dhanapala suggests not only the nation's waning relevance in a
globalizing world, but that it increasingly stands in the way of desirable
development. Despite commitments quite distinct from Dhanapala's affirmation of
globalization, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire makes a conceptually allied argument:
The
decline of the nation-state is not simply the result of an ideological position
that might be reversed by an act of political will: it is a structural and
irreversible process. [...] The declining effectiveness of this structure can
be traced clearly through the evolution of a whole series of global
juridico-economic bodies, such as GATT, the World Trade Organization, the World
Bank, and the IMF. The globalization of production and circulation, supported
by this supranational juridical scaffolding, supersedes the effectiveness of
national juridical structures. (336)
These networked
institutions that regulate legal and material life under globalization orient
to and reiterate a logic of power that Hardt and Negri theorize as "Empire"
(xii). While it can make use of nations and their structures, "Empire"
primarily displaces them.
For
many other scholars, however, nationhood and nationalism continue to have
prevalence. According to Craig Calhoun, "globalization has not put an end to nationalism—not
to nationalist conflicts nor to the role of nationalist categories in
organizing ordinary people's sense of belonging in the world" (171). "Indeed,"
Calhoun writes, "much of the contemporary form of globalization is produced and
driven by nation-states—at least certain powerful nation-states" (169).
In alignment with Calhoun and in stark contrast to Hardt and Negri, Martin Wolf
argues that "globalization is not destined, it is chosen. It is a choice made
to enhance a nation's economic well-being" (182). "Integration is a deliberate
choice," Wolf continues, "rather than an ineluctable destiny, it cannot
render states impotent. Their potency lies in the choices they make" (183). And
in an even more precise departure from Hardt and Negri, Wolf writes,
"Institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the EU, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement underpin cooperation among states" (184). And finally, "Global
governance will come not at the expense of the state but rather as an
expression of the interests that the state embodies. As the source of order and
basis of governance, the state will remain in the future as effective, and will
be as essential, as it has ever been" (190). While Morgenthau, Hobsbawm,
Guéhenno, and Hardt and Negri partake in a shared an emphasis on the
nation-state's receding significance, Calhoun and Wolf share the sense that
nation-states remain formidable agents within an increasingly unified global
market system.
In
the 2011 edition of his dynamic and insightfully ambivalent book Globalization and the Nation State,
Robert Holton synthesizes so many of these and other scholarly perspectives,
indicating that "global and national processes often interact and adapt to each
other, creating processes that reflect both global and national or local
elements" (2) and that "some versions of nationalism are compatible with
globalization and cosmopolitanism" (227). Historian and historiographer David
W. Noble—a friend and mentor to whom I am deeply indebted—shares
with Holton and many others an unwillingness to champion either nationalism or
globalism. Noble does, however, contribute to this discussion a unique
suggestion that both nationalist and globalist imaginaries are subtle
iterations of the same commitment to an aspirational exodus out of the mess of
history. In his studies of historians, authors, composers, artists, economists,
and scientists, Noble has argued that in recent centuries middle classes on
both sides of the Atlantic (most notably Britain, France, and the settler
colonies they spawned) have consistently imagined themselves to be building
nations that embody the culmination of history. According to Noble, these
nations imagined that "their cultures had grown out of their national
landscapes, those virgin lands whose naturalness and purity were protected by
national political boundaries" (Death
xxvi). These ostensibly organic nations had achieved the end of history by
securing political sovereignty congruent with their respective fatherlands.
This achievement thus marked a transcendent exodus from a timeful world of
dynamic complexity and tradition into a timeless world of stable simplicity and
modernity. The state-oriented concept of nationhood has been imagined by these
middle classes as a signal achievement of modernity's exodus. According to this
imagination, the nation-state is the mode of socio-polity situated at the end
of history's arduous march of progress out of culture into nature, out of limits
into infinitude.
Yet
across recent decades, it has been an important task of transnational studies
to disclose the stratifying and violating power undergirding this imagination.
Contemporaneously with these efforts an alternative imaginary has gained formidable
traction. Many of the inheritors of nation-states have maintained faith in
historical progress while revising their understanding of the telos in order to
point eagerly toward the unfettered global marketplace as history's
culmination. "Modern nations as sacred spaces had been replaced by the sacred
space of the universal marketplace," Noble writes. "For the middle classes,
that marketplace now represents the end of history" (Death xxxvii). In his most recent book, Noble continues in this
vein, noting that across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries,
perspectives both within and beyond the academy "replaced the nation with the
global marketplace as the end of history. Particular nations did not represent
the timeless laws of nature; only the global marketplace expressed those
universal patterns" (Debating 6).
Dominant political and economic discourses and the array of scholarly voices
cited above reveal that the frictions and intimacies between state nationalism
and globalization remain heated and complex. Noble's analysis of these
sentiments tells us that they are both fantasies with little to offer either
the intellectual work of constructing critical histories or the material work
of facilitating functional societies. Neither paradigm has the potential to
envision and foster a just world. Imagining otherwise and creating cultural,
political, and economic relations between and beyond state nationalism and
market globalism is therefore crucial.
Among
many other possibilities, indigenous writing and intellectual histories serve
as important resources for this vital endeavor. When informed by the work of
indigenous writers and intellectuals, efforts to reimagine structures and
processes of societal affiliation might more effectively foster reconfigured,
enhanced, and expanded recognitions of Native sovereignties while also
facilitating the deliberation and pursuit of justice in various contexts and on
various scales. For the purposes of this essay, I will explore this possibility
by focusing first on some of the ways in which Native writing is currently
studied within the academy and second on a particularly noteworthy piece of
Native writing: the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. What I am
suggesting here is that a meta-critical rumination on some of the primary
critical approaches to Native literary and intellectual traditions should help
reveal for us key contributions that indigenous narratives make to the vital
work of imagining ethical modes of polity.
Within
the overlapping fields of Native American literary studies and Native
intellectual history, recent years have witnessed a cumulative drive to
systematically organize major scholars and their work into critical taxonomies.
This tendency seems to be due at least in part to academic anxiety in the face
of the exponential growth that these fields have enjoyed. In many instances,
scholars of Native writing are associated with one of two opposed categories,
often termed the "cosmopolitan" and "nationalist" factions. [1] Upon initial consideration, this appears to be a compelling and functional
schema: While the cosmopolitan critics emphasize the ways in which Native
literatures and intellectual histories resist the legacies of colonialism
through the foregrounding of cultural fluidity, adaptation, subversive
resistance, and cross-cultural engagement, nationalist critics insist that
Native writing remain accountable to specific tribal histories, epistemologies,
and sovereignties while also aggressively confronting land dispossession and other
colonial injustices. Yet this dichotomy oversimplifies a wide array of
available critical approaches while also ignoring the ways in which diverse,
dynamic, and mutually illuminating perspectives interact and resonate with one
another. As Jace Weaver notes, "the space between nationalism and
cosmopolitanism is not as wide as some have contended" ("Turning West" 33). An
oppositional taxonomy thus constrains our scholarly capacities to explore the
conceptions of polity remembered, imagined, and articulated in Native writing.
By better observing and honoring the nuance of critical voices, we can better
observe and honor the significant extent to which ethics and affiliations
commonly attributed to cosmopolitanism are integral to the forms and processes
of Native nationhood. We might thereby account for the national orientations,
the cultural and historic specificities, the multivalent adaptability, and the
transnationally mediated sensibilities of the community formations narrated
within Native writing.
Even
a cursory consideration of the most prominent critical figures associated with
the cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies reveals the inadequacy of these
categories. Gerald Vizenor is regarded by many (and repudiated by some) as the
foremost practitioner of the cosmopolitan approach to Native American Studies.
Vizenor's association with the cosmopolitan critical faction arises in no small
part from his affinity for poststructuralist and continental theory, his
skepticism toward authenticity, and his celebration of mixed-blood
subjectivity. According to Arnold Krupat, "Gerald Vizenor has explored the
possibilities of Native cosmopolitanism in his fiction and criticism,
celebrating the once pitied, or despised 'halfbreed' as the 'mixedblood' or
'crossblood'" (20). Yet it is increasingly clear that Vizenor should be
recognized as a noteworthy theorist and advocate of sovereign tribal
nationhood. Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, for example, notes that "Vizenor's
writing is deeply applicable to one of the most important processes happening
in Anishinaabeg communities: the redefining, reestablishment, and reassertion
of practices and processes necessary for Anishinaabeg notions of nationhood to
be reactualized" (128). Citing Sinclair, Lisa Brooks has likewise noted that
"through his fiction, Vizenor has long participated in a process of imagining
community survivance" (58). Most recently, Jace Weaver has observed that
"[a]mong Native Americans, there is no more erudite or cosmopolitan critic than
Vizenor. No one is more conversant with critical theory or more adept at
deploying it. Yet he is also a nationalist" ("Turning West" 32). This
nevertheless understudied trajectory of Vizenor's work is evident in the deep
cultural and linguistic inflections present throughout his writing and also in
his enduring and increasingly explicit examination of both orthodox and
innovative theories of sovereignty.
In
his 1991 novel The Heirs of Columbus,
for example, Vizenor offers a narrative of the making of a "new tribal nation"
explicitly described as "a sovereign nation" (119, 123). In a collection of
essays from late in the same decade, he takes up a keen and sustained interest
in what he terms the "sui generis
sovereignty" of tribal nations (Fugitive
15). For Vizenor, "natives are neither exiles nor separatists from other
nations or territories" (181). "The presence of natives on this continent," he
continues, "is an obvious narrative on sovereignty" (182). Vizenor's commitment
to Native sovereignty--a key hallmark of nationalist criticism--could not be
more clear. Of course, Vizenor's conception of sovereignty here is neither
absolutist nor separatist; it is relational. He deliberately emphasizes "the
diplomatic narratives of treaties, executive documents, and court decisions that
acknowledge the rights and distinctive sovereignty of native communities"
(181).
In
his book Native Liberty, Vizenor's
increasing gravitation toward nationhood is evident in his engagement with
various conceptions and critiques of polity and sovereignty in the work of
Giorgio Agamben, Stephen Krasner, David Wilkins, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Michel Foucault, John Boli, and T. Alexander Aleinikoff, among others.
Through his discussion of these theorists, Vizenor asserts that "sovereignty
must be reconceived" and he posits the "distinctive sense of sovereignty" (162)
maintained by indigenous peoples as a resource for doing so. "Natives, in the
past century," Vizenor writes, "have articulated, emulated, and litigated the
notion of state sovereignty as independence and autonomy; that minimal view of
state or territorial sovereignty, however, has lost significance in the
economic globalization of the world" (114). Vizenor thus gestures toward an
innovative "visionary sovereignty" (108) that complements and resonates
extensively with critical theorist Nancy Fraser's critiques of the "Westphalian
political imaginary, which sharply distinguished 'domestic' from
'international' space" (Scales of Justice
12). According to Fraser, the Westphalian concept of sovereignty "has been
challenged from at least three directions: first, by localists and
communalists, who seek to locate the scope of concern in subnational units;
second, by regionalists and transnationalists, who propose to identify the
'who' of justice with larger, though not fully universal, units, such as Europe
or Islam; and, third, by globalists and cosmopolitans, who propose to accord
equal consideration to all human beings" ("Abnormal Justice" 401). Vizenor's
theoretical and applied narrations of sovereignty synthesize components of each
of the interventions observed by Fraser. Of course, Vizenor cannot but also
posit a most fruitful and fundamental fourth: the politics of indigeneity.
If
Vizenor—who in the early 1990s claimed that "nationalism is the most
monotonous simulation of dominance" (Manifest
60)—can be reasonably characterized as a writer and intellectual with
substantial nationalist inclinations, we might conversely cast Robert
Warrior—perhaps the most prominent critic associated with the nationalist
critical tendency—as a scholar with a cosmopolitan bent. In 1995 Warrior
published his first book, Tribal Secrets,
which carries the subtitle "Recovering American Indian Intellectual
Traditions." An exploration of American Indian "intellectual sovereignty," the
study marked a watershed moment in what I have come to call the "nationalist
turn" in Native Studies. (We might note that this nationalist turn in Native
Studies, having emerged in the 1990s and only increasing in momentum through
the present, is fully contemporaneous with the "transnational turn" that has
come to so enamor much of the humanities and social sciences.) Warrior set
about the creative recovery of an American Indian critical tradition that would
neither spring from nor be sublimated within intellectual frameworks brought to
the American hemisphere by colonization. Tribal
Secrets has had significant and sustained impact on the field of Native
Studies, informing and influencing subsequent books by each of the foremost
scholars of the nationalist orientation: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jace Weaver,
Craig Womack, and Daniel Justice, among others. In 2006, Warrior joined Weaver
and Womack to co-write American Indian
Literary Nationalism, in which
the three jointly sustain the assertion that "being a nationalist is a
legitimate perspective from which to approach Native American literature and
criticism" (xx-xxi).
Yet
despite this explicit affirmation and avowal of the nationalist critical cause,
there are intriguing indications in many of Warrior's works that suggest
cosmopolitan commitments. While as far as I know he has never had a moment of
full-on Kantianism like that in which the otherwise vociferously nationalist
critic Cook-Lynn suggested "the
American Indian voice might [...] stir the human community to a moral view
which would encompass all of humanity, not just selected parts of it" (64),
Warrior has nevertheless made plain within his contribution to American Indian Literary Nationalism
that "it is possible to be a critic, a nationalist, a cosmopolitan, and a
humanist all at the same time" (192). As Warrior writes in Tribal Secrets, "the process of sovereignty, whether in the
political or in the intellectual sphere, is not a matter of removing ourselves
and our communities from the influences of the world in which we live" (114).
It is, instead, a process of dynamic relationality.
To
suggest that the prevailing associations of Vizenor with cosmopolitanism and
Warrior with nationalism have not adequately accounted for the complexity of
their contributions is not to dismiss these categorizations in any
comprehensive fashion. Rather, it is to join the chorus of theorists calling
into question the general oppositional schema through which cosmopolitanism and
nationalism are conventionally counter-defined. In his essay "Cosmopolitan
Patriots" Kwame Anthony Appiah proclaims that "the cosmopolitan patriot can
entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted
cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one's own, with its own cultural
particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different
places that are home to other, different people" (618). Bruce Robbins has more
explicitly noted that "cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with
nationalism rather than in opposition to it" (2). And Paul Rabinow complements
Appiah and Robbins with his definition of cosmopolitanism as "an ethos of
macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness [...] of the
inescapabilities and particularities of places" (258). The grounded cosmopolitanism
suggested by these and other scholars accounts for particular relations between
peoples and their local places while also compelling ethical inter-community
interactions of relational sovereignties.
Tim
Brennan posits an important and resonant intervention into cosmopolitan
discourse, observing its tendency to drift "into an imperial apologetics"
(147). Yet Brennan also maintains hope that we might realize "a cosmopolitanism
worthy of the name" (309) that would affirm and defend the "sovereignty of
existing and emergent third-world polities [...] in the face of futurist
prognoses that they have ceased existing" (316). Brennan's incisive sense of
the cosmopolitan vis-a-vis the national resonates extensively with the ways in
which I am understanding the sophisticated critical positions of Vizenor and
Warrior. For these and many other indigenous writers and intellectuals,
sovereignty is itself an extensively cosmopolitan endeavor. This is radically
different than a conception of sovereignty marked by a governmental prerogative
to decide the state of exception and to suspend the rule of law in order to
uphold a disciplinary legal domain, whether isolationist or imperial. It is
instead an acknowledgement that sovereignty is always relational, that it is
necessarily and unavoidably rooted in culture, and that it is most operative at
the interfaces where recognition and reciprocity reside.
We
can witness the presence of a sophisticated and vitally enduring tradition of
cosmopolitan nationhood in a multitude of sites, moments, texts, and actions.
In Warrior's discussion of the 1881 Osage Constitution, for example, it becomes
clear that late nineteenth-century Osages were concerned not only for their own
national interests but also for Kaw rights and aspirations (The People 77-78). And well over a
century later we can now witness a growing transnational wave of constitutional
reform sweeping across Indian Country. This wave is impelled in part by
enduring and increasing dissatisfaction with the mode of constitutionalism
promoted in the mid twentieth century by the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA).
Departing from prior federal policies aimed at assimilation and land
dispossession, the IRA encouraged tribes to establish constitutional governance
structures based on municipal practices (Wilkins xxii). Willfully ignoring and
marginalizing tribal traditions and cultural frameworks, the IRA sought a
systematic reorganization of tribal government in order to serve federal
purposes. The resultant frameworks, based in many instances on a "Model
Constitution" distributed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, have
sometimes failed to garner sufficient regard from tribal citizens and have thus
contributed to intra-tribal tensions and crises (Cohen On the Drafting
173-177). Moreover, the "self-governance" approach promoted by the IRA
entrenched paternalistic federal oversight and brought disruptive pressure to
bear upon tribes as they crafted their formative governing documents. This
intrusive pressure came heavily to bear in the early 1960s as the Minnesota
Chippewa Tribe—a confederation of Ojibwe nations including White
Earth—updated its IRA-oriented constitution. The current efforts of White
Earth to implement their own constitution is driven in part by dissatisfaction
with facets of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe's constitution that were
manipulated by the federal government (Doerfler "Anishinaabeg Society" 22).
Both
as a departure from IRA-style tribal constitutionalism and a foray into
community-based indigenous governance, the White Earth Constitution offers a
conceptual and material manifestation of Native nationhood that illuminates and
is illuminated by the tension-laden debates within Native American Studies
regarding nationalism and cosmopolitanism. More importantly, the Constitution
also serves as a political instrument necessarily oriented to material
functionality in the complex contexts of United States settler-colonial
federalism. The White Earth Constitution does not mark a culmination, an end of
a developmental history; rather, it marks a transition which entails both the
maintenance and transformation of relations—most centrally those within
the White Earth Nation and those between the White Earth Anishinaabeg, the
confederated Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and the United States.
Because
Vizenor led the team charged with drafting the Constitution, it should not come
as a surprise that the document is thoroughly marked by his characteristic
literary hand. Creating a national constitution is perhaps the most patently
nationalist task a writer can take up. As the principal scribe of a legal
instrument through which the Anishinaabe of White Earth "constitute, ordain and
establish" themselves as a nation, Vizenor clearly and firmly positions himself
as a writer, intellectual, and political actor deeply invested in nationalist
discourse and advocacy. Yet this in no way sets aside his pronouncements and
positions that diverge from nationalism. Indeed, as both a narration of
nationhood and a framework for its practice, the constitution is both
necessarily and emphatically cosmopolitan. It reimagines nationhood in ways
that resonate with, enhance, and challenge the increasingly sophisticated
discourses regarding nationhood, cosmopolitanism, settler colonialism, and
constituency currently at the core of Native Studies.
Of
course, the Constitution of the White Earth Nation is not a solitary work of
literary craft. It is born of a collaborative process detailed in the book The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a
Native Democratic Constitution and in James Mackay's interview with
Vizenor. Through debates, dialogs, collaborations, and constitutional
conventions, the Constitution bears the voices of numerous White Earth
Anishinaabeg. Each article and revision was subject to a dedicated convention
procedural vote, and the final version of the Constitution was ratified by a
two-thirds supermajority at the final convention in April 2009. In November
2013 the Constitution was affirmed by eighty percent of voting White Earth band
members and thereby adopted. According to Vizenor, "The Constitution of the
White Earth Nation was inspired by native reason, narratives of survivance and
cultural traditions, totemic associations, cosmopolitan encounters, and modern
democratic constitutions, and was ratified by Native delegates with a
determined sense of Native presence, of resistance, and survivance over absence
and victimry" ("Constitutional Consent" 15). These terms, familiar to most
readers of Vizenor, here find perhaps their most practically-oriented
application.
Even
with an inherent and necessary Anishinaabeg-centric orientation, it remains
important to recognize that the White Earth Constitution also must
assert itself in relation to the fraught and ironic terrain of settler
federalism where political and legal authority is divided between federal,
state, and tribal governments. Vizenor has noted that "the Constitution of the
White Earth Nation is neither similar to nor commensurate with the federal
executive structures of governance" ("Constitutional Consent" 16). Despite this
dissimilarity and incommensurability, the Constitution necessarily positions
itself amid the complex overlapping sovereignties of United States federalism.
While the White Earth Nation is not appealing to the United States for a
permissive right to collective indigenous political existence (something of a
distinction from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Constitution which situates
itself as a "privilege granted the Indians by the United States under existing
law"), the White Earth Constitution does affirm the shared political and legal
intimacies most centrally rooted in the 1867 treaty between the U.S. and the
Chippewa of the Mississippi, an ongoing diplomatic relationship through which
these Anishinaabeg have made (under intense pressures) a sovereign investment
in United States federalism. Acknowledging that treaty-making involved
"coercion, deception, misunderstanding, [and] fatalism" and observing that "the
hundreds of treaties made between Indians and Americans during the nineteenth
century were a mixed bag on every level," Scott Richard Lyons also asserts that
"Natives understood what was at stake in their treaties" and in affirming them
"signified agency and consent—yes, limited on both counts" (127). White
Earth's conflicted yet committed sovereign investment in treaty federalism was
and is cosmopolitan in character. American Indian sovereignty can be understood
as both inherent and federated, even while extra-constitutional. Tribes are, as
David Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima have noted, the "senior sovereigns" of
this continent (249). Vizenor has likewise written that "Native liberty, natural
reason, and survivance are concepts that originate in narratives, not in the
mandates of monarchies, papacies, severe traditions, or federal policies"
("Constitutional Consent" 11). It is a fundamental doctrine of Indian law in
the United States that the settler government does not create, gift, or
delegate governing authority to tribes. Sovereign power inheres in tribes,
arising as it does from deep histories of human and institutional interaction
that predate and endure under colonialism. This authority is acknowledged, not
established, by the United States in statute, case law, and diplomatic accords.
In his fundamental treatise on federal Indian law, Felix Cohen writes:
Perhaps
the most basic principles of all Indian law supported by a host of decisions
[...] is the principle that those powers which are lawfully vested in an Indian
tribe are not, in general, delegated powers granted by express acts of
Congress, but rather inherent powers of a limited sovereignty which has never
been extinguished. Each Indian tribe begins its relationship with the Federal
Government as a sovereign power, recognized as such in treaty and legislation.
The powers of sovereignty have been limited from time to time by special
treaties and laws designed to take from the Indian tribes control of matters
which, in the judgment of Congress, then, must be examined to determine the
limitations of tribal sovereignty rather than to determine its sources or its
positive content. What is not expressly limited remains within the domain of
tribal sovereignty. (Handbook 122)
As Cohen's realist
account indicates, a correlating doctrine of federal Indian law holds that
Congress has the power to diminish unilaterally the sovereignty of tribes.
American Indian nations thus currently enjoy and are subject to federal
recognition and containment of their nevertheless resilient inherent
sovereignty.
Through
the variously diplomatic and exploitative relations shared by Native nations
and the United States, both are currently compromised sovereigns. Sovereignty
is always relational, never absolute. Sovereign polities necessarily have the
capacity to manage intra- and inter-political relationships. This sine qua non
of sovereignty entails compromise. This includes the sense of weakness, marked
by regret and disappointment. As we well know, Native nations in the United
States have been severely curtailed and violated in their intertwined
political, legal, cultural, economic, and ecological dimensions. While far less
consequential, the settler nation state's commitments to universalizing
neoliberalism are frustrated by the endurance of indigenous peoples, polities,
claims, and obligations. Tribes and the United States can also be seen as
compromised sovereignties in the sense that they have made mutual co-promises
of interdependence. While not existentially crucial to tribes, the treaty and
trust obligations associated with Native-settler diplomacies have formative
import for Native nations. Treaties did not create tribes, but they did often
delineate tribal land bases and establish federal recognition of tribal
nations. More starkly, the fragile and partial legitimacy of the United States'
jurisdictional claims fundamentally relies upon relations—both historical
and contemporary—with Native nations. Without tribally affirmed
diplomatic land cessions, there is no such thing as legitimate U.S. territory.
"The authority of Indian tribes to enter into treaties with European states and
the United States," writes Phillip M. Kannan, "is a prerequisite to the
validity of land title in the United States" (813). While discourses of U.S.
and international law continue to assert a legal doctrine of discovery in which
the land claims of indigenous peoples are reduced to mere rights of occupancy,
David Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima argue that a more historically accurate
and legally sound conceptualization of this doctrine would and should recognize
that it merely grants to certain aspirational settlers a preemptive right
against other aspirational settlers (19-63). Wilkins and Lomawaima's preemptive
account of the doctrine of discovery emphasizes relations between colonizing
polities rather than direct relations between colonizers and Native nations.
The legitimate establishment of settler sovereignty therefore requires Native
assent.
Within
the morass of federated, always-relational, and often-chafing Native and
settler sovereignties resides the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. The
cosmopolitan nationhood envisioned and formulated within the Constitution is
neither determined by, completely liberated from, nor neglectful of settler
imperatives. This is evident, for example, in the Constitution's primary
articles on citizenship:
Article
1: Citizens of the White Earth Nation shall be descendants of Anishinaabeg
families and related by linear descent to enrolled members of the White Earth
Reservation and Nation, according to genealogical documents, treaties, and
other agreements with the government of the United States.
Article
2: Services and entitlements provided by government agencies to citizens,
otherwise designated members of the White Earth Nation, shall be defined
according to treaties, trusts, and diplomatic agreements, state and federal
laws, rules and regulations, and in policies and procedures established by the
government of the White Earth Nation.
The move to lineal
descent resonates with Vizenor's prior warnings against "political reversions
to exclusive consciousness" (Fugitive
67) and marks a radical—even if not completely unproblematic—distinction
from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe's blood quantum-based membership criteria to
a kinship-based mode of affiliation. While these emergent citizenship criteria
depart from the federally generated and encouraged regime of blood quantum,
they do not actually depart from relational federalism itself, which clearly
remains a formative presence in these articles. Indeed, while the racialist
logic of blood quantum is not explicitly invoked here in Article 2, that logic
remains operative by way of the "laws, rules, and regulations" referenced.
Moreover, the move away from blood quantum is itself in certain ironic respects
a move on behalf of the maintenance of federated tribal status. Within her
contribution to The White Earth Nation:
Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution, constitutional writing
team member Jill Doerfler notes,
Based
on current citizenship requirements, many tribes will have no new citizens in
fifty years and even more will face the same fate in a century. Blood quantum
is mathematical termination. Once Native nations 'disappear,' the U.S.
government will finally be free of their treaty and fiscal responsibilities. In
an effort to prevent this situation, many tribes are changing citizenship
requirements to ensure that their nations will continue in perpetuity. ("A
Citizen's Guide" 83)
Unless Native nations
recover and redevelop more inclusive, even cosmopolitan, approaches to defining
and cultivating their citizenries, the federated political status of American
Indian tribes will dissolve. While blood quantum regulations do not have the
direct capacity to vanish cultures or peoples, they do have the actuarial power
to disappear federated polities. Despite the distributive and cultural
anxieties associated with Native citizenries of lineal descent, the people of
White Earth have determined to pursue such a path in order to affirm their kinship
customs and in order to ensure their own endurance as a federated Native
nation. [2]
A
commitment to the relational sovereignty of federalism also explicitly arises
in Article 10 of the Constitution's chapter on "Rights and Duties": "The People
shall have the right to possess firearms except for convicted felons in
accordance with state and federal laws." This article recognizes the tenuous
ecology of gun control within United States federalism and also makes a tacit
gesture toward Public Law 83-280, which authorizes state criminal jurisdiction
on the White Earth Reservation (among many others). Article 17 of the same
chapter also situates the White Earth Nation in relation to United States
federalism while still asserting inherent Native sovereignty:
The
Constitution of the White Earth Nation is inspired by inherent and traditional
sovereignty, and contains, embodies, and promotes the rights and provisions
provided in the articles and amendments of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968,
and the United States Constitution.
This article conveys the
White Earth Constitution's most assertive affirmation of the federated
dimension of tribal sovereignty. Yet it does so, of course, in the context of
an explicitly emphasized and prioritized inherent tribal sovereignty. In his
essay on the Constitution David Carlson notes this complex, observing that the
document seeks "to integrate aspects of Western law (certain forms of rights
consciousness, for example) into the realm of mino-bimaadiziwin, to redefine Anishinaabeg legal and political
identity, dialectically, in a way that speaks to the realities and
contingencies of the present moment" (36).
The
relational and cosmopolitan orientation of Native nationhood within the
Constitution is not at all limited to its federalist gestures. The preamble,
which reads as follows, conveys the far-reaching yet intimately local scope of
White Earth nationhood:
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.
We
the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order to secure an inherent and
essential sovereignty, to promote traditions of liberty, justice, and peace,
and reserve common resources, and to ensure the inalienable rights of native
governance for our posterity, do constitute, ordain and establish this
Constitution of the White Earth Nation.
Reflecting both the
Constitutions of the United States and of Japan, this preamble also conveys its
immersion in Anishinaabe culture, history, and kinship. Within the White Earth
Constitution's first sentence, the Anishinaabe of the White Earth Nation define
themselves in relation to their tradition of spatial liberty. The document
enshrines movement across the place of North America as a central attribute and
practice of White Earth nationhood. Because this liberty is continental in
scope and range, we know right away that this tradition of movement—which
includes the Anishinaabeg migration to the places where food grows on water—brings
the White Earth Nation and its citizens into transnational realms and
discourses. Furthermore, the preamble goes on to suggest that many of these
interactions are informed by and become themselves stories of "survivance" and
"reciprocal altruism." As Vizenor has written elsewhere, interdependence is "an
honorable mandate of sovereignty" (Manifest
147). And as Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair explains, "The migration path
teaches Anishinaabeg that motion is the way geographical, social, and spiritual
relationships have been forged, maintained, grown, and fortified. And while the
Anishinaabeg nation's borders, citizens, and cultures have shifted and moved as
others were met and warred with, and knowledge was traded, the nation as a
whole has continued" (147). In order to reiterate and explain its emphasis on
diplomatic interaction, the version of the Constitution published upon
convention ratification included a supplemental glossary explaining that
"reciprocal is to share a mutual obligation, and altruistic is to be unselfish,
benevolent, and compassionate." That a national constitution gives voice to
relational responsibilities and cosmopolitan commitments indicates the extent
to which its mode of nationhood is mediated by transnational interactions. As
Warrior explains, indigenous nationhood "is born out of native
transnationalism, the exchange of ideas and politics across our respective
nations' borders" ("Native American Scholarship" 125).
Both
in relation to and well outside of the federated contours of White Earth
nationhood, these Anishinaabeg are reconstituting themselves as transnational
citizens, navigating a cosmopolitan constellation of national affiliations,
obligations, and liabilities. One of the pragmatic ways the Constitution
accounts for this constellation is through the establishment of legislative
representation for off-reservation citizens. Such an arrangement affirms the
extra-reservation scope of White Earth nationhood and the overlapping
citizenships of its members. In Vizenor's book Fugitive Poses, something like this constellation of affiliations
and responsibilities is given articulation through the term "transmotion." He
writes, "transmotion is personal, reciprocal, the source of survivance, [...]
an original natural union in the stories of emergence and migration that relate
humans to an environment" (182-183). And he continues, "Clearly, the notions of
native sovereignty must embrace more than mere reservation territory" (190).
The active presence of transmotion within the Constitution of the White Earth
Nation underscores its grounded cosmopolitanism that accounts for particular
relations between peoples and their local places while also enjoining the
ethical inter-community interactions of relational sovereignties. An embrace of
"more than mere reservation territory" is not an abandonment thereof. In the
same ink strokes in which the Constitution's preamble asserts its cosmopolitan
breadth, it also posits straightforward nationalist pronouncements and
aspirations. These include claiming and securing the Nation's essential
sovereignty, preserving its resources as National commons, and asserting a
perpetual right of self-determination. The Constitution of the White Earth
Nation thus synthesizes and materializes many of the most sophisticated
scholarly insights on offer from various corners of Native Studies. By uniting theoretical
sophistication and practical functionality, the Constitution puts forth a
cosmopolitan decree of Native nationhood that challenges us to reconsider the
conceptual and practical oppositions prevalent in political and critical
thought and action, and it suggests that—in accord with Kwame Appiah,
Bruce Robbins, Paul Rabinow, and Tim Brennan—grounded and materially
relevant cosmopolitanism may very well be a central practice of beneficent
nationhood.
David
Noble's broad view of historiography and intellectual traditions reveals that
the twin conceits of an ostensibly transcendent modernity—liberal
nation-states and market neoliberalism—have little to offer to
communities of people hoping to dynamically sustain themselves and their
relations. The lack of beneficial capacity brought by liberal nation-states and
market globalism makes necessary the pursuit of alternative modes of polity and
economy. History has not been resolved, nor shall it be. Rather, we find
ourselves—like all generations before and after—learning how (and
how not) to take better care within both space and time. In part, this
necessitates acknowledging, responding to, and learning from the complex
claims, aspirations, and political status of indigenous peoples. As Felix Cohen
famously observed, "Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shifts from
fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere" ("Erosion" 390). Even
while inconsistently and often in spite of themselves, federated and
international systems of law do provide venues and opportunities for the
articulation and hearing of indigenous concerns and ambitions that are not so
easily absorbed by unitary nation-states or accommodated by neoliberalism. Not
only do these concerns and ambitions illuminate the inadequacy of those
dominant structures, they also gesture toward alternative trans/national
possibilities.
As narrated in the White Earth Nation's constitutive political instrument, a Native nation is transforming itself in relation to the struggles and opportunities it encounters. In doing so it has a great deal to teach us about how communities might live in relation to one another as we continually identify and strive for justice on a wide range of scales. We do so not in pursuit of some bliss that awaits at some end of history, but rather to remember and to imagine otherwise.
Notes
1. Other terms for the cosmopolitan tendency include "dialogic," "cross-culturalist," "constructivist," and "hybridist"; the nationalist tendency has been variously refered to as "sovereigntist," "tribally centered," "indigenist," "materialist," and "separatist." I first worked with nascent considerations of some of the meta-critical concerns of this essay in a 2007 article published in Studies in American Indian Literatures. Appleford, Brooks et al., Christie, Krupat, and Weaver ("Turning West") have also characterized and considered these critical tendencies.
2. Scholars addressing (among many other things) anxieties associated with determining Native citizenship include Barker, Dennison, Garroutte, Harmon, Lyons, Russell, Spruhan, Sturm, TallBear and (in Canadian First Nations contexts) Palmater.
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