Radio, Savage Love, an irony dog trainer and innovative unpublished writer, Moby Dick, exotic publisher and totemic guardian of deformed aquarium fish, Waasese, a laser holoscene scientist, Hole in the Storm, a visionary artist who earned an ironic nickname because he was a quiet painter at the very heart of a storm, Chewy Browne, the senior exile with a magnificent soprano voice, and Justice Molly Crèche, fur trade necrostorier and the steadfast advocate of totemic justice and animal rights in courts, declared a new native nation in exile at Fort Saint Charles in Lake of the Woods.
Chewy Beaulieu Browne was a delegate, twenty years ago, to the constitutional conventions, and she initiated the community councils and totemic associations that were essential to democratic governance. “If you ain’t tookin then I’m a lookin,” she loudly teased my great-uncle at the first convention, and he was taken, but they became very close friends and active in the community and totemic councils. Chewy enchanted the delegates then and the exiles now with her course of teases and emotive soprano voice. She sang the poetry of the preamble and the articles about irony and continental liberty.
Chewy was one of the thirteen Manidoo Singers. The singers honored the spirits of the dead with songs, including the despised governor of the sector, Godtwit Moon. She was determined at age ninety to live in exile, and would not be denied the right of exile on the Baron of Patronia.
Moby Dick started the ouster stories on the first voyage of exiles that autumn. The notice of our actual banishment was a handprinted poster mounted at the entrance to the casino. The poster noted that we were removed forever from the former reservation and new federal sector. The order was arbitrary, and everyone understood that we were ostracized only because we had resisted the congressional abrogation of the constitution and egalitarian governance, declared our confidence and absolute allegiance to the native constitution, and because of our wholehearted loyalty to new totemic associations, but not the national sectors.
Many natives returned to live on the reservation the same year the constitution was certified by almost eighty percent of the registered citizens who voted in a referendum. There was great excitement at the time, election debates were serious and constructive, several native judges of the constitutional court were confirmed, totemic associations and councils were underway, and the new library collection had more than doubled with the novels, poetry, history, art, and critical studies published by native authors.
The eager delegates to the constitutional conventions initiated the new custom of Treaty Shirts on the same day that native citizens endorsed the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. The eight exiles carried on that shirty tribute to native governance for twenty years and wore the same unwashed shirt at conferences and legislative sessions, a ceremonial vestment of continental liberty. The odors of the shirts were nasty, and the conventions and native seminar stains were ironic archives, the traces and citations of hors d’oeuvres, silhouettes of chicken wings, spicy meatballs at banquets, and buffet spatters.
Tedwin Makwa, or The Bear, a native philosopher, was our garment mentor, and he was renowned for the stench of his embroidered cowboy shirt. He wore the same unwashed shirt at conferences, social and political events, and in the classroom for decades. Traces of his travels and activities, overnight binges, messy sex, pizza and burger prints, stains of mustard, wine, mayonnaise, and fry bread ooze were the distinctive codes of cryptic stories and native reciprocity.
Makwa was truly a master of ironic stories, but only strangers, the uninitiated, or those with olfactory disorder would sit next to him at a conference or a restaurant. The stench of his cowboy shirt with more than a decade of sweat, grease, and wine would foul the air and overpower any ordinary conversation. Friends held their breath when he reached out for a hearty embrace.
The Constitution of the White Earth Nation was set more than sixty years too late in any critical calendar of continental liberty. Earlier the constitutional government could have become much stronger with the actual steady growth and prosperity of the nation rather than with the slow decline of the world economy and financial systems. The economic decline resulted in the abrogation of the reservation treaty and the ruination of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation.
There were many earlier native initiatives to create a democratic constitution, the very visions and strategies that would have connected with the first wave of native college graduates in the nineteen sixties, but the steady political putter and shame of federal agents, and the obvious trickery, lethargy, and corruption of older reservation leaders were too much to counter at the time.
Twenty years ago hundreds of natives returned with their relatives to the reservation, to a new constitutional democracy, with praise and anticipation of an ethical and worthy government. We were right about the merit, ethos, and virtues of autonomous governance, but never gave much thought to the reports on the incredible race of credit and the national debt. We had overlooked the enormous increase in trust endorsements, once-named entitlements, and regulations, and the worldwide government debt and economic decline. The conditions became so serious in the past decade that some news and editorial reports declared the crises an era of political retractions, banishment and renouncement, a “national dust bowl of endorsements,” public obligations and debts, debts, debts.
Children, elders, horses, pets, boats, summer cabins, snowmobiles, stores, movie theaters, markets, malls, and houses were abandoned in the millions around the country, and we were banished along with an autonomous native government when treaty land and reservations were converted overnight to federal endorsement sectors by congressional plenary power.
Clément Beaulieu, my great-uncle, pointed out this giant double catch of plenary power when the constitution was ratified, a tricky catch we did not fully grasp at the time, that congressional actions could terminate the reservation and leave the constitution without a native venue, domain, or territory to practice governance.
Plenary power was absolute, but not comparable to the elusive traces and turns of demons in native trickster stories. The conversion of reservations and state counties to federal sectors was actually ironic because we had been weakened by our own vitality, gentle conceit, and hearty determination to create a constitutional government. We were convinced at the time that the honor of a democratic constitution would never be denied in the modern world.
Savage Love avowed that the word “abandonment is an absence, a passive accusation, inactive, and the words oust, banish, evict, exile, and chase were active, but neither the post nor promises were more than a tentative intention, and with no actual sense or significance, none.” She was always casual, and seemed to understate the philosophy of existential absence over presence, and yet repeated the point that the ratified articles in the constitution were mere intentions, autonomous in practice, and we were the natives who created the actual substance with each word, and the most recent recitation was in the sentiments of exile.
“The constitution is more active in exile than it was bound to the territory of a federal treaty,” Gichi Noodin shouted, “so, our exile made perfect sense, a constitution of new continental liberty.”
“No, no, abandoned children and mongrels are actual, real, a heartbeat, a presence, not the same as moored boats and empty houses,” moaned Moby Dick.
“The words have no meaning or native story,” declared Savage Love. “The notions of abandon and renounce were never states of gravity because words were always stranded in emotion and nostalgia, and the tease of the next listener or reader, the word was never an actual person, mongrel, or totem, the words are naught but a crease of sound.”
“Right, the meaning of the words in the constitution change with the users, and in the same way that stories on Panic Radio were never, never the same,” said Gichi Noodin. “Why would natives listen day after day if the stories were always the same?”
“Children and animals, abandoned or not, have real names and legal standing in the world court of justice, but repossessed cars and foreclosed houses do not,” said Justice Molly Crèche.
“Cars and abandoned machines were never sincere,” said Hole in the Storm, “but the great spirit of animals have standing in art and any serious native court of stories.”
“The bat and animal totems double the standing of humans,”