Following James Mackay's thought-provoking theorization of constitutional criticism and David Carlson's important and insightful analysis of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation (CWEN) within the context of principal author Gerald Vizenor's critical, literary, and political oeuvre and debates about the political and practical implications of his work, this essay seeks to locate the CWEN within the broad ground of a long "continental" literary tradition of constitutional literature and, in doing so, perhaps provide a foundation for the practice of constitutional criticism that Kirby Brown performs in the essay that follows, a skillful reading of John Milton Oskison's novel Black Jack Davy through the critical lens of Cherokee constitutionalism.1 A respectful interloper in Vizenorian territory, I had the fortune of teaching the White Earth Constitution this semester in a class on Native American literary traditions, which was held in a renovated one-room chapel. We read it halfway through the semester, and the living text emerged as a touchstone to which [End Page 48] we constantly returned, inviting new questions about the classical indigenous texts we read before it, and generating conversations about the role of irony and political critique in texts as diverse as colonial-era petitions, nineteenth-century political prose, and "hot off the press" twenty-first-century fiction. In this essay I dwell on some of those earlier literary traditions, with which we began the course, and then shift to the question of irony, which dominated and sparked the later conversations, to consider how Gerald Vizenor and the other collective authors of the White Earth Constitution might engage new innovations on longstanding indigenous literary traditions.
Skillful Reading And Writing 4.pdf
The course began with imagination, place, and the word. We read classic essays by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko,2 and then we launched right into an intertextual reading of one of the first works of indigenous constitutional literature recorded in the Roman alphabet, the Quiché Maya Popol Vuh. We paired two translations with a "reading" of Mayan imagistic and glyphic writing, visiting an exhibit called "Storied Walls" at Harvard's Peabody Museum that included representations of murals from San Bartolo, Guatemala, and Bonampak, Mexico, with an interpretive tour hosted by Marc Zender, a specialist in the glyphs.3 This allowed us to pair image with word, imagistic evocation with artistic representation, a "mythic" text with a historical people and place. Figures from the Popol Vuh came to life before our eyes, while the people who read and participated in the text became real historical persons, who slept in particular places, celebrated significant days, and formed stories about each other. 2ff7e9595c
Comments