The Constitution of the White Earth Nation: A New Innovation in a Longstanding Indigenous Literary Tradition

Abstract

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. 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