The seven exiles transform Vizenor’s ideas into artistic, political practices, archiving their literary and cultural ancestry in song, debate, dance, and the titular “treaty shirts” that they wear - unwashed convention shirts archiving the stains and smells of previous community gatherings.
Imagining a future where his books might be either treasured or destroyed, Treaty Shirts explores possibilities for alternative literary and political legacies. At a recent conference on “Indigeneity’s Radical Commitments” at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where I was able to hear him read from the novel, Vizenor chose the date 2034 for his near future because it is the year he will turn 100. Vizenor regularly reuses characters throughout his fiction, but this intertextuality takes on new stakes in the context of Treaty Shirts’s focus on aging, art, and political and personal legacies.
Even the subtitle - “a familiar treatise” - hints at the intertextuality of the work.įor readers already familiar with Vizenor’s oeuvre, Treaty Shirts can seem at times like a series of Easter eggs inviting reflection on his previous works. Many of the characters featured in the novel are direct descendants of characters from Vizenor’s other novels and stories. Another character notes that Bearheart has been burned by “tradition fascists” within the future White Earth Nation for its objectionable use of irony and eroticism. Heirs of Columbus appears as one of the treasured print books kept by the character Savage Love. ( Bearheart features a post-petroleum future United States, while Heirs thinks about the relationship between Indigeneity and genetic science.) The intertextuality of Treaty Shirts, however, extends beyond genre similarities Vizenor also writes himself-as-author into the world of the novel. As the premise suggests, Treaty Shirts follows the style of Vizenor’s previous science fictional novels like Bearheart and The Heirs of Columbus all three novels use SF to explore a key political issue for Indigenous peoples in North America.
Vizenor invites readers to experience his imagined future as an archive referencing his previous works and as a playful speculation on the continuing relevance of Indigenous literary and political writing.
By distancing themselves from this new federal sector system, the seven fugitives reassert their political sovereignty and practice “survivance,” Vizenor’s term for a combination of survival and resistance that actively rejects stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as passive and fading victims of a colonial past. In the aftermath of this decision, private surveillance agencies and drones overrun the former reservation, casinos are transformed into casino medical centers that require the aging reservation population to gamble for their hospice care, and a new, corrupt sector governor is appointed and promptly murdered. In this dystopian United States, Congress decides to abrogate all treaties in the hope that they can seize casino money to balance the budget.
The seven fugitives contrast their creative, ironic acts of Native governance against the governmental systems of the newly created “federal sectors” that have replaced the federal reservation system in Vizenor’s speculative near future. Treaty Shirts follows seven self-declared exiles from the White Earth Nation in Minnesota as they set out to practice Native governance on a houseboat that broadcasts radio signals from a lake that straddles the border between the United States and Canada. GERALD VIZENOR’S most recent novel, Treaty Shirts: October 2034 - A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation, is an ironic, intertextual, slipstream, futurist, speculative constitution and declaration of the rights of human, chicken, mongrel, holotrope, and mutant fish beings.