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Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015)

The White Earth Constitution, Cosmopolitan Nationhood, and the
Fruitful Ironies of Relational Sovereignty

JOSEPH BAUERKEMPER

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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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.

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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.

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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’

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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.

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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

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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

Joseph Bauerkemper “The White Earth Constitution”

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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