Native Liberty

Gerald Vizenor was a journalist for the Minneapolis Tribune when he discovered that his direct ancestors were the editor and publisher of The Progress, the first Native newspaper on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Vizenor, inspired by the kinship of nineteenth century Native journalists, has pursued a similar sense of resistance in his reportage, editorial essays, and literary art. Vizenor reveals in Native Liberty the political, poetic, visionary, and ironic insights of personal identity and narratives of cultural sovereignty. He examines singular acts of resistance, natural reason, literary practices, and other strategies of survivance that evade and subvert the terminal notions of tragedy and victimry. Native Liberty nurtures survivance and creates a sense of cultural and historical presence. Vizenor, a renowned Anishinaabe literary scholar and artist, writes in a direct narrative style that integrates personal experiences with original presentations, comparative interpretations, and critiques of legal issues and historical situations.

Thirteen essays explore some 500 years of literacy campaigns in vastly different societies: Reformation Germany, early modern Sweden and Scotland, 19th century US, 19th-20th century Russia and the Soviet Union, pre-revolutionary and revolutionary China, and a variety of Third World countries. The 1763 Royal Proclamation forbade non-natives under British authority to molest or disturb any tribe or tribal territory in British North America. Clark, a lawyer specializing in aboriginal rights, contends that this Proclamation had legislative force and that, since imperial law on this matter has never been repealed, the right to self-government continues to exist for Canadian natives. He also explores the difficulties of aboriginal self-government in the constitution and offers some advice to government and aboriginal negotiators. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The cornerstone of Clark's argument is the 1763 Royal Proclamation which forbade non-natives under British authority to molest or disturb any tribe or tribal territory in British North America. Clark contends that this proclamation had legislative force and that, since imperial law on this matter has never been repealed, the right to self-government continues to exist for Canadian natives.

Thirteen essays explore some 500 years of literacy campaigns in vastly different societies: Reformation Germany, early modern Sweden and Scotland, 19th century US, 19th-20th century Russia and the Soviet Union, pre-revolutionary and revolutionary China, and a variety of Third World countries. The 1763 Royal Proclamation forbade non-natives under British authority to molest or disturb any tribe or tribal territory in British North America. Clark, a lawyer specializing in aboriginal rights, contends that this Proclamation had legislative force and that, since imperial law on this matter has never been repealed, the right to self-government continues to exist for Canadian natives. He also explores the difficulties of aboriginal self-government in the constitution and offers some advice to government and aboriginal negotiators. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D’Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio. Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition—one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people’s diverse political contexts.

11 Ecstatic Vision, Blue Ravens, Wild Dreams: The Urgency of the Future in Gerald Vizenor's Art -- Contributors -- Index

Research on Indigenous participation in sport offers many opportunities to better understand the political issues of equality, empowerment, self-determination and protection of culture and identity. This volume compares and conceptualises the sociological significance of Indigenous sports in different international contexts.

How does one make a clear distinction between issues such as tribal sovereignty, indigenous rights, and law and justice? How do these topics differ, and can they be separated from, issues such as identity, health, and environment? The answer, of course, lies in the interconnectedness of all aspects of Native American life, culture, religion, and politics. This format encourages the consideration of Native politics both in terms of unifying themes and contexts and with regard to local situations, needs, and struggles.