Treaty Shirts
October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation
Sales Date: 2016-05-10
The imagined narratives of seven native exiles from the White Earth Nation
Gerald Vizenor creates masterful, truthful, surreal, and satirical fiction similar to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. In this imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations; they pursue the liberty of an egalitarian government on an island in Lake of the Woods. These seven narrators, known only by native nicknames, are related to characters in Vizenor's other novels and stories. Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and this novel is a rich and critical commentary on the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867, and a vivid visualization of the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, in 2034.
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GERALD VIZENOR is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the American Book Award and the New York Fiction Collective Award. He lives in Naples, Florida.
"[A]n ironic, intertextual, slipstream, futurist, speculative constitution and declaration of the rights of human, chicken, mongrel, holotrope, and mutant fish beings ... Treaty Shirts offers science fiction as an ironic, playful space to imagine possibilities for survivance and sovereignty."
~Stina Attebery, Los Angeles Review of Books
""In a pithy of 125 pages of story, Vizenor deftly discusses continental sovereignty, cultural memory, treaty tales, Native creation stories, exotic victimry, totemic unions, and a wide range of other topics, all with the human animal and its intraspecies war at the forefront.""
~Shawn M. Higgins, The American Indian Quarterly
""[A]n ironic, intertextual, slipstream, futurist, speculative constitution and declaration of the rights of human, chicken, mongrel, holotrope, and mutant fish beings Treaty Shirts offers science fiction as an ironic, playful space to imagine possibilities for survivance and sovereignty.""
~Stina Attebery, Los Angeles Review of Books
""Treaty Shirts weaves 18th century history with speculative fiction, literary references with pop culture, Ojibwe dream songs with internet belief, and real people with native trickster stories.""
~Morning Edition - MPR (Minnesota Public Radio)
"In writing that's full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be."
~Diane Glancy, author of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education
"Treaty Shirts masterfully exhibits the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights and intellectual sovereignty. Most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his aims, not through condemnation and animus, but by the humor and tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers.""
~Billy J. Stratton, author of Buried in Shades of Night
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