Treaty Shirts: A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation by Gerald Vizenor

Author:Gerald Vizenor [Vizenor, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819576293
Google: 5N5_CwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0819576298
Barnesnoble: 0819576298
Goodreads: 27286522
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

4

GICHI NOODIN

Panic Radio has broadcast without a license at least three hours every night for more than forty years. The first broadcasts were from a rusty blue van parked near colleges and universities, and from cardboard shadow cities under the interstate bridges in the city. The live broadcasts have continued on the international border in a houseboat named the Baron of Patronia.

The Baron of Patronia was the name of my great-uncle and, you know the story, he shouted and waved at bears and missionaries but never changed the weather or literature until he created the first panic holes and roared into the stony earth. The actual location of that maiden shout was a blue meadow near Bad Medicine Lake.

Natives were healed over the panic holes, and there were no dues or duties to the wily shamans, or recitations to the priestly hustle and bustle of salvation. Needless to say the old enterprise healers conspired to shame and shut down the panic holes, but the shouters gathered in the hundreds at country meadows and city parks and bellowed out the very names and venture cures of the doctors and politicians over personal and communal burrows of recovery.

The Baron of Patronia encouraged panic shouters in the ruins of civilization, and saluted once or twice a week the native woman who roared over a cardboard box with such musical vitality the range of her roars and shouts became regular recitals in the shadows of the highrise towers and interstate bridges, an overnight remedy of city misery.

Captain Shammer, my cousin, was raised with three sisters, two brothers, and seven mongrels on the Red Lust, a houseboat on Lake Itasca. He inherited the captaincy from his father Eighty, a nickname related to the atomic number of mercury. Shammer shouted into the summer waves, the first native since the fur trade to practice panic holes in natural motion on water, and he was haunted by winter stories of the ancient monks in the red pine, the Benedictine ghosts of Fleury sur Gichiziibi.

Shammer was later named chairman of native studies and straight away he converted the faculty office hideouts to necessary courses of native studies, such as the program to train mongrels to detect the absence of irony, postindian holograms, denivance press, a casino in the library, and the Panic Hole Chancery.

Native students unearthed survivance with wild shouts into panic holes, and easily overcame the crude sentiments of victimry. That obscure chancery of panic revived the old teases of creation stories. The dicey shamans were shouted out at the chancery, and at last the old hoaxers of native medicine were driven to the rich saloons with the lonesome pretenders of the commonweal. The enterprise shamans continued to rattle for the sacred, sleight the spirits, and every time the hokey dance moves were for the money.

Sun Bear, Night Bear, Big Bear, Crazy Bear, Wise Bear, Medicine Bear, name the poseur bears that became sweat lodge shamans to the rich, bored, tedious, and wannabe famous. The overnight bears moved with the easy money, and the motion was never natural.

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