The Right to Gather

Abstract

The fourth chapter, “The Right to Gather,” reads a set of texts by Anishinaabe writer, activist, and philosopher Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor is widely read as an Indigenous poststructuralist, and this chapter attends to his less celebrated and more pragmatic attempts to grapple with the limits of colonial legal protections, specifically pertaining to the flourishing and gathering of manoomin/wild rice. The chapter offers a genealogy of state and federal court cases through which colonial officials attempt to stabilize their own legal authority via the protection of manoomin. Against this, the chapter tracks the history of Vizenor’s own challenges to colonial law and his attempt (along with Erma Vizenor) to use manoomin’s special legal status to retheorize sovereignty itself—as a fundamentally social and supercolonial modality—via the White Earth Constitution.