There are innumerable facets to exile.

One narrative is of the personal saga. What is it like to be stripped of community, of intimate family, of personal possessions, and after exile, to have one’s reputation smeared with malicious lies in a post facto attempt at justification by those who believed they stood to gain?

Exile is not well clarified by cultural narratives in the United States. Except for the lacunae in constitutionally-protected rights beneath the shadow of contemporary “tribal sovereignty,” exile is illegal, defined in a small body of case law as “cruel and unusual punishment,”[1] unconstitutional, and in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “a fate universally decried by civilized people.”[2]

Even though some form of exile was the impetus behind the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic voyages made by the ancestors of many Americans, the history of those involuntary journeys has either been ignored – many families’ stories of their own histories begin at the Atlantic seaboard and are glossed in generic terms like “Scotch-Irish” in reference to the “old country” – or are recast in heroic generalities. Most European-Americans describe their forcibly uprooted ancestors as “seeking liberty,” descendants eight generations removed from that stormy crossing in reeking ship-holds tell their grandchildren, or perhaps more grandly, they are memorialized as valiantly upholding the “true faith,” or passionately motivated by luminescent political ideals.

The exiles named in popular Euro-American culture are mostly romantically cast political idealists, passionately discussing revolutionary theories and drinking coffee on the Parisian left bank with fellow expatriates, or vanquished generals like Napoleon, who are memorialized with well-manicured battlefields, pastries, and palindromes,[3] rather than broadly-circulated diaries.

And, although some indigenous peoples may have used banishment as the most extreme of all possible social sanctions, a ‘social death penalty,’ Ahnishinahbæó^tjibway did not.[4]

Without cultural archetypes as touchstones of “meaning,” weaving a narrative of cohesive understanding involves a dynamic synthesis of personal and community perceptions and interpretations. “Meaning” cannot be stripped of its context and remain intact – and exile by its very nature removes the one exiled from the societal contexts within which one might seek coherent meaning, strips away identity and severs friendships, pares a person to the surprisingly slender thread of “self” without community.

Along with contemporary meanings ranging around “enforced removal” according to an edict or sentence, “penal expatriation or banishment; the state or condition of being penally banished,” etc., the Oxford English Dictionary includes among its definitions of “exile”:

∙ Waste or devastation of property; ruin, utter impoverishment. to put in exile [OF. metre a essil]: to ravage (a country), ruin (a person). Obs. [usage citations spanning the years 1267 to 1618]

∙ slender, shrunken, thin, diminutive, with the “primary sense” of one potential derivation “being assumed to have been ‘disemboweled’ [usage 1420-1611].

The obsolete meanings in Oxford reflect understandings of “exile” in medieval Europe, at a time when the practice had not yet been “universally decried” as cruel beyond the bounds of ‘civilized’ practice, and thus become so unusual as to have almost no cultural referent.

I did not think to read Oxford’s etymologies and obsolete meanings until the spring of 2004, after nearly six years of exile. And yet, I had written to a friend in 2001-2002:

… Spent an unexpected chunk of the day with another woman who was banished [in consequence of her courageous and honorable actions[5] on another Indian reservation] about the same time I was: she wanted someone with her when she went to talk to her attorney, “what next” after having a lower court ‘win’ overturned on appeal. Knowing her, talking with her now-and-then, has been a real gift ... someone else walking a similar path of terrible solitude, social death, disemboweled identity ... in some ways she’s a very different person from me, but the personal impact of banishment / exile has been in other ways eerily similar …

And:

After Wub-e-ke-niew died ... after I got thrown out of my house and caught up in a bureaucratic and legal morass ... after I was banished ... one of the few ‘threads’ remaining of my unraveled being was my personal “integrity,” an almost pure-faith belief that in my making some difficult decisions as ethically as I could, somehow things would eventually become ‘okay’ again.

“Ethics” ... “integrity” ... on some levels they’re abstract words, with referents in “ideal” domains, whether the rarefied philosophical heritage of Lislakh[6] civilization or the teachings of Aboriginal Indigenous ways-of-being. But in either - perhaps ‘both’ - it seems like ethics and integrity are, in part, like guiding “signposts” through life’s sometimes difficult terrain ...

… As I walked - as a woman I encountered at Kinko’s a few years back described it (in understandings distilled from her own anguished odyssey [in other milieux]), “UNDER the [Biblical-referent] ‘valley’ [of death]” - through those first years of exile, struggling to transcend my pain and rage and woundedness, my own sense of “ethics” and “personal integrity” was one of the few shards of my shattered life I saw to hold onto: for guidance through difficult decisions, as something with which I might begin rebuilding my life and myself.

Narratives of exile

What and where are the threads with which one might begin weaving narratives of exile, reconstructing the fabric of one’s life? A part of the story can be told chronologically.

I did not stay and talk with Mary for very long, when we reached her house after that interminable drive into exile on May 29^th.

Mary, cherished friend, had sat with me through the first nightlong vigil after my husband died. Wub-e-ke-niew still lay on the bed, and his spirit was a palpable presence filling the room. I had straightened his legs so that he would be … more comfortable … but had not been able to make myself cover his face, not yet. Mary and I sat in our coats, deliberately leaving the house cold so that Wub-e-ke-niew’s body – he had been adamantly opposed to embalming – would “keep.” We poured the last of the still-warm coffee that Wub-e-ke-niew had made from its thermos, then brewed another pot, smoked cigarettes, and our quiet conversation wove through the backwoods silence. We talked of moments remembered, of the profoundly beautiful man Wub-e-ke-niew had been, and occasionally lapsing into the present, began to touch on the details of his funeral … how to fulfill his clearly-expressed desires to be buried “the old way.” That night was sometimes painful, filled with deep sadness, but there was also a kind of serenity as we sat with my deceased husband. Death is a natural part of life, and even when death comes too young, there is an inexplicable harmony in the cycles of life-and-death.

The day that I was exiled was different, unnatural, rent asunder by the unnamable. After that interminable drive from Red Lake, we sat in Mary’s kitchen and drank coffee, and neither of us had words for what had just happened. “Thank you for coming with me,” I said, and then did not know what else to say.

I drove from Mary’s to the Bemidji offices of the Ojibwe News, the weekly newspaper that Wub-e-ke-niew had written for since it was founded in 1988. The publisher Bill Lawrence’s road-worn little red Honda was parked in front, and I went inside. “They banished me,” I told him, in unprefaced continuation of the conversation we’d had a couple of days earlier about the upcoming tribal court proceedings.

“Who did?”

“Bobby Whitefeather.” I showed Bill the order of exile signed by the tribal chairman. I’m one of those people who are usually tightly focused and practical in a crisis, but I felt like a rapidly deflating balloon whizzing around in the newspaper office, bouncing off of the walls, starting to succumb to the as-yet incomprehensible reality of being exiled.

Guided by Bill’s questions, I explained to him what had happened. “Write it,” he said.

The Ojibwe News is a weekly newspaper, that goes to press on Thursdays. I made arrangements to buy a secondhand computer from a friend-of-a-friend with my good name as credit security, and retreated to Mary’s guesthouse, a one-room pine-paneled cottage perched at the edge of the Mississippi riverbank. Fueled by the shocky adrenaline of freshly imposed exile, coffee, cigarettes, and the meals that Mary insisted I eat, I wrote.

For about forty hours, I gazed out across the river as the sun set and rose, and set and rose again, smoked pack after pack of unfiltered cigarettes, brewed pot after pot of strong coffee, and struggled to write a coherent – and professional-quality, journalistically fair – news story in the third person. I left a blank line after the attribution for tribal court judge Bruce Grave’s comments, since Bill knew him personally. Although all too common at Red Lake and other reservations, exile is still “news” in Indian country.

Early Thursday morning, I put the story on a diskette, made a printout, and drove to the newspaper’s offices. I showed Bill the blank space for Bruce Graves’s comments, and suggested that he’d be more likely to talk if Bill called him. Then, I handed the printout and a red pen to Bill, and went outside with a mug of the newspaper’s staple black coffee. I stood there smoking, watching the traffic drive by on a perfectly ordinary-seeming day in Bemidji, waiting for the publisher to decide what to do with what had become, during forty hours of writing, a long newspaper story.

Bill made a few edits, called Graves, and when I came back inside, handed me the lightly-marked printout, told me what Graves had said, and pointed me to a computer. I made the changes, added the quote from Graves, saved the file for the typesetter, made a photocopy of Whitefeather’s exile order, finished my coffee, and left. “On deadline,” there’s no time to spend in casual conversation at a newspaper.

From the newspaper, I drove to the Anishinabe Legal Services legal aid office in Cass Lake, looking for a lawyer, and then the finality of exile started to hit me. Hard. I called Mary, told her I was going to be gone for a few days – she’d given me an invitation to stay as long as I liked in her guesthouse – and started driving, northeast to where the upper Red Lake extends off the reservation. It’s a fairly long drive from Bemidji to Washkish, and then northwards on the rough gravel roads that run nearest the lakeshore. When I finally got to the lake, in unsettled lands near the north shore, I sat at the water’s edge until late night, crying deep wracking screams of anguish into the chilly starlit wilderness, mourning the loss of my husband, my home, the land and the lake that are one with my spirit …

I slept in my car that night, and through the next few days drove slowly around the external boundary of the reservation, counterclockwise, sleeping in my car and in the woods, crying and sometimes screaming into the backwoods silence. In the checkerboarded patchwork of land ownership of the “ceded lands” north of the reservation, I hid my car on a trail where the most recent tracks were blurred by time, and lay for many hours in the woods an isolated parcel of ‘reservation land’ where Wub-e-ke-niew and I had come to pick blueberries, facedown against the sandy bosom of Grandmother Earth, crying, seeking solace, asking for help in healing from wounds I did not yet fully comprehend.

Finally, I drove south, back to Bemidji. The article I’d written was printed in the newspaper, page one …

Talking to those friends who were off-reservation was painful, awkward, we didn’t know what to say – and I learned that exile is shameful as well as painful, and shied from seeing anyone from Red Lake who’d come ‘to town’ in Bemidji.

I went to the Cities, two hundred miles south, and tried – for a long time unsuccessfully – to focus on schoolwork. I looked everywhere I knew to look for an attorney to represent me in the legal mess launched by disagreement with Valerie Blake – Wub-e-ke-niew’s ex-wife’s oldest daughter – over Wub-e-ke-niew’s death certificate, and inflamed into chaos by the tribal court’s attempted probate and my being exiled. To the best of my extensively researched knowledge, there is no such lawyer, at least not one willing to represent a client stripped of her assets by a tribal government, and so I bought a copy of the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure, spent a lot of time in law libraries, and tried to represent myself. And lost, floundering in alien discourse, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where my certiorari briefs got “thrown out” by a clerk on a technicality. For years, whenever I happened to about that principled legal battle, it was still a defeat in which the pain radiated, raw and red from an aching heart.

That’s one piece of a still-unwoven narrative of exile.

The other pieces, without the threads of time to bind them together into some apparently coherent chronology, remain fragmentary:

One of my professors and thesis advisors, a wise woman with a profound and deep understanding of humanity, explaining exile as being “a refugee without community.”

Someone I’ve known for many years, and worked with in the 1970s, turning away from me as though I’m an evil spirit bringing plague. “I heard about you,” he said, “at the tribal court.”

Explaining to a friend what it felt like, about a year after being exiled: “it’s like someone has cut me open (gesturing upwards along the centerline, the length of my torso), pulled my guts out onto the ground, and stomped on them.”

Two years after exile, the image of myself as a crumbling skeleton, collapsed on the ground only half out of the grave, the scattered shards of my spirit rustling in the wind.

A friend whose grandmother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, the only one of her family who survived, telling me, almost ferociously, “even impossible journeys are made one step at a time,” and then hugging me with an understanding that transcends words.

Old friends in whose memory the beauty and the dreams that Wub-e-ke-niew and I built together at Red Lake have not died, old friends who remember the person I once was and have faith in who I can become, loyal friends whose trust in their own perceptions of the world transcends the official – and unofficial – censure …

New friends whose insight extends beyond my masks of pride and rez-tough endurance, who see the wounds underneath those masks with compassion but not pity, but who also see the human being – and her possibilities – at the core, and have encouraged me to rebuild my strength, to understand exile not as an “end” but rather as a transition to something new.

And … the people from Red Lake who have had the courage to say, “it was wrong, what they did.” Given the political situation at Red Lake, it took a great deal of courage for them to say that.

[1] Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), 271-272 [notes 11 and 12 omitted]: The primary principle is that a punishment must not be so severe as to be degrading to the dignity of human beings. Pain, certainly, may be a factor in the judgment. The infliction of an extremely severe punishment will often entail physical suffering. See Weems v. United States, 217 U.S., at 366. Yet the Framers also knew “that there could be exercises of cruelty by laws other than those which inflicted bodily pain or mutilation.” Id., at 372. Even though “there may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture,” Trop v. Dulles, supra, at 101, severe mental pain may be inherent in the infliction of a particular punishment. See Weems v. United States, supra, at 366. That, indeed, was one of the conclusions underlying the holding of the plurality in Trop v. Dulles that the punishment of expatriation violates the Clause. [note 13] And the [page 272] physical and mental suffering inherent in the punishment of cadena temporal, see nn. 11-12, supra, was an obvious basis for the Court’s decision in Weems v. United States that the punishment was “cruel and unusual.” [note 14]

[note 13] “This punishment is offensive to cardinal principles for which the Constitution stands. It subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated. He may be subject to banishment, a fate universally decried by civilized people. He is stateless, a condition deplored in the international community of democracies. It is no answer to suggest that all the disastrous consequences of this fate may not be brought to bear on a stateless person. The threat makes the punishment obnoxious.” Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 102 (1958). Cf. id., at 110-111 (Brennan, J., concurring):
“It can be supposed that the consequences of greatest weight, in terms of ultimate impact on the petitioner, are unknown and unknowable. Indeed, in truth, he may live out his life with but minor inconvenience. . . . Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the impact of expatriation -- especially where statelessness is the upshot -- may be severe. Expatriation, in this respect, constitutes an especially demoralizing sanction. The uncertainty, and the consequent psychological hurt, which must accompany one who becomes an outcast in his own land must be reckoned a substantial factor in the ultimate judgment.”
[note 14] “It is cruel in its excess of imprisonment and that which accompanies and follows imprisonment. It is unusual in its character. Its punishments come under the condemnation of the bill of rights, both on account of their degree and kind.” Weems v. United States, 217 U.S., at 377.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

[4] E.g., in her November 3, 1986 paper on “Discipline,” Red Lake elder Lorraine Kingsley detailed traditional forms of “discipline” ranging from “education,” to “shunning” as a “very severe form of discipline.” Kingsley explained, “Even a few minutes of this discipline is remembered for a lifetime in our society where human relationships are more valuable than gold.” http://www.maquah.net/AhnishinahbaeotjibwayReflections/AppendixI/1986-11-03_Lorraine_Kingsley_on_discipline.html

[5] We exiles are so few that to be more specific would make her identifiable, and she – like me – has gone through periods of living-in-hiding, perhaps in personal reaction to having internalized some of the social isolation of exile, as well as in prudent response to the death threats and acts of opportunistic violence (presumably originating from the ‘tribal establishment’).

[6] Defined by Wub-e-ke-niew in the Glossary to We Have The Right To Exist, p. 251:

Lislakh: I am using this word, which was brought into the English language by linguist Carleton Hodge, to refer to the inter-related and historically connected peoples who share societal, cultural, language and/or patrilineal roots within that usually referred to as an abstract entity, Western Civilization. Lislakh includes Germanic people and the heirs of the Roman Empire (who speak languages academically categorized as Indo-European), as well as the Arabic and other peoples whose languages are categorized as Semitic, and the Moorish and other North African and Middle Eastern peoples who have common and long-standing historical inter-relationships within the context of Western Civilization.

Lislakh was coined as an abstract analytical category, although it describes historical and present reality. The word is used in this book to refer not only to the common roots of the Lislakh people, but also to their often violent co-history during their millennia of expansion. That the word Lislakh is a neologism of limited circulation is itself a manifestation of the ethos of English-speaking and other Lislakh peoples, symptomatic of the abstract isolationism of their linguistic structures and of the extent to which these peoples have been severed from their roots and their own identity.

In using the word Lislakh, I do not presume to define those people to whom I refer--especially not in the ways that they have tried to re-define and label the Aboriginal Indigenous people as Indians, and have imposed their derogatory names, projections and stereotypes onto the indigenous peoples whose land they have expropriated. I observe, however, that these people who have no name for themselves urgently need to come to terms with their identity, their past history, their roots, and their present reality: both as an inter-connected group of people, and as human beings with inherent responsibilities. The people to whom I refer as Lislakh must no longer go about stealing from each other and from other peoples; they can not continue to shirk their responsibilities toward Grandmother Earth.

Chapter 5 – Exile

Narratives of exile