smear of mastery

Honor is about relation. It is about the creation of a more suitable world. It is the reification of values in conduct. Honor is not a title, it is a way of practicing being in relation with oneself and community. Honor is built by sharing stories and songs; it is wrecked by belief.
Humor is a type of surprise, therefore: surprises are fluid lubricants to our whole selves. Humor is something far more vital than a joke or the laughter at something funny. It flows in a culture like a fluid. Humor resists explanation. It becomes stale when inscribed, like water kept in a glass overnight. Nothing ages quite so poorly as humor which has outstayed its welcome. 
In the context of the heard, humor is a rhetorical communication, like irony. It goes deeper than words on a page. It is a communication which creates a deep physical response in the listener, as does poetry. No one actually believes a joke after the punchline
The imagic is not a mere image. It is contextual visual information, impossible to extract without collapsing its structure. It is ephemeral, like humor or irony in this sense, that it needs context to support its structure. Imagic is a linguistics term describing semantic meaning derived from reference to image or quality.
Image can be an illusion. In fact, its "reign" is one of deception. It has replaced the imagic and the imagination. An image is worth a thousand words, but the heard, imagic, mediations of tribal stories contain more information within the context of their presence than do a thousand images of an absence. Images are used to construct beliefs; The imagic is a presence in a story.
Imagination stemming from beliefs as opposed to from stories is a disastrous performance of representation.

A constructed simulation with no referent in the real.
The individual is a simulation designed to weaken humans from their natural strength in community. It gives some undue power, while distancing all from any sense of identity grown from connection. The cult of individual responsibility is debunked as capitalist rhetoric enforcing the deliberate abandoning of social responsibility. Vizenor uses the term to highlight how a person is grown vs. how an individual is constructed. An individual is a mathematical variable, emotionally blank while being unique in appearance. Simulations are often about appearance. A person is an individual when they represent a Planck length of a man.
An individual is a belief; a person is a story.
Though Vizenor does not make explicit use of this distinction, it feels salient. Intelligence is a trait which is exercised and expanded through contact with the infinite real. Knowledge can be more easily simulated as one need only recognize certain signifiers which could be simulations without referents. Stories are intelligence; beliefs are knowledge.
The intransitive takes no object. It is the action, the continuity of action and the fuzzy beginnings and endings. It passes over no thing. It does not crystallize itself in the need of an explicit place to close itself. In a culture where we are all becoming endlessly, collapsing all our meaning into a point or object of closure seems ignorant.
Irony is a word that no one agrees on.
Kitchsymen pander to beliefs and (mis)representation. They coat their simulations in the image of the made-up Indian.
The smear or scratch of mastery. The knowledge of the books of the house. The literature of dominance is the catalog of the works of manifest manners. It is the collected projects of centuries of statecraft under the banner of racialism. It is everything that has been written and will be written which denies natural reason in favor of simulation. It is the system of thinking and knowing which creates these works.
Literature of Dominance is the mark of the house, it is the record of control asserted over native people and colonizing people. Dominance is also mastery; mastery in the grip of the ignorant is denial of chance, while deeply being a product of it. Most of the persons in positions of power in our culture arrived in their mastery through dumb luck.
The literature of dominance is a collection of beliefs.