Sovereignty is an odd, even foreign
notion in a free democracy. David Carlson's Imagining
Sovereignty concludes with a call for direct action to combat nations like
the United States and Canada that continue to assert sovereignty over
indigenous peoples, perhaps, Dr. Carlson suggests, along the lines of Idle No
More. Perhaps the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's stand against the Dakota Access
Pipeline is an answer to his call. These are actions against a sovereign,
represented by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, acts of
self-determination.
The "sovereign" traditionally is a
single person, say a queen or an emperor, or perhaps an all-powerful religious
figure. Sovereignty is also an ancient, terrifying notion. Witness Hobbes'
monstrous Leviathan. The sovereign, almost by definition, can do no wrong. The
sovereign may not always be correct, but is always too powerful or too perfect
to be wrong. Self-determination, in contrast, is normal. It is the American way
of individualism, and has been from the moment the Declaration of Independence
reached the colonial streets. Self-determination is the theoretical counterpoint
to the sovereign, with the diffuse masses overriding their master and
proclaiming, "Don't tread on me." The People are the Sovereign, and government
is stunted by checks and balances and separation of powers.
And yet Americans embrace the notion of
sovereignty in order to claim strength as a unified whole. United, Americans
stand. Divided, Americans fall. Instead of the weak, flailing United States
government under the Articles of Confederation, we have the towering supremacy
of the federal government under the Constitution. This sovereign prevailed in a
horrifically bloody civil war and in multiple world wars. This sovereign
imposed human rights norms in the Deep South from on high, presides over the
entire world as an economic and military Superpower, and administers the
world's only multi-trillion dollar national budget. Even the most radical
libertarians chant "USA! USA! USA!" when the national women's soccer team takes
the pitch in the World Cup.
That modern American Indian nations
claim sovereignty and
self-determination in the same breath in this political atmosphere should be unsurprising
given the benefits of asserting both. But some Americans shake their heads and
wonder how such a weak and dependent group of lower class people could be so
audacious as to claim sovereignty, or to effectively govern themselves or
anyone else. Similarly, Indian people who are citizens or members of the tribes
that assert sovereignty and claim the power of self-determination sometimes are
not convinced, either. Historically, tribal leaders claiming sovereignty more
often than not found themselves talking to an empty longhouse, or worse, dead.
Consider Hole-In-The-Day (the younger), a Minnesota Ojibwe leader assassinated
by his own people. Modern tribal leaders spending too much time testifying
before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on tribal self-determination or
giving speeches for the National Congress of American Indians in conferences at
tribal resorts are routinely voted out of office.
David Carlson's work dives into this
contradiction between tribal sovereignty and self-determination, highlighting
how assertions of illiberal tribal sovereignty—in political, legal, and
literary domains—do important work toward establishing tribal
self-determination within the polity governed by the American Leviathan.
Mid-twentieth century Indian people divided their attention between saving
tribal governments or asserting individual civil rights. D'Arcy McNickle's professional and literary career, as described
by Dr. Carlson, is a bridge between the bad old days of Indian dependency on
the federal government and the rise of tribal sovereignty talk (and, later,
action) by tribal leaders.
Dr. Carlson's historical tale of how sovereignty
came to be the touchstone of American Indian activism in the twentieth century
leans heavily on McNickle. The federal government
again and again targeted Indian tribes for termination, and drew multitudes of
Indian people away from Indian country to the cities through the Indian Adoption
Project and the Urban Relocation Project. McNickle's
work proved that Indian people retained their tribalism in the face of these
American efforts to destroy it. McNickle's work laid
a framework for contemporaries like Vine Deloria, Jr. to advocate tribal nationalism
in the framework of Indian individualism.
With Congress finally getting something
right in Indian law and policy by enacting the first of several
self-determination acts in the 1970s, there finally arose a focus on Indian
tribes instead of individual Indian activism. In some ways, the cultural
Indians gave way to the political Indians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
hired all the anthropologists to advise the federal government how to make
policy. Indians started going to college in greater numbers, and many returned
home to contribute to a tribal nationhood. In larger numbers every generation,
Indian people have returned to the tribal government and to their home
territories, hedging their bets in favor of sovereignty. In short, Indian people
have embraced self-determination through the sovereign rather than self-determination
through individualism—no different than the Founders of the American
Republic.
There are significant advantages to
embracing a tribal sovereignty. Dr. Carlson's historical road trip through the
rise of tribal governments tells part of the story. Powerful people listened
when a tribal leader audaciously declared tribal sovereignty. Invocation of
sovereignty is invocation of power. Tribal sovereigns defend their people, providing
for child welfare, health care, law enforcement. Tribal sovereigns fight legal
and political wars in federal courthouses and in the Senate Committee on Indian
Affairs. Tribal sovereigns employ thousands of non-Indians to clean rooms at
tribal resorts and test water samples for tribal conservation departments. All
of this, of course, is accomplished through self-determination. With some
tribal nations, the individualistic character of self-determination has eroded.
Sovereignty arose in other areas, too,
in invocations of cultural sovereignty, literary sovereignty, linguistic
sovereignty. Dr. Carlson narrates the stories of the literary nationalists
Craig Womack and Jace Weaver and the cultural
nationalist Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Now when Indians read materials on Indian
literature or Indian culture, they expect the authors to be Indians. More and
more, Indian people learn about their cultures not from academic research of
non-Indians, but from Indian writers and scholars—and their elders and
cultural teachers. This, too, is self-determination, protected and cultivated
in the shadow of tribal sovereignty's powerful penumbra.
Still, there can be significant
downsides to embracing self-determination through sovereignty. Tribal leaders
will sometimes say that tribal sovereignty means the tribal power to make
tribal mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes and correct them with tribal
solutions. But sovereignty too often means the learning comes slow, if at all. A
couple dozen tribes are mired in disenrollment debacles and holdover councils
that create intractable political disputes. Tribal sovereignty strips away
potential federal remedies, leaving human rights abuses unresolved. Sovereignty
hasn't solved poverty or hopelessness on many reservations, either. The Obamas
visit with Pine Ridge schoolchildren who told them they each knew several
schoolmates who had committed suicide somehow underscores the need for tribal
sovereignty, and the limitations of tribal sovereignty.
Is literary nationalism susceptible to parallel
abuses and failures? Probably not. Governance and scholarship have different
aims and apply different tools. Dr. Carlson's survey of this literature
helpfully shows that Indian literary scholars are engaged in the process of
introducing indigenous philosophies and histories into the scholarship. But
there's a risk, however small, that cultural sovereignty could be used in
efforts to bar access and engagement to tribal cultures.
The centerpiece of Dr. Carlson's work
is the controversial White Earth Nation's constitutional reform. This is an
ongoing project that seeks to undo a tribal organic document adopted decades
ago by a tribal government under the deep influence, if not control, of the
federal government. Tribal citizenship criteria based purely on ancestry—blood
quantum—is perhaps the most critical question in this controversy. The
proposed constitution (one voted on and approved in a tribal election but
somehow still not tribal law) would look beyond mere blood quantum and employ indigenous
community standards to determine citizenship. Dr. Carlson sees this work as a
tool to move toward tribal sovereignty and
self-determination, the ultimate goal being decolonization. It's an admirable
objective. And Dr. Carlson's analytical methodology depends on tribal solutions, not federal or
non-Indian solutions. More times than one might expect, the mere process of
self-determination is enough to enhance tribal sovereignty.
Dr. Carlson's work gives us much to
think about in relation to the algebra of tribal sovereignty and
self-determination. There is comfort, usually, in tribal sovereignty through
actions rooted in self-determination. The diffusion of tribal sovereignty
authority is real. Externally, one might see a tribal sovereign, a relatively
powerful unified whole. Internally, one sees constant acts of tribal
self-determination in the form of modern tribal democracy. The anti-pipeline
movement might be evidence of tribal self-determination flowing into the
greater American world, perhaps infusing American citizens with the
forward-thinking "Don't Tread on Me" tradition of self-determination and
sovereignty.
Matthew
L.M. Fletcher, Michigan State University