Indigenous Sovereignty in the 21st Century: Knowledge for the Indigenous spring by Michael Lerma (review)

Michael Lerma, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University, wrote this book for American Indian studies and the history classrooms to demonstrate the political supremacy that the United States government exerts over Indigenous nations. He asserts his book's approach is informed by international relations and comparative politics, and calls the history of Indigenous peoples and the United States "the domestication of tribes." Ultimately, Lerma feels that a good percentage of both scholars and tribal leaders often ignore the "bad faith" relationship that exists between the U.S. government and Indian nations, and he believes that scholars have a responsibility to talk about the pink elephant¹ in the room so that our next generation of leaders in Indian Country are prepared to bring viable solutions to their communities.

Lerma covers eight policy eras created and implemented by the U.S. government to diminish/disestablish aboriginal land title and tribal sovereignty. They are the treaty making era, the removal era, the reservation era, the allotment era, the reorganization era, the termination era, the self- determination era, and the forced federalism era. While Lerma identifies these eras, they are not of much use to the reader because he struggles to put the eras in a linear time frame.

He uses the word "creep" to describe this consistent degradation of tribal powers, which has four components: 1) Destroy aboriginal title through land purchases first, followed by conquest, and eventually allotment.² This takes the form, initially, of treaties and eventually is accomplished through the plenary power doctrine of the federal courts³; 2) diminish tribal powers through the federal courts (civil and criminal jurisdictions)⁴; 3) create avenues of economic encroachment by allowing states to extend their jurisdictions into Indian Country; and4) most recently, exploit the natural resources of Indigenous communities through creating a self-determination that requires Secretary of Interior approval to make any decisions.

Lerma points out two phases of treaty making: 1) treaties made in the interests of U.S. survival; and 2) treaties made under coercion or duress that confined tribes to reservation lands. These early treaties were made because the Indigenous nations were militarily superior or equal to the United States; according to Lerma, they were contracts of military alliance. Furthermore, Lerma points out that these treaties with the United States were sacred and memorialized with objects like the wampum belts that represented a spiritual relationship of the highest regard by the Indigenous nations who made them.

By contrast, he says, the United States made these contracts in bad faith, with the intention to abrogate them once the benefit was received, which always resulted in the further diminishment of the Indigenous nation's aboriginal title over natural resources and land.

Attacking the term "imperial binary" taken from Keven Bruyneel's book, The Third Space of Sovereignty (2007), which suggests Indigenous sovereignty is unique and not like a real nation's sovereignty, Lerma argues that Indigenous nations must have had the same sovereignty of any European nation at one time to negotiate treaties with European nations (pre-constitutional status) and after U.S. formation (extra-constitutional status).

He says most historians today only recall the second phase of treaties, believing Indigenous nations were never powerful nations and were always inferior to the U.S. military. This helps justify the imperial binary concept, according to Lerma.

Lerma's point here is that tribes today have the same sovereign rights as any other nation except those rights they agreed in treaties to relinquish to the United States. He goes on to emphasize that any concept framing Indigenous sovereignty as a distinct from Westphalian definitions of sovereignty runs the risk of continuing the genocide of Indigenous peoples.

While Lerma doesn't suggest Indigenous peoples had Western notions of aboriginal title or sovereignty, he emphasizes that Indigenous nations were acknowledged to have these attributes of a nation. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been any treaty...