Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature by David J. Carlson (review)

No concept is more critical to Native American and Indigenous studies than sovereignty. Yet despite its importance (or perhaps because of it), few things, if any, are more contested. For some, sovereignty means control of a specific land base. For others, it is about authority over a citizenry. After more than five hundred years of settler colonialism, the term may have become a retronym.

A retronym is a new term created from an existing one because of changed circumstances, requiring an adjectival modifier. For instance, technological progress in creating color television created the need to specify "black-and-white television." (Before color's advent, all televisions were black and white). It may therefore be necessary today to refer to "territorial sovereignty," "political sovereignty," or "economic sovereignty," and so forth.

Taiaiake Alfred and Audra Simpson, in a conversation in Alfred's book Peace, Power, and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999), went so far as to suggest that sovereignty is a Western concept and therefore of no utility to Natives. The same argument, however, could be made for "nationhood." Certainly prior to European contact all tribal peoples had specific territories and ways of governing themselves. They understood who was a member of their group and who was not. What are these things, if not "sovereignty"?

Into this thicket strides David Carlson, chair of the English department at California State University, San Bernardino and an editor of the journal Transmotion. As a member of Transmotion's editorial board and an attorney, I was especially pleased to see this book. As his subtitle suggests, Carlson examines how self-determination (or sovereignty) plays out in the overlapping spheres of law and literature.

After an overview of the idea in federal Indian law, Carlson writes:

To fully appreciate the significance of the concept of sovereignty in contemporary American Indian writing and thought, one must move beyond a sense that the term is wholly compromised by its connections to a Western, and admittedly colonial, heritage. In Indian hands, sovereignty has proven an evolving and multivalenced signifier, one that is deployed today in a wide range of contexts—both political and literary.

(36)

As proof he delves into Vine Deloria Jr. and John Mohawk's seminal contributions to the lesser known but consequential Basic Call to Consciousness (2005 edition).

Carlson examines the "academic civil war" between cosmopolitan and nationalist critics (the internecine appellation bestowed by cosmopolitan Kenneth Lincoln), proclaiming himself an "allied critic" in the nationalist camp (12). As one of the founders of the literary nationalist movement, I welcome such an intelligent and sympathetic fellow traveler. Carlson expresses a preferential option for Red on Red (1999) by Craig Womack, my coauthor (along with Robert Warrior) of American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006).

The heart of the book, for me, are his back-to-back chapters on Dakota scholar and writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Anishinaabe author, poet, and theorist Gerald Vizenor, who put his words to activist use in writing the constitution of his White Earth Nation of Anishinaabeg Natives in Minnesota. Carlson's close reading of both is, in itself, a valuable contribution to American Indian literary studies.

Having won the "war," nationalist critics did not vacate the field. Instead some have taken a transnationalist turn, as I did in The Red Atlantic (2014). In the process they created what Carlson describes, in the case of the late John Mohawk, as the "internationalization of sovereignty" (66–67).

Carlson has produced a clear, well-written monograph. It will be essential to anyone in Native American and Indigenous studies, especially literary studies. It is, however, also accessible to the non-specialist. Particularly valuable is the bibliography, a feature all too rare in academic books these days.

In his conclusion, Carlson writes:

My sympathies are with big tent critical approaches, and I hope to suggest that the intellectual work of decolonization requires considerable mobility and innovation in our thinking. . . . I must also...