Imagination and Indigenous Sovereignty in the Trumpian Era

Donald Trump should not really have a place within a discussion of Native American sovereignty. If sovereignty is to mean anything, it must surely be considered as inherent rather than external: reflections on the particularities of Indigenous sovereignty, particularly in its non-Westphalian manifestations, should take as their starting points the observations of Indigenous thinkers. In the case of the present essay-review, the danger is that we will end with Native American nations placed within a zone of victimage, sad sacrifices to inevitable historical processes. And it should also be borne in mind that, as with much else in the Trump Administration, at the time of writing most of President Trump's threats to Native sovereignty lie in the zone of bluster and symbolism rather than hard, successfully implemented, administrative action.

When the US elects a president who has been spouting antitribal rhetoric for three decades, whose first action in office was to place a portrait of his genocidal forebear Andrew Jackson on prominent display, and whose administration has made repeated and unconstitutional moves to reclassify Native people as racial minorities rather than sovereign governments, it does somewhat throw the issue into sharp relief. None of Trump's opinions are new: from government boarding schools to official bans on religious rites, from the Dawes Act allotment of Native land to Congressionally mandated termination of treaties, the US in both its liberal and conservative modes has always bent toward the possession of Indian land and the genocidal elimination of Native cultures. Tribal sovereignty, which all of these were meant to overcome, is the expression of the continuance of Native nations in the face of five centuries of disease, enslavement, and broken treaties. Yet the word itself, sovereignty, seems deeply unsatisfactory. In the absence of a sovereign, in the absence of formal recognition by the post-Westphalian world order independent of the settler state that surrounds them, can sovereignty be more than a convenient fiction?

The settler scholar David J. Carlson, in his monograph Imagining Sovereignty (2016), observes in typically understated style that tribal sovereignty represents "an interesting historical and structural anomaly," given that the concept essentially evolved in US American jurisprudence as a way of avoiding both the Scylla of giving Indigenous peoples the same rights as white citizens, and the Charybdis of formally becoming a colonial and imperial power (19). Tracing some of the ways that the US has used the concept in a way that is "at best inconsistent and at worst cynically manipulative," Carlson notes that, for all the manifest desire of the European-American framers of tribal sovereignty to diminish and ultimately eliminate the original inhabitants of the Americas, the cumbersome illogicality and contingent nature of the concept allows for it to be used at least as a roadblock to internal US imperialism (30). Although Carlson does not make this observation, it seems instructive to compare how in the last half century Native nations have been able to use federal Indian law to resist almost all attempts to reduce their land base significantly further. Indeed, they have been able to wrest control of more judicial and fiscal matters from states, while inhabitants of US unincorporated territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa have been kept as unacknowledged colonies entirely dependent on the will of Congress. Yet, as Carlson notes, Indian law, not firmly rooted in the Roman legal tradition, is subject to willful change by the US government: as the current...