The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations

Conclusion: The Third Space of Sovereignty

217 THE THIRD SPACE OF SOVEREIGNTY In writing this book, a question often popped into my mind, the one famously posed by postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak: “Can the subaltern speak?” Spivak’s question is not about the vocal cords of the colonized; it is about the colonizer’s ear drums; “Can the subaltern speak?” really means, “Are the colonizers deaf?” not “Are the colonized mute?” This study has demonstrated ways in which the American settler-state and nation have sought, often successfully, to impose temporal and spatial limitations on indigenous political life. In resistance, indigenous political actors speak against and across the boundaries of colonial rule by articulating and fighting for a third space: a space of sovereignty and/or citizenship that is inassimilable to the modern liberal democratic settler-state and nation. The settler polity is often deaf to the indigenous claim for a third space because this claim refuses to accommodate itself to the political choices framed by the imperial binary: assimilation or secession, inside or outside , modern or traditional, and so on. Looked at in this way, indigenous political resistance is refusal of a false choice. Among other things, this book has been an effort to expose to clearer light the presence and politics around the third space, defined by colonial impositions and postcolonial resistances. To conclude the book, I look at how the third space concept could positively reshape the language and therefore the terms of and possibilities for indigenous–settler-society relations in the future, and I also suggest its applicability to the wider political discourse and politics around sovereignty. REFUSING THE FALSE CHOICE: SEEING THE THIRD SPACE In their introduction to the important collection Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous People, the volume’s editors, Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, note that for some of their contributors, such as James Tully as well as Will Kymlicka and J. G. A. Pocock, “there can be CONCLUSION CONCLUSION 218 no equal standing for indigenous peoples until they are acknowledged as equal sovereigns within a postcolonial constitutional arrangement,” while “for others, such as [Iris] Young and [Augie] Flores and [Roger] Maaka, it is the very nature of the sovereign state that must be rethought.”¹ While these descriptions flatten the complex views of each of these scholars, there is something worth drawing from the two approaches implied here. The first approach seeks to rethink governance from below by seeking to secure and “arrange” multiple nodes of sovereignty in a multilayered political system wherein settler and indigenous polities can coexist, overlap, and interweave jurisdictions. The second approach, by contrast, rethinks governance from above by arguing that the hegemonic “sovereign state,” and thus state sovereignty, is inherently incompatible, and in fact hostile, to the secured existence of indigenous political autonomy. What I find compelling and significant here is the general direction in which these thinkers are going on this issue, which is to see and argue that the viability of political autonomy for indigenous tribes will not come through accommodation of the settler-state’s political system, boundaries, and culture. Rather, it will require some degree of meaningful change in the settler-society’s institutional organization and ideational approach and the concomitant solidification of a location and form of indigenous sovereignty that is self-determined and thus not dependent on the settlersociety . Missing from these formulations, however, is a precise concept as well as a vocabulary that can pin down the alternatives represented in this “postcolonial arrangement” and/or “rethinking of the sovereign state.” I propose that the “third space” may well provide the vocabulary that both captures and helps to constitute a viable, increasingly sought-after location of indigenous postcolonial political autonomy that refuses the choices set out by the settler-society. But cultivating this discourse and seeing its constitutive possibilities is easier said than done, so one of the first steps toward moving in this direction will involve refusing the false choice set out by the settler-state. In a 1998 Law Review article, Julie Cassidy set out and critiqued the terms of the false choice presented to those advocating sovereignty for indigenous nations and tribes: “The resolution relating to Aboriginal sovereignty is often mistakenly perceived as only involving two possibilities: (1) acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty and the consequent de- CONCLUSION 219 struction of the “occupying” state’s sovereignty; or (2) continuation of the past denial of Aboriginal sovereignty...