- Indigenous Nations and Modern States: The Political Emergence of Nations Challenging State Power by Rudolph C. Rÿser
International relations theory (irt) is notoriously blind to indigenous peoples as political actors on the world stage, typically relegating them to the realm of postcolonial studies when it considers them at all. irt’s state-centric beginning place is usually the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, from which the modern nation-state emerges, seen through two predominant theoretical lenses: the Machiavellian model of realpolitik embodied in realism, and the liberal politics of universalism. But Rudolph Rÿser, author of Indigenous Nations and Modern States, contends that the [End Page 543] twentieth century fundamentally changed the landscape of international relations, simultaneously reconfiguring the way indigenous peoples fit into that landscape. It’s not that indigenous peoples suddenly appear as actors situated in state-dominated processes but a reminder that the taxonomy of “indigenous peoples” (or even indigenous “nations”) is only an artificial construction formulated by the lingering manifestations of colonial wars of domination, juxtaposed to the much more recent phenomenon of the modern state.
Indigenous nations are, after all, communities of people who are rooted to place through great expanses of time. While empires have for millennia come and gone, it is nations that endure, the author reminds us. Rÿser works through the methodological framework of Fourth World theory, which makes clear distinctions between nations and states, presupposing that nations, unlike states (“substitutes for empire”), “innately spring from human beings engaged in social, cultural and biological relationships” (45). It emerges largely out of the global activism of twentieth-century Native leaders like Shuswap chief George Manual (whose 1974 book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality applied the term to Indian nations), who was among the first activists to organize indigenous peoples across international borders and with whom Rÿser worked for many years as an advisor. Fourth World theory provides an avenue to discuss the nationhood of indigenous peoples as one type of Fourth World nation in the context of geopolitical relationships. It also decenters the state as the sole arbiter of indigenous lives and their political standing, instead recognizing the ways in which colonized nations exercise agency even in the midst of de facto state domination. He recounts in chapter 3, for example, how tribal nations’ proactive assertions of self-determination in the mid-twentieth century led to the formation of the Self-Governance Demonstration Project of 1990, when tribes negotiated self-governance compacts with the United States, effectively reviving the treaty relationship.
Fourth World theory is descriptive of scale, as it addresses political relationships. The obsolescence of empires is evident in their breakdowns throughout the last century in liberation movements on virtually every continent of the globe. The independence movements that liberated nations from the grasp of the Soviet Union and decolonized South America, Asia, and Africa also contributed to greater levels of autonomy for submerged nations in the Americas and the Pacific region. The ever-increasing [End Page 544] numbers of member states of the United Nations, the author argues, is testament and has resulted in new and alternative forms of political associations for Fourth World nations engaging in assertions of autonomy as the global trend of political decentralization advances in response to historical oppression. Some of these alternative forms of political status are even evident in the United States. The Lummi Nation, for instance, has a form of political relationship with the United States known as an associated nation by virtue of its negotiated long-term self-governance compact under the Self-Governance Demonstration Project. The history of self-governance of American Indian nations laid the foundation for understanding the “government-to-government” paradigm now guiding relations between tribal nations and the United States. Chapter 4 engages a historical overview of the relationship between First Nations and Canada.
A detailed examination of modern wars in chapter 7 reveals that the majority of the world’s military conflicts are based on conflicts between nations and states, not (contrary to...