Imagined Geographies

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nation-state (in this case, the United States) and at the

level of resistances against it. I examine four kinds of in-

digenous space imagined, fought for, and, to a remarkable

extent, achieved and lived by American Indian people in

the United States in the present. The first is tribal sover-

eignty within a Native homeland (a modern tribal gov-

ernment with its tribal citizenry on its reservation) as

exemplified so well in the Warm Springs declaration

quoted above. The second is territorially based rights to

off-reservation resources that imply comanagement of

(or perhaps even shared sovereignty over) overlapping ter-

ritory by tribes, on the one hand, and the federal and

state governments, on the other hand. Off-reservation fish-

ing rights in the Pacific Northwest are a good example.

The third is generic (supratribal) indigenous rights within

an inclusive space that ultimately spans all of the terri-

tory of the contiguous United States, what I will call

national indigenous space (I leave Alaska and Hawaii

out of the picture in the interest of making the argument asdirectly as possible).1 The final one is hybrid indigenous

space in which Indian people claim and exercise citizen-

ship simultaneously in Native nations and in the United

States. The nation-state, it turns out, is only one among

several (perhaps many) political geographies imagined,

lived, and even institutionalized under modernity by

American Indians.

As is well known, the modern nation-state form was

a historical emergence. The prevailing genealogical narra-

tive runs something like this: In the premodern context of

medieval Europe, political space was heteronomous and

essentially unstatelike (Ruggie 1998:146). Sovereignty, to

the extent that such a thing existed, was parcelized(Anderson 1974:15), an intricate puzzle of partial and

overlapping sovereignties (Mattingly 1988:23). Modern

political space, represented in the present by the nation-

state, is fundamentally different. The modern state claims

totalized territorial sovereignty, not jurisdictional rule

(Sahlins 1989:63), in which the geography of states takes

the form of discrete, mutually exclusive, internally contin-

uous domains, with clear insides and outsides and

linear borders (see also Brubaker 1992; Poggi 1978). The

modern state claims, as Benedict Anderson puts it, sov-

ereignty [that] is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over

each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory

(1991:19). Such panoptical sovereigntyalong with theidea of the nation as an imagined communityalso

implies the more or less equal treatment of citizens, who

become, from the imputed standpoint of the state, inter-

changeable as objects of the states gaze.

The emergence of the nation-state is even more re-

cent: Anderson (1991:113) argues that only in 1922, with

the formation of the League of Nations, did the nation-

state, with its deep horizontal comradeship and histor-

ical continuity through empty homogenous time, finally

become the universal political form on the planet (1991:

7, 24). From that point, a mosaic understanding of

the globe has organized thinking about political space,

amounting to a states-metageography (Taylor 2004:219).

The consolidation of this geography, Anderson asserts,

was premised on a fundamental change . . . taking place

in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than

anything else, made it possible to think the nation (1991:

22). The hegemonic effect of the modern episteme of

nation-state sovereignty in shaping our imaginations

is that it becomes increasingly difficult to think in

terms of a geographical order that is not state-based

(Murphy 1996:103). This is true to such an extent, Ander-

son argues, that the nation-state became a modular

form available for pirating by all sorts of imaginable

communities (1991:156)the nation-state, in other words,

is in circulation not only as an obligatory but also

as a liberatory category in the global public sphere: It

structures both political realities and subversive politi-cal imaginaries.

As soon as one acknowledges the historicity of the

nation-state form, however, one is immediately struck

by the formidable number of counterexamples to this

presumptively modularized and universalized political

episteme. For example, Aihwa Ong has described the

condition of graduated sovereignty, whereby citizens in

different zones that are differently articulated to global

production and financial circuits are subjected to differ-

ent sets of civil, political, and economic rights (1999:

215 216). Ong has in mind free-trade zones and other

spatial arrangements by which developing states such as

Malaysia outsource some state functions to other statesor transnational corporations. What results is a system

of variegated citizenship in which populations subjected

to different regimes of value enjoy different kinds of

rights, discipline, caring, and security (Ong 1999:217).

The states gaze, in other words, may be studiously non-

panoptical, its sovereignty purposely not flat, full, or even

across its territory but carefully zoned.

Reflecting on Ongs remarkably provocative des-

cription of graduated sovereignty, one is immediately

aware that modern states have always been graduated,

even the most powerful, most liberally democratic, West-

ern states. Consider the case of the United States and

African Americans. Black people were first denied thestatus of legal personhood under the U.S. Constitution

left out of the reach of the states pastoral power be-

cause they were deemed property, not legal personsthen

abandoned by the central state to white-controlled lo-

cal governments and unlicensed violence during the

Jim Crow era. Is this not precisely an example of gradu-

ated sovereignty, in which the state outsources the

governance of some would-be citizens to state subcon-

tractors, public and private? This is a case in which the

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nation-state purposely declined to exercise full, flat, and

even jurisdiction over space, at least as far as some of

its citizens were concerned.

Consider, as well, the case of color-blind enforce-

ment of civil rights law in the United States in the present,

a trend that seems to be increasingly institutionalized

by both state and federal courts and legislatures. Does

this not guarantee the security of white privilege against

black and antiracist demands for substantive equality or

social justice for all U.S. citizensa demand that would

require some kind of affirmative action to remedy both

historical and ongoing racial inequality? And is this

not precisely a form of graduated sovereignty, but one

that takes the remarkably powerful ideological form

of apparent race neutrality on the part of the state

(see, in particular, Brown et al. 2003:ch. 1; Omi and

Winant 1994:ch. 7)? Consider, also, the situation of un-

documented immigrant labor. Commerce, indeed, daily

life as Americans know it, would quickly grind to ahalt in places like California without the labor of un-

documented workers who regularly cross the border de-

spite border security.2 U.S. immigration law sees to it

that these workers have no citizenship or other rights

that the nation is bound to respect. These workers

unentitled and always subject to deportationthus in-

evitably eschew unions (in fact, do not assert any kind

of rights as workers other than the agreed-on pay in the

daily verbal contract) and do not claim workers com-

pensation, medical or dental coverage, unemployment

benefits, social security benefits, or even drivers licenses

or other items in the standard wage package or the so-

cial wage for documented workers in California (see, e.g.,Kearney 1998). Finally, very real places exist where

the state seems incapable or unwilling to use the force

at its disposal to provide equal protection to all of its

citizensbecause of which certain well-known cate-

gories of citizens are regularly, even systematically,

assaulted, raped, and killed in private or otherwise un-

licensed acts of violence: women in their own homes

and on the streets, especially at night, people of color in

high-crime areas, and, of course, inmates in prisons

supposedly the most disciplinary of total institutions

(all such places and times are, of course, very much

socially produced).3 The list of ways the state variegates

its gazegraduates or zones its sovereigntyso as to bene-fit some citizens systematically and, just as systemati-

cally, to disempower or otherwise harm other citizens,

of course, goes on.

This article is a preliminary attempt to reimagine the

political space of the nation-stateand to do so from the

standpoint of those made marginal to it. None of the four

kinds of indigenous space to be examined here are con-

sistent with the received wisdomscholarly or popular

regarding the supposedly homogenous political space of

the nation-state. Either in terms of imaginary geography

or in terms of lived political space, the American Indian

cases to be discussed all problematize the modular, epi-

stemic, and universal space of the modern nation-state

that seems so oftenagain, in both scholarly and popular

contextsto be spoken of as if it were either historically

inevitable or an obligatory worldview. My point, however,

is not to critique current thinking on the nation-state

formobviously this thinking is a necessary part of any

critical analysis of modernityso much as to productively

complicate understanding of it.

Tribal sovereignty

As noted above, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm

Springs Reservation certainly seem to have borrowed a

modular form of the nation-state (although they would,

no doubt, see it as more a matter of indigenous con-

tinuity, not one of pirating a modern commodity form).Their political imaginary, which is probably represen-

tative of the dominant thinking among tribal leaders

and Indian intellectuals throughout the United States,

seems to be fully consistent with the common sense of

political modernity in which all territorial space on the

planet is partitioned into nations: Each nation, with its

own culture, its own language, its own history and place

on the map is entitled to its own state with clear and

secure borders and general autonomy within those bor-

ders and to a seat at the table of the community of nations.

This mosaic political imaginary is visually represented

by the multicolored map of nations described as the

national geographic by Liisa Malkki (1997), and has,in fact, been institutionalized in the United States re-

garding American Indian peoples. Figure 1, published

by the U.S. Census Bureau, depicts the reservations

which are understood by many Americans, both Indian

and non-Indian, as indigenous nationsof the United

States. Although the different reservations are not mul-

ticolored on this or any other map that I know of, the

national geographic logic of distinct sovereignties rooted

in discrete territories is clear enough. This is the case

even in cyberspace, in which federally recognized tribes

may use the nsn.us or nsn.gov (native sovereign na-

tion) domain designations. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe

has even enacted legislation regarding its airspace, andthe question of tribal currencies has recently been

aired nationally.

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the United States, in a clear

strategy of graduated sovereignty, has not fundamen-

tally opposed the model of sovereignty articulated by the

Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and other Native

peoples.4 Federal Indian law as made by Congress, exe-

cuted by the executive branch, and interpreted by the

federal courts, is largely in agreement with the essentials

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of the Warm Springs Declaration of Sovereignty, and

unquestionably the declaration is in part shaped by Native

readings of federal Indian law. Indeed, many of the ideas

that Indian people have about tribal sovereignty clearly

come from their reading and interpretation of federal law

(see Biolsi 2001). Here is Chief Justice John Marshall in one

of the key Supreme Court cases dealing with the sover-

eignty of Indian Tribes:

[The majority of the justices are convinced as to] thecharacter of the Cherokees as a state, as a distinct po-litical community, separated from others, capable ofmanaging its own affairs and governing itself. . . . Theyhave been uniformly treated as a state from the set-tlement of our country. The numerous treaties made with them by the United States recognize them as apeople capable of maintaining the relations of peaceand war . . . [with] the United States. . . . The acts of our

government plainly recognize the Cherokee nation as astate. [Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1, at106 (1831)]

Marshall went even further toward recognizing the sover-

eignty of the Cherokee Nation in an 1832 opinion: The

Indian nations have always been considered as distinct,

independent political communities, retaining their originalnatural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil,

from time immemorial. . . . The very term nation, so

generally applied to them, means a people distinct from

others (Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. [6 Pet.] 515, at 559

[1832]). Neither Great Britain nor the United States had

ever attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of

the Indians, Marshall wrote (Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S.

[6 Pet.] 515, at 547 [1832]). What is more, the states of the

Union had no authority to interfere in any way with

Figure 1. American Indian Reservations. Source: Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce 2000.


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Indian tribes, even tribes within their exterior geographic

boundaries: The laws of Georgia can have no force,

Marshall made clear, within the Cherokee Nation (Worces-

ster v. Georgia, 31 U.S. [6 Pet.] 515, at 561 [1832]).

The freedom of tribes from state law within their res-

ervation homelands remains a basic principle of federal

Indian law and the legal status of Indian tribes and is what

allows tribes, for example, to operate casinos. But tribes

are not only free from state jurisdiction in general. Because

they are preconstitutionaltheir existence as sovereign

polities predates the existence of the United Statesthey

are also extraconstitutional: They exercise their sover-

eignty without constraint by the federal Constitution or

federal law in generalwith some critical exceptions ex-

plored below. Thus, the Supreme Court as early as 1896

held that the Bill of Rights was not a constraint on what

tribal governments do to their own tribal citizens (Talton

v. Mayes, 163 U.S. [1896]; see also Santa Clara Pueblo v.

Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 [1978]).Note that the formal federal recognition of indigenous

sovereignties in the United States has gone further than

it has in other Western nation-states. In Canada, for ex-

ample, although the 1982 constitution declares that exist-

ing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples

of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed, Aboriginal

self-government can be exercised only within the

framework of the Canadian Constitution, and the partic-

ulars of self-government must be negotiated with the

federal and provincial or territorial governments (Minister

of Indian Affairs and Northern Development 1995; see

also Asch 1993; Harris 2002; Macklem 2001; McKee

2000). Indigenous sovereignty is even less developed inAustralia, where the recognition of Native Title subse-

quent to the groundbreaking Mabo decision in 1992 does

not involve recognition of sovereignty or Aboriginal self-

government (see Mercer 1997; Povinelli 2002; Reynolds

1996; Webber 2000).

The apparent exceptionalism of the United States

regarding the indigenous notwithstanding, however,

American Indian tribes generally have much more in

mind in the way of sovereignty than the U.S. government

is prepared to countenance. In fact, the Warm Springs

Declaration of Sovereignty was meant as a declaration

of independence from U.S. federal definitions of tribal

sovereignty. That the federal courts recognize a kind oftribal sovereignty and that Congresss clear policy since

the 1970s has been one of respecting tribal sovereignty

and supporting tribal self-determination are certainly

true. Even President George W. Bush went so far in 2002

as to assure that my Administration will continue to

honor tribal sovereignty by working on a government-

to-government basis with American Indians and Alaska

Natives. But the kind of sovereignty being honored

here is a profoundly limited onelimited, in fact, to the

point that it does not make logical sense to many Indian

people, is not really sovereignty at all from their point of

view, and can only be understood as bespeaking a pro-

foundly racist view of Indians on the part of Congress,

the courts, and white people in general.

Although the 1830s Marshall opinions on inherent

tribal sovereignty still have effect in federal Indian law, a

century-old doctrine undercuts the Marshall holdings:

This is the rule that gives Congress what the Court calls

plenary power over the status of Indian tribes. In the

1904 case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (187 U.S. 553 [1903]),

the Supreme Court held that Congress has essentially

absolute power over tribes and can abrogate treaties or

otherwise legislate regarding Indian tribes without their

consent because Indians are wards of the United States

(for the origin of the concept of Indian wardship, see

United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375, at 383 [U.S. Sup. Ct.,

1886]). Lone Wolf has never been overturned and is con-

sidered good law in the present. Congress, can reducetribal powers at will and has done so. It did so as early

as 1885 in enacting the Major Crimes Act (23 Stat 385),

which imposed federal jurisdiction over serious crimes

committed by or against Indians on reservations (see

Harring 1994). And it did so most recently in the 1988

Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA; 102 Stat 2467). The

IGRA was a congressional reaction to the growing suc-

cess of tribes in the gaming industryand the increasing

jealousy of revenue-hungry states (and, perhaps, the

gaming industry)in the 1980s. Tribal gaming was, prior

to the IGRA, available for reservation economic develop-

ment (free from state regulation or interference) on the

basis of inherent tribal sovereignty, as announced by theSupreme Court in 1832. The IGRA, however, limits tribal

gaming to those forms of gambling legal under state law,

and it requires tribes to enter into compacts with states

before they can open gaming operations; essentially this

means that states have veto power over tribal gaming.

Although Congress presented this act as an attempt to

balance the interests of states and tribes, from the point

of view of tribal advocates it was simply a blatant viola-

tion of inherent tribal sovereignty exercised through the

plenary power the Court arbitrarily gave to Congress over

Indian tribes.5

In addition to congressional plenary power over

Indian tribes, the federal courts, the Supreme Court inparticular, have invented the notion of implied repeals

of inherent tribal sovereignty (see Wilkins and Lomawaima

2001:ch. 5). This refers to court-ordered reductions of

tribal sovereignty in instances in which Congress has

not explicitly enacted legislation to reduce tribal sover-

eignty but in which the federal courts think up abroga-

tions of sovereignty as logical implications of Congresss

intent regarding Indians or their dependent status. For

example, in 1978 the Supreme Court considered the


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question of whether the Suquamish Indian Tribe in

Washington State might exercise criminal jurisdiction over

non-Indians within reservation boundaries.

Before summarizing the Courts holding, I stress

the importance of understanding that the question in

Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (435 U.S. 191 [1978])

was not just a matter of abstract principles of sover-

eignty because tens of thousands of non-Indians live,

work, recreate, and do business on Indian reservations

in the United States. On many reservations, non-Indian

residents constitute the majority of the population and

have organized counties and municipalities under state

law within the borders of the reservations. This situa-

tion is not a historical accident. On the contrary, in the

late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal govern-

ment encouraged non-Indian settlers to homestead what

was deemed surplus tribal land and to buy land from

Indians within reservation borders. The assumption

was that white settlers were good role models in thegame of civilizing Indians and that white farmers and

their communities would raise the property values of

the surrounding reservation land, materially benefit-

ing their Indian neighbors. The government also as-

sumed that the reservations would disappear as legal

enclaves as Indians became civilized and, thus, U.S. citi-

zens.6 Because of a radical reversal of Indian policy in

the 1930s, however, the reservations never disappeared,

and most reservations today have a checkerboard pat-

tern in which Indian land under federal trust status and

non-Indian deeded land are interspersed (see Figure 2;

see Biolsi 2001).

Checkerboarding was the prevailing situation onreservations nationally when the Supreme Court an-

swered the question in Oliphant. Writing for the majority,

Justice William Rehnquist held that a careful analysis

of treaties and acts of Congress made clear that even

though Congress had never expressly forbidden the

Suquamish or other tribes to exercise criminal jurisdic-

tion over non-Indians, that intent was clearly implied.

But more than mere congressional intent was involved;

ultimately the matter was one of logic: Indian tribes

are prohibited from exercising both those powers of au-

tonomous states that are expressly terminated by Con-

gress [through its plenary power] and those powers

inconsistent with their status (435 U.S. 191 [1978], at 208,quoting Oliphant v. Schlie, 544 F. 2d, at 1009 [U.S. Ct.

Appls., 9th Cir.; 1974]). Regarding the latter, Rehnquist

insisted that upon incorporation into the territory of the

United States, the Indian tribes thereby come under the

territorial sovereignty of the United States and their exer-

cise of separate power is constrained so as not to conflict

with the interests of this overriding sovereignty. Thus,

there are inherent limitations on tribal powers that

stem from their incorporation into the United States

(435 U.S. 191, at 209 [1978]). One of these limitations

stems from the overriding sovereigns great solicitude

that its citizens be protected by the United States from

unwarranted intrusions on their personal liberty. . . . By

submitting to the overriding sovereignty of the United

States, Indian tribes therefore necessarily give up their

power to try non-Indian citizens of the United States

(435 U.S. 191, at 210 [1978]). As of 2005, in terms of crim-

inal jurisdiction, tribes may not so much as issue traffic

tickets to non-Indians.

In 1981, the Supreme Court applied the basic logic of

its Oliphant decision on tribal criminal jurisdiction overnon-Indians to the question of tribal civil and regulatory

jurisdiction, holding that the inherent sovereign powers

of an Indian tribe do not extend to the activities of non-

members of the tribe (Montana v. United States, 450 U.S.

544, at 565 [1981]). The Court has, of late, been particularly

ambitious to outlaw what it apparently sees as tribal

attempts to find loopholes by which tribal governments

might exercise civil and regulatory jurisdiction over non-

Indians. In the 2001 case of Atkinson v. Shirley (532 U.S.

Figure 2. Checkerboarding on Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota. Shaded

areas are federal Indian land in trust status. Blank areas are fee-patented

land, owned mostly by non-Indians. Map courtesy of Office of Water

Resources, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Rosebud, South Dakota.


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902[2001]), the Court held that the Navajo Nation has no

authority to impose a business tax on a trading post owned

by a non-Indian in the middle of the Navajo Reservation.

Even though the business relies on tribal services and

exists because of the tourist industry based on the pres-

ence of Indians, the Court insisted that the tribe has

no authority to regulate the business operations of non-

Indians on private property.

Advocates of tribal sovereignty recognize clearly

that the kind of sovereignty they are allowed under

federal Indian law is a specific kindinternal self-

determination or dependent sovereignty in the federal

courts terms. One of my consultants on Rosebud Reser-

vation describes it as amounting to making Indian tribes

into Boy Scout troops or private clubsvoluntary asso-

ciations, not governments. Indian people on Rosebud

Reservation commonly point out that when an Indian

leaves the reservation, he or she immediately comes

under the criminal and civil regulatory jurisdiction ofthe state of South Dakota (or Nebraska) and its sub-

divisions, even though that person does not live in the

jurisdiction in question, vote or run for office there, or

expect a jury of peers were he or she to wind up in

court there. Indians ask, why, then, is a non-Indian not

subject to tribal jurisdiction when he or she enters the res-

ervation? The argument that an Indian could theoretically

take up legal residence and become a voter, officeholder,

or jury member in the off-reservation jurisdictionwhere-

as a non-Indian could not do the same with respect to

tribal governmentseems strained logic to most Indians

as an explanation for the general territorial jurisdiction

that obtains in the case of white governments but notin the case of tribal governments. Indeed, it seems to

many, if not most, Indian people like a racist differentia-

tion in which white people simply refuse to trust Indian

people to exercise governance responsibly or democrati-

cally. In any event, the sovereignty exercised by Indian

tribes is anything but consistent with the modular

model of nation-state sovereigntyalthough the modular

model is very much the vision and goal of tribal advocates.

One legal scholar calls such arrangements for tribal gov-

ernments mere semblances of sovereignty (Aleinikoff

2002). A critical anthropology of modern political sub-

jectivity must necessarily pay attention not just to the

pirating of a modular nation-state model as a politicaltactic but also to the lived reality of graduated, quasi

(Jackson 1990), or permeated sovereignty (Biersteker

and Weber 1996:9). Tribal homelands are relegated,

under federal law, to a condition of heteronomous po-

litical space in which different citizens are subject to

different sovereigns in coterminous physical space. As

John Ruggie explains, this kind of arrangement has a

precedent in premodern, medieval European political

organization, before it was thoroughly reorganized into

the distinct, disjoint, and mutually exclusive territorial

forms of the modern state (1998:172).

Comanagement

In addition to declaring sovereignty over the reserva-tion, the Warm Springs declaration looks beyond the

reservation boundaries:

Our homeland also encompasses, and our sover-eignty extends to, tribal off-reservation rights in ourhistoric ancestral domain, a vast region that includesthe Columbia Plateau and far beyond. These off-reservation rights include rights attaching to our usualand accustomed fishing grounds and stations; to in-lieu fishing sites; to burial sites and other sacred sites;to lands on which tribal members can hunt, gatherroots and berries, and pasture stock. [ConfederatedTribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon1992; emphasis added]

The claim here is based, in part, on terminology in

the 1855 treaty signed by the people of what is now the

Warm Springs Reservation with the United States at the

Dalles, Oregon Territory:

The exclusive right of taking fish in the streamsrunning through and bordering said reservation ishereby secured to said Indians; and at all other usualand accustomed stations, in common with citizens, ofthe United States, and of erecting suitable houses forcuring the same; also the privilege of hunting,

gathering roots and berries, and pasturing their stockon unclaimed lands, in common with citizens, issecured to them. [12 Stat 37, at 38; emphasis added]

The ceded lands remain a critical part of the Warm

Springs tribal homeland as well as that of the people of the

Yakima, Umatilla, and Nez Perce reservations, who also

signed versions of the 1855 treatyeven though the ceded

lands are no longer reservation land and are composed of

federal, state, and private lands (see Figure 3).

In the wake of a series of fish-ins beginning in 1964,

which were meant to assert off-reservation, treaty-based

fishing rights, and after prevailing in federal court against

the attempts by Oregon and Washington to deny treaty-based fishing rights (see Cohen 1986), Northwest tribal

members now regularly fish at usual and accustomed

places free from state jurisdiction. In the federal litiga-

tion, the tribes were assigned the responsibility by the

courts to regulate their own tribal citizens off-reservation

fishing and have delegated that responsibility to the Co-

lumbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (see http://

www.critfc.org). But in the tribal view, what is at stake is

much more than simply freedom from state fish and game


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laws or the right to have tribal fish and game wardens. In

simplest terms, tribal advocates believe that, on the basis

of the treaties and their reserved off-reservation rights,

Indians have what amounts to the right of shared sover-

eignty (see Silvern 1999, 2002), or at least comanagement,

with the federal, state, municipal, and county govern-

ments in the ceded areas over the health and future of

both the particular food sources mentioned in the trea-

ties and the environment more generally (other specific

sites are included within tribal jurisdiction via other fed-

eral laws and policies; see below). One should understand

that this vision of shared sovereignty entails an assump-

tion of coequal sovereignty, not nested, hierarchical sov-ereignty or a relationship of scaled sovereignty, in which

the highest sovereign encompasses the lower sover-

eignsas in the relationship between the states and the

federal government (on the construction of such vertical

scales and spatial political encompassment in Third

World contexts, see Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Thus, the

vision here is of tribes as entities fully sovereign vis-a`-vis

the U.S. government and certainly vis-a`-vis the states.

Not surprisingly, the state and federal governments,

exhibiting their own concerns for territorial sovereignty, do

not agree to shared sovereignty with tribes outside of res-

ervation boundaries (see Silvern 1999, 2002). What has

evolved in its place in the last ten years is a frameworkfor allowing tribal governments to have some official role

as stakeholders in policy making by state and federal

agencies. Commonly called a policy of government-to-

government relations, this framework first appeared in

the 1990s. In 1996, for example, Governor John Kitzhaber

of Oregon signed an executive order mandating dia-

logue of his department heads with tribal governments

on matters of policy in which tribes and the state have

mutual interests. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed

an executive order requiring federal agencies to establish

procedures for tribal governments to provide meaningful

and timely input in the development of . . . policies on

matters that significantly or uniquely affect their commu-

nities (see also Clinton 1999).7 Although the phrase

government-to-government is, in fact, an exaggeration

of the actual recognition granted to tribal governments

under this policy (because neither the federal nor the

state governments agree to share sovereignty with tribal

governments over nonreservation lands), tribes clearly see

this procedure as a means for exercising some degree of

what they deem sovereignty over off-reservation lands.

This model has some remarkable parallels with the pro-

cess of recognizing Native Title in Australia, in which

Aboriginal groups may be granted rights to public lands

that might include visiting to protect important places,

making decisions about the future use of the land or wa-

ters, hunting, gathering and collecting bush medicines

(National Native Title Tribunal 2003). In the case of na-tional parks, Aboriginal groups have a recognized right to

co-management (see New South Wales National Parks

and Wildlife Service n.d.).

The struggle over shared sovereignty is well illus-

trated by the Kennewick Man case in the Northwest.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation

Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) assigned ownership of Native

American human remains and associated funerary

objects discovered on federal or tribal lands to the tribe

with the closest cultural affiliation with such remains or

objects when lineal descendants cannot be ascertained

(U.S. Code, Vol. 25, Ch. 32, Sec. 3002). In 1996, human

remains dated as old as 9200 B.P. were discovered on theColumbia River near Kennewick, Washington, and were

turned over by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineersthe

owner of the landto an anthropologist for study. The

Yamaka Nation, Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Tribes of

Umatilla Reservation, and Confederated Tribes of Colville

Reservation demanded return of what they call the

Ancient One to them for reburial under the terms of

NAGPRA. After convoluted litigation between a group of

plaintiff anthropologists, on the one side, and the tribes,

Corps of Engineers, and Department of the Interior, on

the other side, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth

Circuit held in 2004 that NAGPRA did not apply to the

Ancient One because the remains are so old and physi-cally distinct from contemporary American Indians. The

court reasoned that because NAGPRA defines Native

American in the present tense (of, or relating to, a tribe,

people, or culture that is indigenous to the United States

[U.S. Code, Vol. 25, Ch. 32, Sec. 3001, Para. 9]), the act

unambiguously requires that human remains bear some

relationship to a presently existing tribe, people, or culture

to be considered Native American and thus eligible for

repatriation (Bonnichsen v. United States, 357 F. 3d 962, at

Figure 3. Ceded Lands of the 1855 Treaty Tribes in the Columbia Basin.

Source: Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission 1992:1.


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972 [U.S. Ct. of Appls., 10th Cir., 2004]). Thus, the court

denied the tribes claim to shared sovereignty over an-

cient, off-reservation remains because the Ancient One

did not meet a narrow definition of a biologically an-

cestral relationship to the tribes (Bonnichsen v. United

States, 357 F. 3d 962, at 969 [U.S. Ct. of Appls., 10th Cir.,

2004]). The remains bear no relationship, the court

said, to the Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, or Colvilles,

and are not Native American under the terms of

NAGPRA (Bonnichsen v. United States, 357 F. 3d 962, at

977 [U.S. Ct. of Appls., 10th Cir., 2004]). In doing so, the

court denied to tribes the opportunity to exercise shared

sovereignty over the off-reservation landscape by deny-

ing the continuity of Native presence on the landscape.8

What the tribes generally seek regarding off-reservation

rights is heteronomous political space in which more than

one sovereign may exercise jurisdiction in coterminous

space and in which political space itself is discontinuous.

In this case, however, and distinct from the situation exam-ined in the previous section, in which heteronomy is forced

on tribal governments by the federal and state govern-

ments as a means of limiting tribal sovereignty, heteron-

omy has the effect of extending tribal self-determination

while limiting the absolute sovereignty of the federal and

state governments. Indeed, much of the literature cele-

brating the liberatory effects of postsovereign or postna-

tional political space cites precisely the kind of shared

sovereignty sought by Indian tribes beyond their reserva-

tion borders (see, e.g., Ford 2001; Frug 1991; Leitner 2004;

Ruggie 1998; Stacy 2003; Young 2000).

National indigenous space

In November 1969, a group of 89 American Indians landed

on Alcatraz Island with the intention of occupying it.

Calling themselves Indians of All Tribes, they claimed

the island on the basis of what they called the right of

discoveryparodying the so-called doctrine of discovery

by which the United States claims its legal title to much of

North America:

To the Great White Father and All His People:

We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as

Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians.

. . .

We plan to develop on this island several Indianinstitutes:

A center for Native American Studies. . . .

An American Indian Spiritual Center. . . .

An Indian Center of Ecology. . . .

A Great Indian Training School. . . .

. . .an American Indian Museum. [Josephy et al. 1999:

4043]

The island was occupied until June 1971 (see Johnson 1996;

Johnson et al. 1997).

The occupation of Alcatraz stands in contrast to

the geography of tribal sovereignty on the reservation

homeland and off-reservation shared sovereignty within

traditional tribal homelands. Alcatraz was occupied not

by members of a single tribe within their tribal home-

land, but by a group claiming to represent all American

Indian people, a form of identity commonly called pan-

Indianism in the scholarly literature (see, e.g., Hertzberg

1971; Thomas 1968). And just as pan-Indianism repre-

sented the invention of a new ethnic group, the Ameri-

can Indian (Thomas 1968:129), so the space claimed by

pan-Indians represents the social production of new po-

litical space: not a tribal homeland or even a mosaic ofdifferent homelands, but a generic Native space of U.S.

national dimensions. Alcatraz was seen as just a piece of

a national Indian Territory held by American Indian peo-

ple as a whole, and the cultural institutions that would

be built there would speak to all Indian people in the

United Statesand perhaps beyond. To the mosaicor

actually the archipelagoof tribal homelands would be

added continuous, national indigenous space. This geog-

raphy is notor, not necessarilyinconsistent with tribal

sovereignty, but it operates at a different spatial scale in

terms of imagined Native community. Historian Frederick

Hoxie (2005), in adapting a reading of Paul Gilroys The

Black Atlantic (1993) to the case of American Indians,has illuminated this kind of national indigenous geog-

raphy in his concept of a Red Continent. A brief ex-

ample illustrates: When I once took a group of Portland

State University students to visit Warm Springs Reserva-

tion, our host from the tribal administration pointed

out that we visitors had entered a different nation, and

that all of us, even the Indian students who were not

Warm Springs citizens, were aliens. One of my students,

an urban Dine (Navajo), took offense at this: Appar-

ently he thought that native space is native space and

that he should, as Native, feel at home (in a way non-

Indians might not) in the Warm Springs Nation. What

my Dine student had in mind was akin to the nationalindigenous space imagined at Alcatraz, whereas our

Warm Springs host was speaking in the language of

nation proper (in this case, and at least one other de-

scribed below, some inconsistency exists between conti-

nental indigenous space and tribal sovereignty).9

Although things did not work out quite the way the

occupiers at Alcatraz, or anyone else, expected, much of

what they planned in 1969 has come to pass in different

ways. Native American Studies programs, which were


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just starting at the University of California, Berkeley, San

Francisco State, the University of California, Los Angeles,

and the University of California, Davis, in 1969, now are

common as freestanding programs or components in

ethnic studies or American studies programs around

the United States (see Champagne and Stauss 2002). The

National Museum of the American Indian is now open on

the Mall in Washington, D.C. These and other develop-

ments reflect a consciousness of the common experience

of the indigenous in the United States. That my student

could take offense at the perceived violation of this in-

digenous geography is testament to its cultural weight.

The geography of national indigenous space has

been institutionalized in other ways, too. In 1984, Klamath

tribal member Al Smith was fired from his job as a drug

counselor with a private drug rehabilitation program in

Oregon for ingesting peyote in Native American Church

meetings. When Smith applied for unemployment insur-

ance benefits with the state Employment Division, hisapplication was denied on the grounds of his having

been fired for misconduct. Under Oregon law at the

time, peyote was a controlled substance, an illegal drug,

so partaking of peyote, especially by a drug counselor,

amounted to employee misconduct. Although most

states at the time and the federal government exempted

the use of peyote by Indian members of the Native

American Church from criminal prohibition, Oregon did

not, and the legal question was whether this arrange-

ment was a violation of Smiths first-amendment right

to free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court, in its

Employment Division v. Smith opinion, answered no, that

Oregons drug law had not been specifically directedat persecuting Smiths religion, that it was a neutral law

of general applicability that just happened to prohibit

what the Native American Church considers a central

sacrament (494 U.S. 872, at 879 [1990]). The Oregon law

was constitutionally valid, and Indian people had no

right to expect to practice their religion wherever they

wanted. Although the Court did not specifically say so,

the tacit reasoning was that Indian people might pre-

sume to practice their religions and other customs on

reservations where, generally, state laws do not apply to

Indians minding their own business, but outside of reser-

vations, Indians have no special rights simply because

they are Indian. After a remarkably organized public information and

lobbying effort by the National Congress of American

Indians, the Native American Religious Freedom Act

Project, and other organizations and individuals (includ-

ing production and circulation of a video documentary,

The Peyote Road [1992]), Congress responded to the

Employment Division v. Smith holding with the American

Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994,

providing that the use, possession, or transportation of

peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial

purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional

Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by

the United States or any State (U.S. Code, Title 42,

Ch. 21, Subch. I, Sec. 1996a).10 What this means is that

any American Indian, anywhere in the United States,

whether on or off any reservation, in any city, in any

state, is free to have and use peyote for Native religious

purposes. As did the Indians of All Tribes in their occupa-

tion of Alcatraz, this law produces a Native space in which

Indian people have indigenous rights across the national

landscape, not just within reservation enclaves. Similar

national indigenous rights for Indians codified in federal

law include access to eagle feathers in an exemption from

the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (U.S. Code, Title

16, Ch. 5a, Subch. II, Sec. 668a) and the right to a protected

status for use of the phrase Indian made in the sale of

artwork and crafts (Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, U.S.

Code, Title 18, Pt. 1, Ch. 53, Sec. 1159).A critical characteristic of contemporary Native Amer-

ican life is that more Indian people live off reservation

than on, mostly in metropolitan areas, partly as a result

of the economic pull of such areas, which offer more jobs

and higher wages than most reservation economies have

any chance of doing. But a historical push was also a

factor. Relocationthe goal of moving Indians from res-

ervation to citywas the official policy of the United

States from the early 1950s into the 1960s (see Fixico

1986), and one of the underlying goals of relocation,

consistent with the larger goal of terminating tribes, was

to solve the Indian problem by detribalizing Indians

and eradicating both Indians and tribes as legal cat-egories. Thus, not surprisingly, the commonsense under-

standing of even many Indian people is that urban

Indians are somehow less authentically Indian than reser-

vation Indians, perhaps even a kind of second-class tribal

citizen (see, e.g., Jackson 2002). At the same time, urban

Indians may appear as somehow less authentically urban

citizens than other urban residents, merely denizens,

akin, perhaps, to immigrants (see Buff 2001). Although

the term diaspora is not usually associated with urban

Indians, the concept is consistent with much of the pre-

vailing common sense about urban Indians in the United

States (see, e.g., Clifford 1997). But this is not the kind of

spatial organization of nativeness imagined and claimedat Alcatraz (nor is it the kind of nativeness claimed by

some First Nations women in Canada, who see the cities

as new territories of rights [Peters 1998:678]). The forms

of portable Indian status just examined are meant, among

other things, to allow Indians to live in cities, or, indeed,

wherever they choose, without giving up their identity or

legal status as Indians or their ability or right to practice

indigenous cultures. At work is a form of place making

that is meant to make Indians at home everywhere


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within the United States. These laws are critical for

most urban Indian people not for the specific rights they

recognizemost Indian people do not use eagle feathers

or peyote or produce Indian-made artwork for salebut

for the general principle they reflect: that Indian people

do not lose their right to be Indian or their claim to

Indianness when they live among non-Indians.

This national indigenous geography also opens up

possibilities for people who identify themselves as In-

dians but who are not members of federally recognized

tribes (i.e., not card-carrying Indians). If not only a

tribal reservation but all of the United States is Native

homeland, people who claim descent from Native ances-

tors but who do not live on a reservation and never

have can more easily assert and exercise their Indianness.

A serious Native intellectual vision has emerged out of

this situation, led by Ward Churchill and M. Annette

Jaimes, among others, who ask both why the federal

government was and is intent on terminating Indiansand tribes via blood quantum requirements and why

so many Indian people and tribal governments continue to

engage in autogenocide by definitional and statistical

extermination (Churchill 1999:56). More important for

present purposes, these thinkers imagine a U.S. national

Indian population of much more substantial numbers

(upward of 15-fold) than those reported by the Bureau of

Indian Affairs (Churchill 1999:57; see also Forbes 1990;

Jaimes 1992; Stiffarm and Lane 1992). Put differently,

what would the United States look like if the indigenous

presence was more akin to that in, say, Guatemala (see

Warren 1998), Mexico, or Peru? Perhaps not surprisingly,

however, this much more populous and geographicallynational understanding of Native or Indian is not

consistent politically with the tribally based sover-

eignty movementthe Indian national geographic of

federally recognized tribesand has been criticized by

other Indian thinkers, sometimes harshly, as amounting

to an exercise in ethnic fraud.11

To make the transcontinental United States, rather

than the reservation, the homeland of Indian people also

opens up the meaning of sovereignty in fundamental

ways. For example, some Native scholars and tribal intel-

lectuals who are advocates of tribal sovereignty on reser-

vation homelands insist on the importance of essentially

going back to indigenous fundamentals or looking in-side for keys to tribal survival and the indigenous future

(see Porter 1999 for an extended argument). But Robert

Warrior (Osage), a faculty member in English at the Uni-

versity of Oklahoma, understands sovereignty as a more

open-ended process. Recovering critical insights from

Vine Deloria Jr. (Sioux), for example, Warrior writes,

Through [a] process-centered definition of sovereignty,

Deloria is able to avoid making a declaration as to what

contemporary American Indian communities are or are

not. Instead, Deloria recognizes that American Indians

have to go through a process of building community and

that that process will define the future (1995:91). Warrior

quotes from an interview in which Deloria asserts,

Everyone doesnt have to do everything that the oldIndians did in order to have a modern Indian identity.We dont have to have every male in the tribe do theSun Dance. We need a larger variety of culturalexpression today. I dont see why Indians cant bepoets, engineers, songwriters or whatever. I dont see why we cant depart from traditional art forms anddo new things. [1995:93]

Such indigenous cosmopolitanism necessarily implies that

Indians are at least as at home in cities, universities, the

entertainment industry and mass media, and so on, as

they are on reservations. With national Native space in

mind, one should not be surprised to find Indians inunexpected places (Deloria 2004)excelling at the arts,

sciences, and letters in and of the dominant society

while still being Indian.

Thinking expansively about Native space has also, as

might be expected, opened up a transnational, conti-

nental, or hemispheric perspective among many Indian

people. Indian Country Today, the major national Ameri-

can Indian newspaper (available online at http://www.

indiancountry.com), regularly covers, not unexpectedly,

Canadian First Nations stories, but more interestingly,

news from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and other southern

countries. The International Indian Treaty Council, which

was founded in 1974 and describes itself on its World Wide Web homepage as an organization of Indigenous

Peoples from North, Central, South America and the Pa-

cific working for the Sovereignty and Self-Determination

of Indigenous Peoples and the recognition and protection

of Indigenous Rights, Traditional Cultures and Sacred

Lands, has as its logo a red silhouette of both New

World continents, crossed by a pipe (International Indian

Treaty Council n.d.a). The Indian Law Resource Center

also works on indigenous rights hemispherically and re-

cently won a case it filed on behalf of two Shoshone

women with the Inter-American Commission on Human

Rights of the Organization of American States (Indian

Law Resource Center n.d.a). Both organizations as wellas other American Indian organizations and individuals

are active with the world indigenous movement, centered

at this moment on the adoption of the UN Draft Declara-

tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (on the draft

declaration, see Biolsi 2004; Indian Law Resource Center

n.d.b; International Indian Treaty Council n.d.b). But the

kind of globalism practiced by both organizations as well

as by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous

Issues (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/index.html),


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does not imagine or produce indigenous space beyond

individual indigenous nations, and the world indigenous

movement is very much akin to an indigenous united

nations in which the common colonial situations of each

individual and autonomous indigenous nation is recog-

nized but the mosaic of separate and autonomous Na-

tive sovereignties is never questioned. And, tellingly, the

logo on the front page of every paper issue of Indian

Country Today is a silhouette of the United States (ac-

tually, only the 48 contiguous states; both Alaska and

Hawaii, to say nothing of the Pacific possessions, are ex-

cluded) showing reservations in red. Even for this globally

aware newspaper, Indian Country apparently stops

abruptly at both the northern and southern borders of

the contiguous states.12

Hybrid political space

All of the cases of Indian and tribal rights examined sofar are, legally speaking, fundamentally different from

affirmative action, even though they may seem like a

related form of special or race-based rights to some non-

Indians. The legal distinction between Indian rights un-

der federal law and the pursuit of civil rights by racial

minorities is made plain by a 1974 Supreme Court case,

Morton v. Mancari. This was a class-action challenge by

white Bureau of Indian Affairs employees to the agencys

Indian-preference policy in hiring and promotion, in

which the plaintiffs argued that Indian preference vio-

lated the prohibitions against racial discrimination in

the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. In Morton v.

Mancari, the Court explained that the preference andother special laws for Indians and tribes are not granted

to Indians . . . as a discrete racial group, but, rather as

members of quasi-sovereign tribal entities (471 U.S. 535,

at 554 [1974]).

But one would be mistaken in assuming that In-

dian people or Indian tribes have a stake in federal In-

dian law but not in state and federal constitutional and

other civil rights law, including affirmative action, that

would serve to protect individual Indian people and

their communities from racial discrimination. American

Indians have been U.S. citizens since 1924, and they

have invoked civil rights protections repeatedly from even

before that time, both on and off the reservation, againsttribal governments (see, e.g., Native American Church

v. Navajo Tribal Council, 272 F. 2d 131 [U.S. Ct. Appls.

for the Tenth Cir., 1959]; Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez,

436 U.S. 49 [U.S. Sup. Ct., 1978]; see also Harris 1990;

MacKinnon 1987), state governments, and the federal

governmentinvolving everything from the rights of the

accused to a fair trial to voting rights and affirmative

action programs to the rights of a racial minority to a pub-

lic sphere or civil society that does not constitute a ra-

cially hostile environment (the Smith case described in

the previous section is, of course, also an example of civil

rights law of critical importance to Indian people).

Two examples will indicate the importance of tradi-

tional U.S. civil rights law (broadly defined) for Indian

people. In 1992, seven individual American Indians filed

a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to

cancel the trademark registrations of the Washington

Redskins football team. Their argument was that the

trademarks and images are racially disparaging to Ameri-

can Indians and, therefore, prohibited by the Trademark

Act. The Patent Offices Trademark Trial and Appeal

Board found in favor of the petitioners in 1998 (Harjo v.

Pro-Football, Inc., Cancellation No. 21,069, Trademark

Trial and Appeal Board, U.S. Department of Commerce

[1998]). Pro-Football, Inc., the owner of the Redskins, ap-

pealed to federal district court, and in September 2003, the

court held that the petitioners had failed to prove that

the trademarks were disparaging to a substantial com-posite of Native Americans (Pro-Football, Inc. v. Harjo,

284 F. Supp. 2d 96, at 144 [U.S. Dist. Ct. for the Dist. of

Columbia, 2003]). The loss of this case only highlights for

Indian people and their allies the greater political vision

of racial public respect. Many Indian people and their al-

lies describe this as a fundamental matter of racial justice

in U.S. societyof treating everyone equally and not

allowing Indian people to be racially insulted when other

groups would never be treated with such prejudice. A

well-known political cartoon by Thom Little Moon has

circulated in Indian newspapers that confrontationally

poses the question of what would happen, or how would

Americans feel, if Jews or African Americans or Chinese Americans had sports teams named after them (see

Figure 4). The point is clear: Indian people intend to

Figure 4. Mascots; by Thom Little Moon. Source: Indian Country Today,

January 25February 1, 1999.


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defend their individual rights to racial equal treatment

in both courts of law and the court of mass-mediated

public opinion.13

Two critical points about the fight against racist

sports mascotsand the issue extends beyond the Red-

skins to include the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta

Braves, the Fighting Illini of the University of Illinois, and

the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux, among

othersare important to note. First, the political space

at issue here is not tribal or Native: Rather, this is a mat-

ter of U.S. citizens in U.S. territory who happen to be

Indian. The political geography is squarely centered in

the map of the United States as a (multiracial) nation-state

of equal citizens. At work is not just a fight against racist

hate speech but also a larger struggle for inclusion in

U.S. society, or for cultural citizenshipthe right to be

Indian and American at the same time in a truly multi-

cultural society (see Ramirez 2004). Second, although this

geography is very different from that of the others exam-ined here in that it is more inclusionary (in a context of

multiculturalism or cultural citizenship) than it is indige-

nous, the anti-defamation movement, as it is called

by the National Congress of American Indians (n.d.a), is

a celebrated cause among members of that organization

itself, tribal governments, individual Indian people both

on and off the reservations, and urban Indian organiza-

tions such as the American Indian Movement. In other

words, tribal citizenship and indigenous identity, on the

one hand, and U.S. citizenship and belonging, on the

other hand, are not seen as mutually exclusive when

the matter is fighting racism against Indian people. In-

deed, the ability of Indian people to articulate the veryproblem of racism and to struggle against it necessarily

requires a different scale of political geographythe

United States, or Americathan that of the indigenous

nation-state-on-the-reservation.

My second example concerns Indian voting rights.

Prior to the 2000 general election, a voter registration

drive targeted all of the reservations in South Dakota,

and the Indian vote was credited with the reelection of

Democrat Tim Johnson to the U.S. Senate by a slim mar-

gin. The lesson was learned by Indian leaders, and the Na-

tional Congress of American Indians organized Native

Vote 2004, an effort to mobilize the American Indian

and Alaska Native vote (National Congress of AmericanIndians n.d.b), although the Indian vote in South Dakota

was not able to return Democratic minority leader Tom

Daschle to the Senate. Both tribal governments and indi-

vidual Indian people have been keen to enforce Indian

voting rights under federal law. In September 2004, the

U.S. District Court for South Dakota ruled on a challenge

to redistricting by the state brought by four Lakota citizens

and voters. Argued for the Indian plaintiffs by the Amer-

ican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the suit claimed that

District 27, which includes Pine Ridge and Rosebud Res-

ervations (see Figure 5), packs Indian voters into a

single district, thereby depriving them and other Indian

voters in the neighboring District 26 of the equal oppor-

tunity to participate in the political process and to elect

candidates of their choice (Bone Shirt v. Hazeltine, Civ.

013032, Complaint [U.S. District Ct. for South Dakota,

2001]). In other words, the ACLU argued that Districts 26

and 27 are drawn so that Indian voters have a majority

only in the district where they are packed (in District 27,

Indians are 89 percent of the population; in District 26,

Indians presently compose only 39 percent of the popu-

lation but could well constitute a majority if this district

were redrawn to include some of the Indian people now

residing in District 27 with a supermajority of Indian

voters; Ross 2004). The district court held that illegal

packing was, indeed, involved and ordered the state to

remedy the situation (Bone Shirt v. Hazeltine, 2004 U.S.

Dist. LEXIS 19265). Beyond voting and officeholding byIndian individuals, tribal governments are also in a posi-

tion to make campaign contributions that may influence

electoral outcomes, particularly when tribes can deploy

substantial war chests on the basis of gaming reve-

nues, as, for example, in California and New Mexico (see

Mason 2000).

Most Indian people do not see dual citizenship

the simultaneous claim of rights as American Indians and

general civil rights as U.S. citizensas problematic. Nei-

ther do most tribal governments or the National Congress

of American Indians. As the chairman of the Mohegan

Nation put it at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq

in 2003, the Mohegan Tribe is [a] sovereign nation but [a]sovereign loyal to the United States (Indian Country

Today 2003: A3). Indians do, after all, serve in the U.S.

military and die in U.S. warseven CNN carried the death

in Iraq of Hopi soldier Lori Pistewa, the first American

Indian woman in the U.S. armed forces killed in combat

Figure 5. South Dakota legislative voting districts; graphic by Thom Little

Moon. Adapted from Steinberger 2001: A3. Reprinted with permission of

Serenity J. Banks, Lakota Journal editor.


251


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(see Figure 6). Even Indians on reservations are required to

pay federal and some state taxes. The list of the obligations

of U.S. citizenship borne by American Indians goes on in

this vein, so why should Indians not claim rights as U.S.

citizens? What is more, for Indians and tribes not to take

U.S. citizenship and participation in the U.S. federal sys-

tem seriously would be unwise. State and federal legisla-

tures regularly enact laws, or fail to act, impacting the

rights and welfare of tribes and Indian peoplethink, for

example, of the annual federal Indian budget for the

Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service

and of the necessity for states to approve tribal gaming

plans and deliver state welfare programs on reservations

so tribes and individual Indians have a direct interest in

influencing elections and public policy through voting,

campaign contributions, political advertising, and lobby-

ing. Clearly, dual citizenship is a matter of recognizing a

hybrid political space in which the simultaneous exis-

tence of two nations in the same physical space is natu-ralized. As discussed above in the case of tribal sovereignty

as it actually exists on reservations and that of tribal claims

to off-reservation rights, in this hybrid political space the

single-point perspective associated both with the modern

national citizen and with the exclusive and panoptical

jurisdictional gaze of the state (Ruggie 1998:185) is shat-

tered into multiperspectival optics.

I do not, by any means, suggest that Indian people do

not have situated standpoints on their U.S. citizenship

standpoints often at odds with those of other Americans.

As is to be expected, September 11, the war on terrorism,

and the war in Iraq are all subjects of intense debate in

the Indian public spheremediated by local, regional, and

national newspapers, e-mail discussions, tribal council

deliberations, and, of course, face-to-face dialogues in

Indian communities. One woman on Rosebud Reserva-

tion wrote in the local newspaper in March 2003: I believe

this war [the invasion of Iraq] has nothing to do with

us Lakota people (Todd County Tribune 2003). A friend

of mine from Rosebud Reservation, Howard Valandra,

wrote the following in an e-mail to a list of Indian recip-

ients in September 2001, putting into writing what must

have been in the thoughts of many Indian people:

As I watched the newscast of the senseless strikeagainst the World Trade Towers and the federalbuilding in Washington my thoughts and feelings went back generations. In the not too distant pastour relatives were attacked while they slept, ate, orsat around talking. The attackers thought our rela-

tives to be bad and probably not worth the bulletsshot into them. Our relatives were children, little chil-dren, women, elders and protectors. Our relativescried and wondered how one human could do thisto another. The past few days, many, if not most ofthe people in the Untied States are feeling thebewilderment and anger that has been passed downfrom generation to generation to me. Time will tellif they are as strong willed as Native people.

Echoing the view of many Indian people across the United

States, Lakota Journal editor Tim Giago has writ-

ten repeatedly in his weekly, nationally syndicated col-

umn of the long history of terrorism experienced byIndian people at the hands of the United States. Never-

theless, in September 2001, he insisted that as a U.S.

veteran he had rightly fought to defend this nation [the

United States!] in hopes that war would never come to

our shores, and he specifically denied the equivalence of

the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and September 11

(Giago 2001; emphasis added). Many, if not most, Indian

people also know full well that the overrepresentation of

young Indian men and women in the U.S. armed forces

is a function of reservation poverty. And many tribal lead-

ers believe that the war on terrorism will be partly paid

for with cuts in the federal Indian budgets, even while

Indian young men and women fight and die overseas(Bourland 2002). But the (apparent) willingness of most

Indian people to take seriously their U.S. citizenship in

addition to their tribal citizenshipeven in, or perhaps

because of, these most trying of times (see Figure 7)is a

noteworthy (and perhaps remarkable) social fact (see

Figure 8).

But clearly some Indian people see the exercise

of dual citizenship as fundamentally undermining Na-

tive nationhood. Perhaps the most outspoken NativeFigure 6. The Iraq war; by Marty Two Bulls. Source: Indian Country Today,

March 25, 2003.


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intellectual on this matter is Seneca tribal member and

Syracuse University law professor Robert Porter. Like most

scholars, Native and non-Native, Porter sees the 1924 act

by which Congress unilaterally bestowedor, imposed,

depending on ones point of viewcitizenship on Native

Americans as part of the project to assimilate Indians

and eradicate tribes, not as an exercise in what onewould now call inclusion or cultural citizenship in a

multicultural nation. But Porter goes further than most

in his analysis of dual citizenship: Failure to hold abso-

lute political allegiance toward [only] one nation can com-

promise ones political loyalty to either or both of the

nations of which the individual is a citizen (1999:169).

Porter sees dual citizenship as a zero-sum game of pol-

itical participation in which time spent participating in

the American political system is time taken away from

participating in the tribal political system (Porter 1999:

173). American citizenship . . . [for] Indigenous peoples

undermines the loyalty that one has to ones Indigenous

nation, [and] as the commitment of Indigenous citizensto their Indigenous nation diminishes, dual citizenship

will have the effect of destroying the Indigenous nation

from within (Porter 1999:169 170). Porter is partic-

ularly concerned about urban Indians who have left

their reservation homelands: In the absence of the need

to concern themselves with Indigenous self-government,

urban Indians have become increasingly preoccupied

with their status as minorities in the American political

system and the racism and discrimination that is in-

flicted upon Indigenous peoples by virtue of that status

(1999:174). In other words, Porter is concerned that ur-

ban Indians will come to see themselves politically merely

as a U.S. racial minority, whose best avenue for seeking

justice is U.S. civil rights lawand perhaps coalition

with other minoritiesrather than seeing themselves as

citizens of sovereign nations. Porter correctly recognizes

that the view of racial discrimination as politically action-

able presupposes the shared legal, political, and moral

space of the United States, where Indian people might

assert claims to equal treatment as U.S. citizens. Thus, he

not surprisingly goes so far as to urge that Indian people

understand much of the oppression they face as national

origin, rather than race discrimination (Porter 1999:158).

National origin discrimination implies distinct nation-

alities, not races within a multiracial nation, and in the

context of Porters article implies that Indian people

might best remedy discrimination not by asserting their

rights as Americans, but by disengaging and returning tothe placesthe reservationswhere they belong.14

Conclusion

This narrative of imagined Native geographies suggests

that spatializations are constitutive of subjectivities. To

have or to claim particular rightsthat is, to be a poli-

tical subject of any kindis necessarily to inhabit partic-

ular forms of imagined or achievedeven if unstable

or contestedpolitical space. Furthermore, although the

nation may be a modular form available for pirating,

seeing nationalism or modern state-space as hegemonic

or obligatory worldviewseither among the privilegedor among the subalternwould be an error. The nation

Figure 7. September 11, 2001; by Thom Little Moon. Source: Lakota

Journal, September 28 October 4, 2001. Reprinted with permission of

Serenity J. Banks, Lakota Journal editor.

Figure 8. Swift Bear Community, Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota,

August 2000. Photograph by Thomas Biolsi.


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and the modern state may well be weighty culturally

and institutionally, both as received social conditions

faced by disempowered groups and as critical tools of

contestation, but the nation-state is only one among

several (perhaps many) geographies generated within

the horizon of the modern political imaginary. A critically

observant anthropology would see these heteronomous

or nonnation-state geographies not as anomalies or ex-

ceptions to the nation-state rule, but as concrete realities

in which many people live and think about their rights

and interests.

This leads to questions about place and essentialism.

All of the imagined geographies described here are based

on deeply primordialist notions of indigenous locations in

place. Even the national indigenous space of American

Indians is, after all, a place. The challenge for anthropology

is to make sense of this specificity of the Native American

situation without falling into the trap of Native American

or indigenous exceptionalism (no matter how strong thepolitical and disciplinary pressures are in that direction).

Toward that end, recognizing the tensions of race and

nation for American Indians is important. Obviously from

the material examined here, Native nationhood is a critical

site of identity and political struggle for Indian people.

The American Indian sovereignty movement of the last

30 years has kept this focus on indigenous nation-states

at the center of discussions about Indian affairs in the

United States. This is no less true of university curricula

or scholarly publications on American Indians than it is

of the deliberations of the Senate Committee on Indian

Affairs; tribal sovereignty is a household phrase in both

placesas, it is, of course, in Indian households through-out the United States.

But no matter how prominent the concept of indig-

enous sovereignty is in the scholarly literature and cur-

ricula of Native American Studies and in the political

discourses of Indian people nationally, one would be mis-

taken in assuming that U.S. civil and constitutional

rightsU.S. citizenship rights, legally, politically, and

culturallyare not of continuing value and concern to

Indian people. After all, in many ways the history and

current situation of Native Americans is parallel to that

of other racial minorities in the United States. Indian

people are harmed by racist media representations and

hate speech and by institutional racism and exclusionarypractices just as are others who are not white. Indian

people are also harmed, or are at risk of being harmed,

by current calls for a color-blind society and for a re-

treat from the social justice envisioned by the civil rights

movement. Indian people, thus, cannot afford not to

see themselves as a racial minority in a race-stratified

society and not to ask how their being brown, or red, or

even blackgiven that many people of African ancestry

now also claim their Indian ancestry (see, e.g., Brooks

2002)is a condition shared with many other people

who are not Indian but who are nonetheless victims of

racism, exclusion, denial of full citizenship, and white

privilege. And this is true even of Indian people whose

contact with non-Indians goes no further than radio,

satellite TV, video, or an occasional newspaper or maga-

zine because they will inevitably encounter the deeply

racist depictions of Indian people in those media. Indian

people, like other people of color, in other words, are

necessarily opponents of notions of a color-blind society,

or of color-blind social policythat is, a policy blind to

racism. As scholars, how could we hope to understand

the situation of Native Americans without asking sys-

tematic questions about its linkages to the construction

of race and the shoring up of white privilege generally?

These are questions, however, that the anthropology

of Native Americans and interdisciplinary Native Ameri-

can studies have largely yet to pose, much less answer,

because of academic fetishizing of individual Indiantribes as sovereign nations (see, for the critique of

anthropology [and history] in this regard, Biolsi 1997;

Clifford 1988; Dombrowski 2001, 2004; Hoxie 2005;

Sider 2003).15

But at the same time, understanding the antinomies

of racial identity for Indian people is critical. Although

racial identity is, and claims to racial justice are, a poten-

tial basis for social remedies and empowerment for

Indian people, race also has inescapable pitfalls. Tribal

governments have been keen to argue for the past three

decades that tribal membership and the rights of tribes

and their members are not at all about race-based en-

titlement within the United States, but about citizenshipin aboriginal nations that did not disappear legally when

the U.S. polity suddenly (as measured in native time on

the continent) appeared on the scene in North America

(and this political strategy on the part of tribes goes far

toward explaining why anthropologists tend to have the

essentializing tendencies we do regarding Indian tribes;

after all, we understandably want to be allies, the

friends of the Indians). The discourse of tribal nations

can, and often is, profoundly at odds with the discourse

of Indians as a U.S. racial minority. That is precisely

what Porter (1999) argues. After all, many of the oppo-

nents of tribal sovereignty have asserted that tribal govern-

ments or special laws for Indian people are race basedand, therefore, arguably unconstitutional (see, e.g., Citi-

zens Equal Rights Alliance n.d.; One Nation United n.d.).

The political danger of Indian entitlement appearing as

racial privilege in the prevailing lights of the public sphere

is particularly extreme at this time of mania for color

blindness. This tension between race and nation dis-

courses, I would argue, is one of the key specificities of

the Native American situation in comparison with other

disempowered groups in the United States.


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7. The president also signed an executive order in 1996 on

Indian sacred sites, which requires federal agencies managingfederal lands to find ways to accommodate access to andceremonial use of Indian sacred sites by Indian religious practi-

tioners; and . . . avoid adversely affecting the physical integrity ofsuch sacred sites (Clinton 1996).

8. Historical continuity is one of the criteria that the federal

government seems to require persistently of polities that wouldclaim to be Indian tribes (see Clifford 1988; Sider 2003).

9. From a tribal sovereignty standpoint, nonmember Indians

are as alien as are non-Indians. This issue was raised in the case ofDawavendewa v. Salt River Project, in which a Hopi claimed thathis U.S. federal civil right to protection from national origin

discrimination by employers was violated when a (non-Indian)company operating on the Navajo Reservation and subject totribal jurisdiction gave employment preferences to Navajos under

the requirements of Navajo tribal law. Although from the pointof view of the Navajo Nation, this was analogous to federal gov-

ernment regulation of foreign workers under immigration em-ployment law, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

it was federally prohibited discrimination (154 F. 3d 1117).10. Congresss first response to Employment Division v. Smith

was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which recog-nized that laws neutral toward religion may burden religiousexercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious

exercise (107 Stat 1488). The act restore[d] the compellinginterest test, which would require that the federal and state

governments not substantially burden religious exercise withoutcompelling justification. This act, however, was overturned bythe Supreme Court in 1997 in City of Boerne v. Flores(521 U.S. 507).

For complex historical reasons, tribal governments now viewCongress, in particular, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,

chaired at this writing by Republican John McCain (Arizona) andvice-chaired by Democrat Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), as a re-liable ally with a commitment to tribal sovereignty. By contrast,

the Supreme Court is viewed as a more dangerous and unpredict-able branch of government, a branch that has undermined tribal

sovereignty in fundamental ways since 1978.11. The controversy over individual Indian identity is closely

related to the controversy among Indian people over the federalrecognition of specific tribes that have not heretofore enjoyedsuch recognition (unrecognized tribes; see Sider 2003).

12. The degree to which this boundary drawing is naturalizedamong those who think often and hard about Indian affairs in theUnited States was made plain to me when Anna Tsing pointed out

that I had not even noticed that the boundaries of Indian

Country Today are conterminous with U.S. national borders.13. In September 2004, California Governor Arnold Schwarze-

negger vetoed a bill that would have prohibited the use of Red-

skins as a team name in public schools.14. For a compelling account of the differences between rights

based on citizenship in Native nations, on the one hand, and civilrights, on the other hand, see Deloria 1985.

15. Regarding Native American Studies, however, it is impor-tant to recognize the strategic function of tribal essentialism,something not relevant in the case of anthropology or history

(see, e.g., Cook-Lynn 1997).

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Imagined Geographies

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