Mapping Sovereignty

Personhood and the Rights of Nature

In the context of Native American communities, sovereignty speaks not only to self-government and self-determination on the part of federally-recognized tribes, but also is an intellectual basis for movements that sustain food systems, artistic traditions, and Indigenous knowledge more broadly. Native Nations each have their own relationship to their ecosystems, with principles of respect being fundamental.

How did the river get to be in the United States?: Explain previously being claimed by competing European empires

For the United States, the Mississippi River has been engaged as a symbolic marker of its own sovereignty. First in regards to claiming all things east of the river, and then to crossing it. Indigenous sovereignty does not mean “control” of the river; speak to US efforts to control nature. #NoDAPL is an example of jurisdictional clash over a river.

As a keyword and critical intervention, “sovereignty” goes beyond legal applications within settler colonial states to also encompass Indigenous ways of thinking/being about and in relation to nonhuman relatives like water, rivers, oceans, plants, animals, spirits, rocks, among others, as these relationships constitute territories that are defined but not definite, expansive and not bounded, following the movements of stars and seasons.

Categorically close to ‘sovereignty’ are notions of (individual) ‘personhood’ and (collective) ‘peoplehood,’ both of which occupy vexed positions within settler-colonial law across nation-states. One recent (2017) example is New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person—a recognition that suggests, on the one hand, some movement by a settler-colonial nation towards acknowledging nonhuman beings as sentient, agentive persons deserving of legal protections. On the other hand, in regarding rivers and watersheds/tributaries as a source of life—indeed, as life itself—to many Indigenous peoples, we (HWW collective) join with settler scholars like Miranda Johnson (2017) who observes that, while this legal shift in New Zealand is a small, good step toward limiting further, future harm to rivers, it unduly ties the living agency and range of being of rivers, etc. to existing legal frameworks. As Johnson puts it, “the fiction of legal personality singularizes diverse and heterogeneous understandings of the river in a form that… recognizes Maori beliefs and practices,” and in doing so, serves to incorporate and potentially re-settle, Indigenous peoples and territories. Apart from the potential for a toxic politics of recognition, singularizing the river, any river, also stands to limit the range of responsible action (ceremonial, political) to and for them and for their diverse inhabitants. 

A further problem, from our perspective, in according legal personhood to rivers is in mapping a language of rights onto nonhuman beings. We advocate for the observing of proper protocols in relation to our water relatives, not for observing their “rights”…

Instead, we offer examples of the personhood, the individual and collective sovereignties, of the Mississippi River and watershed and their many inhabitant-relatives, that are meant as indicative but not exhaustive of some of these relationships and protocols….

Vince: (in breakout room, with Agleska): I second and third Sam and Chris’ contributions around emphasizing specifically indigenous ways of thinking about sovereignty that are not restricted to legal, statist, and rights-based conventions.  Mni Wiconi is a great example. As are specific places, like the Bdote and Wakan Tipi (which capture the kin relationality as well as the interconnectivity between people and land/water/sky scapes).   

In our breakout room, Agleska and I agreed to a  view of sovereignty that  has ultimately to do with the accountability of a people to (a) place through knowledge and teachings that are about the importance of relations, for example,  of kinship and reciprocity and interconnectivity and interdependence. Such an accountability shores up self-definition of peoplehood, best expressed in the vernacular.  In this way, sovereignty is akin to the idea of being about rooted, which also emphasizes or reinforces particularity and specificity to place in terms of depth: of “deep (temporal and vertical)” anchorage to specific places (such that time and place also matter profoundly). The authority that sovereignty endows comes from the connectivity to place through deep time through the aforementioned terms of relation. But, what’s often omitted in considerations and definitions of the terms of indigenousness is their reach — Indigenous routes — through time, geographic and discursive space.  Indigenous roots and routes are mutually constitutive.  Reach, or routes, ensures particularity without insularity; expansiveness without losing specificity. Indigenous Art and Activism with Water (the Mississippi) shows all of this, and these — like the idea of sovereignty — are best understood in and through  the roots and reaches of indigenous vernaculars and vernacular  practices, especially in relation to certain key sites (of relations.

A last point: As it happens, much of the input in this document and from the breakout room comes from us in Minnesota, where there is a pressing need to acknowledge and honor Dakota sovereignty, but a sovereignty that is informed by and can keep apace with the roots and routes of Dakota indigeneity.   And, per Chris’ email prior to the July 9 meeting, I understand indigeneity as not a synonym for “indigenous” but as an analytic for getting at the claims and conditions of indigenous belongings and accountabilities to place as defined and operationalized through the appropriate vernaculars under consideration.

In my own work I’m writing along the lines of Mni Luzahan and the multiple sacred sites along the river in our homelands of Mnisota. Inspired by the work Native Canoe Program that Vince has founded at UMN-Twin Cities. Indigenous belonging and accountability, that Vince and Chris speak to, are embodied by the relationship building present in our HWW work. As well as Vince’s facilitation of the CHamorus relationships with Dakota people within our Dakota  homelands. Because Dakota’s relative making continues to be a global-political stake that shapes the Mississippi past, present and future. For myself, relative making between the Micronesian and Dakota peoples is an act of sovereignty that powerfully troubles federal and state recognition. This conversation leaves me with further questions about what has always been made possible by disrupting western conceptions of sovereignty.