THOMAS BIOLSI
University of California, Berkeley
Imagined geographies:
Sovereignty, indigenous space, and American
Indian struggle
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I seek to complicate scholars’
understanding of the ‘‘modular’’ form of the nationstate by examining four kinds of indigenous political
space that figure in contemporary American Indian
struggle in the United States: (1) ‘‘tribal’’ or
indigenous-nation sovereignty on reservation
homelands; (2) comanagement of off-reservation
resources and sites shared between tribal, federal,
and state governments; (3) national indigenous
space in which Indian people exercise portable
rights beyond reservations; and (4) hybrid political
space in which Indian people exercise dual
citizenship and assert rights as tribal citizens under
treaty and other federal Indian law, as U.S. citizens
under the Constitution, and as social or cultural
citizens within a multicultural U.S. society.
[indigenous, law, nation-state, Native, race,
sovereignty, space]
I
n 1992, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation
in Oregon issued a Declaration of Sovereignty, enacted by the
Tribal Council:
Our people have exercised inherent sovereignty, as nations, on the
Columbia Plateau for thousands of years, since time immemorial. . . .
We . . . hereby declare our national sovereignty. We declare the
existence of this inherent sovereign authority—the absolute right to
govern, to determine our destiny, and to control all persons, land,
water, resources and activities, free of all outside interference—
throughout our homeland.
This is familiar language to anyone who has listened to American
Indian tribal governments speak of their right to self-determination within
the United States. It is also remarkably similar to language invoked by
indigenous peoples in their claims to self-determination the world over,
and it certainly seems to be the same political language as that spoken by
the historic anticolonial, nationalist movements of the 20th century (one
thinks of Vietnam declaring its independence from France in 1945 by
quoting from the U.S. Declaration of Independence) as well as by a wide
range of ‘‘ethnonational’’ independence movements in the present, from
the Basque region to Northern Ireland and Chechnya to Palestine and
Tibet. The significance of sovereignty and nationalism for formerly—or
still—colonized people seems obvious: ‘‘At the end of a century dominated
by anti-colonial nationalist struggles for sovereignty and independence,
we can hardly help but see national independence as almost synonymous
with dignity, freedom, and empowerment’’ (Ferguson 1997:123). Nations
and nationalities seem very much to be obligatory categories of modern
space and modern political subjectivity, respectively.
In this article, I aim to complicate this prevailing picture of national
sovereignty and national citizenship—both at the level of the established
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 239 – 259, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic
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American Ethnologist
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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 indigenous 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 sovereignty within a Native homeland (a modern tribal government 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 territory by tribes, on the one hand, and the federal and
state governments, on the other hand. Off-reservation fishing 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 territory of the contiguous United States, what I will call
‘‘national indigenous space’’ (I leave Alaska and Hawai‘i
out of the picture in the interest of making the argument as
directly as possible).1 The final one is hybrid indigenous
space in which Indian people claim and exercise citizenship 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 narrative 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 nationstate, 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 continuous domains, with clear ‘‘insides’’ and ‘‘outsides’’ and
linear borders (see also Brubaker 1992; Poggi 1978). The
modern state claims, as Benedict Anderson puts it, ‘‘sovereignty [that] is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over
each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory’’
(1991:19). Such panoptical sovereignty—along with the
idea of the nation as an imagined community—also
implies the more or less equal treatment of citizens, who
become, from the imputed standpoint of the state, interchangeable as objects of the state’s gaze.
The emergence of the nation-state is even more recent: Anderson (1991:113) argues that only in 1922, with
the formation of the League of Nations, did the nationstate, with its ‘‘deep horizontal comradeship’’ and historical continuity through ‘‘empty homogenous time,’’ finally
240
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, Anderson 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 political 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 different 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 states
or 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 state’s gaze, in other words, may be studiously nonpanoptical, its sovereignty purposely not flat, full, or even
across its territory but carefully zoned.
Reflecting on Ong’s remarkably provocative description of graduated sovereignty, one is immediately
aware that modern states have always been graduated,
even the most powerful, most liberally democratic, Western states. Consider the case of the United States and
African Americans. Black people were first denied the
status of legal personhood under the U.S. Constitution—
left out of the reach of the state’s ‘‘pastoral power’’ because they were deemed property, not legal persons—then
abandoned by the central state to white-controlled local governments and unlicensed violence during the
Jim Crow era. Is this not precisely an example of graduated sovereignty, in which the state outsources the
governance of some would-be citizens to state subcontractors, public and private? This is a case in which the
Imagined geographies
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 enforcement 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. citizens—a 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 undocumented immigrant labor. Commerce, indeed, daily
life as Americans know it, would quickly grind to a
halt in places like California without the labor of undocumented workers who regularly cross the border despite ‘‘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 deportation—thus inevitably 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’ compensation, medical or dental coverage, unemployment
benefits, social security benefits, or even drivers’ licenses
or other items in the standard wage package or the social 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
citizens—because of which certain well-known categories of citizens are regularly, even systematically,
assaulted, raped, and killed in ‘‘private’’ or otherwise unlicensed 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 gaze—graduates or zones its sovereignty—so as to benefit some citizens systematically and, just as systematically, 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-state—and 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 consistent with the received wisdom—scholarly or popular—
regarding the supposedly homogenous political space of
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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, epistemic, and universal space of the modern nation-state
that seems so often—again, in both scholarly and popular
contexts—to 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
form—obviously this thinking is a necessary part of any
critical analysis of modernity—so 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 continuity, not one of pirating a modern commodity form).
Their political imaginary, which is probably representative 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 borders 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 regarding 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 nations—of the United
States. Although the different reservations are not multicolored 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 nation’’) domain designations. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe
has even enacted legislation regarding its airspace, and
the 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 fundamentally 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, executed by the executive branch, and interpreted by the
federal courts, is largely in agreement with the essentials
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Figure 1. American Indian Reservations. Source: Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce 2000.
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 sovereignty of Indian Tribes:
[The majority of the justices are convinced as to] the
character of the Cherokees as a state, as a distinct political community, separated from others, capable of
managing its own affairs and governing itself. . . . They
have been uniformly treated as a state from the settlement of our country. The numerous treaties made
with them by the United States recognize them as a
people capable of maintaining the relations of peace
and war . . . [with] the United States. . . . The acts of our
242
government plainly recognize the Cherokee nation as a
state. [Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1, at
106 (1831)]
Marshall went even further toward recognizing the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation in an 1832 opinion: ‘‘The
Indian nations have always been considered as distinct,
independent political communities, retaining their original
natural 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
Imagined geographies
Indian tribes, even tribes within their exterior geographic
boundaries: ‘‘The laws of Georgia can have no force,’’
Marshall made clear, within the Cherokee Nation (Worcesster v. Georgia, 31 U.S. [6 Pet.] 515, at 561 [1832]).
The freedom of tribes from state law within their reservation 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 preconstitutional—their existence as sovereign
polities predates the existence of the United States—they
are also extraconstitutional: They exercise their sovereignty without constraint by the federal Constitution or
federal law in general—with some critical exceptions explored 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 example, although the 1982 constitution declares that ‘‘existing 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 particulars 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 in
Australia, where the recognition of ‘‘Native Title’’ subsequent to the groundbreaking Mabo decision in 1992 does
not involve recognition of sovereignty or Aboriginal selfgovernment (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 of
tribal sovereignty and that Congress’s 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 governmentto-government basis with American Indians and Alaska
Natives.’’ But the kind of sovereignty being honored
here is a profoundly limited one—limited, in fact, to the
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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 profoundly 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 considered ‘‘good law’’ in the present. Congress, can reduce
tribal 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 success of tribes in the gaming industry—and 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 development (free from state regulation or interference) on the
basis of inherent tribal sovereignty, as announced by the
Supreme 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 violation 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 in
particular, 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 sovereignty but in which the federal courts think up abrogations of sovereignty as ‘‘logical’’ implications of Congress’s
‘‘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 Court’s 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 sovereignty 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 situation is not a historical accident. On the contrary, in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government 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 the
game of ‘‘civilizing’’ Indians and that white farmers and
their communities would raise the property values of
the surrounding reservation land, materially benefiting their Indian neighbors. The government also assumed that the reservations would disappear as legal
enclaves as Indians became civilized and, thus, U.S. citizens.6 Because of a radical reversal of Indian policy in
the 1930s, however, the reservations never disappeared,
and most reservations today have a checkerboard pattern 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 on
reservations nationally when the Supreme Court answered 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 jurisdiction 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 autonomous states that are expressly terminated by Congress [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 exercise 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’’
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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.
(435 U.S. 191, at 209 [1978]). One of these limitations
stems from the overriding sovereign’s ‘‘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 criminal 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 over
non-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 nonmembers 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 nonIndians. In the 2001 case of Atkinson v. Shirley (532 U.S.
Imagined geographies
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 presence of Indians, the Court insisted that the tribe has
no authority to regulate the business operations of nonIndians on private property.
Advocates of tribal sovereignty recognize clearly
that the kind of sovereignty they are allowed under
federal Indian law is a specific kind—‘‘internal selfdetermination’’ or ‘‘dependent sovereignty’’ in the federal
courts’ terms. One of my consultants on Rosebud Reservation describes it as amounting to making Indian tribes
into ‘‘Boy Scout troops’’ or private clubs—voluntary associations, 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 of
the state of South Dakota (or Nebraska) and its subdivisions, 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 reservation? The argument that an Indian could theoretically
take up legal residence and become a voter, officeholder,
or jury member in the off-reservation jurisdiction—whereas a non-Indian could not do the same with respect to
tribal government—seems strained logic to most Indians
as an explanation for the general territorial jurisdiction
that obtains in the case of ‘‘white’’ governments but not
in the case of tribal governments. Indeed, it seems to
many, if not most, Indian people like a racist differentiation in which white people simply refuse to trust Indian
people to exercise governance responsibly or democratically. In any event, the sovereignty exercised by Indian
tribes is anything but consistent with the modular
model of nation-state sovereignty—although the modular
model is very much the vision and goal of tribal advocates.
One legal scholar calls such arrangements for tribal governments mere ‘‘semblances of sovereignty’’ (Aleinikoff
2002). A critical anthropology of modern political subjectivity must necessarily pay attention not just to the
pirating of a modular nation-state model as a political
tactic 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 political 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
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the ‘‘distinct, disjoint, and mutually exclusive territorial
forms’’ of the modern state (1998:172).
Comanagement
In addition to declaring sovereignty over the reservation, the Warm Springs declaration looks beyond the
reservation boundaries:
Our homeland also encompasses, and our sovereignty extends to, tribal off-reservation rights in our
historic ancestral domain, a vast region that includes
the Columbia Plateau and far beyond. These offreservation rights include rights attaching to our usual
and accustomed fishing grounds and stations; to inlieu fishing sites; to burial sites and other sacred sites;
to lands on which tribal members can hunt, gather
roots and berries, and pasture stock. [Confederated
Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon
1992; 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 streams
running through and bordering said reservation is
hereby secured to said Indians; and at all other usual
and accustomed stations, in common with citizens, of
the United States, and of erecting suitable houses for
curing the same; also the privilege of hunting,
gathering roots and berries, and pasturing their stock
on unclaimed lands, in common with citizens, is
secured 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 treaty—even 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 treatybased fishing rights (see Cohen 1986), Northwest tribal
members now regularly fish at ‘‘usual and accustomed
places’’ free from state jurisdiction. In the federal litigation, 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 Columbia 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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Figure 3. Ceded Lands of the 1855 Treaty Tribes in the Columbia Basin.
Source: Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission 1992:1.
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 sovereignty (see Silvern 1999, 2002), or at least comanagement,
with the federal, state, municipal, and county governments in the ceded areas over the health and future of
both the particular food sources mentioned in the treaties and the environment more generally (other specific
sites are included within tribal jurisdiction via other federal laws and policies; see below). One should understand
that this vision of shared sovereignty entails an assumption of coequal sovereignty, not nested, hierarchical sovereignty or a relationship of scaled sovereignty, in which
the ‘‘highest’’ sovereign encompasses the ‘‘lower’’ sovereigns—as 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-à-vis
the U.S. government and certainly vis-à-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 reservation boundaries (see Silvern 1999, 2002). What has
evolved in its place in the last ten years is a framework
for allowing tribal governments to have some official role
as stakeholders in policy making by state and federal
agencies. Commonly called a policy of ‘‘government-togovernment’’ relations, this framework first appeared in
the 1990s. In 1996, for example, Governor John Kitzhaber
of Oregon signed an executive order mandating ‘‘dialogue’’ 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
246
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 communities’’ (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 process 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 waters, hunting, gathering and collecting bush medicines’’
(National Native Title Tribunal 2003). In the case of national 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 illustrated 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 the
Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington, and were
turned over by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the
owner of the land—to 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 physically 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
Imagined geographies
972 [U.S. Ct. of Appls., 10th Cir., 2004]). Thus, the court
denied the tribes’ claim to shared sovereignty over ancient, off-reservation remains because the Ancient One
did not meet a narrow definition of a ‘‘biologically ancestral’’ 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 denying 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 examined in the previous section, in which heteronomy is forced
on tribal governments by the federal and state governments as a means of limiting tribal sovereignty, heteronomy has the effect of extending tribal self-determination
while limiting the absolute sovereignty of the federal and
state governments. Indeed, much of the literature celebrating the liberatory effects of postsovereign or postnational political space cites precisely the kind of shared
sovereignty sought by Indian tribes beyond their reservation 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
discovery’’—parodying 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 Indian
institutes:
A center for Native American Studies. . . .
An American Indian Spiritual Center. . . .
An Indian Center of Ecology. . . .
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A Great Indian Training School. . . .
. . .an American Indian Museum. [Josephy et al. 1999:
40 –43]
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 homeland, but by a group claiming to represent all American
Indian people, a form of identity commonly called ‘‘panIndianism’’ in the scholarly literature (see, e.g., Hertzberg
1971; Thomas 1968). And just as pan-Indianism represented the invention of a ‘‘new ethnic group, the American Indian’’ (Thomas 1968:129), so the space claimed by
pan-Indians represents the social production of new political space: not a tribal homeland or even a mosaic of
different 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 people as a whole, and the cultural institutions that would
be built there would speak to all Indian people in the
United States—and perhaps beyond. To the mosaic—or
actually the archipelago—of tribal homelands would be
added continuous, national indigenous space. This geography is not—or, not necessarily—inconsistent 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 Gilroy’s The
Black Atlantic (1993) to the case of American Indians,
has illuminated this kind of national indigenous geography in his concept of a ‘‘Red Continent.’’ A brief example illustrates: When I once took a group of Portland
State University students to visit Warm Springs Reservation, 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’’ Diné (Navajo), took offense at this: Apparently he thought that ‘‘native space is native space’’ and
that he should, as Native, feel at home (in a way nonIndians might not) in the Warm Springs Nation. What
my Diné student had in mind was akin to the national
indigenous 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 described below, some inconsistency exists between continental 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 developments 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 indigenous 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 insurance benefits with the state Employment Division, his
application 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 arrangement was a violation of Smith’s first-amendment right
to free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court, in its
Employment Division v. Smith opinion, answered no, that
Oregon’s drug law had not been specifically directed
at persecuting Smith’s 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 presume 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 reservations, 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 (including 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
248
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 occupation 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 American 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. Relocation—the goal of moving Indians from reservation to city—was 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 categories. Thus, not surprisingly, the commonsense understanding of even many Indian people is that urban
Indians are somehow less authentically Indian than reservation 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 prevailing 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 claimed
at 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
Imagined geographies
within the United States. These laws are critical for
most urban Indian people not for the specific rights they
recognize—most Indian people do not use eagle feathers
or peyote or produce ‘‘Indian-made’’ artwork for sale—but
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 Indians 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 ancestors 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 Indians
and 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 geographically
national understanding of ‘‘Native’’ or ‘‘Indian’’ is not
consistent politically with the tribally based sovereignty movement—the Indian ‘‘national geographic’’ of
federally recognized tribes—and 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 intellectuals who are advocates of tribal sovereignty on reservation homelands insist on the importance of essentially
‘‘going back to indigenous fundamentals’’ or ‘‘looking inside’’ 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 University 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
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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 doesn’t have to do everything that the old
Indians did in order to have a modern Indian identity.
We don’t have to have every male in the tribe do the
Sun Dance. We need a larger variety of cultural
expression today. I don’t see why Indians can’t be
poets, engineers, songwriters or whatever. I don’t see
why we can’t depart from traditional art forms and
do 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 in
unexpected 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, continental, or hemispheric perspective among many Indian
people. Indian Country Today, the major national American 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 Pacific 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 recently 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 well
as other American Indian organizations and individuals
are active with the world indigenous movement, centered
at this moment on the adoption of the UN Draft Declaration 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 recognized but the mosaic of separate and autonomous Native 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 (actually, only the 48 contiguous states; both Alaska and
Hawai‘i, to say nothing of the Pacific possessions, are excluded) 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 so
far 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 nonIndians. The legal distinction between Indian rights under 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 agency’s
Indian-preference policy in hiring and promotion, in
which the plaintiffs argued that Indian preference violated the prohibitions against racial discrimination in
the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. In Morton v.
Mancari, the Court explained that the preference and
other 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 Indian people or Indian tribes have a stake in federal Indian 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, against
tribal 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
government—involving 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 public sphere or civil society that does not constitute a ra-
250
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 traditional 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 American Indians and, therefore, prohibited by the Trademark
Act. The Patent Office’s 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, appealed 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 composite 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 allies describe this as a fundamental matter of racial justice
in U.S. society—of 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 25 – February 1, 1999.
Imagined geographies
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 mascots—and the issue extends beyond the Redskins 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
others—are important to note. First, the political space
at issue here is not tribal or Native: Rather, this is a matter 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 citizenship—the right to be
Indian and American at the same time in a truly multicultural society (see Ramirez 2004). Second, although this
geography is very different from that of the others examined here in that it is more inclusionary (in a context of
multiculturalism or cultural citizenship) than it is indigenous, 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 organizations 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. Indeed, the ability of Indian people to articulate the very
problem of racism and to struggle against it necessarily
requires a different scale of political geography—the
United States, or ‘‘America’’—than 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 margin. The lesson was learned by Indian leaders, and the National Congress of American Indians organized ‘‘Native
Vote 2004,’’ an effort to ‘‘mobilize the American Indian
and Alaska Native vote’’ (National Congress of American
Indians 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 individual 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 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the suit claimed that
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District 27, which includes Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations (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 opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect
candidates of their choice’’ (Bone Shirt v. Hazeltine, Civ.
01 – 3032, 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 population 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 by
Indian individuals, tribal governments are also in a position to make campaign contributions that may influence
electoral outcomes, particularly when tribes can deploy
substantial war chests on the basis of gaming revenues, 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. citizens—as problematic. Neither 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. wars—even 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.
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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 system seriously would be unwise. State and federal legislatures regularly enact laws, or fail to act, impacting the
rights and welfare of tribes and Indian people—think, 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 lobbying. Clearly, dual citizenship is a matter of recognizing a
hybrid political space in which the simultaneous existence of two nations in the same physical space is naturalized. 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 shattered 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,
Figure 6. The Iraq war; by Marty Two Bulls. Source: Indian Country Today,
March 25, 2003.
252
and the war in Iraq are all subjects of intense debate in
the Indian public sphere—mediated 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 Reservation 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 recipients 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 strike
against the World Trade Towers and the federal
building in Washington my thoughts and feelings
went back generations. In the not too distant past
our relatives were attacked while they slept, ate, or
sat around talking. The attackers thought our relatives to be bad and probably not worth the bullets
shot into them. Our relatives were children, little children, women, elders and protectors. Our relatives
cried and wondered how one human could do this
to another. The past few days, many, if not most of
the people in the Untied States are feeling the
bewilderment and anger that has been passed down
from generation to generation to me. Time will tell
if 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 written repeatedly in his weekly, nationally syndicated column of the long history of terrorism experienced by
Indian people at the hands of the United States. Nevertheless, 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 leaders 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 citizenship—even 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 Native nationhood. Perhaps the most outspoken Native
Imagined geographies
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flicted upon Indigenous peoples by virtue of that status’’
(1999:174). In other words, Porter is concerned that urban 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 law—and perhaps coalition
with other minorities—rather than seeing themselves as
citizens of sovereign nations. Porter correctly recognizes
that the view of racial discrimination as politically actionable 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 nationalities, not races within a multiracial nation, and in the
context of Porter’s article implies that Indian people
might best remedy discrimination not by asserting their
rights as Americans, but by disengaging and returning to
the places—the reservations—where they ‘‘belong.’’14
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.
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 bestowed—or, imposed,
depending on one’s point of view—citizenship on Native
Americans as part of the project to assimilate Indians
and eradicate tribes, not as an exercise in what one
would 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 absolute political allegiance toward [only] one nation can compromise one’s 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 political 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 one’s Indigenous
nation, [and] as the commitment of Indigenous citizens
to their Indigenous nation diminishes, dual citizenship
will have the effect of destroying the Indigenous nation
from within’’ (Porter 1999:169 – 170). Porter is particularly 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-
Conclusion
This narrative of imagined Native geographies suggests
that spatializations are constitutive of subjectivities. To
have or to claim particular rights—that is, to be a political subject of any kind—is necessarily to inhabit particular forms of imagined or achieved—even if unstable
or contested—political space. Furthermore, although the
nation may be a modular form available for pirating,
seeing nationalism or modern state-space as hegemonic
or obligatory worldviews—either among the privileged
or among the subaltern—would be an error. The nation
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 exceptions 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 the
political 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
places—as, it is, of course, in Indian households throughout the United States.
But no matter how prominent the concept of ‘‘indigenous sovereignty’’ is in the scholarly literature and curricula of Native American Studies and in the political
discourses of Indian people nationally, one would be mistaken in assuming that U.S. civil and constitutional
rights—U.S. citizenship rights, legally, politically, and
culturally—are 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 exclusionary
practices 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 retreat 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 black—given that many people of African ancestry
now also claim their Indian ancestry (see, e.g., Brooks
254
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 magazine 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 policy—that is, a policy blind to
racism. As scholars, how could we hope to understand
the situation of Native Americans without asking systematic 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 American studies have largely yet to pose, much less answer,
because of academic fetishizing of individual Indian
‘‘tribes’’ 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 potential 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 entitlement within the United States, but about citizenship
in 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 opponents of tribal sovereignty have asserted that tribal governments or special laws for Indian people are race based
and, therefore, arguably unconstitutional (see, e.g., Citizens 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 discourses, I would argue, is one of the key specificities of
the Native American situation in comparison with other
disempowered groups in the United States.
Imagined geographies
The comparison of Native Americans with (other)
U.S. minorities raises the question of the unique legal
and political status of American Indians. Anthropologist
George Castile (1992), for example, argues that the special legal status of American Indians recognized by the
U.S. government works ideologically to set the outer
limits on what other racial minorities can expect in the
way of justice in the United States. The message in federal law and national Indian policy is this (and here I am
paraphrasing the main line of thought): U.S. society
will countenance unique legal arrangements for Indian
people—call them race based, if you like—but this is only
because Indians are unique in their indigenousness to
the continent, which makes them a special case. The society is even prepared to consider reparations for American Indians, and it has spent many millions of dollars
over the years in settlement of land claims by Indian
tribes. At this writing the United States has an annual
federal budget for Indian affairs of $5.6 billion in the
Department of the Interior and the Indian Health Service
alone (this does not include the funding earmarked for
Indian programs across a range of other federal agencies),
which is equivalent to slightly more than $3,000 per
‘‘federally recognized Indian.’’ But nobody else may expect race-based or any other kind of group-based rights.
The society does all of this for Indians only because
Indians are a special case. That is the ideological subtext
of federal Indian law and policy. In other words, Indian
people are made to function as a model minority, not a
model of how other minorities should pull themselves
up by their own gumption (despite the federal Indian
budget and even tribal gaming, Indian people as a group
are too poor to serve as that kind of model minority), but
a limit model of what other minorities should never expect as a remedy for racism because other minorities are
not ‘‘special cases’’ but are just U.S. citizens ‘‘like everybody else’’ and should expect no more than anybody
else. Indian law and policy do not exist in isolation, and
examining their ideological resonances within the larger
universe of civil rights struggles in the United States can
go a long way toward understanding how the idea of
color blindness is secured as a commonsense category
in the U.S. public sphere. This kind of critical analysis
necessarily takes into its view the geography of Native
American politics.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I wrote this article while I was a visiting
fellow at the Research Institute of Comparative Studies of Race
and Ethnicity (RICSRE) at Stanford University. I thank the institute for its generous support of my research and for creating a
rich intellectual environment that made me think harder and
better. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at a RICSRE
fellows’ forum, at a meeting of the ‘‘How Do Identities Matter?’’
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seminar at Stanford, and at the anthropology department at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. All three audiences
offered valuable comments that I have incorporated into the
article. I also want to thank David Nugent, who read the manuscript carefully and, as always, helped me make it better. Finally,
I want to thank AE editor Virginia Dominguez for very thoughtful suggestions, and staff associate editor Linda Forman for
helping make this article as clear as possible to my readers. I
dedicate this article to Noah Shintaro.
1. The complicating factor regarding indigenous groups in
Alaska is that the U.S. Supreme Court held in Alaska v. Native
Village of Venetie (522 U.S. 520 [1998]) that Indian Country (the
areas over which Native governments might exercise territorial
jurisdiction) was extinguished in Alaska with the enactment of
the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. Thus, even
though 227 of the 556 ‘‘Indian entities’’ recognized by the United
States are found in Alaska, their governments have no territorial
reach (see Brown 2004). The problem of including Native Hawai‘i
in this analysis is that, although the Native Hawaiian sovereignty
movement makes claims that seem reasonably continuous with
those examined in this article (see, e.g., Trask 1999), the U.S.
government has yet to recognize such claims. There exists, at this
writing, only proposed legislation that would provide ‘‘a process
. . . for the Native Hawaiian people to exercise their inherent
rights as a distinct aboriginal, indigenous, native community to
reorganize a Native Hawaiian governing entity’’ (S. 344, the Akaka
Bill; see Kapur 2004).
2. In Mountain View, California, near where I live, young
Latinos without papers daily stand on a major thoroughfare, El
Camino Real, seeking to get picked up by potential employers
driving by and interested in hiring day labor for cash. Workers in
one cluster make themselves visibly available for work (by their
being male, Latino, and apparently idle) as cars pull out of the
local home improvement center parking lot.
3. Much of the violent crime in high-crime areas has always
been generated by the state itself because, as in the case of
Prohibition, it is the criminalization of the drug trade that produces the violence associated with niches in the underground
economy. Although the war on drugs has never done much—and
never could—to lessen the production, sale, or consumption of
drugs, it has done everything to institutionalize violence in minority communities. Incarceration itself, through the brutality
experienced by inmates, acts to reinforce the violent niche of
the drug trade, and it is critical to recognize that it is a particular category of citizen who is subjected to the violence of ‘‘graduated sovereignty’’ in both contexts: young minority men.
4. The interests of the central state in promoting tribal sovereignty of a particular kind has complex causes that include,
among other matters, the role of Indians as a buffer race (see
Conclusion as well as Castile 1992) and the effectiveness of
tribal sovereignty in the neoliberal outsourcing of political responsibility for the welfare of Indian people from the federal government or general, tax-paying citizens to tribal governments and
Indians ‘‘themselves’’ (see Biolsi 2004).
5. Just as bad as such reductions of tribal power through
congressional plenary power is federal court recognition of Congress as the gatekeeper of the very statuses of Indian and tribe.
Congress has the authority to terminate the federal recognition
of tribes, to restore tribes previously terminated, and to recognize tribes that it had not previously recognized.
6. Before 1924, when all American Indians born in the United
States were granted U.S. citizenship by an act of Congress, an
individual Indian person could become a citizen if he or she was
declared competent to manage his or her personal affairs by the
Secretary of the Interior (see Biolsi 1995).
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7. The president also signed an executive order in 1996 on
Indian sacred sites, which requires federal agencies managing
federal lands to find ways to ‘‘accommodate access to and
ceremonial use of Indian sacred sites by Indian religious practitioners; and . . . avoid adversely affecting the physical integrity of
such sacred sites’’ (Clinton 1996).
8. Historical continuity is one of the criteria that the federal
government seems to require persistently of polities that would
claim 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 of
Dawavendewa v. Salt River Project, in which a Hopi claimed that
his 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 to
tribal jurisdiction gave employment preferences to Navajos under
the requirements of Navajo tribal law. Although from the point
of view of the Navajo Nation, this was analogous to federal government regulation of foreign workers under immigration employment law, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
it was federally prohibited discrimination (154 F. 3d 1117).
10. Congress’s first response to Employment Division v. Smith
was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which recognized that ‘‘laws ‘neutral’ toward religion may burden religious
exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious
exercise’’ (107 Stat 1488). The act ‘‘restore[d] the compelling
interest test,’’ which would require that the federal and state
governments ‘‘not substantially burden religious exercise without
compelling justification.’’ This act, however, was overturned by
the Supreme Court in 1997 in City of Boerne v. Flores (521 U.S. 507).
For complex historical reasons, tribal governments now view
Congress, in particular, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs,
chaired at this writing by Republican John McCain (Arizona) and
vice-chaired by Democrat Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), as a reliable ally with a commitment to tribal sovereignty. By contrast,
the Supreme Court is viewed as a more dangerous and unpredictable 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 federal
recognition of specific tribes that have not heretofore enjoyed
such recognition (‘‘unrecognized tribes’’; see Sider 2003).
12. The degree to which this boundary drawing is naturalized
among those who think often and hard about Indian affairs in the
United 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 Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have prohibited the use of ‘‘Redskins’’ 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 civil
rights, on the other hand, see Deloria 1985.
15. Regarding Native American Studies, however, it is important 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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accepted October 13, 2004
final version submitted October 20, 2004
Thomas Biolsi
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
506 Barrows Hall #2570
Berkeley, CA 94720 – 2570
[email protected]
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