A Symposium on David Myer Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought

Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.