American Indians and U.S. Laws Assignment | Online Assignment

The response should include three parts: (1) a summary of the each chapter, (2) a connection to other course topics, and (3) a personal response to the reading(I’m Asian American)
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SOVEREIGNTY MATTERS
Locations of Contestation and Possibility in
Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination
edited by
Joanne Barker
University of Nebraska Press • Lincoln and London

For Whom Sovereignty Matters
As a category of scholarship, activism, governance, and cultural work, sovereignty
matters in consequential ways to understanding the political agendas,
strategies, and cultural perspectives of indigenous peoples in the Americas
and the Pacific. This is not to suggest that all indigenous peoples within
these diverse regions share the same understanding of what sovereignty is
or how it matters, nor that all of their concerns and labor can be reduced
to sovereignty as a kind of raison d’être. Rather, following World War II,
sovereignty emerged not as a new but as a particularly valued term within
indigenous discourses to signify a multiplicity of legal and social rights to
political, economic, and cultural self-determination. It was a term around
which social movements formed and political agendas for decolonization and
social justice were articulated. It has come to mark the complexities of global
indigenous efforts to reverse ongoing experiences of colonialism as well as
to signify local efforts at the reclamation of specific territories, resources,
governments, and cultural knowledge and practices.
At the same time and owing much to its proliferation, sovereignty has
become notoriously generalized to stand in for all of the inherent rights of
indigenous peoples. Certainly many take for granted what sovereignty means
and how it is important. As a result sovereignty can be both confused and
confusing, especially as its normalization masks its own ideological origins in
colonial legal-religious discourses as well as the heterogeneity of its contemporary
histories, meanings, and identities for indigenous peoples.
Origins
In “Self-Determination and the Concept of Sovereignty,” Lakota scholar Vine
Deloria, Jr., writes that sovereignty originated as a theological term within
early east Asian and European discourses: “Sovereignty is an ancient idea, once