Land rights are key to cultural affirmation and reconstruction.

In all three of these thinkers, the rhetoric of sovereignty takes on a decidedly nationalistic cast, but while they all advocate focusing on action at the community level, none of them can adequately be described as purely separatist. Rather, in explicit opposition to this, Warrior calls for Indians to “withdraw without becoming separatists, being willing to reach out for the contradictions within our experience and open ourselves to the pain and the joy of others” (124). Rather than representing an enclave, sovereignty here is the ability to assert oneself renewed—in the presence of others. It is a people’s right to rebuild, its demand to exist and present its gifts to the world. Also key to these thinkers’ rhetorics of sovereignty is an adamant refusal to disassociate culture, identity, and power from the land, and it is precisely this commitment to place that makes the concept of rhetorical sovereignty an empowering device for all forms of community. While most Indians have a special relationship with the land in the form of an actual land base (reservations), this relationship is made truly meaningful by a consistent cultural refusal to interact with that land as private property or purely exploitable resource. Land, culture, and community are inseparable in Indian country, which might explain Native resistance to such policies as the Dawes Allotment Act of a century ago, which tried to transform Indians into bourgeois whites by making them property-holding farmers. This cultural resistance has consistently been made in objection to the way such policies divide Indian communities and disrupt traditional culture with radically individualist ideologies, and whenever I see community activists of whatever stripe—Black, Hmong, working-class, etc.—making arguments on behalf of “our community” in the face of apparently naked economic self-interest, I think those, too, are claims to sovereignty made by different groups. But most important, as voices of the people, scholars like Deloria, Warrior, and Cook-Lynn are asserting themselves as members of sovereign Indian nations, deploying power and seeking recognition at the colonized scene of writing.