The struggle by indigenous groups against state and corporate violence has produced important victories – decades of empirical examples disprove the narrative that natives are rendered ontologically dead

Consider, for example, the most cited work in the fields of settler colonial and indigenous studies: “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a 2006 essay by the late radical Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. In a clever turn of phrase, repeated today like a Feuerbach Thesis for indigenous radicals and scholars, Wolfe described the invasion of indigenous lands as “a structure not an event.” His argument was that settler colonialism — a form of colonialism where colonists come to stay, as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Palestine, and some Pacific Islands — requires the elimination of Native people and societies to access and occupy their land. As Wolfe put it, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism emerged out of the ongoing “History Wars” in Australia, a public, battle-hardened, and career-defining debate over whether Australia’s treatment of Aborigines should be considered genocide. For decades, specialists have squabbled over the numbers massacred at places like Tasman and Slaughterhouse Creek. These debates remain passionate and deeply controversial. They are tied to political battles over land rights, reconciliation, constitutional recognition, mass incarceration, racism, and Aboriginal treaties. But while his contemporaries tried to win the History Wars by appealing to documents, figures, and definitions, Wolfe sought to reframe the debate. He shifted the focus from determining the point at which butcheries become genocide to the “logic” of eliminating indigenous people over centuries and around the world. Settler colonialism, he argued, is a structural phenomenon that plays an ongoing and central role in shaping the modern world. Wolfe’s was a brilliant intervention. In the jargon-riddled field of postcolonial studies, he homed in on the empires, colonies, states, and territories of ongoing settlement and indigenous dispossession. His theory traveled well. For indigenous scholars and activists from the United States to Palestine and Canada to New Zealand, “settler colonialism” became the dominant framework for understanding ongoing Fourth World struggles. But Wolfe’s theory ran into a rather significant problem — reality. If settler societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are structurally dependent upon the elimination of the Native, how do we explain the survival, resilience, and resurgence of that same Native? How do we explain the global emergence of policies of indigenous self-determination, recognition, and land rights in various forms? Are these policies lipstick on the same colonial pig? Are indigenous people permanently cast in cameo roles — their victories small exceptions that prove the rule? How do we explain Standing Rock? Wolfe’s theory, however popular and illuminating, is in a sense, a gussied-up version of the inevitable victory of Cowboys over Indians — a reworking of Victorian ideology as critical theory. The indigenous story unfolding before us demands more. Explaining Standing Rock The Cowboy is supposed to be everything the Indian is not. While the Indian is depicted as a tragic vanquished trope, the Cowboy is a handsome, swaggering, and triumphant trickster. While the Indian retreats into the wild, the Cowboy hunts down his enemies to settle old scores. While the Indian is at best a noble savage and at worst a villain, the Cowboy is a cultural icon and hero. And, while the Indian is a loser, the Cowboy is a winner. At Standing Rock, generations of myth and folk wisdom proved wrong. As Bill McKibben put it in the Guardian, the Standing Rock movement “is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter.” In a moment when the Left is struggling in the face of a globalizing free market and an ascendant right, indigenous victory stands as both a surprising puzzle and an intriguing promise. It begs the rarely considered question: why have indigenous people been able to secure a stunning victory while even the most successful movements of late have faltered? And what can other movements learn from Indians? Various voices have risen to offer answers. Writing in the Nation, Audrea Lim argues that Standing Rock shows a multiracial coalition united against neoliberalism and white supremacy can win in the heartland. McKibben and Naomi Klein tout the power of direct action and praise indigenous organizers for catalyzing nonviolent mass resistance. In the New Yorker, novelist Louise Erdrich suggests that Standing Rock prevailed because it offered the world an emotionally, historically, and environmentally compelling story rooted in faith. “Every time the water protectors showed the fortitude of staying on message and advancing through prayer and ceremony, they gave the rest of the world a template for resistance,” Erdrich concludes. All of these analyses are accurate, but their individual and collective explanations for the Standing Rock victory are insufficient. They fail to ask key questions about the when, where, how, and who. They do not explain what made this movement and moment different. And perhaps most importantly, in their haste to explain a seemingly improbable and episodic victory, these writers miss the remarkable big picture. Outflanking Corporate Globalization Since the 1970s, unions, public goods, social welfare, and other essential building blocks of social democracy have been beaten back by the free market consensus. Yet over these same decades, indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty have gained ground. At the same time workers lost their unions, the environment was winning a union of its own. That union takes the form of indigenous rights. Credit for these often-overlooked indigenous victories belongs to the indigenous movements that unswervingly pushed for similar goals across decades and even centuries: return of indigenous lands, restoration of indigenous sovereignties, and dignity for indigenous peoples. From the time their lands were seized in the nineteenth century and even before, indigenous people came together, forming tribal, intertribal, regional, and national coalitions and organizations. They pressured states and empires built on lands taken from them to recognize their demands. They stood strong against obstinate and repressive governments determined to claim their remaining territories and assimilate their people into the laboring class. They remained resolute. As the Chiefs of the Syilx, Nlaka’pamux, and Secwepemc nations wrote in a petition to then–Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1910: So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. For the accomplishment of this end we and other Indian tribes of this country are now uniting and we ask the help of yourself and government in this fight for our rights. In moments of global political and economic crisis like the 1880s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and now 2010s, state policies toward indigenous people worldwide often shifted. During the 1880s and 1940s, the United States applied assimilationist pressure on indigenous communities, with disastrous consequences. In the 1880s allotment and privatization policies under the Dawes Act of 1887 splintered indigenous lands and communities and brought poverty and political, social, and cultural erosion. In the 1940s, termination policies designed to eliminate tribes and assimilate Native laborers further devastated indigenous communities. Children were taken from their families and placed in abusive residential schools. Workers were displaced from their homelands and dropped into poverty and homelessness in urban ghettos. Indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, were subjected to sexual violence, sterilization, and medical experimentation. Yet the stubborn dream of indigenous resurgence endured. And crises sometimes ushered in marginal progress. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s so-called “Indian New Deal” afforded tribes greater control over their lands and resources and restored a measure of sovereignty and self-determination. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of the Red Power movement, a momentous breakthrough that pushed the US and Canadian states to adopt policies based on recognition instead of assimilation. The contemporaneous Maori Renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Aboriginal land rights movement in Australia won similar gains. These movements often found unlikely allies in neoconservatives, neoliberals, and their predecessors who, beginning in the 1970s and especially from the 1980s onwards, saw indigenous self-determination and autonomy as an opportunity to scale back social welfare spending and reduce indigenous dependence on the government. It was Richard Nixon who inaugurated the current era of indigenous self-determination. He outlined his commitment to the policy in a special message to Congress on July 8, 1970: This, then, must be the goal of any new national policy toward the Indian people: to strengthen the Indian’s sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community. We must assure the Indian that he can assume control of his own life without being separated involuntarily from the tribal group. And we must make it clear that Indians can become independent of Federal control without being cut off from Federal concern and Federal support. At times, support from capital-friendly politicians contained and defanged the revolutionary potential inherent in the restoration of indigenous lands and sovereignties. In some instances, capital interests used self-determination as a facade to restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global political economy. This occurred at times with Indian gaming, Alaska Native Corporations, corporate iwi that manage Treaty of Waitangi settlement money in New Zealand, the Indigenous Land Corporation in Australia, and First Nations natural resource corporations in Canada. More often, however, indigenous people have coopted conservative forces as agents of an indigenous agenda. Across the world, while other Left and progressive movements gained little and often lost ground, indigenous people moved debate and policy in directions favorable to their interests. Self-determination is now the established framework for indigenous policy in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been firmly endorsed and furthered through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In states built upon the dispossession, marginalization, and attempted elimination of indigenous people, these are remarkable victories. At Standing Rock and at proposed pipeline sites across the United States and Canada, neoliberals have been forced to confront indigenous rights — a legal precedent and policy partially of their own creation — when in a prior age they would have plowed through these communities without a moment’s hesitation. Politicians like Nixon did not anticipate that indigenous people would, for instance, be able to parlay the minor restoration of self-governance over expanded acreage in the hinterlands into a transformative political, economic, and cultural movement. Indigenous people, according to common sense, could never win. The future that is now our present would never happen. This condescending assumption turned out to be dead wrong. And it opened up pathways to victory for indigenous people precisely because they had been underestimated. Viewed from a decades-long and global view, indigenous people emerge as cunning, courageous, and even heroic political tricksters. They took their struggle out onto their lands and waters and into the courts. They outsmarted and outflanked politicians by simultaneously pressuring and cozying up to them. In so doing, they won important and lasting concessions bit by bit. In the long run, these concessions and relationships have provided indigenous nations with access to government as well as the political, economic, and legal leverage to deliver devastating blows to the networks and infrastructure of carbon-dependent capitalism, which threaten the future of indigenous communities, lands, and waters and all who share these with them. This dynamic revealed itself most vividly under the administration of Barack Obama, who many Indians adopted and embraced. Obama became one of the only sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he journeyed to Standing Rock in 2014. In September 2016, at the Obama administration’s final Tribal Nations Conference, National Congress of American Indians president Brian Cladoosby honored Obama with a song, blanket, and traditional cedar hat. At the same time, Standing Rock marshaled a global indigenous-led coalition, pressuring Obama to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Help us stop this pipeline. Stick true to your words because you said you had our back,” Standing Rock youth Kendrick Eagle pleaded in a moving message to the president in November. “I believed in you then, and I still believe in you now that you can make this happen.” A similar dynamic is unfolding in Canada, where Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to renew a “nation-to-nation” relationship with First Nations, a position which contradicts his economic agenda and is forcing him to either backpedal or face a Standing Rock North in the forces aligned against a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. But indigenous movements used more than cunning and moral suasion. They also identified pressure points and exploited them. The Dakota Access Pipeline, by its very nature, was a vulnerable target. Trenches cannot be dug where people stand. A pipeline cannot be rerouted without incurring immense expense. Bakken shale oil costs more to refine and transport to market than other forms of crude oil. Investors, bankers, and business partners are risk averse. They don’t like delays, and they don’t like bad headlines. OPEC, not American and Canadian oil barons and politicians, controls the largest share of the global oil market. In short, if your objective is to shore up the Bakken as a viable domestic alternative to OPEC, Dakota Access looks like a risky play. Now, indigenous operatives and their supporters are pushing investors to divest. In recent weeks, they’ve posted a conspicuous billboard in Times Square and unfurled a massive banner at an NFL game, even as they maintain their presence in North Dakota. While President-elect Trump has threatened to approve Dakota Access, divestment, environmental review processes, and proposed rerouting could end up delivering more partial victories for Standing Rock in the coming months. Had the Democrats won in November, the movement could have killed Dakota Access like Keystone XL, delivering a crippling blow to the Bakken oil barons. But to assume Trump’s election guarantees the pipeline will be completed is to again underestimate the indigenous movement. Indians Make the Best Cowboys At Standing Rock, Indians settled old scores. They danced inside and outside the lines as lawyers and outlaws. They took on pipelines and bulldozers where the tools and trappings of the oil industry were most vulnerable. As capital and corporate globalization threatened to squelch progress and conscience, the Indians rode to victory. The water protectors emerged as heroes. Their enemies became villains. For today, it’s victory. For generations it will be remembered and honored. For the movements of the Left, it’s a lesson. Beyond well-worn analyses of the power of action, solidarity, and narrative, Standing Rock points to the necessity to act when and where the networks and infrastructures of capital are most vulnerable, at the level of individual projects as well as entire industries and global systems. It shows that movements must remain resolute in their aims — even if their goals take decades to achieve. Politics is a long game. Standing Rock also reminds us that resistance is key, but that effective resistance is strategic. And strategic resistance is even more impactful when paired with subtle and cunning forms of persuasion. This is especially essential for Indians, who comprise less than 2 percent of the population and so must out-strategize and outsmart the powers aligned against them to win. Lastly, it suggests that indigenous rights are potentially revolutionary, and that indigenous sovereignty is an increasingly powerful instrument against the forces of capital. When the Justice Department halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in October, they committed to look into Free Prior Informed Consent legislation. Such a move would greatly strengthen the rights and leverage of indigenous nations. The Left should see these and other indigenous struggles as its own, incorporating an indigenous platform into the next generation of radical coalitions and writing and thinking about indigenous issues alongside more commonly discussed forms of oppression. Dark times lie ahead for the first people of this land and all who share it with us. President-elect Trump, a former Dakota Access investor, has threatened to approve the pipeline and others like it. He is lining up resources to accelerate energy exploitation, devastating the natural world and pushing the global thermometer higher and higher. Trump’s advisors have called for the privatization of oil, gas, and coal-rich Indian reservations, mirroring policies like the Dawes Act of 1887 and the “Termination” policies of the 1940s and 50s, both designed to destroy tribal communities. But the frontier is turning. In an unforeseen and previously unimaginable twist, it is the Indians who shepherd forward progress. In their right hand, they clutch a long history of unrequited struggle for Native Sovereignty. Among its many chapters is the story of Standing Rock and the rallying cry heard around the world, “Water is Life!” With their left hand, they sow the seeds and point the way forward for the forces of conscience against capital. In politics, it turns out that Indians make the best Cowboys.

Any critique is a false-choice that doesn’t recognize the complexity of indigenous politics. Negotiating the use of the USFG is a key element in indigenous activism. Their colonialism impacts don’t link.

Bruyneel 7 (Kevin BRUYNEEL Politics @ Babson ‘7 The Third Space of Sovereignty p. 217-223)

In writing this book, a question often popped into my mind, the one famously posed by postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak: "Can the subaltern speak?" Spivak's question is not about the vocal cords of the colonized; it is about the colonizer's ear drums; "Can the subaltern speak?" really means, "Are the colonizers deaf?" not ''Are the colonized mute?" This study has demonstrated ways in which the American settler-state and nation have sought, often successfully, to impose temporal and spatial limitations on indigenous political life. In resistance, indigenous political actors speak against and across the boundaries of colonial rule by articulating and fighting for a third space: a space of sovereignty and/or citizenship that is inassimilable to the modern liberal democratic settler-state and nation. The settler polity is often deaf to the indigenous claim for a third space because this claim refuses to accommodate itself to the political choices framed by the imperial binary: assimilation or secession, inside or outside, modern or traditional, and so on. Looked at in this way, indigenous political resistance is refusal of a false choice. Among other things, this book has been an effort to expose to clearer light the presence and politics around the third space, defined by colonial impositions and postcolonial resistances. To conclude the book, I look at how the third space concept could positively reshape the language and therefore the terms of and possibilities for indigenous-settler-society relations in the future, and I also suggest its applicability to the wider political discourse and politics around sovereignty. REFUSING THE FALSE CHOICE: SEEING THE THIRD SPACE In their introduction to the important collection Political1heory and the Rights of Indigenous People, the volume's editors, Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, note that for some of their contributors, such as James Tully as well as Will Kymlicka and J. G. A. Pocock, "there can be no equal standing for indigenous peoples until they are acknowledged as equal sovereigns within a postcolonial constitutional arrangement," while "for others, such as [Iris] Young and [Augie] Flores and [Roger] Maaka, it is the very nature of the sovereign state that must be rethought." 1 While these descriptions flatten the complex views of each of these scholars, there is something worth drawing from the two approaches implied here. The first approach seeks to rethink governance from below by seeking to secure and "arrange" multiple nodes of sovereignty in a multilayered political system wherein settler and indigenous polities can coexist, overlap, and interweave jurisdictions. The second approach, by contrast, rethinks governance from above by arguing that the hegemonic "sovereign state," and thus state sovereignty, is inherently incompatible, and in fact hostile, to the secured existence of indigenous political autonomy. What I find compelling and significant here is the general direction in which these thinkers are going on this issue, which is to see and argue that the viability of political autonomy for indigenous tribes will not come through accommodation of the settler-state's political system, boundaries, and culture. Rather, it will require some degree of meaningful change in the settler-society's institutional organization and ideational approach and the concomitant solidification of a location and form of indigenous sovereignty that is self-determined and thus not dependent on the settlersociety. Missing from these formulations, however, is a precise concept as well as a vocabulary that can pin down the alternatives represented in this "postcolonial arrangement" and/or "rethinking of the sovereign state." I propose that the "third space" may well provide the vocabulary that both captures and helps to constitute a viable, increasingly sought-after location of indigenous postcolonial political autonomy that refuses the choices set out by the settler-society. But cultivating this discourse and seeing its constitutive possibilities is easier said than done, so one of the first steps toward moving in this direction will involve refusing the false choice set out by the settler-state. In a 1998 Law Review article, Julie Cassidy set out and critiqued rhe terms of the false choice presented to those advocating sovereignty for indigenous nations and tribes: "The resolution relating to Aboriginal sovereignty is often mistakenly perceived as only involving two possibilities: (r) acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty and the consequent desrruction of the "occupying" state's sovereignty; or (2) continuation of the past denial of Aboriginal sovereignty. However, it is possible for both entities to enjoy concurrent sovereignty."2 The false choice here is that either indigenous tribes and nations must become sovereign states, thereby destroying the settler-states within which they reside, or their citizens must accept unambiguous inclusion in the settler polity, thereby denying their collective claim to sovereignty. This false choice of either destruction or denial is built on colonialist and statist presumptions. The colonialist presumption is that the settler polity and its institutions represent the ideal of modern political development, while indigenous political society and institutions are, at best, underdeveloped or, at worst, primitive, and thus incapable of real independence in our time. The statist presumption is that legitimate, viable sovereignty can be secured and expressed only through statist institutions, the purview of which is singular and plenary over political space marked by unambiguous boundaries. When articulated in tandem, these colonial-statist presumptions form the foundation of the imposition of colonial rule over indigenous people within liberal democratic settler-states such as the United States. We saw this during and especially after the Civil War when, in their own way, each of the three branches of the American federal government sought to clearly define and secure the reunified boundaries of the American nation-state by domesticating indigenous tribes to them, which included ending the formal process of treaty-making and codifYing U.S. plenary power. During the Progressive era, these colonial-statist imperatives drove U.S. policies that sought to break up what Teddy Roosevelt called the "tribal mass" through various means, including allotment of indigenous territory, the unilateral conferral or imposition of U.S. citizenship on people who were already citizens of their tribes, and the closure of U.S. political boundaries to indigenous people not residing within what America deemed its political space. This imperative persisted in different ways throughout the twentieth century, such as in the midcentury termination policy, and has taken its most notable contemporary form in the antitribal sentiment evident in mainstream American electoral politics, citizen groups' discourse in the civil society, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Over the course of American political history, indigenous sovereignty has been deemed something that needed to be denied-for example, through the codification of U.S. plenary power-and/or something that threatened the destruction of U.S. state sovereignty, as expressed, for instance, by contemporary antitribalism. The enduring presence of colonial ambivalence has maintained the parameters of this false choice, putting indigenous sovereignty and political life in a seemingly impossible colonial bind that has positioned indigenous tribes as "domestic to the United States in a foreign sense." In fact, this ambivalence has served to forestall the complete imposition of any particular thrust in the vacillating history of U.S. Indian policy. The ambivalence inherent to the false choice is also, in part, a product of and opens room for what I have referred to as indigenous postcolonial resistance. This is a resistance that defies American colonial imperatives and seeks to, reframe the boundaries that purport to bind indigenous political life. Like the approaches offered by the scholars noted earlier, Julie Cassidy's alternative of "concurrent sovereignty" refuses the idea that the only options available result in either the destruction of state sovereignty or the denial of indigenous sovereignty. Her refusal echoes the efforts of indigenous political actors and movements discussed in this book. John Ross and his Cherokee colleagues refused the treaty terms that they thought would destroy their nation. In so doing, although they likely lost more than they won in the 1866 treaty negotiations, they nevertheless maintained the unity of the Cherokee nation and in important ways shaped its sovereign purview in the Indian Territory. During the Progressive era, Clinton Rickard and his compatriots, among others, fought to refuse the imposition of U.S. citizenship and the rigid American political boundaries that they saw as inimical to citizenship in their own nations. Their efforts amounted to a defense of the independent political life of those nations, and they resonate to this day in, among other things, the annual traditions enacted at the U.S.- Canadian border that symbolically and physically express an indigenous refusal to abide settler-state boundaries. In the 196os and 1970s, the politics of indigenous refusal gained its greatest notoriety when the Red Power movement refused the false choice of either the assimilatory aims of the civil rights movement or the nationalist separatism of third world anticolonialism. Instead, Red Power fought for a right to self-determination as a proactive challenge to and even "recolonization" of American colonial boundaries, symbolized by the occupation of Alcatraz Island and by Vine Deloria's notion of the modern "tribe as a nation ex- tending in time and occupying space." Deloria's vision was that of tribes whose identity and expression of sovereignty transcend the boundaries of colonial time-that feeling of being "unreal and ahistorical," as he called it-and by so doing are better able to secure and expand the location of indigenous people in postcolonial space, across the boundaries of colonial rule. The political history of indigenous people's refusals of the false choice set out for them indicate a persistent effort both to self-determine what sovereignty means to them and to expose the uncertainty and even impossibility of U.S. sovereignty as a totalizing claim to supreme, legitimate authority. In this regard, indigenous and U.S. or settler claims to sovereignty face the challenge of dealing with the instability of the term itself. Recall Roxanne Doty's point, noted in chapter 1: "The social construction of sovereignty is always in process, and is a never completed project." This process can be seen in the political interchange between American colonial impositions, colonial ambivalence, and indigenous postcolonial resistance, which continually struggle over the precise meaning and purview of the political authority claimed by the settler-state and the many indigenous tribes. While the American perspective cleaves to a statist notion of sovereignty as a source of domination, indigenous politics in its many forms refuses to be contained by the limits of the boundaries of the settler-state and the nation. These refusals demonstrate that indigenous political identity, agency, and autonomy reside in postcolonial time and space, always already across the temporal and spatial boundaries marked out by the settler-state and the colonialist political culture. By articulating this postcolonial fact, indigenous political actors and institutions reveal that settler-state boundaries are just one way-a colonialist way-to map out a people's relationship to time and space in North America, and they can offer the third space of sovereignty as a politically and discursively locatable alternative. In this regard, it is my hope that the idea of the third space also contributes to the general aims pursued by the scholars noted earlier as well as by scholars of indigenous politics such as Tom Biolsi, who builds his contemporary analysis on the premise that "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."3 The "imagining" of alternative "political geographies" is a fundamental part of the effort to see viable alternatives to the statist or colonialist conception of sovereignty. To be sure, this antistatist or anticolonial effort does not exist in a vacuum, relevant only to indigenous political concerns, bur is connected to and possibly even constitutive of the effort to reimagine the role and meaning of sovereignty in the political world generally. In a genealogy of the concept of sovereignty, international relations scholar Jens Bartelson urges us to consider "the question of sovereignty [as a] question of the unthought foundations of our political knowledge and how they relate to the concept of sovereignty, when stripped of all predetermined content and opened to definitional change over time."4 Bartelson is encouraging us to imagine various possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between people, power, and space over time, and, just as important, to take heed of what we lose by not opening ourselves up to at least a consideration of alternatives. For example, what are the implications of allowing hegemonic political space as defined by the state system to remain an "unthought epistemological foundation of sovereignty"? A major political implication, according to Alexander Murphy, is that by constituting and accepting "sovereignty as a territorial ideal ... the modern territorial state has co-opted our spatial imaginations."5 Refusing this co-optation-this false choice-requires a decolonization of our spatial imaginations to reveal forms of political space that cannot simply be mapped onto the boundary lines of the international state system. It is in this regard that indigenous politics can inform and be informed by the reconsiderations of sovereignty occurring more generally because they refuse to say simply Yes or No to state sovereignty, but instead imagine a postcolonial supplemental remapping of sovereign relationships that can include but will not be dictated to or contained by state boundaries. Therefore, I suggest that the third space may also prove of worth as a conceptualization of antistatist autonomy that can be an alternative to the polar imaginaries that either see state sovereignty as the unavoidably exclusive font of legitimate political space or postulate a political world in which we have somehow moved beyond state sovereignty altogether. In accord with this aim of decolonizing our spatial imaginations and thereby drawing out postcolonial supplemental alternatives to state sovereignty, I rurn to the ideas of two contemporary indigenous political voices, one of whortl is looking to reconsider governance from below and one from above. In reconsidering contemporary governance from the ground up, we should consider the decolonization plan proposed by Chief Justice Robert Porter of the Supreme Court of the Sac and Fox nation of Kansas and Missouri. Porter argues for a form of decolonization that I deem postcolonial in nature because it is based on an understanding that "a decolonized relationship does not mean that there is no relationship at all. The United States remains committed by treaty and legal obligations."6 To this end, he proposes specific forms of decolonization that directly reshape the boundaries of U.S.-indigenous legal jurisdiction, such as a change in "federal law to recognize the power of Indian nations over misdemeanors committed by non-Indians within tribal borders."7 1his proposal works across the boundaries in an effort to decolonize them so that instead of representing colonial impositions on indigenous sovereignty they come to represent sites for the fuller expression of tribal sovereignty. Porter's postcolonial decolonization strategy is similar, in a general sense, to what the Oneida nation of New York sought in repurchasing land for their historic reservation: to assert indigenous authority over some components of the overlapping, checkerboarded legal and political jurisdictions of historic indigenous territory. This unilateral assertion of authority would not be seamless or comprehensive, for just as the Oneida were seeking only to be exempt from state and local taxation, Porter's claim is only for tribal jurisdiction over less serious offenses committed in indigenous territory. The intention of both efforts was to express and cultivate a third space of sovereignty, and one cannot fully comprehend either effort without appreciating the role of boundary-crossing here. Nevertheless, as we saw in chapter 6, the Supreme Court's decision in the Oneida case clearly indicates that American colonial impositions continue to seek to defuse and delimit indigenous sovereign expression. Although this was a disappointing decision for the Oneida nation and for indigenous tribes generally, the actions of the Oneida nation that led to this case point to the direction that future expressions of and struggles for indigenous sovereignty may well take across the boundaries of colonial rule.

neoliberalism has controlled society in three ways