Negotiating Ojibwe Treaty Rights: Toward a Critical Geopolitics of State-Tribal Relations
Abstract
Social and political conflict appear to be the rule rather than the exception in contemporary relations among American Indians, their non-Indian neighbors, and the governments of the states in which they reside. Conflicts between states and tribes occur over issues such as land claims, casino gaming, taxation, environmental pollution regulation, zoning, water rights, hazardous waste disposal, mining, the protection of sacred places, and on-and off-reservation hunting and fishing treaty rights. Although the specific details of state-tribal relations vary from state to state and from tribe to tribe, a common thread underlies and structures the contours of these relations and conflicts. What ties these different conflicts together is that they center on the question of political control over geographical space. They revolve around the question of who has a legitimate claim to legal and political authority over reservation space and off-reservation spaces that are now situated as part of a state’s territory. Such conflicts are fundamentally about differing constructions and interpretations of the spatial boundaries and spatial extent of state-tribal political relations. Understanding the political construction of the geographies of state-tribal relations requires an archaeology or excavation of the historically constituted assumptions about the spatial organization of political power as it emerged in Western societies and as it has been imposed by the Western colonial project. What is being questioned and contested in these conflicts are Euro-American, state-centric conceptions of exclusive territorial sovereignty that deny and erase or seek to limit autonomous Indigenous geographies. Alternatively, American Indian (Indigenous) conceptions of political space assume an autonomous-sovereign space for Native peoples within the spatial confines of contemporary states. Moreover, American Indians and other Indigenous peoples challenge the exclusive territorial definition of the state.