Global Societies Journal

Indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada define self-determination as the right to be recognized as an autonomous nation with international status free from paternalistic intervention by settler-state governments. The discourse on Native self-governance suggests that self-determination can be best realized through Native centered practices and logics. Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred, argues that chief among them is the regeneration of Native lifeways and spiritual practices. The work of Andrea Smith cautions us to recognize how the self-determining subject is in itself a racial project wherein the Native subject is always aspiring to be “fully human.” In contrast, Smith argues that true liberation could be realized by negotiating an alternate definition of personhood that is constituted in and through our beings. Alfred theorizes a form of self-determination that is based on the regeneration of religious lifeways, which, I argue, express the ‘radical relationality’ that Smith describes. This article tethers the work of these two scholars to suggest that Native-centered negotiations of self-determination can only be understood through Indigenous ontological logics and religious lifeways.