Social Science and the Study of Indigenous Peoples' Politics: Contributions, Omissions, and Tensions (Oxford University Press)

Chapter on: Political Science and the Study of Indigenous Politics Introduction The discipline of political science does not take indigenous politics seriously. To be sure, there are political scientists who have made important contributions to the study of indigenous politics. However, the bulk of the discipline either does not place indigenous politics in its field of vision or it analyzes it through frameworks that forestall adequate analysis. The worst offender in this regard is American political science, both in the sense of the sub-field that studies the United States and the scholarship and institutions (i.e. political science departments, associations, journals) of the country. A good deal of my discussion will thus focus on American political science, particularly those approaches that do not pay adequate attention to history, to culture, and to inter-disciplinary, theoretical, and comparative approaches to politics. In this sense, while my focus is on the U.S. context, I see the invisibility and distortion of indigenous politics to be a problem one can locate in other liberal-democracies built upon a foundation of settler-colonialism, and across the sub-fields of political science when one locates work build upon narrowly constrained methodological and epistemological presumptions. While there are a number of viable routes one can take to address this matter, I focus on two active and increasingly prevalent topics of study in political science scholarship; that is, first, work on sovereignty and the state and, second, work on race and ethnicity politics. As it concerns both areas, I reveal the predispositions within the pursuit of these topics that shield or distract scholars from seeing the value and importance of indigenous politics. These predispositions are: i) the

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emphasis on sovereignty as an exclusive characteristic of the state; ii) the inability of much of the scholarship on the politics of race and ethnicity to account for or understand the political identity and politics of indigenous people. In my discussions of both areas and predispositions, there will be consistent reference to the role of settler-colonialism as a historical and persistent structuring force in political life. As such, my analysis of these topic areas and their predispositions is, among other things, an effort to refuse the general inattention to settler-colonialism in much of the political science discipline. In short, I claim that taking indigenous politics seriously means taking settler-colonialism seriously, and vice versa. The rest of the chapter will proceed as follows. Next, I offer a sense of the contributions that have been made on this topic, offering a sense of why and how political scientists that do take indigenous politics seriously are at the same time necessarily engaged in a form of resistance to the dominant methodological and epistemological presumptions of the discipline itself. Then, in their own discrete sections, I will examine each of the two topic areas/predispositions that I see to be the sources of the omissions and tensions in the relationship between political science and indigenous politics. Even more importantly, in each section I will also set out ways in which these predispositions can be overcome or approached in order to foster work that will improve the visibility and understanding of indigenous politics as well as help address some of the persistent themes and questions pursued in political science. In so doing, I argue that political science needs to do more than simply add indigenous politics and stir, but rather in each of the fields of study under examination I will consider what is lost in our understanding of the general topic by a lack of attention to indigenous politics and what happens to our grasp of these topics when indigenous politics is accounted for. In other words, I consider what can be gained for our understanding of politics by taking indigenous politics seriously. In

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this way, I seek to show that even political science scholars whose research interests do not and may never directly include indigenous politics have a clear interest in the discipline taking the subject matter seriously, both regarding the substance of the field itself and the possible methodological and epistemological pathways it may open up. To this end, throughout the chapter I build upon the insights accrued to suggest ways in which a legitimate case could be made for situating indigenous politics as its own distinct sub-field of political science, right alongside the subfields with which we are familiar.1 I ask the reader to engage in the thought experiment with me as I proceed. What would an indigenous politics sub-field look like? What would be its methodological and epistemological presumptions? How would it not only serve its specific subject matter, the politics and concerns of indigenous peoples, but also stand as an important contributor to the wider study of politics in the discipline as a whole, offering unique ways to see and assess our political condition?

Contributions and Marginalization One consequence of the relative invisibility of indigenous politics in political science is that interested students and scholars may look first to work in the disciplines of history, anthropology, english literature, or american studies to locate major contributions on this topic, and not without some justification. While a fully informed perspective on indigenous politics requires reading across disciplines, it is the particular if contained contributions of political science that I map out in this section. Just as I set out and will soon discuss at greater length two general predispositions that forestall the production of more and better political science work on indigenous politics and political science work generally, I see three paths of research through

I thank series editors, Dale Turner and Jose Lucero, for suggesting the idea of a sub-field.

which contributions have been made on this account. The three paths are: i) studies of the governance and political history of indigenous nations on their own; ii) studies of the historically entrenched relationship between indigenous politics and the practices of dominant state institutions; and iii) theoretical studies that illuminate the colonialist and anti-indigenous presumptions of dominant political societies. I shall briefly elaborate on each, and do so with reference to some notable scholarly works, but with the caveat that this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. In terms of work that seeks to understand the politics of indigenous nations in their own right, there are two distinct approaches through which political science scholars have made important contributions. The first is scholarship that takes the reader into the structure and practices of indigenous governments themselves, with a particular concern for the contemporary institutions and practices. Such work can take the form of a study dedicated to one tribal government, such as that of the Navajo Nation (Wilkins, 2003). Or this work can be done through a more comparative framework that sets out varying forms of tribal governing structures and arrangements such as that of the Haudenosaunee, Muscogee, Lakota Sioux, Pueblos, and Yakimas and places the development of these governments into their historical context as well as elucidating their contemporary forms (OBrien, 1989). Whether as a single case or a comparative study of indigenous nations, these works take the reader inside tribal governments in a manner that shows, for example, the structure and workings of their legislative, judicial, and executive branches. The second contribution is work that looks at the historical development, political struggles, and defining terms of the political life of an indigenous nation in their effort to define and express sovereignty, most notably. The study of the historical and contemporary struggle over the meaning and expression of native nationalism for the Kahnawake Mohawk is

an example of such work (Alfred, 1995). What one finds in this latter type of work is less a concern with the translatable structure of the indigenous government i.e. the workings of the legislative branch than with the history and contemporary form of the internal and external political struggles of an indigenous nation. In sum, whether examining tribal governments or political struggles more generally, these political science studies offer pathways toward understanding the inner workings of indigenous politics where the agency and structure of indigenous political actors and institutions are the central focus and concern. The second notable direction taken in this regard is that which seeks to shed light on the relationship between indigenous politics and that of the dominant polity. The premise of these works is that learning about indigenous politics in say the United States requires knowing how the American political system works; and vice versa, a full grasp of American politics requires understanding indigenous politics. In this spirit, David Wilkins American Indian Politics and the American Political System is the standard-bearer political science textbook that sets out the fundamental aspects of indigenous politics e.g. the history of U.S. Federal Indian Policy, U.S.Indian treaties, Indian Law, indigenous governments in the context of their relationship to aspects of U.S. politics that one would learn in a standard introductory class, such as the role of political institutions, political participation, political economy, voting, interest group activity, and the media (Wilkins, 2002). This approach to the study of indigenous politics includes political science work done on more specific issues, such as the politics of tribal recognition (Cramer, 2005), the relationship of U.S. jurisprudence and the U.S. Supreme Court to indigenous rights and sovereignty (Norgren and Shattuck, 1991; Wilkins, 1997), and the political effort of indigenous people to express their right to vote in the U.S. political system (McCool et. al., 2007). Overall, what students and scholars can gain from this sort of political science work is

greater insight on both indigenous politics and the dominant political system, if not equally so at least concurrently and necessarily so. As well, critical to these and other works that seek to take indigenous politics in the U.S. context seriously is their direct attention to history, to social and political development, and to the role of culture, discourse, and identity. These more qualitative and contextual approaches often do not get the attention they deserve in more mainstream political science research, especially concerning the United States, but they are key elements in the effort to take indigenous politics seriously. As such, in drawing attention to the importance of indigenous politics, I am also emphasizing the epistemological and methodological undercurrents that can lead one toward or away from indigenous politics. As researchers, we need to pitch widely for the answer to want counts as knowledge that contributes to the study of politics, and therefore expand the approaches we can take to glean the most from this knowledge. In looking at work that is not focused on the U.S. context or that de-centers the United States as a subject of research by offering global or comparative perspectives we tend to find more political science studies that pay serious attention to indigenous politics. At the global level, work that seeks to demonstrate the wide reach and diversity of indigenous voices in the world, on every continent, demonstrates the persistent and yet under-appreciated presence of the politics and concerns of indigenous people as constitutive of the contemporary political condition (Wilmer, 1993). As well, political scientists such as Sheryl Lightfoot are paying increasing and valuable attention to the role of global institutions such as the United Nations, which in 2007 adopted the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Lightfoot, 2010; Lightfoot, 2012). Lightfoot offers keen analysis of the contributions and pitfalls of the effort to address indigenous peoples concerns through international human rights measures. Focusing on specific regions, the increasing importance of indigenous politics in Latin and South America has

drawn the attention of political scientists working in the sub-field of comparative politics. Such political works range from those that compare the contemporary indigenous politics across Latin America (Yashar 2005), to works that draw distinct two-state comparisons of indigenous politics in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia (Van Cott, 2008; Lucero, 2008), and work that focusses in on the politics of indigenous activism and exclusion as practiced in specific countries, such as Mexico and Nicaragua, in the 20th century (Jung, 2008; Hooker, 2005). This is a small sample of an emergent political science literature in comparative politics. Whether it is through a global or comparative lens, a focus on regions in which indigenous politics has taken increasingly center stage, or where, indeed is constitutive of the discourse and politics of national identity, an emerging collection of political scientists are finding that one cannot seriously analyze these regions or countries without taking account of indigenous politics. From another angle, one could also see this emergent work as representing one of the bases for the composition of a distinct indigenous politics sub-field. In this case, rather than indigenous politics being pursued within the field of comparative politics, here comparative politics would be pursued in the field of indigenous studies, offering the unique perspectives and approaches that go with the study of indigenous peoples politics. In particular, note for consideration that both in terms of the methodological approaches often utilizing historical, ethnographic, qualitative, and/or discursive analysis and the rise of indigenous politics globally, one can begin to see the epistemological and methodological rationale for a sub-field in which indigenous politics offers a wide-ranging and distinct way to assess politics, and to do political science. The third pathway of political science work on indigenous politics is that which seeks to uncover the theoretical roots and dynamics of indigenous and settler polities, with an eye to their inter-relationship, conflicts, historical development, and contemporary form. This work offers a

critical perspective on settler-colonial domination and/or opens up ways to see and further imagine anti-colonial politics and indigenous sovereignty as active features of political life in contexts such as the United States and Canada. Scholarship in this mode has sought to re-assess Western constitutionalism and the role of diversity in political systems by means of the mutually constitutive relationship between settler and indigenous political systems and viewpoints (Tully, 1995). It has also offered us a way to re-assess the political identity and legacy of major political figures, such as U.S. President Andrew Jackson, by examining their views of and relationship to indigenous people (Rogin, 1991). In general, this approach makes us see the dominant polity in new ways through a theoretical study of the relationship to indigenous politics. It is telling that the two scholars cited here, James Tully and Michael Rogin, are from the political theory subfield. Over the last three to four decades one finds in political theory increasing efforts to take indigenous politics seriously as a way to re-think persistent political science questions about the meaning and politics of citizenship, group and minority rights, diversity, multiculturalism, political identity, sovereignty, and state-civil society relations. Some of the most well regarded, even field defining, political theorists along with Tully and Rogin, also Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Iris Marion Young, and J.G.A. Pocock, to name but a few have in some form given serious scholarly attention to indigenous politics (see Kymlicka 1996; Taylor 1994; Young 2000; Pocock 2000). In one sense, I take this to be a function of the theoretical enterprise, in its most ideal form, which is to critically challenge and open up political categories, to place them in historical and cultural context that widens the epistemological terrain one can study, and to engage in normative arguments about how we can re-imagine the concepts, contour, and practices of political life. The precise critiques, approaches, and arguments made by these scholars vary widely, but the thread that connects these works and that fosters more serious

attention to indigenous politics is an openness to interpretive fluidity and thus a resistance to seeing and analyzing the world through contained, fixed categories that may be thereby more amenable to quantitative analysis but lack appreciation for the historical, and cultural dynamics one draws out from qualitative and interpretive analysis. The methodological presumption here is a tendency to see politics as historically and culturally situated, and thus potentially re-situated, which thereby widens ones frame of epistemological vision for seeing what could and should count as matters pertinent to politics. This not to say that political theory is above reproach on the topic of indigenous politics, far from it. In fact, an increasingly vital direction in political theory scholarship seeks to confront the dominant settler politys presumptions and practices by examining the theoretical and traditional roots and practices of indigenous nations, often in ways that much of political theory does not appreciate, cannot, or will not, see. Out of this engagement scholars of this type of work draw out resources for the generation of an indigenous manifesto or critical indigenous philosophy that serve to critique what some forms of indigenous governance have become under the influence of colonial domination, as well seeking to resist the possibly well meaning, but still inadequate, liberal or multicultural solutions, such as those that invoke the politics of recognition, to address indigenous political demands for rights and sovereignty (Alfred, 1999; Turner, 2006; Coulthard, 2007). In these and similar works, the reader is compelled to learn and grapple with the theoretical logics of settler and indigenous political systems, as considered on their own and in persistent encounter with one another. In all, while political theory has more work to do in the area of indigenous politics, the field also offers critical approaches and resources that demonstrate a level of seriousness towards the subject matter, and also could serve as key contributors to an indigenous politics sub-field itself.

While this mapping of the approaches to the study of indigenous politics is by no means exhaustive, it does point to a fair number of strong, important works by political science scholars that tend to share a methodological preference for more multi-method, interdisciplinary, and interpretive approaches, those which thereby presume, seek out, and generate a more inclusive epistemological terrain upon which to work. In fact, one could peruse just this list of scholarly work and wonder if there really is a problem with political science not taking indigenous politics seriously. But the issue here is not the quality of a good deal of the work that is produced, even while it is still necessary to make students and scholars aware of this scholarship and those who resist the dominant strains in the discipline in producing it. Rather, the problem is that even the best work on indigenous politics is still too often deemed to be tangential to and thus marginalized within the discipline of political science. This marginal status is especially the case in U.S. political science. A symbol and constituent of this marginalization can be seen in the fact that the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, which averages 6000 attendees per year with a program comprising 800 panels, allocates an average of two panels per year, and sometimes just one, for the topic of indigenous politics 2 out of 800! I argue that that there is a direct reason for this: For the most part, political scientists in and concerned with the United States do not deem the concerns and claims of indigenous people to be important enough and the indigenous population large enough to matter when it comes to the issues commonly pursued in the discipline; those related to power, interest, governance, electoral politics and policy-making. The study of indigenous politics is thus viewed as a topic that could be pursued if one wishes but that does not need to be studied in order to sufficiently grasp the politics of, in this case, the United States, and this view prevails to a slightly lesser extent in other settler polities as well. As well, importantly, the approaches scholars utilize to address indigenous

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politics are not usually the more quantitative, behaviorist approaches that tend to be rewarded and recognized in the disciplines flagship and supporting institutions (ie. departments, journals, foundations). While I clearly disagree with how the discipline views and approaches the study of indigenous politics, as well as the disciplines methodological and epistemological major presumptions, the way to address and amend the perception that indigenous politics is an exotic or unique topic but not a central one is to do more than simply assert its importance or make the case about the strength of the political science scholarship that has been produced. As I have experienced, such pleas either fall on deaf ears or receive polite, patronizing smiles and nods. What needs to be done is to directly address the relationship and importance of indigenous politics to some of the major topics in the discipline so as to demonstrate what is missing from these discussions when indigenous politics is left out and how an understanding of indigenous politics opens up new ways of seeing and grappling with long familiar institutions, discourses, and practices. I turn next to this endeavor, beginning with two staples of the political science diet, sovereignty and the state.

Sovereignty, the State and the Constitutive Absence of Indigenous Politics Over three and a half million indigenous people reside within the internationally recognized boundaries of the United States and Canada. Many are citizens of indigenous political communities, such as the over 560 federally recognized tribes in the United States and 630 First Nations in Canada as well as those indigenous nations that are not federally recognized, such as the Hawaiian nation. While there is a great deal of cultural and social diversity among these many tribes and nations, they share the general political experience of being colonized by and living under the rule of a Euroamerican settler-state. A major consequence of settler-colonialism

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is that the concept of sovereignty as asserted and practiced by indigenous nations has been too often and to no small extent frustrated, suppressed and/or transformed politically by the imposition of a primarily European-conceptualized notion of sovereignty. Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation from 1992-2003, gave voice to this frustration: There is a lot of talk about sovereignty, and the talk has become very stale. It is mostly about whether the United States or Canada will allow Indigenous peoples to control their own lands, lives, and destinies. Sovereignty is nothing more than the ability of a group of people to make their own decisions and control their own lives (Yazzie, 2000: 46). The political talk about indigenous sovereignty is stale because of the prevailing view in Euro-american political culture and in political science that, as a normative matter, sovereignty should be understood as embedded in and expressed through the state. However, indigenous political communities, on the whole, do not see the state as the ideal location and norm for securing their sovereignty. Pragmatically, of course, it is hard to imagine one thousand indigenous states in North America, but there is a deeper historical and ideological reason why indigenous tribes and nations do not tend to idealize the state. The fundamental premise of an indigenous claim to sovereignty is that indigenous tribes and nations have inherent sovereignty. This is the idea that indigenous sovereignty is not granted by the settler-state, but rather reflects the self-governing power that indigenous communities expressed prior to the founding of the U.S. and Canadian states and continue to assert, to different degrees, since the imposition of settler-colonialism. In the view of many indigenous people, the right to this sovereign power has never been extinguished, even as, for example, U.S. and Canadian state sovereignty grew out of the colonial imposition of Euroamerican society and institutions in North America. In settler contexts, then, the statist ideal for securing sovereignty should also be seen as a colonial ideal for imposing and maintaining political authority over people and territory. 12

In much of political science, sovereignty is understood and analyzed upon the presumption that the concept is intimately and inescapably bound to the concept of the state. And this reflects the methodological and epistemological presumptions that tend to forestall serious engagement of indigenous politics by much of the discipline, particularly those of the discipline that views the state and sovereignty as fixed variables, to the point of becoming reified, in the political science calculus. As a consequence, the claims by indigenous nations and tribes for sovereignty are either ignored as improper expressions of sovereignty or are measured against the meaning and function of state sovereignty that is presumed to be sovereigntys defining norm. Given that the concept of sovereignty is central to indigenous peoples politics and that political science is generally unable or unwilling to see and/or take these claims seriously, this statist presumption significantly contributes to the invisibility and distortion of indigenous politics in the discipline. The predisposition toward state sovereignty creates a concomitant tendency in political science research to conceive of the state (the so-called sovereign state) as a singular actor and/or to focus on the dominant nations state activities and institutions at the expense of forms of governance and politics that do not fit this model, such as that of tribal governments or indigenous politics that do not seek assimilation to the political life of the dominant state and national institutions, discourses, and practices. And here we see the epistemological consequences of the disciplines predominant attention to fixed political categories, for this constrained vision limits the knowledge one may deem to be the legitimate basis for a political science study, and thereby limit and exclude important topics from being studies at all. I define this absence as a constitutive absence, rather than a benign oversight, because the inattentiveness to or even disavowal of indigenous politics on this matter helps produce a more coherent conceptual understanding of sovereignty in the discipline than actually

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exists if one takes a closer look at the historical and conceptual components of this central political concept. For Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively, sovereignty was the absolute power of a single leader over the people of a demarcated space, and this sovereignty was constrained only by natural law (Bodin, 1992; Hobbes, 1968). Contemporaneously, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) formally acknowledged a system of sovereign states (Spruyt, 1994: 26), marking the emergence of states as the primary form of legitimate political space. Westphalia signifies the start of the modern state system that has become the generally accepted view of the meaning of sovereignty: states expect noninterference from other states in their domestic governing structures, and outside the boundaries of any single state is an anarchic or ostensibly natural political realm within which states conflict, balance and/or ally with each other (see Holsti, 1991). In contrast to the absolutism of Bodin and Hobbes and to the Westphalian systemic view, in the 18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered up a notion of popular sovereignty in the form of the general will of the people as the prevailing authority in a political space (Rousseau, 1987). Around this same time, forms of constitutional sovereignty also emerged that stood to accommodate polities ruled by the one, the few or the many (Deudney, 1996). But of the three general forms of sovereignty noted here absolute, constitutional and popular the form which one is hard pressed to locate today is that of popular sovereignty. The devaluation of popular sovereignty has occurred because sovereignty has become, according to Alexander Wendt, a social identity, and as such, both a property of states and of international society. Its core is a notion of political authority as lying exclusively in hands of spatially differentiated states, in which sense it is an attribute of the state implying territorial property rights (Wendt, 1994: 388). The devaluation of, or outright inattention to,

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indigenous sovereignty a form of popular sovereignty in its own right has occurred in roughly the same manner. In the article referenced above, Wendt does not make reference to indigenous politics, but what he unintentionally points to are three key components of political life that are defined and shaped through the constitutive absence of indigenous sovereignty in political science analyses of the politics of sovereignty and the state. The three components are the social identity, political authority, and territorial property rights of Western settler-colonial states. The social identity here is that of the modern state as the exclusive and preeminent form of sovereignty, one which thereby affirms the social identity of the people, often the dominant nation and/or majority society, which is most identified with and ostensibly secured by the state. As a consequence, the form of political authority that is necessarily avowed in the hegemonic construction of this statist social and national identity is that which is distinctly hierarchical and often militaristic, with a zero-sum view of power and power relations. And finally, the production of a statist social identity with hierarchical political authority serves to legitimate the central function of state sovereignty, which is to secure the exclusive authority over and claim to the property of a bounded territory. In all, then, for political science the concepts of state and sovereignty have coconstituted the identity and properties of one another to such a degree that their linkage seems essential, necessary, and inextricable, and thereby the inability or unwillingness to account for other possible sovereign expressions should be seen as constitutive or structured absences, not just benign ones. Georg Srenson concedes this point in his generally excellent assessment of the limitations in how the main schools of international relations understand sovereignty, in the course of which he nevertheless asserts that not any association can become sovereign . . . only a certain type of player [can], the one we call a state (Srenson, 2001: 147). Thus, beyond the

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general exclusion of the study of indigenous sovereignty from political science in itself a serious and constitutive lacunae the claim about who or what gets to count as a player points to the deeper matter of the epistemological presumptions of most political science work on sovereignty and the state. In this regard, as is often the case, methodology and epistemology are mutually constitutive, as our ability to see is often shaped by how we look, and what we understand ourselves to be looking for. Here we get a better sense about what is lost in the study of sovereignty and the state as a consequence of a lack of attentiveness to indigenous politics, and also what could be gained if this subject were approached seriously. The loss comes in the absence of a richer understanding of the forms and functions of identity, power, and political space/territory that can be and are conceived and practiced through non-statist expressions of sovereignty. A loss also exists in the limitations that political scientists place upon how they purport to know and then analyze these concepts as they are constituted and at work in political life. These losses are thus epistemological, first and foremost, but also point to the underlying questions of methodology. With this in mind, the pertinent question then becomes: By taking indigenous politics seriously what can political scientists see that they could not see before in their studies of sovereignty and the state? This question is meant not only for those who might consider doing research on the subject of indigenous politics but just as much for those political scientists who might consider taking some time to read up on it for how it might reveal new insights and opportunities for their primary field of study. The answer to the question goes well beyond seeing indigenous politics for itself, important as this is. Rather, the answers, in their plurality, come via widening the epistemological terrain upon which scholars can do work in areas such as social and political identity, power, and space as it relates to the politics of sovereignty in any context in which

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indigenous peoples politics have been practiced historically and in the contemporary era, and this accounts for the majority of the countries on earth. As well, the potential methodological and epistemological windfalls garnered from the serious pursuit of indigenous politics on the matter of sovereignty add more important planks to the foundation of a subfield that could be dedicated to indigenous politics, one which could prove of beneficial both to its specific subject matter and to the discipline in general. To re-cast Srensons notion of the sovereign player, once one is open to a wider sense of who can, has, and/or continues to be such a player, then our sense and definition of the game itself is meaningfully transformed, such as envisioning a wider playing field, or terrain, upon which the politics of sovereignty is played out. If, as Wendt argues, sovereignty has become a social identity what happens when we see that identity as not only constructed, claimed and practiced by states, but also by indigenous tribes and nations in non-statist forms, historically and in the contemporary era? The first thing one might see is that political authority and the power implicated by the claim to the social identity of sovereignty is not the exclusive function of states, and as such the meaning of sovereign authority and power must be seen as practiced in diverse ways and forms. Indigenous nations all around the world engage in their own sovereign self-governing practices, and have for centuries, without becoming states. To mark out different expressions of sovereign power and political authority in indigenous politics is not to claim that these are necessarily better expressions, normatively or politically, than those of state sovereignty. All that is required to establish the pertinence for political science is to show that indigenous sovereignty has been and remains an active practice all around the globe. Now, to be sure, indigenous sovereign practices work to greater and often lesser effect for indigenous selfgovernance in comparison to and as a consequence of the dominance of settler-states. But this

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fact, especially the expressions of indigenous sovereignty limited by settler-states, does not disprove the claim that the social identity and political authority of indigenous sovereignty are active, observable expressions of sovereignty, just as the fact that there are weaker states, sometimes very weak, does not disprove the pertinence of state sovereignty as an active practice. And those weaker states do not lose their status in the category of players in the international system of sovereign states due to their weakness vis a vis stronger states. Similarly, the truth of the matter regarding many of the limitations and deprivations imposed on indigenous sovereignty by settler-colonial practices, institutions, and discourses does not thereby deprive indigenous nations, by my account, of their social identity as sovereign players. And these impositions are also not the only story of indigenous sovereignty one can tell, as I shall show with a contemporary example of politics of sovereignty. By opening up the possibilities for the construction of the social identity of sovereignty one thereby opens up questions for how we define and understand the concept and practices of sovereign political authority. For example, in July 2010 the world ranked Iroquois National Lacrosse team was unable to travel to the World Lacrosse Championships in England because the team-members insisted on utilizing their Haudenausanee (Iroquois) passports to travel abroad. The U.S. federal government initially refused to recognize the players passports, but then the U.S. State Department relented after a great deal of negative publicity about the teams situation as well as a consequence of political pressure applied by supporters of the teams claim to their own national passports. However, the British government never relented on the issue, and thus the team could not compete. Throughout this standoff, the lacrosse team refused to acquire and utilize U.S. passports for which they were eligible, and which the U.S. State Department promised to expedite. If a political scientist were to analyze this conflict from a

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perspective that sees states as the exclusive players in the game of sovereignty, she or he might simply explain this incident as one in which one sovereign state, the United States, declared a and exception to the usual rules on passports whereas another sovereign state, the British Government, did not do so, and that would be the end of story as sovereignty is concerned. However, the statist perspective offers us only limited and therefore inadequate insight regarding what occurred here. First off, the Iroquois lacrosse teams use of their passports was not a onetime political stunt, but rather a reflection of the standard and long-held sovereign practices of the Iroquois nations. As Peter Jemison of the Seneca nation stated, For 30 years our people have been able to travel on that passport (Haygood, July 14, 2010). While Jemison is referring to the utilization of passport documentation specifically, citizens of the Iroquois nations have engaged in the consistent, if occasionally interrupted, practice of freely passing across the borders demarcating U.S. and British and then Canadian formal state territory since at least as far back as the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation. In short, the events of July 2010 concerning the lacrosse team were nothing new as it concerns the politics of sovereignty in settler-state contexts. This was another instance of sovereign practices and conflicts over the social identity and political space of sovereignty that have been going on for centuries. Secondly, the Iroquois teams refusal to take up the option of acquiring and using U.S. passports was itself a claim for and expression of sovereignty. These athletes were engaging in the active politics of sovereignty under the premise that sovereignty is not reified into one form or player, such as that of the state, but is rather a perpetually constructed, practiced and contested power that occurs at state and non-state levels of governance. In this case, of course, the teams efforts did not lead them to being able to travel and compete, but that is the nature of politics, not every action and effort leads to the desired result; there are winners and losers in most political contests. However,

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what one sees through a perspective that takes indigenous politics seriously is an active site of political contest in which the terms of the social identity, political authority, and territory are neither singularly nor exclusively defined and practiced by states. As it concerns the wider theoretical assessments of sovereignty, indigenous politics reveals the historical and contemporary gaps, fissures, and fluidity in the meaning and practice of state sovereignty itself. In political science, one can locate such general insights about state sovereignty in work by scholars in the sub-field of critical international relations, and here the interpretive methodological approach is key to the insights generated. By taking a constructivist approach to state sovereignty, these scholars reveal the fluidity and contested nature of the territorial boundaries, political authority, and social identity of state sovereignty. (for example, see Ashley, 1988; Bartelson, 1995; and Biersteker and Weber eds, 1996). Emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, the critical IR approach has been an important innovation in the political science literature on sovereignty, even while many of the larger insights garnered in these works point to issues and tensions in the international state system that indigenous nations have been well aware of and engaged with for centuries. Thus, the seemingly innovative and relatively recent (late 20th century) perspective that this sub-field has sought to bring to political science is the standard historical reality and contemporary practice for indigenous nations, people, and politics. To say this is not to devalue the contributions of critical international relations, and in fact one author has deftly and at length directly addressed the relationship between indigenous politics and the logic of the international state system (Beier, 2005). Rather, I make this contrast so as to place the emphasis back on what is lost when political science does not take indigenous politics seriously, and also what could have been gained all along if indigenous politics as a field of study had its own legitimate standing as a distinct field of study. One simply cannot take

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indigenous politics seriously and also see the state as an exclusive and/or reified, non-constructed player in the game of sovereignty politics. For the most part, critical international relations theorists are conceptual allies in this regard, but work in this field and farther afield would be able to see even more of what it is looking for by engagement with, or at least knowledge of, the politics of the people and nations who have been aware of and politically challenging and dealing with these realities for many centuries now. Finally, the other important insight in this regard that can be gained from taking indigenous politics seriously concerns the state itself, regardless of ones view of sovereignty. The history of colonial encounter, domination, conflict and anti-colonial resistance is central to the origins, development, and contemporary structural and cultural forms of a vast number of modern states. And yet, to take the example of the United States that clearly falls in this category, one has to stretch ones neck in various crooks and nannies of American politics scholarship to find work that recognizes and addresses in some way the constitutive role of indigenous politics and U.S.-indigenous relations to the form and practices of the U.S. state. I would go far as to say that to not see the role of settler-colonialism in the production of all or parts of such modern states as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Russia, and China is to not see these states at all. In this regard, the noted contributions in the fields of global and comparative politics indicate that there are a number of scholars who concur with this insight, and pursue their work upon this presumption. However, the political science scholars who study these and other pertinent states and yet do not in some way account for or acknowledge the politics of indigenous people in the history and status of these state forms are blinding themselves to the more complicated story of state development, institutions, and practices that can be told here. They are engaging the production of a

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constitutive absence that may produce a more stable and thus easily analyzable set of categories for engaging in political science research on the modern state, but they do so to the detriment of a wider, more complicated, and likely more accurate vision of one of the disciplines central concepts. To point out the absence of indigenous politics from much of the political science work on sovereignty and the state is not to claim that it is the only such absence. As Michael Hanchard has noted, none of the now canonical texts or textbooks in political theory, comparative politics, or international relationsdevotes attention to the conjuncture of race, state, and political theory (Hanchard, 2010: 516). Gender and sexuality would also be included in this list of constitutive absences. My aim here, rather, is to make the case that indigenous politics must be placed within the field of topics that political science needs to take seriously if the discipline is to be able to gain a more comprehensive grasp on some of its most fundamental categories, such as sovereignty and the state. In this regard, serious scholarly engagement with indigenous sovereignty does not just challenge the status of state sovereignty but serves to reveal and challenge subtending presumptions about the social identity implied with the state, the forms of political authority accepted as the norm, and what we come to accept as sovereign territory and the meaning of political space and a peoples relationship to it. Drawing out these potential contributions of the study of indigenous politics further suggests that an indigenous politics subfield would be well positioned to take on important intellectual and political challenges with an eye to generating its own categories and approaches rather than relying on amending or adapting to those of the presently constituted fields. In short, there may need to be a sovereignty movement on behalf of the study of indigenous politics itself, instead of the effort to carve out an approved, but likely still marginalized, location as a special or sub-category within the present

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fields of the discipline. Next, I turn to look at another way in which the constitutive absence of indigenous politics manifests itself in political science, that being in scholarship on race and ethnicity in the United States.

Race, Ethnicity, and the (Un)-Bracketing Indigeneity: Seeing the Colonial Arrangements of White Supremacy When I was running for president in 1992, I didn't know much about the American Indian condition except that we had a significant but very small population of Indians in my home state and that my grandmother was one-quarter Cherokee. U.S. President Bill Clinton. July 9, 1998. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton. October 8, 1998 These two quotations offer ways to trouble and challenge our understanding of the identity and background of then President Bill Clinton, and by correlation that of the American nation itself as it concerns the notions of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. But only one of these public statements garnered substantial attention. The first quotation, from Clinton himself, constructs him as 1/16th Cherokee, to deploy the language, logic, and calculations of the controversial notion of blood quantum. Depending upon whether his claim is true and if Clintons grandmother was a registered member of the Cherokee Roll in early 20th Century, the 42nd President of the United States may be eligible to register as a member and thus citizen of the Cherokee nation. The second quotation, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning American author Toni Morrison, comes from her short essay in the New Yorker magazine published in the midst of the Republican Partys effort to impeach Clinton in the late 1990s. One of Morrisons central claims was that Clintons upbringing and image Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds23

and-junk-food-loving as well as the impeachment investigations his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched made him someone to whom African-American men could relate very well (Morrison, 1998). While the context of this piece and its point is more complex than often given credit, this essay became known for one thing; having Toni Morrison probably the most famous living African-American author refer to Bill Clinton as our first black president. While Morrisons statement that Clinton was, figuratively, the countrys first black president received a great deal of public attention as well as some scholarly analysis, Clintons own claim to a possibly verifiable indigenous identity has been virtually ignored, including by political science scholars interested in race and ethnicity politics in the United States. I juxtapose these quotations and the response to them to illustrate the dynamics and discourse of U.S. race and ethnicity politics and the context within which political scholars concerned with this topic do their work. As with the previous section on sovereignty, the aim here is not to chastise scholars for excluding indigenous politics or demand that race and ethnicity scholarship simply add indigenous politics to the mix. Rather, it is important to see the deeper roots of the issue, ask again what is lost by not addressing indigenous politics on this topic, what can be gained by taking the subject-matter seriously, and whether attention to indigeneity as distinct from race and ethnicity might require that it serve as an important pillar of a hypothesized indigenous politics sub-field. Overall, my claim is that in political science work on race and ethnicity politics, indigenous peoples politics are often erased, bracketed, or fundamentally misunderstood. This is especially the case in the study of race and ethnicity in the United States, which for good reason is a popular and central site of such research given the nations history of institutionalized

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slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and its self-proclaimed status and self-image as a nation of immigrants. Special attention to political science scholarship on the U.S. context is appropriate because I see such work to be particularly deficient on the matter of indigenous politics. I find at least two main reasons for this. First, in general, political scientists studying the U.S. context often presumptively exclude indigenous politics from discussion in studies of race and ethnicity politics because these scholars do not know how to categorize indigenous people politically. Second, if indigenous peoples politics are discussed and analyzed, their identity and claims are often too easily positioned as analogous to other non-dominant groups such as immigrants and their descendants and African slaves and their descendents in a manner that does not account for the distinctive history and, in particular, nation-based identities and claims for sovereignty that define much of indigenous politics. As it concerns categorization, political scientists tend to bracket or erase indigenous politics from their studies because of an uncertainty about where and how indigenous people fit in relation to what is often termed the racial hierarchy of the United States. The U.S. racial hierarchy refers to the ranking of racial and ethnic groups from the top to the bottom according to the relative status of groups as a consequence of the historical and contemporary racialized institutions, practices, and structures of the nation. For scholarly purposes, to invoke the racial hierarchy is not to affirm it or claim it be just or at least one would hope not. Rather, it is utilized as a heuristic device for revealing the structure, durability, and changes in American racial and ethnic relations. The fundamental structure and most durable feature of the hierarchy is the white-black binary, locating white Americans at the top of the hierarchy and Black Americans at the bottom of it, with all other racial and ethnic groups located in-between these two poles of the binary. As has been well documented and analyzed by scholars of U.S. race and

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ethnicity politics, this framing white-black binary constructs a more fluid role for those inbetween groups primarily immigrant and their descendants who, as the argument goes, generally seek to distance themselves from the lower racial status of African Americans and move towards the highest status of white Americans. As this binary-framed argument about the hierarchy proceeds, these in-between groups seek to move up the racial hierarchy by assimilating to the category and identity of whiteness so as to improve their cultural, economic, and political status in the United States. However, while this framework profoundly shapes how numerous scholars understand and analyze race and ethnicity politics as presently constructed, it does not offer a way to grasp the central dynamics, claims, and trajectories of indigenous politics in the United States. In contrast to the trajectory of seeking to move up the racial hierarchy so as to reap the social, political, and economic wages of whiteness (Du Bois, 1999), indigenous political identity can be seen as, in fact, threatened by the whitening effects of such U.S. policies as blood quantum that seek to dissipate and thus undermine the status of indigenous people as citizens of their tribes and nations. To their credit, most scholars of race and ethnicity politics recognize that the racial hierarchy framework is not a good fit for addressing indigenous politics, and this is the reason that they tend to bracket or not address the topic. While no scholar can cover every topic or group in such studies, the prevalence of the white-black binary/racial hierarchy framework and its inapplicability to indigenous politics returns me to the question of what is lost, both as it concerns the study of race and ethnicity politics and of indigenous peoples politics. There is a traceable background to the construction and perpetuation of the U.S. racial hierarchy framework. Since well before the U.S. founding and then for a century beyond it the institution of slavery shaped and defined the identities of and relationship between white

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Americans and Black Americans, just as it served as a fundamental constituent of the political, economic, and cultural creation and maintenance of the U.S. nation itself. The parameters shaping the meaning of race in the United States are thus defined in great part by white-black relations, this is true. However, the relationship between white Americans (and before them Europeans) and indigenous people is as fundamental to the political, economic, and cultural creation and maintenance of the U.S. nation and state. Yet the dynamics, consequences, and sometimes even the very existence of this relationship between the settler society and indigenous people are often lost in studies built upon the racial hierarchy framework. I argue that the reason indigenous people and indigenous politics are lost or left out is because they are, indeed, so fundamental to the story of the U.S. nation and state, not because they are marginal to it. As political theorist Steven Johnston put it with regards to the foundation and development of the United States: without ethnic cleansing, no country; without slavery, no independence (Johnston, 2009: 265). That is, to understand U.S. politics at its origins and beyond one must be able to account for the role of the dispossession of indigenous lands and concomitant removal of and violence toward indigenous people as well as the role of slave labor and concomitant kidnapping of and violence toward African people and their descendents. Without these practices there would never have been a United States, or at least not in anything like the form we know it today. This brings us back to the suggestion of an indigenous politics sub-field, one which would attend to indigeneity as neither race nor ethnicity, but as it concerns its own distinct history and construction, and with a concern for its distinct political implications, possibilities, and challenges. The creation of a sub-field in which indigeneity stands as a fundamental and dedicated pillar of study may be the best way to construct an approach that can then engage the

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historical construction, distinctions, and relationship among race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, rather than troubling with how the latter does or does not fit in relation to the other two as the presumptive categories under examination. This way of constructing, analyzing, and re-thinking categories of political identity, and of group-based hierarchies, would likely garner much-needed historical, cultural, and interpretive insight on the constitutive relationship between identity, institutions, and practices in contexts such as the United States. From an indigenous studies perspective, a major contribution in this regard would to provide the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual tools for allowing scholars to see that countries such as the United States are settler colonial polities in structure, in practice, and in discourse. While events and practices such as the dispossession of indigenous territory, slavery of African people and their descendent, and the extreme violence towards indigenous people and Black americans from prior to the founding through and far beyond the nations first century are not strongly contested as historical facts, it is their connection to U.S. political institutions, practices, and discourses in the form we know it today or even in their development in the past century that tends to stop scholars short, or leave them at a loss, in their analyses. To assert, as I do, that politics scholars should account for indigenous politics in some way is not to say that every study must involve the historical and/or contemporary experience and issues of indigenous people, but it is to say that a scholar should be able to account for why this is not the case if he or she moves to bracket or exclude indigenous politics from the analysis. In this general regard, I echo the imperative that Rogers Smith and Desmond King set out concerning U.S. race politics: Analysts should inquire whether the activities of institutions and actors chiefly concerned either to protect or erode white supremacist arrangements help to account for the behavior and changes in the nations political institutions, coalitions and contests they study. Any choice not to consider racial dimensions requires explicit justification (Smith and King, 2005: 78).

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Smith and Kings claim here is that given the deeply constitutive racial history of the United States, political scientists studying such topics as bureaucracy and the Congress should presume that the battles for and/or against white supremacy are woven into the development and practices of these and other features of U.S. governance, or if not be clear as to why not. Their effort is thus to demand that political scientists not leave out or bracket race in their studies, and I am very sympathetic with this aim. However, in so doing these two noted scholars of race and ethnicity politics themselves essentially bracket the role of indigenous peoples politics and U.S./indigenous relations in their effort to argue for the importance of white supremacy in the history, development, and contemporary status of U.S. politics. What is lost here is a more comprehensive and thus more accurate understanding of the sources, dynamics, and consequences of white supremacist arrangements and resistances to them in U.S. politics. As it concerns settler political societies, such as the United States, you cannot understand white supremacy in all its complexity without addressing the constitutive role of settler colonialism, and thus the loss goes beyond the bracketing, absence, or insufficient attention to indigenous politics itself. The loss comes in the deficiencies in understanding the source and workings of white supremacy as a whole. And while analyzing U.S. history through the categories of race and ethnicity may allow us to see quite a bit, if left there it will blind or at best seriously shield our ability to see and assess the development and role of settler colonialism itself and its constitutive relationship to white supremacy. Smith and King are aware of the tensions in applying their racial framework on to other forms of domination and exclusion, such as those concerning indigenous people in the United States, and thus they allow that these could reasonably be viewed as relatively autonomous racial orders from that of the black-white binary defined racial hierarchy (Smith and King,

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2005: 81). Unintentionally, to be sure, their reference to autonomous racial orders suggests that a distinct approach to the topic may well be necessary. They point being that one does indigeneity a disservice by collapsing it into race and ethnicity. It is to their credit that they acknowledge the complexity of the diverse group relations and forms of domination even while maintaining their claim to the primary political role of their version of the racial order. However, despite their allowance in this regard or maybe because of it, they still presume that settler colonialism and indigenous politics has not and does not served to critically shape the white supremacist arrangements that have so defined the history and present of the United States. To be fair, as mentioned earlier, this absence or bracketing of indigenous politics in race and ethnicity political science scholarship is itself a reflection of the absence or bracketing of indigenous people from much of American public and political discourse. But I am being fair only in so far as to explain this absence/bracketing, not to excuse it. It is the task of scholars to refuse to abide such public silences, especially when the silence at issue is contributing to a lack or loss of understanding of defining structures and practices such as white supremacy. And I suggest that this particular silence does serve to perpetuate the logic and practices of white supremacist arrangements. To illustrate what I mean by this, and also to show what can be gained from taking indigenous politics seriously, I return to the quotations and question regarding Bill Clintons identity. As noted, in 1998 Clinton defined himself as part Cherokee and the claim had almost no resonance in U.S. public and political discourse, and then Toni Morrison referred to Clinton as the first black President and it became one of the most famous statements of the impeachment years, if not of the entire decade. With regards to these quotations, to understand the arrangements of white supremacy to their fullest extent, or at least to begin on that path, one

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would have to be able to account for these claims and their differential responses in relationship to one another, not separately or with the question of Clintons indigeneity bracketed from or subsumed within the black-white binary framework. It is the wider relationality that matters here, because it can lead to insight about how settler-colonialism and slavery, and more specifically indigenous territorial dispossession, the reservation system, the Black Codes and Jim Crow, all represent important components of white supremacist practices, structures, and logics in the United States. In this regard, as anthropologist and american studies scholar J. Khaulani Kauanui observes with regards to Clintons claim to Cherokee ancestry, despite this assertion, Clinton continues to be known as a former president who is white, not the first American Indian president of the United States.... However, if Clinton had instead declared that his grandmother had been one-fourth African-American, he would not still be considered a white man (Kauanui, 2008: 17). In Clintons case, the issue was not him being seen as AfricanAmerican as defined by ancestry, but rather Morrisons reference to him being our first black President concerned the dynamics driving the politics of impeachment. As political theorist George Shulman reads it, Morrison was making a distinctly political point: The Right reads him as Black.... The Right does not directly call Clinton a black president, but its language, linking immorality to sexual appetite and loss of control, does bespeak the racial subtext that Morrison names outright (Shulman, 2008: 219, 220). Now, one might argue that in the pairing of Shulmans apt take on Morrisons claim about Clintons politicized blackness and Kauanuis claim about Clintons persistent whiteness we see how blackness represents the lowest status on the racial hierarchy whereas indigeneity has moved up the racial hierarchy, further whitening itself to the point that Clinton asserting a Cherokee ancestry does not threaten or dilute his racial status as a white American and also subtly indicates an elevation of the racial

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status of indigenous people in the U.S. racial hierarchy. But this reading tells only half the story, or maybe even just one-third, or even less than that. When one takes indigenous politics seriously, the inattention to Clintons claim about his ancestry is read not as a sign of the assimilatory capacity of indigenous identity in a black-white binary racial hierarchy, but rather as a marker of the success of settler colonialism as a structure and practice that disavows the dispossession of and violence towards indigenous people that was critical to the U.S. founding, and which remains critical to the development and maintenance of the United States to our time. In this sense, Clintons persistent whiteness in the context of his assertion of indigenous ancestry is a practice of colonial genocide as one critical component of U.S. white supremacy. Through this lens, indigenous people are not garnering the wages of whiteness but rather dealing with the settler-colonial effort to dismantle, dissipate, and destroy indigenous national communities and claims to sovereignty. It is for this reason that I refer to an explanation constructed through the black-white racial hierarchy to be telling one-third of the story, at best. For, while I find Shulmans reading of Morrison to be acute and correct, the next question I ask is what can be gained for the study of the complicated dynamics of race and ethnicity politics in the United States by the serious accounting of indigenous politics in, as it is before us in this example, the issue of Clintons identity. The first answer is that we start thinking in terms of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, in a relational sense. We find this approach in the way Kauanui analyzes the functioning of white supremacy in this example, as she states: Dominant notions regarding American Indians and African Americans relate both to each other and to assertions of whiteness that stem from American colonization, enslavement, and other forms of domination. In contradistinction to policies affecting American Indians, blood served an opposite purpose for African Americans one that reflects their disenfranchisement, exclusion,

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and lack of access to U.S. national and state government (Kauanui, 2008: 17). Here, then, through the lens of a scholar who takes indigenous politics seriously, we see U.S. white supremacy in a more expansive and complex form than is commonly defined and applied in scholarship on race and ethnicity politics. In her analysis, there is not a pre-eminent structuring binary at work that frames the racial hierarchy, be it a black-white or indigenous-white binary. In fact, Kauanui defines the dynamic here as a continental triangulation of black, white and Indian racialization (Kauanui, 2008: 16). Triangulation is thus an alternative mode through which to make visible the complex workings of U.S. white supremacy, one which has been applied to other forms of racial and ethnic political dynamics in the United States (see Jean Kim, 1999). Whether one finds triangulation a valuable construct here, or offers another alternative mode of analysis, what is gained from refusing to bracket indigenous politics or subsume it in an inappropriate framework is the development of an enhanced, multi-dimensional capacity to see the practices of and resistances to white supremacy. However, this requires seeing these as settler colonial practices not as practices of racism alone, as conventionally understood, and in this regard the meaning of white supremacy, as well as the meaning of whiteness itself, takes on a different form when indigeneity and colonialism are understood in their own right, and then brought into the wider analysis. In this regard, stepping outside or beyond the binary requires taking seriously the role of colonization in the construction of white supremacys arrangements and practices, and upon that basis then accounting for how this serves to transform our definition and grasp of these arrangements and practices. To be clear, my recommendation to political science scholars interested in race and ethnicity is not to abandon the black-white binary. Rather - in a similar vein as the imperative set out by Smith and King - to urge those engaged in studies through this framework to account for

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whether indigeneity is also meaningfully constitutive of the story they seek to tell. If this is not the case, then the binary framework may well be rather appropriate. But if the politics of race and ethnicity does implicate indigeneity one is then compelled to seek out alternative frameworks out of which can be gained first, a clear grasp of the politics and history of indigenous peoples and indigeneity, and second, a multi-dimensional and relational view of, in this case, the arrangements, structures, and practices of white supremacy and settler colonialism in the United States. In this regard, it might have seemed odd for me to have started this section with quotations concerning former President Bill Clinton. After all, with persistent and pressing concerns to indigenous people such as the status of tribal sovereignty, land claims, the socioeconomic conditions on many reservations, and the survival of indigenous languages and traditions, to name just a few of many important matters, one could well see Clintons identity as a rather marginal matter to indigenous politics. And I would agree; it is marginal relative to other matters of more central concern to indigenous people on a day to day basis. But the problem with the invisibility and misunderstanding of indigenous politics in political science is much less with those scholars who are already doing serious work in this area those who are already aware of and possibly researching some aspect of the more pressing concerns just mentioned. Rather, the fundamental problem resides with the vast majority of scholars in the discipline who do not even see indigenous politics in the first place, unless it is directly and distinctly marked out as such. Thus, I began with and elaborated upon the Clinton example to offer an analytical entry point accessible to any political scientist interested in American politics. My focus here has been on scholars of race and ethnicity politics because they are potential allies in taking indigenous politics seriously, and would probably not object to the

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notion that a greater accounting of indigenous politics would shed more analytical light on U.S. white supremacy. But the Clinton example also directs us to scholars of the presidency, of U.S. political institutions, and electoral politics, just to name three popular topics in the U.S. politics that one might not see as needing to be attentive to indigenous politics. The Clinton example shows that there are many entry points to this topic, places where one may not recognize the loss accrued by not taking indigenous politics seriously or the clear gains that are possible by reimagining the wider research topic to which one is most committed. As such, there are two important results of re-imagining of U.S. politics by a serious appreciation of indigenous politics: First, one can see U.S. white supremacy in its persistent and multi-dimensional forms; and second, this multi-dimensionality thereby reveals the inescapable fact that settler-colonialism shapes U.S. politics in varied and fundamental ways. Throughout the chapter, I have suggested that one concrete way for political science to take indigenous politics seriously is to consider the idea of indigenous politics as its own subfield, positioned alongside international relations, comparative politics, political theory, and nation-based sub-fields such as American politics. Important concepts in political science such as the state, sovereignty, authority, power governance, citizenship, race, ethnicity, political identity, political culture, inequality, and white supremacy can be seen in a new light through the perspective of indigenous studies. This is a product not only of the subject matter of indigenous peoples politics, histories, concerns, and claims, but also of the methodological priority in indigenous studies on understanding the situated context situated in history, in culture, in discourse, in practices that bring to life the complex and diverse politics of indigenous people and nations. The diversity of the structures and practices of the thousands of indigenous governments around the world in and of itself could form the basis for a self-standing indigenous

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politics sub-field that would keep scholars busy for decades. As well, and critically, an indigenous politics sub-field would position settler colonialism as another fundamental pillar of study; understanding and analyzing it as an ideology, a practice, a discourse, a structure, and distinct mode of historical and political development and domination that has shaped our world in fundamental ways, and continues to do so. To conclude the chapter, then, my final words will be on the matter of settler-colonialism.

Conclusion To state that political science should take indigenous politics seriously is necessarily to say that the scholars in this discipline need to take settler-colonialism seriously in contexts such as the United States. Through the general topics of sovereignty and race and ethnicity politics in this chapter I have sought to show that taking indigenous politics and settler-colonialism seriously is not a matter of having to veer off ones primary research agenda necessarily, but rather it requires engaging the task that scholars are supposed to pursue: Asking un-addressed and new questions; challenging conventions, shibboleths, and under-examined presumptions about the way the world works; and seeking to carve out new terrain of possibilities for future researchers. And carving this new terrain might involve re-thinking the way we organize and structure the discipline of political science itself. We have seen this happen in different ways with the increasing, although still insufficient, attention to race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class in political science. More generally, the inability of political scientists to see, accept, and/or directly address the settler colonial roots of many of the worlds most influential and prosperous countries means that, at a fundamental level, they misapprehend a fundamental component of political societies such as the United States and Canada, to name just two. My plea

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here is not to simply add indigenous politics to what presently exists and hope for the best, but rather to compel those of us in the discipline of political science to see if with regards to the particular topics that we study be it U.S. politics, Canadian politics, political theory, international relations, comparative politics etc indigenous politics and settler colonialism plays a meaningful role in the shape, structure, and practices which discovers in their research. Meaningful here does not meaning necessarily most important or definitive although one would likely be surprised how often this turns out to be the case but rather sufficiently important that ones understanding of the subject matter under examination would be noticeably re-structured by taking indigenous politics seriously; re-structured in a way that offers a more compelling, comprehensive, and possible unique grasp on the general topic pursued. And, to take that next step, we could even ask ourselves if what we study is a U.S. politics, comparative politics, or political theory topic in name only, a product of the institutional constraints of how we structure the discipline, and as such what would it mean to build a more appropriate institutional home for such work. Still, even the answer to all these questions is no, a sincere effort to compel the next generation of political science scholars to address them at all as a necessary matter of consideration in developing ones research would be a step, if not a leap, beyond where political science has been on this issue since the founding of the discipline over a century ago.

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