Indigenous Sovereignty and Nationhood

Sovereignty is a particularly significant concept within indigenous discourses that signifies the multiplicities of legal and social rights to cultural, economic, and political self-governance. The utility of the concept is central to the organization of social movements, and the articulation of political agendas for decolonization and social justice.¹ Sovereignty complicates global indigenous efforts that challenge ongoing experiences of colonialism while re-claiming cultural knowledge, practices, resources, and specific territories. Indigenous struggles involving indigenous/local/rural modes of resistances are characterized by their relationality and embeddedness within multiple fields of power.² Some of these fields of power, in addition to the sovereign state, include the global neoliberal agenda that marginalizes indigenous lives and voices, and the academic knowledge production steeped in European epistemologies that reduces indigenous ecological living as peripheral.