Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T08:51:07.397Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Colonial America Today: U.S. Empire and the Political Status of Native American Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2019

J. M. Bacon  and
Matthew Norton
J. M. Bacon
Affiliation:
Grinnell College
Matthew Norton*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article systematically assesses U.S.-Native relations today and their historical foundations in light of a narrow, empirical definition of colonial empire. Examining three core elements of colonial empire—the formal impairment of sovereignty, the intensive practical impairment of sovereignty through practices of governance and administration, and the continuing otherness of the dominated and dominant groups—we compare contemporary U.S.-Native political relations to canonical instances of formal colonial indirect rule empires. Based on this analysis, we argue that the United States today is a paradigmatic case of formal colonial empire in the narrow, traditional sense, one that should be better integrated into the comparative, historical, and sociological study of such formal empires. Furthermore, this prominent contemporary case stands against the idea that the era of formal colonial empire is over.

Keywords

empirecolonialismindirect rulesettler colonialismU.S. empireU.S. colonialismNative Americanssociology of lawcomparative studies of empirecontemporary colonialism
Type
Trust
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 301 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Julia and Steinmetz, George. 2015. Sovereignty and Sociology: From State Theory to Theories of Empire. Political Power and Social Theory 28: 269–85.Google Scholar
Alfred, Gerald R. 1999. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Asch, Michael. 2014. On Being Here to Stay: Treaties and Aboriginal Rights in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Bacevic, Andrew J. 2009. American Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bacon, J. M. 2017. ‘A Lot of Catching Up’: Knowledge Gaps and Emotions in the Development of a Tactical Collective Identity among Students Participating in Solidarity with the Winnemem Wintu. Settler Colonial Studies 7, 4: 441–55.Google Scholar
Ball, Milner S. 2000. John Marshall and Indian Nations in the Beginning and Now. John Marshall Law Review 33, 4: 1183–95.Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sukanya. 2010. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Banner, Stuart. 2007. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge: Belknap.Google Scholar
Blumm, Michael C. 2011. Why Aboriginal Title Is a Fee Simple Absolute. Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, 4: 975–93.Google Scholar
Bradford, William. 2005. Beyond Reparations: An American Indian Theory of Justice. Ohio State Law Journal 66, 1: 1–104.Google Scholar
Brown, Nicholas A. and Kanouse, Sarah E.. 2015. Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Bruyneel, Kevin. 2007. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, Donald. 1934. The Principles of Native Administration and Their Application. Lagos: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Canby, William C. 2009. American Indian Law in a Nutshell. 5th ed. St. Paul: West.Google Scholar
Champagne, Duane. 2015. Indigeneity or Ethnicity: A Choice that Could Harm Tribal Identities. Indian Country Today, 22 Mar.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 2012. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Felix S. 2006. On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Cook, Samuel R. 1996. Ronald Reagan's Indian Policy in Retrospect. Policy Studies Journal 24, 1: 11–26.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cornell, Stephen and Kalt, Joseph P.. 2010. American Indian Self-Determination: The Political Economy of a Successful Policy. Joint Occasional Papers on Native Affairs, No. 1. Tucson: Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.Google Scholar
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Crowder, Michael. 1964. Indirect Rule: French and British Style. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 34, 3: 197–205.Google Scholar
Duthu, N. Bruce. 1994. Implicit Divestiture of Tribal Powers: Locating Legitimate Sources of Authority in Indian Country. American Indian Law Review 19, 2: 353–402.Google Scholar
Echo-Hawk, Walter R. 2010. In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum.Google Scholar
Evans, Laura. 2011. Power from Powerlessness: Tribal Governments, Institutional Niches, and American Federalism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fasseur, Cees. 1997. Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia. In Gates, E. N., ed., Critical Race Theory: Essays on the Social Construction and Reproduction of “Race.” New York: Garland Publishing, 83–108.Google Scholar
Fisher, Michael H. 1998. Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System 1764–1857. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Frickey, Philip P. 1993. Marshalling Past and Present: Colonialism, Constitutionalism, and Interpretation in Federal Indian Law. Harvard Law Review 107, 2: 381–440.Google Scholar
Getches, David H. 1996. Conquering the Cultural Frontier: The New Subjectivism of the Supreme Court in Indian Law. California Law Review 84, 6: 1573–655.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2015. Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, 1: 52–72.Google Scholar
Go, Julian. 2004. ‘Racism’ and Colonialism: Meanings of Difference and Ruling Practices in America's Pacific Empire. Qualitative Sociology 27, 1: 35–58.Google Scholar
Go, Julian. 2008. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Go, Julian. 2011. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Alyosha. 2014. Formations of United States Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hauptman, Laurence M. 1986. Africa View: John Collier, the British Colonial Service and American Indian Policy, 1933–1945. Historian 48, 3: 359–74.Google Scholar
Henson, Eric C., ed. 2008. The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination: The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ibhawoh, Bonny. 2013. Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire's Court. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. The American Empire: The Burden. New York Times, 5 Jan. At: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/the-american-empire-the-burden.html (accessed 3 Dec. 2018).Google Scholar
Johnson, Tadd M. and Hamilton, James. 1995. Self-Governance for Indian Tribes: From Paternalism to Empowerment. Connecticut Law Review 27, 4: 1251–80.Google Scholar
Kades, Eric. 2001. History and Interpretation of the Great Case of Johnson v. M'Intosh. Law and History Review 19, 1: 67–116.Google Scholar
Left Quarter Collective. 2009. White Supremacist Constitution of the U.S. Empire-State: A Short Conceptual Look at the Long First Century. Political Power and Social Theory 20: 167–200.Google Scholar
Lugard, Frederick 1892. British East Africa and Uganda: A Historical Record Compiled from Captain Lugard's and other Reports, with Map. London: Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
Lugard, Frederick D. 1906. Political Memoranda: Revision of Instruction to Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political & Administrative, 1913–1918. London: Frank Cass & Co.Google Scholar
Lugard, Frederick. D. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. 2010. Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maier, Charles S. 2006. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2012. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Myers, Jason Conard. 2008. Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power. University Rochester Press.Google Scholar
Nadasdy, Paul. 2012. Boundaries among Kin: Sovereignty, the Modern Treaty Process, and the Rise of Ethno-Territorial Nationalism among Yukon First Nations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 3: 499–532.Google Scholar
Nathan, Manfred. 1928. Empire Government. London: George Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Norgaard, Kari Marie. 2014. The Politics of Fire and the Social Impacts of Fire Exclusion on the Klamath. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 36, 1: 77–97.Google Scholar
Porter, Bernard. 2006. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Robert B. 1999. Demise of the Ongwehoweh and the Rise of the Native Americans: Redressing the Genocidal Act of Forcing American Citizenship upon Indigenous Peoples. The Categories of Difference. Harvard Blackletter Law Journal 15: 107–84.Google Scholar
Prucha, Francis Paul. 1997. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Richard. 1990. Text and Testimony in the Tribunal de Première Instance, Dakar, during the Early Twentieth Century. Journal of African History 31, 3: 447–63.Google Scholar
Robertson, Dwanna L. 2013. A Necessary Evil: Framing an American Indian Legal Identity. American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 37, 4: 115–39.Google Scholar
Skibine, Alex Tallchief. 2008. Tribal Sovereign Interests beyond the Reservation Borders. Lewis & Clark Law Review 12, 4: 1003–46.Google Scholar
Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik. 2012. Marked by Fire: Anishinaabe Articulations of Nationhood in Treaty Making with the United States and Canada. American Indian Quarterly. 36, 2: 119–49.Google Scholar
Steele, Michalyn. 2016. Plenary Power, Political Questions, and Sovereignty in Indian Affairs. UCLA Law Review 63: 666–710.Google Scholar
Steinman, Erich. 2012. Settler Colonial Power and the American Indian Sovereignty Movement: Forms of Domination, Strategies of Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 117, 4: 1073–130.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George. 2013. Introduction. In Steinmetz, G., ed., Sociology & Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George. 2014. The Sociology of Empires, Colonies, and Postcolonialism. Annual Review of Sociology 40, 1: 77–103.Google Scholar
Strommer, Geoffrey D. and Osborne, Stephen D.. 2014. The History, Status, and Future of Tribal Self-Governance under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. American Indian Law Review 39, 1: 1–75.Google Scholar
Tignor, Robert L. 1971. Colonial Chiefs in Chiefless Societies. Journal of Modern African Studies 9, 3: 339–59.Google Scholar
Tjiook-Liem, Patricia. 2011. The Loa Joe Djin-Case. In Dieleman, M., Koning, J., and Post, P., eds., Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change. Leiden: Brill, 117–38.Google Scholar
United States Commission on Civil Rights. 2003. A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.Google Scholar
Vandenbosch, Amry. 1933. The Dutch East Indies, Its Government, Problems, and Politics. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.Google Scholar
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Walker, Francis Amasa. 1874. The Indian Question. Boston: J. R. Osgood.Google Scholar
Washburn, Kevin K. 2017. Trump Proposes Hundreds of Millions in Cuts to Federal Appropriations for Indian Country. Indian Country Today. At: https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/trump-proposes-hundreds-millions-cuts-federal-appropriations-indian-country/ (accessed 24 Oct. 2017).Google Scholar
Wilkins, David E. and Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. 2002. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Wilkins, David E. and Wilkins, Shelly Hulse. 2017. Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Robert A. 1997. Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Walter L. 1980. United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism. Journal of American History 66, 4: 810–31.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4: 387–409.Google Scholar