In 1911, Elaine Goodale Eastman, longtime editor of writing by her husband, Indigenous writer Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), published Yellow Star, a narrative for white family audiences. Both the Eastmans’ already-troubled marriage and their parenting of mixed-race children illuminate the text, as does their history of linked authorial experiences. Anticipating twenty-first-century battles over competing historical narratives about Indigenous peoples in school curricula and public discourse, Yellow Star’s depiction of history-in-the-making underscores intersections between the domestic and the public, as well as between communal lived experience and larger social issues. The text simultaneously claims a potential role for young people’s literature in the cultural construction of historical understanding. Eastman’s main character, Stella/Yellow Star, arrives in a fictional New England village as an orphan of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Determined to continue valuing her Indigenous community, Stella models both a particular brand of assimilation and resistance to its would-be totalizing power. Before returning west to teach children of her tribe, she also articulates an alternative historical voice. Yellow Star draws on Eastman’s background as a white woman involved in assimilationist education. Progressive in her commitment to on-reservation learning rather than boarding schools, Goodale Eastman was nonetheless implicated in white culture’s racial hierarchies.

Self-determination is a central concept for political philosophers. For example, many have appealed to this concept to defend a right of states to restrict immigration. Because it is deeply embedded in our political structures, the principle possesses a kind of default authority and does not usually call for an elaborate defense. In this paper, I will argue that genealogical studies by Adom Getachew, Radhika Mongia, Nandita Sharma, and others help to challenge this default authority. Their counter-histories show that the principle was used to justify, strengthen, and adapt imperial rule in the twentieth century. In particular, the idea that controlling a population's composition through regulating immigration is an essential aspect of self-determination emerged as a response to White anxieties about the migration of negatively racialized groups. Genealogies have not been adequately appreciated as a critical tool within the mainstream of political philosophy. I show that these genealogies have a critical role to play because they unsettle our uncritical attachment to the structures of the nation-state system and raise serious questions about the meaning and emancipatory force of the principle of self-determination.