Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:10:20.010Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Boundaries among Kin: Sovereignty, the Modern Treaty Process, and the Rise of Ethno-Territorial Nationalism among Yukon First Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2012

Paul Nadasdy
Paul Nadasdy*
Affiliation:
Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Cornell University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Canadian government recently concluded a series of land claim and self-government agreements with many First Nations in the Yukon Territory. A result of First Nation claims to land and sovereignty in the region, these modern treaties grant First Nations some real powers of self-governance. They are framed in the idiom of sovereignty, but they also compel First Nation people to accept—in practice if not in theory—a host of Euro-American assumptions about power and governance that are implicit in such a framing. This article focuses on a central premise of the sovereignty concept: territorial jurisdiction. The Yukon agreements carve the Yukon into fourteen distinct First Nation “traditional territories.” Although many assume that these territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory. Thus, the agreements do not simply formalize jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; rather, they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. The powers these agreements confer come in the territorial currency of the modern state, and territorialization processes they engender are transforming First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One significant aspect of this transformation is the emergence of multiple ethno-territorial identities, and corresponding nationalist sentiments. I examine these processes by focusing on two cases of contemporary boundary making among Yukon First Nations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 499 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

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

Agnew, John. 1994. The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory. Review of International Political Economy 1, 1: 53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agnew, John. 2005. Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 2: 437–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albers, Patricia. 1996. Changing Patterns of Ethnicity in the Northeastern Plains, 1780–1870. In Hill, J. D., ed., History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 90–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfred, Taiaiake. 1999. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Anderson, James. 1988. Nationalist Ideology and Territory. In Johnson, R. J., Knight, D., and Kofman, E., eds., Nationalism, Self-Determination and Political Geography. London: Croom Helm, 18–39.Google Scholar
Anderson, James. 1996. The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 133–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Malcolm. 1997. Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In Low, S. and Lawrence-Zúñiga, D., eds., The Anthropology of Space and Place. Oxford: Blackwell, 337–49.Google Scholar
Ardrey, Robert. 1966. The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations. New York: Atheneum.Google Scholar
Asch, Michael. 1999. From Calder to Van der Peet: Aboriginal Rights and Canadian Law, 1973–96. In Havemann, P., ed., Indigenous People's Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. New York: Oxford University Press, 428–46.Google Scholar
Barker, Joanne, ed. 2005. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Biolsi, Thomas. 2005. Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle. American Ethnologist 32, 2: 239–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruyneel, Kevin. 2007. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cattelino, Jessica R. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cheyfitz, Eric. 2000. The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, 2: 248–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Kenneth. 1991. Best Left as Indians: Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territories, 1840–1973. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Easton, Norman. 2001. Intergenerational Differences in Ethnic Identification in a Northern Athapaskan Community. American Review of Canadian Studies 31, 1–2: 105–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Easton, Norman. 2007. King George Got Diarrhea: The Yukon-Alaska Boundary Survey, Bill Rupe, and the Scotty Creek Dineh. Alaska Journal of Anthropology 5, 1: 95–118.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil. 2002. Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neo-Liberal Governmentality. American Ethnologist 29, 4: 981–1002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flanagan, Thomas. 2000. First Nations? Second Thoughts. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, E. E.. 1940. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1981. The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henkel, Heiko and Stirrat, Roderick. 2001. Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular Subjection. In Cooke, B. and Kothari, U., eds., Participation: The New Tyranny? New York: Zed Books, 168–84.Google Scholar
Hill, Jonathan, ed. 1996. History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irlbacher-Fox, Stephanie. 2009. Finding Dahshaa: Self-Government, Social Suffering, and Aboriginal Policy in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Google Scholar
Kluane First Nation. 2003. Kluane First Nation Final Agreement among the Government of Canada and Kluane First Nation and the Government of the Yukon. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada.Google Scholar
Knight, David. 1982. Identity and Territory: Geographical Perspectives on Nationalism and Regionalism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72, 4: 514–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legros, Dominique. 1985. Wealth, Poverty, and Slavery among 19th-Century Tutchone Athapaskans. Research in Economic Anthropology 7: 37–64.Google Scholar
Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7, 1: 24–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClellan, Catharine. 1975. My Old People Say: An Ethnographic Survey of Southern Yukon Territory. 2 vols. Ottawa: National Museum of Man.Google Scholar
McClellan, Catharine. 1992. Before Boundaries: People of Yukon/Alaska. In Borderlands: A Conference on the Alaska-Yukon Border, Whitehorse, Yukon, 2–4 June 1989. Proceedings. Whitehorse: Yukon Historical and Museums Association, 8–34.Google Scholar
Meek, Barbra A. 2010. We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabascan Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Adam. 2010. Ethno-Territoriality and Intervention in Two Bosnian Towns. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar
Murphy, Alexander. 1989. Territorial Policies in Multiethnic States. Geographical Review 79, 4: 410–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, Alexander. 1996. The Sovereign State System as Political-Territorial Ideal: Historical and Contemporary Considerations. In Biersteker, T. J. and Weber, C., eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 81–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Google Scholar
Paasi, Anssi. 1996. Territories, Boundaries, and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Penrose, Jan. 2002. Nations, States, and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought. Nations and Nationalism 8, 3: 277–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prucha, Francis. 1994. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raustiala, Kal. 2009. Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rée, Jonathan. 1992. Internationality. Radical Philosophy 60: 3–11.Google Scholar
Richland, Justin. 2009. Hopi Tradition as Jurisdiction: On the Potentializing Limits of Hopi Sovereignty. Law and Social Inquiry 36, 1: 201–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruggie, John. 1993. Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations. International Organization 47, 1: 139–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sack, Robert. 1986. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sider, Gerald. 1994. Identity as History: Ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis, and Ethnocide in the Southeastern United States. Identities 1, 1: 109–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Anthony. 1979. Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. London: Martin Robertson.Google Scholar
Smith, Anthony. 1981. States and Homelands: The Social and Geopolitical Implications of National Territory. Millenium: Journal of International Studies 10, 3: 187–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soja, Edward. 1971. The Political Organization of Space. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers.Google Scholar
Strang, David. 1996. Contested Sovereignty: The Social Construction of Colonial Imperialism. In Biersteker, T. J. and Weber, C., eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 22–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strayer, Joseph. 1970. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sturtevant, William. 1971. Creek into Seminole. In Leacock, E. and Lurie, N., eds., North American Indians in Historical Perspective. New York: Random House, 92–128.Google Scholar
Thom, Brian. 2009. The Paradox of Boundaries in Coast Salish Territories. Cultural Geographies 16, 2: 179–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaìi Press.Google Scholar
Vandergeest, Peter and Peluso, Nancy. 1995. Territorialization and State Power in Thailand. Theory and Society 24, 3: 385–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watkins, Mel, ed. 1977. Dene Nation: The Colony Within. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Max. 1946. Politics as a Vocation. In Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. W., eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 77–128.Google Scholar
Wilkins, David and Lomawaima, Tsianina. 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar