An Institutional Invisibility

Kennan Ferguson’s larger argument holds true not just within political science at large but especially within the study of American politics and, what is more, in the study of American political development. Aside from Laura Evans’ searching essay in the American Political Science Review in 2011 and a few other works,^{Footnote 3} the American politics literature has been woefully silent on how tribal governments engage in advocacy and coalition-building, or how Native American individuals and communities navigate turbulent and dangerous currents of ethnic and racial politics.

The two more historical communities in the American politics subfield—American political development and social policy, respectively—have done no better. APD’s emphasis upon the nation state (and upon state-building as “development”) marginalizes indigenous governance even as it neglects settler colonial legacies of violence.^{Footnote 4} Important works by Kevin Bruyneel, Paul Frymer, and Carol Nackenoff notwithstanding,^{Footnote 5} APD’s deep neglect of Native American political development before, during, and after European colonization reinforces Ferguson’s larger point about the erasures of political science. Similarly, a large literature in social policy actively (and appropriately) grapples with issues ranging from racial politics, the carceral state, immigration and rights, the oppression and liberation of non-heterosexual identities and bodies, to race, ethnicity and health policy. Yet despite the living presence of five million Native Americans, next to nothing is written on Native American politics and policy within political science today.

On Sovereignty and Survivance

On other matters, I think Ferguson’s summary misleads. He writes that “Indigenous patterns of thought overtly oppose many of the values that the United States presumes: the legitimacy of majoritarian democracy, the primary of sovereignty, the rule of law, and especially American exceptionalism.” On majoritarian democracy and American exceptionalism, I am in agreement. Not so on the rule of law, which as concept and as metaphor was and remains an animating force in many Native American communities. Native Americans have invested heavily in legal expertise and in building a federal bar. So too, Native Americans performed skillful innovations in early American petitioning, using complaints to administrative agencies to induce different parties to monitor treaty compliance. The idea of shaping, reshaping and surveilling treaty agreements—honoring a different rule of law, that of alliances sanctioned by indigenous sovereignty—suffuses so much of Native American politics then and now that I think it is impossible to do away with the concept. Better to refashion it.^{Footnote 6}

In some cases, hard and creative political work in shaping, monitoring, and even revising treaties has led to real and non-trivial gains. Seneca petitioning and advocacy in the 1830s and 1840s led to the partial reversal of the fraudulent Buffalo Creek Treaty, creating the basis for the sovereignty and appreciable success of today’s Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations in Seneca Nation.^{Footnote 7} Those battles established Seneca orator Sagoyewatha (Red Jacket) as another in the line of political leaders and thinkers whose writings should be taught in political science.^{Footnote 8} Similar developments occurred in Michigan among the Ojibwe and Odawa. And in the late 1960s, the Taos pueblo successfully built alliances and public support for the return of its sacred space at Blue Lake, leading to a landmark congressional statute signed by President Nixon in 1970. The transfer of 48,000 acres of land and waterscape from the settler republic to the indigenous community, in the midst of Nixon’s southern strategy and renewed racial tensions in the United States, deserves searching analysis.

What should we call these various efforts, whether successful or not—advocacy? Diplomacy by another name, or what the Iroquois call kaswentha? Many Native American leaders, whether individual tribal members or those at the National Congress of American Indians, are unafraid to use the term “lobbying” to describe part of what they do, and sovereignty provides both means and an ends to justify these practices. Tribal sovereignty remains an important principle in American Indian law, and tribes have fought for such principles—not simply their rights, but their rights to govern themselves—for centuries. What Gerald Vizenor called survivance—that ability to perform persistence and sustained presence physicially, spatially, culturally, narratively—forms an appropriate subject for political science.^{Footnote 9} How do dispossessed peoples variably contest settler societies? What are the tools with which they do so? Asking not only how dispossession occurred, but how it has been contested, how tribal sovereignty has been built, rebuilt, protected against overwhelming odds and institutional hostility—strike me as fundamental questions of institutional political science. It remains our collective task to embrace them.