six The Ethics of Sovereignty

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

[Our] cultural heroes . . . never become the object of individual attention
as to the efficacy in either the facts of their existence or their present
supranatural ability to affect events.
—Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red

Consider that every inch of stolen ground recovered by . . . Native Ameri-

cans comes directly from the imperial integrity of the U.S. itself.
—Ward Churchill, Marxism and Native Americans

Kinship structure and naming practices, religion

and spirituality, governance, and land are key elements
that scaffold the “Savage” narrative of sovereign loss.
My purpose is not to reenact a thorough and precise
ethnographic study of these elements of Indigenous
sovereignty in their various tribal specificities. Rather, I
want to point out that these are the scaffolding elements
agreed on by a range of the most prolific and respected
Native American thinkers north of the Mexican border.
What is important for this study is how these elements
are imagined and authorized.
Indigenous scholars do not compartmentalize or
separate the various elements of sovereignty: land, reli-
gion, kinship, and governance. However, metacommen-
taries often treat these elements separately. Vine Deloria
Jr., Taiaiake Alfred, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Ward
Churchill provisionally break down these elements for
two reasons, one methodological, the other political.
First, the deracination of Native American culture on
U.S. soil has been almost as complete as the deracina-
tion of African culture on U.S. soil. All of these writers
not only meditate on a grammar of “Savage” suffering,
The Ethics of Sovereignty 163
in the way that Marxist and psychoanalytic scholars meditate on a gram-
mar of Settler suffering, but they also participate in the restoration, rein-
vigoration, and, in some cases, reconstitution of Native culture for Native
youth. (This latter mission is expressed most explicitly in the work of
Deloria and Trask.) This pedagogic process is part of an ongoing psychic
as well as physical reconstruction of a people.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

Between 1500 and the 1890s, Settler genocide against Indigenous
people in the forty-eight contiguous states and Hawaii had reduced the
population from between 15 to 19 million to 250,000. Today the Native
American population stands at 4,119,000—a sixteenfold population in-
crease over the period of one century. This figure is even more amazing
when one considers that genocidal practices have continued, transmog-
rified and, in some cases, intensified over the twentieth century and that,
consequently, the life expectancy of Native American men living on res-
ervations is forty-four years. Small wonder that the most prolific meta-
commentators of “Savage” ontology view their work as integral to the
ongoing fight, as Trask puts it, “against our planned disappearance.”1
Deloria’s methodological separation of land, religion (including lan-
guage and kinship), and governance allows Indian readers, especially
youth, to contemplate the various components of deracinated Native
American sovereignty. It is a provisional separation in service to a cul-
tural and political movement that seeks to reconstruct and restore sover-
eignty in a more comprehensive way.2 As Deloria concludes:

At least part of the motivation for [The Metaphysics of Modern Exis-

tence] comes from the reception that some young Indians gave to God
Is Red, [which] attempted to outline the areas of difference between
Western religious conceptions and a generalized theory of Indian be-
liefs. In the years since God Is Red was published, a number of young
Indians have thanked me for writing it, saying they always believed the
migration, creation, or revelation stories of their tribe but were un-
able to defend the reality they experienced in the face of disbelieving
non-Indians.”3

Here Deloria explains how his (and others’) methodological isolation

and elaboration of various elements of Native American sovereignty em-
bolden and politically enfranchise Native American youth—thus con-
tributing to collective restoration. He continues:
164chapter six
That a catastrophic theory of interpretations could be used to verify
their tribe’s traditions and, in some instances, could show them how to
relate their traditions to modern developments in physics, medicine,
psychology, and religion encouraged me to attempt a more thorough
outline of the differences that exist between traditional Newtonian
and Darwinian interpretations of the world and new ideas now sur-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

facing. I thus firmly believe that the newly emerging view of the world
will support and illuminate Indian traditions and that Indian tradi-
tions will prove extremely useful and accurate when cast in a new and
more respectful light.4

This passage indicates the overall political necessity for treating the el-
ements of “Savage” sovereignty separately: this particular gesture en-
ables the metacommentators to disarticulate the ethics of the Settler’s
en­semble of ontological questions, the fundamental factor that “keeps
Indians and non-Indians from communicating [being] that they are
speaking about two entirely different perceptions of the world.”5 But this
disarticulation is also provisional: it gives Native ontologists hope for
an eventual ethical articulation between the elements of “Savage” sov-
ereignty and the elements of Settler ontology elaborated in the work of
exceptional Settler intellectuals, organizers of what Deloria calls a newly
emerging view of the world.6 (It should be noted here that the degree of
investment in this hope varies from ontologist to ontologist: Deloria is
high on this hope, Silko dreams of it in fiction, Churchill acknowledges
it with cold intellectualism, and Trask will not countenance it at all.)7 Let
us now examine the imaginative labor common to “Savage” ontology’s
meditations on governance, religion, and land.

Governance
All of the metacommentators on “Savage” ontology attribute the desta-
bilization of energy (power) in the universe to the coming of the haole,
the destroyer or predator: the White, the Settler.8 The harmonic balance
of waken, orenda, manitou, or mana has yet to be restored in the uni-
verse, but Silko, Churchill, and Trask point to a moment in recent Na-
tive American history when Indigenous people in Canada and the United
States began to reconnect with the power of the universe on a grand,
The Ethics of Sovereignty 165
communal scale. They all agree that this period of rearticulated spiritual
power commences in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and extends for some
(especially the Hawaiians) into the 1980s. Trask suggests that, as a result
of a groundswell of political activism, coupled with the reinvigoration of
tribal customs—in other words, with the revitalization of Indigenous
demands for decolonization—mana was reasserted as a defining element

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

of cultural and political leadership in the sovereignty movement.9 Trask
and Deloria emphatically seek to distinguish power as it occurs in the
schema of “Savage” sovereignty from power as it occurs in the schema of
Settler sovereignty. They suggest that, where Settler sovereignty is con-
cerned, power can be vested as spiritual, as in the hegemony of Christian
deities and ecclesiastics, or secular, as in the power of money, civil rights,
or force of arms. But the manifestation of Settler/Sovereign power differs
from that of mana in that Settler power is either completely secular or, in
the case of Christianity, asserts supreme dominance over the elements of
the universe rather than balance within the elements of the universe. The
implications of this difference for the ontological modality of sovereignty,
though nuanced, are profound.
Trask points out that a high chiefly line (whose opposite number
would manifest itself as some sort of sanctioned leadership in civil
society—that is, as a member of the clergy or a public official) “may be-
queath the potential for mana, but the actualization or achievement of
mana . . . requires more than genealogy, it requires specific identifica-
tion by the leader with the people . . . [and] presupposes that the people
acknowledge mana as an attribute of political leadership.”10 It would be
all too easy to suggest that Trask’s description of Native power (mana)
and its legitimation is but a reconfiguration of the hegemony in Settler
civil society (i.e., the communicability of Christian faith, the power of the
press, the interpellation of advertising and media, the plebiscite’s pro-
duction of consensus). But this is not the case.
Taiaiake Alfred lays such misreading to rest by reminding us that the
constituent subjects of Native sovereignty consist not only of the Human
(the sole subject position of Western metaphysics) but of all the animate
and inanimate creatures in the universe: “In indigenous philosophies,
po­wer flows from respect for Nature. In dominant Western philosophy,
power derives from coercion and artifice—in effect, alienation from na-
ture.”11 This is a significant difference between the manifest content of
166chapter six
tribal society and civil society, but more important, it is an effect of the
latent difference between “Savage” and Settler ontologies.
Trask hints at this difference when she writes, “Both the people and
their leaders understand the link between mana and pono, the traditional
Hawaiian value of balance between people, land, and the cosmos.” Al-
though pono, balance in the universe, and mana, the power of the uni-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

verse, are two distinct concepts, they are in fact inextricably bound. The
combined restoration of the articulation of mana and pono in the people
of the tribal community, and the articulation’s subsequent restoration in
the leadership—by way of the people—are both necessary if Native gov-
ernance is to be not only legitimate but coherent. Without both of these
the idea of the tribe is not possible. These interwoven necessities index
a glaring irreconcilability between the structure of Settler sovereignty
(whether spiritual or secular hegemony) and that of “Savage” sovereignty:
“Only a leader who understands [the] familial genealogical link between
Hawaiians and their lands can hope to re-establish pono, the balance
that has been lacking in the Hawaiian universe since the coming of the
haole. The assertion of the value of pono then, awaits the leader with
mana.”12
Trask goes on to state in no uncertain terms that reclamation of mana,
Native power, is achieved through a process of decolonization which di-
rectly “opposes the American system of electoral power”: “Mana . . . [is]
a tremendous challenge to the colonial system which defines political
leadership in terms of democratic liberalism. . . . [Indigenous] leaders
embody sovereignty only if they are pono, that is, only if they believe
in and work for the well being of the land and the people. In this way
Hawaiian leaders exhibit mana and increase it if they speak and represent
the needs of Hawaiians not the needs of all citizens of Hawai’i, or of leg-
islative districts, or of bureaucratic institutions.”13 In other words, mana
and pono not only make tribal society irreconcilable with civil society,
but they make tribal society and civil society disarticulate one another;
furthermore, mana and pono, as foundational to both the conceptualiza-
tion and functioning of tribal society, bar the subject of civil society—
ontologically—from the Indigenous world: the Settler would have to lose
hegemony as the element constituent to his or her ontology in order to
gain access to a world whose foundation is the interweaving of mana and
pono. In short, the Settler would have to die.
The Ethics of Sovereignty 167
Deloria, much like Trask, makes an important intervention when he
splits the hair of the Settler/“Savage” conflict between the level of ex-
istence (“We have been taught to look at American history as a series
of land transactions involving some three hundred Indian tribes and a
growing United States government. This conception is certainly the pic-
ture that emerges when tribal officials [on the reservation] are forced to

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

deal with [state] officials, claims commissioners, state highway depart-
ments, game wardens, county sheriffs and private corporations”) and the
level of ontology (“Yet [this is] hardly the whole picture. Perhaps nearly
as accurate would be the picture of settlement phrased as a continuous
conflict of two mutually exclusive religious views of the world”). Deloria
goes on to explain how the most banal and benevolent impositions of
civil society made the “natural” reinscription of “Savage” ontology im-
possible. He begins by reminding the reader that tribal organization itself
did not elaborate a collective imaginary of industrial-scale social rela-
tions characteristic of Settler civil society. Europeans looked on various
tribal groups who had similar language patterns and customs in com-
mon and imagined they were encountering “nations.” Deloria argues that
instead of “nation” the more appropriate simile would have been “band.”
Although these bands sometimes came together for ceremonies, to share
war parties, or to sign treaties, they would break apart whenever they
became too large to support themselves and needed a large game source
to feed everyone. “For political decisions, religious ceremonies, hunting
and fishing activities, and general community life both the political and
religious outlook of the tribe was designed for a small group of people.
It was a rare tribal group that was larger than a thousand people for any
extended period of time.”14
Clearly, Deloria draws here largely from the specificity of his own La-
kota people in order to make comprehensive structural generalizations
regarding the touchstones of cohesion which position Indigenous sub-
jectivity. But the specifics he gives should not distract us. He is speaking
of a scale of sociability that internally disarticulates the scale of industry
whenever the latter encroaches on it. Manageability and decentralized
autonomy, rather than a nation-state ideology sutured by hegemony, is
the primary organizing characteristic of Native life. The “banal” and “be-
nevolent” introduction, as well as the violent and militarized introduc-
tion of hegemony as a social foundation, all but destroyed the conceptual
168chapter six
framework of “Savage” sovereignty. Pono was replaced by constitution-
ality. Mana surrendered to Gramscian hegemony. “Today tribal con-
stitutions define who shall represent the tribe in its relations with the
outside world. No quality is needed to assume leadership, except the abil-
ity to win elections. Consequently, tribal elections have become one of
the dirtiest forms of human activity in existence.”15

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

The imposition of civil society on the Native body politic is both dev-
astating and parasitic, devastating in that it cripples the ability of Na-
tive people to think their bodies and their subjective relations through
rubrics of their own cultural imaginary, and parasitic in that it requires
Native people to perform a pageantry of social mimicry. Settler civil so-
ciety feeds off of this mimicry, but not in obvious and straightforward
ways. In other words, Settlers do not develop a sense that the content of
the Settler/“Savage” conflict has been miraculously laid to rest. The af-
fective intensity of White progressive and conservative ire catalyzed by
the recent development of gambling casinos or land use disputes evinces
civil society’s awareness that “the Indian Wars” are ongoing. What Settler
civil society is able to feed off of, however, is a condition in which Indians
must now compose their imaginary of the centuries-old conflict between
Settler and “Savage”—in other words, they must enunciate their Sover-
eign demands—through hegemony’s ensemble of questions and ethical
dilemmas that ontologically enable the Settler and devastate the “Savage.”
The content of the conflict is of little importance when the modality of
simply having the conflict fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of
only one combatant. Indian governance, then, not only functions as the
corpse of tribal society in the ways described by Deloria and Trask, but
lays its body down as a host on which White ethical aggrandizement can
feed and through which the collective ego of Settler civil society can be
monumentalized. As we saw in chapter 2, something similar transpires
between the analysand (the Master) and the Black (the Slave), though
there are essential differences between the two rubrics.

Religion
If Ward Churchill is the most prolific and profound metacommentator
on the ontological modality of genocide, then Vine Deloria Jr. is the most
prolific and profound metacommentator on Indigenous religion. My em-
The Ethics of Sovereignty 169
phasis on profundity and production requires qualification. Deloria and
Churchill would be the first to admit that Native elders, medicine people,
and everyday Indians (what Verdell Weasel Tail [Gary Farmer], Mogie’s
best friend and drinking buddy in Skins, calls “grassroots Indians”) are as
prolific and profound as they are, just as Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers,
Saidiya Hartman, and the Afro-pessimists would not cathedralize their

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

own wisdom but instead confess to channeling the wisdom of the likes
of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, and Assata Shakur, and the
hundreds of thousands of unknown Slaves. The ontologists are prolific
because they write books and articles. But they are profound because
they channel the wisdom of their people’s knowledge. Rather than “lead”
with “original” discoveries, they secure mandates of desire.
Deloria’s influential works, God Is Red and The Metaphysics of Modern
Existence, are attentive to two large tasks. First, Deloria maps the coordi-
nates of religion common to all those positioned (in the Western Hemi-
sphere at least) as Indigenous. In so doing, he says that no clear or de-
sirable distinction exists between spiritual and material, or physical and
psychical, notions in metaphysical meditations on Indigenism. Second,
he maintains that at a plethora of nodal points the constituent elements
of Indian religion articulate with nodal points of Western theology and
psychoanalysis. This is neither the mark of a contradiction nor an error in
Deloria’s work. Though he is often pessimistic about, and hostile to, the
general framework of Western metaphysics, he finds points of ontologi-
cal coalition in what are for him “progressive” White social formations,
as well as in the writing of “enlightened” White ontologists.
Among his favorite examples of such Settler exception are the Jew, the
Amish, the Mormon, and the work of Carl Jung. This notwithstanding,
Deloria maintains that Native touchstones of cohesion are by far more
ethical than Settler metaphysics, be those metaphysics spiritual, as in
the case of Christianity, or secular, as in the case of psychoanalysis and
Marxism: “The minds and eyes of Western man have . . . been rather
per­manently closed to understanding or observing religious experiences.
Religion has become a comfortable ethic for Western man, not a force
of undetermined intensity and unsuspected origin that may break in
on him.”16
Skins’s repeated references to the sacredness of the Black Hills and
the cosmological power of animate and inanimate forms of tricksters, its
170chapter six
extradiegetic reliance on sacred music at key moments when emotional
arguments need to be made and won, and its emphasis on the centrality
that sweat lodges and offerings should play in Rudy’s life (even if they
have not done so in the recent past) are all representational supports of
a screenplay driven by Deloria’s argument that religion is a force of “un-
determined intensity and unsuspected origin” that may, at any moment,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

break in on the subject. Again, Rudy Yellow Lodge is designated by the
script to shoulder the ethical dilemmas this force elaborates. Through
him, the narrative introduces Iktomi (a spirit force and trickster) and de-
ciphers its form and meaning. Iktomi, in the form of a spider, first bites
him when he is a young boy. Later in the film, he sees a spider in his
bathroom sink as he is blackening his face for a vigilante outing. At an-
other point, a medicine man says that Iktomi may have come to Rudy in
the form of the rock on which he hit his head while chasing one of the
reservation’s youth offenders.
The film is not as conscious as Deloria is of the differences between
Christianity and Marxism, on the one hand, and Indigenous religion, on
the other. But Iktomi accrues, adjectivally, to Rudy’s plotline, and not to
Mogie’s, because the film passionately agrees with Deloria that liberation
is inextricably bound to cultural (especially religious) restoration. “Skins,”
the medicine man tells Rudy, “have forgotten the forces around them.”
That Rudy, and not Mogie, receives this bit of cautionary and imploring
information is significant.
When I say that the idea of liberation qua religious restoration does not
accrue, adjectivally, to Mogie’s character, I am not arguing that the real
Mogies of this world, the “grassroots” Indians, are less concerned about
this ethical dilemma than are Deloria and the real Rudys of this world.
What I am saying is that, as far as “Savage” cinema in general and Skins
in particular are concerned, Mogie’s position of red dust and ruin, his
embodied genocide, is not a persona to whom the ensemble of questions
which animate this ethical dilemma accrue. Subsequently, questions of
filial and communal survival versus those of pleasure and release (such as
the gratification of adultery)—questions animated by sweatlodge cleans-
ing, sage burning, spirit offerings, and prayer versus the prolonged angst
of brooding or the rush and “certainty” of vigilantism—not only cluster
around Rudy, to their near exclusion of Mogie, but their presence is so
The Ethics of Sovereignty 171
overwhelming as to crowd out the narrative’s ability to sustain forays into
the ethical dilemmas of genocide.
When, at the end of the film, Rudy confesses his vigilante activities to
Mogie, he says they were for “our people.” “Our people,” says Mogie, with
pronounced sarcasm and incredulity. “Who’s our people?” “You know,
our Tiospaye, our Oyate,” answers Rudy. “Our Oyate,” Mogie laughs. “You

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

gotta be kidding me.”
There is intimation here that, although Rudy has launched vigilante
attacks against troublemakers, Mogie is the one who has blasphemed,
for Oyate implies more than “people” in the sense of a body politic. It has
spiritual significance, whereby the sensory self is intimately bound with
the group. One is said to carry (or not carry) the welfare of Oyate in one’s
heart. Oyate is that vessel through which the sensory self can sacrifice
itself for the good of the nation and “be connected with all creation, both
the present universe and the spirits of those who have gone before.”17 The
narrative does not necessarily imply that Mogie is a cultural scandal (he
has too many facts and figures regarding Indian massacres, even in his
most inebriated moments, for him to be a scandal), but it does maintain
that he is in desperate need of help (because he does not embrace the val-
ues of Oyate)—help which only someone like Rudy can provide. There-
fore it is imperative that the Rudys of the world restore their own spiritu-
ality, so that the Mogies will not be lost completely. What is astounding
is the film’s inability to grasp the organicity of Mogie’s intellectual and
political project. It sees Mogie only as an effect of sovereign deracina-
tion. The narrative’s reluctance to allow the modality of genocide either
to ponder its ethical dilemmas or to stage a conversation between the
genocide modality and the sovereignty modality, let alone a critique of
the sovereignty modality by way of the genocide modality, is mirrored in
Deloria’s metacommentaries on “Savage” ontology.
Deloria’s primary reader is Native American; his secondary reader is
the Settler. His texts address Settlers as though they are simultaneously
his enemies and his possible allies. In other words, he treats the Settlers’
secular Manichaeism, their spiritual monotheism, and their gratuitous
violence as threats to the very possibility of Indigenism. But he also sees
profound structural articulations between Indigenism and more promis-
ing and “progressive” adventures among Settlers. As I noted above, these
172chapter six
adventures include Jungian, as opposed to Freudian, psychoanalysis and
the religious practice and spiritual inheritance of the Amish and Jews.18
Carl Jung, Deloria asserts, did not fall into the Freudian trap of at-
tributing human instincts and intuitions to nonhuman species: sex, in-
dividual survival, and a “social inheritance [no] larger or more complex
than the family group.” Deloria appreciates the basic tenets of Jungian

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

psychoanalysis for the same reasons he celebrates the touchstones of In-
digenous religious cohesion: Jung “recognizes the existence of instincts
but . . . also transcends instinctual problems to draw conclusions from
the study of the human mind which have universal implications.” This
expansive gesture that Deloria experiences in the work of Jung allows for
a Western metaphysics of the human mind which not only has implica-
tions “universal” enough to embrace the Indigenous subject but can also
work hand in hand with an Indigenous religious embrace of what Native
people call “all my relations”—in short, inanimate and animate beings
that are not human.19 Put another way, for Deloria, Jungian psychoanaly-
sis is one of modernity’s few metaphysical meditations which have ethi-
cal capacity.
The potential for ethical capacity is also found in the structure and
practice of Amish and Jewish spirituality. Deloria claims that the Amish,
like spiritually centered Indians, lack the social alienation found else-
where in Settler civil society. This, he believes, “stems from their tight
communal ways, the fact that they settled on definite lands and are re-
lated to those lands.”20 This is one of the many instances when Deloria
presents land, conceptually, as the capacity to transpose space into place.
In other words, he gives value to land, subordinating—or outright
rejecting—its commercial value for its ontological value. In this way, the
stewardship relationality of “Savage” sovereignty sets the ethical stan-
dard against which only one or two Settler meditations and formations
can measure.
In addition, language, much like land, is imbued by Deloria with
both a temporal and a spatial capacity. He maintains that the ethical-
ity of language is ensconced in its binding power. Prior to contact and
conquest, Indian languages vouchsafed each Indian tribe’s “discernable
history, both religious and political” and bound “each tribe . . . closer”
together. Such power has been lost to the Settler due to the alienating
interventions of Western metaphysics; colonization threatens Indians
The Ethics of Sovereignty 173
with a similar loss. The Jews, however, are a notable exception among
Settlers. “Only with the use of Hebrew by the Jewish community, which
in so many ways perpetuates the Indian tribal religious conceptions of
community, do we find contemporary similarities. Again conception
of group identity is very strong among the Jews, and the phenomenon
of having been born into a complete cultural and religious tradition is

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

present, though many Jews, like many Indians, refuse to acknowledge
their membership in an exclusive community.”21 Language, then, is a tem-
poral capacity, the power to transpose meaningless and unspecified time
into the meaningful and specific “event” known as the tribe. The “event”
is not a single instance but rather a temporal coherence which perpetu-
ates “the Indian [and Jewish] tribal religious conception of community.”
The temporal power of language must not only have been transposed in
the past but must reinscribe itself in the time of the present if the event
of the tribe is to cohere as “an exclusive community” in the future.
Deloria’s outlines of Indigenous religion (as a constituent element
of “Savage” sovereignty) move back and forth between three registers:
(1) spatial capacity to transpose terra nullius into nameable place, cou-
pled with a stewardship, rather than a proprietary, relation to those
place names, (2) temporal capacity to transpose meaningless time into
coherent chronology—the elaboration of the tribe as “event” through
the reification of language, and (3) a series of celebrations of the holistic
dimensions of Indigenous religion in contradistinction to the isolating,
alienating, and atomizing dimensions of Western metaphysics.
For Deloria, the holistic impetus of Indigenous religion stems from
several attributes, one of which is the lack of doctrine. Since tribal reli-
gions are not doctrinaire there can be no religious heresies in Indigenous
spiritualism: “It is virtually impossible to ‘join’ a tribal religion by arguing
for its doctrines. People could care less whether an outsider believes any-
thing. No separate standard of religious behavior is imposed on followers
of the religious tradition outside of the requirements for its ceremonies—
who shall do what, who may participate, and who is excluded from which
part of the ceremony, who is needed for other parts of the ceremony.” The
importance of Deloria’s claims above should not be reduced to a mere
comparison of Indigenous and Christian religious practices. Rather, his
analysis alerts us to an incompatibility between important elements of
“Savage” existence and Settler existence: “One could say that the tribal
174chapter six
religions created the tribal community, which, in turn, made a place for
every tribal individual. Christianity, on the other hand . . . created the
solitary individual who, gathered together every seven days, constitutes
the ‘church,’ which then defines the extent to which the religion is to be
understood and followed.” Deloria throws a spanner in the works of not
just Christianity but Western metaphysics itself by suggesting that Chris-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

tianity conceives of the individual as an element within the group (soci-
ety), when in point of fact (the “fact” being the elements of “Savage” onto­
logical thought) it is the group that must be apprehended as an element
within the individual. The inability of Western metaphysics to grasp this
is central to its internally, as well as outwardly, destructive legacy: “With
the individual as the primary focal point and his relationship with the de-
ity as his primary concern, the group is never on certain ground as to its
existence but must continually change its doctrines and beliefs to attract
a maximum number of followers: it is always subject to horrendous frag-
mentation over doctrinal interpretations, whenever two strong-minded
individuals clash.” This clash between strong-minded individuals is a
common occurrence systemic to the historiography of Western meta-
physics, a hair trigger that threatens, if not the rest of the world, then at
least the coherence of “Savage” sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere.
In tribal religions, contrary to the built-in dualism of Christianity, “theol-
ogy is part of communal experiences needing no elaboration, abstraction,
or articulation of principles. Every factor of human experience is seen in
a religious light as part of the meaning of life.” This safeguards against the
social manifestation in Christianity and Western metaphysics writ large
which distinguishes between the outcast (the heretic) and the flock. “Be-
cause the Christian religion is conceived as a person,” writes Deloria, “the
individual is both victim and victor of the religion.”22
Indigenous religion cannot accommodate such divine individualism.
Deloria maintains that such divine individualism is a key, an internal
catalyst to a wide range of social ills in civil society, despite the fact that
this divine individualism is known by its euphemism, “salvation.” There is
“no salvation in tribal religions apart from the continuation of the tribe
itself. . . . The possibility of conceiving of an individual alone in a tribal
religious sense is ridiculous. The very complexity of tribal life and the
inerdependence of people on one another makes this conception im-
probable at best, a terrifying loss of identity at worst.”23
The Ethics of Sovereignty 175
The absence of a doctrinaire context for Indigenous religion not only
militates against existential isolation common in the West but also allows
for a more comprehensive and less atomized experience of, and relation-
ship to, the universe and its powers. This is possible because, as Deloria
notes, “tribal religious realities” do not divide the world into dualistic
realms of “spiritual and material . . . , this-worldly and other-worldly,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

and absolute space and time dimensions” but instead “maintain a consis-
tent understanding of the unity of all experience.” Deloria is quick to ac-
knowledge, however, the possibility of religious articulation between the
“Savage” and the Settler when he points out that in the Western scheme
of knowledge there are “some things that have utmost importance” for
Native peoples, but they can only be ascertained by what appears to be
a symptomatic, rather than a direct, reading of “their system of beliefs,
their myths, or their social and political organizations.”24
Still, Western metaphysics, whether secular or religious, is not imbued
with what, for Deloria, is the most common feature of Indigenous aware-
ness of the world, “the feeling or belief that the universe is energized by a
pervading power.” This common awareness of a pervasive power is a con-
stituent element of “Savage” sovereignty although its manifest content
elaborates different ceremonial forms and is known by different names
across Native America: mana in Hawaii, waken, orenda, or manitou in
North America. These names give tribal members the conceptual frame-
work for meditation and prayer with respect to widely distributed pow-
ers in the universe, the “inherent energy,” the “field of force” capable of
producing extraordinary effects.25
The barrenness of Western metaphysics, as opposed to the plenitude
of the Indigenous spirituality, lies not only in the former’s need to atom-
ize the natural world into realms, but also in its desire to master, rather
than experience, what it encounters in that world. Contrary to the claims
of Western metaphysics, this need to atomize and desire to master dead-
ens, rather than sharpens, awareness of the universe:

The observations and experiences of primitive peoples was so acute

that they were able to recognize a basic phenomenon of the natural
religiously rather than scientifically. They felt power but did not mea-
sure it. Today we measure power but are unable to feel it except on
extremely rare occasions. We conclude that energy forms the basic
176chapter six
constituent of the universe through experimentation. For primitive
peoples, on the other hand, the presence of energy and power is the
starting point of their analyses and understanding of the natural world.
It is their cornerstone for further exploration.26

Power—such as waken, orenda, manitou, or mana—also has specific res-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

onance in the way Indigenous people imagine and structure governance
(tribal society).

Land
In delineating “Savage” ontology through the element of land, Indige-
nous scholars emphasize that a relationship (a) to the land in general and
(b) to the land which any given tribe inhabited at the time of contact,
is a relationship constituent of ontology. Most writers are also quick to
distinguish between their relationship to the land and that of the Set-
tler. Land thus becomes a pivotal element in a semiotics of “Savage” loss
and Settler gain: “We are all land-based people . . . who are attuned to
the rhythms of our homelands in a way that assumes both protection
of, and an intimate belonging to, our ancestral places. . . . [But we are]
surrounded by other, more powerful nations that . . . want our land and
resources. . . . [This is an] ongoing colonial relationship.”27
“Savage” sovereignty qua land is distinguished from Settlerism in how
it imagines dominion and use. Indigenous dominion is characterized by
the idea of “stewardship” rather than the idea of ownership:

Indigenous philosophies are premised on the belief that the earth was
created by a power external to human beings, who have a responsi-
bility to act as stewards; since humans had no hand in making the
earth, they have no right to “possess” it or dispose of it as they see
fit—possession of land by man is unnatural and unjust. The steward-
ship principle, reflecting a spiritual connection with land established
by the Creator, gives human beings special responsibilities in the areas
they occupy as Indigenous peoples, linking them in a “natural” way to
their territories.28

Stewardship impacts on use in that the land—what Western metaphysics

refers to as “nature”—is viewed as source rather than resource. This not
The Ethics of Sovereignty 177
only gestures to the unethical spiritual and political character of the capi-
talist profit motive but also posits “resource development” and industrial­
ization as paradigms of dominion and use which are irreconcilable with
Indigenism’s paradigms of dominion and use. It not only marks a conflict
between Indigenism and the heinous and exploitive desires of capitalism
but also between Indigenism and the emancipatory and revolutionary

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

desires for a Marxist proletarian dictatorship.
Ward Churchill illustrates the split between Indians and Marxists re-
garding “conclusions to be drawn from analyses of what is wrong with the
capitalist process; with a vision of an alternative society. . . . the redistri-
bution of proceeds accruing from a systematic rape of the earth is, at best,
an irrelevancy for . . . Indians.”29 Metacommentaries of “Savage” ontology
continually make the point that Native people share and watch over the
land in concert with other creatures that inhabit it. Settlerism’s structural
imposition on the Indigenous system of relationality (one in which all
inhabitants of the land are the Indian’s “relations”) is tantamount to the
dismantling of Indigenous subjectivity. This dismantling of subjectivity,
Churchill and others point out, cannot be repaired by a Marxist revolu-
tion (found, for example, in Negri’s and Hardt’s idea of “time redeemed”
or the commons restored), for such a revolution neither reinstates “stew-
ardship” nor returns kinship relations among animate and inanimate to
the paradigm of dominion and use.30
The Settler’s ontological degradation in the form of capitalism, and his
or her emancipation in the form of communism, entails the beginning
and the continuation of Indian land dispossession—a dispossession far
more profound than material larceny: “Abandonment of their land base is
not an option for Native Americans, either in fact or in theory. The result
would simply be ‘auto-genocide.’ ”31
“Savage” sovereignty’s notions of stewardship and source are pre-
sented as ethical alternatives to Settler sovereignty’s notions of domi-
nance and resource. The counterpoint offered by Deloria, Trask, Alfred,
and Churchill to Marxists and Settler progressives is twofold. First, civil
society cannot become ethical simply by adjusting its paradigm of re-
source accumulation and distribution; instead, the entire ensemble of
questions which orient the Human in relation to the natural world have
to be “Indigenized.” This also means—as Churchill, Trask, and Silko,
but not Deloria and Alfred, are quick to point out—that the Indigenous
178chapter six
subject, and not the Settler, is the quintessential revolutionary subject-
position. The Indigenous subject, and not the proletariat, is the sine qua
non of revolutionary subjectivity because the semiotics of loss which po-
sitions the Indigenous (dispossession of a culturally and spiritually spe-
cific land base wherein all creatures were their relations and of which
they were stewards) is an essential modality of dispossession. Disposses-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

sion of labor power, at the site of the wage relation, is an important but
ultimately inessential form of dispossession. Not only is it inessential but
it takes place in an a priori unethical ontological formation: Settlers and
civil society. This is a schematization of the difference between a vital
aspect of “Savage” sovereignty and Settler sovereignty. Churchill puts a
finer point on it by suggesting that not only is the proletariat not the
essential placeholder for the revolutionary subject, but the proletariat’s
struggle to obliterate the wage relation and democratize ownership of
the means of production (of which land is a primary component) is at
best inadequate, and at worst unethical, in comparison to a struggle to
re-Indigenize the land.

The potential for oppositional action, centering upon tangibles such

as landbase rather than abstractions on the order of “class interest” . . .
should be starkly evident. Concomitantly, the threat to the stability
of the status quo should be readily apparent. A whole body of anti-
colonial theory should spring to the mind of any well-read leftist and
serve to underscore this [point]. . . . Consider that every inch of stolen
ground recovered . . . by Native Americans comes directly from the
imperial integrity of the U.S. itself. . . . By any definition, the mere po­
tential for even a partial dissolution of the U.S. landbase should be a
high priority consideration for anyone concerned with destabilizing
the status quo.32

In this passage Churchill is not simply asserting a tactical distinction

between Marxist politicos and organizations like the American Indian
Movement. Rather, his examination of the Marxist answer to the ques-
tion What is to be done? critiques the question itself at a paradigmatic
level, while offering an alternative, a paradigmatic shift predicated on In-
digenism. In short, Churchill claims that if Settler revolutionaries shift
the spatial paradigm of Marxism from the wage/labor nexus (where sur-
plus value is extracted on the Gramscian factory floor or from within the
The Ethics of Sovereignty 179
Negrian libidinal “commons”) to the land/spirit nexus (the domain where
all objects are related to each other as subjects and where source cannot
be denigrated as resource) then the revolution would possess an essen-
tial, rather than merely an important, ensemble of questions—questions
of Native power (mana, waken, manitou, or orenda) rather than Settler
hegemony (influence, leadership, and consent).33 This shift from the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

wage/labor nexus to the land/spirit nexus, Churchill implies, would make
the movement a better and more ethical fighting machine, and, most im-
portant, give the Settler the ontological integrity she or he could never
achieve through the machinations of hegemony.

Sovereignty and the Structure of Antagonisms

The meditations on “Savage” ontology which are weighted heavily to-
ward the modality of sovereignty reproduce a network of connections,
transfers, and displacements—articulations—between themselves and
meditations on Settler ontology. I am not suggesting that the content
of Marxism, or even of Christianity and psychoanalysis, for that matter
(meditations foundational to the range of ethical questions one can con-
ceptualize in civil society), can be reconciled with the content of Indig-
enous religion, land cathexis, and governance. Trask, Deloria, Churchill,
and Silko persuade me when they argue that Marx, Freud, and Jesus have
lost (usurped?) the road map to Turtle Island.
I borrow the notion of triumvirate articulation (connections, transfers,
and displacements) from Peter Miller’s and Nikolas Rose’s article “On
Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise under Advanced Lib-
eralism.” Miller and Rose reject the trend in scholarly writing about psy-
choanalysis that attempts to explain the discourse “by locating its origins
in general social and cultural transformations.” Their strategy of analysis
differs from dominant trends in scholarship in that they are “concern[ed]
with therapeutics as a form of authority.” This means that their analy-
sis focuses on the rhetorical strategies through which the discourse of
psychoanalysis (in an historical milieu of advanced liberalism) becomes
authoritative. Their analysis is animated not by the why but by the how
of therapeutics.34 Similarly, we have asked ourselves how, rhetorically,
the Settler/Master’s grammar of exploitation and alienation functions.
In what way is this grammar authoritative in discourses as disparate as
180chapter six
feminism, Marxism, and Western aesthetics?35 We asked ourselves why
there is no articulation between the Slave’s grammar of suffering and the
Settler/Master’s grammar of suffering. What prevents them from being
simultaneously authoritative? Now, we find ourselves faced with sover-
eignty as a modality of the “Savage’s” grammar of suffering, with the net-
work through which sovereignty’s authority functions, and with the pos-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

sibility or impossibility of its articulation with the Settler and the Slave.
Deloria, Churchill, and others insist on the incompatibility of both
Marxist and psychoanalytic utopianism as projects of emancipation for
Native people. Churchill goes so far as to say that “Marxism [constitutes]
as great a threat to native sovereignty and self-determination as capital-
ism.”36 In addition, there seems to be a radical disarticulation between
the Settler’s and the “Savage’s” topographies of the soul: the secular me-
diations and processes through which a psychoanalyst “punctuates” (as
Lacan would put it) the analysand’s empty speech, thereby guiding the
analysand to a nonegoic relationship with his or her contemporaries (the
attainment of full speech), are apparently dumbstruck when confronted
by the mediations and processes through which the medicine man or
medicine woman heals the tribal member and thereby reharmonizes him
or her with the universe and all its relations. Deloria links this besetting
hobble of psychoanalysis’s healing power to the bankrupt ethics of Chris-
tianity: “The original [Christian] perception of reality becomes trans-
formed over a period of time into philosophies and theologies which pur-
port to give a logical and analytical explanation of ultimate reality [i.e.,
Freudian psychoanalysis]. These explanations, of course, have eliminated
the human emotions and intuitive insights of the original experience and
in their place have substituted a systematic rendering of human knowl-
edge concerning the natural world.”37 Here, Deloria glosses Leslie Silko’s
assertion that Europeans are spiritual orphans. “The ancestors had called
Europeans the orphan people and had noted that as with orphans taken
in by selfish and coldhearted people, few Europeans had remained whole.
They failed to recognize the earth as their mother.”38 The disturbing result
of this abandonment, Deloria argues, is the European

divisions of the natural world into spiritual and material, eternal and
ephemeral, this-worldly and other-worldly, and absolute space and
time dimensions. . . . Primitive people do not differentiate their world
The Ethics of Sovereignty 181
of experience into two realms that oppose or complement each other.
They . . . maintain a consistent understanding of the unity of all experi-
ence. Rather than seeking underlying causes or substances, primitives
report the nature and intensity of their experience. Carl Jung clarified
this approach to experience when he wrote that “thanks to our one-
sided emphasis on so-called natural causes, we have to differentiate

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

what is subjective and psychic from what is objective and ‘natural.’ For
primitive man, on the contrary, the psychic and the objective coalesce
in the external world.”39

Deloria and others thus make it clear that the network of connections,
transfers, and displacements which authorize and articulate Settler on-
tology and the sovereignty modality of “Savage” ontology is not a network
of relays between the content of their respective rhetoric, for they do not
map the soul with the same vision of spatial and temporal cartographies.
How, then, is the articulation sutured if not by the content of their vi-
sions? Why is it that the struggle between one half of “Savage” ontology
(sovereignty) and the complete ontological frame of reference of the
Settler/Master (exploitation and alienation) cannot be characterized as
an antagonism? Why, instead, must it be thought of as a conflict? How can
we name this rubric of articulation between these two mortal enemies?
What the Settler and the “Savage” share is a capacity for time and
space coherence. At every scale—the soul, the body, the group, the land,
and the universe—they can both practice cartography, and although at
every scale their maps are radically incompatible, their respective “map-
ness” is never in question. This capacity for cartographic coherence is
the thing itself, that which secures subjectivity for both the Settler and
the “Savage” and articulates them to one another in a network of con-
nections, transfers, and displacements. The shared capacity for carto-
graphic coherence ratchets the Settler/“Savage” struggle down from an
antagonism to a conflict. In other words, this struggle succumbs to the
constraints of analogy, is captured and made into a simile by the word
like: like the war in Iraq, like the Palestinian struggle, like women’s libera-
tion, and so on. At best, the “like” makes the Settler/“Savage” struggle
legible in the discourse of postcolonial theory. At worst, the simile grants
the Settler/“Savage” struggle the tepid legibility of various junior partner
struggles in civil society.
182chapter six
Of course, the “Savage” ontological modality of genocide ratchets the
Settler/“Savage” struggle up from a conflict to an antagonism and thus
overwhelms the constraints of analogy. Suddenly, the struggle between
the Settler and the “Savage” is “like” nothing at all, which is to say it be-
comes “like” the struggle between the Master and the Slave. Suddenly,
the network of connections, transfers, and displacements between the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

“Savage’s” semiotics of loss and the Settler’s semiotics of gain is over-
whelmed—crowded out—by a network of connections, transfers, and dis-
placements between a genocided thing and a fungible and accumulated
thing. Unfortunately, ontological meditations in which Native American
theorists muse on genocide as an ontological modality are found, for the
most part, only in the work of Churchill and, to a lesser extent, Silko.
Without more work on this articulation, there can be no hope of theo-
rizing the partial object status of the “Savage” in conjunction with the
absolute object status of the Slave.
If Native American theorization embraced its structural nonpresence,
one could begin to look for an articulation between the object status of the
“Savage” and that of the Slave. The diagnostic payoff of this would mani-
fest in a further and more decisive crowding out of any ethical pretense
that the ontologists of White civil society could claim (having lost their
Indigenous interlocutors, they would only have the power of their empty
rhetoric and their guns), and there is no telling what kinds of unflinching
revolutionary prognostications could result over the years. For this to
happen, a handful of Native American theorists must join that handful
of Black theorists and dialogue in the empty space and temporal stillness
of absolute dereliction. What, we might ask, inhibits this analytic and
political dream of a “Savage”/Slave encounter? Is it a matter of the Native
theorist’s need to preserve the constituent elements of sovereignty, or is
there such a thing as “Savage” Negrophobia? Are the two related?
Skins is a film whose ontological authorization struggles in uneasy
tension between the monumentalizing imaginary of sovereignty and the
absolute dereliction of genocide—between the authority of Rudy Yellow
Lodge and Mogie Yellow Lodge. This tension is anxious and brittle, ill
at ease with its competing authorizations. This anxiety manifests in the
modality of genocide’s entrance through the backdoor, so to speak—by
way of Graham Greene’s performance, and his rewriting of the dialogue,
and by way of the formal, rather than narrative, cinematic strategies. In
The Ethics of Sovereignty 183
other words, the film knows, unconsciously, Mogie’s genocided body
as the quintessence of “Savage” ontology, but the narrative only recog-
nizes, consciously, Rudy’s sovereign body as the quintessence of “Savage”
ontology.
As I have noted, only a small number of Native American ontological
meditations are given over to genocide; most meditations on the gram-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

mar of “Savage” suffering focus on sovereignty and its semiotics of loss.
Furthermore, most of the Native American writing that reflects on geno-
cide as an ontological modality (instead of simply recording it as expe-
rience) has been done by two authors: Leslie Marmon Silko and Ward
Churchill. Although the works of Silko and Churchill often meditate on
sovereignty through the same semiotics of loss found in Trask, Alfred,
and Deloria, their prose and analysis often grapple with an ensemble of
questions central to extermination. Silko’s method of conveyance and
argumentative strategy is poetic, narrative, associative, and impression-
istic; Churchill’s is marked by a strong, highly rhetorical prose style and
evidentiary argument strategies; his books sometimes have almost as
many pages of footnotes as they do pages of prose.
In “Concerning Violence,” Fanon splits an important hair between
structural position and political discourse when he writes that natives “do
not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth,
for they are the truth.” For Fanon, this ontological truth makes “morality
[i.e., political action/discourse/aesthetics] very concrete; it is to silence
the settler’s defiance, to break his flaunting violence—in a word, to put
him out of the picture.”40 I intend to proceed in such a way as to trouble
Fanon’s assertion of Native ontology when the U.S. “Savage” is the native
in question. For the bifurcation of “Savage” ontology often works, cine-
matically and in the ontological meditations and political common sense
under consideration here, to put Settlers back into the picture (makes
them present on screen), and, however unwittingly, defers indefinitely an
ethical encounter between the “Savage” and the Slave.
In this regard, Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power, Righteousness: An In-
digenous Manifesto is an interesting exception which presents us with a
semiotics of sovereignty that should not be labeled “sovereignty” since
it attempts to disturb, rather than suture, touchstones of cohesion be-
tween the “Savage” and the Settler. Alfred goes so far as to assert that
sovereignty is an inappropriate concept for Indigenism because the
184chapter six
notion of an Indian “state” is an oxymoron. Traditionally, Indigenous
governance elaborates no absolute authority, coercive enforcement of
decisions, hierarchy, or separate ruling elite. Sovereignty, for Alfred, is
an exclusionary concept rooted in adversarial and coercive Western no-
tions of power.41 His book stages an intramural conversation between
a cross-section of Native thinkers. In it, he presents his own work and

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

also invites Native scholars (from Audra Simpson, a twenty-nine-year-
old Kanien’kehaka graduate student in anthropology, to Atsenhaienton,
an international spokesperson for the Kanien’kehaka people, part of
the Iroquois Confederacy, to well-known authorities on ontology such
as Deloria) to muse with him on the ways the Indigenous position is
imagined.
To Audra Simpson he puts the question of sovereignty directly, asking
her if there is a difference between sovereignty and the Native concept of
“nationhood.” Her response is worth quoting at length.

The concepts are quite different. I find it hard to isolate, define, and
then generalize what a “Native” concept of nationhood would be with-
out it sounding contrived. This is a tired point: we are different people,
different nations, and would have different ideas about what nation-
hood is and what it means to us. The Sechelt conception or Northern
Cree conception will certainly depart from Mohawk ideas about who
we are. Each people will have a term in their own language that will
mean “us.” I think that is what our concept of nationhood is.
My opinion is that “Mohawk” and “nationhood” are inseparable.
Both are simply about being. Being is who you are, and a sense of who
you are is arrived at through your relationships with other people—
your people. So who you are is tied with what we are: nation.
Now, sovereignty—the authority to exercise power over life, affairs,
territory—this is not inherited. It is not part of being, the way our
form of nationhood is. It has to be conferred, or granted—it’s a thing
that can be given and thus can be taken away. It’s clearly a foreign
concept, because it occurs through an exercise of power—power over
another. . . . 42

Skins presents us with a paradox, manifest in its simultaneous em-

brace of indigenous being in intra-tribal (cosmological, inanimate, and
non-human) relations and institutionality (the logic of policing) deployed
The Ethics of Sovereignty 185
through rugged individualism (Rudy’s persona: tall; broad shouldered;
burdened with isolated rather than communal angst). Granted, it is not
altogether clear that the film’s intentions are to condone openly Rudy’s
vigilantism (one could argue that the narrative condemns it just as easily
as one could argue that it merely condemns its excesses). But it is clear
that the film imagines the loss of what Alfred and Simpson call commu­

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

nal or tribal “being,” as an ethical dilemma to be struggled over, not by
the tribe or communal entity, but by one man; a man whose authority
has been “conferred, or granted,” by the logic of policing, “the authority
to exercise power over life, affairs, territory.”

This is not to say that the valuing of sovereignty, of having control over
territory has not been indigenized. We’ve used it in a rhetorical and
political way time and again. But I think there is a difference between
the being of who we are—Mohawk—and the defense mechanisms that
we have to adopt in the neocolonial context—sovereignty.43

Here Simpson suggests that the Rudy-phenomenon, which appears in

“Savage” cinema, political tracts, and ontological meditations, may be a
compensatory gesture, a form of strategic essentialism geared to help the
Native American antagonist over the immediate hump of whatever con-
flict she or he is pressed into at the moment. I believe that exploration of
the libidinal economy—that is, the unconscious reflexes, selections, and
combinations detected in cinema—render her explanation too generous
and thus in need of further elaboration.
It is important to note that Alfred and Simpson are Native Canadians.
True, they are both Mohawk and part of the Iroquois Confederacy, which
spans across Southeastern Canada and the Northeastern United States.
But Alfred writes as though he is in conflict primarily with Canadian
Settlerism. His book concretizes his structural claims, politically and an-
ecdotally, by way of Canadian versus Indigenous conflicts. This does not
put Alfred’s assumptive logic, or the basis of his claims, at variance with
those of Indigenous thinkers in the United States, such as Trask, a Native
Hawaiian, or Deloria, a Lakota.44 I submit, however, that the difference
between deconstructive proclivity in Alfred and Simpson as regards the
idea of “Savage” sovereignty, and the intensity with which sovereignty
is invested by U.S. scholars and activists, stems from a combination of
political, material, and libidinal factors.
186chapter six
To begin with, Canada is a vast country covering 3,852,000 square
miles, compared to the United States of America’s 3,615,211 square miles.
Yet Canada has only 33 million people, 3.3 million of whom are Indig-
enous. Of the 288 million inhabitants of the United States, 4.1 million
are Indigenous. In other words, 10 percent of Canadians are Indigenous
whereas only 1.6 percent of people in the United States are Indigenous.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

This has impacted the social reality profoundly: Native people in Canada
have various forms of governmental autonomy and their own television
channel. In addition, although Whites in Canada can know Whiteness
in contradistinction to Native Canadian genocide, the number and fre-
quency of genocidal campaigns never approached the scale that they did
south of the border.
None of this accounts, however, for the fact that Trask’s ontological
meditations are charged with the same unflinching political rhetoric as
that in the work of Churchill, a Cherokee whose people were massacred
on the Trail of Tears, or Deloria, a Lakota whose people were massacred
at Wounded Knee in 1890 and attacked there again, as part of a reign of
terror on Pine Ridge, in the 1970s, or Silko, a Laguna whose reservation
is known as the single most radioactively contaminated area in North
America outside of nuclear bomb test sites.45 Trask is a Hawaiian. As
such, her people’s victimization by U.S. genocidal practices mirrors that
of Alfred and Native Canadians more than it does Indigenous people
trapped within the forty-eight contiguous States—decimated, as they
were, from 19 million to 4.1 million. In other words, one can look to the
empiricism of material (tactile) conditions and say Native Canadians are
10 percent of a national population in a vast and mostly uninhabited land.
Thus, the hydraulics of Settler repression need not be as deracinating as
those in a Settler society with roughly the same amount of territory but
with roughly eight times as many Settlers.
Again, in the United States, the “Savage” equals 1.6 percent of the popu-
lation and the Settler equals 80.6 percent. Since contact, genocide has re-
versed the “Savage” to Settler ratio with nearly perfect symmetry. Herein
lies the Manichaeism of the Settler/“Savage” antagonism, a Manichaeism
manifest far more emphatically in the United States than in Canada. In
the United States, the symbiosis between the material production of liv-
ing zones (scaled up from White bodies to civil society) and dead zones
(scaled up from Red flesh to the reservation) is so pervasive that one
The Ethics of Sovereignty 187
need not belong to a specific tribe which has directly experienced the
events of genocide in order for one’s own Indigenism to be underwrit-
ten by the historical trauma of genocide. (Like “Savage” ontologists from
Hawaii or Canada, Saidiya Hartman makes a similar case with respect to
the Slave, explicitly arguing that the spatial condition of chattel slavery
is not bound by the borders of the plantation, but also territorializes the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

world of Blacks in the North. And she implicitly argues that the temporal
condition of chattel slavery did not end in 1865 but followed generations
of Blacks 140 years into the future.)46
The historical relationship of Trask’s Hawaiian people to genocide
(in terms of scale, intensity, and duration) is closer to that experienced
in Canada than that suffered in the United States. Still, Hawaiians came
to know themselves as belonging to a group of people whose ontology
was predicated on genocide. In addition, the Manichaeism between the
Master and the Slave (between exploited bodies and accumulated flesh)
added to the intensity of the Manichaeism between the Settler and the
“Savage.”47 The Master/Slave antagonism put further libidinal pressure
on the social structure of relations with which Indigenous Hawaiians had
to contend psychically and politically. The unflinching analysis, politics
of refusal, and acerbic method of conveyance, taking no prisoners, in the
work of Hawaiian thinkers like Trask, and which is not found in the work
of Native Canadians like Taiaiake Alfred, is a reflection not of differing
ontological structures but rather of variant social intensities. To put a
finer point on it, if, as I have argued, the Master/Slave dynamic is an on-
tological, and not simply a historical condition, then Canada cannot be
said to be “free” of that dynamic simply because there are no plantations
in Canada.
The structure of Canadian antagonisms (Red, White, and Black) is iso-
morphic with the structure of antagonisms elsewhere in the hemisphere.
But the Canadian socialization of that structure has “allowed” Blacks
and some Native Americans to consider Canada as a safe haven from the
“excesses” of the United States.48 This may account for Taiaiake Alfred
and Audra Simpson’s casual deconstruction of sovereignty versus its
reification beyond the sort of strategic essentialism (what Simpson calls
“indigenized sovereignty”) in the works of Trask, Deloria, Churchill, and
others south (and west) of Canada’s borders. However, Trask’s ontologi-
cal meditations share, with Silko’s and Churchill’s, an unflinching hatred
188chapter six
for the United States of America, a hatred uncharacteristic of Alfred’s
discussion of Canada.
Most important, Trask, Churchill, Deloria—and, to a lesser extent,
Silko—have an ossified and possessive relationship to the idea of colo-
nialism which Alfred’s and Simpson’s more relaxed and contemplative
writing is able to deconstruct. Oddly enough, it is the success of their

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/642073/9780822391715-007.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 17 October 2022

struggles with the Canadian government, admittedly limited and driven
by the logic of postcolonialism (extensive self-governed territories inside
of Canada, a national television station, royal commissions dedicated to
negotiating expanded sovereignty), which has, over time, given Canadian
First Peoples the space to be critical of and live in a deconstructive rela-
tionship to that very logic.
Simpson says, “The valuing of sovereignty, of having control over
territory, has . . . been indigenized.”49 This is her way of answering the
question of whether “control over territory” is or is not an element con-
stituent of “Savage” ontology. But rather than answer the question, I be-
lieve that Alfred’s and Simpson’s dialogue has just begun to pose it. Skins
takes up this question more substantially, and so do the metacommenta-
tors on “Savage” ontology south of the Canadian border.
There are of course political and spiritual differences between the cos-
mology of the “Savage” and the cosmology of the Settler. The question
before us, however, is if those differences are essential, as Simpson and
others seem to argue, or important, as I would suggest, when one consid-
ers them not only through the way Settler/“Savage” relationality is imag-
ined, but through the way “Savage”/Slave relationality is (un)imagined.
I make this suggestion not by offering evidence which contradicts what
Simpson, Alfred, Deloria, and others press into service of their argu-
ments regarding the essential division between Settler and “Savage,” but
by demonstrating how the antagonistic disarticulation which seems to
occur between the Settler and the “Savage” is recomposed as a conflictual
articulation in the presence of the Slave. This claim will be taken up in the
remaining chapters of part 3, in a close reading of Skins.