Imagination and Indigenous Sovereignty in the Trumpian Era

Tribal sovereignty, at the time of writing directly threatened by actions of the Trump Administration, expresses more than just a bare legal concept. Reviewing six recent texts in American Indian studies, this essay argues that imaginative sovereignty—that is to say, tribal peoples’ creative expression of lived experience of resistance to colonial assault and erasure—cannot be codified in legal terms, and indeed may at times exist in opposition to sovereignty as defined under US federal law. The legal tensions around sovereignty are traced in books by David J. Carlson and Cheryl Suzack and in collections edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Scott Richard Lyons, and then used as a hermeneutic for assessing works by Mark Rifkin and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.