Decolonizing Self-Determination: Haudenosaunee Passports and Negotiated Sovereignty

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognises both Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and simultaneously offers protections in regard to states’ right to sovereignty and territorial integrity vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples’ claims. Often, this is considered an internal inconsistency of the UNDRIP, and another common critique is that Indigenous peoples were only recognised as having a diminished right to self-determination, which is less than what everyone else enjoys. This article stands in contrast to these two lines of critique, arguing that the UNDRIP’s articulation of self-determination is potentially ushering in a broadening, and possible reshaping, of self-determination, which has been increasingly decoupled from singular Westphalian notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘territoriality’ in ways that require ongoing negotiation between peoples and states. This case study of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s issuance and use of their passports, based on original fieldwork including a set of qualitative interviews with key informants, demonstrates how the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is pushing the practice and understanding of self-determination in multiple, new directions to include plural sovereignties in deeply significant ways concerning International Relations in both theory and in practice.