Remapping Sovereignty examines how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty over the course of the twentieth century. While political theorists have criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority, alternatives to sovereignty remain elusive. Recasting these debates, Temin argues that activists-intellectuals in the long Red Power movement of the twentieth century engaged in complex acts of contesting and remapping the logic of sovereignty. If logics of Westphalian sovereignty revolve around “the normative centrality and perceived necessity of the claim to final and ultimate authority over a bounded space” (6) then central to its institutional practice is a refusal of the webs of relationality and interdependence on the land and human and non-human others. Rather than upholding these sovereign logics, Indigenous claims to self-determination, Temin shows, are premised not the assertion of territorial control but on the cultivation of reciprocal relations of care for the earth. Creating alternatives to both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from the constitutive disavowal of these relationalities embedded in both the concept and practice of state sovereignty.

Political theory has, until recently, exhibited a telling lack of interest in Indigenous thinkers and ideas. Remapping Sovereignty is an impressive history of twentieth-century political thought that follows recent efforts to correct this tendency. Remapping Sovereignty’s unique strength lies in its focus on individual Indigenous political theorists. Temin presents these figures as sophisticated, systematic thinkers with specific, context-motivated agendas and stakes animating the ideas they articulated. Remapping Sovereignty balances careful historicism with an edifying showcase of how twentieth-century Indigenous political thinkers’ situated ideas continue to offer generally valuable contributions to contemporary political theory. Temin’s textual expositions and the historical context he provides for the conceptual lineage he reconstructs will, hopefully, push readers to exercise and demand more precision when invoking the still sometimes vague category of “Indigenous political theory.”

In her 1983 How to Suppress Women’s Writing, feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ outlined the many approaches used to ignore, condemn, or otherwise belittle the intellectual productions by members of the “wrong” groups.1 In addition to discouragement and blocking access to requisite materials and training, other regular tactics include isolating a given author or one of their texts from the tradition to which they or it belong and simply “ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition,” which Russ considers both most common and most difficult to combat.2 Among the many contributions of Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty is his actively counteracting the ignoring of “the works, the workers, and the whole tradition” by refusing to isolate the six individual North American Indigenous political thinkers who are his focus from the larger, internally diverse, dynamic political worlds of which they are part. Far from monolithic or univocal, what emerges is an intergenerational multi-nation effort to articulate aspirations and concerted action that respond with dignity and power to distinct and overlapping moments in ongoing processes of settler-colonial genocide and dispossession.

This wonderful book is deeply researched, conceptually clarifying, and beautifully written. When read together, its chapters produce a powerful image of the alternative political possibilities outlined by North American Indigenous writers including Zitkala-Ša, Ella Deloria, Vine Deloria Jr., George Manuel, Lee Maracle, and Howard Adams. Temin has done his intellectual work well: I came to the book with extensive knowledge of some of the figures it covers, and little knowledge of others, and came away able to think much more deeply about all involved. This is a first-rate scholarly effort.