{"id":61225,"date":"2025-12-03T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=61225"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:03","slug":"what-future-for-native-sovereignty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/what-future-for-native-sovereignty\/","title":{"rendered":"What Future for Native Sovereignty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma<\/em>, which Robert J. Miller (Eastern Shawnee Tribe) and Torey Dolan (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) call \u201clikely the most significant Indian law case in well over 100 years.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> McGirt<\/em> affirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation\u2019s reservation had never been disestablished, meaning much of eastern Oklahoma remains tribal land. The ruling was celebrated for restoring treaty promises and affirming the legal endurance of tribal sovereignty after centuries of settler encroachment and legal erasure. But it has also ushered in a new era of jurisdictional entanglement: tribal governments were suddenly tasked with exercising criminal jurisdiction over vast swaths of land\u2014including serious felony cases involving Native defendants\u2014without the infrastructure, legal humanpower, or federal funding necessary to match state prosecutorial capacity.<\/p>\n

For many tribes, the 2020 decision poses a paradox: sovereignty is reaffirmed, but so too are the burdens of governance under inequitable conditions.2<\/a><\/sup> That\u2019s why there\u2019s now a major debate in contemporary Indigenous political theory, asking whether sovereignty can still serve as a radical framework, or whether it has already been co-opted by the settler state.3<\/a><\/sup> Especially in the aftermath of McGirt<\/em>, a pivotal question for Indigenous political leaders is how to ensure that Indigenous sovereignty does not calcify into the same punitive logics, bureaucratic violences, and elite self-perpetuation that have long defined colonial rule.<\/p>\n

That question of sovereignty is answered by Jon Hickey\u2019s 2025 novel Big Chief, <\/em>which considers how Native self-determination navigates the same institutional forms that have long suppressed it. Sovereignty is the<\/em> problem of Big Chief<\/em>, but to be sure, Hickey, an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, refuses to add any simple buzz to that too-often-essentialized word. As its front-cover blurb by David Heska Wanbli Weiden puts it, Big Chief<\/em> may be \u201cthe great Native American political novel,\u201d but in the process it complicates some of the rudimentary political aims of Native peoples today.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? In one of the climactic scenes of Hickey\u2019s Big Chief<\/em>, Mitch Caddo has been practically left for dead in the northern Wisconsin snow after a violent encounter with another member of his reservation. Now, to survive, Mitch must break into a cabin, \u201cabandoned for the season,\u201d with the uncanny charm of a \u201cfairy-tale gingerbread house.\u201d But once inside, the external aesthetic of rustic tradition gives way to a climate-controlled condo outfitted for leisure. Here is sanitized wilderness for a \u201cchimokomon who fishes and mows down nature in a loud four-wheeler ATV but feels naked without the comfort of their suburban home.\u201d Mitch enters the house and, ruminating on its owner\u2019s absent presence, reveals the political stakes of Hickey\u2019s novel, and of much contemporary Native literature: \u201cYou don\u2019 want to be advertising to the darkness outside that someone has intruded on this perfect home. But isn\u2019t that what they\u2019re doing? Intruding on this sovereign nation?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the most powerful sovereigns in Big Chief<\/em> wield sovereignty in deplorable ways. Mitch, for instance, is hardly an ideal spokesperson. Working for his childhood friend, the standing tribal president Mack Beck, Mitch pays teenagers to steal the campaign signs of Mack\u2019s rival Gloria Hawkins, uses burner accounts to question her tribal enrollment, and drafts banishment orders against protesters and enemies. Mack, for his part, bulldozes sacred protest sites and orchestrates the banishment of his white adopted father, Joe Beck, with a smug authoritarian flair. Together, they show us sovereignty as spectacle; reform is swapped for retribution. In Mitch and Mack\u2019s hands, sovereignty devolves into settler cosplay. They weaponize enrollment rolls, giving DC paranoia a tribal spin.<\/p>\n

Hickey\u2019s portrayal of morally ambiguous Native people is not complexity for complexity\u2019s sake, but it is also not a new feature of Native literature. American culture has long propagated the myth of the \u201cnoble savage,\u201d the idealization of Indigenous peoples as inherently innocent and morally superior because<\/em> they supposedly live close to nature. But Native novels since, at the latest, Joaquin Murieta<\/em> by the Cherokee novelist John Rolin Ridge (1825\u20131867) have parried this trope\u2014in Ridge\u2019s case, by showing the Mexican bandit responding to American incursion with compromised acts of vengeance.<\/p>\n

Hickey renders Mitch and Mack ironic versions of what Deborah Miranda (Ohlone\/Costanoan-Esselen Nation) terms \u201cbad Indians,\u201d her reclamation of the derogatory label that titles her memoir.4<\/a><\/sup> Like the subjects of Miranda\u2019s book, Mitch and Mack are part of a critique of the colonial state, but for Hickey, their badness is the essential part of that critique. Their refusal to be exemplary unsettles the cultural demand for Indigenous figures to serve as moral counterpoints to colonial violence. Mitch and Mack resist both racism and<\/em> the trap of positive caricature by being morally suspect. They affirm a fundamental Native ethical contingency that must be emphasized in response to a long-standing American tradition of stereotyping, whether negative or idealizing. Hickey complicates the valorization of self-determination that expresses itself by electing these squalid operatives. How can words like sovereignty not become noble savages, too?<\/p>\n

Thus, Big Chief<\/em> is many kinds of novel: the<\/em> political novel, as Weiden crowns it, but also a family drama, a legal thriller, a cancer book. It refuses to determine itself as one genre and likewise refuses to make any simple claims about self-determination. Hickey proposes that sovereignty is a systematically ambivalent formation: having achieved sovereignty, these leaders on the Passage Rouge Reservation are caught between empowerment and the snares of administration.<\/p>\n

Mitch and Mack have gained hold over the master\u2019s tools, but seem hardly interested in dismantling the master\u2019s house. Mack\u2019s actions and rhetoric reveal this deeper issue most cuttingly: he enacts a nation-state model, a governance focused on borders and interdiction. Technically, these are expressions of sovereignty, but they reproduce the disciplinary logic of colonialism\u2014the usage of territorial rights to benefit a cabal of insiders.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Hickey\u2019s portrayal of morally ambiguous Native people is not complexity for complexity\u2019s sake, but it is also not a new feature of Native literature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nThis center will not hold, not least because, over the course of Big Chief<\/em>, there are simply too many eyes on the governing administration on Passage Rouge. There are FBI agents investigating fishy land deals; there are the voters who believe in Gloria\u2019s boilerplate Green-esque, \u201cgranola party\u201d candidacy (\u201cGloria things,\u201d Mitch explains, include \u201ctrying to get the tribe’s construction company to go all in on solar panels and carbon-negative concrete\u201d). But the rot is visible from within, too. Mitch works best as a compelling protagonist when he is a skeptical insider, raising his eyebrows at Mack\u2019s definition of sovereignty: \u201cWe ain\u2019t sovereign if we don\u2019t exercise sovereign rights of self-determination. We ain\u2019t a nation if we don\u2019t control our borders. We ain\u2019t a nation if we can’t enforce basic fuckin\u2019 black-and-white, right-and-wrong laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the novel\u2019s end, Mitch will denounce this punitive definition. In a moment of reflection that directly counters Mack\u2019s swagger, Mitch finally recognizes \u201cthe flaw\u201d in their machinations, perhaps spurred by experiences like his legally dubious intrusion of the house: \u201cWe were working with the wrong tools, ones that were imposed on our people years ago. Judging our destinies by these imperfect and misleading measurements\u2014who\u2019s in charge, who goes to jail, who gets to be in the tribe, and so on\u2014is an affliction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, Hickey diagnoses the problem that has plagued his protagonist all novel long. Unlike Mack, Mitch is marked as salvageable\u2014the novel\u2019s locus of hope in formation: \u201cIf there\u2019s a medicine for it, a ceremony, a song, I want it, but it still eludes me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Settler Fantasies, Televised<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"Hannah <\/a>\n \n Hannah Manshel <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

As a counterpoint, the book also fleshes out a less cynical version of sovereignty. It\u2019s an answer to the queasy sovereigns who cannot carry the novel\u2019s hopes\u2014at least, if Hickey is to guide Indigenous sovereignty forward. Big Chief<\/em>\u2019s second vision of sovereignty, which asserts self-determination as the entry point into relational caretaking, is partly represented by Gloria. But it finds its more interesting articulation in her aide: Layla, Mack\u2019s sister and Mitch\u2019s on-again, off-again partner, with whom he shared a magical summer and a pregnancy scare.<\/p>\n

What Layla recognizes is that moving past the loathsome form of sovereignty expressed by Mitch and Mack is contingent on a rethinking of time. One must, as Mark Rifkin puts it, go \u201cbeyond settler time,\u201d into the space that Layla identifies as the time of dreaming.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In a conversation between Mitch and Layla, she identifies the real reason they never got together: \u201cYou don\u2019t know when to be serious or when to just let yourself dream.\u201d Mitch\u2019s obsession with realpolitik\u2014however justified by trauma\u2014has killed something between them and in himself. His response to Layla\u2019s accusation reveals his self-aware entrenchment in a nonrelational form of political determination: \u201cJust say it, Layla. Just say, run away with me. \u2026 Here I am having these cruel thoughts and unfair expectations from her, wanting some wildly unrealistic quid pro quo: save me and I\u2019ll save you.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast to this rhetoric, Layla\u2019s capacity to dream, tinged by Gloria\u2019s sense of hope, casts her as Hickey\u2019s moral center. Reflecting on the brief moment when she thought she might be pregnant, Layla insists on dreaming\u2019s importance for imagining continuity: \u201cI was thinking about names. Dreaming about them. I was thinking about what it would be like \u2026 But it didn’t happen. I was okay with that, and you were okay with that, but you seemed like you were too<\/em> okay with that. I didn\u2019t want you to be okay. I wanted you to ache like me. Just because you’re dreaming doesn’t mean you’re unrealistic. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Layla justifies what grizzled cynics like Mitch might call idealism by maintaining the beauty of her momentary dwelling in potential. Layla dreamt of a child: the dreaming existed and mattered, even if the child never materialized. The imagined child represents what Indigenous studies scholars call speculative kinship, the practice of forming kin outside normative structures that often emerge from settler cultures. Speculative kinship allows for the formation of ties through a memory of shared dispossession or ceremonial obligation, rather than through a strict, state-sanctioned version of bloodline. It shows up when an aunt is not an aunt by birth but through years of caretaking, or when solidarities form between Indigenous and Black communities resisting environmental violence on shared land.<\/p>\n

\n

Layla\u2019s demand of futurity counters Mitch\u2019s capture by settler logics of domination; and it does so by reorienting sovereignty away from jurisdictional enforcement, and toward relation. Layla suggests that sovereignty\u2019s gift of self-determination could be the capacity to sustain and imagine kinship: even across time fractured by settler dislocation, as when burial grounds are flooded for hydroelectric dams, or when families were broken by boarding schools severing children from land and language.<\/p>\n

Their conversation, unfortunately, is interrupted: a phone call comes in, Hickey\u2019s reminder of the urgency with which business as usual breathes down one\u2019s neck. Sovereignty based in control crowds out the attentiveness that relation requires. For sovereignty not<\/em> to reproduce deplorable forms of governance, it must avoid the alarms of settler temporality.<\/p>\n

What if, instead, one dreams after the alarm goes off? Layla contradicts the temptations of cynicism by demanding time for grief, a dreaming that dignifies what never was, and thus what might still be.<\/p>\n

  1. Robert J. Miller and Torey Dolan, \u201cThe Indian Law Bombshell: McGirt v. Oklahoma,\u201d Boston University Law Review<\/em>, vol. 101 (2021), pp. 2049, 2051. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Miller and Dolan, \u201cThe Indian Law Bombshell,\u201d p. 2051. Their framing of the case\u2019s potential emphasizes contingency: \u201cBut if<\/em> the state, the tribes, and the United States can adjust to this new reality, it is possible that under settled case law and the example of other states that also have numerous Indian nations and reservations within their borders, this new situation can be managed and ultimately work well for all the governments and peoples concerned\u201d (emphasis added). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  3. Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene First Nation), for instance, warns that state-sanctioned recognition risks reinscribing colonial authority, while Eve Tuck (Unangax\u0302, Aleut Community of St. Paul Island) and K. Wayne Yang argue that even \u201cliberal advances in representation and inclusion\u201d can fall prey to the \u201ccomplacency of voyeurism\u201d and end up obscuring or deferring decolonial demands. See Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 3; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, \u201cUnbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research,\u201d Qualitative Inquiry<\/em>, vol. 20, no. 6 (2014), p. 817. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  4. Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir<\/em>, expanded ed. (Heyday, 2024). \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  5. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination<\/em> (Duke University Press, 2017). \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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