Cooperation without Submission

Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation–US Engagements

Justin B. Richland

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226608624
• Categoría: Law
• Categoría: Law Theory & Practice

A meticulous and thought-provoking look at how Tribes use language to engage in "cooperation without submission." It is well-known that there is a complicated relationship between Native American Tribes and the US government. Relations between Tribes and the federal government are dominated by the principle that the government is supposed to engage in meaningful consultations with the tribes about issues that affect them.In Cooperation without Submission, Justin B. Richland, an associate justice of the Hopi Appellate Court and ethnographer, closely examines the language employed by both Tribes and government agencies in over eighty hours of meetings between the two. Richland shows how Tribes conduct these meetings using language that demonstrates their commitment to nation-to-nation interdependency, while federal agents appear to approach these consultations with the assumption that federal law is supreme and ultimately authoritative. In other words, Native American Tribes see themselves as nations with some degree of independence, entitled to recognition of their sovereignty over Tribal lands, while the federal government acts to limit that authority. In this vital book, Richland sheds light on the ways the Tribes use their language to engage in "cooperation without submission."

PART 1

Introduction

1

Cooperation without Submission

Introduction

This book considers the historic and ongoing relationship between the United States and those Native Nations whose territories and reservations are now located within that settler nation’s borders. More specifically, it is my attempt to describe an often overlooked and misunderstood dimension of those relations; namely, the way they are enacted and made meaningful by those Tribal leaders who undertake them and the non-Native officials with whom they engage as part of their everyday governance.

In my twenty-five years working mostly for the Hopi Tribal Nation but also with other Tribes and Tribal advocacy organizations, I have regularly been struck by a fact at once routine and in need of restating; that is, while more dramatic events like the 2017 confrontation at Standing Rock Sioux Nation over the Dakota Access Pipeline rightly bring to the fore Indigenous Nations’ interests and relations vis-à-vis the United States (Estes 2019; Estes and Dhillon 2019), the majority of the work that goes into navigating the complex relationships between Tribes and the United States happens in more routine day-to-day governance. It is work that takes place in the neon-lit rooms of US executive branch offices in Washington, DC, or in bland regional federal buildings, or in the multipurpose conference centers of Tribal government buildings. They also occur occasionally as public meetings at town halls, school gyms, resort casinos, and bingo parlors. The work is often unremarkable engagements and bureaucratic back-and-forth that rarely make the local diner-counter conversation circuits, let alone the national press.

The invisibility of these events has meant that most Native Nation–US engagements are rarely understood as sites for the enactment of Tribal sovereignty, Tribal governance, and/or resistance to settler colonial impositions. Moreover, what might count as expressions of Tribal self-determination in these contexts often looks different from how they appear in moments of more spectacular confrontation. Instead of raised fists and body blockades, enacting self-determination in these quiet contexts involves a subtle but determined insistence by Tribal advocates on the enduring viability of their People’s interests and the norms, knowledge, and relations that constitute them. This insistence is often the impetus behind Tribal representatives’ willingness to engage US officials in the first place. And it is a ground they do not cede, even when non-Natives misunderstand their reasons for engaging or when the outcomes of their engagement fall short of their Tribes’ goals.

I call this commitment “cooperation without submission,” which is based on what my mentor, Hopi linguist, lawyer, and anthropologist Emory Sekaquaptewa, once said about his People’s principles of sociocultural and political order. At first glance, the phrase seems to express a simple contradiction. How can there be “cooperation” between two or more political agents without each yielding some aspect of their respective autonomy? Further reflection only yields more complexity, for “cooperation” offered up without autonomy is not cooperation at all; it is coercion. At this point, the phrase not only starts to sound tautological but also bears a striking resemblance to some of the classic themes of Euro-American political liberalism, the stuff of sovereignty and social contract theory deliberated by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and their followers and critics.

But Sekaquaptewa insisted that he learned this lesson elsewhere. He argued that his view is based on the teachings he received about the coordination accomplished by the clans and ceremonial societies that constitute Hopi society, and particularly how they come together for Hopi Peoples’ mutual benefit and ongoing well-being. Of particular import is that this coordination is conditioned on the mutual respect for each clan’s particular norms, knowledge, and relations (what they call navoti, traditional sacred knowledge or knowledge gained through hearing) and the strict prohibitions against sharing that navoti with anyone not a member of that clan or not initiated in its ceremonial societies. It is this commitment to decentralized social power and authority—to the notion that each Hopi clan has its own ways of valuing, knowing, and relating to the world—that cannot not be challenged by the other clans that have thrown in their lot together. It is the ongoing relations of respect for each partner clan’s authority and the vigilance against imposing the norms and knowledge of one on any other that constitutes the glue holding Hopi society together rather than pulling it apart (Ishii 2001; Sekaquaptewa 1972).

It is my argument in this book that, although he never claimed it, Sekaquaptewa’s theory both suggests an abiding principle of Hopi sociality and characterizes an impetus that Hopi—and indeed many other Tribal Nations—rely on when engaging their non-Native counterparts in US federal agencies and other settler colonial organizations and institutions: many Native Nations have a similarly distributed, decentralized theory of sociopolitical authority and practices of self-governance. This, coupled with their shared experience of centuries of Euro-American settler colonialism—which invariably makes them unrecognizable and erases their sovereignty and authority even when claiming to work for their benefit—is why I argue that Sekaquaptewa was speaking about a Hopi theory of sociopolitical order and engagement that has resonances with the experiences and commitments of other Native Nations’ engagements with the United States.

I believe that cooperation without submission (hereafter, CWS) can be understood as an Indigenous theory of jurisdiction. It describes an actively accomplished sphere of authority that Indigenous leaders (and advocates for Native Nations) invoke and enact as expressions of their ongoing sovereignty in the practices of their everyday self-governance. It is a jurisdiction entailed and produced in the details of the legal language—juris-diction (literally law-talk)—that Native Nation leaders and representatives deploy when undertaking the government-to-government relationship with the US settler state. I argue that US agencies and organizations have long passed laws and policies that claim an interest in Indigenous norms, knowledge, and relations. More often than not, however, they treat Indigenous lifeways as objects to be inquired about, evaluated, and made meaningful according to US regulatory and scientific criteria. Ironically, they do not see them as the foundational and constitutive elements of Indigenous everyday practices of self-determination, or of that which is accomplished through Indigenous juris-dictions of CWS. The results are therefore all too predictable. That is, US agents and agencies continuously make unrecognizable the reasons Native leaders and advocates engage with them in the first place, and constantly misdiagnose why federal laws and policies fail Tribal Nations more generally. This has been true since the first relations with Native Nations.

To understand this, we need to consider the legal and political histories of US relations with Native Nations and the criticisms leveled against US and other settler colonial regimes governing their relations with Indigenous Nations. This will be taken up in finer detail in chapter 2, but I offer a cursory discussion of it here. I will then introduce readers to the kinds of scenes of Native-US engagements I analyze in this book by using two specific examples from the hundreds of hours of ethnographic data I have gathered in working with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. The details of these two events allow me to highlight the theories and methods of legal language analysis and linguistic anthropology that I apply to Native-US engagements throughout the book. These include, in particular, the theories and methods that I gather under my notion of legal language as juris-diction. I end this chapter with an overview of the general structure of the book, including summaries of the chapters that follow.

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It has been almost two hundred years since the 1831 Supreme Court decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia,1 in which were announced some of the foundational principles of federal Indian law. Chief among these were: (1) that Tribes are “domestic dependent nations” retaining certain inherent rights of self-determination and internal governance, while ceding other aspects of their sovereignty to the United States, including absolute title to their Aboriginal lands and resources;2 and (2) that to the extent that US settler colonialism infringes on Tribal sovereignty, the federal government bears a “trust responsibility” to Tribal Nations. That is, whenever the United States enacts policies affecting Tribal Nations, it must do so in a manner that comports with Tribes’ best interests.3 These remain, ostensibly, the two organizing principles of US policies toward Tribal Nations to this day, including those that are supposed to animate the details of regulatory and administrative processes that have constituted the front line of Native-US engagements (Getches et al. 2016; R. Miller 2015).

Even those unfamiliar with the history of US policies toward Native Americans will know that this relationship is one in which the “best interest” of Tribal Nations has usually been defined by federal actors in ways that effectuated the further loss of Tribal Nations’ political, economic, and sociocultural autonomy. This certainly was the case from the mid-1800s to early 1900s, when the prevailing policies called for the breaking up of collective Tribal land holdings, the cultural assimilation of Native Peoples through forced reeducation, and the erasure of Tribal Nations’ political relations to the United States (Pommersheim 2009; Wilkinson 1987). It is also true of the policy from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, which attempted to end the unique relationship between certain select Tribes and the US, to additionally allow several named state governments to assume criminal jurisdiction over Tribal lands in their borders, and to do both without any effort to secure Tribal consent for these tectonic policy shifts. Scholars of federal Indian law and Tribal governance understand both periods as the long dark nights when Tribal Nations suffered the greatest losses at the hands of a US government that was ostensibly acting in their best interests (Getches et al. 2016; Wilkins and Stark 2018).

But some argue that settler colonial depredations have also been enacted on Native Nations between the 1930s and 1950s and again from the late 1960s until now, when the nominal commitments of US policy toward Native Nations have been the acknowledgment of Tribal rights to self-governance. These periods are characterized by laws that ended prior assimilative policies and inaugurated processes for “recognizing” and “reorganizing” Tribal Nations, while later encouraging them to exercise their rights to self-determination by exerting greater control over the day-to-day operation of federally funded programs. While these policy eras express a greater commitment to Tribal sovereignty, they have more recently come under criticism for actually doing more to erode genuine Tribal self-governance. The critique is that they fail to genuinely acknowledge and be open to the decision-making authority of Tribal Nations over their own futures, while at the same time hiding behind virtuous-sounding policies the United States’ role in continuing to deprive Tribal Nations of their rights (Bruyneel 2007; Coulthard 2014; Deloria and Lytle 1983).

In light of this, colonialism in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other settler nation-states has been described as uniquely committed to the elimination of Indigenous Nations (Veracini 2010, 2015; Wolfe 1999, 2006). And this is true “whatever settlers may say” (Wolfe 2006, 388). One of the founding theorists of settler colonialism, Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, quotes Deborah Bird Rose when he writes that “to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home” (388). Given this, he argues:

Settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. (388)

This concept of settler colonialism has found fertile ground in Native American studies, Indigenous studies, and the anthropologies concerned with both. It discloses how and why struggles like the resistance of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Nation to the Dakota Access Pipeline arise not just when US policies are explicitly oriented to the elimination of Tribal Nations but also in periods when those policies proclaim US support for Tribal self-governance and economic development. Wolfe’s theory contextualizes Indigenous resistance as a legitimate response both to overt acts of settler violence and to the equally insidious settler impulse to “maintain the refractory imprint of the native counterclaim,” a perverse drive to cultivate an “‘indigenous aura’ to reflect and justify the settler state’s independence from what was the mother country” (Wolfe 2006, 389).

In a similar vein, historian Philip Deloria (1998) describes this refraction as the kind of “playing Indian” on display from the earliest days of the US’s pre-revolutionary era into the present. It is evident in the acts of colonial rebels in the Massachusetts Colony, who disguised themselves as Mohawks and destroyed tea shipments from the United Kingdom in what is now known as the Boston Tea Party. But it is also present in the seemingly more benign appropriations by the Boy Scouts of America and its ersatz Indian themes, which arose at the very same time that US policies were lashing Native Peoples with the deepest cuts of forced assimilation. And it continues in the various mascot controversies that continue to embroil sports culture in the United States (King and Springwood 2001). A great irony of the interest that non-Native individuals and institutions have long displayed for Native Nations and their norms, knowledge, and relations is that their interest has almost always come at the expense of Indigenous Peoples themselves.

The irony is no less dramatic, and the appropriation no less serious, when the “playing Indian” is less obvious. For example, some of the theoretical and analytic apparatuses I use in this book are schools of thought whose unique efflorescence can be at least partly traced to the norms, knowledge, and relations gained from early Euro-American encounters with Native Nations and their theories of sociality and governance.4

I am not the first to notice these influences nor to acknowledge their erasure. In Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy, Scott L. Pratt (2002) argues that philosophical pragmatism owes its reputation as a “distinctively American philosophy” (xvii) as much to lessons learned from Native American rejections of non-Native encroachment as to rejections of European political and conceptual traditions. Pratt argues that the lessons learned from Native Americans are precisely those of what he calls an “indigenous attitude” (38) formed in the crucible of engaged response to the ethnocentric chauvinisms of European thought of the day. This attitude sought to replace European emphases on objectivism, certitude, and progressive rationalism with perspectives that bear a striking resemblance to Indigenous intellectual principles, like the Narraganset concept of wunnégin, that emphasize practical ethics, epistemological diversity, and the generation of meaning and understanding as immanent in the relational engagements of everyday life (Pratt 2002). Pratt is clear that the influence was not direct. Rather, he traces how these concepts and the works of Indigenous leaders such as Teedyuscung (Delaware) and Sagoyewatha (Seneca) overtly influenced early Euro-American thinkers and political actors such as Roger Williams and Benjamin Franklin. Later, this influence reached the writings of nineteenth-century figures such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), John Ross (Cherokee), and Lydia Marie Child. It was through these genealogies that certain notions of the ethics of an everyday relational epistemology, and the ideas of practical, autochthonous governance it underwrote, came to bear intellectual fruit in thinkers that include William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey, among others (Pratt 2002).

As I show in greater depth in chapter 6, a similar influence can be traced through the work of the American legal realist Karl Llewellyn. His groundbreaking work on the “law-ways” of the Northern Cheyenne was completed at nearly the same time as he led the charge in a legal realist–inspired reform of US commercial law through the drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code. For scholars like Llewellyn, whether they recognized it or not, their “playing Indian” proved to be serious business indeed.

To the extent that my own thinking in this book, and in other writings, has been inspired by the insights of both philosophical pragmatists and legal realists, one might say that my attention to the commitments of CWS is not only unsurprising but long past due. For whatever may have come before, I myself cannot escape the debts I owe to Indigenous theories and the relations invariably formed in and through those theories that have come down to me. Nor should I. For what kind of relations are adequately compassed merely by acknowledging their history? Recognizing the debts owed to Indigenous thought, as I do here, may be a necessary first step, but recognition in and of itself is inadequate to the ongoing relations that these and other engagements inaugurated long ago.

Indeed, by itself, simply “recognizing” Indigenous Peoples and their impacts on US ...