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Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty

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Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY David Myer Temin IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Joan Tronto October 2016 © David Temin 2016 i Acknowledgements Perhaps the strangest part of acknowledging others for their part in your dissertation is the knowledge that no thanks could possibly be enough. At Minnesota, I count myself lucky to have worked with professors and fellow graduate students alike who encouraged me to explore ideas, take intellectual risks, and keep an eye on the political stakes of any project I might pursue. That is why I could do a project like this one and still feel emboldened that I had something important and worthwhile to say. To begin, my advisor, Joan Tronto, deserves special thanks. Joan was supportive and generous at every turn, always assuring me that the project was coming together even when I barely could see ahead through the thicket to a clearing. Joan went above and beyond in reading countless drafts, always cheerfully commenting or commiserating and getting me to focus on power and responsibility in whatever debate I had found myself wading into. Joan is a model of intellectual charity and rigor, and I will be attempting to emulate her uncanny ability to cut through the morass of complicated debates for the rest of my academic life. Other committee members also provided crucial support: Nancy Luxon, too, read an endless supply of drafts and memos. She has taught me more about writing and crafting arguments than anyone in my academic career, which has benefited the shape of the dissertation in so many ways. Bud Duvall taught me to think critically and structurally and his intellectual imprint is everywhere in this document. His advice to me at the early stages of the project especially was invaluable. Bud’s dissertation group also provided a needed lift to get me through to the end of the project. Though I had never taken her seminars and probably sounded quite green when I first approached her ii to be on the committee, Jeani O’Brien enthusiastically supported this project and has helped me build bridges to Native Studies and into the archive. Given her insistence on power in history, she made a perfect fit for the committee. Rob Nichols offered encouragement and, across several conversations, proved instrumental to framing my understanding of Deloria after I completed my archival work. His careful and politically sage arguments about the ongoing reality of colonization also have significantly influenced the way I think about the topic of the dissertation. Joe Soss, Liz Beaumont, Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo, and Yves Winter all also helped out with the project and encouraged me along the way. Joe in particular offered a wonderful intellectual space to explore in his dissertation group to present the inchoate early stages of the project, and he taught me not to fall into the trap of thinking that there is a single “right” way to think about knowledge production and to trust my way of getting through to the world. I had no shortage of wonderful graduate school colleagues—and, I can truly say, friends—who pushed me to think critically in ways I never could have anticipated upon entering the program in 2010. Chris Stone probably read more drafts than anyone. Aside from being a remarkable friend and roommate, he allowed me to talk for long hours with him about the project and never once succumbed to boredom. Adam Dahl has been a scholarly model for me and careful and critical reader of this project. I look up to him and now feel lucky to work with him as a co-author. A number of others read numerous drafts and shaped my intellectual trajectory: Charmaine Chua, Chase Hobbs-Morgan, Bryan Nakayama, Quynh Pham, and María José Méndez Gutiérrez all helped along the way, providing both theory-brainstorming sessions iii and often needed levity over the years. Zein Murib, Elena Gambino, Elif Kalaycioglu, John Greenwood, Rachel Mattson, David Hugill, Ashley English, Garrett Johnson, Brooke Coe, David Forrest, Matt Hindman, Garnet Kindervater, Ashley English, Aaron Rosenthal, Lucas Franco, Giovanni Mantilla, Darrah McCracken, Tracey Blasenheim, Samarjit Ghosh, Shai Gortler, and Justin Hardy all helped in small and big ways. In addition to the Political Science Department, I also felt lucky to have discussants, interlocutors, and fellow library and coffee shop denizens across political theory and native studies willing to hear out my ideas and who offered me kind encouragement and enthusiasm in various venues over the past couple years. In this regard, thanks go to: Phillip J. Deloria, Heidi Stark, Kennan Ferguson, Glen Coulthard, David Wilkins, Burke Hendrix, Jeanne Morefield, Christina Beltrán, Alyosha Goldstein, David Williams, Michael Goodhardt, Kevin Bruyneel, Heather Pool, Patricia Marroqiun Norby, Kelly Wisecup, Tim Waligore, Andrew Valls, Sam Chambers, Lisa Disch, Ike Sharpless, Caitlin Tom, Himadeep Muppidi, David Blaney, PJ Brendese, Jill Doerfler, Jane Gordon, Angelica Bernal, John LeJeune, Kim TallBear, Robert Geroux, and Eva- Maria Müller. I would never have written this dissertation without significant financial support. The Department of Political Science proved supportive during the academic year and over the summers. I also enjoyed funding instrumental to my archival research from both the University of Minnesota Graduate School and the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. I had the chance to work with wonderful archivists whom I got to know over the long haul of archival research. I iv thank archivists at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research, the Newberry Library, and the National Museum of the American Indian’s Vine Deloria, Jr. Library. I cannot thank my family enough for their love and support over the years. My parents, Andrew Temin and Hilda Rosenberg, both supported me in their own ways and asked often about the progress of this long process. I thank my mom for her incredible love and care in what was a difficult couple of years. My brother, Josh, has always been a wonderful friend and remains my first intellectual comrade. My family of lifetime friends, Dan, Nate, Adam—and, now, their partners—tended to provide a good phone chat or getaway to Pelee at the right time from the dissertation. We still miss Alex dearly, but we are lucky to have each other after all these years. My new family, Bernie, Paul, and Phil, made Minneapolis finally feel like home. None of this, though, would have been possible without Grace Christiansen. Where Grace is, there is home. Besides being a great partner, she inspires me everyday to do what I love. v Abstract This dissertation reconstructs the political thought of Yankton Dakota activist-intellectual Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005) in order to explore how Indigenous peoples in the Americas have developed a tradition of politically engaged, anti-colonial critique—a politics of decolonization. Since World War II, democratic theorists have mounted accounts of civic inclusion and multicultural representation to both invigorate projects of democratic state- and nation-building and to respond to legacies of racial and cultural injustice. Against these accounts, I argue that settler democracies make their boundaries through colonial projects of replacement and normalized incorporation that disavow and dissolve Indigenous peoples’ separate polities. Beginning with his leadership in the National Congress of American Indians in 1964, Deloria provided a) an analysis of narratives of civic inclusion and multicultural representation as colonial and b) translated practices of decolonization emergent from the Indigenous sovereignty movement into an evolving framework of shared Indigenous concepts. The project traces Deloria’s counter- proposals through three phases: First, Deloria confidently re-theorized democratic state- building as “empire” so as to promote among Indigenous peoples an anti-colonial politics of self-determination (1964-1969). Second, Deloria aggressively reimagined Indigenous sovereignty as a distinctive variant of constituent power (1969-1975). Third, Deloria disappointedly reckoned with the durability of colonialism and capitalism as twin engines of destruction and re-described Indigenous conceptions of sacred territory, relationship, and responsibility as the ethical-political foundations of decolonization (1975-2005). Through this reconstruction of Deloria’s work in conversation with contemporary Indigenous and Settler-Colonial Studies, my project provides a basis for refashioning political theory’s core interpretive commitments to address the questions of dispossession, landlessness, self-determination, and sovereignty most apt for decolonization struggles in settler-colonial contexts. vi Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i ABSTRACT v PREFACE 1 INTRODUCTION: Decolonizing Political Theory 7 Chapter One Rethinking Racial Domination and Repair in Settler-Colonial Democracies 56 Chapter Two Custer’s Sins: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Civic Inclusion 99 Chapter Three Between Indigenous Sovereignty and Black Power: Reading Civil Rights in an 150 Era of (Post)colonial Citizenship Chapter Four Temporary Visibility: The Politics of Tribal Sovereignty, 1969-1976 204 Chapter Five Displacing the Paradox of Founding: Treaties and Sovereignty in Vine Deloria, 228 Jr.’s Behind the Trail
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