Sovereignty
by
This iteration of my work on sovereignty is cognizant of its framing as a keyword in a series published by New York University Press. The press is located within Lenapehoking, the historic territory of the Lenape people. As a Lenape scholar, I hold this representation accountable to the people from whose territory it is published. Sovereignty is a word that registers varying contested ways of conceptualizing, evaluating, and negotiating the terms of our social relations and conditions with one another, other than humans, the land, and water. By thinking through two discrete and opposed claims on what sovereignty means and how sovereignty matters—by white supremacy and by Indigenous feminism—it is possible to understand in part the difficult terrain of racialized, gendered, and sexualized social contestations that inform its continued significance. I begin with a definition. The United Nations defines sovereignty as a set of inherent, fundamental human rights to governance that belong to the state (a polity under a system of governance) and to the individual (a person). State sovereignty is associated with collectively held rights to self-governance, territorial integrity, natural resource control, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural autonomy. These rights are anchored to the principle of noninterference from foreign governments...
This essay may be found on page 211 of the printed volume.