Diaspora has become a powerful theoretical and ideological lens through which scholars

of the American academy connect members of disparate groups. It has been described by Paul

Gilroy in The Black Atlantic as a “condition of modernity,” (attached to a process) whereas Brent

Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora theorizes it as a methodological “practice,” which

“can be articulated (or brought together) only in forms that are provisional, negotiated, [and]

asymmetrical.” But what is it exactly that constitutes the articulation (or bringing together) of

diasporic communities? And does this practice extend to social groups that can be said to also

constitute sovereign nations? Rachel Buff’s Immigration and the Political Economy of Home

and Renya K. Ramirez’s Native Hubs together offer a glimpse at what such articulations (or

connections) might look like in (some of) America’s contemporary indigenous communities.

Buff and Ramirez each find utility in diaspora studies and read together they provide insights

into the ways in which Indian Country might contain diasporic communities of its own. This

project considers their contributions to these complex discourses as a means to enter into

dialogue with contemporary pressing issues in Indian Country and Native American and

Indigenous Studies (NAIS).

Before engaging directly in a discussion of how Native American and Indigenous peoples

define nation status and their citizenship within these nations, it is important to set parameters or

at least provide a basic framework for understanding what diaspora means in the context of this

project. I want to avoid making definitive disclaimers as to what diaspora is, because it is not my

purpose to make claims of truth and foreclose alternatives. It is productive to instead to examine

diaspora in terms of the discourses it has produced to understand how Edward’s diasporic

“practices” articulate through communities. In her essay “Defining Diaspora, Refining a

Discourse,” Kim D. Butler argues that for a community to be considered in diasporic terms it

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must address at the minimum four things: “1) Reason for, and conditions of, the dispersal, 2)

Relationship to the homeland, 3) Relationship to the hostlands, [and] 4) Interrelationships within

communities of the diaspora.” - tools for comparative research - Using Butler’s general

guideline, diasporic “systems of meaning and representation” can be said to intersect with

discourses produced in Native American and Indigenous Studies about nationhood and

citizenship.

The nation-state is seemingly a formulation antithetical to diaspora, which begins in

many ways with a rejection of full membership to the national polity – this is what necessitates

coalition building through diasporic communities. Vine Deloria, Jr. defines nationhood as a

“process of decision making that is free and uninhibited within the community, a community in

fact that is almost insulated from external factors as it considers its possible options.” While the

nation is an idea “distinct from the old Indian culture and traditions”; he argues, however, that

nationhood “is the only form of political participation that the Unites States government would

recognize and deal with.” Indigenous populations distinct from one another existed on the

continent that came to be called America long before the formulation of the federal U.S.

government. It does no one any good to pretend that indigenous people were passive and

peaceful all the time: there was slavery (Dels project) and inter-tribal warfare. But to borrow

language from Anna Tsing in Friction, the “scale” of power in slavery and inter-tribal warfare

was balanced very differently than upon colonization. In other words, the stakes in control of the

social, material, and cultural processes of a community were very different pre-colonization than

post. Indigenous populations of America have struggled for sovereignty and autonomy from the

United States since its inception, California Indians have a special place in this history.

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 This struggle for the self determination or sovereignty of indigenous people plays out

within the borders of the American host land—initially indigenous home land —and

manifests through the establishment of nationhood separate or sovereign from America and its

other nations within. Nationhood relies upon some sense of a physical border between two or, in

this case, more nations. Mary Pat Brady argues borders function as “the producer of a constant

reenactment of historical divisions, conquest, and control.” However, as Deloria, Jr.

demonstrates, the establishment of national borders also functions as a form of indigenous

survival and resistance and these indigenous resistances are central to Native American and

Indigenous studies. For American Indians in California, insulation from “external factors” is

nearly impossible due to the continual encroachment upon indigenous lands, the termination of

tribal lands to allow for the incorporation of those sacred lands into the larger geography of

California – (“perhaps this is what as a condition of modernity.”)

- conditions of dispersal are the conditions of citizenship in NAIS

(larger paper does historical look at the making and unmaking, or recognition and termination, of

California tribes, for the purposes of this talk I am focusing on more contemporary issues.)

Citizenship itself is multilayered in America as “natural” residents become citizens by birth.

Simultaneously, Americans also have membership as citizens within state and local polities all of

which entails rights, privileges, and obligations specific to those polities, but these also connote

definitive land boundaries and borders relating directly to the polities at hand. For indigenous

people, historically citizenship entailed a lengthy judicial process that for some, like California

Indians, ended in the termination of the (U.S. official) “boundaries and borders” of their sacred

lands and their sovereignty as indigenous people. Vine Deloria, Jr. in Exiled in the Land of the

Free writes that in 1870 under the fourteenth amendment of the Federal Constitution, Indians

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were not citizens of the U.S., but that they were subject to the “jurisdiction of their own tribes

and not the United States.” - this is what he calls dual citizenship - This meant that Indians were

not protected by the U.S. Constitution and not subject to its privileges. Sovereignty, therefore,

was a status to be granted by the federal government. As it could be granted, self-determination

could also be taken away. While Indians were citizens according to Federal law, states also had

the right to bestow, and therefore, rescind rights and privileges accrued through citizenship.

This exposes the fragility of native nationalisms in NAIS discourse.

This might be a dangerous move to make because of the different times and places, but

CA as a case study illustrates that in some ways the structure of native nationalisms

contemporarily – with the emphasis on income through gaming- results in divisiveness among

tribal communities. Ramirez in Native Hubs cites the disenrollment strategies employed by the

Miwoks of the Cold Springs Rancheria who recently built a casino and wish to “concentrate [the]

“wealth” among a smaller tribal population. These strategies include sending out letters to

members targeted for disenrollment that “cancel” meetings meant to alter the bylaws concerning

tribal membership, while members not targeted are verbally encouraged to show up and vote.

The process of becoming sovereign is therefore a contested terrain not just between the U.S. and

Indians, but also within tribes themselves. Tribal divisiveness prevents coalition building, which

inhibits tribal to federal processes, such as recognition, which is symptomatic of the vexed

relationship between tribes as “domestic dependant nations” and the federal government.

What I want to suggest is that contemporary N.A. Indigenous nationalisms can be

divisive, unstable, conditional and provisional. While I have provided a thumbnail sketch of

nationhood in NAIS, the point is that belonging and citizenship, as Ramirez argues, is itself a

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“contested concept, but also an extremely complicated issue for Indigenous peoples” who may

have to struggle to remain members in their own tribes.

Diaspora is always, in some ways, about finding a sense of belonging, but belonging is,

therefore, a problematical within tribal communities. The 1950s termination era CA was

prompted in part as a way to combat communism by preventing the “red threat” of tribal

communalism. Forced detribalization during the federal termination era was, thus, one extension

of country wide efforts at reducing any subversive or un-American operations within its borders -

communities. Buff argues that dual citizenship was problematic in this era, because communal

ideals promoted “dual loyalties to ‘nations’ within’ rather than the development of safely

individualized citizens.” Thus, it became important for the federal government to couch the

terms of this termination period in language that would read as “empowerment” for natives. In

the 1950s, therefore, the U.S. Congress sought to fully “enfranchise” indigenous people by

dissolving its federal supervision of Indians through the termination of their status as “wards” of

the U.S. – to facilitate assimilation on August 18, 1958, the federal government authorized

$509,235 to be held “in fee” for members of California tribes to purchase tribal lands pursuant to

the Bureau of Indian Affairs California Rancheria Act, P.L. 85-671.

(CA huge population of native people – this individualized property ownership). The

remaining Rancherias were dissolved when Eisenhower sought to protect America from war by

providing road access to all great cities in America, which would purportedly become targets

during war. The El Dorado Rancheria (and N. California’s other Rancherias) impeded the

construction of Highway 50 during the final phase of the “Dwight D. Eisenhower National

System of Interstate and Defense Highways.”

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 As a result of forces meant to assimilate Indian difference into the larger national body,

individual tribes are forced to develop concrete identities that are legible to the state and national

bodies. Deloria, Jr. argues that “intangible, spiritual, and emotional aspirations of American

Indians,” should never be supplanted by sovereign entities. Nationhood is contrary to indigenous

ways of relating to each other, but Indian resurgence through the juridical concept of the nation

must be considered a form of indigenous resistance to assimilation and an example of the

resilience of a people with a long history of intra-continental connectivities.

I began this essay by asking whether entities understood to constitute nations can be

considered diasporic and argued that diasporic communities share four common constructs. U.S.

Federal policy leads to ancestral lands being taken away to become part of the national body of

the host land. The 1958 California Rancheria Act terminated all California tribes at the federal

level and the subsequent 1966 encroachment of the Interstate system, designed to protect the

American nation from outside threats, meant that inside the U.S. nation, land belonging to

ancestors was sold and subsumed by America for the sake of national development to protect its

borders. Fifty thousand American Indians in California now live and work “off reservation,” it

becomes important to look beyond nation making as a physical act to retheorize indigenous

citizenship on different terms. Ramirez argues that most of the scholarship coming from NAIS

has focused “primarily on external forces, leaving out how internal dynamics marginalize

members of Indian tribes and communities.”

This is not to say that external forces are not important, because they have and continue

to directly shape Indian Country today. Recalling the actions of the Miwoks of Cold Springs

Rancheria, it becomes evident that the effects of “forced federalism” often impede the building

of both intertribal and intra-tribal relationships. Focusing on “external forces” elides the

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experiences of large populations of Indians who were forced off reservations and Rancherias

during the 1950s termination era. Buff and Ramirez’s projects are, therefore, important

contributions to NAIS, because they use ethnography to focus on communities whose identities

were shaped anew by their urban surroundings.

Buff’s monograph focuses on festivals as places that “connect individuals from disparate

parts of the globe” who have parallel experiences with America as a powerful national body;

through these spaces, invented traditions have become a way for indigenous populations to

“remember” the past. Ramirez’s monograph also identifies powwows as shared spaces, but as

her scholarship focuses solely on indigenous peoples of America, she also identifies sweat lodge

ceremonies, American Indian Alliance meetings, and high schools as places where “Indians

could come together to share their feelings of common identity.” Benedict Anderson in

Imagined Communities argues that “the birth of nationalism” as an imagined community arises

from a sense of “simultaneity-along-time.” This means that members of the nation, as an

imagined community, move along in the world knowing that their national body is “steady,

anonymous, [and] simultaneous.” This sense of simultaneity and connection, thus, might also be

said to characterize diasporic Indian nations. A key difference in the experience of nationhood

for some contemporary reorganizing indigenous nations is that the geography of the nation is “an

imagined community” whose borders are its people. Ramirez argues that “Native diaspora . . .

refers not only to landless Natives’ imagining and maintaining connections with their tribal

nations, but also to the development of intertribal networks and connections within and across

different nation-states.”1 Ramirez builds upon Gilroy’s geographical concept of diaspora,

1
Original emphasis, Ramirez, 11.

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arguing for a revision of diaspora not as a Black Atlantic, but as a hub—a circle that maintains

“diasporic awareness” through “bridging differences.”

I have argued thus far that nationhood is a form of indigenous identity making that allows

American Indians to take a legible form. How does this articulate with hub making or Native

American and Indigenous diaspora? Nation making is articulated through a field of power

instantiated through laws, which establish and regulate from outside how one practices one’s

indigenous identity inside one’s nation. Power is therefore exercised through the ability to

require Indians’ government “look like” the U. S. government – this is what Michel FOucualt

would call biopower. This form of government is a way to force coherence and form onto a

group of people with their own traditions, customs, beliefs, and laws but it is also a powerful way

in which to become or remain “suitable” to state authorities. As Vine Deloria, Jr. stated,

nationhood provides an acceptable “context” in which American Indians negotiate with U.S.

state and federal authorities. To use Ramirez’s metaphor, one’s nation might be said to be an

axis that acts, in diasporic language, as a “center” for Indian communities. This center, the

nation as a hub, is therefore also a source of resistance to total assimilation.

The practice of sovereignty through nationhood, then, is manifested through continual

negotiation. Colonization and the development of the U.S. nation form the conditions of

dispersal for indigenous peoples; however, dispersal experiences take different forms for each

tribe. For example, recovering from federal termination era in 2002, the Miwoks of the Shingle

Springs Rancheria were able to receive a land allotment upon their federal recognition, whereas,

the Miwoks of the El Dorado Rancheria were not. This is due to many factors, including

ongoing lawsuits over illegal land seizures during the federal termination era. In fact The Bureau

of Land Management recently recommended the termination of the land allotment program

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altogether, not because there are no Indians, but because there is “generally no currently

available lands [that] qualify for allotments.” Currently, there are twenty-two federally

recognized tribes in California, Alaska, Arizona, Washington, and Michigan that are “landless.”

Ultimately, however, every tribe in America has had to deal with colonial, then state and

federal threats to their homelands. Nation making has become a common thread that defines

some Indians’ relationships to their home lands and host lands, but so does exclusion from these

legible manifestations of Indian identity. This is where diasporic spaces become important for

Indians throughout the U.S. In the NAIS classroom and alliance spaces, our identities as

indigenous peoples reflect common historical experiences. These common experiences can be

characterized, according to Stuart Hall, as “unstable points of identification or suture, which are

made, within the discourses of history and culture.” Identity formation occurs through a

continual process of negotiation with outside forces. To maintain indigenous identities, CA

tribes must struggle not only against federal law, which in the 1950s sought to dissolve all tribal

affiliations, but against state laws and the encroachment onto ancestral lands. Assimilation and

incorporation, indeed indigenous history, always involves reciprocal action between tribes, their

home lands, and the host land.

Tribes are sovereign and, as such, deserve the rights and privileges accorded such status.

Conventionally, however, this has meant that tribes maintain connections to their ancestral home

lands through reservations and Rancherias, which establishes borders between tribal nations and

the American nation. In the new era of “federalism” tribes are forced to transcend traditional

conceptions of nationhood and develop alternative self-definitions. These tribes exercise legible

forms of governing organization “landless” tribes are dependent upon the host nation to provide

spaces in which to practice this form of government. The idea that nation is a geographically

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bounded territorial entity is destabilized under these conditions and Indian tribes form

governments within de-territorialized spaces. J. Lull describes deterritorialization as a loss of

“‘natural’ relation between culture with geographic and social territory (including)

relocalizations of new and old forms of symbolic production.” Some tribes must, therefore,

come together as diasporic peoples on ancestral lands now owned by the hostland (or citizens of

the hostland) and tribes do this to retain and further develop the practices that are integral to

American Indian identity.

The nation-state and sovereignty are not coterminous with static territorialized forms of

government; rather for some Native Americans the nation becomes an alternative geography of

belonging that sometimes has no physical boundaries at all. Native Americans carve spaces

where there sometimes is literally none to call one’s own, therefore, nationalism in the NAIS

context should be considered a process, much like diaspora, rather than a static place. Tracing

this process means being aware that nationhood and sovereignty, indeed the rights and

responsibilities of being an Indian citizen, occurs under constantly shifting circumstances within

ever changing boundaries. American Indians mediate cultural practices that define them as

distinct tribes with the cultures of their homelands.

*****This essay has reviewed literature produced by Native American scholars about

citizenship, nationhood, and sovereignty to juxtapose what they might mean for contemporary

CA indigenous communities.

Buff and Ramirez agree that as a condition or a process diaspora is, at the least, an experience through

which indigenous identities form and are negotiated which is “continually through “transformation and difference.”

(hall) Citizenship and nationalism—key themes in Native American and Indigenous Studies—are only problematic

in the context of diaspora to the degree that these words connote a sense steadfast boundaries. In the context of

Native American and Indigenous studies, however, the nation, sovereignty and citizenship is always a contingent

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status, sometimes even within tribes. Because there are twenty two tribes who have status at the federal level, but

are without tribal land, it is important that NAIS begins the work of theorizing what American Indians nationhood

will look like in this future of forced federalism.

Tracing the ways in which Native American and Indigenous communities approach these

issues reveals complex histories of political and cultural negotiation that transcend common

notions of the nation. While some American Indians enjoy sovereignty as “domestic dependant

nations” on their own land, others join together in diasporic spaces to exercise their sovereignty.

Sovereignty, therefore, must be understood as a method of disciplining social bodies through

technologies of power that are gained through negotiations. Regulations upon Indians at the

state level always draws upon the power of the federal contract, which Michel Foucault in

Society Must Be Defended argues is a “first initial, and foundational” authority that then invests

states with the “technology of biopower”—control over human bodies within state territories that

are vested with authority to “make live and let die.” In other words, power occurs through

different valences and these mechanisms of power, such as sovereignty, take the shape of legible

government structures, such as nations, that “do not exist at the same level” as those vested with

authority, but as Foucault argues, neither are they exclusive of one another. Therefore, while

nationhood and sovereignty may be a tool to exercise citizenship in legible forms, some

American Indian communities are still without a place to call their own: they are diasporic.

***This essay begins a conversation with and issues a challenge to scholars in the field of

NAIS to explore how twenty first century Indian nations in California, Alaska, Arizona,

Washington, and Michigan—all recovering from the 1950s termination period—are experiencing

reorganization in an era where there is literally no land available in the federal trust to call nation

(home). The social and physical geography of twenty first century Indian nationhood and

sovereignty, for many American Indians, transcends borders and will, therefore, need to be re-

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theorized. This paper suggests that one productive conceptualization of this emergent

indigenous social and cultural geography is a Native American and Indigenous diaspora, which

always relates to but does not necessarily have physical borders.

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