LEGACIES OF VIOLENCE: CITIZENSHIP and sovereignty on contested lands

LANDSCAPE CITIZENSHIPS, ROUTLEDGE (2021)

The political and economic power of the United States is both materially and ideologically built upon its landholdings. Its dominion over land has always been an act of violence against Indigenous peoples; a violence that is measured, mapped, legislated, commodified, and mobilized through its land laws. Examining these laws through an anti- colonial lens disrupts dominant narratives that neutralize the history and production of the American landscape. Indeed, the power of these laws lies in their apparent neutrality by normalizing propertied systems and erasing landed claims for Indigenous sovereignty. Reading the original texts of these land laws exposes how parcelling, allocating, selling, and regulating land have all been part of a larger strategic and cumulative effort to brutally erode Indigenous peoples’ rights as both members of their own sovereign nations and as citizens of the United States. In this context, land laws entwine American citizenship with histories of stolen land and systems of private property.

When the Indian Citizenship Act was passed in 1924, nearly 150 years after the founding of the United States, it granted American citizenship to all Indigenous peoples (Indian Citizenship Act, 1924). Though citizenship is often understood as the means by which individuals are protected from violence and afforded rights by the state, for the Indigenous peoples of the United States, citizenship has been the very mechanism that permits violence because American citizenship continues long- term processes of land dispossession and forced relocations of Indigenous people. Federal land laws, those that exist at the level of the nation- state, underwrite and complicate conceptions of Indigenous sovereignty and citizenship, and position the United States as a land that has been both imagined and physically transformed through an ongoing campaign of violence— politically sanctioned, racially motivated, protracted, and enduring. This chapter argues that the formation of nations relies on access to a land base; that the establishment of the United States as a nation was grounded in the dispossession of Indigenous lands; and that throughout American history, the policies that have governed those stolen lands have been violent instruments to shape the citizenship of Indigenous peoples to their own nations and to the United States.