This Sovereign Land
This Sovereign Land

Author: Daniel Kemmis

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2013-03-22

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 161091113X

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In the eight states of the interior West (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), 260 million acres -- more than 48 percent of the land base -- are owned by the federal government and managed by its Washington, D.C.-based agencies. Like many other peoples throughout history who have bristled under the controlling hand of a remote government, westerners have long nursed a deep resentment toward our nation's capital. Rumblings of revolution have stirred for decades, bolstered in recent years by increasing evidence of the impossibility of a distant, centralized government successfully managing the West's widespread and far-flung lands. In This Sovereign Land, Daniel Kemmis offers a radical new proposal for giving the West control over its land. Unlike those who wish to privatize the public lands and let market forces decide their fate, Kemmis, a leading western Democrat and committed environmentalist, argues for keeping the public lands public, but for shifting jurisdiction over them from nation to region. In place of the current centralized management, he offers a regional approach that takes into account natural topographical and ecological features, and brings together local residents with a vested interest in ensuring the sustainability of their communities. In effect, Kemmis carries to their logical conclusion the recommendations about how the West should be governed made by John Wesley Powell more than a century ago. Throughout, Kemmis argues that the West no longer needs to be protected against itself by a paternalistic system and makes a compelling case that the time has come for the region to claim sovereignty over its own landscape. This Sovereign Land provides a provocative opening to a much-needed discussion about how democracy and ecological sustainability can go hand in hand, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the West and western issues, as well as for all those concerned with place-based conservation, public lands management, bioregionalism, or related topics.

Land and Sovereignty in India
Land and Sovereignty in India

Author: André Wink

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-12-03

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780521051804

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This original contribution to Indian history, focusing on contemporary and largely indigenous documents, introduces a set of concepts for the analysis of late Mughal rule. More specifically it examines the origins and development of the Maratha svardjya or 'self-rule' within the context of declining Muslim power. It traces the expansion of Maratha dominion to a process of fitna, a policy of 'shifting alliances' which was recurrent in the wake of Muslim expansion throughout its history. The book gives an interesting perspective on Hindu-Muslim relationships in the pre-British period as well as on the nature of the Indo-Muslim state and its most important successor polity, on its capacity for change and development in the intermediate sections of society, the land-tenurial system, the monetization of the economy, and on the fiscal system.

Navajo Sovereignty
Navajo Sovereignty

Author: Lloyd L. Lee

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 081653408X

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A companion to Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, each chapter of Navajo Sovereignty offers the contributors' individual perspectives. This book discusses Western law's view of Diné sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lloyd L. Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values.

The White Possessive
The White Possessive

Author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1452944598

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The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

The Sovereign Street
The Sovereign Street

Author: Carwil Bjork-James

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0816540152

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In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city. Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty
Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty

Author: J. Kehaulani Kauanui

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-09-27

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0822371960

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In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. Kēhaulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites' approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom's continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.

Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories
Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories

Author: Annette Angela Portillo

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0826359167

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In Sovereign Stories, Annette Angela Portillo examines Native American women’s autobiographical discourses and multiple-voiced life stories that resist generic conventional notions of first-person narrative. She argues that these “sovereign stories” and “blood memories” not only reveal the multilayered histories and identities shared by each author, but demonstrate how their narratives are grounded in ancestral memory and land. These autobiographies recall settler-colonialism, deterritorialization, and genocide as the writers and activist-scholars reclaim their voices across cultural, national, and digital boundaries. Portillo provides close readings of memoirs, life stories, oral histories, blogs, social media sites, and experimental multigenre narratives including those by Delfina Cuero, Ruby Modesto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins.

Free the Land
Free the Land

Author: Edward Onaci

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-17

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1469656159

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On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South--including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana--as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day. This book is the first to tell the full history of the RNA and the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Edward Onaci shows how New Afrikans remade their lifestyles and daily activities to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture, and argues that the RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles. Onaci expands the story of Black Power politics, shedding new light on the long-term legacies of mid-century Black Nationalism.

One Land, Two States
One Land, Two States

Author: Mark LeVine

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2014-06-20

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0520279131

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One Land, Two States imagines a new vision for Israel and Palestine in a situation where the peace process has failed to deliver an end of conflict. “If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, and if a one-state solution remains unacceptable,” the book asks, “can the land be shared in some other way?” Leading Palestinian and Israeli experts along with international diplomats and scholars answer this timely question by examining a scenario with two parallel state structures, both covering the whole territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, allowing for shared rather than competing claims of sovereignty. Such a political architecture would radically transform the nature and stakes of the Israel-Palestine conflict, open up for Israelis to remain in the West Bank and maintain their security position, enable Palestinians to settle in all of historic Palestine, and transform Jerusalem into a capital for both of full equality and independence—all without disturbing the demographic balance of each state. Exploring themes of security, resistance, diaspora, globalism, and religion, as well as forms of political and economic power that are not dependent on claims of exclusive territorial sovereignty, this pioneering book offers new ideas for the resolution of conflicts worldwide.