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.

How the U.S. governments policies and romanticisms of Indians shape our perception and therefore their history.

This book explores the relationships between property and the concept of sovereignty from a number of different perspectives. It distinguishes between the dual meaning of 'sovereignty' in property discourse - political sovereignty and owner sovereignty. The contributors discuss the nature of sovereignty in both senses, applying it to a wide range of topics such as the evolution of property rights in fragile and conflict-affected nation states, and notions of sovereign property in new worlds. A section on the Arts illuminates the relationships between property, sovereignty, and culture, and a further section investigates regulatory property and governmental control over resources. The book concludes with an exploration of sovereign shaping of private property entitlements to achieve instrumental ends. This interesting collection will be valuable to those in the fields of legal philosophy, property theory, international and comparative law, and political sociology. This book explores the relationships between property and the concept of sovereignty from a number of different perspectives. It distinguishes between the dual meaning of ‘sovereignty’ in property discourse - political sovereignty and owner sovereignty. The contributors discuss the nature of sovereignty in both senses, applying it to a wide range of topics such as the evolution of property rights in fragile and conflict-affected nation states and notions of sovereign property in new worlds. A section on The Arts illuminates the relationships between property, sovereignty and culture and a further section investigates regulatory property and governmental control over resources. The book concludes with an exploration of sovereign shaping of private property entitlements to achieve instrumental ends. This interesting collection will be valuable to those in the fields of legal philosophy, property theory, international and comparative law, and political sociology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How should we think about politics in a world where ecological problems - from the deforestation of the Amazon to acid rain - transcend national boundaries? This is the timely and important question addressed by Thom Kuehls in Beyond Sovereign Territory. Contending that the sovereign territorial state is not adequate to contain or describe the boundaries of ecopolitics, the author reorients our thinking about government, nature, and politics. Kuehls argues that changes in technology and the scope of governmental aims have rendered conventional ecological and internationalist aims anachronistic - and ultimately ineffective - in the face of impending environmental collapse. He questions the process by which land is transformed into an object of sovereignty - into "territory" - demonstrating how representations of political space that are premised on territorial sovereignty fail to come to terms with much of what is involved in ecopolitics. Ultimately, Kuehls critiques an orientation that privileges a certain utilitarian relationship between humans and nonhuman nature, one in which the earth is largely interpreted as given to humans. Deeply humanistic and challenging conventional wisdom, Beyond Sovereign Territory will be of interest to readers of environmental politics, geography, international politics, and political theory.

How could the simple planting of a flag by a sailor mysteriously transfer total control over the destinies of the original inhabitants of Australia to a distant king of whom they had never heard? The sad answer to this question involves a series of illegal and corrupt decisions by the highest courts in England and Australia over more than 200 years. These decisions have served to deny the sovereignty of First Nations people. But these same decisions do not withstand rigorous legal scrutiny. From the mis-application of the doctrine of Terra Nullius to the dependence on flawed and discredited precedent in calling on the doctrine of Act of State, the illegality of the dispossession of Australia’s indigenous people is laid bare. This legal deconstruction of the major cases reveals the extreme fragility of the arguments denying Indigenous sovereignty. In fact, it shows that the very arguments used to deny this sovereignty, actually demand its recognition. The Australian High Court has tied itself in knots to avoid facing the reality of Indigenous sovereignty. These knots are a legal fiction whose undoing illustrates the advantages of joint sovereignty as a just way forward for all Australian people.

Described as 'ground-breaking' in Kent McNeil's Foreword, this book develops an alternative approach to conventional Aboriginal title doctrine. It explains that aboriginal customary law can be a source of common law title to land in former British colonies, whether they were acquired by settlement or by conquest or cession from another colonising power. The doctrine of Common Law Aboriginal Customary Title provides a coherent approach to the source, content, proof and protection of Aboriginal land rights which overcomes problems arising from the law as currently understood and leads to more just results. The doctrine's applicability in Australia, Canada and South Africa is specifically demonstrated. While the jurisprudential underpinnings for the doctrine are consistent with fundamental common law principles, the author explains that the Australian High Court's decision in Mabo provides a broader basis for the doctrine: a broader basis which is consistent with a re-evaluation of case-law from former British colonies in Africa, as well as from the United States, New Zealand and Canada. In this context, the book proffers a reconceptualisation of the Crown's title to land in former colonies and a reassessment of conventional doctrines, including the doctrine of tenure and the doctrine of continuity. 'With rare exceptions ... the existing literature does not probe as deeply or question fundamental assumptions as thoroughly as Dr Secher does in her research. She goes to the root of the conceptual problems around the legal nature of Indigenous land rights and their vulnerability to extinguishment in the former colonial empire of the Crown. This book is a formidable contribution that I expect will be influential in shifting legal thinking on Indigenous land rights in progressive new directions.' From the Foreword by Professor Kent McNeil (to read the Foreword please click on the 'sample chapter' link).