Abstract
Since the last third of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have claimed their sovereignty. There, it is possible to distinguish representations, in the form of marks of indigenous sovereignty, which go further than the modern concepts of state sovereignty and law, and compete with them. From then onwards, the liberal state has responded by creating ethnic administration policies aimed at the conservation and cultural revaluation of the indigenous culture. Such state operation, or indigenous patrimonialization, is what I am seeking to understand in this paper. For that purpose, I have developed two arguments: the first upholds that the role of indigenous patrimonialization is the conservation of state sovereignty, while the second states that patrimonialization is the result of the exceeded capacity of the liberal state and law to generate jurisprudence concerning indigenous peoples.
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Notes
This article does not seek to discuss the liberal state, neither in historical nor in conceptual terms. For the purposes of this work, liberal states are understood as the constitutional legal systems consolidated in the Western world throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, safeguarding and guaranteeing individual rights, and understanding cultural pluralism on the basis of those rights. See: Habermas (1995), and Freeden (1996).
For the concept of ‘Cultural Sovereignty’, see: Coffey and Tsosie (2001).
There, the narrative of Mother Earth, where humans do not have a higher status than non-human entities, has broad relevance. See: International Indian Treaty Council (1974). See also: Sanders (1977). For the concept of Pachamama, see: Roel (1981, p. 127). Similarly, for the narrative of the struggle against the West as a horizon for collective action, see: Indian Council of South America (1980).
In this vein, we can also find Alfred, who, looking for alternatives to the concept of sovereignty and liberalism, observes in the traditional cultural values of North American Indians the ‘contribution to the reconstruction of a just and harmonious world.’ See: Alfred (2005, p. 49; 2001, p. 31 − 4). See also the concept of ‘Sustainable Sovereignty’, which subordinates ‘political/legal struggle’ to ‘spiritual and relational responsibilities’ (Corntassel 2008, p. 117).
Young (2007: 240) questions the system of state sovereignty by proposing a model of federal governance inspired in the Great Law of Peace.
Similarly, Means (1992, p. 29) suggested it ‘We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. Even if it’ s only a handful of red people living high in the Andes, American Indian people will survive and harmony will be reestablished. That’s revolution.’
‘Si en el mundo existe un grande amante de la Tierra ese es el indio: un amante sublime, desinteresado porque la sabe madre’ (Carnero 1968, p. 56).
The laxity with which the culture of indigenous peoples is protected within the liberal state results in their appropriation by non-indigenous actors who use it for their own benefit. This gives rise to problems such as ‘neo-extractivism’, ‘biopiracy’, ‘and neo-shamanism’, all of them phenomena that tend to relativize, decouple, and trivialize this property in relation with its original holders, favoring the weakening and redefinition of marks of indigenous sovereignty, and with them the aspects that support indigenous dissent within the state regime. See: Burchardt and Dietz (2014), Davidov (2010), Teubner and Fischer-Lescano (2008).
In relation to indigenous dissent and the possibilities for its realization within the state, the work of Segato (2014) is highly illustrative. Taking the case of the criminalization of indigenous infanticide in Brazil, the author asks to what extent such criminalization is just insofar as it is erected by a ‘State of colonial roots’, not just because the practice is inserted within particular conceptions of humanity, life, and death, but also because it asserts the juridical legitimacy of the state over indigenous peoples. Opposing a state of a punitive or interventionalist type erected through self-imposed ‘moral superiority’, Segato proposes a ‘restitutive’ type of state, that is, one that concedes autonomy to indigenous communities so that they can develop their own internal dissent, critically reevaluating their own traditions. The key thing, for the author, is that the state aim at protecting not the ‘culture’ of indigenous peoples, but rather their ‘history’ by accepting them as collective actors that, without unchanging traditions or customs, can accumulate their own historical experiences. The question that arises here, however, is what the juridical form and language oriented towards protecting the ‘history’ of indigenous peoples would look like, and once achieved, the second question would be whether such forms and languages permit indigenous peoples to be considered peers in their differences.
It should be noted that this operation can most likely be observed in New Zealand. In that country, the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga (human environmental management) was incorporated into the 1991 Resource Management Act. As a constituent part of this legislation, the concept allows for decisions regarding the most diverse projects that affect the dignity of human and non-human animals, which also include the most diverse supernatural entities. See: Bargh (2012).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, as well as Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel and Julio Labraña for their comments on the preliminary version.
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The research connected with this article has received funding from the national grant project “Fondecyt 1200439”, in which Dr. Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel is the main researcher; and the grant system of the doctoral program in Processes and Political Institutions of the School of Government at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez.
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Espinosa, P. Reconfiguring Sovereignties Through the Law: Indigenous Patrimonialization in the Americas. Law Critique (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09372-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09372-3