Sovereignty as Community Agency: An Epistemological Approach to American Indian Identity

• In Event: The (Im)possibility of (Re)Indigenization: Indigenous Futurities Beyond Settler Structures

Abstract

This paper presents my dissertation proposal and seeks feedback on its epistemological approach to questions of American Indian identity as I begin fieldwork. The project addresses a central paradox: Indigenous identification, tribal citizenship, and institutional nationhood have expanded within a settler colonial structure designed for elimination. I argue that dominant sociological frameworks rooted in race and ethnicity cannot adequately resolve this contradiction because they misclassify Indigeneity as minority-group culture rather than as a political status grounded in sovereignty, jurisdiction, kinship, and collective continuity.

I reconceptualize sovereignty as community agency—the collective capacity to reorganize structure by mobilizing cultural, political, and material resources. Rather than treating sovereignty as a static legal designation, I theorize it as a sociological process enacted through everyday governance, narrative labor, kinship practice, and cultural work. This framing raises epistemological questions about how identity should be conceptualized, measured, and interpreted when it is embedded in nationhood rather than ethnicity.

Empirically, the project focuses on the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. The research design is longitudinal and multi-method, combining approximately 250 archival oral histories, 20–25 new interviews using Anishinaabeg storytelling methods, and five decades of tribal documentary materials. As I enter the data collection phase, I seek input on how to analytically bridge macro-level structures—settler colonial governance, federal recognition, and institutional development—with micro-level narrative experience, including subjectivities, kinship practices, and embodied identity.

By foregrounding sovereignty as iterative cultural and political practice, the project aims to contribute to sociological theory on identity, structure, and agency. I invite discussion on the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of treating Indigenous nations as theorists of structure rather than as racialized minority populations.

Author

• Billie Sams, Brown University