Land and Song: Indigenous Reflections on Sovereign Community

• In Event: Rethinking Sovereignty, Power and Justice from a Critical Perspective

Abstract

“She learned both from the land and with the land.” --Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2014

In his Theory of Communicative Action (1985), Jurgen Habermas argues that modernity, at least, European modernity, requires a differentiation of self, nature, and society. This disenchantment of the modern West enables its characteristic processes of rationalization, juridification, and universalization. However, in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (2010), Habermas recognizes these modern developments are not without their costs. As Harmut Rosa powerfully depicts in Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2016), the price of western modernity is too often a muting of the world and a loss of resonance.

In this paper, I compare this western experience of modernity with indigenous reflections – some modern, some traditional, some bridges between them -- on the relatedness of all beings, more specifically, on the integral ties between the land and song. My argument has two foci: the fracturing of connections manifest in the settler colonial categories of western legal systems within which indigenous peoples are repeatedly forced to argue for the protection and restoration of their lands; and, the unbroken connections to the land that indigenous peoples have practiced and sustained through ceremony – ritual song and dance – during centuries of colonial attempts at assimilation unto genocide.

My case study is the continuing struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux to stop the construction and operation of the Dakota Access Pipeline. This case is especially relevant because it illustrates both foci of my argument: multiple uses of song – in sacred ceremony, unity concerts, and pop music fundraisers – to affirm and protect the Oceti Sakowin, the Black Hills, and Lake Oahe; and, legal decisions – ongoing cases known as the Standing Rock IV – that reveal repeated failures to understand the indigenous concept of sovereign community articulated by the tribes. Ultimately, I argue that the modern West, with its politics of dislocation, has much to learn from the indigenous peoples in our midst about “right relations” to the land and all beings.

Author

• Nancy Sue Love, Appalachian State University