Contenu du sommaire : Sovereignty/Sovereignties in the United States: Concepts and Challenges

Native American nations' sovereignty in the United States is often approached solely from a legal perspective, questioning the actual degree of autonomy enjoyed by tribal governments. Based on the reflections of several Indigenous intellectuals, including historian and art critic Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), this article invites us to expand the concept of sovereignty to the cultural and artistic fields, while pointing out several major issues entailed by Indigenous visual sovereignty, especially in films.

From Worcester v. Georgia (1832) to Mc
Girt v. Oklahoma (2020), the Supreme Court recurrently reaffirmed Native American sovereignty. However, because the sovereignty preserved by the Supreme Court emanates from the treaties signed with the European and Euro-American colonizers, it can be said to be a conceded form of sovereignty. Another form of sovereignty can be identified as « indigenous, » for at least two reasons. First, it comes from and is exerted upon a specific territory with which a society maintains a specific cultural, spiritual, economic and political relationship. Besides, it existed before colonization. Moreover, sovereignty also implies the power to decide what one's life and one's discourse should be, which allows for a conception of self-determination as the power to define oneself. Native American scholars refer to « intellectual sovereignty. » The Cherokees can be taken as a case study to illustrate these different conceptions of sovereignty, from Cherokee indigenous sovereignty, allegedly represented by the Crown of Tannassy, to the failed attempt to create the State of Sequoyah, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The liberal international order, developed under US leadership right after the Second World War, is struggling to survive in the twenty-first century, under the blows of more and more authoritarian states and the distrust of the United States itself. Initiating a movement of withdrawal, President Trump and the most conservative Republicans have become champions of the defense of American “sovereignty”, crusading against a number of international institutions and agreements, against free trade and immigration perceived as contrary to the interests of Americans. By placing recent developments in a historical framework in order to better understand their continuities or ruptures, this article proposes to analyze the uses of the concept of “sovereignty” in the field of U.S. international relations in the first quarter of this century.