The Paradox of Sovereignty: Contingencies of Meaning in American Indian Treaty Discourse

Abstract

American Indian treaties and treaty law may seem to fall solely within the purview of legal methodology and critical analysis, yet the 367 American Indian treaties signed with the US federal government beg for the type of dissection and analysis generally associated with cultural and literary critical theory. The tools by which texts are dissected can elucidate the mutable nature of treaty discourse and cut to the core of the hierarchical power structures inherent in relations between the US government and American Indian nations. Treaties are discourses that have had, and continue to have, literal real-world impact.1 Moreover, treaties have created a paradoxical situation for American Indians who push for sovereign political autonomy from the United States: treaties grant and deny sovereignty. In this article, I examine the discourse of American Indian treaties, and subsequent twentieth-century treaty legislation, with a critical eye toward the sociopolitical contingencies, historical and contemporary, that determine how these discourses achieve meaning. Ultimately, I argue that treaties have become “fourth-world” texts that create this paradoxical notion of sovereignty. In understanding the nature of fourth-world texts, current American Indian activists and scholars can effectively influence how treaties create meaning in the twenty-first century. There are two primary texts for this essay. The first is the Treaty of Medicine Creek (1854) signed in western Washington between the US government and nine American Indian nations.2 It is the first of ten so-called Stevens Treaties, named after then governor Isaac I. Stevens, signed between 1854 and 1855 (the