Abstract
AbstractPernicious threats to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous empowerment at local scales of governance have often evaded the scrutiny applied to other formations of the settler state. To illustrate this point, I draw on recent attempts to divide and redistrict county jurisdictions that overlap with the Navajo Nation. I argue that such efforts become a pretext to treat Navajo citizens as an economic liability and to exclude them from upwardly mobile settler polities in historically racialized ways. As a result, rural politics becomes a crucial site for understanding the contemporary struggles of the 573 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States. I conclude that considerations of rurality must be attentive to how histories of dispossession continue to surface in and permeate the present political moment.
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