Indigenous Diplomacies before the Nation-State

Abstract

The power of Europeans to represent Indigenous peoples remains an important part of the armory of conquest and colonization. Being convinced of the essentially parochial and passive character of Indigenous cultures, Europeans imposed their systems of representation and regulation soon after arriving on Indigenous lands. These obscured and profoundly damaged the ways in which the original inhabitants had historically connected with other peoples and the environment around them. The imposition of fixed borders around territories, resources, and people and the establishment of administrative systems to regulate everything within those borders underwrote the global legitimation of the hegemonic model of sovereignty. In so doing, not only has much of the diversity of human experience of encountering and engaging the other been lost or rendered archaic, but a distinct set of human traditions for practicing what scholars call “international relations” has been cast aside. It should be cause for optimism then, that at precisely the moment when the variety, complexity and urgency of our shared global challenges mandates fresh thinking and new relations between human communities, Indigenous peoples are representing themselves anew, evading the denigration implicit in Europe’s hegemonic categories.