A Postscript: Sovereignty is Still the Issue

“A Postscript: Sovereignty is Still the Issue,” an Outcome archive entry by Adam DJ Brett, Betty Hill (Lyons), Nethanial Belmont. The entry belongs to the jcrt collection and connects readers to scholarship, public history, and organizing around the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian domination, Indigenous sovereignty, law, religion, land, memory, and accountability.

In brief, it addresses This postscript argues Indigenous nations need full sovereignty, rejecting settler carve outs and urging a healing return to precolonial lifeways now.. For readers arriving from the main Doctrine of Discovery site, this post functions as a pointer rather than a replacement for the full Outcome record. The canonical page preserves the complete context, metadata, author information, citation links, media, and neighboring materials in the archive.

The source text highlights terms and contexts including This postscript reflects on two special issues that interrogate religious and legal justifications of domination and argues that questions of sovereignty remain constitutive for the field of Indigenous studies today. In contrast to proliferating carve‑outs such as food, energy, gaming, or cannabis sovereignty, the authors contend that such adjectival sovereignties concede excessive ground to settler colonial frameworks premised on tribal recognition, regulation, and permission. They assert that Indigenous nations are sovereign nations rather than administratively defined “tribes,” and that sovereignty must be conceptualized as a lived, ongoing practice rather than a delegated or derivative status. Accordingly, the postscript calls for an understanding of Indigenous sovereignty as grounded in land,. Read the canonical Outcome page for the complete entry.

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