The Role of Sovereignty in Decolonization

In her 1983 How to Suppress Women’s Writing , feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ outlined the many approaches used to ignore, condemn, or otherwise belittle the intellectual productions by members of the “wrong” groups. 1 In addition to discouragement and blocking access to requisite materials and training, other regular tactics include isolating a given author or one of their texts from the tradition to which they or it belong and simply “ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition,” which Russ considers both most common and most difficult to combat. 2 Among the many contributions of Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty is his actively counteracting the ignoring of “the works, the workers, and the whole tradition” by refusing to isolate the six individual North American Indigenous political thinkers who are his focus from the larger, internally diverse, dynamic political worlds of which they are part. Far from monolithic or univocal, what emerges is an intergenerational multi-nation effort to articulate aspirations and concerted action that respond with dignity and power to distinct and overlapping moments in ongoing processes of settler-colonial genocide and dispossession.