ABSTRACT
As previous chapters suggest, Indigenous movements pose challenges to contemporary political theory. Although theorists such as Hobbes and Tocqueville had no direct hand in Indigenous peoples’ treatment, the concepts, principles, and logics of their arguments, the political structures they produced, legitimated, and defended, were responsible for shaping and legitimating the treatment of Indigenous peoples. To be clear, a direct line of causality here is less important than the resonances across contexts: political theory expressed and legitimated what was possible and desirable. As such, it is implicated, and is itself a key site of engagement: violences and limitations of inherited concepts and institutions must be revealed and explained, and other visions of what is possible and desirable must be articulated. This is a necessary part of the process of change, and how it is executed matters. Until we can imagine better, less repressive and violent, practices of sovereigntypractices through which we can produce legitimate forms of authority-we will remain trapped within the logics and necessities of those we have inherited.
