ABSTRACT
"Indigenous experience" is difficult to contain: the senses of beXlonging evoked by the phrase are integral to many, and diverse, localisms, and nationalisms. This chapter argues that indigenous claims to “sovereignty” contain analogous contradictions, and possibilities. Confronting the actual diversity of indigenous societies, one works with a series of contexts and scales, new terms of political mobilization and expanded social maps. The varieties of indigenous experience proliferate between the poles of autochthony and diaspora. Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act stabilized land holdings in a state where indigenous populations, while dispossessed of much territory, had never been subjected to the forced localization of a reservation system. New leaders, culture brokers, and economic elites, new dependencies on governmental, corporate, academic, and philanthropic resources are inextricably part of the processes by which extended indigenous connections are being made. Indigenous movements take advantage of interstitial possibilities, failures and openings within national–transnational governmental structures of “graduated sovereignty”.
