ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history and multiple meanings of sovereignty to highlight some unwelcome effects of its application to indigenous-rights debate and the formulation of relevant social policy. The variegated pattern of tribal sovereignty and its unusual interweaving with US national sovereignty, Biolsi insists, make it necessary to rethink our ideas about the state. Sovereignty holds particular interest because of its talismanic status within the indigenous-rights movement. For a term of great political consequence, sovereignty has a surprisingly unstable meaning. The status of sovereignty as an untouchable article of faith is made equally clear by Andrea Smith, who struggles to reconcile her commitments as a Native feminist with the sometimes negative impact that indigenous sovereignty has had on American Indian women. Sovereignty of the micronational variety is clearly implicated in the rise of minimally regulated political spaces that are immensely useful to global capital.
