ABSTRACT
This chapter provides in a first step a brief overview of some of the discussions regarding the concepts of nation, nationhood, and nationalism in Indigenous contexts in North America. Given the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the topic, it then selectively zooms in on two specific forums of negotiating and conceptualizing contemporary Indigenous nationhood and questions of sovereignty: Indigenous literatures as potentially ‘national’ literatures, using the example of Lee Maracle’s novel Celia’s Song (2014); and tribal constitutions, with a particular focus on how they conceptualize citizenship in the tribal nation, with a focus on the example of the 2009 Constitution of the White Earth Nation (CWEN). Both Indigenous literature and tribal constitutions explore, so the argument is made in this chapter, forms of cultural and political organization and forms of belonging that actualize specific intellectual and political traditions and that, to varying degrees, oscillate between ‘ethnic’ and a ‘civic’ components of nationhood.
