In 2020, the Canadian state confronts at least two major crises of legitimacy. The first escalated as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded the Wet'suwet’en nation's yintah (territories), seizing several matriarchs of the Unist'ot’en clan while they engaged in ceremony. In response the Wet'suwet'en, as well as long-standing and emergent allies, targeted critical infrastructure, grinding the flow of capital to a near halt, and adopted three key slogans: “Reconciliation Is Dead,” “Shutdown Canada” and “Land Back.” The second crisis, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, reveals not only the fragile capacity of the Canadian state to maintain essential services for those it claims to govern but also the degree to which a redoubling of state logics around “belonging” and “worthiness” determine life and death. Of particular note are the systemic under-provisioning of Indigenous communities and the hardening of border regimes that predicate support on citizenship. The confluence of these crises reveals the constitutive exclusions of both Indigenous peoples and migrants from the Canadian state-building project.

With its titular concern for the “separation of Natives and Migrants,” Home Rule seems well timed for insight into these crises. Extending work begun in her first book, Home Economics (2006), Sharma accounts for how the violence—direct and structural—targeting those whom state authorities label as “Migrants” is not incidental to the global state system but, rather, essential to reproducing its governing logics. For scholars of migrant justice, large parts of this text will be rich and rewarding. In her attempt to provide a unified theory of the figure of the “Native” within this global state system, however, what strength Sharma's analysis has is overtaxed to the point of exhaustion. Home Rule seeks to identify how “autochthonous discourses” (or the presumed right that people of a place have to govern said place) are used to re-present transmutations in systems of coercion as if they achieved liberation—as witnessed in (many) postcolonial states. Sharma nevertheless proceeds to stretch her concepts into deformity, made most evident in her specious efforts to suggest that white supremacist movements and Indigenous nations’ claims to sovereignty are rooted in a shared political ideology of “autochthony” (10, 33, 245). Those who have seriously engaged with the substance of Indigenous theories of nationhood and sovereignty will likely find Home Rule quite obtuse on the matter.

Across nine sprawling chapters, ranging in their temporal and geographic foci, Sharma seeks to understand how the “state [legal] category” of both “Native” and “Migrant” function to create populations whose movements are differentially managed to facilitate capital accumulation (7). A relative paucity of primary textual evidence of how these categories were used in different times, places and across translation makes appreciating the granularities and distinctions that Sharma smooths to construct her ideal types quite difficult. Nevertheless, read together, chapters 2, 3 and 5 trace out Home Rule's central conceptual argument: that the construction of “Native” and “Migrant” shifts dramatically in the transition from a world-system of imperial states to one of nation states. In this transition, Sharma claims, “Native” stops being a category imposed upon populations and instead legitimizes claims to territorialized political authority (7). Recognizing that several states did “nationalize” their sovereignty much earlier (76–80), Sharma suggests this transition finalizes itself in the postwar era with the emergence of a “Postcolonial New World Order” under American hegemony, structured and reproduced through the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (118–28). Sharma adroitly shows how projects of “national liberation” from empire into statehood actively “channeled anticolonialism into postcolonialism by normalizing the organization of political communities as nationally sovereign states” in which hierarchies of class, race, gender and so on are maintained and intensified (140). In doing so, Sharma displaces the Westphalian myth by showing that it is only in the twentieth century that the nation-state comes into its fullness, importantly challenging a dominant and Eurocentric narrative of state-development.

Despite these strengths, Home Rule's failings are difficult to look past; most glaring and pertinent to the Canadian Journal of Political Science is the book's treatment of Indigenous-led anticolonial movements against settler colonies like Canada. While Sharma finds it “necessary to state clearly that this book is not against Indigenous peoples” (21), her critique of autochthonous discourses nevertheless rebukes Indigenous demands for decolonization with the same appraisal that she gives white supremacist demands for an ethnostate (245, 256–60). This uncanny trajectory within Home Rule results from three fatal flaws in how Sharma engages with (or, more accurately, disengages from) Indigenous thought.

The first is that her argument relies on an etymological fallacy: Sharma's account presumes both nation and sovereignty to have fixed, universal meanings that (inexplicably) derive wholly from European thought (245). This rejection of philosophy-after-Wittgenstein is possible because of Sharma's second major flaw: a refusal to engage Indigenous political theory. Given its centrality to her argument, one should expect significant analysis engaging statements from Indigenous leaders, philosophers and/or scholars to evidence that the parallel being drawn is, in fact, more than homographic. However, Home Rule contains few, if any, engagements with primary material from historical Indigenous political theorists, and Sharma's engagement with contemporary Indigenous scholars amounts to fragmented references to fewer than a handful of scholars—the most extended of which seems incongruent with her own analysis (250–51). Rich debates in volumes like Joanne Barker's (Reference Barker2005) Sovereignty Matters or Scott Richard Lyons’ (Reference Lyons2010) X-Marks make no imprint on Sharma's flattening gaze over Indigenous political theory. Finally, Sharma's commitment to a macro-historical lens—while not without merit—forces her attention solely on hegemonic political formations. A history more attuned to realities on the ground could avoid falling prey to the book's first two flaws. In contrast to the “invented” traditions (54) or the genesis of Indigenous “nationalism” (250) that Sharma perceives, a detailed history of treaty making in North America—such as offered in Aimée Craft's (Reference Craft2013) Breathing Life into the Stone Fort Treaty or Leanne Simpson's (Reference Simpson2008) “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa”—evidences practices of nationhood and sovereignty that are not invariably exclusionary or supremacist, as Home Rule insists they must be.

A meaningful engagement with Indigenous political theory and practice reveals the existence today of the relational frameworks that Sharma believes are only still to come, in which all can find ways to live in right relation with one another without having to reduce our differences or complexities. One need only look to the Unist'ot’en Healing Centre over its decade-long work in order to imagine a response to COVID-19 that—rooted in the sovereignty of an Indigenous nation—is premised on a responsibility to care for one another and the land without exception. Much like Sharma's other work on Indigeneity and colonialism, Home Rule chooses to persist in the most storied of imperial traditions by proving itself largely disinterested in engaging Indigenous peoples as producers of political theory and systems of governance in their own right.