Anthropologist Andrew Canessa and Political Scientist Manuela Lavinas Picq bring their attention to a topic that continues be a site of tension across the world: the relation between Indigenous peoples and the state. A great deal has been written about this as Indigenous peoples have struggled to move past colonialism, assimilationism, multiculturalism, and neoliberal citizenship. Scholars have documented important new forms of self-determination and autonomy produced by Indigenous activism at national and international levels. Yet, the continuing hegemony of the modern Westphalian system has meant that nation-states have reserved sovereignty for themselves.

Canessa and Lavinas Picq’s new book analyzes why “the gate of sovereignty” has so often remained closed (32). They argue that the system of sovereign nation-states “was designed to exclude Indigenous peoples” (4). First, modernity came into being in relation to and in opposition to the invented category of indigeneity. Then, defining Indigenous Others as requiring civilization allowed non-indigenous states to “negate Indigenous authority and appropriate their territories” (36), permanently ending their claims to sovereignty. Thus, the authors argue that, rather than being marginal to the international system, Indigenous peoples are “fundamental to how it was constituted and how it operates” (5). As a result, “Indigenous peoples have shaped modern state-making, becoming co-constitutive of the international sovereignty regime” (4).

While ideas about the relationship between colonialism and modernity have been discussed extensively, especially by Native scholars and Decolonial Studies scholars, this book does an excellent job of combining careful analysis of early European theories of state sovereignty with current ethnographic cases of Indigenous politics to make an irrefutable argument about the centrality of indigeneity to the study of the state. The case studies from Ecuador and Bolivia in Chapters 4 and 5, for me, the heart of the book, showing how Indigenous peoples can pose challenges to the closed gate of the modern state in some situations but not in others.

The Introduction traces both anthropological and International Relations approaches to sovereignty, pointing to its two persistent features: the idea of the state as a supreme authority with the right to make laws, and the idea of its indivisibility, allowing only one sovereign. Indigenous politics pose challenges to both, re-defining self-determination to include “potentially plural and inclusive” sovereignties (20). The chapter traces the long arc from the Doctrine of Discovery to colonial expansion to republican state sovereignty. A central argument is that what defines Indigenous peoples across their diversity is the very fact that they are “denied sovereignty by the international system of states” (7). Indigenous people continue to be fundamental actors in the international sphere, they suggest, noting that the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) marked a fundamental challenge to the state system, “formalizing the existence of nonstate forms of self-determination in world politics” (33).

Chapter 1 asks who can be considered Indigenous. Because indigeneity is a “settler invention” (5), it defies easy definition. Instead of essentializing or searching for some impossible authenticity, they conclude “indigeneity is a particular kind of power relation, more specifically a relationship with the state” (34). The chapter looks at the complex legal and discursive mechanisms—such as land titles, legal categories of race, inheritability, and forms of citizenship—through which land was dispossessed and peoples erased. Finally, it considers Indigenous resistance, defining indigeneity as a “political relation that arises out of engagement and struggle” (59). Indigenous peoples, then, are those who “stand outside the state” (55).

Chapter 2 examines the European philosophical origins of the modern state, showing how indigeneity was necessary to the construction of Western modernity. The authors describe the works of Hobbes and Locke and the debate of Valladolid to show how Europeans misunderstood or ignored the realities of native peoples to construct a narrative dichotomy underlying the modern notions of sovereignty. “Thinkers like Locke and Hobbes defied European political modernity by inventing America both as Indigenous and a wasteland, a free-for-all up for grabs landscape that has had lasting consequences across the world” (77). The chapter ends with a discussion of the nature-culture binary that underlies Enlightenment thinking, and the ontological questions Indigenous worldviews pose to that system of thought.

In Chapter 3, the authors continue their efforts to redefine indigeneity. Here, they ask how the debates circulating in Africa about autochthony and indigeneity can help observers understand the complex relations different Indigenous groups have with each other and the state in Latin America. Comparing cases from Bolivia and Cameroon, they argue that indigeneity is still a useful analytical tool, if power relations and relations with the state are at the center of analysis. Drawing on the autochthony literature, they pose five pairs of factors that illuminate differences between Indigenous groups: 1) majoritarian vs. minoritarian discourses; 2) claims on the state vs. claims against it; 3) hegemonic vs. counterhegemonic discourses; 4) deterritorialized vs. territorialized indigeneities; and 5) symbolic vs. substantive indigeneity. Using these factors allows the authors to analyze the complex conflicts between lowland and highland groups in Bolivia, providing a nuanced reading of indigeneity and the differing positions each group has to the state.

Chapter 4 focuses on Kichwa women activists from Chimborazo, Ecuador, who pushed through a provision guaranteeing gender equality for Indigenous women into the new constitution at the Constituent Assembly in 2007. Indigenous groups had successfully advocated for collective rights for Indigenous peoples and feminist groups had successfully argued for gender equality, but the existing laws did not contemplate incorporating women’s rights within collective rights. So, Indigenous women activists had to articulate three legal systems—state, Indigenous, and international—to develop a new system of legal accountability (130). The chapter traces their struggles to use international law such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) as well as UNDRIP to convince assembly participants that CEDAW’s international principles of gender equality were valid at the local level in Ecuador (122–23). The resulting constitutional provisions guarantee the participation and decision-making of Indigenous women in newly established Indigenous justice institutions, “making collective rights accountable to international norms on gender equality” (128). The authors argue that by working through the state instead of contesting it, Kichwa women have enacted a form of “vernacular statecraft,” engaging the limited participation of the state as a third party to generate their own authority (134–35). The authors suggest this serves as an Indigenous challenge to “the notion of sovereignty and indivisible and supreme legal authority” (137). I am compelled by the argument but also find myself thinking about the Bolivian case, where the new Indigenous rights established in the 2007 constitution turned out to be ignored by the state in practice. Will the rights established through this vernacular statecraft be implemented in meaningful ways or will the state find ways to assert its sovereignty on the ground?

If Chapter 4 demonstrated a case where Indigenous politics successfully challenged the modern state model, Chapter 5 examines one where the unitary modern state prevailed. The authors consider the “Indigenous state” led by Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales. During his regime, Morales made indigeneity and Indigenous values central to the new state, produced a new constitution declaring the state to be plurinational, and established new forms of Indigenous autonomies. Yet, the authors ask, if indigeneity is defined by the lack of sovereignty, can a state ever be Indigenous? The authors describe how Morales consolidated “a national homogenous indigeneity as a tool of statecraft, with Andean solstice celebrations becoming a national marker of an indigenized state” (142). Yet, the Morales state also generated differentiated forms of Indigenous citizenship, including some groups like the coca-growers and middle-class urban groups, and excluding and repressing others, like the lowland peoples, who continued to be relegated to the “savage slot.” The authors note the positive effects of the Morales redistribution project—poverty reduction, social programs, labor rights, expanded citizenship rights (146)—but conclude that these were only possible because of the exercise of sovereign power over territory. Examining conflicts resulting from the regime’s ongoing development projects, they argue “the Plurinational State perpetuated settler extractive economies of dispossession on Indigenous territories, repressing claims of self-determination as it enabled the land grab” (143). This extractivism, they conclude, is “the foundational essence of Westphalian colonialism” (166). Ultimately, despite the efforts of Indigenous activists to promote plural sovereignties, Morales was not able or willing to fundamentally alter relations between the state and Indigenous peoples, leaving modern state sovereignty intact.

While others have made similar arguments about the failures of the Morales state, the great value of this book is its melding of the concepts of Indigeneity and sovereignty, showing how they remain articulated and in permanent contestation. Bringing together anthropological and political science approaches, comparing the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, and drawing on the important insights from Native scholars has provided a thoughtful frame for their powerful argument.