Most discussions of indigenous peoples and the injustices they face examine the history of unfair treatment of indigenous peoples by liberal democracies, or consider how treaties between indigenous peoples and Western governments were routinely violated by the latter. What is interesting about Burke Hendrix's approach is that he takes the individual as his starting point and, moving through social contract theory and natural rights, he examines how far the categories of Western analytical political theory can be used as a framework for thinking today about justice for indigenous peoples. In this careful and theoretically nuanced book, Hendrix wants to avoid a historical justification for secession or partial autonomy for indigenous peoples. He gets surprisingly far with this approach.

Hendrix looks at international law, conceptions of property ownership, and consent theory as possible foundations of political authority, and finds them all wanting. Many others have looked at how these concepts work when considering this kind of question, of course, so in some ways, Hendrix's argument is not particularly new. Indeed, he even suggests that the chapter on international law can be skipped by those who know the subject. The novelty of the book lies less in Hendrix's rendering of arguments about political authority than in how he applies these arguments to indigenous peoples.

International law uses two principles to justify political authority: territorial integrity and self-determination. The two, however, often clash, and Hendrix convincingly finds the resources of international law inadequate in its attempts to resolve the tensions between the two. Hendrix finds the resources of natural property rights theory more promising, but at best only partly sufficient in justifying political authority. One problem with a theory of natural property rights is the tremendous amount of dislocation it would cause, since nearly all the land in the world today was at some point unjustly acquired. Many also have their liberty tied to the property they own, so forcing them off the land they occupy because of an unjust transaction made in the past would be to commit another injustice. Further, Hendrix, drawing on John Locke's complex account of natural property rights, takes seriously the notion that indigenous peoples may have had a duty to transfer some of their land to others, though he is clear that this hardly means that the way in which indigenous peoples were removed from their land was justified. What this does mean is that indigenous peoples cannot justly claim all their historical lands, at the same time that they do have important, if limited, claims to these lands. Hendrix argues they be given the right of first refusal when their former lands come up on the market, perhaps with funds supplied by the state. He argues as well that some state-owned land should be transferred to indigenous peoples.

So indigenous peoples have some claims to the lands they previously occupied. But which lands, which houses, which specific material objects? Should indigenous peoples have the right to first refusal for all property sold in the democracies (the setting for Hendrix's argument) in which they live? Perhaps Hendrix does not take the issue much further because property rights claims do not devolve into issues of self-determination, and it is this latter topic that carries the weight of the last part of the book. If political authority is important, then a key issue is sovereignty, which Hendrix discusses only briefly here. But he does contend that the social contract bequeaths to the state a “kind of partial ownership” (p. 63), where the elements of property ownership considered necessary to ensure political control are held by the state, and not by the primary landowner. This means that the state itself should directly own a limited amount of property. This conclusion is one that Hendrix is reluctant to endorse, partly because indigenous peoples would themselves be inclined to reject it, given their communal ownership structure. Hendrix suggests, however, that if indigenous peoples ground their land claims in the cloak of natural rights, then they may be forced by the logic of their argument to embrace this conclusion. Or, perhaps, they can take another route to justify their claims to land. It is this latter route that Hendrix pursues.

Hendrix, like many before him, ultimately finds consent to be unsatisfactory to ground political authority. He thus argues instead for a Kantian notion of natural duties, the idea that we have duties as human beings to care for others. Hendrix argues that such duties require that we “live under a well-designed regime of political authority” (p. 90), which means a democratic state, since such states treat their majorities well, and, more recently, have bestowed similar treatment on their minorities. Indeed, because minorities are now often well-treated, Hendrix contends that the idea of the “remedial right to secede”—that idea that badly treated minority groups have a right to establish their own state—has little force in democracies today.

So how might indigenous autonomy be justified? One possible justifying condition is when the psychological costs of living in a state one dislikes “are truly substantial and fully understandable,” for example, when the state was “responsible for horrific injustices to one's ancestors” (p. 127), even if the state is now reformed. Of course, this argument cannot help but rely on history, and one wonders whether Hendrix could have done more to flesh out this argument. One result of a horrific history, for example, is the mistrust it engenders on the part of the minority group, which makes good governance harder to accomplish. It would have been good to see how Hendrix would deal with such complexities. Hendrix's second argument is that some populations may want a different balance of rights and duties than the balance codified in the state in which they reside, and that this may justify secession. Hendrix rightly does not want to make secession easy, nor does he want it to be impossible. He argues too that the very threat of exit may make secession less likely, since it may induce the majority to satisfy the concerns of the minority. To ensure that secession is really the proper route, Hendrix argues for extensive deliberation about the matter among the parties involved, and two or three referenda, separated by several years. Hendrix also argues that partial autonomy for indigenous peoples may be appropriate at times.

Despite the book's generic title, Hendrix's subject is indigenous peoples. But one wonders whether his argument might inadvertently apply to other groups as well. Can a wealthy region secede from a region because it feels badly treated, for example? Can Utah secede because it has a different conception of rights and duties than many others in the U.S.? While these questions are left dangling, Hendrix's policy suggestions relating to indigenous peoples are quite sensible and should be taken seriously by the relevant parties within liberal democracies and by scholars concerned with indigenous rights. This is an important and valuable book, and while it takes some time to get to Hendrix's own constructive argument, this is time well spent, for his patient arguments are important and valuable.