"Relationality is a core principle of Indigenous studies, yet there is relatively little work that assesses what building relations looks like in practice, especially in the messy context of Native nations' governance. Focusing on the unique history and context of Osage nation building efforts, this insightful ethnography provides a deeper vision of the struggles Native nation leaders are currently facing. Exploring the Osage philosophy of moving to a new country as a framework for relational governance, Jean Dennison shows that for the Osage, nation building is an ongoing process of reworking colonial constraints to serve the nation's own ends. As Dennison argues, Osage officials have undertaken deliberate changes to strengthen Osage relations to their language, self-governance, health, and land-core needs for a people to thrive now and into the future. Scholars and future Indigenous leaders can learn from the Osage Nation's past challenges, strategies, and ongoing commitments to better enact the difficult work of Indigenous nation building"--

"In New York Harbour, at the entrance to the United States of America, stands the Statue of Liberty: Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty stands as a beacon welcoming all to the land of the free, holding a torch and a tablet inscribed with the date of American Declaration of Independence. At her feet lies a broken chain. The ideal of freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization, and is exported to the world, often by force. Wars and invasions are justified with the claim that we must free the foreign people, whom we will then turn away at our borders. Many are excluded from the ideal of freedom: the American Declaration of Independence was signed by slave owners, and the land that was declared independent was stolen from Indigenous peoples. Indigenous lands and peoples around the world remain colonized, and the practice of Black slavery continues in practices of mass incarceration. The land of the free, like other "developed" nations, polices its borders to keep out unwanted foreigners. Walls are not really necessary. Worldwide, the freedom of some depends on the exploitation and oppression and exclusion of most of the world's people"--

"An original account of the stakes of sovereignty for recovering anticolonial pasts and fashioning anticolonial futures. Despite their signal contributions to present-day anticolonial struggles from #NODAPL to Idle No More, Indigenous societies around the globe are recurrently neglected in histories and theories of decolonization. What results from this disregard is not only skewed history, but also diminished political horizons for those (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) striving to transform an unequal world profoundly shaped by colonialism. Bridging political theory and Indigenous Studies, political theorist David Temin shows how key 20th-century Indigenous intellectual-activists in lands today claimed by Canada and the United States fundamentally recast the philosophical substance and normative goals of decolonization. Through history, textual interpretation, and conceptual analysis, his book recasts a vision of anticolonial thought and agency that circles around a politics of self-determination disentangled from sovereignty as institution and ideal-one committed to the relational flourishing of human and other-than-human beings against colonial domination"--

"This book examines the construction of memory in two indigenous sacred sites in the US and Mexico. It juxtaposes two relationships, the Chemehuevi people and their ties with the Old Woman Mountains of the East Mojave Desert, and the Caxcan people and their ties with Tlachialoyantepec in Zacatecas, Mexico. This research outlines a personal journey, a process of making connections through indigenous decolonial methodologies, and a research project in histories of both the Chemehuevi and Caxcan and their relationships to sacred mountains. This work emphasizes cultural engagements with performative and phenomenological insights as having historic preservation value"--