Abstract
There is a growing pluralism in many corners of International Relations that recognizes that global politics reach far beyond the state and its machinations; however, the contributions of Indigenous politics, both theoretically and practically, tend to be overlooked in the field despite their significant contributions to conceptualizations of essential concepts in International Relations such as sovereignty, nationalism, legitimacy, and security. In her 2019 work Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance, and Gender, Dr. Rauna Kuokkanen seeks to redefine self-determination by foregrounding Indigenous feminisms and the knowledge of Indigenous women within understandings of nationhood, nation-building, governance, and rights. The theoretical advancements Kuokkanen offers demonstrate that Indigenous politics look far beyond the domestic realm, where they are usually housed, to consider their wider transformative effects.
This work interrogates much of the literature on Indigenous self-determination and sovereignties—including that of this author—by emphasizing the ways in which self-determination is expressed via the individual rather than the nation, and specifically via women. Kuokkanen reveals a complex relationship between gender and self-determination in which Indigenous women’s conceptions of individual integrity weave into understandings of self-determination that extend past law and rights discourse to venerate personal “acts of sovereignty” (50) along with collective approaches. By proposing processes of Indigenous self-determination that focus on re-establishing the roles of women in governance structures and respecting women’s corporeal integrity, as well as traditional governance and political practices, Kuokkanen joins the growing body of literature challenging political scholars to imagine alternatives to state-based polities that look beyond colonial oppression.
Kuokkannen deftly outlines the inextricable relationship between gender and self-determination, considering free, prior, and informed consent in the context of broader corporeal consent and the role that women tend to play as land protectors. Aggregating the norm of integrity and the value of self-determination, Kuokkannen proposes a theory of self-determination as integrity: integrity of the land and integrity of the body, including individual, collective, territorial, and cultural integrity, at the centre of which is consent. Collective territorial consent and individual corporeal consent become necessary conditions for Indigenous self-determination.
The scope of Kuokkanen’s field work is impressive: seventy-six semi-structured interviews, primarily with Indigenous women, in five Arctic countries. Drawing on these interviews, Kuokkanen offers an overview of the various approaches these regions have adopted to incorporate Inuit values and governance principles into their respective governments in Canada, Greenland, and Sápmi (the Sámi region of Scandinavia). This comparison demonstrates the ways in which Western or colonial political institutions have asserted themselves in, and continue to co-opt, Indigenous articulations of self-determination. This replication of state models produces and reproduces colonial racialized and gendered processes of domination; however, as Kuokkanen argues, the termination of oppressive colonial governance practices is not a panacea for gender discrimination, misogyny, and violence against women in Indigenous communities.
Kuokkanen identifies two broad categories of relations of domination that impede self-determination: state relations and gender relations. She illuminates the exclusion of the concerns of women and gender from struggles and articulations of self-determination, the relegation of women to informal political spaces and the undervaluing of those contributions, gendered divisions of labour in the private sphere, masculinist institutions and agendas, and the inherent gender dynamics of liberal governance structures. By bringing gendered themes to the fore, Kuokkanen reframes the self-determination discourse, problematizing understandings of self-determination, authority, and governance exclusive to gendered analyses of power. Her analysis demands a reassessment of the research on Indigenous rights, governance, and self-determination that does not consider gender. For instance, work on equitable resource extraction that exclusively frames arguments in the context of Indigenous authority and jurisdiction over lands, while neglecting gendered concerns such as “man camps,” dilutes understandings of self-determination. Moreover, Kuokkanen argues that this exclusion both produces and reproduces gendered structural violence, implicitly noting scholars’ complicity in this violence when they fail to include gendered analyses in definitions of self-determination.
While the problem of violence against women is particularly acute in Indigenous communities, political elites in almost all polities deprioritize and depoliticize women’s concerns. The question, therefore, is why do political elites—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—undervalue women’s lives, well-being, experiences, and priorities? Kuokkanen’s occasional emphasis that Westphalian notions of self-determination undermine individual integrity sometimes belies her true meaning, which is that they fail to account for women’s (and non-binary and other gender-diverse people’s) individual integrity. Surely, liberal accounts of self-determination, particularly as expressed in international law, sufficiently provide for the individual; what Kuokkanen is arguing, however, is that the individual is only conceived as male. Women’s rights and objectives are inconsequential to, and hindered by, both Indigenous leaders and the state. In this way, Kuokkanen’s work also speaks to broader questions of gendering security to recognize that women are never secure within the patriarchy and that the state relinquishes its role of protector by both ignoring and perpetuating constant and quotidian violence against women and girls.