Review of David Myer Temin, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Political Thought. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Abstract

To be reminded of how contested issues around political sovereignty are in our time, one need only glance at news headlines. Readers expect, in fact, a daily bombardment of updates on war, genocide, and famine on multiple continents, and news of the latest wave of refugee deportation in the US and Europe. At the level of cultural and educational sovereignty, we confront the increasing precarity of humanities curricula at universities, book bans, and cuts to ethnic studies programs in American schools. If history is written by the victors, those with money and power drown out the voices outside the mainstream, including those of Indigenous North Americans. David Myer Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought demonstrates, to the contrary, how dynamic Indigenous voices have remained throughout the twentieth century and into the present. It is refreshing when a book such as Temin’s is published by a major university press.