Review of Beyond Settler Sovereignty (Rifkin)

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In his second chapter, Rifkin opens with an anecdote about viewing the film Lincoln and its silent portrayal of Seneca hahësnowa:nëh (Chief) Ely S. Parker, a representation that he finds ultimately stands for Native peoples' struggles for sovereignty and the ways in which Native American identity precludes inclusion in a national narrative that centralizes the Civil War as integral to becoming. Rifkin traces a process he calls the emancipation sublime and uses it to denote the war's meaning as a vehicle for making apparent the state's inherent democracy, a process that disallows Native peoples' inclusion in the "temporality of the union" (51–52). Rifkin's argument is convincing in many ways, but would be helped by spending time on the intersections of "the union" and Parker's role in both it and the Iroquois Confederacy, given the founding fathers' employment of Hodinöhšö:ni:h governance as a template for designing US democracy. This concern is a minor quibble in a book spilling over with impressive insights about Indigenous temporalities and their relationship to sovereignty, however.

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