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Within Indigenous studies the concept of sovereignty has received a wide range of expressions, theories and realizations. Our article covers one part of this vast literature on Indigenous sovereignties by looking at how various books have centered Indigenous sovereignty within their analysis. This survey foregrounds our special issue on creative sovereignty by illustrating the breadth of how Indigenous peoples and scholarship have engaged the concept of sovereignty to both understand the present and imagine different futures. This introductory article for the special issue on Creative Sovereignties does three things: (1) it illustrates that Indigenous sovereignties exist in the in-between space between what is and what is possible, (2) it puts forward a three-part understanding of creativity, and lastly (3) it introduces each of the articles, notes from the field, and creative works featured in this special issue.
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Creative Sovereignty: The In-Between Space: Indigenous Sovereignties in Creative and Comparative Perspective

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Film has been the primary way dominant society has consumed inaccurate and problematic symbols, images, and stereotypes of Native peoples for over one hundred years. Indigenous-made films, on the other hand, reclaim Indigenous representational space or ‘visual sovereignty’ through narratives of Indigenous experience that highlight culturally relevant stories and contemporary issues they face. In particular, Indigenous-made speculative fiction inspires contemplations of Indigenous agency in alternative realities. Indigenous futurisms expressed in works of speculative fiction is a rejection of theoretical, institutional, and political projects that imagined Indigenous peoples in the past and excluded them from the future. Through a survey of Neshnabé speculative fiction and other art, this article argues that Indigenous futurisms constitute creative approaches to sovereignty in a multiplicity of potential futures and is an analytical framework that illuminates the ever-expanding contours of Indigenous sovereignty in order to imagine an otherwise to present and past circumstances of Indigenous existence.
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Sovereign Futures in Neshnabé Speculative Fiction

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In <italic>Radical Traversals</italic>, Sierra Edd combines work on Indigenous art practice and production, politics of aesthetics, and temporal sovereignty, to highlight the potentialities of decolonial imagining and interpretative methods of listening in an analysis of the digital music collection called the <italic>Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape</italic>. Edd examines how sonic affect and the remix form create spatial and temporal multidimensionality or hyper-presence, to disrupt Western orders of objecthood and colonial logics in music. Drawing on epistemological provocations in Native and Indigenous studies, Black diaspora studies, and Sound studies, this paper uses a theoretical framework of traveling Indigeneity to center collaboration and theorizations on decolonial imagination which describes emergent radical envisioning and world-making as a conceptual tool of troubleshooting. To foreground the engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous sound and aesthetics in music, Edd uses a method of close-listening, a heterogeneous intimacy or a whole-body encounter with sonic (meta)physics and acoustics. This paper illustrates how listening and engaging with the <italic>Mixtape</italic>’s political aesthetic form encourages decolonial imagining and employs micro-scale resurgence enacted in quotidian intellectual and emotional knowledge building.
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Radical Traversals

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This article contributes to conversations about creative sovereignties by exploring what truly ‘nation-to-nation’ fiscal relationships might look like between Canada and Treaty 6 First Nations if Treaty 6 were taken seriously. Since fiscal relations between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states often perpetuate colonial sovereignty, reimagining fiscal relations in a historical treaty context offers creative opportunities for decolonization. The article first examines the history of the 1876 Treaty 6 and the relationships Treaty 6 created. It is established that Treaty 6 created nation-to-nation relationships that were based on the desire for mutually beneficial relations in a shared space, and that treaty included fiscal obligations for Canada. Since 1876, including today, fiscal relations between Canada and First Nations have generally been inconsistent with the spirit and intent of treaty. The article proceeds to offer examples of changes that could be made to create fiscal relationships consistent with treaty. Some of these recommendations are relatively pragmatic and would come at little political, fiscal, or constitutional cost to Canada, while others are more dramatic, and would involve a fundamental reshaping of Canada as we know it.
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Creative Sovereignties and Fiscal Relations

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This article explores the prevenance of militarization within the important cultural and political space of the powwow. Finding popular explanations of military service (such as poverty, lack of opportunity, and desired upward social mobility) insufficient in explicating the visibility of militarization, this work illustrates how colonially suppressed values have been enacted through the creation of new symbols and forms of practice. Looking to the use of warrior staffs, the Lakota sacred numbers, and the Lakota Flag Song, the article focuses on warriorhood and illustrates how traditional cultural practices are preserved through cunning navigations and transformations of colonial landscapes, allowing for a creative expression of individual and communal sovereignty.
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Preserving Values

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This article critiques narrow conceptions of sovereignty, while holding up Indigenous practices of sovereign place making and creative relational sovereign enactment. I come into this contestation by thinking through creative acts of sovereignty as a generative praxis. Informed by these practices offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty as practiced, generative and relational. Grounded practices of Indigenous peoples in Denendeh (Northwest Territories, Canada) and the authors own experience as a settler living and working in Denendeh, this article also offers a space to think through ‘refusability’ as relational response.
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Generative Refusal: Creative Practice and Relational Indigenous Sovereignty

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The following is a presentation delivered as introductory remarks for my PhD defense of the dissertation, “Weaving our authority together: transforming the prairie Indigenous political order” held in February 2020. The remarks presented a rare opportunity to strike a tone that needed to speak to my dissertation committee, six family members and four community members from Maskwacîs. These community members travelled on behalf of the Board of Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission, my research partner, and the Ermineskin Education Trust Fund, that administered the funding for almost the entirety of my post-secondary education and helped me to access my treaty right to education. My main motivation was to draw a clear picture of how exclusive sovereignty is a legacy of settler colonization that has impacted Maskwacîs and how we confronted that legacy through the articulation and implementation of a relational sovereignty.
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Replacing Exclusive Sovereignty with a Relational Sovereignty

Extraction: Seeking Ways to Survive

The Deer with 3: Expressing Indigeneity Through Experimental Hip Hop

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 2 (January 2019)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Borderlands Journal

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since then, it has fostered radical thinking across the borders between disciplines, nations, sexualities, economies, identities, peoples and species, and fostered interplay between rigorous scholarship in philosophy, law, cultural studies, politics, sociology, geography, international relations and the environment. Borderlands' profile in areas such as refugees, indigenous politics, post-and de-colonial theory, biopolitics, post-Marxism, queer theory, race and gender, is especially strong, but the journal remains open to a range of concerns and disciplines.  As the complex discourse and reality of the Anthropocene evolves, Borderlands is opening its pages to work in the environmental humanities, posthumanism, STS, and environmental politics, theory and law. It aims to foster new conjunctions of justice, power, theory and bodies; to connect theory, event and structure in compelling and thoughtful ways.  You can read the Borderlands' manifesto to get a sense of the vision with which we began.  Writing for Borderlands  Borderlands has a global reputation for first-class theorising and innovative conjunctions of theory, event and situated analysis. Borderlands' editorial board includes some of the world's most important social theorists including Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claire Colebrook, Michael Hardt, Donna Haraway, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Adi Ophir, RBJ Walker and McKenzie Wark. Our rigorous standards and double-blind peer-review process ensures that only the highest-quality work is published. Your work will be published with an open access license - for free - ensuring global and equitable access to your work from readers around the world. And, by publishing with Borderlands, you help support a radical publishing space untainted by big corporate profitmaking and neoliberal elitism.  Past issues of Borderlands  Borderlands issues from 2002-2019 were published under the ISSN 1447-0810 and can be viewed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive.  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and all users are free to share the work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. The material published in the journal may not be altered or built upon.  All authors who wish to publish in Borderlands must agree to the licensing terms stated above.  ABOUT SOCIETY  The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Environment and Governance Research Group brings together leading international researchers in environmental politics, law and policy, biodiversity, climate security, food systems, and environmental ethics. Our work has a common focus on improving law, public policy and international cooperation in protecting ecosystems and managing the impact of human-induced environmental change. With planet Earth having entered the Anthropocene - the epoch of dramatic human impacts on the Earth’s ecology and systems - our work crosses disciplines and charts paths for improved governance that can support ecological sustainability, and key human interests in health, justice and security, into the long-term future.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.