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Indigenous studies is not one canon but many place-based traditions, and its central question is not inclusion but who holds authority over land, law, and data.
Indigenous studies is not a single canon, region, or theory. It is a set of place-based intellectual traditions, each rooted in particular land, language, law, and ceremony, and each performing a double movement: analyzing settler colonialism while foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty. I will argue that the field's governing move is the shift from recognition to jurisdiction. I will show it by reading Glen Coulthard and Audra Simpson alongside the Doctrine of Discovery in U.S. law, then setting that argument beside Moana Jackson's constitutional work in Aotearoa.
Recognition names the inclusion, rights, and state validation that matter and that can leave colonial structures fully intact. Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks makes the case: where land, jurisdiction, and political economy stay under settler control, recognition reproduces the power it claims to address. Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus, centered on Kahnawà:ke and on Mohawk life across an imposed border, gives the field its counter-concept. Refusal is not simply saying no. It is an epistemic and political practice: refusing the state's terms, refusing extractive research, refusing inclusion that leaves land relations untouched.
The counterpart is resurgence, most associated with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who asks what it means to rebuild Indigenous life from inside Indigenous law, land, language, kinship, and ceremony rather than only seeking a seat in colonial institutions. Resurgence is renewal from the inside, not withdrawal. Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee and Lenape), in Pagans in the Promised Land, asks for the view from the shore: what it was to stand on Turtle Island and watch the ships arrive.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang issue the warning the whole field now works under. Decolonization is not a metaphor. It entails the repatriation and rematriation of Indigenous land and life, not curricular reform or diversity work. If you use the words colonial, anti-colonial, decolonial, or postcolonial, define them, cite the scholarship, and be ready to say whether land and Indigenous authority are actually at stake.
The Doctrine of Discovery, rooted in fifteenth-century papal edicts, entered U.S. federal Indian law through Chief Justice John Marshall's 1823 opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh, and it still undergirds dispossession. Contemporary scholarship treats it not as ancient history but as an active legal afterlife with global reach. Philip P. Arnold's The Urgency of Indigenous Values (Syracuse University Press, open access on JSTOR) makes a conceptual shift I find load-bearing: from Indigenous religions to Indigenous values. The values are rooted in skä•noñh, an Onondaga word for peace and well-being, foundational to the Great Law of Peace and to proper relationship with the natural world. Using the Two Row Wampum as method, Arnold challenges the assumption that "religion" is the natural category for Indigenous life. Dana Lloyd's work on teaching Native American religions on stolen land presses the point: settler management of what counts as religion was itself an instrument of rule.
Method follows. Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies makes method itself the site of colonial and decolonizing work; Shawn Wilson's Research Is Ceremony offers relational accountability; and the CARE Principles from the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics) answer the open-data movement by insisting that open does not mean ethical.
Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou), who has recently joined the ancestors, spent a life asking what law existed in Aotearoa before the Crown arrived and what restoring it would take. His 1988 report He Whaipaanga Hou examined Māori imprisonment rates, refused the Crown's explanation, and refused as well to answer inside the Crown's framework. Māori data, he argued, must be interpreted through Māori frameworks. The monocultural system could not see what it was doing because it had eyes only for itself.
In the 2000s Jackson led Matike Mai Aotearoa for the Iwi Chairs Forum, asking how a constitution might be grounded not in Westminster but in He Whakaputanga, the 1835 Declaration of Independence. Its findings hold that Māori never ceded sovereignty, that tikanga should guide constitutional relationships rather than decorate them, and that kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga must exist as distinct but relational spheres, neither subordinate. Tina Ngata continues that restoration work.
Two hemispheres, one argument. As Onondaga Nation Turtle Clan Faithkeeper Oren Lyons says, sovereignty is the act thereof.
The Postmodern Terminal >_