In this book, Rauna Kuokkanen takes on an ambitious project that manages to contribute to and expand multiple disciplinary subfields at the same time. Substantively, this work focuses on the limits of our existing understanding of self-determination by considering the experiences of indigenous peoples in settler states, with a particular focus on how restructuring gender norms through colonization has affected contemporary indigenous political institutions and discourse. This book details a range of gender norms in indigenous communities before contact and how they were recast to create new, foreign forms of domination within those communities into the present. Kuokkanen argues that, absent indigenous approaches to gender, current law (international and domestic), political institutions, and debates all fail to acknowledge an indigenous right to self-determination. Such a failure is a function of a myopic concern for individual rights in discussions of self-determination and the continued, unspoken gender-based domination within and outside of indigenous communities.
In the context of political theory, Kuokkanen provides an indigenous feminist analysis to build a concept of self-determination that arises out of the perspectives of indigenous peoples from across five countries: Canada, Greenland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Through this innovative, methodologically rich approach, she identifies the “norm of integrity” (p. 24) as an imperative for indigenous self-determination. This norm is diminished and eroded by violence and inequality in the settler colonial context. Kuokkanen incorporates Jennifer Nedelsky’s theory of relational autonomy and Iris Marion Young’s contributions to the debates on nondomination to show how such violence operates at the hands of states and internally in indigenous communities whose gender norms have been compromised. Her 76 semi-structured interviews consider “three dimensions of self-determination: the concept of self-determination, current status of implementation, and its relationship with violence against women” (p. 10). This innovative move—structuring a normative concept based on the collective and shared expressions of individuals in communities—is monumental enough in itself for the subfield. But Kuokkanen does not stop there in making noteworthy contributions.
Indeed, Kuokkanen’s methodological approach incorporates and draws on the unique dynamics of doing social science research in Canada, where indigenous people have had an arguably stronger say than in other countries in the contemporary construction of research methods that are to be used in their communities. This partnership in research (“by and with, rather than on and for,” p. 10) is also reflected in her incorporation of a research frame more common among decolonial and indigenous studies scholars than among political scientists. Namely, Kuokkanen uses a kind of network analytic approach to identify participants where the focal point of the network is, self-consciously, the researcher herself. By relying on her personal network to identify research participants, she argues that she is using “an Indigenous research method of relationality” (p. 10). This approach is complemented by textual analysis of a variety of governance documents, policy and media statements, meeting minutes, and so forth, which are used to identify institutional gender structures and highlight the way in which gender violence is being insufficiently addressed by those institutions.
On the whole, this book marks exceptional developments in and for political science, a few of which I note here. First, although inductive reasoning is not new to political theorists, the basis and source of such reasoning are rarely, if ever, empirical qualitative research. To be crass about it, those of us using inductive approaches most often rely on our own good reasoning as rooted in the textual analysis of other scholars. We are not in the business of surveying (literally) the range of possible theoretical considerations for a concept under study by asking others what they think and allowing them to shape it. I appreciate that Kuokkanen has made this intentional, explicit shift toward a multimethodological approach to political theory, and I also acknowledge that doing so can come at a cost, which I address shortly.
Second, although accepted and common among scholars in post- and decolonial studies, the intentional incorporation of her own positionality as an indigenous feminist and the reliance on her own personal network for research purposes are still relatively new and sit at the margins, marked as “suspect” in most political science circles. To the extent that Kuokkanen’s approach marks a shift toward empirical inclusivity, it is noteworthy. It also enables us to direct our attention to debating the merits of, purposes for, and frames used (and taught) in political science, which often rely on notions of objectivity and distance from the subject of our study to create a veneer of validity. Although Kuokkanen’s work does not explicitly address this particular debate, it provides a solid foundation for the conversation and ought to be included in graduate school curriculums for its methodological contributions.
In many ways, this book picks up where my work (Kessler-Mata, American Indians and The Trouble with Sovereignty, 2017) left off by developing a future-oriented vision of what indigenous self-determination might look like. However, our conceptions of what self-determination is and what it does diverge in several important ways. First, for Kuokkanen, self-determination is a “foundational value that seeks to restructure all relations of domination” (p. 23) and that “fosters the norm of integrity,” which includes territorial, cultural, collective, and individual integrity. In my own variation, self-determination is a protected space for the flourishing of an indigenous community life and is marked by the absence of domination from externally situated individuals and institutions. It is distinct from self-governance, which includes institutional forms and relations with externally situated entities. Kuokkanen, however, does not make the distinction between self-governance and self-determination. Without such a distinction, the limits of existing self-governance institutions become imprinted on and constrain the possibilities of the concept of self-determination. Self-governance is inherently limited by its definition. The “self” in self-governance is defined by its relations with and to others, which is made all the more apparent in the context of institutional relationships between governments. But self-determination is an end-state goal, not a present condition. It is principled and intentionally underdefined so as to not prescribe additional dominative norms. In this respect, I believe Kuokkanen’s reliance on self-determination as inductively defined runs the risk of adopting at once too many prescriptive characteristics and the undesirable limits that must frame considerations of self-governance. At the end of the day, it strikes me that she is actually positing what “indigenous” (rather than self-determination) means in a political sense and identifying the implications of this meaning for governance, self-determination, and decolonization. Concepts such as integrity, then, become foundational to what an indigenous political perspective is and how it is performed.
In addition to those mentioned earlier, one of the greatest contributions of this book is the way in which Kuokkanen provides a meaningful platform to elevate the voices of her participants in articulating indigenous perspectives on gender, in light of the related inability of our existing political institutions to reflect those perspectives. Her work is thought provoking, insightful, and relevant now more than ever.
