Review: The Third Space of Sovereignty

The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations #

By Kevin Bruyneel

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8166-4988-4.

Kevin Bruyneel's book turns on a refusal. The United States has always offered Indigenous peoples a rigged menu of choices: assimilate or secede, become "modern" or stay "traditional," accept the gift of citizenship or remain outside the nation. Bruyneel argues that Native political actors have refused to pick, and that the refusal is itself a coherent political stance rather than confusion or failure. He calls the position a "third space of sovereignty," a location neither fully inside nor fully outside the American settler-state, from which Indigenous nations expose the limits of colonial rule while declining the terms it sets. In this review, I will argue that the book's wager pays off: the in-between is not a weakness to be resolved but the very ground of Indigenous postcolonial resistance, and Bruyneel's concept gave the field a vocabulary it still uses. While the third space can turn slippery in application (I will return to this), the contribution has aged remarkably well.

How the argument runs #

The framing is explicitly postcolonial. Bruyneel draws on Homi Bhabha's notion of a third space, along with Gayatri Spivak and Frantz Fanon, to read U.S.-Indigenous relations as a colonial relationship that mainstream American political science has been reluctant to name as such. The payoff is conceptual precision about what sovereignty means when a people is boundaried by, but not dissolved into, a settler nation; the third space fills the lacuna between the two positions the settler-state pretends exhaust the options.

The book moves chronologically across six chapters, each anchored in a documented struggle. It opens with the colonial relationship that hardened after the Civil War, then turns to Cherokee political maneuvering during and after that war. A strong chapter treats the 1871 congressional decision to end treaty-making as a move in what Bruyneel calls colonial time, the imposition of a temporality in which Native nations are always cast as belated, arriving too late to a modernity defined against them. He reads citizenship, including the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, as a contested gift that binds as much as it grants (the double valence of the gift is the chapter's quiet engine). A later chapter tracks the mid-twentieth-century shift from a civil rights idiom to explicit claims of decolonization, and a final case study takes up contemporary sovereignty fights, above all California gaming politics and the 1998 Proposition 5 campaign, before generalizing the third-space concept outward.

Bruyneel draws his evidence from the archive of American law and politics. He reads Supreme Court decisions, including Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, and City of Sherrill v. Oneida, alongside congressional debates, and he sets these against Indigenous political texts such as the 1972 Twenty-Point Position Paper. The method is interpretive rather than quantitative, closer to political theory than to conventional Americanist history, and it works best when a legal doctrine and a tribal position paper appear as competing claims on the same contested ground.

Contribution, strengths, and weaknesses #

The contribution is real and has aged well. Published just before settler colonial studies became a dominant frame, the book helped make it ordinary to describe U.S.-Indigenous relations as colonial and to treat sovereignty as a live political practice rather than a settled legal status. The third-space concept gave scholars a vocabulary for the both/and character of Indigenous nationhood, and political science, Native studies, and legal scholarship have cited the book widely for exactly that reason. Bruyneel writes with analytic clarity, and the historical chapters stand on firmer ground than the theoretical apparatus alone would lead you to expect.

The weaknesses are the ones that tend to shadow ambitious theory. The case selection is emphatically U.S.-centered, which is fair given the subject but limits how far the third-space idea travels without adjustment, despite the closing move to generalize it. The concept itself can turn slippery; because the third space is defined by what it refuses, it sometimes threatens to absorb any Indigenous political act as evidence, which makes the thesis hard to falsify. And readers who want the granular institutional and economic detail of tribal governance will find the book operating a level of abstraction above that. In my estimation these are the costs of a theory-forward project rather than fatal flaws, but they shape who will get the most from the book and how far its central concept can be pushed.

Verdict #

The Third Space of Sovereignty is a foundational text for anyone thinking seriously about Indigenous politics under settler rule, and it belongs on graduate reading lists in Native studies, American political development, and postcolonial theory. It rewards readers comfortable with theoretical argument and case-based interpretation; it will frustrate those looking for a policy handbook or a comprehensive tribal history. Bruyneel does not resolve the tension at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty. His achievement, as I understand it, is to show that the tension is the point, and that refusing the colonizer's binary is a form of politics with its own logic and its own history. Nearly two decades on, the book still frames the conversation it entered, a third space writ large across the field it helped to found.