When I set out to curate this collection of writing on “sovereignty,” I knew it was a mammoth to explore. Among original peoples of the Northeast, the word – the idea – is layered with centuries of entanglement between dispossession and self-determination, belonging and constraint. By its simplest meaning, sovereignty implies the authority or autonomy to govern oneself. But what does that really look like for Indigenous nations whose lands, economies, and movements remain shaped by external control? What does it mean to claim sovereignty when access to live and thrive on our own homelands is not common among us?
As an Aquinnah Wampanoag woman, I’ve come to understand sovereignty not only through governance or political structure, but as a living practice — a way of being in the right relationship with land and kin, and of carrying forward responsibilities that long predate any government’s attempt to define us. Yet for many of our tribal nations, sovereignty remains as much an aspiration as a reality, both politically and culturally.
To explore this tension, I turned to my tribal community and colleagues whose work and lives continually ask what it means to belong to a place that has always known us. Their reflections reveal how “sovereignty” is negotiated every day — in the tensions between survival and self-definition, history and present life. Through these writings, we see how community members contend with individual identity, responsibility, and rights — not as abstract ideas, but as living questions that shape how we move forward together, keeping central the values that make us whole.
For readers of Motif, especially those joining us for this Indigenous Peoples’ edition, I invite you not only to sit with these voices, but to let them shift something in you. Consider what sovereignty means where you stand, and how your own relationships — to place, to history, to one another — might reflect or challenge it. Finally, sovereignty for Native Nations is not a closed concept; it’s a shared responsibility to ensure Indigenous peoples can live fully and freely in the places that we have always. It lives, breathes, and calls us all to act with greater intention in this home that we now share.
NaDaizja Bolling is a citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah and is the Executive Director of the Aquinnah Cultural Center, where she leads program and museum strategy that center Wampanoag knowledge, land, and community.