Based on three years of ethnographic research in the Yukon, this book examines contemporary efforts to restructure the relationship between aboriginal peoples and the state in Canada. Although it is widely held that land claims and co-management – two of the most visible and celebrated elements of this restructuring – will help reverse centuries of inequity, this book challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that land claims and co-management may be less empowering for First Nation peoples than is often supposed. The book examines the complex relationship between the people of Kluane First Nation, the land and animals, and the state. It shows that Kluane human-animal relations are at least partially incompatible with Euro-Canadian notions of “property” and “knowledge.” Yet, these concepts form the conceptual basis for land claims and co-management, respectively. As a result, these processes necessarily end up taking for granted – and so helping to reproduce – existing power relations. First Nation peoples’ participation in land claim negotiations and co-management have forced them – at least in some contexts – to adopt Euro-Canadian perspectives toward the land and animals. They have been forced to develop bureaucratic infrastructures for interfacing with the state, and they have had to become bureaucrats themselves, learning to speak and act in uncharacteristic ways. Thus, land claims and co-management have helped undermine the very way of life they are supposed to be protecting. This book speaks to critical issues in contemporary anthropology, First Nation law, and resource management. It moves beyond conventional models of colonialism, in which the state is treated as a monolithic entity, and instead explores how “state power” is reproduced through everyday bureaucratic practices – including struggles over the production and use of knowledge.

In recent decades, indigenous peoples in the Yukon have signed land claim and self-government agreements that spell out the nature of government-to-government relations and grant individual First Nations significant, albeit limited, powers of governance over their peoples, lands, and resources. Those agreements, however, are predicated on the assumption that if First Nations are to qualify as governments at all, they must be fundamentally state-like, and they frame First Nation powers in the culturally contingent idiom of sovereignty. Based on over five years of ethnographic research carried out in the southwest Yukon, Sovereignty’s Entailments is a close ethnographic analysis of everyday practices of state formation in a society whose members do not take for granted the cultural entailments of sovereignty. This approach enables Nadasdy to illustrate the full scope and magnitude of the "cultural revolution" that is state formation and expose the culturally specific assumptions about space, time, and sociality that lie at the heart of sovereign politics. Nadasdy’s timely and insightful work illuminates how the process of state formation is transforming Yukon Indian people’s relationships with one another, animals, and the land.

With a long history and deep connection to the Earth’s resources, indigenous peoples have an intimate understanding and ability to observe the impacts linked to climate change. Traditional ecological knowledge and tribal experience play a key role in developing future scientific solutions for adaptation to the impacts. The book explores climate-related issues for indigenous communities in the United States, including loss of traditional knowledge, forests and ecosystems, food security and traditional foods, as well as water, Arctic sea ice loss, permafrost thaw and relocation. The book also highlights how tribal communities and programs are responding to the changing environments. Fifty authors from tribal communities, academia, government agencies and NGOs contributed to the book. Previously published in Climatic Change, Volume 120, Issue 3, 2013.