Description
While there are many thousands of articles analysing the USA in leading International Political Economy journals, it is more rare to find research that looks at the sovereign political communities within American borders, such as the Navajo, Cherokee, Choctaw and the 524 federally recognised tribes within the territorial boundaries of the USA, composed of an estimated population of 5.2 million people. This is reflective of a larger trend of neglecting Indigenous communities globally, not just in the USA. How could greater representation of First Nations economic issues and thought improve the study of International Political Economy? In this paper, I theorise how greater attention to Indigenous Political Economy could serve to improve the field of study and the impact of political economy scholarship on marginalised groups global. I focus on three potential foci of research: First Nations economic policy, lessons drawn from ‘the Great Dying’ and Indigenous economic thought. There is relative lack of engagement regarding tribal public communications and Indigenous activism around political economy topics such as pipeline access, Stolen Sisters and data centre expansions. Political Economy scholarship on climate catastrophe literature rare engages with or seeks to learn from the first human made climate catastrophe that killed 90% of the Indigenous American population in the sixteenth century. Finally, ‘normal’ concepts in political economy, such as land and labour, still naturalise meanings generated from racialized and false understandings of the Americas in the early centuries of European colonialism. I conclude that the lack of engagement with these issues reproduces the racialized assumption that the sovereignty of these nations either does not exist or is not significant in an ostensible ‘International’ field of political economy. I conclude with an urgent call for amplifying First Nations in the field of study towards to production of an Indigenous Political Economy.
