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I contrast two perspectives adopted to theorize political authorities. The first is the modern perspective. It conceives of political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens and regards the state as the political organization of this society. This perspective is primarily concerned with the principles that should govern the use of state power. The second is the political pluralist perspective. It recognizes a multiplicity of normative orders as equally legitimate. The focus is put on the civic processes by which a diverse citizenry should negotiate its interactions. I illustrate these perspectives by considering how they approach diversity, and more specifically the political claims of indigenous peoples. The pluralist perspective is argued to be normatively motivated by a consideration for the actual freedom of citizens to sustain diverse normative orders, to negotiate the structure of political society, and to jointly search for justice.

This essay relies on the insight that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure geared toward the elimination of Indigenous presence to argue that ideologies that legitimate and naturalize settler occupation are equally ongoing. More specifically, the ideologies that justify settler colonialism in major states like Australia, Canada, and the United States, are like Flying Heads that shape-shift and recur over time. We explore how two notorious ideological tropes—terra nullius and the myth of the Vanishing Race—recur in the work of contrasting contemporary theorists. Ultimately, Flying Head ideologies of settler colonialism cannot be defeated by reasoned argument alone, but by structural transformations beyond the settler-colonial relations that necessitate and sustain them. Following diverse Indigenous theorists and activists, we briefly explore prefigurative resurgent practices and how Indigenous political imaginaries, like the Dish with One Spoon, offer alternatives to transcend the settler colonial present.

This paper aims to contribute to the decolonization and Indigenization of democratic theory. Regarding decolonization, I explain that democratic self-determination is typically associated with sovereign autonomy and can serve to justify policies and discourses of settler colonial control, erasure, and assimilation. Regarding Indigenization, I reconceptualize democratic self-determination from an Indigenous starting point. I discuss the Two Row Wampum of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and offer an account of the political principles it embodies. I interpret it as advancing a relational conception of democratic autonomy, which makes it possible to embrace a plurality of political arrangements and political actors, to blur the distinction between internal authority and external sovereignty, and to de-emphasize the enforcement of decisions in favor of the maintenance of commitments to a political relationship.

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