This afterword argues for the importance of an historical consciousness in thinking about the contemporary era. The articles in this special issue suggest a much more complicated and entangled relationship between concepts of the indigenous and modernity. Attention to the lives of Sarah Winnemucca, Joseph Brant, Robert Kerr, Anthony Martin Fernando and Kahgegagahbowh suggestively recasts our understandings of rights and modernity away from a central starting-point in the metropole to much more fluid and multiple sites of generation in different locales.