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I wish to thank Sheryl Lightfoot, Meagan Cloutier, Graham White and the CJPS reviewers for their helpful comments. I also wish to acknowledge the support of the Canada Research Chairs programme.
First Words
The discipline of political science does not take Indigenous politics seriously. To be sure, there are political scientists who have made important contributions to the study of Indigenous politics. However, the bulk of the discipline either does not place Indigenous politics in its field of vision or it analyses it through frameworks that forestall adequate analysis. (Bruyneel, 2012:1)
As a discipline, political science is rooted in the enlightenment and in the writings of enlightenment scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Arguably, the works of these "great men" have defined and confined the discipline and the manner in which political scientists have engaged with the Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS) for the last 50 years. This is particularly the case when it comes to the study of Indigenous politics, a topic that was completely absent in the journal until the late 1970s, virtually absent until the mid 1980s and seldom written about until the 1990s when Canadians confronted Indigenous politics on a regular basis in the news and on the streets. Through the years, studies of contemporary Indigenous peoples and their interactions with the state have increased in numbers. Indeed, the number of Aboriginal politics publications in CJPS has exploded in recent years. Still, because of the roots of the discipline, political scientists have largely ignored Indigenous political traditions and have largely studied contemporary Indigenous politics from the vantage point of the Western-eurocentric tradition.
A recent article by Will Sanders reviewing Indigenous-focused publications for the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian Journal of Political Science also noted that such publications were "slow to emerge" with 45 articles, 3 review essays and 40 book reviews; 12 of these articles having been published between 2010 and 2013 (Sanders, 2015: 679, 691). Similar to the state of the discipline in Canada, authors have been almost exclusively non-Indigenous (with no publications by Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders) and have focused on the intersection between Indigenous peoples...