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- Title
SOVEREIGNTY THREAT: LOREAL TSINGINE, POLICING, AND THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF INDIGENOUS DEATH.
- Authors
Beardall, Theresa Rocha
- Abstract
In March 2016, Loreal Tsingine, a twenty-seven-year-old Diné mother living in Winslow, Arizona, was killed by Officer Austin Shipley. After two investigations insinuated that Shipley was justified in using fatal force to take Ms. Tsingine's life, the Navajo Nation filed two suits in federal court: one against the city claiming that the Winslow Police Department was negligent in training, hiring, and supervising Shipley and another against the Justice Department for failing to act upon this violation of civil and constitutional rights. Despite national awareness that police violence is a persistent social problem, Ms. Tsingine's story, the stories of many other Native women killed by police, and tribal intervention on behalf of these community members, are rarely covered by national media. This Article disrupts that erasure by arguing that the invisibility of Native women and tribes is not arbitrary and is instead representative of settleranxieties about indigeneity, race, class, and gender. To contextualize this claim, I frame indigeneity as an intersectional identity and examine how women of color broadly, and Black and Native women specifically, disproportionately experience police violence, yet pose different threats to the legitimacy of the settler-state. Importantly, I introduce the concept of sovereignty threat to explain this social phenomenon and show how tribal sovereignty and ongoing Indigenous kin relationships with land, place, and peoples jeopardize the settler-state's claims to territorial sovereignty. Thus, I reveal that Ms. Tsingine's death constitutes much more than a case of local law enforcement actualizing their biases while on patrol. Her death demonstrates the settler-state's desire to protect itself from sovereignty threat by controlling the generative power of Native women and their bodies. This uniquely Indigenous threat affects macro-level social structures, mesolevel interactions between sovereigns, and micro-level social encounters between Native Peoples and police, including the fatal encounter between Shipley and Ms. Tsingine. I conclude by reorienting the Navajo Nation's attempts to protect their members off-reservation as one way tribal nations refuse the settler-state's narrow conceptualization of Indigenous sovereignty.
- Subjects
WINSLOW (Ariz.); UNITED States. Dept. of Justice; KILLINGS by police; INDIGENOUS women; TRIBAL sovereignty; LAW enforcement; TRIBES; VIOLENCE against women
- Publication
Nevada Law Journal, 2021, Vol 21, Issue 3, p1025
- ISSN
2157-1899
- Publication type
Article