The settler colonial sovereignty of policing: Brieanna Watters, Policing Sovereignty: Tribal-State Policing Agreements and Settler Colonial Governance, PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonial sovereignty of policing: Brieanna Watters, Policing Sovereignty: Tribal-State Policing Agreements and Settler Colonial Governance, PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2025

09Feb26

Abstract: This dissertation examines how tribal–state policing agreements operate as technologies of settler-colonial governance on the Green Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Although these agreements are publicly framed as pragmatic solutions to jurisdictional complexity and as exercises of tribal sovereignty, I argue that they simultaneously extend state authority, constrain Indigenous autonomy, and reproduce racialized spatial inequalities. Using a multi-method qualitative design—archival research, interviews, and ethnographic police ride-alongs—I trace the historical rise of tribal policing from mid-century termination and relocation policies, through the Red Power era, to the expansion of federal policing grants in the 1990s. Across this trajectory, two mechanisms emerge: conditional recognition, in which tribal policing is acknowledged only when structured through state-defined standards and oversight; and jurisdictional siphoning, through which authority that appears to flow toward the tribe is simultaneously pulled back into county and state regulatory systems. Ethnographic analysis shows how officers’ daily practices create working geographies that assign most tribal officers to predominantly Native, economically marginalized spaces while select tribal officers police whiter, wealthier areas—producing racialized boundaries of belonging, risk, and deservingness. The dissertation argues that these agreements do more than coordinate policing; they reorganize colonial power while Indigenous leaders engage in strategic, pragmatic forms of governance within these constraints.

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