Sovereignty as a scalar process: Historic preservation and Indian gaming on tribal land in Wetumpka, Alabama.

Sovereignty is not the sole province of the nation-state, or any other pre-existing scale. It is a concept that is struggled over amongst multiple entities, at multiple scales, each presenting itself as the one with the power above all others to control what happens in a given place. This paper focuses on assertions of sovereignty made in the course of what is now a thirty-year-old conflict over land-use at Hickory Ground, Alabama, a historic Creek Indian site once rescued for historic preservation but now the location of an Indian gaming facility. These assertions represent an ongoing jockeying for position that belies any type of rigid hierarchy of scale and instead reveals its continual construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]