This article begins with an obvious but necessary premise: the U.S. state has historically produced itself as sovereign over a specific territorial mass through the violent conquest and continuing occupation of lands to which Native Americans also lay and have laid sovereign claim. At its core, this article seeks to ask how a Liberal conception of law legitimates and maintains this foundational violence within its own texts. Additionally, I intend to imply that within that question lies the further question of what academic writing might offer to activist work by making this foundational violence within the law of the United States visible as such.