This article questions the concept of sovereignty as European modernity translated it into Māori in the Treaty of Waitangi established in 1840 between the Māori chiefs of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the British Empire. The concept of sovereignty is difficult to translate into Māori as it has no direct equivalent, and so the term kawanatanga—a transliteration approximating the sound of the English “governor” (kawana + the suffix –tanga) and therefore doing very little to convey the idea of absolute power wielded by a sovereign—was chosen by the missionary and translator Reverend Henry Williams. Did the latter wish to deceive the Māori, as some scholars have suggested? Or was the concept itself simply untranslatable? Careful consideration of this translation problem reveals that no formalized equivalent of “sovereignty” ever precedes its realization—that “sovereignty,” in fact, is not “transferred” at all, but rather performed, its conceptual content and its production in culture isomorphous: sovereignty is performed, and translation, as a concomitant creative operation, partakes in this performance’s actualization. By coining a term (kawanatanga) that is at once foreign yet still vernacular, Henry Williams rejects (perhaps without meaning to) “sovereignty” as a ready-made abstraction or transferable signified. And in so doing, he resists the urge to close the text within a univocal interpretation of “sovereignty.” Seen from this new perspective, William’s translation demonstrates something of anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ “pensée sauvage,” introduces a potentially vulnerable yet essential relativity into discourse on postcolonial translation.