Since the last third of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have claimed their sovereignty. There, it is possible to distinguish representations, in the form of marks of indigenous sovereignty, which go further than the modern concepts of state sovereignty and law, and compete with them. From then onwards, the liberal state has responded by creating ethnic administration policies aimed at the conservation and cultural revaluation of the indigenous culture. Such state operation, or indigenous patrimonialization, is what I am seeking to understand in this paper. For that purpose, I have developed two arguments: the first upholds that the role of indigenous patrimonialization is the conservation of state sovereignty, while the second states that patrimonialization is the result of the exceeded capacity of the liberal state and law to generate jurisprudence concerning indigenous peoples.