Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas)

Red Skin, White Masks

Indigenous Americas

Robert Warrior, Series Editor

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Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

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Red Skin, White Masks

Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

Glen Sean Coulthard

Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred

Indigenous Americas

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis • London

Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy,”
University of Toronto Quarterly
77, no. 1 (2008): 164–66, reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press,
www.utpjournals.com
; and as “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,”
Contemporary Political Theory
6, no. 4 (2007): 437–60. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published as “Resisting Culture: Seyla Benhabib’s Deliberative Approach to the Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts,” in
Deliberative Democracy in Practice
, ed. David Kahane (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 138-54, reprinted with permission of the publisher, copyright University of British Columbia Press 2009, all rights reserved.

Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coulthard, Glen Sean.

Red skin, white masks : rejecting the colonial politics of recognition / Glen Sean Coulthard ; foreword by Taiaiake Alfred.

(Indigenous Americas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4529-4243-8

1. Indians of North America—Canada—Government relations. 2. Indians of North America—Canada—Politics and government. 3. Indians of North America—Legal status, laws. etc.—Canada. 4. Indians, Treatment of—Canada. 5. Canada—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. I. Title.

E92.C68 2014

323.1197´071—dc23

2013049674

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

For Richard Park Coulthard (1942–2012)

Contents

Foreword

Taiaiake Alfred

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Subjects of Empire

1. The Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts

2. For the Land: The Dene Nation’s Struggle for Self-Determination

3. Essentialism and the Gendered Politics of Aboriginal Self-Government

4. Seeing Red: Reconciliation and Resentment

5. The Plunge into the Chasm of the Past: Fanon, Self-Recognition, and Decolonization

Conclusion. Lessons from Idle No More: The Future of Indigenous Activism

Notes

Index

Foreword

Taiaiake Alfred

Not so very long ago, in Canada there numbered just less than fourteen million inhabitants: thirteen million human beings, and half a million Natives. The former had the land; the others had the memory of it. Between the two there were hired chiefs, an Indian Affairs bureaucracy, and a small bourgeoisie, all three shams from the very beginning to the end, which served as go-betweens. In this unending colony the truth stood naked, but the settlers preferred it hidden away or at least dressed: the Natives had to love them and all they had done, something in the way a cruel father is still loved by the children who are wounded by his selfish hands. The white élite undertook to manufacture a Native élite. They picked promising youths, they made them drink the fire-water principles of capitalism and of Western culture; they educated the Indian out of them, and their heads were filled and their mouths were stuffed with smart-sounding hypocrisies, grand greedy words that stuck in their throats but which they spit out nonetheless. After a short stay in the university they were sent home to their reserves or unleashed in the cities, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing to say to their brothers and sisters that did not sound false, ugly, and harmful; they only mimicked their masters. From buildings in Toronto, from Montréal, from Vancouver, businessmen would utter the words, “Development! Progress!” and somewhere on a reserve lips would open “. . . opment! . . . gress!” The Natives were complacent and compliant; it was a rich time for the white élite.

Then things changed. The mouths of Natives started opening by themselves; brown voices still spoke of the whites’ law, democracy, and liberal humanism, but only to reproach them for their unfairness and inhumanity.
White élites listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment and reproach, these pleas for reconciliation, with apparent satisfaction. “See? Just like we taught them, they are able to talk in proper English without the help of a priest or of an anthropologist. Just look at what we have made of the backward savages—they sound like lawyers!” Whites did not doubt that the Natives would accept their ideals, since the Natives accused the whites of not being faithful to them. Settlers could still believe in the sanctity of their divine civilizing mission; they had Europeanized the Natives, they had created a new kind of Native, the assimilated Aboriginal. The white élites took this all in and whispered, quiet between themselves over dinner, as good progressive persons of the (post)modern world: “Let them cry and complain; it’s just therapy and worth the expense. It’s better than giving the land back!”

Now the sham is coming to an end. Native thinkers and leaders are coming on the scene intent on changing things, entirely. With the last stores of our patience, Native writers, musicians, and philosophers are trying to explain to settlers that their values and the true facts of their existence are at great odds, and that the Native can never be completely erased or totally assimilated. This
New Indigenous Intelligentsia
is trying to get settlers to understand that colonialism must and will be confronted and destroyed. It is not 1947; we’re not talking about reforming the Indian Act so that we can become little municipalities. It is not 1982; we’re not talking about going to court to explore empty constitutional promises.

It is the twenty-first century. Listen: “what is treated in the Canadian discourse of reconciliation as an unhealthy and debilitating incapacity to forgive and move on is actually a sign of a
critical consciousness
, of our sense of justice and injustice, and of our awareness of and unwillingness to
reconcile
.” Coulthard is talking about rising up, Seeing Red, about resurgence and the politics of authentic self-affirmation. This is a call to combat contemporary colonialism’s objectification and alienation and manipulation of our true selves. He understands that in Canada today “settlement” of conflict means putting the past behind us, a willful forgetting of the crimes that have stained the psyche of this country for so long, a conspiracy of collective ignorance, turning a blind eye to the ongoing crimes of theft, fraud, and abuse against the original people of the land that are still the unacceptable everyday reality in Canada. So how could we settle and accept and not question and challenge the naturalized injustice that frames and shapes and gives character to our lives? There is
nothing natural about the dominance of white people on the North American continent and the removal and erasure of our people, our laws, and our cultures from our homelands.

Glen Coulthard is a leading voice of the new Indigenous Intelligentsia, and he has accomplished so much with this book. To have rescued Karl Marx from his nineteenth-century hostage chamber in that room in the British Library and to expose him to the full breadth of history and the light of the human landscape was enough to make this a great work of political theory. He’s gone beyond that accomplishment in correcting Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Frantz Fanon’s narrow vision—something you have to excuse them for given they were doing philosophy while in the midst of a ferocious physical fight—and brought Marx and Sartre and Fanon together with his Dene Elders and me and you, Reader, to show us all how our psycho-affective attachments to colonialism are blocking the achievement of a just society. As such, this book is a profound critique of contemporary colonialism, and clear vision of Indigenous resurgence, and a serious contribution to the literature of freedom.

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of
Red Skin, White Masks
would not have been possible without the insight and guidance offered by many friends and colleagues. The unwavering support and intellectual guidance provided by professors James Tully and Taiaiake Alfred warrant special mention. If there are any insights to be gleaned from
Red Skin, White Masks
, it’s due in large part to the support I received from these two outstanding scholars. I consider both of them to be friends and mentors of the highest order.

I would also like to thank the many people I have met over the years who have influenced my thinking in innumerable ways. In particular, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my close friends and esteemed colleagues Dory Nason, John Munro, Robert Nichols, Jakeet Singh, and Rita Dhamoon. Your thoughtful comments on various incarnations of this project have been invaluable. You have all been crucial to my intellectual and personal development in ways that I cannot possibly express here.

There are, of course, many others whose words of encouragement and support have indelibly shaped this book. In particular, I would like to start by acknowledging my friends and colleagues in the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia: Dory Nason, Sheryl Lightfoot, Daniel Justice, Linc Kesler, (the forthcoming) Johnny Mack, Janey Lew, Jie Ie Baik, Hannah Butson, and Tanya Bob. I look forward to many more conversations in the future.

Special thanks are also due to my editor, Jason Weidemann, at the University of Minnesota Press, as well as the series editor for Indigenous Americas, Robert Warrior. Your collective support for this project struck the perfect balance between persistence and compassion.

Credit is also due to the many illuminating conversations I have had over the years with these brilliant interlocutors: Erin Freeland Ballantyne, Leanne Simpson, Audra Simpson, Andy Smith, J. P. Fulford, Duncan Ivison, Melissa Williams, Jeff Corntassel, Michael Asch, Avigail Eisenberg, Jeremy Webber, Chris Andersen, Peter Kulchyski, Paul Patton, Kevin Bruyneel, Richard Day, Harsha Walia, David Dennis, Cliff Atleo, Ivan Drury, Elizabeth Povinelli, Laura Janara, Barbara Arneil, Bruce Baum, Jeffery Webber, Nikolas Kompridis, Brad Brian, Sylvia Federici, Andrej Grubacic, Dylan Rodriguez, Brendan Hokowhitu, Vince Diaz, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox, Francois Paulette, Stephen Kakfwi, Kyla Kakfwi Scott, Amos Scott, Melaw Nakehk’o, Modeste and Therese Sangris, Toby Rollo, Am Johal, Shyla Seller, Matt Hern, Geoff Mann, Mike Krebs, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Scott Morgensen, Shiri Pasternak, Chris Finley, Arthur Manuel, Val Napoleon, Mandee McDonald, Siku Allooloo, Nina Larrson, and Jarrett Martineau.

A shout-out is also due to my students at the University of British Columbia and elsewhere. Thanks to Kelsey Wrightson and Matthew Wildcat for the care they put into helping prepare the text, both intellectually and physically, for publication. I have also learned so much from my conversations in and outside of the classroom with Daniel Voth, Jessica Rosinski, Derek Kornelsen, Jessica Hallenbeck, Dawn Hoogeveen, Kelly Aguirre, and Charlotte Kingston.

Finally, I could not have completed this project without the love and support of Amanda Dowling; our children, Hayden and Tulita Dowling-Coulthard; and my mother, Christine Coulthard. This book is for all of you.

I dedicate
Red Skin, White Masks
to the loving memory of my father, Richard Park Coulthard (1942–2012). I miss you more than words can say.
Mahsi cho!