Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (10 page)

Further, while Turner is right to pay attention to discursive forms of power, his analysis eclipses the role that
non
discursive configurations play in reproducing colonial relations. My concern here is that the problem with the legal and political discourses of the state is not only that they enjoy hegemonic status vis-à-vis Indigenous discourses, but that they are also backed by and hopelessly entwined with the economic, political, and military might of the state itself. This means that Indigenous peoples must be able to account for these material relations as well, which would require an exploration of theories and practices that move beyond liberal and ideational forms of discursive transformation. While I recognize that this might be beyond the scope of Turner’s investigation, I think that speaking to the diversity of forms of decolonial practice would have made his case more convincing.

One of the important insights of Fanon’s critique of the politics of recognition is that it provides us with theoretical tools that enable us to determine the relative transformability of certain fields of colonial power over others. These tools subsequently put us in a better position to critically assess which strategies hold the most promise, and which others are more susceptible to failure.

Conclusion

In retrospect, Fanon appears to have overstated the “cleansing” value he attributed to anticolonial violence.
101
Indeed, one could argue that many Algerians have yet to fully recover from the legacy left from the eight years of carnage and brutality that constituted Algeria’s war of independence with France. Nor was the Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) revolutionary seizure of the Algerian state apparatus enough to stave off what Fanon would call “the curse of [national] independence”: namely, the subjection of the newly “liberated” people and territories to the tyranny of the market and a postindependence class of bourgeois national elites.
102
But if Fanon ultimately overstated violence’s role as the “perfect mediation” through which the colonized come to liberate themselves from both the structural and psycho-affective features of colonial domination that he identified so masterfully, then what is the relevance of his work here and now?
103

In this chapter I have suggested that Fanon’s insights into the subjectifying nature of colonial recognition are as applicable today to the liberal “politics of recognition” as they were when he first formulated his critique of Hegel’s master/slave relation. I have also suggested that Fanon’s dual-structured conception of colonial power still captures the subtle (and not so subtle) ways in which a system of settler-state domination that does not sustain itself exclusively by force is reproduced over time. As Taiaiake Alfred argues, under these “postmodern” imperial conditions “oppression has become increasingly invisible; [it is] no longer constituted in conventional terms of military occupation, onerous taxation burdens, blatant land thefts, etc.,” but rather through a “fluid confluence of politics, economics, psychology and culture.”
104
But if the dispersal and effects of colonial and state power are now so diffuse, how is one to transform or resist them? Here I believe that Fanon’s work remains insightful. In that all important footnote in
Black Skin, White Masks
where Fanon claimed to show how the condition of the slave in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
differed from those in the colonies, he suggested that Hegel provided a partial answer: that those struggling against colonialism must “turn away” from the colonial state and society and instead find in their own
decolonial praxis
the source of their liberation. Today this process will and must continue to involve some form of critical individual and collective
self
-recognition on the part of Indigenous societies, not only in an instrumental sense like Fanon seemed to have envisioned it, but with the understanding that our cultural practices have much to offer regarding the establishment of relationships within and between peoples and the natural world built on principles of reciprocity and respectful coexistence. Also, the empowerment that is derived from this critically self-affirmative and self-transformative ethics of desubjectification must be cautiously directed
away
from the assimilative lure of the statist politics of recognition, and instead be fashioned toward our own on-the-ground struggles of freedom. As the feminist, antiracist theorist bell hooks explains, such a project would minimally require that we stop being so preoccupied with looking “to that Other for recognition”; instead we should be “recognizing ourselves and [then seeking to] make contact with all who would engage us in a constructive manner.”
105
In my concluding chapter I flesh-out what such a politics might look like in the present; a politics that is less oriented around attaining a definitive form of affirmative recognition from the settler state and society, and more about critically reevaluating, reconstructing, and redeploying
Indigenous cultural forms in ways that seek to prefigure, alongside those with similar ethical commitments, radical alternatives to the structural and psycho-affective facets of colonial domination discussed above. However, before I can commence with this concluding part of my project, Fanon’s critique of recognition must first be evaluated against the politics of recognition as it has played out in the empirical context of Indigenous–state relations in Canada. Providing such an evaluation will be my focus in the next three chapters.

2

For the Land

The Dene Nation’s Struggle for Self-Determination

As suggested in my introduction and chapter 1, one of the problems most commonly associated with the politics of recognition has to do with the ways in which it has, at times, shown to be insufficiently informed by “a sociological understanding of power relations.”
1
For self-proclaimed “historical materialist” critics Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, the conflict at the heart of those power relations effaced by the liberal recognition paradigm is primarily economic in origin. “This conflict,” Widdowson and Howard write, is “elaborated in all of Marx’s writings [and] exists between the few who own the means of production and those who are the producers of all value.”
2
Elsewhere, Widdowson and Howard make the absurdly reductionist claim that insofar as the politics of recognition “encourages the native population to identify in terms of
ethnicity
instead of
socioeconomic class
” it must be discarded as inherently “divisive and reactionary.”
3
The authors then go on to tritely conclude that it is only by “eliminating this fundamental ‘difference’
[namely,
class
difference] that we can become a global tribe and the ‘world can live as one.’”
4

In this chapter, I examine further the left-materialist critique of identity/difference politics in light of the Dene Nation’s struggle for recognition and self-determination in the 1970s and early 1980s. In doing so, I suggest that insofar as the identity-related claims of Indigenous peoples for recognition are always bound up with demands for a more equitable distribution of land, political power, and economic resources, the left-materialist concern regarding the effacement of political economy by questions of cultural recognition is misguided when applied to settler-state contexts. Indeed, following Ian Angus, I argue that, in contexts where “culture” is understood in an “inclusive anthropological sense” to “encompass both ideology and material conditions” the sharp distinction between base and superstructure that underwrites the left-materialist position appears “rather useless as a starting point for social philosophy and political criticism.”
5
However, if one takes a modified version of the left-materialist challenge and instead examines the relationship between Indigenous recognition claims and the distinction made by Nancy Fraser between “transformative” and “affirmative” forms of redistribution, the criticism begins to hold more weight.
6
Recall that “transformative” models of redistribution are those that seek to correct unjust distributions of power and resources
at their source;
that is, they not only seek to alter “the
content
of current modes of domination and exploitation, but also the
forms
that give rise to them.”
7
As we shall see below, the last thirty years we have witnessed a gradual erosion of this radical imaginary within the mainstream Dene recognition and self-determination movement, which in the context of land claims and economic development has resulted in a significant decoupling of Indigenous “cultural” claims from the transformative visions of social, political, and economic change that once constituted them. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate in concrete terms how and why this has emerged as the case.

The argument presented below is broken into four sections and a conclusion. In the four sections I examine the process of primitive accumulation as experienced by the Dene peoples of the Northwest Territories, Canada. These sections are meant to illuminate in more practical terms the theoretical discussion I provided in the introduction and chapter 1. More specifically, in the first section, I examine the changing social, political, and economic context within and against which the Dene self-determination movement emerged in
the 1970s and 1980s. In the second section I examine the place-based cultural foundation undergirding the Dene Nation’s critique of capitalist imperialism as expressed at the public hearings of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry between 1975 and 1977. I call this place-based foundation
grounded normativity
. In the next two sections I show how a similar critique came to inform our demand for cultural recognition in the Dene Declaration of 1975, as well as the three subsequent land-claims proposals submitted by the Dene Nation to the federal government in 1976, 1977, and 1981. I argue that all four of these articulations of recognition were informed by a place-based ethics that fundamentally challenged the assumed legitimacy of colonial sovereignty over and capitalist social relations on Dene territories. And finally, in my conclusion, I examine some of the effects that the negotiation of land claims has had on this place-based ethics, and how these effects have in turn shaped the contemporary trajectory of Indigenous politics in northern Canada toward neocolonial ends. Although the last century has witnessed numerous attempts by the state to coercively integrate our land and communities into the fold of capitalist modernity, it was not until the negotiation of land-claims settlements in the 1970s and 1980s that this process began to significantly take hold. In this respect, it would appear, as my reading of Fanon suggests, that the process of primitive accumulation has been at least in part facilitated by the very mechanism of recognition that we hoped might shield our land and communities from it: the negotiation of a land settlement.

A Brief History of Denendeh

According to oral historical accounts, the Dene have occupied and governed themselves over the lands within and immediately surrounding what is now the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, since time immemorial. During the period under examination here, it was not uncommon for Dene to refer to this vast homeland as Denendeh, or “land of the people,” which traditionally covered an area that spans over one million square kilometers from the mouth of the Mackenzie River (or Dehcho, as the Dene call it), southward to the northern tip of the provinces, and east to Hudson Bay. Today, however, the word “Denendeh” has come to represent much of the geographical area known as the present NWT (excluding, of course, Inuvialuit territory in the far north), thus distinguishing it from Nunavut (which, in 1999, was established as the publically governed territory of the Inuit). Non-Native accounts
derived from recent archaeological and linguistic evidence, while imprecise and controversial, suggest that the first direct ancestors of the Dene migrated to our present location between two and three thousand years ago, although unspecified human population is thought to have occurred well before this time (anywhere between ten and twenty-eight thousand years ago).
8

There are currently five Dene regions that fall within the political boundaries of the present NWT. The northernmost region is occupied by the Gwich’in Dene, whose comprehensive land-claim area, settled in 1992, borders the southernmost boundary of the Inuvialuit land-claim area, settled eight years before then.
9
Immediately to the south of the Gwich’in lie the territories of the Sahtu Dene (comprising the Hare, Mountain, and Bear Lake people), whose lands stretch west and north of Great Bear Lake, which in their own language is also referred to as Sahtu. In conjunction with the Métis of the region, the Sahtu Dene settled their comprehensive land claim in 1993.
10
Just south of the Sahtu claim area is the Dehcho region, occupied by Slavey-speaking Dene. Although their land claim has yet to be settled, Dehcho territory extends south beyond the Mackenzie River to the NWT/Alberta/British Columbia borders. Just north and to the west of the Dehcho region are the territories of the Tlicho Dene. Tlicho lands extend up from Great Slave Lake (or Tindee/Tucho, as the Dene refer to it) to the NWT/Nunavut border. The Tlicho are the most recent Dene group to settle their land-claim dispute, which in 2003 became law and includes the first Aboriginal self-government agreement in the NWT.
11
And finally, just south of Tlicho territory is the Akaitcho region, occupied by the Weledeh (or Yellowknives) and Chipewyan Dene. This region is my home territory and extends south of Great Slave Lake to the NWT/Albert/Saskatchewan borders and east to Nunavut. Unlike the other regions noted above, in 1999 our communities decided to pursue our land grievances (which have yet to be settled) via the specific claims process (through Treaty Land Entitlement, or TLE) instead of the comprehensive claims route.
12
Although vastly separated in terms of geography, all of the Dene nations occupying these regions speak related dialects of the Northern Athapaskan language family, and historically they shared many similarities in terms of spiritual beliefs, legal orders, forms of governance, and economic systems.

The 1950s and 60s witnessed several profound changes in the economic and political landscape of Denendeh, all of which would come to shape the character of Dene activism in the decades to follow. During this period, many
Dene individuals found themselves having to escalate their involvement in the cash economy of the emerging settler society due to an increase in the cost of trade goods and a decrease in the price of furs following World War II.
13
As a result, by the 1950s many families had to supplement income derived from hunting, trapping, and fishing with a combination of paid labor, welfare, and family allowance. Assuming that the fur trade would never recover from the postwar recession, the federal government began to initiate policies aimed at forcefully establishing permanent Dene communities, arguing that this would better facilitate the integration of adult workers into the wage economy, and at the same time provide a context conducive to educating Native children in the skills required for attaining menial employment in an emerging capitalist economy. Even with this being the case, by the late 1960s, the full effects of primitive accumulation had yet to take hold as a delicate balance was struck between a mode of life sustained by traditional land-based harvesting activities on the one hand, and income generated from state transfers and seasonal paid employment on the other.
14

The fragile “articulation” struck in the 1950s and 60s between these two distinct ways of life—that of extractivist capitalism and Indigenous hunting/fishing/harvesting—was largely absent in the political sphere, however, where northern development was occurring in a far more asymmetrical manner.
15
The clearest example of this came in 1967, when Canada announced its plans to transfer the administrative center of the NWT from Ottawa to Yellowknife, without consulting the majority Native population. Before this, the sole political authority over issues concerning the NWT rested with the federal government in Ottawa. After the transfer, the size and power of both the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) and its non-Native constituency increased dramatically. Between 1967 and 1979, for example, the GNWT grew from 75 to 2,845 employees, roughly 400 more than the number of federal employees employed in the region.
16
During the same period, the operating and capital budgets of the GNWT rose from $14,584,000 to $282,167,000—a near twenty-fold increase.
17
Not surprisingly, the influx of administrative staff and families significantly affected the area’s general population, which jumped from roughly 29,000 to 35,000 between 1966 and 1971.
18
As the above numbers indicate, a significant percentage of this increase can be attributed to the newly formed northern bureaucracy. As the settler population continued to grow, many of the newcomers began to pressure the federal government to advance
northern economic initiatives, most notably in the form of nonrenewable resource development. As one might expect, all of this would generate feelings of discontent and alienation within and among our communities, as we soon found ourselves becoming a numerical minority in our homeland with little influence over issues pertinent to the well-being of our land and way of life. As the Dene Nation explained in 1984: “Although we [remained] the majority population in Denendeh [after 1967], we were finding ourselves to have less say in the administration and laws of our land. Every year more mines were discovered and opened, roads were built, parks proposed, oil and gas wells drilled, without our consent or often our knowledge.”
19

From the position of the minority non-Native population, however, the devolution of powers from Ottawa to Yellowknife seemed to reflect an attempt to foster legitimate and responsible government north of 60 degrees. This was the position advanced, for example, by the Advisory Commission on the Development of Government in the Northwest Territories, also known as the Carrothers Commission. In 1965 the federal government established the commission to investigate local preferences for political development in the NWT, including the possibility of splitting the district into two geographical units.
20
Over the following year, the commission documented the testimony of 3,039 residents in fifty-one communities across the region.
21
In 1966 the commission published its findings, which suggested that Canada keep the NWT intact, but “locate the government of the Territories within the Territories, to decentralize its operations as far as practicable, to transfer administrative functions from the central to the territorial government in order that the latter may be accountable on site for the administration of the public business, and to concentrate on economic development and opportunity for the residents of the north.”
22
The following year, Canada responded to the recommendations by establishing Yellowknife as the territorial capital, and by committing to more nonrenewable resource development in the area.