Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (12 page)

Any cursory glance at the testimony made by Indigenous participants at the Berger Inquiry clearly demonstrates the significance of land in our critique of colonial development. One of the most profound statements of this sort was delivered by Philip Blake, a Dene from Fort McPherson. Notice the three interrelated meanings of “land” at play in his narrative: land-as-resource central to our material survival; land-as-identity, as constitutive of who we are as a people; and land-as-relationship:

When Blake suggests in his testimony that as “Indian people” we must reject the pathological drive for accumulation that fuels capitalist expansion, he is basing this statement on a conception of Dene identity that locates us as an inseparable part of an expansive system of interdependent relations covering the land and animals, past and future generations, as well as other people and communities. For many Natives at the time of the Berger Inquiry, this relational conception of identity was nonnegotiable; it constituted a fundamental feature of what it meant to be Dene. Furthermore, it also demanded that we conduct ourselves in accordance with certain ethico-political norms, which stressed, among other things, the importance of sharing, egalitarianism, respecting the freedom and autonomy of both individuals and groups, and recognizing the obligations that one has not only to other people, but to the natural
world as a whole.
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I suggest that it was this place-based ethics that served as the foundation from which we critiqued the dual imperatives of colonial sovereignty and capitalist accumulation that came to dictate the course of northern development in the postwar period. In the following section, I show how the same foundation shaped the Dene Nation’s demand for recognition and self-determination in the years to follow.

The Dene Declaration: Understanding Indigenous Nationalism

On July 19, 1975, at the second annual Joint General Assembly of the Indian Brotherhood of the NWT and the Metis and Non-Status Association of the NWT, more than three hundred Indigenous delegates unanimously voted to adopt what quickly became known as the Dene Declaration—a political manifesto demanding the full “recognition” of the Dene as a “self-determining” nation “within the country of Canada.”
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In his
Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors
, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred provides a theory of Indigenous nationalism useful for developing an understanding of the politicized articulation of indigeniety called attention to in the Dene Declaration. According to Alfred, Indigenous expressions of nationhood are “best viewed as having both a relatively stable core which endures and peripheral elements that are easily adapted or manipulated to accommodate the demands of a particular political environment.”
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For Alfred, Indigenous political identities are not based on clearly delineated essences, nor are they merely “invented” to correspond with shifting political aspirations; rather, Indigenous articulations of nationhood are best understood as informed by a complex of cultural practices and traditions that have survived the onslaught of colonialism and continue to structure the form and content of Indigenous activism in the present.
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Contrary to many other forms of nationalism, however, Alfred is quick to point out that most Indigenous movements do not seek recognition and self-determination “through the creation of a new state, but through the achievement of a cultural sovereignty and a political relationship based on group autonomy reflected in formal self-government arrangements.”
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Dene nationalism during this period can be understood within a similar cultural frame—as a dynamic revival of Dene political concepts framed in a manner to meet the economic and political goals of contemporary Dene society. To this end, although our movement was firmly grounded in and motivated
by political values and concepts rooted in the relational conception of land noted above, it also actively incorporated new social and political discourses to supplement these older traditions.
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A number of these discourses were drawn off to articulate our vision of a postcolonial political relationship with Canada, including, among others, Marxist political economy, world systems analysis, theories of development and underdevelopment, and Third World anticolonialism.
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Although all of these conceptual tools helped shape, to varying degrees, our views on colonialism and self-determination, here I want to highlight one that remains particularly salient to this day: the Marxist concept “mode of production.”
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In its broadest articulation, “mode of production” can be said to encompass two interrelated social processes: the resources, technologies, and labor that a people deploy to produce what they need to materially sustain themselves over time, and the forms of thought, behavior, and social relationships that
both condition and are themselves conditioned by these productive forces
.
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As the sum of these two interrelated processes, a “mode of production” can be interpreted, as Marx himself often did, as analogous to a way or “mode of life.” A “mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of individuals,” write Marx and Engels in
The German Ideology
. “Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of
expressing their life
, a definite
mode of life
on their part.”
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I suggest that this broad understanding of mode of production as a
mode of life
accurately reflects what constituted “culture” in the sense that the Dene deployed the term, and which our claims for
cultural recognition
sought to secure through the negotiation of a land claim. Simply stated, in the three proposals examined below, our demand for recognition sought to protect the “intricately interconnected social totality” of a distinct
mode of life
;
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a life on/with the land that stressed individual autonomy, collective responsibility, nonhierarchical authority, communal land tenure, and mutual aid,
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and which sustained us “economically, spiritually, socially and politically.”
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As George Barnaby wrote in 1976: “The land claim is our fight to gain recognition as a different group of people—with our own way of seeing things, our own values, our own lifestyle, our own laws. . . . [It] is a fight for self-determination using our own system with which we have survived till now.”
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Understanding “culture” as the interconnected social totality of distinct
mode of life
encompassing the economic, political, spiritual, and social is crucial for
comprehending the state’s response to the challenge posed by our land-claim proposals. As demonstrated in the following section, the state responded to this challenge, as Fanon himself might have predicted, by structurally circumscribing the terms and content of the recognition it was willing to make available to us through the negotiation of a land settlement. As noted previously, the reason the Crown agreed to get into the land-claims business in the first place was to “extinguish” the broad and undefined rights and title claims of First Nations in exchange for a limited set of rights and benefits set out in the text of the agreement itself. In the 1970s, Canada still required the explicit “cede, release and surrender” of Aboriginal rights and title prior to the resolution of a settlement, which from the Crown’s perspective constituted the surest way to attain the political and economic “certainty” required to satisfy the state’s interest in opening up Indigenous territories to further economic investment and capitalist development.
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Although the state no longer requires the formal “extinguishment” of Aboriginal rights as a precondition to reaching an agreement, the purpose of the process has remained the same: to facilitate the “incorporation” of Indigenous people and territories into the capitalist mode of production and to ensure that alternative “socioeconomic visions” do not threaten the desired functioning of the market economy.
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With this objective firmly in place, both Canada and the NWT insisted on negotiating a land settlement based on the following two principles: first, that a Dene political claim to self-determination was invalid; and second, that any settlement reached must attain “finality” through the extinguishment of what remained of Dene rights and title in exchange for the institutional recognition and protection of certain aspects of Dene “culture.” However, for the state, recognizing and accommodating “the cultural” through the negotiation of land claims
would not
involve the recognition of alternative Indigenous economies and forms of political authority, as the mode of production/mode of life concept suggests; instead, the state insisted that any institutionalized accommodation of Indigenous cultural difference be reconcilable with
one
political formation—namely, colonial sovereignty—and
one
mode of production—namely, capitalism.

Land Claims and the Domestication of Dene Nationhood

In his 1999
Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations
, Special Rapporteur for the United
Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities Miguel Alfonso Martinez examines the myriad techniques and rationales adopted by colonial settler regimes to “domesticate” the “international” status of Indigenous nations, thereby placing their claims squarely under the “exclusive competence” of the “internal jurisdiction” of non-Indigenous nation-states.
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In the following analysis of the three land-claims proposals submitted to the federal government by the Dene Nation between 1976 and 1981, it will be shown that, rather than recognize our right to self-determination, both the GNWT and the Government of Canada defended within the land-claims process a depoliticized discourse of Indigenous “cultural rights” that it used to rationalize the hegemony of non-Indigenous economic and political interests on Dene territory. In this way, it will be shown that, from the state’s perspective, the land-claims process constitutes a crucial vehicle for the “domestication” of Indigenous claims to nationhood.

On October 25, 1976, the IB-NWT, under the leadership of Georges Erasmus, provided the federal government with a land-claim proposal designed to accommodate the robust form of recognition expressed in the Dene Declaration. The proposal, titled “Agreement in Principle between the Dene Nation and Her Majesty the Queen, in Right of Canada,” called upon the federal government to negotiate with the Dene Nation in accordance with an expansive list of principles, including the recognition of a Dene right to self-determination; the right to retain ownership of a significant portion of our traditional territories; the right to exercise political jurisdiction over the territories in question; the right to practice and preserve our languages, customs, traditions, and values; and the right to develop our own political and economic institutions. All of these rights, we claimed, would be exercised “within Confederation” through the establishment of a “Dene government” vested with political authority over land and subject matters currently within the jurisdiction of the federal and territorial governments.
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Essentially, the 1976 “Agreement in Principle” outlined in broad terms the foundation for building a renewed relationship with the state that would secure a degree of Indigenous political and economic autonomy unprecedented in the history of land-claim settlements in Canada.
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Although the specific
form
this autonomy would take remained unspecified in the proposal, a number of statements made and research reports produced by the Dene during this period suggest that it would look radically different from the economic and
political institutions of the dominant society. In terms of political development, for example, the IB-NWT emphasized the need to construct contemporary political institutions on the traditional principle of popular sovereignty and consensus decision-making, thus including as wide a spectrum of Dene as possible in the formation of government policy.
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This commitment to the construction of alternative governance forms cashed out politically in 1976, when the IB-NWT announced that it would officially boycott participating in the territorial government, arguing that it was a “colonial institution” that did not represent the perspectives of the Dene people, and that this was reflected in the
style
and
structure
of government itself.
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The boycott lasted until 1979. George Barnaby, one of the two elected Dene officials to resign from territorial politics in 1976 (the other being James Wah-Shee), explained his motivation like this: “If we go through a whole Dene movement and we end up with native people just giving orders to their own people, [then we will not be] better off than now, when white people order us around.” For Barnaby, a “true [Dene] government” would be the “people themselves deciding what they want” and then working together to achieve their desired goals.
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