Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (17 page)

In such contexts, I simply do not see how deliberatively policing hybrid cultural forms can subvert the colonial context within which these gendered
practices flourish. Even if we were to provide institutional spaces within which one might deconstruct and expose the Native elite’s sexist misuse of culture as a means of maintaining patriarchal privilege, we would still leave intact the host of other social relations that work in concert with patriarchy to inform the misuse to begin with. In effect, we would be locked in a vicious circle of essentialist claims-making and identity deconstruction, having to repeatedly deliberate over and unpack problematic identity claims and practices only to have them resurface in another place and context because we have failed to undermine the full conditions of their production.

This assessment of Benhabib’s constructivist position should not be interpreted as rehashing some reductionist model of oppression where patriarchy is simplistically cast as some second-order, epiphenomenal “effect” of the more “foundational” problem of settler-colonialism. What I am suggesting here is quite different: that the oppression faced by Indigenous women in Canada cannot be adequately understood when separated from the other axes of oppression that have converged to sustain it over time. In the settler-colonial context of Canada, these power relations of course include patriarchy, but also white supremacy, capitalism, and state domination. By focusing too narrowly on the gendered character of essentialist cultural claims, Benhabib failed to take into consideration the multiplicity of ways in which these other dynamics have served to inform, indeed proliferate, these sexist practices.

Social Constructivism, Colonial Domination, and the State

In the previous section I suggested that Benhabib’s anti-essentialist critique of the politics of recognition represents both a sociological statement about the hybrid nature of cultural identities, as well as a normative project aimed at progressive social change. However, unlike more explicitly poststructuralist-inspired theorists who tend to view anti-essentialist criticism as a potentially transformative practice in its own right, Benhabib moves beyond the realm of deconstructive critique and applies what she sees as the best insights of social constructivist thought to the development of a deliberative project capable of accommodating justifiable demands for cultural recognition without violating individual claims to equality.
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In doing so, I claim she makes a very problematic move: once she establishes the constructedness of cultural identities
as a definitive feature of social life, she then proceeds to ground her normative position on what a political order ought to look like based on this universal depiction.
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What form ought this political order take? As noted previously, for Benhabib it should comprise “impartial institutions in the public sphere and civil society where [the] struggle for recognition of cultural differences and the contestation of cultural narratives can take place without domination.”
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If group demands for cultural recognition meet this deliberative standard, there is no reason why the state should not provide legal and institutional accommodation for the group in question.
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This, again, is quite different from the standard poststructuralist position, which tends to view the institutionalization of any claim to universality with suspicion.
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Now, thus far my critique has been directed fairly broadly at the colonial implications of what I have characterized as an uncritical normative privileging of cultural contestability in Benhabib’s social constructivism. Seen from this angle, Benhabib’s deliberative approach appears problematic only insofar as it has appropriated this uncritical strand of constructivist thought. In this section, I want to flip the gaze around. That is, I want to examine more closely a colonial implication of Benhabib’s statist model of deliberative democracy, and in doing so show how her social constructivist commitments work in concert with this statism to reinforce a colonial structure of dominance.

My concern here is that by employing the so-called social fact of cultural contestability as a standard against which democratic theorists, judges, policy makers, and the state ought to assess the legitimacy of claims for recognition, Benhabib’s theory potentially sanctions the very forms of power and domination that anti-essentialist democratic projects ought to mitigate. First, by placing the burden squarely on the shoulders of claimants of recognition to prove that their identity movements do not deny the contestability of cultural practices before they are eligible for institutional accommodation, Benhabib’s model potentially renders rectifying forms of recognition and redistribution unattainable for Indigenous groups whose cultural expressions do not adhere to this excessively fluid form. Second, and more problematically,
even if
Indigenous claims for recognition do manage to meet these criteria, her theory leaves uninterrupted the colonial social and political structure that is assigned the adjudicative role in assessing recognition claims and enforcing postdeliberative claim decisions. Political theorist Duncan Ivison perceptively refers
to this second problem as the “legitimacy” crisis faced by most deliberative approaches when applied to colonial contexts.
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I will now discuss these two problems in turn.

First, in many cases Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination simply defy all protocols associated with social constructivist criticism. As Arif Dirlik has commented: “Not only do [they] affirm the possibility of a ‘real’ native identity, but [they] also assert for the basis of such an identity a native subjectivity that has survived, depending on location, as many as five centuries of colonialism and cultural disorientation. Not only [do they] believe in the possibility of recapturing the essence of precolonial indigenous culture, but [they] also base this belief on a spirituality that exists outside of historical time. . . . In all of these different ways, indigenous ideology would seem to provide a textbook case of ‘self-Orientalization.’”
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Dirlik does not end his observations here, however; in other works he goes on to discuss the ways that Indigenous scholars and activists defend what would appear to be essentialist notions of indigeneity in their attempts to provide radical alternatives to “the challenge of modern political organization— in particular the nation-state—and [which] offer possibilities that need to be considered seriously in any place-based democratic alternatives” to the hegemony of state and capitalist forms of domination.
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Our discussion of the place-based alternatives to colonial economic and political development articulated by the Dene Nation in the previous chapter provides an excellent example of such a project.

Benhabib’s intervention, however, focuses solely on the exclusionary features of essentialist identity formations, and this understanding is subsequently reflected in her deliberative approach. The potential problem here, of course, is that by theoretically and institutionally privileging recognition claims that adhere to an infinitely negotiable conception of culture, it is unclear what Indigenous claims Benhabib’s deliberative model would be willing and able to accommodate. For one, almost every Indigenous demand for recognition that I can think of is couched, at least in part, in the vernacular of “cultural survival” and “autonomy”—and rightfully so, given the history of genocidal state assimilation policies that Indigenous people and communities have been forced to endure. Thus, as Arif Dirlik and Roxann Prazniak caution, even when the emancipatory potential of seemingly essentialist Indigenous claims are not
readily apparent, it is crucial to “distinguish between claims to identity of the powerful and the powerless, because the powerless may face such threats, including on occasion the threat of extinction, that is intellectually, politically, and morally irresponsible to encompass within one notion of ‘essentialism.’”
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In the concluding chapter of
The Claims of Culture
Benhabib recognizes the challenge that Indigenous claims to self-determination present her position. “These peoples,” she writes, “are seeking not to preserve their language, customs, and culture alone but to attain the integrity of ways of life greatly at odds with modernity.”
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She continues:

Although Benhabib recognizes the limits of her approach in colonial contexts, in the end she is still unrelenting in her commitment to a conception of democratic governance that views justice for Indigenous communities in terms of their greater inclusion into the institutional matrix of the larger settler state and society. Indeed, her whole approach suggests that this inclusion is
necessary
so that Indigenous peoples’ nonliberal, nonmodern cultural norms and practices remain open to contestation and group deliberation. Indigenous peoples, in other words, require access to the deliberative mechanisms and democratic institutions of the enlightened colonial society
for the well-being of their own citizens
. The assumption here being that the colonial imposition of patriarchal governance structures in First Nations communities has so damaged customary gender roles that the colonial state apparatus is now required to intervene in the political life of First Nations communities to ensure that Indigenous women’s rights are honored and upheld. Here, the legitimacy of a
substantive right to Indigenous autonomy and self-determination is perversely undercut by the very success of the colonial project itself. The adverse effects of colonization demand more colonial intervention.

Second, although these proposals may avoid some of the effects associated with essentialist group practices, they nonetheless leave unscathed the presumption that the colonial state constitutes a legitimate authority to determine which demands for Indigenous recognition ought to be accommodated and which ought to be denied. Ironically, however, the state’s assumed position in these struggles is itself what is contested by many Indigenous claims for cultural recognition. What is also ironic is the fact that that the state’s assumed authority in these matters is premised on the profoundly essentialist, indeed
racist
, understanding that Indigenous peoples were too uncivilized to constitute equal and self-determining nations when European powers unilaterally asserted their sovereignty over Native North America.

When the first Europeans arrived in what is now Canada, survival required that they immediately enter into political and economic relationships with the diverse, sovereign, and self-governing Indigenous nations that they encountered. Over the ensuing four centuries the relationship between Indigenous nations and the growing settler society would undergo substantial changes, shifting from “mutually beneficial associations . . . between equal nations to the coercive imposition of a structure of domination.” As the settler society grew in numbers and strength, their dependence on the technologies and knowledge of Indigenous peoples began to wane, and the relationship shifted from one premised on peaceful coexistence and relative equality between peoples to a colonial relationship “in which Aboriginal peoples and their cultures were treated as unequal and inferior.”
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Over the last decade, numerous scholars have convincingly shown how the conceptualization of Indigenous societies as politically and culturally inferior continues to inform Canada’s presumed authority over Indigenous lands and people.
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Because Indigenous societies were considered so low on the natural scale of social and cultural evolution, settler authorities felt justified in claiming North America legally vacant, or
terra nullius
, and sovereignty was acquired by the mere act of settlement itself. As Michael Asch’s work has pointed out, the Supreme Court of Canada still implicitly and consistently invokes the racist
terra nullius
thesis to justify the unequal distribution of sovereignty that structures the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada.
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The colonial state is not only a racial structure, however; it is also fundamentally
patriarchal
in character. To date, one of the best analyses of the patriarchal nature of settler-state power has come from one the most persistent and thoughtful critics of
Charter
protection for Indigenous women: the late Mohawk legal scholar Patricia Monture. As an unrelenting advocate of both Indigenous nationalist struggles
and
emancipation for Indigenous women, Monture’s work embodies among the best of contemporary Indigenous feminist theory and practice, even though she did not identify her work in these terms.
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What Monture’s work adds to the intersectionality of Indigenous feminist approaches to decolonization is a critical analysis of the colonial state as manifestation of male power, which she claims renders its legal apparatus very problematic as a site of emancipation for Indigenous women. “The Canadian state is the invisible male perpetrator who unlike Aboriginal men does
not
have a victim face,” asserts Monture in her pathbreaking book,
Thunder in My Soul
. “And at the feet of the state I can lay my anger to rest.”
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I think that Monture’s concern with the legalist approach to seeking gender justice for Native women adopted by organizations like The Native Women’s Association of Canada is that such an approach implicitly assumes that the colonial state is ultimately a
gender-neutral
apparatus that only
historically
adopted a patriarchal logic to frame Indian legislation, instead of understanding male dominance as a constitutive feature of state power as such. What are the implications of turning to the state as a protector of Indigenous women’s rights if the state itself constitutes the material embodiment of masculinist, patriarchal power? Here I suggest that Monture’s insights coalesce productively with those of political theorist Wendy Brown. For Brown, gender emancipation strategies that rely on the state apparatus in this way have deeply contradictory implications given that “domination, dependence, discipline, and protection, the terms marking the itinerary of women’s subordination in vastly different cultures and epochs, are also characteristic effects of state power.”
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Subsequently, when women turn to the state apparatus in their struggles for gender justice they risk reiterating rather than transforming the subjective and material conditions of their own oppression. At the very least, Monture’s Indigenous feminist critique of the colonial state provides us with a tool to critically reflect on the contradictory impulses associated with seeking emancipation from the adverse gendered and racist effects of state power by means of law. This does not require that Indigenous peoples vacate the legal field entirely, however. As
Kwakwaka’waka scholar Sarah Hunt writes, “Surely we must engage with this powerful system, but appealing to the law alone will not stop the violence.”
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For Hunt, as with Monture, this system must be used very cautiously and strategically, so as to not “reproduce the systems and ideologies that colonialism has produced.”
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And, as Anishinaabe feminist Dory Nason suggests, these strategic engagements must be supplemented, if not eventually replaced, by “those values, practices and traditions that are the core of Indigenous women’s power and authority—concepts that have been, and remain under attack, and which strike at the core of a settler-colonial misogyny that refuses to acknowledge the ways in which it targets Indigenous women for destruction.”
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