Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (26 page)

In
Wasáse
Alfred expands on the foundational critique he develops in
Peace, Power, Righteousness
in a way that provides more depth to our understanding of both the complexity of power relations that give shape to settler-colonialism and the types of practices we might engage in to transform these relations. To my mind, one of the more important layers of complexity Alfred adds in
Wasáse
has to do with the placement of gender in his theoretical framework, which was largely absent in previous work. I would suggest that there are two reasons that inform the inclusion of a gendered component to Alfred’s more recent position. First, and most importantly, the crucial interventions of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism over the years have made it
impossible
for any credible scholar working within the field to ignore the centrality of sexism to the colonial aims of land dispossession and sovereignty usurpation. This crucial area of work has also made it impossible to credibly ignore the impact that colonial patriarchy continues to have on our national liberation efforts. Second, I also think that gender figures its way into Alfred’s more recent work because of the explicit collapse of any ends/means distinction in his notion of resurgence. One of the central “problems” with Indigenous politics, insists Alfred, “is that there is no consistency of means and ends in the way that we are struggling to empower ourselves.”
19
For Alfred, we must remain cognizant of the subtle ways our methods can come to discursively shape the ends we seek to attain through our decolonization strategies.
20
This is why Alfred is quick to insist that the struggles of Indigenous peoples today cannot hold onto a concept of struggle “that is gendered in the way it once was and that is located in an obsolete view of men’s and women’s roles.” Instead, Indigenous struggles must “be rethought and recast from the solely masculine view of the old traditional ways to a new concept of the warrior that is freed from colonial gender constructions.”
21

Critically, Simpson extends this gendered analysis to interrogate the subtle infiltration of heteropatriarchal norms in our practices of national liberation and resurgence. Drawing off the insights of recent scholars working at the intersection of queer theory and Indigenous studies, in particular the writings of Chris Finely and Andrea Smith,
22
Simpson challenges the perpetuation of heteropatriarchy within our movements on several fronts, including “[through
the construction of] rigid (colonial) gender roles, pressuring women to wear certain articles of clothing to ceremonies, the exclusion of LGBQ2 individuals from communities and ceremonies, the dominance of male-centred narratives regarding Indigenous experience, the lack of recognition for women and LGBQ2’s voices, experiences, contributions and leadership, and narrow interpretations of tradition used to control the contributions of women in ceremony, politics and leadership.”
23
Although I am speculating here, I suspect that Simpson’s important call to “queer resurgence” represents her own response to concerns raised by Métis feminist Emma LaRoque regarding the heteronormative conception of Indigenous womanhood that underwrites certain aspects of recent Indigenous feminist reclamation projects. Of particular concern to LaRoque is the manner in which Cree feminist Kim Anderson appears to foreground her particular view of Indigenous motherhood as “central to Aboriginal women’s epistemology” in general. Although LaRoque recognizes that Anderson takes “great pains” to include as many nonmothers as possible in her analysis, including extended family members and other Indigenous women caregivers who do not have children, Anderson’s normative privileging of “maternalization” nevertheless ends up being “totalizing and exclusionary.” LaRoque’s point here is not to dismiss the emancipatory potential of Anderson’s invocation of a “maternal-based” ethical practice; rather, she is simply highlighting the way in which a specific practice of cultural empowerment can itself discursively rule out or constrain other equally legitimate and potentially empowering ways of being Indigenous in the present.
24
I think that Simpson’s argument in “Queering Resurgence” is meant to clarify the decolonial role she attributes to her own experience of motherhood and childrearing in
Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back
.
25
Perpetuating these heteronormative exclusions “cannot be part of our nation-building work,” states Simpson unequivocally. “This is not resurgence.”
26

Alfred’s call for a consistency between the means and ends of decolonization implicates more than oppressive gender constructions. It also has ramifications in the realm of political economy and governance. In relation to political economy, for example, Alfred’s resurgent approach to decolonization demands that we challenge the commonsense idea that one can construct an equitable relationship with non-Indigenous peoples and a sustainable relationship with the land by participating more intensely in a capitalist economy that is environmentally unsustainable and founded, at its core, on racial, gender, and class exploitation and inequalities.
27
The same can be said regarding our attempts
to negotiate a relation of nondomination with a structure of domination like the colonial nation-state. For Alfred, the best aspects of traditional Indigenous governing practices stand in “sharp contrast to the dominant understanding of ‘the state’: there is no absolute authority, no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy and no separate ruling entity.”
28
In our thirty-year effort to achieve recognition of a right to self-government, we have come to accept the liberal democratic state as a legitimate, if not normative, mode of political organization. In doing so, Alfred claims that we have allowed “indigenous political goals to be framed and evaluated according to a ‘statist’ pattern.”
29
In light of the productive capacity of the colonial state to call forth modes of life that mimic its constitutive power features, Alfred’s concern is that our negotiations for self-government will end up replicating the worst manifestations of the state’s power within the intensified context of our own communities and governance structures. We also saw in chapter 3 how a similar concern came to animate the late Mohawk legal theorist Patricia Monture’s critique of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an appropriate tool in the gender justice struggles of Indigenous women. For Monture, when Native women seek legal protection from the patriarchal colonial state as a means of ameliorating the gendered violence that the state has disciplined into the minds and bodies of our citizens through the Indian Act, they risk reifying the subjective and structural relations required for their continued domination both as Indigenous women and as members of Indigenous nations.
30
To my mind, Monture’s insight here adds a crucial gender dynamic to Alfred’s claims that “structural change negotiated in a colonial cultural context will only achieve the further entrenchment of the social and political foundations of injustice, leading to reforms that are mere modifications to the pre-existing structures of domination.”
31
By contrast, the resurgent approach to recognition advocated here explicitly eschews the instrumental rationality central to the liberal politics of recognition and instead demands that we
enact
or
practice
our political commitments to Indigenous national and women’s liberation in the cultural form and content of our struggle itself. Indigenous resurgence is at its core a
prefigurative
politics—the methods of decolonization prefigure its aims.

Idle No More: A History

Below I want to turn our attention to the Idle No More movement that burst onto the Canadian political scene in the late fall/early winter of 2012/13. To my mind, Idle No More offers a productive case study against which to explore
what a resurgent Indigenous politics might look like on the ground. Before I turn to this analysis, however, providing a bit of context to the movement is required.

On December 14, 2012, the Canadian senate passed the Conservative federal government’s controversial omnibus Bill C-45. Bill C-45, also known as the Jobs and Growth Act, is a four-hundred-plus-page budget implementation bill that contains comprehensive changes to numerous pieces of federal legislation, including, but not limited to, the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the Navigable Water Act.
32
From the perspective of many Indigenous people and communities, the changes contained in Bill C-45 threaten to erode Aboriginal land and treaty rights insofar as they reduce the amount of resource development projects that require environmental assessment; they change the regulations that govern on-reserve leasing in a way that will make it easier for special interests to access First Nation reserve lands for the purposes of economic development and settlement; and they radically curtail environmental protections for lakes and rivers.
33

Indigenous opposition to Bill C-45 began in the fall of 2012 as a grassroots education campaign initiated by four women from the prairies—Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean and Nina Wilson—under the mantra “Idle No More.” The campaign’s original aim was to provide information to Canadians about the impending impacts of Bill C-45 on Aboriginal rights and environmental protections before the legislation was passed by the Canadian senate. Then, on December 4, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat Cree Nation announced that she would begin a hunger strike on December 11 to bring attention to the deplorable housing conditions on her reserve in northern Ontario, to raise awareness about the impacts of Bill C-45, and to demonstrate her support for the emerging Idle No More movement. During her hunger strike Chief Spence consumed only liquids—a combination of lemon water, medicinal teas, and fish broth—which she claimed she would continue to do until she secured a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor-General David Johnson to discuss treaty rights. Her hunger strike took place in a teepee on Victoria Island, near Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and lasted from December 11 until January 24, 2013.

By the second week in December the movement had exploded on social media under the Twitter hash tag #IdleNoMore (or #INM for short), with the first national “day of action” called for December 10. Protests erupted in
cities across the country. At this point, the tactics favored by Idle No More participants involved a combination of “flash mob” round-dancing and drumming in public spaces like shopping malls, street intersections, and legislature grounds, coupled with an ongoing public education campaign organized through community-led conferences, teach-ins, and public panels. On December 21 an Idle No More protest involving thousands of Indigenous people and their supporters descended on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. During roughly the same time, Idle No More tactics began to diversify to include the use of blockades and temporary train and traffic stoppages, the most publicized of which involved a two-week railway blockade established in late December by the Aamjiwnaag First Nation near Sarnia, Ontario.
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By late December it was clear the something truly significant was underway with the Idle No More movement. Indeed, Canada had not seen such a sustained, united, and coordinated nationwide mobilization of Indigenous nations against a legislative assault on our rights since the proposed White Paper of 1969. What had begun in the fall of 2012 as an education campaign designed to inform Canadians about a particularly repugnant and undemocratic piece of legislation had erupted by mid-January 2013 into a full-blown defense of Indigenous land and sovereignty. By early January the momentum generated by Idle No More, in combination with the media attention paid to Chief Spence’s hunger strike, had created such a national stir that the Prime Minister’s Office was forced to respond by calling a January 11 meeting with the Assembly of First Nations, although the prime minister never explicitly stated that his decision to call the meeting was a result of pressure mounted by the escalating protests.
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At the height of the protest activities leading into the January 11 gathering, political analyses of the movement ranged from the entirely asinine to coverage that was both engaged and critically astute. Exemplifying the former, right-wing ideologue Christie Blatchford referred to Chief Spence’s peaceful hunger strike as an act of “intimidation, if not terrorism: She is, after all, holding the state hostage to vaguely articulated demands.”
36
The claim that Idle No More’s “demands” were somehow abstruse was (and, at the time of writing this chapter in March 2013, continues to be) popular among mainstream media critics. In an especially laughable piece written for the
National Post
in January 2013, Kelly McParland speculated that Idle No More’s lack of focus and clarity was a result of the movement having been “seized” by the forces of
Occupy Wall Street. “What are the aims of The Cause?” asks McParland condescendingly. “No one is really quite sure: just as with Occupy, the Idle forces are disparate and leaderless.”
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For others, however, it is precisely the diversity and bottom-up character of the movement that make decolonization movements like Idle No More so potentially transformative. Idle No More “is not led by any elected politician, national chief or paid executive director,” explains Mi’kmaq legal scholar Pamela Palmater. “It is a movement originally led by indigenous women and has been joined by grassroots First Nations leaders, Canadians, and now the world.”
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Similarly, for Leanne Simpson, the strength of the movement lies in the fact that it is not led from above, but rather has “hundreds of eloquent spokespeople, seasoned organizers, writers, thinkers and artists acting on their own ideas in anyway and every way possible. This is the beauty of our movement.”
39

As with any grassroots political movement, the diversity at the heart of Idle No More resulted in debates and disagreements over what types of strategies and tactics to use in our efforts to forge meaningful change. These debates intensified in the days leading up to the January 11 meeting. On the one side, there was the perspective among many Native people working within mainstream Aboriginal organizations that saw the January 11 meeting as an important space to get Aboriginal issues and concerns on the federal government’s political agenda. On the other side of the debate, however, were the voices emanating up from the communities (with some chiefs following suit), that saw the turn to high-level political negotiations as yet another attempt by the state and Aboriginal organizations, in particular the Assembly of First Nations, to coopt the transformative potential of the movement by redirecting it in a more moderate and reformist direction.
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Longtime Secwepemc activist and leader Arthur Manuel gets to the core of the debate when he writes that “one thing is clear: that certain Indigenous leaders only know how to meet with government and not fight with government. In situations like Friday [January 11] they say that it is important to ‘engage’ with government when they open the door to discussion. The real problem is that you get sucked into basically supporting the government’s position unless you walk out. In this case it is just another ‘process’ and not ‘change in policy’ that the AFN left the room with.”
41
There is much historical evidence to support Manuel’s concern. If we take a step back and look at the history that led to our present juncture, especially since the late 1960s, the state has always responded to increased levels of
Indigenous political assertiveness and militancy by attempting to contain these outbursts through largely symbolic gestures of political inclusion and recognition. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 4, this was precisely the manner in which the federal government attempted to address the fallout of the decade-long escalation of First Nations’ militancy that culminated in the Meech Lake Accord and the conflict at Kanesatake in 1990. And if we push our view back a bit further yet, we see a similar strategy used by the federal government to quell the upsurge of struggle that eventually defeated the White Paper of 1969. It was at this time that the entire policy orientation of Canada’s approach to solving the “Indian problem” began to shift from willfully ignoring Aboriginal peoples’ rights to recognizing them in the manageable form of land claims and eventually self-government agreements. I suggest that Idle No More is an indication of the ultimate failure of this approach to reconciliation. After forty years the subtle lure of Canada’s vacuous gestures of accommodation have begun to lose their political sway.