Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (29 page)
Authors: Glen Sean Coulthard
Tags: #SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
The civilizational discourse that rationalized both the theft of Indigenous peoples’ land base and their subsequent confinement onto reserves facilitated a significant geographical separation of the colonizer and the colonized that lasted until the mid-twentieth century.
65
As Sherene Razack notes, the segregation of urban from Native space that marked the colonial era began to break down with the increase in urbanization that took hold in the 1950s and 1960s, which resulted in a new racial configuration of space. Within this new colonial spatial imaginary,
The city belongs to the settlers and the sullying of civilized society through the presence of the racialized Other in white spaces gives rise to a careful management of boundaries within urban space. Planning authorities require larger plots in the suburbs, thereby ensuring that larger homes and wealthier families live there. Projects and Chinatowns are created, cordoning off the racial poor.
Such spatial practices, often achieved through law (nuisance laws, zoning laws, and so on), mark off the spaces of the settler and the native both conceptually and materially. The inner city is racialized space, the zone in which all that is not respectable is contained. Canada’s colonial geographies exhibit this same pattern of violent expulsions and the spatial containment of Aboriginal peoples to marginalized areas of the city, processes consolidated over three hundred years of colonization.
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The dispossession that originally displaced Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories either onto reserves or disproportionally into the inner cities of Canada’s major urban centers is now serving to displace Indigenous populations from the urban spaces they have increasingly come to call home. To this end, I suggest that the analytical frame of
settler-colonialism
developed throughout the previous chapters offers an important lens through which to interrogate the power relations that shape Indigenous people’s experiences in the city, especially those disproportionately inhabiting low-income areas. As we learned in previous chapters, defenders of settler-colonial power have tended to rationalize these practices by treating the lands in question as
terra nullius
—the racist legal fiction that declared Indigenous peoples too “primitive” to bear rights to land and sovereignty when they first encountered European powers on the continent, thus rendering their territories legally “empty” and therefore open for colonial settlement and development.
In the inner cities of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Regina, Toronto, and so forth, we are seeing a similar logic govern the gentrification and subsequent displacement of Indigenous peoples from Native spaces within the city. Commonly defined as the transformation of working-class areas of the city into middle-class residential or commercial spaces, gentrification is usually accompanied by the displacement of low-income, racialized, Indigenous, and other marginalized segments of the urban population.
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Regardless of these violent effects, however, gentrifiers often defend their development projects as a form of “improvement,” where previously “wasted” land or property (rooming houses, social housing, shelters, small businesses that cater to the community, etc.) and lives (sex-trade workers, homeless people, the working poor, mentally ill people, those suffering from addictions, etc.) are made more socially and economically productive. This Lockean rationale has led scholars like Neil Smith, Nicholas Blomley, and Amber Dean to view the gentrification of urban space
through a colonial lens, as yet another “frontier” of dispossession central to the accumulation of capital.
68
Through gentrification, Native spaces in the city are now being treated as
urbs nullius
—urban space void of Indigenous sovereign presence.
All of this is to say that the efficacy of Indigenous resurgence hinges on its ability to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples’ experiences in
both
urban and land-based settings. Mi’kmaq scholar Bonita Lawrence suggests that this will require a concerted effort on the part of both reserve- and urban-based Indigenous communities to reconceptualize Indigenous identity and nationhood in a way that refuses to replicate the “colonial divisions” that contributed to the urban/reserve divide through racist and sexist policies like enfranchisement.
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Although Lawrence’s work has shown how Native individuals, families, and communities are able to creatively retain and reproduce Indigenous traditions in urban settings, she also recognizes the importance for urban Native people to have “some form of mutually agreed upon, structured access to land-based communities.”
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Access to land is essential.
Similar struggles are seen in land-based communities, which would no doubt benefit from the numbers and human capital offered through the forging of political relations and alliances with the over 50 percent of Indigenous people now living in cities.
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For Lawrence, all of this suggests that urban Native people and First Nations need ways of forging national alliances strategically in a manner that does not demand that First Nation governments endlessly open their membership to those who grew up disconnected from the life and culture of their original communities, or urban Indigenous people having to engage in the arduous struggle of maintaining an Indigenous identity cut off from the communities and homelands that ground such identities.
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In other words, we need to find ways of bringing together through relations of solidarity and mutual aid “the strengths that urban and reserve-based Native people have developed in their different circumstances, in the interests of our mutual empowerment.”
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Thesis 4: Gender Justice and Decolonization
According to Anishinaabe feminist Dory Nason, if Idle No More showed us anything, it is the “boundless love that Indigenous women have for their families, their lands, their nations, and themselves as Indigenous people.”
This love has encouraged Indigenous women everywhere “to resist and protest, to teach and inspire, and to hold accountable both Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies to their responsibilities to protect the values and traditions that serve as the foundation for the survival of the land and Indigenous peoples.” Nason is also quick to point out, however, that the same inspirational power of Indigenous women’s love to mobilize others to resist “settler-colonial misogyny’s” inherently destructive tendencies has also rendered them subjects of “epidemic levels of violence, sexual assault, imprisonment and cultural and political disempowerment.”
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The violence that Indigenous women face is both systemic and symbolic. It is systemic in the sense that it has been structured, indeed institutionalized, into a relatively secure and resistant set of oppressive material relations that render Indigenous women more likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to suffer severe economic and social privation, including disproportionately high rates of poverty and unemployment, incarceration, addiction, homelessness, chronic and/or life-threatening health problems, overcrowded and substandard housing, and lack of access to clean water, as well as face discrimination and sexual violence in their homes, communities, and workplaces.
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Just as importantly, however, the violence that Indigenous women face is also “symbolic” in the sense that Pierre Bourdieu used the term: “gentle, invisible violence, unrecognized as such, chosen as much as undergone.”
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Symbolic violence, in other words, is the subjectifying form of violence that renders the crushing materiality of systemic violence invisible, appear natural, acceptable.
As we saw in chapter 3, the symbolic violence of settler-colonial misogyny, institutionalized through residential schools and successive Indian Acts, has become so diffuse that it now saturates all of our relationships. The misogyny of settler-colonial misrecognition through state legislation, writes Bonita Lawrence, “has functioned so completely—and yet so invisibly—along gendered lines” that it now informs many of our struggles for recognition and liberation.
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In such contexts, what does it mean to be “held accountable” to our “responsibilities to protect the values and traditions that serve as the foundation for the survival of the land and Indigenous peoples”? To start, it demands that Indigenous people, in particular Native men, commit ourselves
in practice
to uprooting the symbolic violence that structures Indigenous women’s lives as much as we demand
in words
that the material violence against Indigenous women come to an end. This is what I take Nason to mean when she asks
that all of us “think about what it means for men, on the one hand, to publicly profess an obligation to ‘protect our women’ and, on the other, take leadership positions that uphold patriarchal forms of governance or otherwise ignore the contributions and sovereignty of the women, Indigenous or not.”
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Here, the paternalistic and patriarchal insistence that we “protect
our
women” from the material violence they disproportionately face serves to reinforce the symbolic violence of assuming that Indigenous women are “ours” to protect. Although many Native male supporters of Idle No More have done a fairly decent job symbolically recognizing the centrality of Indigenous women to the movement, this is not the recognition that I hear being demanded by Indigenous feminists. The demand, rather, is that society, including Indigenous society and particularly Indigenous men, stop collectively
conducting ourselves
in a manner that denigrates, degrades, and devalues the lives and worth of Indigenous women in such a way that epidemic levels of violence are the norm in too many of their lives. Of course, this violence must be stopped in its overt forms, but we must also stop practicing it in its more subtle expressions—in our daily relationships and practices in the home, workplaces, band offices, governance institutions, and, crucially, in our practices of
cultural resurgence
. Until this happens we have reconciled ourselves with defeat.
Thesis 5: Beyond the Nation-State
We are now in a position to revisit the concern I raised at the end of chapter 1 regarding a problematic claim made by Dale Turner in
This Is Not a Peace Pipe
. Turner’s claim is that if Indigenous peoples want the political and legal relationship between ourselves and the Canadian state to be informed by and reflect our distinct worldviews, then we “will have to engage the state’s legal and political discourses in more effective ways.”
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This form of engagement, I claimed, assumes that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada derives its legitimacy and sustenance by excluding Indigenous people and voices from the legal and political institutional/discursive settings within which our rights are determined. Seen from this light, it would indeed appear that “critically undermining colonialism” requires that Indigenous peoples find more effective ways of “participating in the Canadian legal and political practices that determine the meaning of Aboriginal rights.”
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Yet, I would venture to suggest that over the last forty years Indigenous peoples have become incredibly skilled at participating in the Canadian legal
and political practices that Turner suggests. In the wake of the 1969 White Paper, these practices emerged as the
hegemonic
approach to forging change in our political relationship with the Canadian state. We have also seen, however, that our efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed, but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political configurations of power that we initially sought, through our engagements and negotiations with the state, to challenge. Why has this been the case? Part of the reason has to do with the sheer magnitude of discursive and nondiscursive power we find ourselves up against in our struggles. Subsequently, in our efforts to
interpolate
the legal and political discourses of the state to secure recognition of our rights to land and self-determination we have too often found ourselves
interpellated
as subjects of settler-colonial rule.
What are the implications of this profound power disparity in our struggles for land and freedom? Does it require that we vacate the field of state negotiations and participation entirely? Of course not. Settler-colonialism has rendered us a radical minority in our own homelands, and this necessitates that we continue to engage with the state’s legal and political system. What our present condition does demand, however, is that we begin to approach our engagements with the settler-state legal apparatus with a degree of critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution that has to date been largely absent in our efforts. It also demands that we begin to shift our attention away from the largely rights-based/recognition orientation that has emerged as hegemonic over the last four decades, to a resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions. It is only by privileging and grounding ourselves in these normative lifeways and resurgent practices that we have a hope of surviving our strategic engagements with the colonial state with integrity and as Indigenous peoples.
Introduction
1.
When deployed in the Canadian context, I use the terms “Indigenous,” “Aboriginal,” and “Native” interchangeably to refer to the descendants of those who traditionally occupied the territory now known as Canada before the arrival of European settlers and state powers. At a more general level I also use these terms in an international context to refer to the non-Western societies that have suffered under the weight of European colonialism. I use the specific terms “Indian” and “First Nation” to refer to those legally recognized as Indians under the Canadian federal government’s Indian Act of 1876 (unless indicated otherwise).
2.
Dene Nation, “Dene Declaration,” in
Dene Nation: The Colony Within
, ed. Mel Watkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 3–4 (emphasis added).
3.
Assembly of First Nations (AFN),
Our Nations, Our Governments: Choosing our Own Paths
(Ottawa: Assembly of First Nations, 2005), 18.
4.
Ibid., 18–19. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was established by the federal government in 1991 to investigate the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of the colonial relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the state in Canada. The commission culminated in a five-volume
Final Report
, which was published in 1996. The RCAP report will be examined in detail in chapter 4.
5.
For discussion, see Michael Murphy, “Culture and the Courts: A New Direct in Canadian Aboriginal Rights Jurisprudence?,”
Canadian Journal of Political Science
34, no. 1 (2001): 109–29; Murphy, “The Limits of Culture in the Politics of Self-Determination,”
Ethnicities
1, no. 3 (2001): 367–88.
6.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND),
The Government of Canada’s Approach to Implementation of the Inherent Right and the Negotiation of Aboriginal Self-Government
(Ottawa: Published by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1995).
7.
Will Kymlicka,
Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity
(Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sheryl Lightfoot, “Indigenous Rights in International Politics: The Case of ‘Overcompliant’ Liberal States,”
Alternatives: Global Local Political
33, no. 1 (2008): 83–104; Ronald Niezen,
The Ori
gins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); James (Sa’ke’j) Henderson,
Indigenous Diplomacy and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Achieving UN Recognition
(Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2008).
8.
Alan Cairns makes the argument that recognition politics have required the state to reconceptualize the relationship with Indigenous peoples; see his
Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000); and
First Nations and the Canadian State: In Search of Coexistence
(Kingston, Ont.: Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, 2005). The language of “mutual recognition” is used explicitly in RCAP,
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
, 5 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1996); Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,
Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan
(Ottawa: Published under the authority of the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1997);
A First Nations–Federal Crown Political Accord on the Recognition and Implementation of First Nation Governments
(Ottawa: Published under the authority of the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 2005). For a more substantive, postcolonial articulation, see James Tully,
Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in the Age of Diversity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
9.
Richard J. F. Day,
Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Also see Richard Day and Tonio Sadik, “The BC Land Question, Liberal Multiculturalism, and the Spectre of Aboriginal Nationhood,”
BC Studies
134 (Summer 2002): 5–34. The following writings provide a sample of the more influential works in the diverse field of recognition-based approaches to liberal pluralism: Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in
Re-Examining the Politics of Recognition
, ed. Amy Gutmann, 27–73 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Will Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
(Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kymlicka,
Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada
(Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kymlicka,
Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship
(Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2001); Kymlicka,
Multicultural Odyssey
; Tully,
Strange Multiplicity
; Patrick Macklem,
Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); RCAP,
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
; Keith Banting, Thomas Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle, eds.,
The Art of the State
, vol. 3,
Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada
(Kingston, Ont.: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007); Siobhán Harty and Michael Murphy,
In Defence of Multinational Citizenship
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
10.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,
Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy
(Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1969). For an authoritative analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the 1969 White Paper, see Dale Turner,
This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
11.
For a history of this period, see John Tobias, “Protection, Assimilation, Civilization,” in
Sweet Promises: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada
, ed. J. R. Miller, 127–44 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); RCAP,
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
, vol. 1.
12.
J. R. Miller,
Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Indian Residential Schools
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). This book provides an authoritative history of residential schools in Canada.
13.
Sarah Carter,
Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Helen Buckley,
From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare: Why Indian Policy Failed the Prairie Provinces
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).
14.
Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States,”
Hypatia
18, no. 2 (2003): 3–31; Lawrence,
“Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
15.
Christopher Walmsley,
Protecting Aboriginal Children
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
16.
On settler-colonialism and the “logic of elimination,” see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,”
Journal of Genocide Studies
8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
17.
“Statement of the National Indian Brotherhood,” in
Recent Statements by the Indians of Canada
, Anglican Church of Canada General Synod Action 1969, Bulletin 201, 1970, 28, quoted in Olive Patricia Dickason,
Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), 386.
18.
Sally Weaver, cited in Leonard Rotman,
Parallel Paths: Fiduciary Doctrine and the Crown-Native Relationship in Canada
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 7.
19.
Dickason,
Canada’s First Nations
, 388.
20.
Calder et al. v. Attorney-General of British Columbia
(1973).
21.
St Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company v. The Queen
(1888).
22.
For an excellent discussion of the
Calder
case and its influence, see Michael Asch, “From ‘Calder’ to ‘Van der Peet’: Aboriginal Rights and Canadian Law, 1973–96”, in
Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand
, ed. Paul Havemann, 428–46 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
23.
Ibid., 430–32.
24.
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,
Statement on Claims of Indian and Inuit People: A Federal Native Claims Policy
(Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development), 1973.
25.
Francis Abele, Katherine Graham, and Allan Maslove, “Negotiating Canada: Changes in Aboriginal Policy over the Last Thirty Years,” in
How Ottawa Spends, 1999–2000
, ed. Leslie Pal (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2000), 259.
26.
Jean Chrétien in
Montreal Gazette
, June 16, 1972, 1, quoted in Robert Davis and Mark Zanis,
The Genocide Machine in Canada
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973), 42.
27.
Mel Watkins, ed.,
Dene Nation: The Colony Within
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); Thomas Berger,
Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry
(Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1977). These texts summarize the struggle of the Métis and Dene during this period. On the efforts of the James Bay Cree, see Boyce Richardson,
Strangers Devour the Land
(Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1991).
28.
Wolfe, “Settler-Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388. Throughout the following chapters I will often use the terms “settler-colonialism,” “colonialism,” and (on occasion) “imperialism” interchangeably to avoid repetitiveness. I do so, however, acknowledging the distinction that Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini (
Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview
[London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010]), Robert Young (
Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction
[Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001]), and James Tully (
Public Philosophy in a New Key
, vol 1. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004]) have drawn between these interrelated concepts. In the work of all of these scholars, settler-colonial and colonial relationships are conceptualized as more
direct
forms or practices of maintaining an imperial system of dominance. Settler-colonialism, in particular, refers to contexts where the territorial infrastructure of the colonizing society is built on and overwhelms the formerly self-governing but now dispossessed Indigenous nations; indeed, settler-colonial polities are predicated on maintaining this dispossession. Imperialism is a much broader concept, which may include colonial and settler-colonial formations, but could also be carried out indirectly through noncolonial means.
29.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, vol 1. (New York: Penguin, 1990).
30.
Ibid., 874.
31.
Ward Churchill, ed.,
Marxism and Native Americans
(Boston: South End Press, 1983). The character of the debate is well represented in this text.
32.
Charles Menzies, “Indigenous Nations and Marxism: Notes on an Ambivalent Relationship,”
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry
3, no. 3 (2010): 5.
33.
Peter Kropotkin,
Conquest of Bread and Other Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 221.
34.
Jim Glassman, “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-Economic’ Means,”
Progress in Human Geography
30, no. 5 (2005): 611.
35.
Marx,
Capital
, 1:899. The degree to which Marx is susceptible to this general line of criticism is itself the subject of debate. For instance, an interesting argument developed by Massimo De Angelis suggests that if we conceive of primitive accumulation as a set of strategies that seeks to permanently maintain a
separation
of workers from the means of production then it would follow that this process must be ongoing insofar as this separation is constitutive of the capital relation as such. The specific character of primitive accumulation strategies might change at any given historical juncture, but as a general process of ongoing separation it must remain in effect indefinitely. See Massimo De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous
Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures,’”
The Commoner
, no. 2 (September 2001): 1–22. However, the question this position raises is why then utilize the historical marker “primitive” to refer to the process at all, instead of simply referencing the “accumulation of capital” proper? This latter question is explored in Paul Zarembka, “Primitive Accumulation in Marxism, Historical or Trans-Historical Separation from Means of Production?,”
The Commoner
(March 2002), 1–9, as a qualification to Angelis’s earlier contribution to the same journal.
36.
David Harvey,
The New Imperialism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Silvia Federici,
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
(New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Taiaiake Alfred,
Wasáse: Indigenous Path
ways of Actions and Freedom
(Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005); Rauna Kuokkanen, “Globalization as Racialized, Sexual Violence: The Case of Indigenous Women,”
International Feminist Journal of Politics
10, no. 2 (2008): 216–33; Andrea Smith,
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
(Boston: South End Press, 2005). Also see Retort Collective,
Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
(New York: Verso, 2005); Michael Pearlman,
The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Todd Gordon, “Canada, Empire, and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas,
Socialist Studies
2, no. 1 (2006): 47–75; Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery
(London: Verso, 1997). Also see De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation”; De Angelis’s article is one of many contributions in the issue devoted to examining the continual relevance of Marx’s dispossession thesis in the contemporary period.