Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (4 page)

The second insight facilitated by this contextual shift has to do with the role played by Indigenous labor in the historical process of colonial-capital accumulation in Canada. It is now generally acknowledged among historians and political economists that following the waves of colonial settlement that marked the transition between mercantile and industrial capitalism (roughly spanning the years 1860–1914, but with significant variation between geographical regions), Native labor became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the political and economic development of the Canadian state.
50
Increased European settlement combined with an imported, hyperexploited non-European workforce meant that, in the post–fur trade period, Canadian state-formation and colonial-capitalist development required first and foremost
land
, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap, Indigenous labor.
51
This is not to suggest, however, that the long-term goal of indoctrinating the Indigenous population to the principles of private property, possessive individualism, and menial wage work did not constitute an
important feature of Canadian Indian policy. It did. As the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1890 wrote: “The work of sub-dividing reserves has begun in earnest. The policy of destroying the tribal or communist system is assailed in every possible way and every effort [has been] made to implant a spirit of individual responsibility instead.”
52

When this historical consideration is situated alongside the contemporary fact that there has been, first, a steady increase in Native migration to urban centers over the last few decades, and, second, that many First Nation communities are situated on or near lands coveted by the resource exploitation industry, it is reasonable to conclude that disciplining Indigenous life to the cold rationality of market principles will remain on state and industry’s agenda for some time to follow.
53
In this respect Marx’s thesis still stands. What I want to point out, rather, is that when related back to the primitive accumulation thesis it appears that the history and experience of
dispossession
, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Just as importantly, I would also argue that dispossession continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has provoked. Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around
the question of land
— a struggle not only
for
land in the material sense, but also deeply
informed
by what the land
as system of reciprocal relations and obligations
can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.”
54
I call this place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice
grounded normativity
, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.

The third insight to flow from this contextual shift corresponds to a number of concerns expressed by Indigenous peoples, deep ecologists, defenders of animal rights, and other advocates of environmental sustainability regarding perceived “anti-ecological” tendencies in Marx’s work. Although this field of criticism tends to be internally diverse—and some have argued, overstated (I am thinking here of eco-socialists like Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster)—
at its core it suggests that Marx’s perspectives on nature adhered to an instrumental rationality that placed no intrinsic value on the land or nature itself, and that this subsequently led him to uncritically champion an ideology of productivism and unsustainable economic progress.
55
From the vantage point of the capital relationship—which, I have argued, tends to concern itself most with the adverse structural and ideological effects stemming from expropriated labor—
land is not exploitable, people are
. I believe that reestablishing the colonial relation of dispossession as a co-foundational feature of our understanding of and critical engagement with capitalism opens up the possibility of developing a more ecologically attentive critique of colonial-capitalist accumulation, especially if this engagement takes its cues from the grounded normativity of Indigenous modalities of place-based resistance and criticism.

And finally, the fourth insight that flows from the contextual shift advocated here involves what many have characterized as Marx’s (and orthodox Marxism’s) economic reductionism. It should be clear in the following pages that there is much more at play in the contemporary reproduction of settler-colonial social relations than capitalist economics; most notably, the host of interrelated yet semi-autonomous facets of discursive and nondiscursive power briefly identified earlier. Although it is beyond question that the predatory nature of capitalism continues to play a vital role in facilitating the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Canada, it is necessary to recognize that it only does so
in relation to or in concert with
axes of exploitation and domination configured along racial, gender, and state lines. Given the resilience of these equally devastating modalities of power, I argue that any strategy geared toward authentic decolonization must directly confront more than mere economic relations; it has to account for the multifarious ways in which capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and the totalizing character of state power interact with one another to form the constellation of power relations that sustain colonial patterns of behavior, structures, and relationships. I suggest that shifting our attention to the colonial frame is one way to facilitate this form of radical intersectional analysis.
56
Seen from this light, the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or “base” from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations
converge
to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining
capacities. Like capital, colonialism, as a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, is not “a thing,” but rather the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it. When stated this way, it should be clear that shifting our position to highlight the ongoing effects of colonial dispossession in no way displaces questions of distributive justice or class struggle; rather, it simply situates these questions more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power that inform our settler-colonial present.

With these four insights noted, I can now turn to the third and final feature that needs to be addressed with respect to Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis. This one, which constitutes the core theoretical intervention of this book, brings us back to my original claim that, in the Canadian context, colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through overtly coercive means, but rather through the asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation. This is obviously quite different from the story Marx tells, where the driving force behind dispossession and accumulation is initially that of
violence:
it is a relationship of brute “force,” of “servitude,” whose methods, Marx claims, are “anything but idyllic.”
57
The strategic deployment of violent sovereign power, then, serves the primary reproductive function in the accumulation process in Marx’s writings on colonialism. As Marx himself bluntly put it, these gruesome state practices are what thrust capitalism onto the world stage, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.”
58

The question that needs to be asked in our context, however, and the question to which I provide an answer in the following chapters, is this: what are we to make of contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities such as Canada?
59
Stated in Marx’s own terms, if neither “blood and fire” nor the “silent compulsion” of capitalist economics can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in liberal democratic contexts, what can?

Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts

To elucidate precisely
how
colonial rule made the transition from a more-or-less unconcealed structure of domination to a mode of colonial
governmentality
that works through the limited freedoms afforded by state recognition and accommodation, I will be drawing significantly (but not exclusively) on the work of anticolonial theorist, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.
60
At first blush, turning to Fanon to develop an understanding of the regulating mechanisms undergirding settler-colonial rule in contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the norm governing the process might seem a bit odd to those familiar with his work. After all, Fanon is arguably best known for the articulation of colonialism he develops in
The Wretched of the Earth
, where colonial rule is posited, much like Marx posited it before him, as a structure of dominance maintained through unrelenting and punishing forms of violence. “In colonial regions,” writes Fanon, the state “uses a language of
pure violence
. [It] does not alleviate oppression or mask domination.” Instead, “the proximity and frequent, direct intervention by the police and military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm” (emphasis added).
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And considering Fanon wrote
The Wretched of the Earth
during one of the twentieth century’s most gruesome anticolonial struggles—the Algerian war of independence (1954–62)—it is not surprising that he placed so much emphasis on colonialism’s openly coercive and violent features. Given the severe nature of the colonial situation within which
The Wretched of the Earth
was produced one could argue that the diagnosis and prescriptions outlined in the text were tragically appropriate to the context they set out to address.

But this simply is not the case in contemporary Canada, and for this reason I begin my investigation with a sustained engagement with Fanon’s earlier work,
Black Skin, White Masks
. As we shall see in the following chapter, it is there that Fanon offers a groundbreaking critical analysis of the affirmative relationship drawn between recognition and freedom in the master/slave dialectic of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
—a critique I claim is equally applicable to contemporary liberal recognition-based approaches to Indigenous self-determination in Canada.
62
Fanon’s analysis suggests that in contexts where colonial rule is not reproduced through force alone, the maintenance of settler-state hegemony requires the production of what he liked to call “colonized subjects”: namely, the production of the specific modes of colonial thought, desire, and behavior that implicitly or explicitly commit the colonized to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination. However, unlike the liberalized appropriation of Hegel that continues to
inform many contemporary proponents of identity politics, in Fanon recognition is not posited as a source of freedom and dignity for the colonized,
but rather as the field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained
. This “is the form of recognition,” Fanon suggests, “that Hegel never described.”
63
Subsequently, this is also the form of recognition that I set out to interrogate in
Red Skin, White Masks
.

Outline of the Book

With these preliminary remarks made, I will now provide a brief outline of the structure and chapter breakdown of the book. In chapter 1, I use Frantz Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to challenge the now commonplace assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. I begin my analysis by identifying two Hegelian assumptions that continue to inform the politics of recognition today. The first, which is now uncontroversial, involves recognition’s perceived role in the constitution of human subjectivity: the notion that our identities are formed
intersubjectively
through our complex social interactions with other subjects. As Charles Taylor influentially asserts: the “crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally
dialogical
character. . . . We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others acknowledge in us.”
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The second, more contentious assumption suggests that the specific structural or interpersonal character of our relations of recognition can have a positive (when mutual and affirmative) or detrimental (when unequal and disparaging) effect on our status as
free and self-determining agents
. I draw off Fanon’s work to partially challenge this second assumption by demonstrating the ways in which the purportedly diversity-affirming forms of state recognition and accommodation defended by some proponents of contemporary liberal recognition politics can subtly reproduce nonmutual and unfree relations rather than free and mutual ones. At its core, Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition politics can be summarized like this: when delegated exchanges of recognition occur in real world contexts of domination the terms of accommodation usually end up being determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship. This is the
structural
problem of colonial recognition identified by Fanon in
Black Skin, White Masks
. Fanon then goes on to demonstrate how subaltern populations often develop what he called “psycho-affective”
attachments to these structurally circumscribed modes of recognition. For Fanon, these ideological attachments are essential in maintaining the economic and political structure of colonial relationships over time. This is the
subjective
dimension to the problem of colonial recognition highlighted in
Black Skin, White Masks
. With these two interrelated problematics identified, I go on to conclude the chapter with a brief discussion of an alternative politics of recognition, one that is less oriented around attaining legal and political recognition by the state, and more about Indigenous peoples empowering themselves through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning that seek to
prefigure
radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power identified earlier in the chapter. I call this a
resurgent politics of recognition
and take it up in more detail in my concluding chapter.