The 'Indian Thing': on Representation and Reality in the Liberal Settler Colony

Settler Colonial Studies

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The ‘Indian thing’: on representation and reality in the liberal settler colony

Bruno Cornellier

To cite this article: Bruno Cornellier (2013) The ‘Indian thing’: on representation and reality in the liberal settler colony, Settler Colonial Studies, 3:1, 49-64, DOI: 10.1080/18380743.2013.761935 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18380743.2013.761935

Published online: 15 Mar 2013.

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The ‘Indian thing’: on representation and reality in the liberal settler colony Bruno Cornelliera,b* aCentre for Globalization and Cultural Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; bDepartment of English, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

This paper constitutes a theoretical intervention into the politics of indigenous representation in modern Canada. My aim is to provide a conceptual alternative to the persistent critical reliance on notions of misrepresentation, factual rectiﬁcation, and intercultural reconciliation, each of which is implicit in various popular, institutional, and academic appreciations of ‘Indian’ representations and realities. I contend that such humanistic understandings of representation and mediation are grounded in the same metaphysics of absence and presence that authorise the state’s vocabularies of authenticity and liberal correction. Instead, I propose to explore the ﬂeeting character of what I call the ‘Indian thing’. This ‘thing’ corresponds to that constantly deferred presence of the self, which emerges from the interstices of a racial−colonial relation of power each time Natives and non-Natives attempt to designate that which is truly Indian and that which is not. In such a context, the politics of indigenous representation can circumvent the logic of a corrective or restorative justice under the aegis of the Sovereign. To represent Indians thus becomes a contest not so much for the truth of Indianness (or for the thing itself). It rather constitutes a polemical act of appropriating the power to designate what that Indianness will allow and authorise within and without the liberal settler state – a state which, despite its attempt to self-supersede its own conditions of operation (to paraphrase Lorenzo Veracini), can nonetheless never be freed from the challenges, anxieties, and exigencies of Indianness.

You’re the real thing, aren’t you? That’s what I wanted, isn’t that what I have? (Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day)

In June 1944, referring to public policies pertaining to film in Canada, filmmaker John Grierson, better known as the founding father of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), wrote: ‘We can shout as we like about this new nation we are building; we can be as proud as we please of the Canadian “thing”.’1 And yet, he goes on to lament that it is not this Canadian ‘thing’ that tran- spires in Canadian cinema, since it is the pride of another nation (the USA) that Hollywood forces us to enjoy. To counter the fiction associated with private capital, American-style entertainment, and social inertia, Grierson then imagines for Canada a documentary cinema that will serve a broadly defined ‘public’. And it is just such an existential sense of emptiness – or the need to define the Canadian nation as ‘something’ that, in and of itself, would be this something – that Grierson’s NFB set out to fulfil. Thus, the Film Board would henceforth proceed to parade, before the nation and the world, that ‘thing’ that provides the basis for measuring any statements purporting to refer to that which defines Canadianness.

*Email: [email protected]

Sixty-eight years later, Canada is still not to be outdone when the time comes to flaunt its exceptionalism – that Canadian ‘thing’–the moral conscience of a continent that is otherwise corrupted by the violence, greed, and the thirst for conquest of the USA. Now, because Canada, like the southerly neighbour towards which it is wont to cast chastising glances, was also born out of a project of colonial settlement on native land, this indefinable quality that is the nation’s moral character must be part of a humanistic narrative coupled very specifically with an Indian reality that has the potential to sanction the sovereignty of the ‘new’ nation. Accordingly, when the settler nation of Canada proudly parades the culture of the peoples whose lands it has colonised, it will in its turn be called upon to wonder whether, when filming and documenting Indians, it is truly in propinquity with ‘the real thing’. In short, in the face of its refusal of American-style entertainment, Grierson’s statement – if indeed it is part of the apophatic emergence of a nation’s soul – will also have to contend with an additional hesitation, or even, a source of anxiety: will it ever be possible to know whether the Indian that stands there before ‘us’ is truly representative of ‘that Indian thing’ designated by the settler colony in search of its own legitimacy and its own state of exception?2

The Indian, the colony, and ‘that Indian thing’ The Indian: a thing? The Indians of Kanehsatake, Restigouche/Listiguj, Caledonia, Nisga’a, Wasagamack, and Lac-Barrière, not to mention the Inuit of Igloolik – are these people then things? Of course not! Now, by considering Indians its ‘thing’, the nation does not need the Kah- nawake Mohawks or the James Bay Cree to signify or name a reality. Allow me, then, to pose a question that, despite its assumed air of innocence, perfectly illustrates the reason behind and the origin of this notion: How is it possible that Canada can be represented or signified by totem poles at Walt Disney World or by an Inukshuk at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver? The answer: because there is ‘that Indian thing’ about Canada. That is to say that to survive its history and colonial heritage, both morally and politically, the modern, liberal settler state needs to become somewhat but never altogether Indian. It needs to imagine a certain filiation between the European settlers and the First Nations. It needs that je ne sais quoi, that ‘Indian thing’ that – named but not completely, mentioned but not defined – designates an Indianness that, while it is evoked and invoked by the presence of the Indian, no longer needs him or her to manifest itself as a reality. This essay, then, is not about someone (or some people), but rather about something. Not those men and women called by themselves or others by the term Indians (or ‘Indians’, indians,3 Natives, Amerindians, aboriginals, Indigenous peoples, First Nations, Native Ameri- cans, American Indians, Autochtones), but actually that ‘Indian thing’. This of course does not mean that this ‘thing’ exists or is manifest without subjects. Yet, if this ‘something’ indeed affects and calls to question the subjectivities and the bodies that inhabit and comprise the spaces that we know as Canada, Québec, America, or the settler colony, it nonetheless expresses itself without the constraints that might be imposed by the body-subjects. It is because bodies always seem to be an excessive encumbrance to that ‘Indian thing’–always too much, never enough – that Indianness can be divorced from the pronoun ‘Who’ and, in so doing, slip away from the people who are designated – or who designate themselves – as Indians. This ‘thing’ is nonetheless constantly called into question by the body-subjects who, by attempting to capture it in representation, seek to reveal themselves in a relation of intimacy, identity, otherness, or hostility in the face of an Indianness without bodies or subjects, signifiers or referents. As I mean to demonstrate in the following pages, if that ‘Indian thing’ makes the liberal settler colony hospitable for the members of the sovereign body, this does not mean that this ‘thing’ lies exclusively within the confines of the Sovereign. It is in fact because the settler reaches her/his own limit when s/he comes into contact with someone, in a forced relationship with an indigeneity Settler Colonial Studies 51 that s/he can neither deny nor ignore, that the settler must make the Indian her/his ‘thing’. Similarly, native subjects must also represent or articulate that which will allow them to define themselves – in relation to or in opposition to the nation-state – in terms of difference, identity, otherness, originality, or as partner, citizen, adversary, sovereign. In so doing, native subjects also make themselves creators of images and statements, thus attempting to make that ‘Indian thing’ speak – to induce it to say something that is also or somewhat about themselves. It was as a response to what seemed to me to be a dead end in academic and media discourses about popular representations of Indianness that I began to turn my attention to the notion of the ‘thing’ in postcolonial theories. I observed that discourses about native representations are commonly anchored to a desire to deconstruct ‘Indian fictions’–those of the White Man – and to revise or rewrite the narrative that tied the nation to its dishonourable colonial legacy.4 Such critical undertaking is, in a way, the natural ally of a revisionist historiography that sets out to rectify the factual errors of a national and colonial history that had previously been written with an eye to blotting out the reality of native peoples, along with the violence and injustices of which Natives had been the silent or forgotten victims, behind ‘misrepresentation’, ideological manipulation, fetishisation, sham discourse, sleight-of-hand, and outright lies.5 As a result, it appears to me that this insatiable drive to correct, designate, and celebrate that which corresponds to the reality of native peoples cannot be dissociated from the economy of presence and difference supporting liberalism and its colonial manifestations. What anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli describes as the ‘self-correcting movement of public reason’6 in the liberal and multicultural settler colony perfectly illustrates this ontological economy of presence and difference. According to such an onto-political tradition, the recognition of the subject as that which s/he truly is – in opposition to an alienated subject or a subject whose identity is obscured by an image or ideology that replaces her/his reality – constitutes the outcome and victory of the Sovereign’s moral and human community. As Glen Coulthard explains, such politics of native recognition ‘prefigures its [own] failure to significantly modify, let alone transcend, the breadth of power at play in colonial relationships’.7 Indeed, such a conception of intercultural encounters, when associated with a will and a humanistic duty to recognise before ‘us’ what ‘they’ truly are, mistakenly assumes that it might be possible, in line with the self-correcting movement of liberalism, to interrupt the racial−colonial power dynamic that drives all efforts to represent and designate native and non-native identities and subjectivities in the settler colony. In response to such an understanding of the subject and representation (or the subject of representation), the critical and theoretical thrust of my work will henceforth focus on the power of designation claimed by those who grant themselves the authority – within the framework of this racial−colonial relation of power – to identify or authenticate that which undoubtedly corresponds to the reality, identity, and truth of the Indian. The concept of the ‘thing’ thereby provides a theoretical alternative to any critical stance premised on the notion of correction, revision, or rectification of Indian representations, which could then be substituted, it is assumed, for the presence or the visible evidence of a real Indian – one that is commensurate with the sovereign project of the settler state. On that topic, one may very well argue that Native Canadians can hardly ever remove themselves from the undefinable particularities of the ‘Indian’, that is, this onomastic mistake that empowered Europe to designate different indigenous nations according to a certain continuum of indigeneity and raciality. Indeed, the ‘Indianness’ of these different peoples still constitutes the principal marker of difference and sameness between settlers and all those who are (partly or entirely) ‘Indian’ in the liberal settler colony. Be that as it may, and despite the persistent stance of pi(e)ty adopted by certain academic and media discourses towards those wrongly sub- jected to such mistaken designation, Canadian Natives’ involvement with ‘Indianness’ does not 52 B. Cornellier necessarily condemn those Indians to simply be passive victims to a colonial-representational apparatus; nor will their identity, once designated as Indian, be necessarily lessened to the status of mere expression of aesthetic silence or to a state of subservience to settler colonial imaginaries. Accordingly, and because the European-Canadian nation becomes morally unsustainable once Indianness starts to manifest (or represent) itself outside of or in opposition to Canadianness, any representation or statement that seeks to barricade that ‘Indian thing’ outside of the legitimate province of the Sovereign threatens – perhaps more than any other critical undertaking – the coherence and naturalisation of the national, settler colonial project. Indianness, as I conceive of it here, is thus not so much about a body, a materiality, or a reference; rather, it is the perpetually deferred stake of a settler colonial conflict with complex political ramifications, both locally and globally.

The thing, thingification, metaphysics: presence and absence The ‘thing’ to which I refer here, although it takes part in and emerges from a somewhat compar- able colonial relation of power, nonetheless differs from the thing alluded to in Aimé Césaire’s famous equation, which stated: ‘colonization = “thingification”’. Describing the coloniser as a ‘classroom monitor’ [‘un pion’] and the ‘indigenous man’ as an ‘instrument of production’8 in a relationship of domination and submission, Césaire’s formula refers back to the classic equation from Western metaphysics – that is, to the economy of presence and absence opposing signified and signifier, substance and appearance (or substitution) – when considering the thing’s mode of being. According to this equation, one is made into a thing by colonisation because one’s agency, which is the guarantee of one’s full presence in regard to oneself, is restrained and replaced by an image that substitutes itself for the self one really is. The substance of the colonised as a woman or a man, her/his intimate truth, is wiped out by the way her/his self is put to use by this other person (the coloniser), who makes the colonised a thing for his own purposes. This does not mean that one’s being and agency are, according to this equation, definitively annihilated or extinguished by such process of thingification. Rather, they are simply concealed while still remaining active, burning, and ready to spring forth from behind thingification. Such conception of the subject then summons the classical tropes of alienation, according to which relations of domination would pull ‘me’ (I myself) away from who ‘I’ am. This way of understanding thingification corresponds rather well with the Hegelian tradition that Achille Mbembe describes in his important work on the ‘postcolony’. Here, colonialism is understood as a relation of domination within which it would be impossible for native subjects, subjugated to the power of the colonial nation-state, to present themselves or to be recognised in their quality as an ‘I myself’. As such, before the coloniser, the colonised could never be anything but a stranger (or a strangeness) – that is, that impenetrable (or animal) mass of uncontrollable urges, in opposition to a subject acknowledged in her/his ability to act and to transcend the self. ‘In such circumstances’, explains Mbembe,

the only possible relationship with [the colonized] was one of violence and domination. At the heart of that relationship, the colonized could only be envisaged as the property and thing of power. He/she was a tool subordinated to the one who fashioned, and could now use and alter, him/her at will.9

Such conception of a colonial self is not foreign to thingiﬁcation as expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre when he states, ‘[m]y original fall is the existence of the Other’. He writes,

Strictly speaking, it is not that I perceive myself losing my freedom in order to become a thing, but my nature is – over there, outside my lived freedom – as a given attribute of this being which I am for the Settler Colonial Studies 53

Other. I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidiﬁcation and alienation of my own possibilities.10

If my freedom, according to Sartre, does not reside in a being who is always equal and identical to himself –‘not being his own coincidence’,11 which would bring me back to the character of the in- itself [l’En-soi], that is, the being of a stone with no conscience of itself – it is nonetheless in the absence or negation of an authentic, conscious presence to myself (the for-itself,[Pour-soi]) that I am thingified, petrified in the eyes of the other. In contrast to such economy of presence and absence, opposing that which is authentic and that which is false or alienated (the image, the thing, being, and acting as something other than myself), I propose to consider the ‘Indian thing’ precisely as something that is lacking both an outside (or surface) and an interiority. It is neither an imitation of nor a substitute for the thing itself (for instance, ‘the real Indian’ or ‘the referential Indian’).12 It is (or it allows) the thing itself, even though it is in fact, in and of itself, nothing. Or, at any rate, if it is indeed something, it is not anything that can be perceived or brandished as a presence of the thing itself (‘Indian’, Native, body, identity), as its tangible surface or as a signifier substituting for the thing in its absence. Running counter to such an understanding, the major dictionaries agree in describing the thing as a palpable object defined in opposition to (that is, in the absence of) the subject. A thing is here defined in terms of absence – absence of a soul or absence of subjectivity. It is the object that is not a subject, harking back to the ancient and modern Platonism of Césaire’s equation. The thing is thus thought of as an exteriority in regard to the soul, as an object perceived by the awareness that dwells in the soul (interiority). In conjunction with this notion, the subject in Western metaphysics designates itself according to what it is not. That is, it emerges into a state of awareness (or self- awareness) at the instant when it perceives and represents the other as an exteriority and absolute absence of itself; Mbembe would say absence without qualification –‘nothingness’.13 Thus, the subject may be someone – that is, someone else – or someone insofar as ‘the other’ is not ‘I’.In such a context, the representation of the ‘other’ does not require agency on the part of this ‘other’. Thus, Sartre and Césaire are able to state that within a colonial power relationship, or one of exotic or orientalist consumption, or again of economic exploitation relating to a system based on class or a hierarchy of gender, the other represented for and by the self can be conceptualised as a thing that acts as a substitute for the for-itself of the subject, which then becomes nothing but pure exteriority and absence of agency. Mbembe explains, then, that the general emancipatory project emerging from such a criticism of the commodification and radical alteration of colonised societies will often take on the form of a messianic utopia in which ‘emancipation and recognition … [require] the production of an apologetic discourse based on rediscovery of what was supposed to be the essence, the distinctive genius, of the black “race”’.14 ‘However’, he elaborates, ‘both the asserted denial and the reaffir- mation of that humanity now look like the two sterile sides of the same coin.’15 In this capacity, the concept of the ‘thing’, as I conceive it, will remove the need to establish such a dichotomy, opposing, on the one hand, facts, matter, reality, bodies, and agency, and, on the other hand, names, appearances, signs, perceptions, imagination, substitutions, and alienation. It is therefore no longer in this thing considered as the substitute for the subject’s agency that I am interested, but rather in the being of this ‘thing’ that the subject seeks to designate as s/he speaks and represents her/himself in the world. Hence, I contend that the ‘thing’ neither conceals nor replaces a reality, a body, a subject, or a reference. It does not act as a substitute for a subject or for a visible or tangible reality – that is, it does not signify such a reality in its absence. As it manifests itself in the interval of a particular relation of power, the ‘Indian thing’ is that which allows us to think and imagine this reality, which, again and always, escapes us. And it is with this indeterminate quality – in its being a sign without exteriority or interiority, without signifier or signified, a 54 B. Cornellier deferred sign that eludes our grasp when we attempt to lay hands on it and qualify it as an object or a representation – that this ‘Indian thing’ reveals its full effectiveness and power. Hence my continuous use of quotation marks when I refer to this ‘thing’. As with my reference to Grierson and that Canadian ‘thing’, the use of quotation marks around the word ‘thing’ expresses hesitation, as if the thingness of the term thing, albeit common, could not be apprehended or understood with certainty – the word ‘thing’ henceforth connoting the uncomfortable experience of never knowing precisely to what or to whom we are truly referring when we speak of this ‘thing’. Moreover, in its commonly accepted meaning, the thing refers to a concreteness that is nonetheless in the realm of the indeterminate – that which is not named or which we refuse, in fact, to signify by means of a name or rather by means of a precise, concrete sign, for instance: ‘look at that thing’, ‘that pink thing’, ‘that metal thing’, ‘that pretty thing’, ‘les choses du monde’, and so on. It is on this currently accepted meaning of the word thing used colloquially that I base my concept of Indianness as ‘thing’. Indianness is here considered as that ‘thing’ which, according to common perceptions, names without ever completely identifying the quality of being Indian (the thing itself). Not, then, the thing in opposition to the word, the body or the subject, but rather the ‘thing’ that allows us to avoid ever naming with precision the thing about which (or the person about whom) we speak. For the settler colony, making the Indian its ‘thing’ means, for example, that it can define a reality even while taking care not to express precisely what that reality is or to what bodies (or surfaces) it truly refers. This allows the speaker or the creator of images to maintain a measure of control over what is defined and named, insofar as this naming calls out something that ulti- mately refers to nothing and no one. For the nation born out of settler colonialism, the ‘Indian thing’ allows the subject to entertain a conception of the Indian that has no possible reference or guaranteed basis of meaning. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it allows the subject to discriminate, exclude, or concretely identify the bodies that are presumed to be (or not to be) that ‘thing’ in virtue of a criterion of indeterminability which has as its only reference the will for power of the subject who says, represents, outlines, and authorises. It serves, in a word, statements which – faced with the inconvenient existence of the Indian and the provocation of this body- subject whose proximity requires ‘us’ to speak of it – nonetheless provide ‘us’ with the means to talk about something or someone else, that is, to continually ‘change the subject’.

The African colony, the North American colonial settlement, and the perplexity of the ‘New’ nation Mbembe’sreﬂection on the notion of Zeitgeist – the spirit of the time, that particular conjunction of ‘things’–shares a certain kinship with what I am attempting to accomplish by means of the term-concept ‘thing’. Mbembe writes:

The intuition behind this idea was that, for each time and each age, there exists something distinctive and particular – or, to use the term, a ‘spirit’ (Zeitgeist). These distinctive and particular things are constituted by a set of material practices, signs, figures, superstitions, images, and fictions that, because they are available to individuals’ imagination and intelligence and actually experienced, form what might be called ‘languages of life’ [vivre au monde concret]. [par.] This ‘life world’ is not only the field where individuals’ existence unfolds in practice; it is where they exercise existence – that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death.16

Mbembe then asks, articulating one of the primary leitmotifs that will run throughout his work: ‘What gives this set of things signiﬁcations that all can share? In what languages are these signiﬁcations expressed?’17 Settler Colonial Studies 55

It becomes possible here to work with Mbembe without going so far as to adopt a lexicon that would limit what we might say about the ‘thing’ or the ‘spirit’ (here, the spirit of sub-Saharan Africa) to the reality of what he conceives of as absence, chimera, fiction, or ‘shadow effects’.18 This does not mean that we must therefore abandon all notions of reality, truth, or false- hood. However, pointing out the truth or the duplicity of the ‘thing’ in the face of material reality constitutes a redundant or impertinent assessment, insofar as this ‘thing’ can never be contained or accomplished in the form of an ‘in-itself’ or an immediate thing. This ‘thing’ can manifest itself only in discourse and representation, in the assertion of identity and community made in its name, in a word, in all of these practices by virtue of which fingers are pointed at this ‘something’ that is neither presence nor absence, but that can nonetheless be or designate – somewhere and at a particular moment – a truth. It is only in the course of such manifestations (or, to borrow from Mbembe’s vocabulary, such ‘languages of life’ or ‘life worlds’) that the ‘thing’ can lay claim to some sort of ‘presence’ or materialise into a ‘something’ that is neither a ‘shadow effect’ nor a simple fantasy.19 In other words, if statements about Africa never in fact refer to what it is they profess to designate,20 they nonetheless give rise to something real and tangible – subjectivities, communities, experiences of solidarity, and antagonisms emerging from the numerous attempts to say or signify something and to claim that something as one’s own or as one’s truth. The ‘thing’ is manifest in the conflicting narratives that seek to narrate who or what it ‘actually’ designates, who or what legitimately belongs to its ‘spirit’, and who must keep silent in the face of that which ought to correspond – here, elsewhere, for oneself, against others – to that ‘thing’. It becomes quite real in the expression of rights and responsibilities conferred on bodies that are racialised and mobilised in the designation of that ‘thing’. It becomes concrete when it comes to act as a template for the mobility of those racialised bodies in propinquity with the Sovereign. And finally, it definitively evades any ontology of fantasy or fanciful unreality when in the liberal settler colony, it is pressed into the service of justifying the legitimacy of the Sovereign – the self-same Sovereign who seeks to be consistent with the moral and ethical meanings that contemporary liberal discourse assigns to this ineffable je ne sais quoi that blends together nationality, Indianness, and human justice. It is nonetheless important to point out that the African colony evoked by Mbembe is not the America of colonial settlement. While the African colony and the liberal settler colony indeed originate from a similar global and historical movement of expansion of European capital, it is nonetheless true that the colonial occupation of one group is not necessarily identical, and cer- tainly not in every detail, to the colonial occupation of the other group. As Lorenzo Veracini recently expressed, ‘colonialism is not settler colonialism’.21 He goes even further to affirm that ‘colonial and settler colonial forms should not only be seen as separate but also construed as antithetical’,22 notwithstanding the fact that these two forms regularly coexist. That is, where settler colonialism gradually attempts to supersede the schism opposing the metropolis with ‘its’ native populations, the colonialism theorised by Mbembe is in contrast associated with narratives that serve to maintain and ensure the distance or otherness that separate the metropolis from the colony. Mbembe explains, for example, that it is in relation to Africa that the notion of absolute otherness reached its acme in the Western political and philosophical tradition. Within this tradition, Africa, that great Lacanian Other (with a capital O), came to embody the farthest reaches of the world, that place where Reason and Enlightenment constantly meet with failure, the final frontier of non-western existence. Thus, the West had found this object of desire – Africa, the Other – which gave it a means to affirm to the rest of the world its own difference.23 Edward Said presents a similar argument concerning Western discourses on the ‘Orient’ (or the Middle East)24 – an argument that Stuart Hall makes into a generalisation in the opposition that he establishes 56 B. Cornellier between ‘the West and the Rest’.25 On the other hand, because the liberal North American settler colony inhabits indigenous lands and because it invests these lands with the cloak of its own sovereignty and Europeanness, this colony, morally or politically, cannot afford to conceive of Indianness as a pure exteriority or absolute otherness in regard to the Sovereign. It must justify its invasion, appropriation, and occupation of these ‘other lands’ by designating them as ‘other’ and eventually ‘new’ while at the same time making this otherness inhabitable, desirable, and familiar, and, finally, by making this space into a ‘home’ for a Europeanness that is at once old and new. At this stage, the animal quality of the ‘savage’, her/his subjectivity having been ‘emptied out’ and ‘anihilated’, must be filled with meanings that can never be fully satisfied by locating the Indian categorically on one side of the dichotomous opposition that buttresses the moral architecture of colonialism. The Indian is neither bad nor good, neither noble nor bloodthirsty, neither loved nor despised. In fact, the Indian must embody all of these terms, alternating between one and the other, or, simultaneously, must embody none of them. Because the perplexity surrounding identity in the ‘new nation’ relates to an anxiety born out of the West folding back over the territory of its otherness, the settler colony asks of its subjects a constant back-and-forth movement on either side of the border separating the self from the other, all the while the subject grows into its true self insofar as it has never really been this ‘other’–provided it remains on the ‘good’ side of national, colonial, and racial boundaries. This is why, in many ways, the Indian destabilises the traditional architecture (the dichotomous opposition) of the subject born out of Western political and philosophical traditions, even as this subject persists in laying claim to this architecture that continues to mobilise movements of solidarity and allegiances that allow ‘me’ to be ‘myself’ in regard to the other. The ‘Indian thing’, then, moves incessantly, like a spectre, between the self and the other, Good and Evil, the coloniser and the colonised. It allows the coloniser to don the garb of the colonised even while refusing to be the colonised (and vice versa). For the settler colony, Indianness, in short, must remain in a state of incompleteness and instability – that is, it must remain unsettled. It must be this ‘thing’ that, in some way, is indeed there, assuring and reassuring the settler as to its existence, even while being nothing, even while being non- existent. In this context, that ‘Indian thing’ not only offers Canada (and Québec) an ontological and historical connection to the lands that they occupy (America and the North), it additionally allows them to render invisible the dichotomous opposition and the relationship of exclusion that continue to structure settler colonialism. In other words, that ‘Indian thing’ allows the settler colony to become simultaneously Europe and ‘something else’. Or, conversely, the settler’s Europe becomes ‘something else’ without ever entirely coming to terms with – or for that matter, losing sight of – its European and Western nature. Thus, Indianness is rendered into a non-antithetical component of the settler colonial state. The settler succeeds in doing so precisely because this ‘thing’ can never be brandished as either object or subject that might empirically demonstrate the failure or the abuses of the state, nor might it be used against the state.

The ‘thing’, the limit, the fold Similarly, Christopher Bracken suggests in The Potlatch Papers, that Europe, as ‘a logic – a mode of reasoning, a metaphysics – that enacts strategies of conceptual domination’,26 does not dis- cover – nor does it really converse with – the cultures or othernesses that it wishes to understand or learn about. Rather, Europe ‘gives non-European cultures to itself’.27 This gift, Bracken explains, is conditional on the establishment of a frontier, a border, a caesura that Europe attempts from the outset to draw clearly and indelibly between itself and its exteriority/otherness, if for no Settler Colonial Studies 57 other reason than to be able to celebrate the dissolution of this dividing line of difference at a later date. However, the impermeability of the limit is condemned to failure, as it is necessarily crossed by its own movement, its own writing. In other words, and by way of example, if Europe is to make the Kwakwaka’wakw of the Pacific Northwest coast its absolute otherness, it must understand beforehand, prior to the colonial encounter, what Europe is now, in and of itself, imbued with its selfhood. This definition of selfhood is all the more difficult to plot out and maintain, as settler colonialism incessantly extends the geopolitical and metaphysical body that is Europe over territories that have been defined as Europe’s absolute otherness. It is in virtue of this impossibility of drawing its own limits that Europe, according to Bracken, is not. Rather, Europe folds back over itself, attaches itself, and takes root in the Native’s space. It recreates Europe in propinquity to that which is understood to embody its absolute otherness. The fold reunites that which the boundary was trying to keep apart. The condition of possibility for what Bracken calls ‘Europe-in-Canada’ is therefore the coex- istence of two complementary but contradictory zones: the borderline and the fold. By folding back onto itself on the lands of the ‘other’, even as it is plotting out the limit or frontier of absolute separation between itself and this otherness, Europe redoubles itself:

[Europe] lays itself alongside itself and renders itself different from itself. … [It] holds itself apart from itself, it ﬁnds its own reﬂection in the most un-European regions of Canada, and there intervenes the possibility not simply that ‘Europe-in-Canada’ has ceased to be itself but that it has never been.28

The anxiety born from this going outside of the self – the discovery of one’s own inequality with one’s self – will be all the more unsettling, and Europe made all the more monstrous, when the Indian mimetically sends back to Europe an image of itself and adopts European discourses and garbs, repeating them and, in so doing, taking them out and dispossessing them of their ‘true’ self. Accordingly, this Indian cannot be thought of otherwise than as an ‘alienated’ subject. ‘Europe-in- Canada’ then has no other choice but to deny or to contest this particular Indian’s ownership of that ‘Indian thing’ that allows ‘Europe-in-Canada’ to survive its own demise. This Indian becomes the one that is divorced of her/his original indigeneity – s/he is thought of as alienated from the otherness that corresponds to Canada’s ‘thing’ and to the truth of the Indigene. That ‘Indian thing’ will therefore be useful as a rhetorical device to ease this anxiety, to flatten the fold, and to re-establish the boundary and the dichotomous logic of the colony, while at the same time making this boundary invisible. Or rather, it allows contemporary Canada – as liberal and multicultural as it may be (or claim to become) – to ignore the colonial boundary that it has sought to plot – the one that separates Europe from the Indigene, its absolute otherness. It allows Canada to avert its eyes and choose not to see the boundary even though it knows it is there, so that Canada (and Québec, who forgets that it is also a coloniser, finding comfort in the reassuring memory of the colonisation and conquest of which it was itself the recipient) may fence off the Indian reserve so as not to be it. In this sense, that ‘Indian thing’ serves racism and white supremacy, condemning this overly westernised Indian who benefits from the entitlements that ‘we’ have granted him. That ‘Indian thing’ also serves the Indian of New Age orientalisms and likewise the Indian of benevolent liberal feelings of kindness, seeking to make Canada over through acknowledgement of shame for the misdeeds of history, thus exonerating the State for its past, conceived of as a simple exception or momentary drifting from the path of righteousness that ‘we’ have had the thoughtful ben- eficence to rectify for ‘them’. That ‘thing’ serves, as well, Québécois nationalism, for Québec, it is said, knows better than Canada how to take care of ‘its’ Indians. Québec, it is thus implied, knows how to be respectful of their culture and promises to ensure them a special place in a francophone 58 B. Cornellier sovereign Québec. That ‘Indian thing’, then, paves the way for conceiving of the Indian of La Paix des Braves (2002) and the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (1975) – a more prosperous Indian than the one that inhabits the internal third-world where Canadian Prime Min- ister Stephen Harper sent body bags during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009. That ‘Indian thing’ also serves popular condemnations of the Oka Indians.29 Or rather, it makes it possible to conceive of the Oka Indian outside of Indianness. It makes the dissident Mohawk an ‘un-Indian’ and ‘foreign’30 subject who, like the bad Iroquois persecuting the romanticised Huron of old French−Canadian schoolbooks, allows post-Meech31 Québec and Canada to conceive of the Oka Crisis on their behalf. Always too much, never enough, that Indian body … The ‘Indian thing’ indeed makes all of this possible. After all, Canada and Québec, as alleged mixed-race chil- dren born of European parentage on indigenous soil, were never inhabited by Indians, but rather by that ineffable quality that characterises the America of the Europeans, the otherness of Euro- Canadians, the alienation and/or the inauthenticity of the modern Indian, the media-based stance of pi(e)ty of the white patriarch. To summarise, ‘Europe-in-Canada’, in its multi- or intercultural incarnation, cannot be conceived of as a full-fledged difference – that is, as a difference that excludes all traces of Indianness. At the same time, it cannot tolerate being conceived of or represented as fully Indian (the absolute otherness). It cannot, in fact, survive either the absence or the full presence of the Indian. It requires, therefore, an Indian that is only pure interval or différance. Making the Indian its ‘thing’ therefore allows this New Europe to defer its ‘Indian problem’, to change the subject, to erase and forget, to perfectly stack Europe and Indianness one atop the other without the slight- est overhang, border, incompatibility, or overflow.

The law of the ‘thing’ and the insurmountability of the Indian Nevertheless, if in this case it is indeed Canada that makes the Indian its ‘thing’, this does not make Canada the Indian’s undisputed master. For making the Indian its ‘thing’ means having to adhere to its law. Not the law that governs or regulates the order of things, but the law dictated by the ‘thing’‘as an implacable command … [or] an insatiable demand’.32 For while discourse, by making the Indian its ‘thing’, is not limited by the materiality, corporality, or existence of the Indian, it is always in the Indian’s name that it hears itself speak (of the Indian). It is, in a word, because discourse has no other choice but to name the Indian and to give the Indian to ‘ourselves’ as a ‘thing’ that the ‘Indian thing’ imposes its law. As Scott Lauria Morgensen explains: ‘settler subjects normatively recall and perform indigeneity as a history they at once incorporate and transcend, inhabit and defer. Settlers thus are inexplicable apart from their relationality to Indigen- ous peoples.’33 Len Findlay insists, in a similar vein, that within the colonial settler state, ‘all communities live as, or in relation to, Indigenes. … [T]here is no hors-Indigene, no geopolitical or psychic setting, no real or imagined terra nullius free from the satisfactions and unsettlements of Indigene (pre)occupation’.34 Discourse pursues something that it cannot (or will not) touch, while at the same time remaining unable ever to free itself completely from the object of this pursuit. So that even if the ‘thing’ always slips from the grasp of the discourse or desire that seeks its presence, it still asks to be pursued incessantly and unsuccessfully. Now this ‘thing’, although it has made this request, says nothing and means nothing. This means that nothing and no-one can ever guarantee the accuracy or the truth of what is said about it. Because it neither speaks (to us) nor asks (us) for anything at all, the ‘thing’ can be represented only by a desire that cannot not answer, that cannot not speak for it and in its name, that cannot not command it, forever unsuccessfully, to ‘exist’ or to signify someone or something. The silence of that ‘Indian thing’ commands speech. Or, if not speech, a reaction or a self-positioning that sometimes commands that we remain silent. So that it is possible to affirm that the ‘thing’ Settler Colonial Studies 59 does not exist or that the fact of its existence is, at the very least, not pertinent; yet, speaking up in its name always produces something. And because the ‘thing’, emerging from the interval born out of the colonial encounter, demands to be spoken of, these speech acts can never be understood as mere solipsism or pure relativism. For to analyse these statements (or these representations) is also to analyse a relation of power in which we speak – not an act of speaking up for Indians or in one’s capacity as an Indian, but in the name of that ‘Indian thing’. Thus, it is through inciting that ‘Indian thing’ to say something, although it is forever aphasic, that it becomes possible to produce and visualise Indian (and Canadian) differences and realities and, consequently, identities. In this way, settlers and Indigenous peoples seek to signify and appropriate for themselves, within a particular racial−colonial relation of power, the Indianness that exerts the perplexity of the identities interpellated by settler colonialism. This explains Gerald Vizenor’s refusal to acknowledge that there had ever been an absence of the Native in colonial representation. He invites us, rather, to observe ‘the eyes and hands in fugitive poses to see the motion of natives, and hear the apophatic narratives of a continuous presence’.35 I reiterate, then, that it is due to the intransigent presence and the eloquent silences of those who are designated as ‘Indians’ that the colonial project has to make the Indian its ‘thing’. Or rather, the colonial project’s ‘thing’, its substance, its challenge, and its outcome are this Indianness – the Indianness of these absolutely other bodies and territories over which Europe folds itself. It is no longer the truth, then, or the reality of the representation (or the represented) that is at play here. For reality no longer constitutes the measure of the representation, but rather its effect. It will be necessary, then, to stop conceiving of a real Indian (in the flesh) by virtue of the degree of his or her presence or absence in representation (whether this representation is colonial, mainstream, native, or other) or indeed by virtue of a gradient of reality. Rather, it is henceforth incumbent upon us to affirm and come to terms with the ‘intransitive shadows’36 – neither presence nor absence – of the Indian in all of its representations. The term-concept ‘thing’ offers us, in this respect, a way out of the paradigm of the imaginary Indian (or the discursive Indian) and its demands. That ‘Indian thing’ escapes the logic of imitation and the moral demands (or impediments) of truth and/or of the referential Indian. To conceive of Indianness as a ‘thing’ is to risk the ‘savage philosophies’ evoked elsewhere by Bracken, that is, that desire and taboo of Western metaphysics that enables the sign and the representation to exist beyond the opposition of presence and absence, and therefore beyond any and all guarantees of identity.37 Otherness, henceforth projected outside the self, no longer belongs to either the substance or the body of the other, but rather to the impossible expectation that is born from the meeting of bodies and subjectivities that share a certain propinquity. And if there is indeed a body or substance that exceeds or precedes the representation, this body is only insofar as it is given the gift of a presence. This is why I suggest that Indians, who also compete in the colonial struggle to designate that which is truly ‘Indian’, can never be constrained by the body that girds them. For it is not bodies but indeed that ‘Indian thing’ that constitutes the stakes, the quest,ofthe racial−colonial relation of power in Québec and Canada – and this, even though it is the bodies that, in the end, are marked, trod upon, and mobilised by the physical and epistemic violence of colonialism. This said, while we may be obliged to acknowledge, with Veracini, that it is indeed a characteristic of settler colonialism that it veils its own conditions of production by continuously attempting to white out the indelible line separating the Indian from the settler (or Indianness from nationality), we will have to admit that the most colossal difficulty – the most pessimistic will call it an impossibility – that awaits the process of decolonisation in Canada will henceforth be to conquer and preserve the power, heretofore reserved for the Sovereign, to draw, signify, represent, and defend this boundary that makes it possible to define Indianness in the face of its exteriority. In other words, the space that asks to be conquered in the decolonisation effort 60 B. Cornellier is this ‘vantage point’ from which it is possible to lay claim to a certain authority or sovereignty in pointing one’s finger at that ‘thing’ that truly aligns with Indianness. In such a context, what will be primarily at stake in the politics of indigenous representation, within our liberal modernity, will be this vantage point from which the Sovereign seeks to regulate and limit access, more often than not, in the name of defending and preserving democracy and ‘human rights’. By presenting itself as a defender of the universal right to free expression of dis- sidence and differences, the liberal state generally manages to consolidate its sovereign power in the face of the actions performed by the dissident bodies that threaten its integrity and its borders. In so doing, liberalism, sanctioned by the universalist and humanist rhetoric that is its lifeblood, seeks to reduce representational work in a context of decolonisation or resistance to a simple exercise of poetic and symbolic expression, if not a political exercise of pure form or ‘tokenism’,atthe edges of or alongside (either way, out of reach of) the normative authorities of political power. This is why I am affirming that, faced with the insurmountable task of decolonising settler colonial states, critical studies of film, media, and literary representations of Natives, if they are to be active participants in the resistance against colonial violence, will henceforth need to make it their duty to refuse to subscribe to any critical position that would make recognition of the true Indian in an ‘accurate’ (or revised, documented) representation a way of better apprehending ‘togetherness’ across the racial−colonial divide. To that effect, we must constantly be reminded that one of the very conditions of possibility for togetherness, in our liberal democracies, is to prevent Natives from extirpating themselves from the ascendancy and the power of death of the Sovereign. Importantly, in the past 15 years, significant scholarly contributions in film and media studies have emerged that focus on processes of production and/or cultural mediation in Indigenous cinema, thus complicating such colonial and intercultural narratives of correction, misrepresentation, and liberal reconciliation.38 More recently, other scholars, while not indifferent to questions of appropriate or responsible representation, have also moved away from discourses that would turn Indigenous media and/or Native self-representation into possible tokens for transracial discourses of recognition that would make indigenous nationhood commensurate with the liberal settler state’s multicultural economy of presence, identity, and selfhood. For instance, Corinn Columpar’s work focuses instead on a definition of Fourth Cinema understood as an intersubjec- tive nexus in which constant cultural and economic tensions, as well as the political (and not just cultural) identity of Indigenous communities, emerge as part of a struggle with the systematic nature of settler colonialism.39 In an analogous manner, Michelle H. Raheja’s recent book describes tactical strategies of reading and making films that are ‘engaging and deconstructing white-generated representations of indigenous people’ as part of larger dialogues about Native American sovereignty.40 And yet, despite such ground-breaking academic contributions, one would be ill-advised to underestimate the continuous political, cultural, and popular resilience and influence, within journalistic, policy-making, and academic institutions, as well as within the documentary and indigenous film festival circuits, of such liberal philosophical intuition about the self as presence, absence, and/or re-emergence in representation – an intuition which is also conforming to the NFB’s liberal democratic mandate of giving a voice to underrepresented minorities, thus ‘making [them] feel part of this great country’.41 Towards this end, the critical usefulness of the ‘Indian thing’, as a theoretical concept, is to remove us from an understanding of Indianness that was amalgamated with certain dichotomous oppositions – absence and presence, imaginary and referentiality, alienation and identity. However, it will also be important to recall that the ‘Indian thing’ does not belong to the exteriority of such dichotomous oppositions. Rather, it is born in the interval of these oppositions. It is that which is designated when, on either side of the racial−colonial boundary, an attempt is made to identify that which is Indian and that which is not. Canada and Québec, because Settler Colonial Studies 61 their sovereignty rests on the moral and sovereign guarantee that ‘we’ are indeed at home in the territory of the ‘other’, have no other choice but to constantly make Indianness say ‘something’ that makes ‘us’ possible. The same will hold true for Natives who, in a colonial context as well as in a context of resistance vis-à-vis the state, cannot not also take a stand in regard to their Indian- ness, or, in other words, in regard to this designation that is born out of the colonial encounter – this or that ‘thing’ that I am in regard to you who are not that. Faced with the impossibility of finding a way out of that ‘Indian thing’, I therefore maintain that such cultural and political predicament calls for alternative strategies of resistance, as part of which, we will no longer seek to restore an Indian reality that could be apprehended through the metaphysics of absence and presence supporting the moral and sovereign architecture of the liberal settler colony. Rather, the task before us will be to imagine a new textuality and to create political or media-based interventions that refuse to sanction the State’s authority to designate what or who truly corresponds to that ‘Indian thing’–or to categorically forbid the State to situate itself within the confines of Indianness. Importantly, such a proposition does not constitute an abrogation of the firm opposition between that which I am and who you are – you, who are also human – rather, it calls for a constant re-delineation of this opposition. As a result, it is the entire edifice of settler colonialism that is made visible – or at least, the possibility of not seeing this edifice no longer becomes an option. With the dramatisation and constant replotting of the irre- ducible racial−colonial dividing line that settler colonialism seeks to render invisible, will we thus contribute to denaturalising the sovereign, humanist discourse of the liberal state. As a result, we might perhaps be allowed to hope that such a rupture in the relationship between the nation and that ‘Indian thing’ might have the potential to force our liberal democracies to come into a pro- found, concrete, and consequential awareness of that which the contemporaneousness of the racial and colonial foundations of ‘our’ sovereignty requires in the relationships between the

State, Native peoples, and non-Native racialised minorities – and this from both political and institutional standpoints. In the meantime, antiracist and anticolonial efforts must take on the task of keeping ardent, like an inextinguishable ﬁre, the demands of conﬂict, incommunicability, fracture, and opposition if we hope to eschew the ultimate triumph of settler colonialism: its self- supersession.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Mark Stout who translated the ﬁrst draft of this article into English, as well as Tamara Shepherd for her editorial assistance. This research received funding from the Social Sciences and Huma- nities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture, and the University of Winnipeg.

Notes 1. John Grierson, ‘A Film Policy for Canada (1944)’,inDocuments in Canadian Film, ed. Douglas Fetherling (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1988), 51–67 (55). 2. Here, we should probably also consider yet another set of ‘hesitations’ that are characteristic of settler societies. These hesitations are best observed in what David Pearson has called the ‘“culturalist” ideol- ogies and institutional arrangements’ that were developed by recently declared ‘bi’ or ‘multi’-cultural post-settler states in response to the unease felt by white settlers who ﬁnds themselves in a triangular relationship according to which their normalising subjectivity cannot be abstracted from their relationality with indigenous and exogenous ‘others’. David Pearson, The Politics of Ethnicity in Settler Societies: States of Unease (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 20. On the triangulation between settlers, and indigenous and exogenous alterities, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 16–27. 3. Instead of the word ‘Indian’, Gerald Vizenor writes indian in lowercase and italics. For him, the Indian is ‘a simulation and a loan word of dominance’, whereas ‘the indian is an ironic crease’, a simulation 62 B. Cornellier

with no referent or memories. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 14–15. 4. See, for example, Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian, from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979); Gilles Thérien, ‘L’Indien imaginaire: une hypothèse’, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 17, no. 3 (1987): 3–21; Daniel Francis, The Ima- ginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992); Gilles Thérien, ed., Figures de l’Indien, 2nd ed. (Montréal: Typo, 1995); Robert Appleford, ‘Coming Out from Behind the Rocks: Constructs of the Indian in Recent U.S. and Canadian Cinema’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no. 1 (1995): 97–118; Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998); Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Gretchen M. Bataille, ‘Introduction’,in Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, ed. Gretchen M. Bataille (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 1–10; John Purdy, ‘Tricksters of the Trade: “Remagining” the Filmic Image of Native Americans’,inNative American Represen- tations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, ed. Gretchen M. Bataille (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 100–18; Beverly R. Singer, Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens: Native American Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Gilles Laprévotte and Thierry Roche, Indian’s Song: Des Indiens d’Hollywood au cinéma des Indiens (Belgique: Yellow Now, 2010). 5. Conservative scholars such as James A. Clifton, Tom Flanagan or Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard would alternatively suggest that the work of the critic should be to shatter the ‘indian ﬁctions’ that are supporting a so-called ‘aboriginal orthodoxy’ or ‘industry’ allegedly serving its own self-inter- est in exploiting ‘white guilt’. James A. Clifton, ‘The Indian Story: A Cultural Fiction’,inThe Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies, ed. J.A. Clifton (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 29–48; Tom Flanagan, First Nations? Second Thoughts (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,

2008). 6. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceiv- ability’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 319–34 (327). 7. Glen S. Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2008): 437–60 (443). 8. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence africaine, 1955), 19. The use of the term ‘classroom monitor’ in lieu of the French word ‘pion’ is borrowed from Joan Pinkham’s translation of Césaire’s text (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42. 9. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 26–7; emphasis in original text. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Citadel, 1956), 239; emphasis in original text. 11. Sartre, 53; emphasis in original text. 12. I am referring here to the distinction put forward by semiologist Gilles Thérien between ‘l’Indien du discours’ and ‘l’Indien de la référence’ or ‘l’Indien réel’. Such distinction is similar to the way Daniel Francis and a few of his contemporaries differentiate between the ‘imaginary Indian’ and the Native. Thérien, Figures de l’Indien; Francis, Imaginary Indian. 13. Mbembe, On the Postcolony,4. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. Ibid.; emphasis in original text. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Ibid.; my emphasis. 18. Ibid., 241–2. 19. Ibid., 241. 20. Mbembe writes: ‘narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else’. Ibid., 3. 21. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Introducing Settler Colonial Studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–12 (1) 22. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp. 11–12. 23. Mbembe, On the Postcolony,3. Settler Colonial Studies 63

24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 25. Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’,inModernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1996), 184–227. 26. Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 25. 27. Ibid., 23. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. In July 1990, the Québec provincial police launched a raid over lands occupied by Mohawk protesters who opposed plans to extend a nine-hole golf course over their burial ground. The police raid would cost the life of one police officer and spark an 11-week standoff, the longest in North American history, opposing the Kanesatake and Kanhawake Mohawks to the mayor of the municipality of Oka, the police, the Canadian army, and local protesters. For a detailed account of the Oka Crisis, read Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera, People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka (Toronto: McArthur, 1992). 30. Amelia Kalant, National Identity and the Crisis at Oka: Native Belonging and the Myths of Postcolo- nial Nationhood in Canada (London: Routledge, 2004), 189. 31. The Meech Lake Constitutional Accord of 1987 is a package of constitutional amendments that were meant to convince Québec to endorse the 1982 Constitutional Act. The accord proposed to make offi- cial the status of Québec as a ‘distinct society’; it also featured a series of recommendations that were meant to enhance the role of Canadian provinces in the federation. First ratified by the Québec National Assembly in 1987, the accord also had to be ratified by Parliament and by the legislature of all other Canadian provinces before becoming law. The accord suffered a deadly blow when Elijah Harper, then member of the Manitoba legislature, raised an eagle feather and dissented from the unanimous support that was necessary to bypass the public consultation requested by First Nations protesters and other groups who felt they had not been included in the accord’s process. The defeat of the accord increased nationalist support for sovereignty in Québec and eventually culminated in the 1995 Québec referen- dum on sovereignty, with the ‘No’ option winning by only a few thousand votes. 32. Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University – Press, 1984), 10 12. 33. Scott Lauria Morgensen, ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76 (59). 34. Len Findlay, ‘Always Indigenize! The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial Canadian University’,in Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou (London: Duke University Press, 2009), 405–22 (407). 35. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 165. 36. Vizenor, ‘The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance’, American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1993): 7–30. 37. Bracken, Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–21. 38. See, for example, Faye Ginsburg, ‘Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity’,inFields of Vision. Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Pho- tography, ed. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 256–91; Faye Ginsburg, ‘Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media’,inMedia Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 39–57; Terence Turner, ‘Represen- tation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples’, in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 75–89. Faye Ginsburg, ‘Atanarjuat Off- Screen: From “Media Reservations” to the World Stage’, American Anthropologist 105, no. 4 (2003): 827–31; Lucas Bessire, ‘Talking Back to Primitivism: Divided Audiences, Collective Desires’, American Anthropologist 105, no. 4 (2003): 832–38; Joanna Hearne, ‘Telling and Retelling in the “Ink of Light”: Documentary Cinema, Oral Narratives, and Indigenous Identities’, Screen 47, no. 3 (2006): 307–26. 39. Corinn Columpar, Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), xiv. 40. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 193–94. On a similar topic, Audra Simpson recently invited us to reinvest the question of sovereignty and to make it 64 B. Cornellier

central to scholarly conversations about Indigeneity. For her, analyses of Indigeneity should contribute to a ‘critique of state power, force, and occupation’, as opposed to anthropological work informed by a liberal politic or poetic of ‘rapprochement’ and recognition. Simpson, ‘Settlement’s Secret’, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2011): 211–12. 41. National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Five-Year Strategic Plan (2008), 4, http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/ medias/download/documents/pdf/publications/NFB_STRATEGIC_PLAN.pdf (accessed February 13, 2012). For a more detailed discussion about the settler narratives through which public institutions (such as the NFB) and the cultural press in Québec and Canada ‘make sense’ of activist indigenous documentaries, see Bruno Cornellier, ‘The Thing about Obomsawin’s Indianness: Indigenous Reality and the Documentary Burden of Education at the National Film Board of Canada’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques 21, no. 2 (2012): 2–26.