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

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The 'Indian Thing': on Representation and Reality in the Liberal Settler Colony Settler Colonial Studies ISSN: 2201-473X (Print) 1838-0743 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rset20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 190 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rset20 Download by: [University of Saskatchewan Library] Date: 01 April 2017, At: 16:08 Settler Colonial Studies, 2013 Vol. 3, No. 1, 49–64, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18380743.2013.761935 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 entertain- ment, 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] © 2013 Taylor & Francis 50 B. Cornellier 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 hesita- tion, 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 com- monly 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
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