Indigenous Americas : Red Skin, White Masks
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Red Skin, White Masks Indigenous Americas Robert Warrior, Series Editor Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies Raymond D. Austin, Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law: A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition James H. Cox, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas, The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong Gerald Vizenor, Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point Robert Warrior, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction Robert A. Williams, Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America Red Skin, White Masks Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition Glen Sean Coulthard Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred Indigenous Americas University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy,” University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2008): 164–66, reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press, www.utpjournals.com; and as “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 437–60. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published as “Resisting Culture: Seyla Benhabib’s Deliberative Approach to the Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts,” in Deliberative Democracy in Practice, ed. David Kahane (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), 138-54, reprinted with permission of the publisher, copyright University of British Columbia Press 2009, all rights reserved. Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red skin, white masks : rejecting the colonial politics of recognition / Glen Sean Coulthard ; foreword by Taiaiake Alfred. (Indigenous Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-7964-5 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8166 7965-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—Canada—Government relations. 2. Indians of North America—Canada—Politics and government. 3. Indians of North America—Legal status, laws. etc.—Canada. 4. Indians, Treatment of—Canada. 5. Canada—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. I. Title. E92.C68 2014 323.1197´071—dc23 2013049674 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20191817161514 10987654321 For Richard Park Coulthard (1942–2012) This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Taiaiake Alfred Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. Subjects of Empire 1 1 The Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts 25 2 For the Land: The Dene Nation’s Struggle for Self-Determination 51 3 Essentialism and the Gendered Politics of Aboriginal Self-Government 79 4 Seeing Red: Reconciliation and Resentment 105 5 The Plunge into the Chasm of the Past: Fanon, Self-Recognition, and Decolonization 131 Conclusion. Lessons from Idle No More: The Future of Indigenous Activism 151 Notes 181 Index 221 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Taiaiake Alfred Not so very long ago, in Canada there numbered just less than fourteen million inhabitants: thirteen million human beings, and half a million Natives. The former had the land; the others had the memory of it. Between the two there were hired chiefs, an Indian Affairs bureaucracy, and a small bourgeoisie, all three shams from the very beginning to the end, which served as go-betweens. In this unending colony the truth stood naked, but the settlers preferred it hidden away or at least dressed: the Natives had to love them and all they had done, something in the way a cruel father is still loved by the children who are wounded by his selfish hands. The white élite undertook to manufacture a Native élite. They picked promising youths, they made them drink the fire- water principles of capitalism and of Western culture; they educated the Indian out of them, and their heads were filled and their mouths were stuffed with smart-sounding hypocrisies, grand greedy words that stuck in their throats but which they spit out nonetheless. After a short stay in the university they were sent home to their reserves or unleashed in the cities, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing to say to their brothers and sisters that did not sound false, ugly, and harmful; they only mimicked their masters. From buildings in Toronto, from Montréal, from Vancouver, businessmen would utter the words, “Development! Progress!” and somewhere on a reserve lips would open “. opment! . gress!” The Natives were complacent and compliant; it was a rich time for the white élite. Then things changed. The mouths of Natives started opening by them- selves; brown voices still spoke of the whites’ law, democracy, and liberal humanism, but only to reproach them for their unfairness and inhumanity. ix x Foreword White élites listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resent- ment and reproach, these pleas for reconciliation, with apparent satisfaction. “See? Just like we taught them, they are able to talk in proper English without the help of a priest or of an anthropologist. Just look at what we have made of the backward savages—they sound like lawyers!” Whites did not doubt that the Natives would accept their ideals, since the Natives accused the whites of not being faithful to them. Settlers could still believe in the sanctity of their divine civilizing mission; they had Europeanized the Natives, they had created a new kind of Native, the assimilated Aboriginal. The white élites took this all in and whispered, quiet between themselves over dinner, as good progres- sive persons of the (post)modern world: “Let them cry and complain; it’s just therapy and worth the expense. It’s better than giving the land back!” Now the sham is coming to an end. Native thinkers and leaders are coming on the scene intent on changing things, entirely. With the last stores of our patience, Native writers, musicians, and philosophers are trying to explain to settlers that their values and the true facts of their existence are at great odds, and that the Native can never be completely erased or totally assimilated. This New Indigenous Intelligentsia is trying to get settlers to understand that colo- nialism must and will be confronted and destroyed. It is not 1947; we’re not talking about reforming the Indian Act so that we can become little munici- palities. It is not 1982; we’re not talking about going to court to explore empty constitutional promises. It is the twenty-first century. Listen: “what is treated in the Canadian dis- course of reconciliation as an unhealthy and debilitating incapacity to forgive and move on is actually a sign of a critical consciousness, of our sense of justice and injustice, and of our awareness of and unwillingness to reconcile.” Coult- hard is talking about rising up, Seeing Red, about resurgence and the politics of authentic self-affirmation. This is a call to combat contemporary colonial- ism’s objectification and alienation and manipulation of our true selves. He understands that in Canada today “settlement” of conflict means putting the past behind us, a willful forgetting of the crimes that have stained the psyche of this country for so long, a conspiracy of collective ignorance, turning a blind eye to the ongoing crimes of theft, fraud, and abuse against the original people of the land that are still the unacceptable everyday reality in Canada. So how could we settle and accept and not question and challenge the natural- ized injustice that frames and shapes and gives character to our lives? There is Foreword xi nothing natural about the dominance of white people on the North American continent and the removal and erasure of our people, our laws, and our cul- tures from our homelands. Glen Coulthard is a leading voice of the new Indigenous Intelligentsia, and he has accomplished so much with this book. To have rescued Karl Marx from his nineteenth-century hostage chamber in that room in the British Library and to expose him to the full breadth of history and the light of the human landscape was enough to make this a great work of political theory. He’s gone beyond that accomplishment in correcting Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Frantz Fanon’s narrow vision—something you have to excuse them for given they were doing philosophy while in the midst of a ferocious physical fight— and brought Marx and Sartre and Fanon together with his Dene Elders and me and you, Reader, to show us all how our psycho-affective attachments to colonialism are blocking the achievement of a just society. As such, this book is a profound critique of contemporary colonialism, and clear vision of Indig- enous resurgence, and a serious contribution to the literature of freedom.