Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (18 page)

Here we have arrived at a paradox. If, as I have argued, Benhabib’s use of social constructivism represents not only an empirical statement about the nature of cultural identities, but also a means of undercutting those forms of domination that she views as being legitimized through the reification of essentialist and nonnegotiable cultural forms, then her theory has failed to serve its purpose in the colonial context. In fact, by treating the state as a natural and uncontested arbiter in struggles for recognition—or, as Richard J. F. Day has put it, by assuming that “the state somehow ‘inherently’ occupies a pole of universality, [providing an] appropriate ground for dialogue between [Indigenous peoples,] ethnic groups, regions, and so on”—Benhabib’s model has firmly imbedded Indigenous nations within the racialized and patriarchal structure of colonial domination that their claims for cultural recognition posit as unjust and illegitimate.
74
According to Arif Dirlik it is precisely through this double maneuver—the uncritical and premature positing of cultural “in-betweenness” as both a universal and normative aspect of “the human condition”—that anti-essentialist democratic projects abandon their transformative potential and crystallize into a “new kind of determinism from which there is no escape.”
75

Conclusion

To avoid some of the problems that have come to the fore in the preceding sections, I think it is crucial that advocates of anti-essentialist criticism begin to acknowledge that, as
discourses
, both constructivist and essentialist articulations of identity can aid in either the maintenance or subversion of oppressive configurations of power. Here I employ “discourse” in a Foucauldian manner to refer to the myriad ways in which the objects of our knowledge are defined
and produced through the languages we employ in our engagement with the world and with others. Discursive formations, in other words, are not neutral; they “construct” the topic and objects of our knowledge; they govern “the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about.” They also influence how ideas are “put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others.” Just as a discursive formation can legitimize certain ways of thinking and acting, they can also profoundly limit and constrain “other ways of talking and conducting ourselves in relation to the topic or constructing knowledge about it.”
76
And it is precisely on this last point where I believe constructivist-inspired projects such as Benhabib’s have failed: in their a priori attack on all essentialist claims-making they have refused to acknowledge the repressive ways in which their own discursive interventions have effectively undermined certain forms of subaltern resistance, and have thus unduly constrained the field of legitimate action for Indigenous peoples in their national liberation struggles.

The same can be also be said about the ways in which the discourse of “culture” has been used by certain segments within the Indigenous community to further exclude and marginalize the status of Native women. What is needed in this case is an explicit acknowledgment of the manner in which the Indian Act has itself come to discursively shape, regulate, and govern how many of us have come to think about Indigenous identity and community belonging. As a result, we have to be cautious that our appeals to “culture” and “tradition” in our contemporary struggles for recognition do not replicate the racist and sexist misrecognitions of the Indian Act and in the process unwittingly reproduce the structure of dispossession we originally set out to challenge.

In sum, then, no discourse on identity should be prematurely cast as either inherently productive or repressive prior to an engaged consideration of the historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts and actors involved. To my mind, paying closer attention to context when studying the underlying dynamics of identity-related struggle might better enable critics, especially those writing from positions of privilege and power, to distinguish between “discourses that naturalize
oppression
and discourses that naturalize
resistance
.”
77
This is particularly relevant from the perspective of Indigenous peoples’ struggles, where activists may sometimes employ what appear to outsiders as essentialist notions of culture and tradition in their efforts to transcend, not reinforce, oppressive structures and practices.

4

Seeing Red

Reconciliation and Resentment

On June 11, 2008, the Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen J. Harper, issued an official apology on behalf of the Canadian state to Indigenous survivors of the Indian residential school system.
1
Characterized as the inauguration of a “new chapter” in the history of Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations in the country, the residential school apology was a highly anticipated and emotionally loaded event. Across the country, Native and non-Native people alike gathered in living rooms, band offices, churches, and community halls to witness and pay homage to this so-called “historic” occasion. Although there was a great deal of Native skepticism toward the apology in the days leading up to it, in its immediate aftermath it appeared that many, if not most, observers felt that Harper’s apology was a genuine and necessary “first step” on the long road to forgiveness and reconciliation.
2

The benefit of the doubt that was originally afforded the authenticity of the prime minister’s apology has since dissipated. Public distrust began to escalate following a well-scrutinized address by Harper at a gathering of the G20 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 25, 2009. It was there that Harper made the somewhat astonishing (but typically arrogant and self-congratulatory)
claim that Canadians had “no history of colonialism.” Harper continued: “We have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.”
3
On October 1, 2009, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, responded to the prime minister’s claim: “The Prime Minister’s statement speaks to the need for greater public education about First Nations and Canadian history. . . . The future cannot be built without due regard to the past, without reconciling the incredible harm and injustice with a genuine commitment to move forward in truth and respect.”
4
In this chapter, I explore some of the issues raised by these two seemingly contradictory events—the residential school apology and call for forgiveness and reconciliation on the one hand, and the selective amnesia of Harper’s G20 address on the other—and how they speak to the current entanglement of settler coloniality with the politics of reconciliation that began to gain traction in Canada during the 1990s.

Over the last three decades, a global industry has emerged promoting the issuing of official apologies advocating “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” as an important precondition for resolving the deleterious social impacts of intrastate violence, mass atrocity, and historical injustice.
5
Originally, this industry was developed in state contexts that sought to undergo a formal “transition” from the violent history of openly authoritarian regimes to more democratic forms of rule—known in the literature as “transitional justice”—but more recently has been imported by somewhat stable, liberal-democratic settler polities like Canada and Australia.
6
In Canada, we have witnessed this relatively recent “reconciliation politics” converge with a slightly older “politics of recognition,” advocating the institutional recognition and accommodation of Indigenous cultural difference as an important means of reconciling the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Political theorist Andrew Schaap explains the convergence of these two discourses well: “In societies divided by a history of political violence, political reconciliation depends on transforming a relation of enmity into one of civic friendship. In such contexts the discourse of
recognition
provides a ready frame in terms of which reconciliation might be conceived.”
7

In Canada “reconciliation” tends to be invoked in three distinct yet interrelated ways when deployed in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination. First, “reconciliation” is frequently used to refer to the diversity of individual or collective practices that Indigenous people undertake
to reestablish a positive “relation
-
to-self” in situations where this relation has been damaged or distorted by some form of symbolic or structural violence. Acquiring or being afforded due “recognition” by another subject (or subjects) is often said to play a fundamental role in facilitating reconciliation in this first sense.
8
Second, “reconciliation” is also commonly referred to as the act of restoring estranged or damaged social and political relationships. It is frequently inferred by proponents of political reconciliation that restoring these relationships requires that individuals and groups work to overcome the debilitating pain, anger, and resentment that frequently persist in the wake of being injured or harmed by a perceived or real injustice.
9
In settler-state contexts, “truth and reconciliation” commissions, coupled with state arrangements that claim to recognize and accommodate Indigenous identity-related differences, are viewed as important institutional means to facilitate reconciliation in these first two senses.
10
These institutional mechanisms are also seen as a crucial way to help evade the cycles of violence that can occur when societal cultural differences are suppressed and when so-called “negative” emotions such as anger and resentment are left to fester within and between disparate social groups.
11
The third notion of “reconciliation” commonly invoked in the Canadian context refers to the process by which things are brought “to agreement, concord, or harmony; the fact of being made consistent or compatible.”
12
As Anishinaabe political philosopher Dale Turner’s recent work reminds us, this third form of reconciliation—the act of rendering things
consistent
—is the one that lies at the core of Canada’s legal and political understanding of term: namely, rendering consistent Indigenous assertions of nationhood with the state’s unilateral assertion of sovereignty over Native peoples’ lands and populations. It is the state’s attempt to impose this third understanding of reconciliation on the institutional and discursive field of Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations that is effectively undermining the realization of the previous two forms of reconciliation.

Thomas Brudholm’s recent book,
Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive
, offers an important critique of the global turn to reconciliation politics that has emerged in the last thirty years. Specifically, Brudholm’s study provides a much-needed “counterpoint” to the “near-hegemonic status” afforded “the logic of forgiveness in the literatures on transitional justice and reconciliation.”
13
Focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Brudholm shows how advocates of transitional justice often base
their normative assumptions about the presumed “good” of forgiveness and reconciliation on a number of uncritical assumptions about the supposed “bad” of harboring reactive emotions like anger and resentment: that these feelings are physically and mentally unhealthy, irrational, retrograde, and, when collectively expressed, prone to producing increased social instability and political violence. Brudholm challenges these assumptions through a fascinating engagement with the writings of essayist and holocaust survivor Jean Améry, whose own work challenges the scathing and very influential portrayal of
ressentiment
as an irredeemably vengeful, reactionary, and backward-looking force by Friedrich Nietzsche in
On the Genealogy of Morals
(1887).
14
According to Brudholm, Améry’s work forces us to consider that under certain conditions a disciplined maintenance of resentment in the wake of historical injustice can signify “the reflex expression of a moral protest” that is as “permissible and admirable as the posture of forgiveness.”
15

In this chapter, I undertake a similar line of argumentation, although with two significant differences. First, as a critique of the field and practice of
transitional justice
, Brudholm’s study is “limited to the
aftermath
of mass atrocities” and to the “
time after
the violence has been brought to an end.”
16
In the following pages, the political import of Indigenous peoples’ emotional responses to settler colonization is instead explored against the “nontransitional” backdrop of the state’s approach to reconciliation that began to explicitly inform government policy following the release of the
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
(RCAP) in 1996.
17
I show that in settler-colonial contexts—where there is no period marking a clear or formal transition from an authoritarian past to a democratic present—state-sanctioned approaches to reconciliation must ideologically manufacture such a transition by allocating the abuses of settler colonization to the dustbins of history, and/or purposely disentangle processes of reconciliation from questions of settler-coloniality as such. Once either or both of these conceptual obfuscations have been accomplished, holding the contradictory position that Canada has “no history of colonialism” following an official government apology to Indigenous survivors of one of the state’s most notoriously brutal colonial institutions begins to make sense; indeed, one could argue that this form of conceptual revisionism is
required
of an approach that attempts to apply transitional justice mechanisms to nontransitional circumstances. In such conditions, reconciliation takes on
a temporal character as the individual and collective process of overcoming the subsequent
legacy
of past abuse, not the abusive colonial structure itself. And what are we to make of those who refuse to forgive and/or reconcile in these situations? They are typically cast as being saddled by the damaging psychological residue of this legacy, of which anger and resentment are frequently highlighted.

The second difference is that I use the work of Frantz Fanon as my central theoretical referent instead of that of Jean Améry. As Améry himself perceptively noted in an important 1969 essay, Fanon held a very nuanced perspective on both the potentially transformative and retrograde aspects of colonized peoples’ “hatred, contempt and resentment” when expressed within and against the subjective and structural features of colonial power.
18
This chapter builds on Fanon’s insights to demonstrate two things. First, far from being a largely disempowering and unhealthy affliction, I show that under certain conditions Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective expressions of anger and resentment can help prompt the very forms of self-affirmative praxis that generate rehabilitated Indigenous subjectivities and decolonized forms of life in ways that the combined politics of recognition and reconciliation has so far proven itself incapable of doing. And second, in light of Canada’s failure to deliver on its emancipatory promise of postcolonial reconciliation, I suggest that what implicitly gets interpreted by the state as Indigenous peoples’
ressentiment
—understood as an incapacitating inability or unwillingness to get over the past—is actually an entirely appropriate manifestation of our
resentment:
a politicized expression of Indigenous anger and outrage directed at a structural and symbolic violence that still structures our lives, our relations with others, and our relationships with land.

I develop this argument in three sections and a conclusion. In the first section, I discuss the ways in which “negative emotions” like anger and resentment get taken up in the literature on forgiveness and reconciliation in Canada. In the next section, I provide a reading of Fanon’s theories of internalized colonialism and decolonization in order to counter the largely unsympathetic interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ negative emotional responses to settler-colonial rule in the Canadian discourse on reconciliation. This section will also provide a historical account of the transformative role played by Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment in generating self-affirmative acts of resistance
and Indigenous direct action that prompted the state to respond with pacifying gestures of recognition and reconciliation. And finally, I provide an analysis of the “turn to reconciliation” in Aboriginal policy following the release of the RCAP report in 1996. Here I develop my claim that Indigenous peoples’ resentment represents a legitimate response to the neocolonial politics of reconciliation that emerged in the wake of RCAP.

Dwelling on the Negative: Resentment and Reconciliation

In common usage, “resentment” is usually referenced negatively to indicate a feeling closely associated with anger.
19
However, where one can be
angry
with any number of things, resentment is typically reserved for and directed against instances of perceived wrongdoing. The
Oxford English Dictionary
, for example, defines resentment as a feeling of “bitter indignation at having been treated
unfairly
.”
20
One could argue, then, that resentment, unlike anger, has an in-built
political
component to it, given that it is often expressed in response to an alleged slight, instance of maltreatment, or injustice. Seen from this angle, resentment can be understood as a particularly virulent expression of
politicized anger
.
21

The political dimension of resentment has not gone unnoticed within the Western philosophical tradition; philosophers such as Adam Smith, John Rawls, Robert Solomon, Jeffrie Murphy, Alice MacLachlan, and Thomas Brudholm (to name only a few) have all written extensively on the “moral” significance of emotions like resentment.
22
In
A Theory of Justice
, for example, Rawls writes that “resentment is a moral feeling. If we resent our having less than others, it must be because we think that their being better off is the result of unjust institutions, or wrongful conduct on their part.”
23
In a similar vein, Jeffrie Murphy argues that resentment can be both a legitimate and valuable expression of anger in response to the unjust abrogation of one’s rights; it is an affective indicator of our sense of self-worth or self-respect.
24
And Alice MacLachlan writes: “In emphasizing the moral function of resentment as one kind of anger . . . philosophers have offered an important service to angry victims of political violence, who are often voiceless except in their ability to articulate and express resentment.”
25
Thomas Brudholm notes that, although these theorists vary regarding “the conditions and circumstances under which
anger or resentment is appropriate,” they nonetheless all draw an important “distinction between excessive and pathological forms of anger and resentment, on the one hand, and appropriate and valuable forms, on the other hand.”
26