Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (19 page)

Discussions within the field of recognition and reconciliation politics, however, rarely treat reactive emotions like anger and resentment even-handedly. Indeed, in such contexts, anger and resentment are more likely to be seen as pathologies that need to be overcome. However, given the genealogical association of feelings like resentment with political and moral protest, why have they received such bad press in the literature on reconciliation? I think there are at least two reasons to consider here. First, as several scholars have noted, in the transitional justice and reconciliation literature our understanding of resentment has been deeply shaded by Nietzsche’s profoundly influential characterization of
ressentiment
in
On the Genealogy of Morals
.
27
There,
ressentiment
is portrayed as a reactive, backward, and passive orientation to the world, which, for Nietzsche, signifies the abnegation of freedom as self-valorizing, life-affirming action. To be saddled with
ressentiment
is to be irrationally preoccupied with and incapacitated by offences suffered in the past.
“Ressentiment,”
writes Jean Améry, “nails” its victims to “the past,” it “blocks the exit . . . to the future” and “twists” the “time-sense” of those trapped in it.
28
This theme is taken up again in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, where Nietzsche describes the so-called “man of
ressentiment
” as an “angry
spectator
of everything past.”
29
For Nietzsche,
ressentiment
is an expression of one’s “impotence” against “that which
has been
.”
30
For the resenting subject, “memory” is a “festering wound.”
31
In Nietzsche’s view, to wallow in resentment is to deny one’s capacity to actively “forget,” to “let go,” to
get on with life
.
32
In the third section below I show how state reconciliation policy in Canada is deeply invested in the view that Indigenous peoples suffer from
ressentiment
in a way not entirely unlike Nietzsche describes.

The second reason why negative emotions like anger and resentment find few defenders in the field of reconciliation politics is because they sometimes
can
manifest themselves in unhealthy and disempowering ways. My argument here does not deny this. Individual narratives highlighting the perils associated with clinging to one’s anger and resentment appear too frequently in the Canadian reconciliation literature to do so. Consider, for example, the following account by Ojibwe author Richard Wagamese, which speaks to the
personal necessity of overcoming anger and resentment as a precondition in his own healing journey:

Taken together, these are all very serious concerns. It makes no sense at all to affirm the worth of resentment over a politics of recognition and reconciliation if doing so increases the likelihood of reproducing internalized forms of violence. Nor could one possibly affirm the political significance of Nietzschean
ressentiment
if doing so means irrationally chaining ourselves “to the past.” While I recognize that Indigenous peoples’ negative emotional responses to settler colonization can play out in some of these problematic ways, it is important to recognize that they do not always do so. As we shall see in the next section, these affective reactions can also lead to forms of anticolonial resistance grounded on transformed Indigenous political subjectivities. I suggest that the transformative potential of these emotions is also why Frantz Fanon refused to dismiss or condemn them; instead he demanded that they be
understood
, that their transformative potential be
harnessed
, and that their structural referent be
identified
and
uprooted
.

The Resentment of the Colonized and the Rise of Reconciliation Politics in Canada

Understanding Fanon’s views regarding the political significance of what he calls “emotional factors” in the formation of anticolonial subjectivities and decolonizing practices requires that we briefly revisit his theory of internalized colonialism.
34
Recall from chapter 1 that, for Fanon, in contexts where the reproduction of colonial rule does not rely solely on force, it requires the production of “colonial subjects” that acquiesce to the forms of power that have been imposed on them. “Internalization” thus occurs when the social relations
of colonialism, along with the forms of recognition and representation that serve to legitimate them, come to be seen as “true” or “natural” to the colonized themselves. “The status of ‘native’ is a neurosis,” explains Sartre in his preface to
The Wretched of the Earth
, “introduced and maintained by the colonist in the colonized
with their consent
.”
35
Similar to how the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci viewed the reproduction of class dominance in situations absent ongoing state violence, colonial hegemony is maintained through a combination of coercion and consent.
36
Under such conditions, colonial domination appears “more subtle, less bloody,” to use Fanon’s words.
37

For Fanon, this “psychological-economic structure” is what produces the condition of stagnancy and inertia that characterizes the colonial world.
38
The Wretched of the Earth
, for example, is littered with passages that highlight the fundamentally passive and lethargic condition that the colonial situation produces. The “colonial world,” writes Fanon, is “compartmentalized, Manichaean and
petrified
”; it is a world in which the “colonial subject” is “penned in,” lies “coiled and robbed,” taught “to remain in his place and not overstep his limits.”
39
In
Black Skin, White Masks
, Fanon describes this Manichaean relation as “locked” or “fixed” by the assumptions of racial and cultural inferiority and superiority held by the colonized and colonizer, respectively.
40
Unlike racist arguments that attribute the supposed inertia of colonized societies to the cultural and technological underdevelopment of the colonized themselves, Fanon identifies the colonial social structure as the source of this immobility.
41

Although the internalized negative energy produced by this “hostile” situation will first express itself against the colonized’s “own people”—“This is the period when black turns on black,” writes Fanon, when colonial violence “assumes a black or Arab face”—over time, it begins to incite a negative
reaction
in the colonial subject.
42
It is my claim that this reaction indicates a breakdown of the psychological structure of internalized colonialism. The colonized subject, degraded, impoverished, and abused, begins to look at the colonist’s world of “lights and paved roads” with envy, contempt, and resentment.
43
The colonized begin to
desire
what has been denied them: land, freedom, and dignity. They begin dreaming of revenge, of taking their oppressor’s place:

Although Fanon is quick to insist that the “legitimate desire for revenge” borne of the colonized subject’s nascent “hatred” and “resentment” toward the colonist cannot alone “nurture a war of liberation,” I suggest that these negative emotions nonetheless mark an important turning point in the individual and collective coming-to-consciousness of the colonized.
45
More specifically, I think that they represent the
externalization
of that which was previously
internalized
: a purging, if you will, of the so-called “inferiority complex” of the colonized subject. In the context of internalized colonialism, the material conditions of poverty and violence that condition the colonial situation appear muted to the colonized because they are understood to be the product of one’s own cultural deficiencies. In such a context, the formation of a colonial “enemy”—that is, a source external to ourselves that we come to associate with “our misfortunes”—signifies a collapse of this internalized colonial psychic structure.
46
For Fanon, only once this rupture has occurred—or, to use Jean Améry’s phrase, once these “sterile” emotions “come to recognize themselves” for “what they really are . . . consequences of social repression”
47
—can the colonized then cast their “exasperated hatred and rage in this new direction.”
48

Importantly, Fanon insists that these reactive emotions can also prompt the colonized to revalue and affirm Indigenous cultural traditions and social practices that are systematically denigrated yet never fully destroyed in situations of colonial rule. After years of dehumanization the colonized begin to resent the assumed “supremacy of white values” that has served to ideologically justify their continued exploitation and domination. “In the period of decolonization,” writes Fanon, “the colonized masses thumb their noses at these very values, shower them with insults and vomit them up.”
49
Eventually, this newfound resentment of colonial values prompts the colonized to affirm the worth of their own traditions, of their own civilizations, which in turn generates feelings of pride and self-certainty unknown in the colonial period. For Fanon, this “anti-racist racism” or “the determination to defends one’s skin” is “characteristic of the colonized’s response to colonial oppression” and
provides them with the motivating “reason the join the struggle.”
50
Although Fanon ultimately saw this example of Indigenous cultural self-recognition as an expression akin to Nietzschean
ressentiment
—that is, as a limited and retrograde “reaction” to colonial power—he nonetheless claimed it as necessary for the same reason he affirmed the transformative potential of emotional factors like anger and resentment: they signify an important “break” in the forms of colonial subjection that have hitherto kept the colonized “in their place.”
51
In the following chapters, I delve further into what I claim to be Fanon’s overly “instrumental” view of culture’s value vis-à-vis decolonization in light of the more substantive position held by contemporary theorists and activists of Indigenous resurgence.

In the context of internalized colonialism, then, it would appear that the emergence of reactive emotions like anger and resentment can indicate a breakdown of colonial subjection and thus open up the possibility of developing alternative subjectivities and anticolonial practices. Indeed, if we look at the historical context that informed the coupling of recognition with reconciliation politics following Canada’s launch of RCAP in 1991, we see a remarkably similar process taking place. Let us now turn briefly to this important history of struggle.

Managing the Crisis: Reconciliation and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

The federal government was forced to establish RCAP in the wake of two national crises that erupted in the tumultuous “Indian summer” of 1990. The first involved the legislative stonewalling of the Meech Lake Accord by Cree Manitoba Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Elijah Harper. The Meech Lake Accord was a failed constitutional amendment package negotiated in 1987 by the then prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, and the ten provincial premiers. The process was the federal government’s attempt to bring Quebec “back in” to the constitutional fold in the wake of the province’s refusal to accept the constitutional repatriation deal of 1981, which formed the basis of the the Constitution Act, 1982. Indigenous opposition to Meech Lake was staunch and vocal, in large part due to the fact that the process failed to recognize the political concerns and aspirations of First Nations.
52
In a disruptive act of legislative protest, Elijah Harper was able to prevent the province from endorsing the package within the three-year ratification deadline stipulated in
the Constitution Act. The agreement subsequently tanked because it failed to gain the required ratification of all ten provinces, which is required of all proposed constitutional amendments.
53

The second crisis involved a seventy-eight-day armed “standoff” beginning on July 11, 1990, between the Mohawk nation of Kanesatake, the Quebec provincial police (Sûreté du Québec, or SQ), and the Canadian armed forces near the town of Oka, Quebec. On June 30, 1990, the municipality of Oka was granted a court injunction to dismantle a peaceful barricade erected by the people of Kanesatake in an effort to defend their sacred lands from further encroachment by non-Native developers. The territory in question was slotted for development by a local golf course, which planned on extending nine holes onto land the Mohawks had been fighting to have recognized as their own for almost three hundred years.
54
Eleven days later, on July 11, one hundred heavily armed members of the SQ stormed the community. The police invasion culminated in a twenty-four-second exchange of gunfire that killed SQ Corporal Marcel Lemay.
55
In a display of solidarity, the neighboring Mohawk nation of Kahnawake set up their own barricades, including one that blocked the Mercier Bridge leading into the greater Montreal area. Galvanized by the Mohawk resistance, Indigenous peoples from across the continent followed suit, engaging in a diverse array of solidarity actions that ranged from information leafleting to the establishment of peace encampments to the erection of blockades on several major Canadian transport corridors, both road and rail. Although polls conducted during the standoff showed some support by non-Native Canadians outside of Quebec for the Mohawk cause,
56
most received their information about the so-called “Oka Crisis” through the corporate media, which overwhelmingly represented the event as a “law and order” issue fundamentally undermined by Indigenous peoples’ uncontrollable anger and resentment.
57