Authors: Glen Sean Coulthard
Tags: #SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
For many Indigenous people and their supporters, however, these two national crises were seen as the inevitable culmination of a near decade-long escalation of Native frustration with a colonial state that steadfastly refused to uphold the rights that had been recently “recognized and affirmed” in section 35 (1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. By the late 1980s this frustration was clearly boiling over, resulting in a marked rise in First Nations’ militancy and land-based direct action.
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The following are some of the better-documented examples from the time:
1. The Innu occupation and blockade of the Canadian Air Force/NATO base at Goose Bay in present-day Labrador. The occupation was led largely by Innu women to challenge the further dispossession of their territories and subsequent destruction of their land-based way of life by the military industrial complex’s encroachment onto their homeland of Nitassinan.
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2. The Lubicon Cree struggle against oil and gas development on their traditional territories in present-day Alberta. The Lubicon Cree have been struggling to protect a way of life threatened by intensified nonrenewable development on their homelands since at least 1939, when they first learned that they were left out of the negotiations that led to the signing of Treaty 8 in 1899. In defend ing their continued right to the land, the community has engaged in a number of very public protests, including a well-publicized boycott of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and the associated Glenbow Museum exhibit,
The Spirit Sings
.
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3. First Nations blockades in British Columbia. Through the 1980s First Nations in present-day British Columbia grew extremely frustrated with the painfully slow pace of the federal government’s comprehensive land claims process and the province’s racist refusal to recognize Aboriginal title within its claimed borders. The result was a decade’s worth of very disruptive and publicized blockades, which at their height in 1990 were such a common occurrence that Vancouver newspapers felt the need to publish traffic advisories identifying delays caused by First Nation roadblocks in the province’s interior. Many of the blockades were able to halt resource extraction on Native land for protracted periods of time.
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4. The Algonquins of Barriere Lake. By 1989 the Algonquins of Barrier Lake were embroiled in a struggle to protect their way of life by resisting clear-cut logging operations within their traditional territories in present-day Quebec. Under the leadership of customary chief Jean-Maurice Matchewan, the community used blockades to successfully impede clear-cutting activities adversely affecting their lands and community.
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5. The Temagami First Nation blockades of 1988 and 1989 in present-day Ontario. The Temagami blockades were set up to protect their nation’s homeland from further encroachment by non-Native development. The blockades of 1988–89 were the most recent assertions of Temagami sovereignty in over a century-long struggle to protect the community’s right to land and freedom from colonial settlement and proliferating economic development.
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From the vantage point of the colonial state, by the time the seventy-eight-day standoff at Kanesatake started, things were already out of control in Indian Country. If settler-state stability and authority is required to ensure “certainty” over Indigenous lands and resources to create an investment climate friendly for expanded capitalist accumulation, then the barrage of Indigenous practices of disruptive countersovereignty that emerged with increased frequency in the 1980s was an embarrassing demonstration that Canada no longer had its shit together with respect to managing the so-called “Indian Problem.” On top of this, the material form that these expressions of Indigenous sovereignty took on the ground—
the blockade
, explicitly erected to impede the power of state and capital from entering and leaving Indigenous territories respectively—must have been particularly troubling to the settler-colonial establishment. All of this activity was an indication that Indigenous people and communities were no longer willing to wait for Canada (or even their own leaders) to negotiate a just relationship with them in good faith. In Fanon’s terms, Indigenous peoples were no longer willing to “remain in their place.”
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There was also growing concern that Indigenous youth in particular were no longer willing to play by Canada’s rules—especially regarding the potential use of violence—when it came to advancing their communities’ rights and interests. As Georges Erasmus, then national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, warned in 1988: “Canada, if you do not deal with this generation of leaders, then we cannot promise that you are going to like the kind of violent political action that we can just about guarantee the next generation is going to bring to you.” Consider this “a warning,” Erasmus continued: “We want to let you know that you’re playing with fire. We may be the last generation of leaders that are prepared to sit down and peacefully negotiate our concerns with you.”
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Erasmus’s warning was ignored, and the siege at Kanasatake occurred two years later.
In the wake of having to engage in one of the largest and costliest military operations since the Korean War, the federal government announced on August 23, 1991, that a royal commission would be established with a sprawling sixteen-point mandate to investigate the abusive relationship that had clearly developed between Indigenous peoples and the state.
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Published two years behind schedule in November 1996, the $58-million, five-volume, approximately four-thousand-page
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
offers a vision of reconciliation between Aboriginal peoples and
Canada based on the core principles of “mutual recognition, mutual respect, sharing and mutual responsibility.”
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Of the 440 recommendations made by RCAP, the following are some of the more noteworthy:
Legislation, including issuing a new Royal Proclamation, stating Canada’s commitment to a new relationship with companion legislation establishing a new treaty process and recognition of Aboriginal Nations’ governments;
Recognition of an Aboriginal order of government, subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with authority over matters relating to the good government and welfare of Aboriginal peoples and their territories;
Replacement of the federal Department of Indian Affairs with two departments, one to implement the new relationship with Aboriginal nations and one to provide services to non-self-governing communities;
Creation of an Aboriginal parliament;
Expansion of the Aboriginal land and resource base;
Recognition of Metis self-government, provision of a land base, and recognition of Metis rights to hunt and fish on Crown land;
Initiatives to address social, education, health, and housing needs, including the training of ten thousand health professionals over a ten-year period, the establishment of an Aboriginal peoples’ university, and recognition of Aboriginal peoples’ authority over child welfare.
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RCAP’s vision of a reconciled relationship premised on mutual recognition is not without flaw—indeed, many critics have convincingly argued that its vision still ultimately situates Indigenous lands and political authority in a subordinate position within the political and economic framework of Canadian sovereignty.
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However, RCAP still offers the most comprehensive set of recommendations, informed by five years of research involving 178 days of public hearings in 96 communities across Canada, aimed at reforming the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state to date. The extensive public consultations employed by RCAP subsequently produced a set of recommendations with a significant degree of democratic legitimacy to them, especially to those Indigenous people and communities who would be most affected by RCAP’s proposals. At the very least, then, the RCAP report provides a potentially productive point of entry into the much more challenging conversation that we need to collectively have about what it will take to truly
decolonize the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. This conversation has yet to happen.
The decade of heightened First Nations militancy that culminated in the resistance at Kanesatake created the political and cultural context that RCAP’s call for recognition and reconciliation sought to mitigate—namely, the simmering anger and resentment of the colonized transformed into a resurgent affirmation of Indigenous difference that threatened to disrupt settler-colonialism’s sovereign claim over Indigenous peoples and our lands. In light of this, to suggest that we replace these emotions by a more a conciliatory and constructive attitude like “forgiveness” seems misplaced to me.
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Of course, individual and collective expressions of anticolonial anger and resentment can be destructive and harmful to relationships; but these emotional forces are rarely, if ever, as destructive and violent as the colonial relationship they critically call into question. “The responsibility for violence,” argues Taiaiake Alfred, “begins and ends with the state, not with the people who are challenging the inherent injustices perpetrated by the state.”
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Yet, as the history of First Nations’ struggle that led to RCAP demonstrates, these emotions can also play an important role in generating practices of resistance and cultural resurgence, both of which are required to build a more just relationship with non-Indigenous peoples on and in relation to the lands that we now share. I return to this discussion in my concluding chapter.
Righteous Resentment? The Failure of Reconciliation from Gathering Strength to Canada’s Residential School Apology
The critical importance of Indigenous peoples’ emotional reactions to settler colonization appears even more pronounced in light of Canada’s problematic approach to conceptualizing and implementing reconciliation in the wake of the RCAP report. There have been two broad criticisms of the federal government’s approach to reconciling its relationship with Indigenous peoples: the first involves the state’s rigid historical temporalization of the problem in need of reconciling (colonial injustice), which in turn leads to, second, the current politics of reconciliation’s inability to adequately transform the structure of dispossession that continues to frame Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the state.
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Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox captures these concerns well when she writes that “by conflating specific unjust events, policies, and laws with
‘history,’ what is unjust becomes temporally separate from the present, unchangeable. This narrows options for restitution: we cannot change the past.”
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In such a context, I argue that Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment represents an entirely understandable—and, in Fanon’s words, “legitimate”—response to our settler-colonial present.
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The federal government officially responded to the recommendations of RCAP in January of 1998 with
Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan
.
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Claiming to “build on” RCAP’s core principles of “mutual respect, mutual recognition, mutual responsibility, and sharing,”
Gathering Strength
begins with a “Statement of Reconciliation” in which the Government of Canada recognizes “the mistakes and injustices of the past” in order “to set a new course in its policies for Aboriginal peoples.”
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This is the first policy statement by the federal government that explicitly applies the conceptual language typically associated with “transitional justice” to the nontransitional context of a formally liberal democratic settler state. The result, I suggest, is an approach to reconciliation that goes out of its way to fabricate a sharp divide between Canada’s unscrupulous “past” and the unfortunate “legacy” this past has produced for Indigenous people and communities in the present.
The policy implications of the state’s historical framing of colonialism are troubling. If there is no colonial present, as
Gathering Strength
insists, but only a colonial past that continues to have adverse effects on Indigenous people and communities, then the federal government need not undertake the actions required to transform the current institutional and social relationships that have been shown to produce the suffering we currently see reverberating at pandemic levels within and across Indigenous communities today.
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Rather than addressing these structural issues, state policy has instead focused its reconciliation efforts on repairing the psychologically injured or damaged status of Indigenous people themselves. Sam McKegney links this policy orientation to the increased public interest placed on the “discourse of healing” in the 1990s, which positioned Aboriginal
people
as the “primary objects of study rather than the system of acculturative violence.”
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Hence, the only concrete monetary commitment made in
Gathering Strength
includes a one-time grant payment of $350 million allocated “for community-based healing as a first step to deal with the legacy of physical and sexual abuse at residential schools.”
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The grant was used to establish the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in March of 1998.
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The Conservative government of Canada announced in
2010 that additional funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation would not be provided.
According to Taiaiake Alfred, Canada’s approach to reconciliation has clearly failed to implement the “massive restitution, including land, financial transfers, and other forms of assistance to compensate for past and continuing injustices against our peoples.”
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The state’s lack of commitment in this regard is particularly evident in
Gathering Strength
’s stated position on Canada’s land claims and self-government policies. Rather than affirm Aboriginal title and substantially redistribute lands and resources to Indigenous communities through a renewed treaty process, or recognize Indigenous autonomy and redistribute political authority from the state to Indigenous nations based on the principle of Indigenous self-determination,
Gathering Strength
essentially reiterates, more or less unmodified, its present policy position as evidence of the essentially just nature of the current relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state.