Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (25 page)

However, even though Fanon is willing to assign a slightly more substantive value to practices of cultural self-recognition in his post–
Black Skin, White Masks
writings, he does so without abandoning his previous apprehensions entirely. Indeed, one of Fanon’s lingering concerns is that the cultural forms and traditions exuberantly reclaimed and affirmed by the colonized no longer reflect the dynamic systems that existed prior to the colonial encounter: rather, “this culture, once living and open to the future, [has become] closed, fixed in the colonial status.”
86
The problem here is that the cultural practices that the colonized passionately cling to as a source of pride and empowerment can easily become a cluster of antiquated attachments that divert attention away from the present and future needs of the Indigenous population.
87
In other words, what was initially empowering can quickly become a source of pacifying,
ressentiment
-infected nostalgia. This problem is compounded further in the activism of negritude elites like Senghor, whose work, Fanon claims, racializes and abstracts the past cultural achievements of the colonized to such a
degree that it bears little resemblance to the specificity of struggles occurring at the local, national level.
88
What ultimately needs to be realized in both cases, then, whether it be in relation to the self-affirmative activities undertaken by the colonized intellectual or by the grassroots freedom-fighter, is that the “native’s hand-to-hand struggle with his culture” must be geared toward “the total liberation of the national territory.”
89
According to Fanon, it is only under these radically transformed material conditions that a truly
national culture
can emerge;
90
a “fighting culture” that “does not leave intact either the
form or substance
” of previous cultural practices, but instead strives toward the construction of a
totally new set of social, cultural and economic relations
.
91
Insofar as the “plunge into the chasm of the past” provides a possible means of achieving this ultimate end,
92
then Fanon is more willing than he was in his conclusion to
Black Skin, White Masks
to attribute a transformative function to cultural self-affirmation in the fight for freedom against colonial domination.

Conclusion

In her recent book on Anishinaabe political and cultural resurgence,
Danc
ing on Our Turtle’s Back
, Leanne Simpson suggests that while non-Indigenous critical theoretical frameworks still have much to offer our analyses of contemporary settler-colonialism, they are fundamentally limited in their ability to provide insight into what a culturally grounded alternative to colonialism might look like for Indigenous nations. “While theoretically, we have debated whether Audre Lourde’s ‘the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house,’” writes Simpson, “I am interested in a different question.” She continues: “I am not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house, or our own houses.”
93
By now it should be clear that although Fanon saw the revaluation of an Indigenous “past” as an important means of temporarily breaking the colonized free from the interpellative stranglehold of colonial misrecognition, he was less willing to explore the role that critically revitalized traditions might play in the (re)construction of decolonized Indigenous nations. Subsequently, his work tends to treat “the cultural” in a manner inappropriately similar to how Marxists treat the category of “class”: as a transitional form of identification that subaltern groups
must struggle to overcome as soon as they become conscious of its existence as a distinct category of identification. In my concluding chapter I explore a different way of understanding the significance of Indigenous cultural politics in our struggles for national liberation—a
resurgent
approach to Indigenous decolonization that builds on the value and insights of our past in our efforts to secure a noncolonial present and future.

Conclusion

Lessons from Idle No More: The Future of Indigenous Activism

In writing this book I set out to problematize the increasingly commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state can be reconciled via a liberal “politics of recognition.” I characterized the “politics of recognition” as a recognition-based approach to reconciling Indigenous peoples’ assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity-related claims through the negotiation of settlements over issues such as land, economic development, and self-government. I argued that this orientation to the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still
colonial
insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority.

My conceptualization of settler-colonialism as a structure of domination predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and political authority drew significantly from two theoretical resources: Karl Marx’s writings on the “primitive accumulation” of capital and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial critique of Hegel’s master/slave parable when applied to colonial situations. With respect to Marx, I argued that three issues must be addressed within his work to make his writings on colonialism relevant for analyzing the relationship between Indigenous peoples and liberal settler polities like Canada. First, I argued that Marx’s thesis on primitive accumulation must be stripped of its rigidly
temporal
character; that is, rather than positing primitive accumulation as some historically situated, inaugural set of events that set the stage for the development of the capitalist mode of production through colonial expansion,
we should see it as an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present.
Settler-colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity
. Second, I argued that Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation must be stripped of its early
normative developmentalist
character. While it is correct to view primitive accumulation as the condition of possibility for the development and ongoing reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, it is incorrect to view it as a
necessary
condition for developing the forms of critical consciousness and associated modes of life that ought to inform the construction of alternatives to capitalism in settler-colonial contexts. I also suggested that Marx himself came to acknowledge the problematic character of this early formulation of his thesis and worked to correct it in the last decade of his life. And finally, I argued that the forms of colonial power associated with primitive accumulation need not be understood as strictly coercive, repressive, or explicitly violent in nature; rather, the practices of dispossession central to the maintenance of settler-colonialism in liberal democratic contexts like Canada rely as much on the
productive
character of colonial power as it does on the coercive authority of the settler state. Seen from this angle, settler-colonialism should not be seen as deriving its reproductive force solely from its strictly repressive or violent features, but rather from its ability to produce
forms of life
that make settler-colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seem natural.

To tease out the productive character of settler-colonial power I turned to the theoretical contribution of Frantz Fanon. I used Fanon’s work because it implicates the role played by
recognition
in the reproduction of settler-colonial forms of rule in a manner that still resonates today. More specifically, I used Fanon’s critical engagement with the dialectic of recognition theorized in Hegel’s master/slave narrative to identify the neocolonial function played by contemporary recognition politics in maintaining the settler-colonial relationship between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state. I drew three insights from Fanon in particular. First, I claimed that Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s theory of recognition convincingly unpacks the ways in which delegated exchanges of political recognition from the colonizer to the colonized usually ends up being structurally determined by and in the interests of the colonizer. Second, Fanon also identifies the subtle ways in which colonized populations often come to develop what he called “psycho-affective” attachments to these circumscribed, master-sanctioned forms of delegated recognition. For
Fanon, these psycho-affective or ideological attachments create an impression of “naturalness” to the colonial condition, which he referred to as “internalization” or “internalized” colonialism. Third, Fanon showed how colonized populations, despite the totalizing power of colonialism, are often able to turn these internalized forms of colonial recognition into expressions of Indigenous self-empowerment through the reclamation and revitalization of precolonial social relations and cultural traditions. In the end, however, Fanon viewed these practices of Indigenous cultural self-empowerment, or
self-recognition
, as insufficient for decolonization: they constitute a “means” but not an “end.”

In this chapter I conclude my analysis by turning our attention to the contributions that Indigenous scholars and activists, particularly but not necessarily limited to those working within the emergent theory and practice of
Indigenous resurgence
, have added to our understanding of the entanglement of contemporary recognition politics with the operation of settler-colonial power.
1
I feel that it is important to conclude my study in this way because Indigenous contributions to anticolonial thought and practice have been generally underappreciated for their transformative value and insights. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, even Fanon viewed the decolonial potential of Indigenous cultural politics as fundamentally undercut by its
ressentiment
-directed orientation toward the past. “We should not therefore be content to delve into the people’s past to find
concrete examples
to counter colonialism’s endeavour to distort or depreciate,” writes Fanon in
The Wretched of the Earth
.
2
“Colonialism will never be put to shame by exhibiting unknown cultural treasures under its nose.”
3
I suggest that it is on this point that we reach a limit to Fanon’s anticolonial analysis, especially when applied to the settler-colonial dynamics that inform our current circumstances. Although Fanon eschews an evolutionary anthropological theory of historical development in which societies are viewed as developing along a linear path from primitive to civilized, he remains wedded to a
dialectical
conception of social transformation that privileges the “new” over the “old.” When this dialectic is applied to colonial situations, the result, I claim, is a conceptualization of “culture” that mimics how Marxists understand “class”: as a
transitional
category of identification that colonized peoples must struggle to
transcend
as soon as they become conscious of its existence as a form of identification. This view simply does not provide much insight into either what motivates Indigenous resistance to
settler colonization or into the cultural foundations upon which Indigenous noncolonial alternatives might be constructed.

The concluding thoughts I offer in this chapter are organized into three sections. In the first one, I examine the work of two theorists of Indigenous resurgence, Taiaiake Alfred and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and parse out their significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamics that shape settler-colonialism and Indigenous decolonization in Canada. In the second section, I use the emergent Idle No More movement as a backdrop against which to explore what a resurgent decolonial politics might look like in practice. And finally, I conclude with “Five Theses on Indigenous Resurgence and Decolonization,” in light of what we have learned throughout the preceding chapters.

Indigenous Resurgence

To my mind, the most explicit theorization of the Indigenous resurgence paradigm can be found in the writings of two Indigenous scholar/activists working here in Canada: Mohawk political scientist Taiaiake Alfred and Anishinaabe feminist Leanne Simpson.
4
Like Fanon’s quasi-Nietzschean invocation of self-affirmation in
Black Skin, White Masks
, both Alfred and Simpson start from a position that calls on Indigenous people and communities to “turn away” from the assimilative reformism of the liberal recognition approach and to instead build our national liberation efforts on the revitalization of “traditional” political values and practices.
5
“We [must] choose to
turn away
from the legacies of colonialism,” writes Alfred in
Wasáse
, “and take on the challenge of creating a new reality for ourselves and for our people.”
6
For Simpson, decolonization requires that Indigenous communities reorient our collective labor from attempts to transform “the colonial outside into a flourishment of the
Indigenous
inside.” In other words, we need to decolonize “on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians.”
7

Unlike Fanon’s notion of self-affirmation, however, the resurgence paradigm defended by Alfred and Simpson does not require us to dialectically transcend Indigenous practices of the past once the affirmation of these practices has served to reestablish us as historical protagonists in the present. For Alfred, the struggle to regenerate “traditional values” is assigned a far more substantive value: “We have a responsibility to recover, understand, and preserve
these values, not only because they represent a unique contribution to the history of ideas, but because renewal of respect for traditional values is the only
lasting solution
to the political, economic, and social problems that beseech our people.”
8
The same goes for Simpson’s work: “Building diverse, nation-culture-based resurgences means significantly reinvesting in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions; articulating and living our legal traditions; language learning; creating and using our artistic and performance based traditions. [Decolonization] requires us to reclaim the very best practices of our traditional cultures, knowledge systems and lifeways in the dynamic, fluid, compassionate, respectful context in which they were originally generated.”
9
In
Peace, Power, Righteousness
, Alfred refers to these ethico-political practices of Indigenous resurgence as a form of “self-conscious traditionalism”—that is, a self-reflective program of culturally grounded desubjectification that aims to undercut the interplay between subjectivity and structural domination that help maintain settler-colonial relationships in contexts absent pure force.
10

For Alfred, colonial recognition politics serves the imperatives of capitalist accumulation by
appearing
to address its colonial history through symbolic acts of redress while in actuality “further entrenching in law and practice the real bases of its control.”
11
As we have seen, over the last forty years Canada has recognized a host of rights specific to Aboriginal communities, including most importantly to land and self-government. Canada has always used this recognition, however, as evidence of its ultimately just relationship with Indigenous communities, even though this recognition continues to be structured with colonial power interests in mind. Simpson levels a similar charge against the more recent “turn to reconciliation” in Indigenous politics. “As reconciliation has become institutionalized,” writes Simpson, “I worry our participation will benefit the state in an asymmetrical fashion.”
12
In Simpson’s view, the state’s approach to reconciliation serves to neutralize the legitimacy of Indigenous justice claims by offering statements of regret and apology for harms narrowly conceived of as occurring in the past, thus off-loading Canada’s responsibility to address structural injustices that continue to inform our settler-colonial present. In doing so the state can claim “that the historical ‘wrong’ has been ‘righted’ and further transformation is not needed.”
13
In the end, the optics created by these grand gestures of recognition and reconciliation suggests to the dominant society that we no longer have a legitimate
ground to stand on in expressing our grievances. Instead, Indigenous people appear unappreciative, angry, and resentful, as we saw in chapter 4.

The optics of recognition and reconciliation can also have a colonial impact on Indigenous subjects. For both Alfred and Simpson, settler-colonial rule is a form of
governmentality
: a relatively diffuse set of governing relations that operate through a circumscribed mode of recognition that structurally ensures continued access to Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources by producing neocolonial subjectivities that coopt Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession. According to this view, contemporary colonialism works
through
rather than entirely
against
freedom: In the “new relationship,” writes Alfred, the “rusty cage [of colonialism] may be broken, but a new chain has been strung around the indigenous neck;
it offers more room to move, but it still ties our people to white men pulling on the strong end
.”
14
Alfred’s concern here is that many Indigenous people, particularly those leaders and community organizers heavily invested in the colonial politics of recognition, have come to associate this externally imposed field of maneuver with freedom or decolonization itself.

The biopolitics of settler-colonial recognition can also problematically inform our efforts at Indigenous resurgence. For both authors, recognizing this demands that we remain cognizant of the pitfalls associated with retreating into an uncritical essentialism in our practices of cultural revitalization. As Alfred states in
Peace, Power, Righteousness
: “Working within a traditional framework, we must acknowledge the fact that traditions change, and that any particular notion that constitutes ‘tradition’ will be contested.”
15
A similar insistence on cultural dynamism informs Simpson’s work. Resurgence does not “literally mean returning to the past,” insists Simpson, “but rather re-creating the cultural and political flourishment of the past to support the well being of our contemporary citizens.”
16
For Simpson this requires that we reclaim “the fluidity of our traditions, not the rigidity of colonialism.”
17
Acknowledging culture’s malleability, however, does not mean that we cannot still identify certain “beliefs, values and principles that form the persistent core of a community’s culture,” writes Alfred. It is this “traditional framework that we must use as the basis on which to build a better society.” The resurgence Alfred and Simpson advocate is thus a
critical
one: an intellectual, social, political, and artistic movement geared toward the self-reflective revitalization of those “values, principles and other cultural elements that are best suited to the larger
contemporary political and economic reality.”
18
Resurgence, in this view, draws critically on the past with an eye to radically transform the colonial power relations that have come to dominate our present.