Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (11 page)

Not coincidentally, as the federal government prepared to establish a territorial bureaucracy in Yellowknife, excitement was mounting over the possibility of future petroleum discoveries off the northern shores of Canada and the United States.
23
As it turned out, the excitement was well founded, and in 1968 a huge reservoir of oil and natural gas was discovered beneath Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Almost immediately, Canada started fielding plans from a consortium of corporations to construct a multibillion-dollar pipeline that would
transport the gas via the Mackenzie River Valley to markets throughout southern Canada and the United States.
24
As the federal government stated in 1969: “From the first realization of the magnitude of the Prudhoe Bay find, it [had] been considered likely that . . . gas from the field would . . . find its way to markets in the USA by a pipeline through Canada.”
25
At the time, the estimated cost of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline would have established it as the largest private sector development project in the history of Canada, and quite possibly the world.
26

Unfortunately, for the Dene, Inuit, and Métis of the area, the proposed right-of-way for the pipeline—along with a massive infrastructure of roads, airstrips, camps, gravel pits, storage sites, stream/river crossings, and gas plants—would cut south across the entire western half of our homeland.
27
All of this meant little to the federal and territorial governments, both of which would at the time maintain their “tradition of ignoring native demands in the north.”
28
Although the majority of Dene, Inuit, and Métis overwhelmingly rejected the idea of an imposed pipeline development from the outset, these communities were not initially provided with a means to formally voice their opposition. As Edgar Dosman put it, at the time “no channels existed for the articulation of [Native] concerns. They had no way of knowing what was going on, or what decisions had already been taken. Yet pipeline and resource decisions would change and probably destroy their traditions and way-of-life.”
29

The federal government’s ability to completely ignore the voices of the North’s Indigenous population would soon suffer a major setback, however. In 1969, when sixteen Dene chiefs convened at Fort Smith under the sponsorship of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, it was decided that the Dene needed a more independent and aggressive political body to represent their communities’ concerns. It was at this meeting that leadership established the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, or IB-NWT (renamed the Dene Nation in 1978). The Inuvialuit followed suit and established the Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement, or COPE, in 1970. In 1971 the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada was formed to address the concerns of all Inuit in Canada, including those within the NWT. And finally, in 1972 the Metis Association of the Northwest Territories was set up to represent the interests of the Métis and nonstatus Dene population. Although each organization differed in its specific concerns and visions regarding the scope of northern development, all three would nonetheless mount a push to defend
the interests of Indigenous peoples against the vision of economic and political expansion that state and industry began to aggressively impose the previous decade.
30

For the Dene, making such a push would emerge as one of the IB-NWT’s first major orders of business. This culminated in 1973, when Fort Smith chief François Paulette, along with fifteen other chiefs represented by the IB-NWT, filed a “caveat” with the Northwest Territories Registrar of Land Titles, claiming a Dene interest in more than one million square kilometers of the NWT.
31
The Crown responded by challenging the Dene right to file the caveat, but later that year Justice William G. Morrow of the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories decided that they had “a potentially legitimate case and at least had a right to be heard.”
32
In his subsequent decision, Justice Morrow ruled in favor of the Dene, claiming that the “indigenous people” had a definite interest in the land covered by the caveat, and that “they have what is known as aboriginal rights.”
33
More importantly, however, Morrow concluded that historical evidence suggested that it was unlikely that the Dene had knowingly extinguished their title to the lands covered by Treaties 8 and 11, which they had negotiated with the Crown in 1900 and 1921, respectively.
34
Although the case was eventually appealed and subsequently thrown out on a technicality, the questions raised by Justice Morrow regarding the continued existence of Aboriginal title were never challenged at appeal.

Two major developments arose in the aftermath of this push of early 1970s Native activism. First, on August 8, 1973, the month before Justice Morrow rendered his decision in
Re: Paulette
, the federal government announced its new comprehensive land-claims policy.
35
This announcement, which emerged in the context of heightened Native concerns over the course of northern industrialization, widespread First Nations resistance to the federal government’s 1969 “White Paper” on Indian policy, and the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1973
Calder
decision, essentially reversed the state’s fifty-two-year policy of refusing to address Native land grievances where questions surrounding the existence of Aboriginal title remained open. Because the Dene had essentially asserted in filing their caveat that they had never extinguished their political rights or legal title to their traditional territories, despite having signed Treaties 8 and 11, the Crown proceeded with our claim under its new policy, which was set up to deal with cases “based on the assertion of continuing Aboriginal title to lands and resources.” The thrust of the comprehensive claims policy,
which was reaffirmed in 1981, is to “exchange the claims to undefined Aboriginal rights for a clearly defined package of rights and benefits set out in a settlement agreement.”
36

The second development was the establishment of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, also known as the “Berger Inquiry.” Realizing that it could no longer simply disregard the rights of northern Indigenous peoples, the Crown agreed to sponsor a “commission of inquiry” to investigate the environmental and social impacts potentially posed by the construction of the Mackenzie Valley project. Under political pressure from the New Democratic Party, the Trudeau administration somewhat reluctantly selected Justice Thomas Berger—an outspoken environmentalist and Native rights advocate—to head the investigation. Beginning in the summer of 1975, the commission traveled across Canada and the North, recording the statements, opinions and concerns of hundreds of expert witnesses and nearly a thousand individuals who would likely be affected by the proposed project, both Native and non-Native. After listening to twenty-one months of testimony, Berger released his two-volume report,
Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland
, which recommended that no pipeline ever be built along the north slope of the Yukon between Prudhoe Bay and the Mackenzie Delta, and that a ten-year moratorium be placed on the construction of the Mackenzie Valley project itself, which would ideally allow time for environmental and Native land claims issues to be resolved.
37
Ten years later, in reflecting on the importance of the Berger Inquiry for highlighting the struggles of Indigenous peoples, Frances Abele wrote: “Probably no royal commission or public inquiry has sustained such a large and diverse audience, or provoked, years after its conclusion, such strong emotional responses.”
38

“That Is Not Our Way”: Challenging Colonial Development

By the mid-1970s the Dene had developed a radical analysis of colonial development and effectively utilized both the IB-NWT and the Berger Inquiry to voice their position. As Peter Usher notes, this analysis amounted to a fundamental “critique of capitalism and industrialization.”
39
At this point, I want to return to and further develop a claim I made in my introductory chapter regarding the difference between the normative foundation underwriting Indigenous anticolonialism and anticapitalism and that which underwrites similar sentiments within the Western radical tradition, most notably that of
Marxism. There I suggested that, when related back to the two pillars of Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis—dispossession and proletarianization—it would appear that in Canada the history and experience of the former has structured the political relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state to a greater extent than the latter. I also suggested that the primary experience of dispossession is what also tends to fuel the most common modes of Indigenous resistance to and criticism of the colonial relationship itself: that is, Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of
land
—struggles not only
for
land, but also deeply
informed
by what the land as a mode of reciprocal
relationship
(which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated form of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way. The ethical framework provided by these place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge is what I call “grounded normativity.”

In his groundbreaking 1972 text,
God Is Red
, the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. argues that one of the most significant differences that exist between Indigenous and Western metaphysics revolves around the central importance of land to Indigenous modes of being, thought, and ethics.
40
When “ideology is divided according to American Indian and Western European [traditions],” writes Deloria, this “fundamental difference is one of great philosophical importance. American Indians hold their lands—
places
—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind.”
41
Most Western societies, by contrast, tend to derive meaning from the world in historical/developmental terms, thereby placing
time
as the narrative of central importance.
42
Deloria then goes on to conclude: “When one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make much sense when transferred from one context to the other without the proper consideration of what is taking place.”
43

In drawing our attention to the distinction between Indigenous place-based and Western time-oriented understandings of the world, Deloria does not simply intend to reiterate the rather obvious observation that most Indigenous societies hold a strong attachment to their homelands, but is instead attempting to explicate the position that land occupies as an ontological framework for understanding
relationships
. Seen in this light, it is a profound
misunderstanding to think of land or place as simply some material object of profound importance to Indigenous cultures (although it is this too); instead, it ought to be understood as a field of “relationships of things to each other.”
44
Place is a way of knowing, of experiencing and relating to the world and with others; and sometimes these relational practices and forms of knowledge guide forms of resistance against other rationalizations of the world that threaten to erase or destroy our senses of place.
45
This, I argue, is precisely the understanding of land that grounded our critique of colonialism and capitalism in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib (which is my community’s language), for example, “land” (or
dè
) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on.
46
Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time.
47
Consider, for example, the following story told by the late George Blondin, a respected Sahtu Dene elder. The tale recounts an experience his brother Edward had while hunting moose:

Notice how Blondin’s narrative not only emphasizes the consciousness and individual agency of the raven, but also depicts the relationship between the hunter and the bird as mutually interdependent. The cooperation displayed between Edward and the raven provides a clear example of the ethic of reciprocity and sharing underlying Dene understandings of their relationship with land.

In the decades leading up to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, it became apparent to many people within our communities that the organizational imperatives of capital accumulation signified an affront to our normative understanding of what constituted proper relationships—relationships between people, relationships between humans and their environment, and relationships between individuals and institutions of authority (whether economic or political). Even though by the mid-1970s this grounded normative framework had been worn by decades of colonial
displacement
, it was still functioning enough to frame both our critique of capitalist development and our ways of thinking about how we might establish political and economic relations both within our own communities and with Canada based on principles of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Not coincidentally, Peter Kulchyski highlights this spatial feature of Indigenous struggle well in his excellent book,
Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut
, when he writes: “It is possible to argue that precisely what distinguishes anti-colonial struggles from the classic Marxist accounts of the working class is that oppression for the colonized is registered in the spatial dimension—
as dispossession
—whereas for workers, oppression is measured as exploitation, as the theft of
time
.”
49
I would simply add here that Indigenous ways of thinking about
nonoppressive
relations are often expressed with this spatial referent in mind as well.