Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (14 page)

In terms of economic development, Denendeh would also operate unlike the provinces in a number of key ways. For example, the document suggests that all land and resource development adhere to standards set forth in a “Charter of Founding Principles,” which would emphasize, among other things, maintaining a “harmonious relationship between the Dene and the physical environment.”
111
Thus, the Dene/Métis stated that natural resource use would be determined “on the basis of a ‘conserver society’” with a “firm commitment to renewables.” Once again, building a contemporary economy committed to the traditional practice of harvesting and manufacturing renewable resources would form a significant aspect of economic development within the new territory. However, in circumstances where the exploration and development of Denendeh’s nonrenewable resource base might be permitted to continue, this activity would only be allowed if it promised to ensure the “well-being of the people and resources of Denendeh” as a whole, “as opposed to the economic benefit of the developers.” And to ensure economic self-sufficiency, the Dene/Métis proposed that 10 percent of all resource revenues derived in the territory be collected and paid into a “Dene Heritage Fund” managed by the Dene through the framework of the proposed senate. Remaining profits extracted through rents taken from nonrenewable resource outfits would be redirected back into programs aimed at bolstering the renewable resource sector, be used to cover the operating budgets of the Denendeh government at both the community and territorial levels, and to repay the federal government for its assistance in the delivery of unemployment insurance benefits, family allowances, and so on. Also like its predecessors, the proposal suggests that all private property rights be respected for lands acquired before the implementation of the agreement, although after this date, the Government of Denendeh would
grant property titles solely through long-term leases and hold remaining lands in common for the benefit of all Denendeh citizens.
112

Reaction to the Denendeh proposal varied. Some people were outraged at the proposed agreement, suggesting that it would provide too much protection for Dene rights and interests while ignoring those of the North’s non-Native population.
113
One of the studies prepared for the federal government’s Special Committee on Constitutional Development even suggested that the proposal’s recommended restrictions on private property could be interpreted as violating what many northerners had come to consider an “inalienable right” to own property.
114
Others, however, viewed the proposal as a “unique opportunity to be a part of something exciting, a chance for all people of the north to join together and build a new style of government.”
115

Conclusion

In the end, the federal government remained one of the principal detractors of the Denendeh proposal. Unlike the position outlined in its own comprehensive claims policy, the Dene/Métis adamantly rejected the idea that Indigenous peoples must surrender or exchange their political rights and title as a prerequisite to reaching a land settlement. Maintaining this position caused negotiations to drag on until 1988, when, finally, a new “Agreement-in-Principle” (AIP) was reached between the Dene Nation, the Metis Association, and the Government of Canada. The new AIP offered the claimants “ownership of over 181,000 square kilometres of land, with subsurface rights for approximately 10,000 kilometres of it, and a payment of $500 million over fifteen years as compensation for lost land use in the past.”
116
To reach the AIP stage, however, the Crown required two things. The first was that the recognition of Indigenous political rights be removed from the negotiation table. This essentially meant that the Dene Nation dropped its previous insistence, articulated in the Dene Declaration and the three claims examined above, that a substantive right to self-government form a fundamental component of any land deal. Second, the AIP required the Dene/Métis to agree to “cede, release and surrender” any residual Aboriginal rights and title to the remaining lands of the Northwest Territories. Negotiators for the Dene/Métis thus conceded that, if reached, a comprehensive claim would inevitably involve an “exchange” of Aboriginal “land rights” for a “clearly defined set of land-related and land based-rights.”
117
At this point, however, those involved in the negotiations
refused to see this as an extinguishment of their “political rights,” which they would “continue to negotiate through other forums.”
118

On April 9, 1990, two years after community negotiators agreed to sign the new AIP, Indigenous representatives from across Denendeh convened at a special general assembly held in Fort Rae where they initialed a final agreement that included an extinguishment clause but excluded a self-government component. In July of the same year, a motion was passed at another general assembly, this time held in Dettah, to “have aboriginal and treaty rights affirmed, not extinguished, in the comprehensive claim agreement.”
119
In the end, the majority of delegates voted to affirm the motion and in doing so rejected the Dene/Métis Final Agreement. No doubt frustrated with the nonnegotiable nature of the Crown’s position, Gwich’in representatives opposed the majority decision and formally withdrew from the general assembly. Following their lead, the Sahtu withdrew from the claim several weeks later. The Crown officially stopped funding the Dene Nation’s claims secretariat after the withdrawal of the Gwich’in and Sahtu and instead offered to negotiate with these groups independently. In 1992 the Gwich’in, and in 1993 the Sahtu along with the Métis, extinguished their political rights and title by signing comprehensive agreements with Canada. These settlements signified the official end of an at times tenuous and fragile (but nonetheless unified) Dene national self-determination movement.
120

Northern Indigenous perspectives on economic development began to shift significantly during this period as well. This shift was exemplified most clearly with the backing of diamond mega-mining projects by the Tlicho and Yellowknives Dene First Nation in the late 1990s, and again, in 2000, with the establishment of the Aboriginal Pipeline Group (APG), which represents the interests of most Dene regions in the NWT (excluding the Dehcho) and has since negotiated an agreement to purchase a one-third share in the newly proposed Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP). The MGP, like the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline before it, promises to be one of the largest and costliest pipeline projects in the history of Canada.
121

What is perhaps most interesting about the newest incarnation of the Mackenzie pipeline project is that many of the young Dene activists who opposed it in the 1970s are now either active supporters or founding members of the APG. Former Fort Good Hope chief Frank T’Seleie has explained his change in perspective like this:

If primitive accumulation represents the process of dispossession through which noncapitalist social relations are transformed or integrated into market ones, then it would appear that this phenomenon has gained considerable momentum in the North over the last few decades. Although primitive accumulation no longer appears to require the openly violent dispossession of Indigenous communities and their entire land and resource base, it does demand that both remain open for exploitation and capitalist development. To my mind, a number of interrelated considerations have to be taken into account to figure out why this has emerged as the case in the North, and I would like to conclude by highlighting two of them. The first involves a significant transformation in the discourse of “sustainable development” over the last fifteen years. As Stuart Kirsch has argued, one of the most pressing challenges faced by Indigenous peoples has been the “speed with which capital now appropriates the terms of its critique.”
123
Any visit to the North will unequivocally demonstrate the degree to which state and industry have been able to coopt the discourse of “sustainability” to push their shared vision of economic development. Unlike the discourse of sustainability underwriting the Dene claims examined above, which sought to establish political and economic relations that would foster the reciprocal well-being of people, communities and the land over time, sustainability now refers primarily to the
economic
sustainability of capital accumulation itself. The longer the projected lifespan of a proposed project—that is, the longer period that a project proposes to exploit a community’s land, resources, and labor, the more “sustainable” it is said to be.

The second involves Fanon’s concern regarding the ways in which the field of recognition politics can modify the subject positions of Indigenous people and communities over time. Aside from the inevitable debt trap that land claims lock many First Nations into, which can in turn compel these communities to open up their settlement lands to exploitation as an economic solution,
124
it
appears that the land-claims process itself has also served to subtly shape how Indigenous peoples now think and act in relation to the land. As Paul Nadasdy suggests in his work with the Kluane First Nation in the Yukon, “to engage in the process of negotiating a land-claim agreement, First Nations people must translate their complex reciprocal relationship with the land into the equally complex but very different language of ‘property.’”
125
I would suggest that one of the negative effects of this power-laden process of discursive translation has been a reorientation of the meaning of self-determination for many (but not all) Indigenous people in the North; a reorientation of Indigenous struggle from one that was once deeply
informed
by the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations (grounded normativity), which in turn informed our critique of capitalism in the period examined above, to a struggle that is now increasingly
for
land, understood now as material resource to be exploited in the capital accumulation process.

3

Essentialism and the Gendered Politics of Aboriginal Self-Government

In this chapter I explore in detail the second cluster of concerns often associated with the politics of recognition briefly identified in my introductory chapter. These criticisms have tended to focus on the empirically problematic and normatively suspect character of recognition claims based on “essentialist” articulations of collective identity. According to social constructivist proponents of this line of critique, when claims for cultural accommodation are grounded on essentialist expressions of group identity they can too easily be deployed to justify repressive and authoritarian demands for group compliance on the one hand, or sanction unjust practices of exclusion and marginalization on the other. Without certain guaranteed rights and state institutional mechanisms in place to ensure that problematic cultural norms and practices remain open to democratic deliberation and group contestation, it has been argued that the self-determining status of subaltern individuals within minority groups—especially women and children—will remain at risk.

Recognizing that social constructivist critiques of the politics of culture and identity encompass a vast range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, in this chapter I will focus more narrowly on the work of political theorist Seyla Benhabib, whose contribution represents what I see as an important yet problematic attempt to bridge the gap between the insights afforded by social constructivist
theory
and what she views as the deliberative norms and processes that ought to guide and frame democratic
practice
.
1
In doing so, I argue that Benhabib’s anti-essentialist critique works in concert with a statist feature of her deliberative democratic theory, which functions to inadvertently sanction
colonial hierarchies. This argument can be broken into the following two claims. First, I contend that when examined through the lens of Indigenous peoples’ struggles, Benhabib’s social constructivist critique of the politics of recognition tends to not only overestimate the emancipatory potential of anti-essentialist criticism, but more importantly it also fails to address the full breadth of power relations that often serve to proliferate exclusionary and authoritarian community practices and articulations of identity to begin with. In this regard, I align my work with the growing number of scholars who have begun to critically interrogate anti-essentialist criticism when uniformly applied to a range of conceptually distinct and power-laden contexts.
2

My second claim is directed more squarely at the statist character of Benhabib’s deliberative democratic critique of the politics of recognition. Here I contend that when anti-essentialist theories of cultural identity are projected as a universal feature of social life and then employed as a justificatory measure for evaluating the legitimacy of claims for recognition within and against the uncontested authority of the
colonial state
, they can inadvertently sanction the very types of domination and inequality that both social constructivist and deliberative democratic projects ought to mitigate. This is especially the case with respect to Indigenous claims for recognition, which often throw into question, either implicitly or explicitly, the legitimacy of the state’s assumed role as arbiter in contestations over recognition.

This chapter is organized into four sections. The first section provides a brief sketch of the constructivist critique of the politics of recognition Benhabib offers in
The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
. As with my previous engagement with Charles Taylor in chapter 1, although I focus largely on Benhabib’s work here, many of the conclusions reached in this section are by no means limited to her contribution alone. In the second section, I provide a history of Indigenous women’s struggle against sexist provisions of the Indian Act and an examination of the ways in which this history of struggle informed an Indigenous feminist critique of the gendered dynamics underwriting the decade-long (1982–92) effort of mainstream Aboriginal organizations to secure a constitutional right to the self-government in Canada. In the next section, I argue that, although Benhabib is correct to highlight the ways in which preservationist claims to cultural recognition can and have been used by male segments of colonized societies to justify oppressive gender practices, her critique fails to adequately address the colonial context within
which these practices have come to flourish. And finally, in the last section, I argue that insofar as Benhabib’s theory uncritically positions the colonial state as a legitimate adjudicator of Indigenous recognition claims, her argument is itself ironically premised on the racist/essentialist assumption that Indigenous peoples were so uncivilized at the time of European contact that they did not constitute self-determining subjects in relation to the states that eventually asserted sovereignty over them.

Social Constructivism and Deliberative Democracy

Benhabib’s
The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
sets out to establish a model of deliberative democracy that is capable of accommodating universal demands for individual freedom and equality along with identity-specific demands for the recognition of cultural difference. According to Benhabib, the task of those who are simultaneously committed to a politics that values both cultural diversity
and
democratic equality should be “to create impartial institutions in the public sphere and civil society where [the] struggle for recognition of cultural differences and the contestation of cultural narratives can take place
without domination
.”
3
In order to accomplish this task, Benhabib insists that one reject claims for recognition founded on essentialist and therefore potentially authoritarian conceptualizations of culture and group identity: “Intercultural justice between human groups should be defended in the name of justice and freedom and not of an elusive preservation of cultures.”
4
Identity movements that do seek to preserve the “purity or distinctiveness of cultures,” Benhabib boldly asserts, are simply “irreconcilable with both democratic and more basic epistemic considerations.”
5

Benhabib opens her critique by challenging the empirical foundation upon which most contemporary theories of “mosaic multiculturalism” are based—what she terms the “reductionist sociology of culture.”
6
Quoting the work of Terrance Turner, Benhabib contends that advocates of this form of multiculturalism often embrace a simplistic and sharply delineated conception of cultural identity, which, when institutionalized in the form of public policy risks “essentializing the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or race; it risks reifying cultures as separate entities by over emphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures in terms that potentially legitimize repressive demands for communal conformity; and by treating cultures as badges of group identity, it tends to fetishize them in ways that put them beyond the reach of critical
analysis.”
7
Beyond potentially legitimizing these repressive practices, Benhabib claims that the reductionist approach yields a number of other illiberal consequences, including “(1) the drawing of too rigid and firm boundaries around cultural identities; (2) the acceptance of the need to ‘police’ these boundaries to regulate internal membership and ‘authentic’ life-forms; (3) the privileging of the continuity and preservation of cultures over time as opposed to their reinvention, reappropriation, and even subversion; and (4) the legitimation of culture-controlling elites through a lack of open confrontation with their cultures’ inegalitarian and exclusionary practices.”
8

In contradistinction to this reductionist approach, Benhabib draws on the work of Homi Bhabha and others to defend a constructivist view of identity in which all cultures constitute fluid systems of meaning and representation that are continually constructed and reconstructed through “complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures.”
9
Cultures are thus “fluid, porous, and contested” phenomena, “which are internally riven by conflicting narratives.”
10
Benhabib assures us, however, that this position is not meant to imply that cultures are unreal or fictional entities: “Cultural differences run very deep and are very real,” insists Benhabib, the “imagined boundaries between [cultures] are not phantoms in deranged minds; [they] can guide human action and behaviour as well as any other cause of human action.”
11

Also unlike the reductionist perspective, Benhabib aligns justice in multicultural and multinational contexts not in terms of cultural preservation or autonomy, but rather with the “inclusion” of traditionally marginalized groups into a widening “democratic dialogue” with the citizenry, cultures, and institutions of the surrounding society. In order to facilitate this robust form of inclusion, Benhabib proposes a “dual track” model of deliberative democracy that stresses “maximal cultural contestation in the public sphere,” as well as “the institutions and associations of civil society.” So long as recognition-based claims adhere to the constructivist/inclusion paradigm and allow for the contestability of cultural norms, practices, and boundaries in and through the institutional matrix of civil society and the state, then certain forms of “legal pluralism and institutional power sharing through regional and local parliaments” can and ought to be accommodated.
12
To ensure that pluralist institutional arrangements meet this standard, Benhabib proposes a baseline of three “normative conditions” that ought to be met by any cultural group seeking recognition and accommodation. These conditions are:

After outlining these normative requirements Benhabib concludes that, although “cultural groups may not be able to survive as distinct entities under these conditions,” securing them is nonetheless “necessary if legal pluralism in liberal-democratic states is to achieve the goals of cultural diversity as well as democratic equality, without compromising the rights of women and children.”
14
Under Benhabib’s deliberative model, only demands for recognition that adhere to the above standards and do not deny the contestability of cultural norms and practices can ensure the well-being of individual group members.
15
Here the cultural preservationist impulses of essentialism are clearly portrayed as overly restrictive and rigid, while the inclusive domain of social constructivism is cast as democratic and emancipatory.

Indigenous Women, Gender Discrimination, and Aboriginal Self-Government: A History

Before 1985 all federally registered First Nations women who married non-Native men were forced to relinquish their Indian “status” under sexist provisions of the federal government’s 1876 Indian Act.
16
Like many aspects of
Canadian Indian policy, the state’s gendered criteria for determining who is eligible to claim Indian “status” under the law predates Canadian confederation. In 1850, definitions of status were generally broad in scope and included “any person of Indian birth or blood, any person reputed to belong to a particular group of Indians, and any person married to an Indian or adopted into an Indian family.”
17
With respect to those individuals who acquired status through marriage, this early definition stated that any non-Aboriginal or nonstatus women who married a status male would herself acquire status, but the same was not true for non-Aboriginal men married to status women. Although the 1850 legislation did not yet lay out the terms under which a status woman could expect to lose her status for marrying a nonstatus man, it nonetheless established for the first time a definition of “Indian” that was tightly associated with patrilineal descent.
18

In the years to follow, state-sanctioned gender discrimination within the field of Indian policy would escalate dramatically. For instance, under provisions of the 1869 Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians, status Indian women were legally excluded from the right to receive inheritances from their husbands, they were denied the right to vote and participate in formal band politics, and they could be declared enfranchised without consent upon the enfranchisement of their husbands; finally, Section 6 of the Gradual Enfranchisement Act stated that any status woman who married a nonstatus man would lose all rights and benefits commonly associated with membership in a federally recognized Indian community, including the rights to reside on reserve and receive housing there, federally subsidized health care, postsecondary education, and so on.
19
All of these sexist provisions were incorporated into Canada’s Indian Act in 1876.