Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (33 page)

1.
Prime Minister of Canada, “Statement and Apology” (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 2008). Online as “Prime Minister Harper Offers Full Apology on Behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools System,” Prime Minister of Canada website, June 11, 2008,
http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2008/06/11/pm-offers-full-apology-behalf-canadians-indian-residential-schools-system
.

2.
Courtney Young, “Canada and the Legacy of Indian Residential Schools: Transitional Justice for Indigenous People in a Non-Transitional Society,” in
Identities in
Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies
, ed. Paige Arthur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 217–50; “Native Groups Shut out of Residential School Apology,”
Canadian Press
, June 5, 2008; “Aboriginal Leaders Hail Historic Apology,”
Ottawa Citizen
, June 11, 2008.

3.
David Ljunggren, “Every G20 Nation Wants to Be Canada, Insists PM,”
Reuters
, September 25, 2009.

4.
Stephen Hui, “Sean Atleo Criticizes Stephen Harper over ‘No History of Colonialism’ Remark,”
Georgia Straight
, October 2, 2009.

5.
Jeff Corntassel and Cindy Holder, “Who’s Sorry Now? Government Apologies, Truth Commissions and Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia, Canada, Guatemala, and Peru,”
Human Rights Review
9, no. 4 (2008): 465–89.

6.
For a genealogy of the emergence of “the field of transitional justice,” see Paige Arthur, “How ‘Transitions’ Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice,”
Human Rights Quarterly
31 (2009): 321–67. For a discussion of the application of transitional justice concepts and mechanisms to the context of Indigenous–state relations, see C. Young, “Canada and the Legacy of Indian Residential Schools”; Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir, eds.,
The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Damian Short,
Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishers, 2008).

7.
Andrew Schaap, “Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?,”
Social and Legal Studies
13, no. 4 (2004): 523 (emphasis added).

8.
For example, see Axel Honneth, “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of the Concept of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition,”
Political Theory
20, no. 2 (1992): 187–201. For a discussion of Honneth’s approach, see Fraser and Honneth,
Redistribution or Recognition?
Indigenous people often equate this form of reconciliation with individual and collective “healing.”

9.
Trudy Govier,
Forgiveness and Revenge
(New York: Routledge, 2002), viii.

10.
Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir, “Introduction: Struggles for Inclusion and Reconciliation in Modern Democracies,” in Kymlicka and Bashir,
The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies
, 1–24.

11.
Trudy Govier,
Forgiveness and Revenge
; Govier, “Acknowledgement and Truth Commissions: The Case of Canada,” in
Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights: Critical Dialogues
, ed. Sandra Tomsons and Lorraine Mayer (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2013). Also see Thomas Brudholm,
Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

12.
Oxford English Dictionary quoted in Dale Turner, “Aboriginal Relations in Canada: The Importance of Political Reconciliation,” Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Blog,
Equity Matters
, May 3, 2011,
http://www.idees-ideas.ca/blog/aboriginal-relations-canada-importance-political-reconciliation
.

13.
Brudholm,
Resentment’s Virtue
, 3.

14.
Jean Améry,
At the Mind’s Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities
, trans. Sidney and Stella Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980). Also see, Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989).

15.
Brudholm,
Resentment’s Virtue
, 4.

16.
Ibid., 4–5.

17.
I say “explicitly” here because achieving reconciliation in the three senses noted above always implicitly informed the turn to recognition politics that began in the early 1970s. Also, I borrow the term “nontransitional” from Courtney Young, “Transitional Justice for Indigenous People in a Non-Transitional Society,” Research Brief for Identities in Transition,
International Center for Transitional Justice
, October 2009.

18.
Jean Améry, “The Birth of Man from the Spirit of Violence: Frantz Fanon the Revolutionary,”
Wasafiri
44 (2005): 14.

19.
Thomas Brudholm, “Revisiting Resentments: Jean Améry and the Dark Side of Forgiveness,”
Journal of Human Rights
5, no. 1 (2006): 7–26; Robert Solomon,
Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” Has to Teach Us
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Alice MacLachlan, “Unreasonable Resentments,”
Journal of Social Philosophy
41, no. 4 (2010): 422–41.

20.
See under “resentment,”
http://oxforddictionaries.com
(emphasis added).

21.
On the political significance of anger in the face of gendered and racial oppression, I have learned much from the foundational analysis in Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,”
Women Studies Quarterly
25, nos. 1/2 (1997): 278–85. Also see the fierce poem by queer Menominee poet Chrystos, “They’re Always Telling Me I’m Too Angry,”
Fugitive Colors
(Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), 44.

22.
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2010); John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Solomon,
Living with Nietzsche
; Jeffrie Murphy,
Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); MacLachlan, “Unreasonable Resentments”; Brudholm,
Resentment’s Virtue
.

23.
John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 533.

24.
Murphy,
Getting Even
.

25.
MacLachlan, “Unreasonable Resentments,” 422–23.

26.
Brudholm,
Resentment’s Virtue
, 9–10.

27.
For example, in the context of post-Holocaust demands for reconciliation, Jean Améry wrote: there “seems to be general agreement that the final say on resentment is that of Friedrich Nietzsche” (Améry,
At the Mind’s Limit
, 67).

28.
Ibid., 68.

29.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pipin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111.

30.
Ibid. (emphasis added).

31.
Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
, 230.

32.
Ibid, 38–39, 57–58.

33.
Richard Wagamese, “Returning to Harmony,” in
Response, Responsibility and Renewal
, ed. Aboriginal Healing Foundation (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series, 2009), 144.

34.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 89.

35.
Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, liv.

36.
See Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York: International Publishers, 1999).

37.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 27.

38.
Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
, trans. Richard Philcox (Boston: Grove Press, 2008), 18.

39.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 15 (emphasis added).

40.
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
(2008), xiii–xiv.

41.
The arguments of both Hegel and early Marx are paradigmatic of the former view.

42.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 15–16, 94.

43.
Ibid., 4, 5, 16, 89.

44.
Ibid., 5. On “envy” and its close relationship to “resentment,” see Marguerite La Caze, “Envy and Resentment,”
Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action
4, no. 1 (2007): 141–47.

45.
Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, 89.

46.
Ibid., 31.

47.
Améry, “The Birth of Man from the Spirit of Violence,” 15.

48.
Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, 31.

49.
Ibid., 8.

50.
Ibid., 89.

51.
In the following chapter I explore the limitations of Fanon’s views on the instrumentality of Indigenous cultural politics in more detail.

52.
Georges Erasmus, “Twenty Years of Disappointed Hopes,” in
Drum Beat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country
, ed. Boyce Richardson (Ottawa: Summerhill Press with the Assembly of First Nations, 1990), 24–28.

53.
Newfoundland also failed to ratify the deal.

54.
Kiera Ladner and Leanne Simpson, eds.,
This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years since the Barricades
(Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2010), 1–2.

55.
Linda Pertusati,
In Defence of Mohawk Land: Ethno Political Conflict in Native North America
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 101–2.

56.
“Oka Costs Natives Canada’s Sympathy,”
Toronto Star
, November 27, 1990, A9.

57.
For examples of such representations, see Mark Kennedy, “PM Brands Warriors ‘Terrorists,’ Calls for Surrender,”
Ottawa Citizen
, August 29, 1990, A2; “Army Moving In on Mohawks; ‘No One above the Law’ PM Says of Warriors,”
Edmonton Journal
, August 29, 1990, A1; William Johnson, “Oka Symbolizes Meech Aftermath,”
Edmonton Journal
, July 24, 1990, A7; “Judge Recognizes Native ‘Rage’ as Oka Standoff Leaders Jailed,”
Toronto Star
, February 20, 1992, A13; “Thousands of Okas Loom,”
The
Gazette
, September 28, 1990, A4. For critical analyses of such representations, see James Winter,
Common Cents: The Media’s Portrayal of the Gulf War and Other Issues
(Montreal: Black Roade Press, 1992); Gail Valaskakis, “Rights and Warriors,”
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature
25, no. 1 (1994): 60–72.

58.
Boyce Richardson, ed.,
Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country
(Ottawa: Summerhill Press and the Assembly of First Nations, 1989).

59.
Daniel Ashini, “David Confronts Goliath: The Innu of Ungava versus the NATO Alliance,” in Richardson,
Drumbeat
, 43–72; Marie Wadden,
Nitassinan: The Innu Struggle to Reclaim Their Homeland
(Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1991).

60.
Ward Churchill, “Last Stand at Lubicon Lake,”
Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization
(Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 1999), 190–238; Dawn Martin-Hill,
The Lubicon Lake Nation: Indigenous Knowledge and Power
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

61.
See Nicholas Blomley, “‘Shut the Province Down’: First Nations’ Blockades in British Columbia, 1884–1995,”
BC Studies
111 (1996): 5–35.

62.
Jean-Maurice Matchewan, “Mitchikanibikonginik Algonquins of Barrier Lake: Our Long Battle to Create a Sustainable Future,” in Richardson,
Drumbeat
, 139–68.

63.
Bruce W. Hodgins, Ute Lischke, and David McNab, eds.,
Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Action and Peace at the Temegami Blockades of 1989–90
(Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003).

64.
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 15.

65.
“Act or Face Threat of Violence, Native Leader Warns Ottawa,”
Toronto Star
, June 1, 1988, A1.

66.
In Commonwealth countries a “royal commission” is a major commission of inquiry into an issue of perceived national public importance.

67.
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
, 5 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1996); available online at
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca
and
http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca
.

68.
Mary Hurley and Jill Wherrett,
The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
(Ottawa: Parliamentary Information and Research Service, 2000), 2.

69.
See in particular, Kiera Ladner, “Negotiated Inferiority: The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ Vision of a Renewed Relationship,”
American Review of Canadian Studies
31, nos. 1/2 (2001): 241–64.

70.
Trudy Grovier, “Acknowledgement and Truth Commissions: The Case of Canada,” in Tomsons and Mayer,
Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights
, 44.