Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (5 page)

In chapters 2, 3, and 4, I set out to empirically demonstrate the largely theoretical insights that are derived from my applied use of Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master/slave narrative through three case studies drawn from the post-1969 history of Indigenous–state relations in Canada. These case studies will also serve to flesh out in more detail a number of recent debates within the liberal recognition and identity politics literature, including those that have focused on the following cluster of issues and concerns.

The Left-Materialist Challenge

The ascendant status of “identity,” “culture,” and “recognition” in contemporary political struggles has not emerged without controversy. Critics on the left, for example, have long voiced concern over what they claim to be the excessively insular and divisive character of many culture-based, identity-related movements.
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More specifically, they argue that the inherently parochial and particularistic orientation of recognition-based politics is serving (or worse, has already served) to undermine more egalitarian and universal aspirations, like those focused on class and directed toward a more equitable distribution of socioeconomic goods. As Brian Barry explains: “Pursuit of the multiculturalist [recognition] agenda makes the achievement of broadly based egalitarian policies difficult in two ways. At a minimum it diverts political effort away from universalistic goals. But a more serious problem is that multiculturalism may very well destroy the conditions for putting together a coalition in favour of across-the-board equalisation of opportunities and resources.”
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In such contexts it would indeed appear that “recognition struggles are serving
less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistribution struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them,” as Nancy Fraser’s work suggests.
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In short, advocates of the left-materialist critique challenge the affirmative relationship drawn between recognition and freedom by many defenders of identity/difference politics on the grounds that such a politics has proven itself incapable of transforming the generative material conditions that so often work to foreclose the realization of self-determination in the lives of ordinary citizens.

Chapter 2 interrogates the above challenge through an examination of the cultural, political, and economic dynamics that informed the Dene Nation’s struggle for national recognition and self-determination in the 1970s and early 1980s. During this period the Dene Nation was the main organization representing the political interests of the Dene peoples of the Northwest Territories, of which my own community is a part (the Yellowknives Dene First Nation). Although sensitive to certain concerns animating the left-materialist position, I argue that there is nothing intrinsic to the identity-related struggles of Indigenous peoples that predispose them to the cluster of charges noted above. To the contrary, I suggest that insofar as Indigenous cultural claims always involve demands for a more equitable distribution of land, political power, and economic resources, the left-materialist claim regarding the displacement of economic concerns by cultural ones is misplaced when applied to settler-colonial contexts.
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However, if one takes a modified version of the displacement thesis and instead examines the relationship between Indigenous recognition claims and the distinction made by Nancy Fraser between “transformative” and “affirmative” forms of redistribution the criticism begins to hold more weight.
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For Fraser, “transformative” models of redistribution are those that aspire to correct unjust distributions of power and resources
at their source
, whereas “affirmative” strategies, by contrast, strive to alter or modify the second-order effects of these first-order root causes. As we shall see with the example drawn from my community, the last forty years has witnessed a gradual erosion of this transformative vision within the mainstream Dene self-determination movement, which in the context of northern land claims and economic development has resulted in a partial decoupling of Indigenous “cultural” claims from the radical aspirations for social, political and economic change that once underpinned them. However, following my reading of Fanon, I argue that this gradual displacement of questions of Indigenous sovereignty and alternative
political economies by narrowly conceived cultural claims within the Dene struggle is better understood as an
effect
of primitive accumulation via the hegemonization of the liberal discourse of recognition than due to some core deficiency with Indigenous cultural politics as such.

The Essentialism Challenge

The second constellation of criticisms frequently leveled against the recognition paradigm revolves around the “essentialist” articulations of individual and collective identity that sometimes anchor demands for cultural accommodation in theory and practice. In recent feminist, queer, and antiracist literature, the term “essentialism” is often used pejoratively to refer to those theories and social practices that treat identity categories such as gender, race, and class as “fixed, immutable and universal,” instead of being constructed, contingent, and open to “cultural variation.”
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According to Ann Philips, when recognition-based models of cultural pluralism invoke essentialist articulations of identity they risk functioning “not as a cultural liberator but as a cultural straitjacket,” forcing members of minority cultural groups “into a regime of authenticity, denying them the chance to cross cultural borders, borrow cultural influences, define and redefine themselves.”
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In order to avoid this potentially repressive feature of identity politics, we are told that the various expressions of identification and signification that underpin demands for recognition—such as “gender,” “culture,” “nationhood,” and “tradition”—must remain open-ended and never immune from contestation or democratic deliberation. The anti-essentialist position thus poses yet another set of challenges to the affirmative relationship drawn between recognition and freedom by uncritical supporters of the politics of difference.

Chapter 3 unpacks some of the problems identified by the anti-essentialist challenge through a gendered analysis of the decade of Indigenous mega-constitutional politics spanning the patriation of Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982 and the demise of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. The Charlottetown Accord was a proposed agreement struck between the federal government, the provincial and territorial governments, and Aboriginal representatives on a proposed series of amendments to the Constitution Act, 1982. Among other things, the amendment sought to address issues concerning the recognition of Quebec’s distinct status within confederation, the recognition of an Aboriginal right to self-government, and parliamentary reform.

Although I remain indebted to the critical insights offered by Frantz Fanon and activists within the Dene Nation regarding the entangled relationship among racism, state power, capitalism, and colonial dispossession, all paid insufficient attention to the role played by patriarchy in this corrosive configuration of power. Recent feminist analyses of the ten-year effort to constitutionally entrench an Aboriginal right to self-government provide a particularly illustrative corrective to this shortcoming. Specifically, these analyses have done an excellent job foregrounding the manner in which contemporary essentialist articulations of Indigenous culture have converged with the legacy of patriarchal misrecognition under the Indian Act to discursively inform our recent efforts to attain recognition of a right to self-government. However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

Chapter 4 examines the convergence of Indigenous recognition politics with the more recent transitional justice discourse of “reconciliation” that began to gain considerable attention in Canada following the publication of the
Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
(RCAP) in 1996. RCAP was established by the federal government in 1991 in the wake of two national crises that unraveled the previous summer and fall: the failed Meech Lake Accord and the armed standoff between the Mohawks of Kanesatake, Quebec, and the Canadian military (popularly known as the “Oka Crisis”). The commission was established with a sixteen-point mandate to investigate the troubled relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the state, and to issue a series of
comprehensive recommendations that might serve to facilitate a process of genuine “reconciliation.” The last thirty years have witnessed a global proliferation of state institutional mechanisms that promote “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” as a means of resolving the adverse social impacts of various forms of intrastate violence and historical injustice. Originally, however, this approach to conflict resolution was developed in polities undergoing a formal “transition” from the violent history of openly authoritarian regimes to more democratic forms of rule. This chapter will explore the efficacy of transitional justice mechanisms—such as state apologies, commissions of inquiry, truth and reconciliation commissions, individual reparations, and so forth—when applied to the “nontransitional” context of the Canadian settler state.

In doing so, I argue that in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada—where there is no formal period marking an explicit transition from an authoritarian past to a democratic present—state-sanctioned approaches to reconciliation tend to ideologically fabricate such a transition by narrowly situating the abuses of settler colonization firmly
in the past
. In these situations, reconciliation itself becomes temporally framed as the process of individually and collectively
overcoming
the harmful “legacy” left in the wake of this past abuse, while leaving the
present
structure of colonial rule largely unscathed. In such a context, those who refuse to forgive or reconcile are typically represented in the policy literature as suffering from this legacy, unable or unwilling to “move on” because of their simmering anger and resentment. Drawing again on Frantz Fanon’s work, I challenge the ways in which Canadian reconciliation politics tends to uncritically represent Indigenous expressions of anger and resentment as “negative” emotions that threaten to impede the realization of reconciliation in the lives of Indigenous people and communities on the one hand, and between Indigenous nations and Canada on the other. Although it is on occasion acknowledged that reactive emotions like anger and resentment can generate both positive and negative effects, more often than not defenders of reconciliation represent these emotional expressions in an unsympathetic light—as irrational, as physically and psychologically unhealthy, as reactionary, backward looking, and even as socially pathological. In contradistinction to this view, I argue that in the context of ongoing settler-colonial injustice, Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment can indicate a sign of moral protest and political outrage that we ought to at least take seriously, if not embrace as a sign of our critical consciousness.

By the end of chapter 4 it should be evident why Fanon did not attribute much emancipatory potential to either a Hegelian or liberal politics of recognition when applied to colonial situations; this did not lead Fanon to reject the recognition paradigm entirely, however. Instead, what Fanon’s work does is redirect our attention to the host of
self-affirmative
cultural practices that colonized peoples often critically engage in to
empower themselves
, as opposed to relying too heavily on the subjectifying apparatus of the state or other dominant institutions of power to do this for them. In doing so, Fanon’s position challenges colonized peoples to transcend the fantasy that the settler-state apparatus—as a structure of domination
predicated
on our ongoing dispossession—is somehow capable of producing liberatory effects.
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The task of chapter 5 is to flesh out this self-affirmative thread in Fanon’s thought and politics through a critical reading of his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the one hand, and the
negritude
movement on the other. Although negritude constituted a diverse body of inter- and postwar, francophone black artistic production and political activism, at its core the movement emphasized the need for colonized people and communities to purge themselves of the internalized effects of colonial racism through an affirmation of the worth of black difference. I argue that even though Fanon’s critical appraisal of negritude clearly saw the revaluation of precolonial African cultural forms as a crucial means of momentarily freeing the colonized from the interpellative grasp of racist misrecognition, in the end it will be shown that he shared Sartre’s unwillingness to acknowledge the transformative role that critically revived Indigenous cultural practices might play in the construction of alternatives to the colonial project of genocide and land dispossession. I thus conclude the chapter with the claim that, although insightful in many respects, Fanon’s overly instrumental view of the relationship between culture and decolonization renders his theory inadequate as a framework for understanding contemporary Indigenous struggles for self-determination. Indigenous peoples tend to view their resurgent practices of cultural self-recognition and empowerment as
permanent
features of our decolonial political projects, not transitional ones.