The conquest of the Americas, that vast historical process that dispossesses undetermined numbers of Indigenous peoples to the advantage of European invaders, has not been completed. The liberal consciences of North America today acknowledge wrongdoings of the past, sometimes pausing to note that their own individual ancestors had not yet immigrated to this land (which is to say, they get a free pass on history), sometimes reflecting that past generations did not have the ethical luxury available in our own time, before moving on to other issues. One need not concern oneself so much with past generations and one’s own ancestors. In the minutiae of quotidian life, in the presuppositions of service providers, in the structures of State actions and inactions, in the continuing struggles over land use, in a whole trajectory of policies and plans, the work of the conquest is being completed here and now. By our generation. It is our descendants, a hundred years from now, who will protest that they were not there when land claims were being negotiated, when Aboriginal rights were distorted beyond recognition, when the final acts of the great historical drama of conquest were performed. You who remain silent while this injustice continues, you are responsible. Here. And now.
But then again, so am I.
The northern part of Canada is one of the stages for this drama. In the north it is possible to see, to visually apprehend, the imposition of one way of life on another. It is possible to meet and talk over tea with people who were born in another world and saw an epoch of change in a lifetime. In the contemporary modality this struggle is not about the imposition by force of arms of different languages and cultural forms and land ownership patterns, but even today the struggle is about a power that coerces as much as it cajoles. In the north this power is institutionally supported by a trajectory of policies; no single overriding policy or plan says modernization and assimilation are the ultimate destination. Rather, the presuppositions of a whole set of institutional plans and practices in the areas of education, health care, housing, infrastructure, justice, family services, economic development, and all the rest work relentlessly to underwrite the continuing conquest. These policies themselves rest on a fabric of cultural forms that implicitly and with great subtlety help the policy trajectory make sense.
In the northern part of Canada, this policy trajectory is opposed with a creative energy and a spirit of resistance that defy instrumental accountings. Who could have imagined that in the seventies, faced with the might of the world’s major oil and gas producers, themselves bankrolled by some of the largest capital centres and State powers, a few scattered Dene communities could successfully halt a major construction project: the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline? Thirty years ago, who would have thought Inuit, most only recently moved to permanent settlements from scattered camps on the land, would today speak in their own voices, in their own legislative assembly, in their own territory? The answer to both questions is not “no one.” There were many Inuit and Dene, and others at the time, who rightly believed these were achievable goals. The conquest is not inevitable, inexorable. What our descendants will think of us is as unwritten as the most important of the treaty promises. In what follows, the permutations of this conflict are examined at the micropolitical level of everyday life as much as at the macropolitical level of structure and policy.
The above words were written before the events of September 11, 2001. Since that time “ground zero” has come to have a new connotation. It is not disrespectful to suggest that the term, like the term “genocide,” must not be deployed as a singularity, as a reference to one particular historical event. There are other ground zeros, other kinds of ground zeros, including, for Americans of all kinds, the ground upon which we walk.
One time, while I was engaged in research in the small Dene community of Fort Good Hope, I had an opportunity to travel for two days to the nearby community of Colville Lake. Although Fort Good Hope was small and remote with a population at the time of about 500, located about eighty kilometres to the south of the Arctic Circle on the Mackenzie River (Deh Cho in the Dene language), Colville Lake was even smaller at that time, with a population just over fifty and even more remote, inland to the north and east of Fort Good Hope. Like most students of society and culture who travel in northern Canada, I was interested in traditional Aboriginal lifestyles, without, at the time, having given much thought to the complex issue of what the concept of “traditional” meant. In this vast margin of North America, tradition is still often equated with finding the most northern in the north, the most isolated of the isolated. Colville Lake fit the bill, enjoying a reputation even among the Dene for its traditional economic and cultural life.
It was midsummer in 1985 when I learned that a large airplane had been specially chartered to take a crowd to Colville Lake from Fort Good Hope for Treaty Day ceremonies and celebrations, and that there was room on the plane for me. I eagerly seized the opportunity. I had no idea where I would be staying, what I would eat, what I would do or see, but given that at that time there were no regularly scheduled flights to Colville Lake, it was not a chance to be missed. I joined the small crowd at the airport who quickly filled the Twin Otter for the fifty-minute flight from one small gravel airstrip, over the scrub pines and swamps and giant, rugged hills, to an even smaller gravel strip. Suddenly I was beyond telephone communication, far past the limit of electrical power, in a world of small log houses set in a rough circle on the edge of a huge freshwater lake in bush country. It is somehow fitting that the key cultural event of this first brief visit would involve television.
As our Twin Otter arrived at the airstrip, there was a quick flurry of activity—most of the residents, on hearing our plane in the distance, rushed up to meet it. Supplies and mail were unloaded as we disembarked; letters were loaded that had been finished between the time the plane was first heard and the hour or so later when it left. This, I learned, was the usual routine in Colville Lake: every single one of the sporadic aircraft that arrived afforded a brief opportunity to send out a note or parcel. At the airstrip, relatives and friends greeted each other; the official treaty party—two government officials and a policeman—were escorted by the local missionary to their quarters at the fishing lodge; the whole crowd moved from airstrip to community as the plane left and the normal calm reasserted itself.
It took not much more than twenty minutes for me to walk the entire length of Colville Lake, briefly visit the small Catholic church that was the most prominent structure in town, and then drop in on friends of friends for tea and bannock and dry fish. At that time of year, the rhythm of life in Colville centred on trout fishing: at a leisurely pace, nets were set and checked, fish was cleaned and hung on racks where, in the very dry arctic air, fillets would soon dry into a state that stayed preserved. Orange knuckleberries were just beginning to put in their appearance, so serious picking had not yet begun.
By early evening, the official Treaty Day function was ready to begin. The two government officials, who worked for the federal Department of Indian Affairs, had set up a table in front of a commandeered cabin. They had a list of names and a pile of crisp, new five-dollar bills. Two flags, one of the Northwest Territories and one of Canada, were set up next to the table. Dressed in his formal red tunic, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer hovered near the table, overseeing the proceedings. I stood with a small group of young Dene men, who joked around with their newly collected five-dollar bills, letting them wave in the whipping wind. Older men recalled how Treaty Day in the past had been such an important event, the occasion of a feast and a Dene drum dance. Now, even though everyone in town did come to the table, they did so primarily in order to affirm the importance of the treaty. No one seemed sure what kind of social event would be held that evening, but older folks remembered and reminisced about the drum dances that had been held in the past.
The event turned out to be television watching. When the treaty party retired to the fishing lodge, the rest of the community—women, men, children, and one visiting scholar—piled into a tiny cabin where heavy grey flannel blankets had been hung over the windows to block out the midnight sun. A small gas generator was connected to a television and video cassette recorder; four videos rented for one day from the store in Fort Good Hope were watched, one after another, in a six-hour marathon that began at around ten p.m. and ended sometime between five and six the next morning. Every fifty minutes the generator would run out of fuel, the film would be interrupted, and we would creep out of the packed, dark cabin into the bright sunshine (it was summer; we were above the Arctic Circle) for cigarette and bathroom breaks. All the videos had to be taken back with the return flight the next day. No one had work or school to occupy their morning so no one had to worry about sleeping late. My most vivid memory of the night was when, some time after four in the morning, the last film began, a John Wayne feature called North to Alaska, and the opening song woke the younger children who had fallen asleep in the front row; their heads bobbed along to the familiar tune.
This story from Colville Lake resonates uneasily with a similar story narrated by Stephen Greenblatt in his Marvellous Possessions. He tells of visiting a tiny Balinese village in 1986; recognizing, thanks to the writings of a variety of anthropologists, the communal pavilion; discovering “that the light came from a television set that the villagers, squatting or sitting cross legged, were intent on watching”; climbing nevertheless—”conquering my disappointment”—onto the platform where “on the communal VCR, they were watching a tape of an elaborate temple ceremony. Alerted by the excited comments and whoops of laughter, I recognized in the genial crowd of television watchers on the platform several of the ecstatic celebrants, dancing in trance states, whom I was seeing on the screen.”1 Greenblatt then adds: “We may call what I witnessed that evening the assimilation of the other, a phrase it is well to leave deliberately ambiguous” because “the Balinese adaptation of the latest Western and Japanese modes of representation seemed so culturally idiosyncratic and resilient that it was unclear who was assimilating whom.”2 This anecdote stages, in my view, not so much the “assimilation of the other,” a phrase that in the context of Canadian Aboriginal politics is not ambiguous at all, but rather a dynamic of totalization and subversion where, in Greenblatt’s words, “to recognize and admire local accommodations is not uncritically to endorse capitalist markets, but it is to acknowledge imaginative adaptations to conditions that lie beyond the immediate control of the poor.”3 Something of this dynamic, where a highly individualizing, serial technology— television—was deployed and recontextualized to affirm a cohesive group identity, was similarly staged for me in Colville Lake.
“One time” is an expression I’ve heard many of my Dene friends use as the opening to a story: “one time, a few years ago, I went by boat along the Deh Cho from Simpson to Wrigley.” Not “once upon a time” of fairytale fame, nor a mere and efficient “once,” but, consistently, “one time.” It is a curious expression, denoting as it does the irreducible singularity of the event by reference to the impossible singularity of temporality itself. The narrative form, storytelling practice, is a critical cultural form deployed by Inuit and Dene alike, today as in ancient times. Knowing this, and desiring to write something that might have some appeal especially to northern readers, in my research I left myself open to the possibility of an event. I can be said to have hunted stories: as hunters travel on the land in search of prey, I searched the texts of my journals and memories for narratives. On occasion, this text attempts to follow the rhythm and aspire to the high standard of Dene and Inuit storytelling practice, adopting rhetorical devices commonplace among Aboriginal people in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories but likely unfamiliar to others. Perhaps this written practice will in some way help ensure that this text is of some value to the people it is about. Over the decade that followed my visit to Colville Lake, and especially in the years from 1991 to 1994, when I made a series of visits north specifically for the purposes of this study, there would be many such “one times.”
The Canadian far north is usually considered that part of the country north of the sixtieth parallel. When this study began in the late eighties, there were two territories in the far north, the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories (NWT). The latter was the object of my attention. By the time the study ended, the NWT had divided: a new territory, Nunavut, had been carved out of the northeastern side of the NWT. This event itself speaks to one of the ‘facts’ of northern politics over the past few decades, the drama of the pace of political change in the north. Every half decade since the sixties has brought with it major structural reconfiguration of one sort or another in the political sphere in the NWT. These include the movement of government from Ottawa to Yellowknife in 1967, the evolution of representative government in the seventies, culminating in an Aboriginal ‘takeover’ of the territorial government in the late seventies, the proposals and negotiations about dividing the territories and settling land claims in the eighties, and more recently the establishment and creation of Nunavut through the nineties alongside the settlement of the Imiit land claim and the division of Dene/Métis land claim proposals (with the settlement of three of five Dene/Métis claims). To follow territorial politics at a formal level, one must immerse oneself in federal policies respecting Aboriginal rights (especially land claims policy and Aboriginal self-government policy) as well as territorial political structures. As a political observer working with communities in both the NWT and what became Nunavut—the ‘two places’ the study concerns itself with—through the nineties, I was afforded a unique opportunity to watch some of these changes and to take the development of Nunavut and restructuring of the NWT as part of my inquiry.
Territories in Canada are unusual political entities. They do not have the full status of a province in Canadian federation, but, especially in the last few decades, act with province-like powers in province-like areas of jurisdiction. They do not have a formal vote at the constitutional table, and govern through powers granted by the federal government rather than by the constitutionally determined division of powers that guarantees provinces their autonomy. The NWT is made up of two, broad, ecological areas, the Arctic and the Subarctic, though at times the word “Arctic” is loosely used, like “Far North,” to describe the whole area. Nunavut is entirely comprised of ecologically arctic areas. In the NWT three, quite distinct, Aboriginal cultures or peoples occupy this landscape, Dene and Métis in the Subarctic, and Inuit (most of the Inuvialuit or Yupik variety) in the Arctic, while the vast majority of people (about eighty-five per cent) in Nunavut are Inuit.
Technically, the Arctic is the more northern and eastern portion of the territory, defined by being north of the treeline that cuts on an angle roughly from the northwestern corner of the NWT to its southeastern corner. This area, Nunavut, includes all the High Arctic islands and is politically divided into three regions: Kitikmeot, or Central Arctic, among the most isolated of any part of Canada; Kivilliq (until recently called Keewatin), along the northwestern shore of Hudson Bay; and Baffin, which includes Baffin Island and communities in the very High Arctic. All the communities in these regions are occupied by a majority of Inuit people, most still speaking a dialect of Inuktitut, their language. None are connected to the south by road, and all can be characterized as remote communities.
The Subarctic, also sometimes called the western Arctic, is dominated by the Mackenzie River drainage system, which includes two great freshwater lakes, Great Slave Lake to the south and Great Bear Lake to the north. The river is called the Deh Cho, and the lakes Tucho and Sahtu, respectively, by the mostly Dene inhabitants of the area. There are five Dene regions in the western Arctic: that of the Gwi’chin-speaking peoples in the most northwestern corner; a region called Sahtu to the west and north of the lake of the same name; a region called Dehcho to the south of Sahtu, occupied by Slavey-speaking Dene; a ‘South Slave’ or ‘Treaty 8’ region occupied by Chipewyan-speaking peoples to the south and east of Tucho; and a ‘North Slave’ region occupied mostly by Dogrib-speaking peoples. There are also many Cree-speaking peoples scattered about the western Arctic. “Métis,” who tend to be concentrated in more southern NWT communities but are scattered throughout, is a term that has a loose application but designates at least three overlapping groups: descendants of the historic Métis settlements in western Canada who may have migrated north in the historic Métis diasporas of 1870 and 1885; descendants of so-called mixed marriages between Dene and non-Dene; and Dene without legal status as Dene. I prefer the term “Denendeh,” a Dene term that was used by the Dene Culture Institute and has been deployed recently by June Helm in her book The People of Denendeh to describe this area, officially today known as the NWT. Although not all the Aboriginal groups who live there would use the term, it seems to have the broadest relevance and is far better, in my mind, than the “Northwest Territories,” which, as a name, has been accepted by default. I will continue to use the term NWT to describe the political reality that existed before the creation of Nunavut.
The ‘hinge’ in the division between Denendeh and Nunavut is a last region occupied by Inuvialuit and Yupik-speaking peoples to the north and east of the Gwi’chin, near the Beaufort Sea. The Inuvialuit are the only Inuit cultural group to remain in Denendeh, an issue that itself perplexed territorial politics for a considerable period.
In Home and Native Land, published in the mid-1980s, Michael Asch distinguished the political approach of Aboriginal peoples in the NWT from that of those in southern Canada and the Yukon:
The approach to the establishment of aboriginal political rights in the Northwest Territories is based on the following facts: first, unlike the south, the region as a whole is only thinly populated; second, the sole land-users in the major portion of the territory are the native peoples; third, the native component of the population in each of the two proposed new provinces [Nunavut and Denendeh] has a majority or near-majority status; and fourth, at present, government in the region does not have legislative authority but is, in effect, a colony of the federal government. 4
Although the division of the Territories has taken longer than Asch may have envisaged, and provincial status seems even further away, his facts remain relevant. They lead him to conclude that, “given these conditions, the issue of political rights for Aboriginal peoples cannot easily be separated from the evolution of sovereign government for the Northwest Territories and, indeed, at the most basic level the two become intimately intertwined.”5
For any student of politics, Denendeh and Nunavut are very special jurisdictions. They are among the only places in North America where Aboriginal peoples can use their democratic franchise to control a public government at the provincial level. Furthermore, since 1979, Aboriginal peoples have done just that, electing a majority of Aboriginal politicians to the Territorial Assembly in the NWT. Since 1980, all but two of the government leaders of the NWT have been of Aboriginal descent, and the territorial government has described itself as operating on a consensus system that owes as much to the values and traditions of Aboriginal peoples as it does to the Westminster structure of parliamentary democracy. There are seven official languages in Denendeh, five of them Aboriginal; debates in the Territorial Assembly have been simultaneously translated into each, and Inuvialuit, Métis, and Dene politicians make a point of speaking at length in their own language. The evolution of what is called “responsible government” in the north has been seen as in itself the embodiment of Aboriginal self-government aspirations. This pattern has been left intact in Nunavut, where the government leader is Inuk, as are the majority of the members of the Territorial Assembly, and Inuktitut is not merely an official language, but spoken prominently. The creation of Nunavut, though, has led to a rebalancing of power in Denendeh, with something close to a split between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal voters, where the latter have more influence than they had prior to division.
Substantially complicating politics in Denendeh and Nunavut is the question of land claims. In 1980, all the Aboriginal peoples of the NWT had a legal claim to ownership of the land; that is, they had Aboriginal ‘title’ to the land, whose status, in Canadian jurisprudence, was and remains largely undefined. In 1984 the Inuvialuit settled the first comprehensive land claim in the NWT, called the Western Arctic Claim. Comprehensive claims are so called by the Canadian government to distinguish them from specific claims, the latter referring to claims that arise as a result of broken or unfulfilled treaty promises. Comprehensive claims are organized on the principle of the extinguishment of Aboriginal title in exchange for monetary compensation, clear (or fee simple) title to specific, much smaller, tracts of land, and other benefits; hence, they can be seen as treaties and have the same constitutional status as the early treaties of Canada. There is a great deal of controversy in the NWT among Aboriginal peoples as to whether extinguishing Aboriginal title was a good thing to do, but by the early nineties, the Inuit of Nunavut had settled a single claim covering the whole of the eastern Arctic, and the Dene political organizations had divided over the issue of claims. The Gwi’chin and Sahtu regions settled claims in the first half of the nineties, while the Dogrib have more recently completed a comprehensive claim negotiation that includes self-government provisions and can be said to “exhaust” their Aboriginal rights rather than extinguish them. Meanwhile Chipweyan are negotiating treaty rights, and the Dehcho region has firmly repudiated the notion of extinguishment of Aboriginal title and is trying to develop an autonomous region, modelled on the Nunavut approach.
Northern Aboriginal politics are as intricate, complex, layered, multidimensional, and dynamic as can be found in any political jurisdiction, anywhere. The situation is rapidly evolving, yet the word “tradition” has enormous resonance. “Culture” is a critical political category, but the concept of “multiculturalism” has little relevance. Gender politics have a very specific trajectory here, especially in the context where negotiation of the public and private space remains a critical political structural issue, yet “feminism” rarely reaches the public stage. For many people, the Canadian north may be seen as the most far-flung sort of backwater, on the furthest colonial margin; yet it is precisely here that the latest theoretical constructs find themselves well tested and it is here that our political language and our ability to think the political have to be stretched to and perhaps beyond their limits. And, in my view, it is here, this kind of place, that has the most to teach us today about the political project of democratic government.
This is a book about two communities in Denendeh and one in Nunavut. I originally wanted to document what Aboriginal self-government meant to the people of these communities, how they thought it might lead to changes for the better, what models they wanted to pursue. I also wanted to test the territorial government’s claim that it might act as a vehicle for Aboriginal self-government. And I wanted to document events, provide a snapshot, as it were, of an unfolding politics in the climate of negotiations to settle major, comprehensive land claims in the north. However, as an observer poised to study how macro-level political changes came to bear on local, micro-level, quotidian concerns, I came to see something else, something that escaped the confinements of formal political structures and processes, a politics even more compelling though far less tangible, something like what Fredric Jameson has called a “political unconscious” and that I have come to see as a “cultural politics.”
The communities each agreed in advance to allow me to study with them, and in each case I agreed to help the communities in whatever ways they could make use of me. I thought that by working out of band and municipal offices, with the local administrators and politicians, I would get a better feel for the local political dynamics. I also wanted to make whatever contributions I could while I was there so that I would not be engaged in a one-way, appropriative, exchange. I was drawn to these particular communities initially because they embodied distinct models of local government. They came to embody something far more than that: each with its own personality, its own set of difficulties, its own stories, landscapes, laughters, insights, failings, promises.
Fort Simpson is a Dene (south Slavey) and Métis community in the Dehcho region, on the Deh Cho itself where it is met by the Liard River. Political leaders in the community and the region have rejected the logic of extinguishment of their Aboriginal title and, during the period of this study, enshrined that principle in a regional Deh Cho Declaration. Fort Simpson is connected to the south by road. It has a population of about 1000, many of whom are non-Native. It has both a local municipal council and a band council, the latter established in accordance with provisions of the Canadian federal Indian Act legislation, the former through territorial legislation.
Fort Good Hope is also a Dene and Métis community further north along the Deh Cho. It is in the Sahtu region, and, during the period of this study, participated in negotiating and ratifying a land claim that included an extinguishment clause. It has a population of about 800, the majority of whom are Dene and Métis, speakers of the north Slavey dialect, and is not connected to the south save for a winter road. A unique model of local governance, involving a community council that functions both as municipal and band government, has been established in Fort Good Hope.
Pangnirtung, or Panniqtuuq, as local elders would have it, is on Baffin Island in the eastern Arctic, the most remote of the three communities. It has a population of about 1300, most of whom are Inuit. Panniqtuuq is in Nunavut. There is no band council because Inuit are not governed by Canada’s Indian Act; a municipal (hamlet) council dominated by local Inuit governs local affairs. In fact, the working language of the hamlet council is Inuktitut and at every meeting I have attended, all the councillors have been Inuit.
In each of the communities, I talked to local politicians, elders, and other community residents, both informally and in tape-recorded formal interview settings. I sat in on local government meetings, on local feasts and celebrations, and on community assemblies or meetings. I read documents in the band/community/municipal council offices. I got out on the land with people in their hunting and fishing camps, and watched and listened and read, letting accidents happen; hunting stories. I also held workshops when asked, wrote funding proposals, drafted legal language for negotiations, acted as recorder at meetings, and tried in various ways to give back whatever I could to the communities. The ethics of such an exchange are constitutive of what is called Native Studies.
The three communities stand in for something broader, though, what could be called the fact of community itself, the fact of community as coming into being, being built or falling apart, as a problem, a construction, a trajectory. In their temporalities and spacings, in their debates and discussions, these communities involve attempts to build a precarious socious; each offers its own example of what such a socious can look like, what kind of social relations can be constructed. That is, each is in some fashion the product of decisions and impositions, negotiations and subversions, actions and reactions at the local level to broader structures and possibilities. Frank T’Seleie, from Fort Good Hope, in a conversation with me, questioned the manner in which communities are often taken for granted:
The thing that really focusses it away from the traditional system is the focus on the community, the community. I mean that, when you have people [with] the mentality that the world only exists here. To me, I start my learning in a completely different world. I mean that’s not my vision of the community, that’s a poor mentality. Which, because, we never lived in houses; only now we’re beginning to learn how to live in houses.
Communities, as they are now constituted in the north, are relatively recent accommodations and their basic infrastructures are colonial inspirations: the housing designs, the educational systems, the presupposition of concentrated human occupation at a specific site for a lengthy duration, all come with colonialism. Many Inuit and Dene were born to drastically different circumstances on the land or in the bush, and some continue to exist their settlements as base camps rather than as permanent sites of residence. The K’ashogot’ine, the Liidli Koe Dene, the Panniqtuuq Inuit in the three communities did not take the fact of community in its newer appearance for granted; they actively sought to transform the coming together forced upon them by a colonial regime into a new form of social being, something like a community. The fact of community, the daily decisions and practices and languages that go into forging its continual becoming, this too is what these communities represent, and it is exactly the point at which they find themselves frequently in conflict with the colonial State apparatus.
Through the course of this study, four theses or considerations emerged as focal points for my inquiries and writings. These deserve summary in a provisional manner here, and elaboration in the discussions of each of the communities.
The first thesis is that in Aboriginal self-government, the politics of form is of considerable importance. Discussion of Aboriginal self-government in the political forum has largely concentrated on the question of the transfer of power from federal, provincial, and territorial governments to Aboriginal communities: how much power will communities have over what jurisdictional areas? However, the form in which power is deployed not only reflects the cultural values of those who deploy it, but it embodies, enacts, and perpetuates those cultural values. Any decision made by an Aboriginal community in accordance with the logic of the established order, in accordance with the logic of instrumental rationality and normalization techniques, even if that decision is substantively to do something that will promote traditional values, will be a step in the direction of totalization. The children who watch the deciders will learn that in order to be effective, they must learn the dominant logic. Culture will be separate from everyday life, something to be stored in museum boxes. The debate on Aboriginal self-government must shift to a debate about political forms.
The second thesis is that, if evaluated in meaningful democratic terms, the Aboriginal communities I studied are more than ready for Aboriginal self-government. Much is taking place to ‘prepare’ communities for self-government on the understanding that, somehow, they are not yet ready for it. This derives from an ethnocentric position that assumes all government must follow the dominant Western form. However, if we reject that logic, we come to the conclusion that no one is better situated to understand and consult the people of Aboriginal communities than Aboriginal peoples themselves and, further, that the mode of consultation must be appropriate to the community and culture, not to the Canadian State. If we argue that ‘they’ will not be ‘ready’ for self-government until ‘they’ can manage committee structures and specific financial accounting techniques, we effectively say ‘they’ cannot be self-governing until ‘they’ are like ‘us’.
The third thesis is that although the State is itself a relation and a site of struggle, it structurally is positioned to move in the direction of totalization. The State’s objective, aside from the wishes of its individual agents, is to find a mechanism to incorporate Aboriginal peoples into the dominant order. This is a structural exigency and will never cease as long as the dominant order depends on the logic of capital accumulation and the expansion of the commodity form. It is not this or that individual or even this or that policy that Aboriginal people find themselves opposed to, it is an underlying logic embodied by the State, articulated through a trajectory of policies. Aboriginal peoples in Canada do not experience the State as the protector of their property, the guarantor of peace and order necessary to the individual’s search for fulfilment; they experience the State as ruthless, unrelenting, totalizing machinery. The implication is that Aboriginal people’s struggle for cultural survival will not end as long as these structural exigencies remain in place: it will always be under pressure from mechanisms of totalization.
The fourth thesis is that, at least in this specific context, the State can be defined as a certain kind of writing. The State will not address Aboriginal people until they learn this writing, this form. Negotiation, indeed discussion, cannot proceed without it. But learning this form of writing means engaging in the logic of the dominant order: a paradox. A precondition for playing the game is surrender. In response to this, the many ancient modalities of writing deployed by Aboriginal peoples, especially modes of writing on the land and writing on the body, are being reconfigured and redeployed in creative ways. To the extent that learning to read these creative inscriptions is a critical aspect of understanding the specific characteristics of this struggle, the study of Aboriginal politics involves many a writing lesson.
Finally, this is not only a discussion of three communities and four theses. It is also a study of a certain public space, what could be called a cultural politics and a political culture. The public governments of Nunavut and the NWT remain a site of investigation here, albeit a decentred site. This study traces the outer reaches of power to determine its effects and map the resistances that take place from that specific structural position or terrain. The establishment of communities that deserve the name may be seen as one such resistance. To another form of those resistances we can give the name or apply the term or enunciate the desire called “democracy.” Forcing people to surrender their right to participate in politics by reducing that right to the merest gesture, the written mark, the vote, is deployed as a tool of totalizing power, which everywhere defines itself as democratic and defines democracy by this hollow shell: the vote that establishes ‘representative’ government. But, in some places and in some times, a different kind of political structure involving the continuance of political responsibility operates. Give up, for a moment, the notion that democracy is defined wholly and exclusively by the exercise of the formal vote for a political representative, to think instead the possibility of continued participation in an ongoing public discussion, beyond the boundaries of the State-sanctioned written word, and through the ethics of mutuality established in performative speech gestures, and constituting something that deserves to be named community, embodied here and now in the contradictory call of Aboriginal self-government.
reading. We read for pleasure and for knowledge. Just as our books rub against each other on our shelves, placed together by the accident of category or alphabet, our readings converge with each other; somehow, as the texts are imprinted in our minds, they slip across their covers and merge in strange articulations. Some of us are in large measure the end result of a trail of readings. One can read more than books, though. One can read people, one can read the world. One can read books to gain wisdom and knowledge, power and healing. One can read the bush and the land to gain wisdom and knowledge, power and medicine. One can read the stories inscribed in the landscape with as much care as one reads the narratives of classical history. The differing protocols of these forms of reading need to be respected, and we do well to remind ourselves of the pleasures of the texts.
landscapes. One of the interesting features of northern Aboriginal communities is the way they exist their landscape. It is a commonplace assumption, and one I reject, that Aboriginal peoples are or have been “closer to nature.” In my own view, the metaphor of proximity to nature is wholly suspect since nature retains its power within each of our bodies. One cannot be closer or farther from that which is within us (”do you need to pee?” is how the Italian novelist Italo Calvino raises the question). However, this is not to suggest that Dene and Inuit communities do not structure different relations to their ecological settings. Furthermore, each of the communities discussed here involves, as a community, a way of making its landscape meaningful, a way of making the very shape of the land become part of the social discussion. The landscape itself as a trace as a story as a setting as an obstacle as a site as a question as an opening as a language surrounded by and representing an embodied inscription.
architectures. The organization of built space within the community, in part a response and reflection and denial of the landscape, is also a critical aspect of community life in northern Canada. Experiments in architectural form—sometimes quite dramatic—have been necessitated by the unique engineering problems posed by arctic conditions. Houses are built on stilts so they will not melt the permafrost underneath, or are anchored down to resist strong winds. Public architecture is always fascinating in these communities, and the construction and use of public and private space are a central concern when these are dealt with across cultural boundaries. The fact of housing itself, so crucial to the fact of community, the ways in which houses are occupied, are telling indicators of colonial political dynamics. Housing has been and continues to be one of the most contested and difficult of local political questions in northern Aboriginal communities.
gestures. Like landscapes, gestures are an embodied writing. The habits of everyday life contain the continuing traces of cultural difference. Attention to the language of the gestural allows us to see how communities are continually in a process of being built and rebuilt. Gestures can be wholly saturated with ideology—as in the salute to authority, the sign of the cross, or most symptomatically the silence that greets the spectacle—though those of interest here are those that move in an emancipatory direction: the habitual gesture that reveals something of the cultural context in which it exists and from which it derives its meaning. Gestures live in the everyday, the quotidian, and invite thought respecting daily difference, modes of being that move along differing trajectories, lines of difference.
elders. Like the concept of tradition, the notion of elders is highly politically charged. Elders have an extraordinary value in contemporary popular culture and hence are made to bear the weight of an enormous desire for ‘authenticity’. In Panniqtuuq, in Fort Good Hope, in Fort Simpson, there are elders. Indeed, it is possible to say that the strength of each of these communities in good measure rests on the continuing strength of the elders who remain. Elders can teach with stories and with gestures; they can speak the language of their landscape; they can have an astute understanding of contemporary social issues at the global level or can be largely unconcerned about how their local knowledge relates to broader developments. Different elders have different interests, different kinds of knowledge. In this book, to the extent possible, they have their names: some of the mystification of their status and knowledge disappears when we who write of it accept this form of responsibility, acknowledging the individuality of each elder, whose knowledge is always some reflection of their culture and some reflection of their own idiosyncratic personality. Elders can be respected in their local or regional circumstances and can also be overlooked. Those I have worked with have been humane, humorous, kindly, serious, philosophical, intense, withdrawn, cautious, visionary, grounded, dignified, humble, principled. Contrary to the view implied by their deification, they have not demanded that one agree with everything they say. But one should listen well.
Note one: culture. The concept of “culture” is under attack. A strain of contemporary social theory would suggest that the concept implies too rigidly bounded, too temporally static a social being to be of value any longer. Since there remains a difference between Dene, Inuit, and Métis lifestyles, values, and views and those of the dominant society, and since other ways of conceptualizing that difference—such as the concept of “race”—seem even more reprehensible than the concept of culture, the latter remains in operation in this work. The challenge is to find a way to represent culture that recognizes the porosity of cultural boundaries and does not presume that culture is fixed in time. This study is not about Aboriginal cultures as they may have been practised and lived in some earlier, more valid, ‘pristine’ expression. It looks at Aboriginal cultures as they exist today, in contemporary communities, and it puts into play the questions that culture raises about modalities of looking, including how we look at culture.
Note two: history. History gives us some purchase on the present; with Walter Benjamin I would like to think of history not as context and not as a linear sequence that leads to the present, but as rupture and opening, a field of battle in a war over meaning. The purchase on the present becomes more vivid the further back one goes. Classical history, whether of Europe or Asia or the Americas, partly appeals to scholars because it gives something of a longer term perspective, the perspective of vast distance, on our current troubles. If that is so, then the perspective gained from Aboriginal histories, a perspective that must cross the vast chasm of different modes of production, is glacial. No mere accident of reading, then, leads this study down the pathway of classical history: a love of Aboriginal narrative does not have to preclude or negate the value of the Western canon, though one might ask that the attention paid to the oral foundations of The Odyssey might also inform the hearing given to certain elders. Perhaps it is only in resonance with some of these most revered of Western texts that an appreciation of the significance of contemporary events and responses to them can be approximated.
Note three: names. Names are withheld in this study as an exception rather than the rule. The words of my Métis, Inuit, and Dene teachers and friends deserve to be attributed, recognized, and acknowledged as surely as the words cited from my scholarly sources. Through this practice, which involves its own ethics, Native Studies unravels the concept of “Native informant,” an unravelling that sits closely beside Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstruction of the concept in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Colonial nominalism, the rewriting of personal and geographic names, is also at work in the lack of respect accorded to “Native informants.” Decolonization involves a righting and a writing of names.
Note four: whites. Inuit call us Qallunaat, a word much in use in Nunavut. Dene call us Mola. These words are used in their appropriate contexts in this text. The word “non-Native” is also used. The latter has the merit of reversing a five-centuries-old practice of defining Aboriginal people through absences: the Spanish thought of los indios as “without God, without kings, without laws.” In his influential The Indians of Canada, Diamond Jenness structured the work around a catalogue of things that Aboriginal people did not have. Post-colonial reversal positions the colonial inheritors of the Spanish legacy as ‘without Aboriginality’: I am a non-Native.
Note five: theory. There are those who hate contemporary social theory. No doubt a few can be found practising Northern Studies. There are those who love contemporary social theory. Their lives are sometimes consumed at its sacrificial altars. The three posts of current theory—post structuralism, post modernism, post colonialism—have their place in this study. The concept of totalization, the debates over mode of production, theoretical notions of text and embodiment, these and others allow the refiguring of a political boundary without which politics is impossible. I remain most closely indebted to a dialectical Marxist tradition now largely out of fashion—let the name Jean-Paul Sartre mark this place—but I have allowed whatever current of theory on which a conceptual insight floats to wash over this work. In a small way this work would like to reinvigorate the strong history of theoretical insight in relation to Northern Studies, a line of thought that stretches from Boas to Balicki to Brody, though with terms and concepts of our current moment.
Note six: numbers. The logic of the numerical sequence has been forcefully characterized by Sartre as a serial logic. In northern communities this serial logic, the logic of quantification, of numerical sequence, most frequently serves as a justificatory foundation for imposed State injunctions, while as against it a qualitative logic, defiantly unquantifiable, circulates in stories and gestures. The latter logic, in its unquantifiability, might be called poetic. Methodologically, this study rests on ‘qualitative research’, though I would designate that concept not so much as another step-by-step sequence of clearly delimited practices as a marker for what can not be defined. The invocation of serial logic in the sequencing of this introduction—here! now!—is a modest attempt to hold a mirror up to the colonial busy-workers statistically projecting economic growth cycles on graveyards.
This text is organized into seven chapters. The first two chapters may be taken to offer a variety of contexts or frames, though I prefer to think of them as a contribution in their own right. These chapters include stories of the history of public government in the north, description of the different legal status of Inuit and Dene, discussion of land claims negotiations, as well as commentary on a variety of contemporary social and theoretical concepts that illuminate or open up or structure ways of seeing northern politics. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters discuss the local cultural politics and political structures and spaces of Fort Simpson, Fort Good Hope, and Panniqtuuq, respectively. The sixth chapter raises broad questions about the issue of Aboriginal self-government, the four themes and five concerns enunciated above, and the place of the territorial governments. The last, short chapter is a brief epilogue on hunting stories, because the issue of animal rights and hunting is so important to the continued viability of northern Aboriginal economies.
The word “tradition” and the phrase “on the land,” which are used extensively in this text, may concern non-northern readers, who these days are keenly aware of how much ‘traditions’ are constructed and for whom ‘on the land’ is a signifier without a referent. In the north, these terms are so much a part of everyday discourse that they pass unnoticed. If we remain mindful of the likelihood that where and whenever the concept of “tradition” has been deployed—even in ‘traditional’ times—it involved a fabrication or invention, perhaps a form of what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins calls “mytho-praxis,”6 its deployment here need not unduly concern us. It is only when there is a desire to assert the traditional ‘authenticity’ of this or that cultural practice over others that the term acquires problematic resonances that need to be carefully untangled. To put this in another way, for someone to say “this is the traditional way” could be read as “this is the way we always did things” or “this is the way we did things in the past,” which itself is open to interpretation. It is noteworthy that politically, the deployment of the term gives Aboriginal speakers an authority and legitimacy that counter the credentials of their non-Native counterparts. “On the land,” a phrase perhaps unfamiliar to southern readers, is used as often for those going out on boats or over ice as it is to describe travel over land. “On the land” designates a reality outside of, but in intimate connection with, community life, a constitutive reality that constantly reflects back on community life, usually related to subsistence food production—fishing, gathering, hunting, trapping—and with as much cultural resonance in the North as the concept of “traditional.”
Two concepts that inform this study and have already been partially deployed are best elaborated at the outset. The first of these is totalization. The concept is a well-known Hegelian carry-over into Marx’s and Marxist thought; it has been the subject of intense discussion and debate in the last few decades, though the conversation has taken place almost entirely in abstract philosophical terms, thereby reducing its promise as a tool of social analysis. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argues, “A totalisation has the same statute as the totality, for, through the multiplicities, it continues that synthetic labour which makes each part an expression of the whole and which relates the whole to itself through the mediation of its parts. But it is a developing activity.”7 The homogenization that comes with capitalism, and is increased exponentially in the latest phase of capitalist development, is an expression of the totalizing exigencies at the structural core of the dominant system. Totalization has been experienced by Aboriginal peoples in Canada as a State policy, characterized by many scholars as “assimilation,” which has worked to absorb them into the established order. Theodor Adorno, in his Minima Moralia, provides an eloquent articulation of how totalization works in the realm of social difference:
That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality. . . . The racial difference is raised to an absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely, if only in the sense that nothing that is different survives. . . . The spokesmen of unitary tolerance are, accordingly, always ready to turn intolerantly on any group that remains refractory: intransigent enthusiasm for blacks does not exclude outrage at Jewish uncouthness. The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.8
Fredric Jameson, whose thought in many respects has followed a Sartrean trajectory, has, over the last two decades, established himself as a foremost proponent of the concept of totalization against those, particularly associated with varieties of post-structuralist philosophy, who have attacked it. In his book about Adorno, Jameson suggests that some thinkers in the Marxist tradition have been “stigmatized as ‘totalitarian’ in their insistence on the urgency and centrality of the notion of totality,” arguing that “the misunderstanding lies in drawing the conclusion that philosophical emphasis on the indispensability of this category amounts either to celebration of it or, in a stronger form of the anti-utopian argument, to its implicit perpetuation as a reality or a referent outside the philosophical realm.”9 Jameson is well aware that the concept of totalization is much derided these days as “a properly metaphysical survival, complete with illusions of truth, a baggage of first principles, a scholastic appetite for ‘system’ in the conceptual sense, a yearning for closure and certainty, a belief in centeredness, a commitment to representation, and any number of other antiquated mindsets.”10 However, on the specific charge that “the concept of totalization means repressing all these group differences and reorganizing their former adherents into some ironclad military or party formation,” he argues that “on any meaningful usage—that is to say, one for which totalization is a project rather than the word for an already existent institution—the project necessarily means the complex negotiation of all these individual differences.”11 Jameson’s work allows for an understanding of the critical value of the concept of totalization, both in describing the logic and material practice of the dominant order and in constructing forms of resistance to it, counter totalities or, in a Sartrean vein, “detotalizing” totalities: what today we might want to call “viral resistances.” A viral resistence acts like a computer virus to reconfigure a total field or, at a minimum, to massively disrupt the project of totalization.
The concept of totalization is indispensable to an understanding of the political project of Aboriginal peoples in northern Canada, a project that can be seen as a form of resistance to the world-as-grid being constructed by the totalizing exigencies of commodity culture. Michael Taussig, among many others and in this instance following George Lukacs, describes commodity culture as “the thingifying quality of commodity-inspired culture manifested in such disparate forms as bureaucratic planning and Warhol’s all-alike, endless soup-cans extending over the face of an ever more rationalized capitalist universe,” or, in the less abstract terms that Taussig adds, “what hits you as you wriggle out of the congestion of the city to leap westwards in the state-registered steel beast across the George Washington bridge onto Highway 101 starting with Exit 3 and numbered in order all the way to the Pacific coast where the pounding waves stop it short. A Cold War feat.”12 What exit will we take to Nunavut or Denendeh?
Resistance to totalization, for those who do not have the power to directly confront it, frequently takes the form of subversion. Subversion involves a strategy of reading and a practice of redeployment where a sign or structure or object that has been fashioned as a tool of totalization is reconfigured as a mechanism expressing cultural resistance. Jacques Derrida provides an illustrative example in one of his characterizations of Karl Marx: “Marx wants at the same time to extract them from Stirner’s witness-text and to use them against him. As always, he grabs the weapons and turns them back against the one who thought he was their sole owner.”13 The following example, offered by Taussig—whose work as a reader of the micropolitics of subversion is perhaps his most significant contribution—is equally illustrative:
Sometimes the icons of the Church enter into play with the icons of the state. Cali, the largest city of the Colombian southwest, straddles the angle where the plains cut into the steep slopes of the Andes. Overlooking and protecting the city from afar, on the mountain’s peak, stands an enormous statue of Christ, arms outstretched, crucified. Down in the city, so I am told by one of its young vagabundos, is a statue commemorating its founder, the great conquistador Sebastian Benalcazar. He stands tensed with his hand to his hip, not to his sword, in anger and disbelief that his wallet has just been stolen. (Cali, it should be noted, is notorious for its pickpockets.) With his other hand he points not to the dream of the sublime and future prospects of the town he has founded, but to another statue, that of the first mayor of Cali (so my young friend tells me), accusing him of the theft. The mayor, in his turn, defends himself by pointing to the statue of another of the city’s dignitaries, who in his turn points up the mountain to none less than Christ himself—standing with arms outstretched as for a police search: “I didn’t steal anything. Look and see!” The lot of the urban vagabond and that of Christ are thus brought together, both unjustly blamed by the city’s founding fathers, conquistadores and good bourgeois alike.14
Their “lot” is “brought together” by a subversive rereading of signs—in this case, statues—constructed and placed in order to ‘shore up’ or glorify the dignity and power of church and State. Subversion is often a micropolitics whose traces are in the sphere of the everyday and pass unnoticed or unregistered, as is appropriate to a gesture against the very process of registration, or official writing, that most often marks State power. While any theory of subversion depends upon a notion of intentionality, subversion is an embodied form of contesting intentionality; the fact that subversion can take place itself illustrates that intentions do not and cannot confer any final truth or guarantee ultimate meaning respecting a text. In western Arctic communities, it is commonplace that Dene, especially older Dene, wear their slippers outdoors with a rubber galosh overtop. The same slippers are sold to tourists. In buying them, the tourists surrender the attempt to achieve ultimate convenience in footwear, slip-ons (Adorno thought slipons were “monuments to the hatred of bending down”). The Dene slippers, which require help from the hand to put on, are also are a mainstay of the northern Aboriginal cottage/craft industry. The galoshes worn over them turn them into outdoor wear, but can then be slipped off indoors, turning the slippers back into slippers. Here, a technology developed or intended for wet weather wear is imported and supports the continuance of footwear that is markedly Dene. Subversion and totalization constantly and continually kick each other around.
The relation of totalization to subversion parallels what Jameson describes as a dialectic of ideology and Utopia. It is an intricate relation: what is subversive in one moment can quickly pass over into the realm of totalization. The dominating logic can appropriate, usually through cornmodification, the most subversive gestures. However, the workings of totalization are themselves so complex that even the mechanics of appropriation are open to subversion; this can be learned more from the life practices of the most marginal (and less totalized) people in the world, including Inuit and Dene, than even from the productions of the intellectual classes.
They will fight my fight, with my determination; over there is no more than a here; I am no more in danger ‘over there’ than they are here; I expect nothing from them (alterity), since everyone gives everything both here and ‘over there’. . .
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason
A final comment with which this introduction can be brought to a close. Clifford Geertz has described anthropology in terms of “being there” and “being here,” arguing that “the moral asymmetries across which ethnography works and the discursive complexity within which it works make any attempt to portray it as anything more than the representation of one sort of life in the categories of another impossible to defend. That may be enough. I, myself, think that it is.”15 This text, too, is an attempt to represent one sort of politics in the categories of another. In doing so, the categories themselves come into question, learn to dance in different steps. But this text also represents an attempt to reconstruct the opposition between ‘being there’ and ‘being here’ that the newer smallness of the world, created by totalization, allows. In this sense, this text represents part of an attempt to bring into being a new modality of knowledge, which is tentatively given the name Native Studies. Derrida refers to this ethical reconfiguration to some extent in his remarkable dedication at the beginning of Spectres of Marx: “at once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home. Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.”16 The situation of an academic discipline called Native Studies equally already implies this. Students who have come from ‘there’ to ‘here’—from around the NWT to Ontario and Manitoba—courses taught ‘there’—specifically in Yellow-knife and Panniqtuuq—articles written for the northern press, all imply in my mind a different kind of interrelationship and trace a newer modality of responsibility. Eric Menicoche and Robert Tookoome and Kayrene Kilabuk were students in Native Studies at Trent University while I taught there. Bella T’Seleie, James Wahshee, Richard Van Camp, and many others were students in Native Studies courses I conducted for Arctic College in Yellowknife in 1990, near the beginning of this study. Learning and teaching have had to twist around each other in a manner that challenges and enriches both. At least some of the categories and some of the writing strategies deployed ‘here’ are commonplace ‘there’. And this text is directed, aimed, ‘addressed’, however naively or futilely, as much ‘there’ as ‘here’.