In an interview for this study conducted by Elizabeth Fajber, Mary Louise Norwegian, an amiable, elderly Dene woman who worked as a community health representative in Fort Simpson, told the following story:
Way back when they used to give glasses, the treaty glasses called. We’d get it once every two years, the free glasses. But when they check up for their eyes, we have interpreter there but they only hire interpreter to look up files, and she cannot be with a patient at the same time as being in the office, so yeah, we have interpreter there, but she’s work in the office. So they bring this patient to the room and ask them—because we have so many people in such a short days, just a few days we have to go through all those people—the first thing they ask them: ‘do you read?’ And those Native people say ‘no’. So the kind of glass they give them is for distance, and they never stop to think, these Native women they do embroidery, and sew, and needlework. It’s the same distance as reading a book. And then, so I went out of my way and got a dish of beads and a beading needle and thread needle. So I just leave it there with the [unintelligible] sheets, and they take that and if they see a Native woman they give them that plate and they put thread needle around with needle and beads, and so it’s working a bit better now. But it’s still, you know, they get glasses and they have to wait two more years. They get distance glass, they cannot afford close range glass, they have to wait for two years. So, you know, that’s, that was my biggest concern with eye care, for eye glasses for the Native people, while they have the chance to get it, they should get the right ones.
This story has all the force of a parable, involving as it does questions of seeing, of ways of seeing, and of the visibility of culture itself. Norwegian, the community health representative, notices that women coming for new glasses are being asked by the optometrist if they read and, if they answer negatively, are given glasses for long distance. In a typically Dene fashion, she does not confront the optometrist; instead, she tries to make visible to him what he is not seeing. She does this by leaving beads and needles lying around in this waiting room so he can see that some of the women clearly need glasses appropriate for the intricacies of beadwork.
The story itself is a machine that layers the relation between a non-Native medical specialist and Dene women. The doctor sees the mechanics of eye care enough to offer real help to people. Dene women and men come to him for help. The doctor cannot see exactly what kind of help they need, though of course he thinks he does or he thinks he can find out by asking questions. But an invisible cultural boundary separates him from them, his questions do not account for it, his medical practice is not as helpful as he believes it to be. Norwegian sees the disjuncture in the doctor-patient relation and finds a way of making visible to the doctor his cultural blindness. This whole relation unfolds in the realm of sight, in the realm of what is visible, of what the elderly Dene women want to see and of what the doctor cannot see. This is a story of how to make cultural difference visible and it stages the notion that culture itself is perhaps a way of seeing.
In her The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss argues that the ‘trick’ in Benjamin’s fairy tale is to interpret out of the discarded dream images of mass culture a politically empowering knowledge of the collective’s own unconscious past.1 This is certainly an important and viable program for those caught deeply within the web of late capitalist social relations. But what if the living memory of the collective was politically empowering, not as an unconscious past but as one aspect of the present? What images become politically empowering in such a context? The dialectical images on which Michael Taussig rests so much interpretive power? Or, perhaps, an image of an image, a story of a way of seeing, a story that reveals, makes visible, the limits of a way of seeing, a story that sees seeing itself and, as quietly and insistently as the needle, thread, and beads placed on a plate in the physician’s waiting room, implicitly asks us if we need a new pair of glasses.
Gina Blondin was among the earliest Dene friends I encountered in the Northwest Territories during my first visit, in the summer of 1984. She made it her personal mission to take me a bit under her wing and tried to explain to me some of what the north is all about from a Dene perspective. She was a remarkable person, a strong and vibrant character. She seemed to me to embody something of the spirit of Thanadelthur, the woman who was largely responsible for negotiating peace between the Dene and Cree in the early eighteenth-century fur trade. Like Thanadelthur, Gina could talk. She had an enormous energy and would never sit still, a constant firestorm of movement, meals, papers, picnics, arrangements, thoughts, talk. Talk was her greatest outlet; she spoke rapid-fire, dropping ideas, plans, stories, memories, explanations, justifications in a verbal blizzard, while she whisked her daughter to some practice or other, chopped vegetables, picked up the constantly ringing phone, sorted through mail, dealt with doorbells, and looked over once in a while at her visitor.
She was the daughter of a chief, George Blondin, from the small Dene community of Deline (then Fort Franklin) on Sahtu (Great Bear Lake). Her father, on retirement, became a very well-known storyteller and elder and, thanks in part to her help and encouragement, began to publish traditional Dene stories and histories. Her cousin Ethyl Blondin-Andrew became Member of Parliament for the Western Arctic region for the Liberal party and Secretary of State for Training and Youth in the Liberal government after 1993. Her brother John, until his death in the mid-nineties, was a well-known northern artist, particularly in dance and theatre. She came, in other words, from a very strong family and from a traditional community. During the time I knew her, she was Executive Assistant to the Minister of Education, then Dennis Patterson, and a single mother with a young daughter.
We met through the accident of mutual acquaintances. For no explicable reason we became friends. She offered me meals and paid enough attention to explain something about what was going on, who the key actors were, what their histories were. She helped transform me from another southern researcher stumbling around without a clue into someone who could begin to ask questions. Between 1986, when the study that first brought me to the north was completed, and 1990, when I began the process of starting this study, Gina died of an illness. I found out through friends, from Toronto, a continent away. I never had an opportunity to pay my proper respects. These words, if they are, as Dene might say, “good words,” are my only way of returning the gifts she gave me. Two of the stories she told me stayed with me in spite of the fact that I took no notes, and came to inform how I understand the complex dynamic of northern Aboriginal cultural politics.
Like many Dene of her generation, the political leaders in the prime of life through the seventies and eighties, Gina attended a residential school. Dene children were sent to church-run residential schools from primary years up to school completion, returning home for summers and Christmases. The residential school system is famous in Canada as one of the great colonial institutions established by the settler white colony (see John Milloy’s A National Crime). The legacy of residential schools remains unresolved, and a key component of reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples in Canada will be an accounting of the residential school experience. Because I had attended a government-run residential high school in northern Manitoba (not as harsh an institution as the mission-run schools of the earlier decades, for the accountants of pain to whom this would matter), I was attuned to stories about residential schools and could share experiences. One of those schools in the NWT was a Catholic-run school at Fort Providence, at the south end of the Deh Cho (Mackenzie River), which served many of the Dene communities.
One summer when she was in her teens, Gina was not allowed to return to her family—they were out on the land, or there was an illness—and had to spend the summer at the residential school. She missed her family terribly, and for that reason remembers it as a very sad and lonely period of her life. Gina spent much of her time that summer doing what she was told. The nuns had her working in the dirt, pulling out the plants they didn’t like, leaving alone the ones that grew in the mounds, watering, other tasks that seemed very strange to her. Gina had no idea what this was all about. But she was a good, hard worker, she followed instructions closely, she didn’t need to know what the reasons were or outcome would be. If the white nuns for their own inexplicable reasons wanted her to wallow around in the mud, that’s what she’d have to do. At least she was outside.
The day arrived when something was going to happen to her mounds of dirt. The nuns now had her pulling out little round clumps, brushing mud off them, piling them up. Finally, she recognized them: potatoes! Her reaction, as she explained it to me years later, while leaning across her kitchen counter at the Borealis Co-op in Yellowknife, was something like “yech.” She was “grossed out.” She had eaten potatoes all her life, they were a staple by then for most Dene families, going along nicely with moose or caribou meat, or fish, or in stews. And now, it turned out, they grew in the dirt! in the mud! they were filthy! For a long time afterwards, Gina had a hard time eating potatoes.
The story remains with me to this day. My intent in telling it here is to dramatize a fact of Gina’s life that is typical of many Dene and Inuit. For Hugh Brody, in his recent The Other Side of Eden, it is a determinant fact. Dene and Inuit live in some uneasy fashion between two kinds of ways of life; one of those gets its food largely through cultivation, the work of the soil. The other gets its food by gathering or hunting it from the bush.
. . . proper listening is the foundation of proper living.
—Plutarch, Essays
An astute philosophical analysis on “The Problem of Speaking for Others” by Linda Alcoff concludes with a call that perhaps speaking itself is the problem, that perhaps a willingness to listen would serve better. While the problems of speech and identity politics are much debated these days, much less serious attention is given to the problem of listening, of how to listen. Let Alcoff’s end point act as an introduction, then, and one that leads straight to Plutarch, who did address the problem of listening a long time ago in a well-known essay. Plutarch demands that the attitude of the listener not be passive, suggesting that just as in a ball game the catcher must move and change position in a rhythm that responds to that of the thrower, so in the case of speeches there is a certain harmonious rhythm on both the speaker’s and the listener’s part.2 One of the main points of Plutarch’s essay, which could be read allegorically to deal with the whole problem of listening to ‘others’, was that a degree of empathy or charity was at least initially demanded, in part because “it is impossible for a speaker to be so thoroughly ineffective and mistaken that he fails to come out with a commendable idea or quotation or overall topic and plan, or at least a commendable use of language and structuring of his speech.”3
In a society where “power consists in the monopoly of the spoken word,”4 good listening is hardly a valued attribute. A theme of many of the elders I have talked to—George Blondin, Pauloosie Angmarlik, Paul Wright—has been how people do not listen as well as they did in the past. This is a common assertion of northern Aboriginal elders. For example, Dogrib women told Joan Ryan for her study of Dene traditional justice that in those days people really listened,5 a lament I too heard repeatedly. This is hardly surprising. Walter Benjamin commented, of course, on the same phenomenon, attributing it to the decline of boredom, “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” In Benjamin’s view, when the “activities that are intimately associated with boredom disappear . . . the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.”6
Listening to elders, in particular, is a difficult matter. While the contemporary social veneration of elders makes their speech a valuable source of legitimation, to the extent that frequently elders—commonly unnamed— provide the final, ‘human’ touch to many a politician’s speech, listening to their speech demands attention and care of a particular kind. Good listening here means disentangling the web of anthropological practice, exploding the concept of ‘Native informant’ and the concept of fieldwork, attending to both the immediate power of the individual and the cultural knowledge that the individual bears. And putting oneself in that state of grace, a self-forgetful, distracted boredom, that will allow the story to take root in memory.
Certainly Michael Taussig’s concept of “implicit social knowledge” is relevant. Implicit social knowledge involves “what moves people without their knowing why or quite how, with what makes the real real and the normal normal, and above all what makes ethical distinctions politically powerful.”7 Taussig also takes implicit social knowledge to be an essentially inarticulable and imageric non-discursive knowing of social relationality.8 There must be a way of both respecting the specific, individual views of elders and traditional teachers, and of attuning oneself to their implicit social knowledge. One aspect of the disentangling involves giving one’s ‘informants’ their name: too many texts so carefully cite each textual authority, while conveniently being able to take the utterances of their ‘informants’ as culturally emblematic, that the names that appear in a text about some ‘other’ or ‘other’ are all from the dominant culture. The form in which the images that make up implicit social knowledge are exchanged is itself one critical feature of that knowledge. The narrative form, the practice of storytelling, retains a particular charge among Inuit and Dene alike. The storytelling form as a way of conveying information was and is a refined art among gathering and hunting peoples. This too is a work of stories: stories of communities, of people, of theories, of histories, of ideas, of stories. In the moment of relating these, my only consolation is the hope, like a breath of prayer, that I have listened well.
Dene and Inuit live on a fault line between two very distinct ways of life: that of the (postmodern, industrial, capitalist world and that of their traditional, subsistence, hunting world. That is, their way of life comes from or is related to an underlying structure that social scientists in the Marxist tradition have called a “mode of production.” Fredric Jameson, in proposing a Marxist strategy of interpreting cultural texts, argued that three distinct “horizons of interpretation” could be deployed and that
such semantic enrichment and enlargement of inert givens and materials of a particular text must take place within three concentric frameworks, which mark a widening out of the sense of the social ground of a text through the notions, first, of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time; then of a society, in the now already less diachronic and time-bound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in the vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations, from prehistoric life to whatever far future history has in store for us.9
In Jameson’s schema, a mode of production is the broadest level of analysis, or third and final horizon of interpretation, that can be deployed to understand social phenomena such as cultural texts. Jameson suggests that “the ‘problematic’ of modes of production is the most vital new area of Marxist theory in all the disciplines today.”10
The concept of mode of production comes from Marx, who used it to classify differing types of societies. In his notebooks of 1857-58, Marx discussed the different elements of economic analysis in order to frame his argument for the priority of ‘production’.
Production creates the objects which correspond to given needs; distribution divides them up according to social laws; exchange further parcels out the already divided shares in accord with individual needs; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object and servant of individual need, and satisfies it in being consumed. Thus production appears as the point of departure, consumption as the conclusion, distribution and exchange as the middle, which is however itself twofold, since distribution is determined by society and exchange by individuals.11
This “shallow coherence,” in Marx’s words, of these elements situated production as the generative and determinative point of departure for a social system. Hence, different societies can be classified by the characteristic way or modality that they produce the goods and services they need to survive and reproduce. However, it is important to stress that production, the moment of creation, stands in for the whole social process; a mode of production is not simply a way of making things, but equally implies a way of organizing human relations, ways of ensuring social stability, ways of determining social reproduction, ways of understanding and seeing. A mode of production refers to an intricately interconnected social totality where the moment of economic production, narrowly understood, is itself in part conditioned by the relations it conditions, and where even the notions of what constitutes the “economic,” like production itself, are themselves defined and acquire different status within the whole. Broadly speaking, a mode of production implies a way of life, though the former term points in specific characteristic directions that have value for analytic and classificatory purposes, whether we are economic determinists of the older Marxist sort, or assert notions of “expressive causality” or “expressive correspondence” of the structuralist or post-structuralist variety. In the context of northern Canada, for example, it is the concept of mode of production that allows for recognition of a basic structural similarity between Inuit and Dene, despite the extraordinary differences in their languages, ecological strategies, and expressive cultural life. Hence, for Hugh Brody, who has worked with both Dene and Inuit, the rupture between hunting cultures and farming cultures is the critical, defining feature of the cultural difference between ‘Western’ and Aboriginal peoples.
The anthropologist Eric Wolfe characterizes a mode of production as “a specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labour is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge,” and argues that “the concept of social labour thus makes it possible to conceptualize the major ways in which human beings organize their production. Each major way of doing so constitutes a mode of production.”12 The concept of mode of production has been so widely used, discussed, criticized, and adapted that it is difficult not to deploy without specification. For example, Wolfe clearly sees a mode of production as “historically occurring,” whereas political scientist Nicos Poulantzas argued that “the mode of production constitutes an abstract-formal object which does not exist in the strong sense in reality.” Poulantzas’s suggestion here is important to the degree that it allows us to understand that different modes of production can co-exist within the same social structure; that is, “the only thing which really exists is a historically determined social formation.” Hence, in his view, “the social formation itself constitutes a complex unity in which a certain mode of production dominates the others which compose it.”13
Jameson, while rejecting Poulantzas’s form of distinction between an ‘abstract’ mode of production and a ‘real’ social formation, because it “encourages the very empirical thinking which it was concerned to denounce,” nevertheless accepts and deploys the concept of “social formation.”
Yet one feature of Poulantzas’ discussion of the ‘social formation’ may be retained: his suggestion that every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and structural co-existence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and survivals of older modes of production, now relegated to structurally dependent positions within the new, as well as anticipatory tendencies which are potentially inconsistent with the existing system but have not generated an autonomous space of their own.14
This is a critical point, because it allows us to think of conflict within specific social fields as conflict between, following Raymond Williams’s language,15 dominant and residual or emergent modes of production. It accords with Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse that bourgeois forms of production are dominant but not exclusive.16
Both Jameson and Wolfe, for different reasons, denounce the common tendency to view modes of production in a sequence of evolutionary stages of the primitive to archaic to feudal to capitalist sort. Wolfe, who proposed to discuss three modes of production, wrote that he had no “intention, in the present context, to argue that these three modes represent any evolutionary sequence.”17 Jameson simply notes that the stage schematic has “generally been felt to be unsatisfactory.”18 Interestingly, Marx, who, with Engels in The Communist Manifesto, provided a powerful source for the stage theory argument, showed a much more nuanced understanding in his 1857-58 notebooks, writing, for example, that “it may be said on the other hand that there are very developed but nevertheless historically less mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed division of labour, etc., are found.”19
One of the merits and contributions of Wolfe’s analysis is his definition of three modes of production, “a capitalist mode, a tributary mode, and a kin ordered mode.” Although he writes that “no argument is presented here to the effect that this trinity exhausts all the possibilities,” his discussion of the tributary mode takes in a wide variety of modes usually given distinct status, including the asiatic, archaic, and feudal. Modes of production are frequently distinguished by the way in which surplus value is ‘extracted’ from the broad mass of people. In capitalism, workers sell their labour as labour power and surplus value is what remains to the capitalist after they have paid the worker enough to allow the latter to subsist. The capitalist mode, in my own view, is also characterized by three critical features: the generalized expansion of the commodity form, the structural demand for capital accumulation, and the specific separation of the political and economic hegemonic institutions. In the tithe mode, economic surplus is extracted through the bonds of vassalage usually supported by the deployment of repressive force. The tributary or tithe mode, in Wolfe’s view, is a mode in which the “primary producer, whether cultivator or herdman, is allowed access to the means of production, while tribute is exacted from him by political or military means.”20 What Wolfe called a kin ordered mode I would prefer to designate as a gathering and hunting mode of production, characterized by nomadic and semi-nomadic bands where the primary producer has both access to the means of production and ‘ownership’ of the products of her or his labour. Notably, there is no extraction of economic surplus, but rather systems of generalized reciprocity among gatherers and hunters; hence, even this category needs rethinking if it is to be deployed to understand gatherers and hunters.
This tripartite division is particularly useful because it allows us to displace the concept of “pre-capitalist social formations,” a concept developed by Marx in his 1857-58 notebooks and used widely to characterize conflict between capitalist and earlier modes of production. The problem with the concept of pre-capitalist social formations, like the concept of “tribal peoples,” is that it elides the critical difference between the tributary mode of production and the gathering and hunting mode, between village agriculturalists and nomadic foragers. This difference is critical precisely because there are many features of the tributary mode that are similar to the capitalist mode but do not exist in the gatherer-hunter mode, a point of considerable importance to Brody. For example, both the tributary and capitalist modes are accumulative. The tributary mode involved settlements that allowed for the accumulation of material wealth. Even tributary pastoralists could accumulate, by ensuring that their flocks grew. In capitalism, accumulation reached a qualitatively new dimension with the dominance of abstract wealth in the form of capital. Among gatherers and hunters, particularly nomadic bands, accumulation of goods was not a material possibility. One could only accumulate what one could carry and there was a fairly clear limit to this. Similarly, both tributary and capitalist modes of production are socially structured around class conflict; the gathering and hunting mode was effectively classless. One implication of this is that the word “traditional,” used by agriculturalists and by hunters, takes on quite a different resonance in these distinct contexts. Both involve traditional cultures in conflict and collusion with the dominant structures, but one set of traditional values, that of agriculturalists, involves social hierarchy and values directly related to those now in the ascendancy. When hunters from egalitarian cultures use the word “tradition,” it retains a critical charge.
Hence, the dynamic of conflict between gathering and hunting peoples and the capitalist mode of production is specific and remains largely undertheorized, to a great extent because of the elision that the concept of precapitalist social formations involves. Even Hugh Brody’s recent work casts the conflict in terms of a struggle between hunters and farmers, thereby missing the dimensions of struggle that owe their features to the nature of capitalism, specifically. This particular dynamic of conflict has not been helped by many of those who have studied gatherers and hunters with a concern for the search for ‘pure’ exemplifications of primitiveness, since for the most part they have ignored the conflict altogether. The capitalist mode clearly grew out of the tributary mode and, as a result, even when it imposed itself on the tributary mode, it found social and other material structures that could accommodate its exigencies. The radicality of the difference between capitalism and gatherers and hunters made for an entirely different dynamic, one that continues to this day.
To each mode of production corresponds a mode of social being. This latter phrase may stand in as a working definition for the concept of culture. Reading the traces, in everyday community life in northern Canada, of a gathering and hunting mode of production involves attempting to interpret gestures, structures, stories, talk, objects, for what these may say or how they may point towards a radical alterity, an alterity that operates at the liminal margin of contemporary culture. The most profound differences, which challenge the fundamental structures of being that organize dominant society and which demand operation of concepts suited to the widest horizon of interpretation, are etched in commonplace figures of speech and everyday habits. The work of decoding and interpreting these does not take place for its own sake but has a dual direction: to point towards existing alternative modes of being that may be adaptable to quite different social circumstances, including our own (who and where ever this ‘our’ can be found), and to better understand and advance the specific struggles of particular Aboriginal peoples in the interest of furthering the project of social justice.
“One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such,” writes Jacques Derrida, “except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn’t always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin.”21 The monument is the highest expression of the principle of civilization: it reflects this or that particular civilization’s mode of public remembrance. And it reflects the notion of civilization itself. It is wise to remember that in ancient times, ‘putting up a trophy’ was what the victors did on the field of battle to establish and consolidate their victory. All monuments continue to bear traces of the power that can determine what will be remembered.
We are not used to thinking of gatherers and hunters in terms of empires. Gatherers and hunters left no striking monuments of the order of the pyramids. Their histories do not, by and large, tell us the life stories of ‘great’ conquerors and momentous, nation-building or -shattering events. They left none of the world religions to which millions today bow their heads. What sacred texts they left behind are usually inscribed in, and as an intimate part of, the landscape, as in the story of the giant beaver hides that Dene lawgiver Yamoria left pegged on the south face of Bear Rock Mountain, where “you can see the impression they make to this day.”22 Rather than leaving a substantial material contribution in the form of monuments to what we today might recognize as culture, gatherers and hunters left the most ephemeral but arguably most important of monuments: a set of values socially embedded in a way and a quality of life.
Yet there remains an assumption that the culture of gatherers and hunters is in some way deficient because it is not inscribed in massive architectural structures. And with the enormous self-satisfaction that is one of the society’s constitutive features, the assumption that Western society represents the most ‘highly developed’ way of life still reigns. Critical theory involves a questioning of Western culture from within its own terms, and therefore challenges this assumption. Hence, for example, of the fortunate, privileged, minority, living in increasingly banal suburbs, Theodor Adorno could once write:
Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that—to say nothing of cases where it is bought by abandoning allegedly morbid resistance to its positive surrogate—can men gain an idea of what experience might be. The admonition to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.23
A “highly developed” culture indeed, when we systematically destroy the world only marginally faster than we destroy every remaining capacity within ourselves that allows us to appreciate what is being destroyed. While respect for the other does not necessarily depend upon lack of regard for the self—quite the contrary—in the state of officially sanctioned self-satisfaction that the post-communist Western world has stumbled into, a position of criticism grounded upon the values and material strategies of other cultures becomes an almost necessary facet of their appreciation.
In his conclusion to The Political Unconscious, Jameson suggests “a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s great dictum that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at one and the same time a document of barbarism,’ proposing that the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian.”24 While we might be inspired to stage an alternative reversal, proposing that “no document of barbarism” exists that is not, at the same time, “a document of civilization,” since it is in part the nature and existence of such documents, of the documentary itself, that is in question, we must resist this formulation. Instead of great monuments or documents, instead of “highly developed” self-congratulation, of the gatherers and hunters we have a few scattered inscriptions, a few marginalized communities, a few fragmentary and usually highly distorted observations, passing as they do through the crucible of language before they can be received.
The following passage, by a by-no-means-sympathetic observer, Diamond Jenness, can stand in as an observation and a virtual allegory of the process of observing others. The date was Sunday, August 2, 1914. The place was on the north coast of Alaska. The lengthy excerpt is from Jenness’s recently published diary:
I watched the Eskimo camp ashore through the binoculars. There are 15 people living there, five tents, all of calico, three rectangular gable tents and two oval, like the old Eskimo skin tents, stretched over curving willow sticks. On the beach a man was sitting watching a fish-net stretched in the water on the edge. Presently a boy went down to him and they gathered the fish—salmon trout they looked like—eight in all I think, and flung them up on the beach; then they sat down side by side to chat for a time. Higher up on the bank in front of one of the tents four girls or women were sitting. A young fellow approached, apparently said something to them, then began to run. One of the girls or women sprang up and chased him for a short distance then picked up a clod of earth and threw it after him. Some distance away a man was approaching with a gun—clearly he had been out hunting—probably for ducks. A little while afterwards a little girl in bright red calico dress wandered down to the beach. The same girl ran after her and picked her up and threw her up the bank then scrambled up herself and stretched out on the grass beside the others. Outside another tent a man was gazing placidly out to sea, very likely watching our schooner. The sky was mirrored in the placid water and a little way out from the beach a line of small grounded ice floes stretched along for miles in each direction. Now and again an eider duck or a regiment of oldsquaws flew by. Faint and blurred in the far distance, hardly perceptible to the naked eye, were the Endicott Mountains. Blue smoke curled up from one of the tents and made a dark line across the sky. The whole scene was pervaded with the peace and charm of home, with the melancholy comfort of a sunset.25
Watching through his binoculars, from a comfortable distance, observing and recording, Jenness puts himself in what he names the “scene.” The searching gaze follows the leisurely pace of the people in the distance, the fishers pulling char from their net, the young women keeping a casual eye on the children or chasing their teasers, the hunter returning home, and comes to rest, finally, on “a man . . . gazing placidly out to sea, very likely watching our schooner.” It is at this point that the description of the social scene abruptly comes to an end, and Jenness moves on to the setting and the emotions the whole scene invokes, as if he has reached the point where his descriptive apparatus can no longer accommodate what it discovers. Attention to landscape here marks a refusal to probe the social. Rather than answers to whatever age-old questions we pose, rather than a revelation or a moral or a piece of evidence, or perhaps as well as these—even from the distance of time, space, culture, that separates Jenness and his reader from the scene described—at the very heart of the “scene,” positioned as its virtual “social climax,” we find the liminal point of the modernist anthropological project inasmuch as we encounter the fact that our gaze may be being returned.
The Fenni are astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor. They have no proper weapons, no horses, no homes. They eat wild herbs, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground. Their only hope of getting better fare lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with bone. The women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men; they accompany them everywhere and insist on taking their share in bringing down the game. . . . Unafraid of anything that man or god can do to them, they have reached a state that few human beings can attain: for these men are so well content that they do not even need to pray for anything.
—Tacitus, Germania
The anthropological work of Marshall Sahlins has contributed greatly to our appreciation of the gatherer and hunter mode of production in recent decades. His influential essay “The Original Affluent Society” in Stone Age Economics retains its power as a lever for toppling age-old biases towards so-called primitives, though, interestingly, the widely read piece has not been as subject to careful scholarly analysis as one might think. The by-now-familiar overall thesis in his essay is that the hunting-gathering economy has to be re-evaluated26 and such a re-evaluation could well characterize this form of economy as affluent rather than marginal, subsistence, or outright miserable, as has frequently been the dominant assumption.
Sahlins provides two broad reasons for his re-evaluation. On the one hand, he argues that gatherers and hunters have greater leisure time than any of the economies that followed, suggesting that “hunters keep banker’s hours” (34–35; note the leisurely tone of the Inuit social space in Jenness’s description above). On the other hand, Sahlins argues that there exists “a Zen road to affluence”(2), that gatherers and hunters can take the path of least resistance, in the language of classical Zen philosophy. Simply put, gatherers and hunters have fewer needs and those needs are relatively easily met. Any individual can make with her own hands the things she needs to survive and thrive. Moreover, there is a material limit that conditions the need structure. This material limit is an exigency that derives from the nomadic way of life of most gatherers and hunters. Again, simply put, in a society where you can only own what you can carry, your ownership or ability to accumulate things has an upper limit. Sahlins writes: “of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden. In his condition of life, goods can become ‘grievously oppressive’, as Guisinde observes, and the more so the longer they are carried around” (11). In this social context, objects must be viewed not with the desire that we are increasingly provoked to adopt as an attitude towards things, but with suspicion. For these reasons, Sahlins argues persuasively,
Hunting and gathering has all the strengths of its weaknesses. Periodic movement and restraint in wealth and population are at once imperatives of the economic practice and creative adaptations, the kinds of necessities of which virtues are made. Precisely in such a framework, affluence becomes possible. (34)
Conversely, it is the modern world that carefully harnesses its resources and creates massive surpluses, the enjoyment of which is restricted to extremely few, where meaningful, systematic, impoverishment becomes equally possible if not probable: “poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization” (37). Revisiting Sahlins’s arguments some twenty years after they were posited allows us to recognize both the extraordinary opening they afford in appraising the gathering and hunting mode of production, and the weaknesses and biases they reproduce.
Most critical of these latter is Sahlins’s systematic underappreciation of women’s work and women’s social position. The calculations of hours spent at work, for example, rest on very conventional notions of the concept of labour, almost exclusively focussing on food production. Food division and preparation rarely appear to be considered; discussion of child rearing is non-existent in the essay. In a remarkable passage on the issue of leisure time, Sahlins writes:
Hunter’s subsistence labours are characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore the women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men, and provide the greater part of the food supply. Man’s work is often done. (3 5)
The focus and bias here are on the hunter, as if the hunter’s happiness is of sole importance in Sahlins’s economic re-evaluation of the gatherer and hunter mode of production, as if the labour and lives of women, which implicitly in this account might not be so “often done,” simply did not matter.
Sahlins’s gender biases do not invalidate his general theses, and the work of feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock can be read correlatively as both a corrective and a critical contribution in its own right. Leacock’s feminist ideology-critique began with the proposition that “the continued separation of woman’s position from the central core of social analysis, as an ‘and’, ‘but’, or ‘however’, cannot but lead to continued distortions.”27 Leacock and others have demonstrated that among most gatherers and hunters, it is gathering, one of the important roles of women, that substantively produces the greater proportion of food. Leacock also demonstrated that while women remain primarily responsible for what we would call labour in the domestic sphere, the quality of that labour is substantially improved by its cooperative conditions. Leacock’s central thesis was:
The analysis of women’s status in egalitarian society is inseparable from the analysis of egalitarian social-economic structure as a whole, and concepts based on the hierarchical structure of our society distort both. I shall argue that the tendency to attribute to band societies the relations of power and property characteristic of our own obscures the qualitatively different relations that obtained when ties of economic dependency linked the individual directly with the group as a whole, when public and private spheres were not dichotomized, and when decisions were made by and large by those who would be carrying them out. I shall attempt to show that a historical approach and an avoidance of ethnocentric phraseology in the study of such societies reveals that their egalitarianism applied as fully to women as to men.28
In effect, gathering and hunting societies can be characterized as egalitarian in terms of gender relations; while women and men occupy clearly defined and differentiated social spheres, there is a balanced reciprocity between the two, rather than an order of hierarchy and subordination, as prevails in other modes of production. Following the general direction of Leacock’s work, I have preferred the designation “gatherer and hunter” mode of production rather than “hunter/gatherer” or more simply “hunter,” both of which continue to unduly privilege men’s activities.
It is critical to recognize that Leacock’s and Sahlins’s respective reappraisals of the gatherer and hunter mode of production go against the grain of ancient biases. Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams, on the Beaver or Dunne-za Dene of northeastern British Columbia, begins with an eloquent description of these biases:
The hunting societies of the world have been sentenced to death. They have been condemned, not in any one verdict, but by a process, an accumulation, of judgements. Among simple societies, the hunters’ has seemed the simplest; among flexible and nonindustrial economies, theirs has seemed the most flexible, the ultimately nonindustrial. When adventurers, missionaries, traders, or administrators encountered man-the-hunter, they were sure that here were people whose lives were bare of all comfort, without security, and below morality; people whose prospects for truly human achievement and well-being were minimal. Would-be civilizers concluded that hunters never had, or had lost, the means to achieve a decent way of life; should welcome the benefits of trade, wage employment, and proper religion; should allow their lands to be differently used; and must accept whatever changes are brought to them, however the changes are brought. That is the death sentence. 29
In my view, the “death sentence” is more a result of “a process”—which will be discussed below—than an “accumulation of judgements,” but the judgements have played a critical role in supporting the process. These judgements are the heirs of an ancient, neolithic bias; that is, the bias of settled agriculturalists against nomadic gatherers and hunters. Neolithic bias is not simply a matter of this or that particular judgement but, rather, as Brody illustrates, an accumulation of self-consistent and self-supporting evaluations (such as that which assesses a civilization on the basis of the monumental size of its architectural accomplishments); more importantly, a structure of thought, and an ideology. To those who would accuse Sahlins, Leacock, or myself of an overly romanticized view of gatherers and hunters, one partial response points to the necessity of countering a deep structural bias that condemns them.
The hierarchy of civilized/savage or civilized/barbarian that was developed by neolithic peoples to give them moral authority over their neighbours has been inherited and perpetuated in the industrial era, to the extent that it has become virtually impossible to think with gatherers and hunters, to cognitively work within the categories of gatherer and hunter experience. This, on the one hand, implies that it is difficult to find a way of appreciating the gatherer and hunter mode of production within the terms or language of dominant discourse, which is structured around a series of oppositions, such as civilized/savage, that systematically devalue gatherers and hunters; and on the other hand, it implies that attempts to appreciate gatherers and hunters ultimately draw us away from ourselves, into another language. Plutarch once wrote of Sophocles that he tried “to change the actual nature of language, which has the most bearing on morality and virtue”;30 the insight is compelling, and recalls post-structuralist insistence on the manner in which political values are embedded in language. The critique of ethnocentrism involves a reworking of language or a discursive practice that constantly tests the limits of language. The issue of thinking gathering and hunting within dominant discourse can be staged with reference to the development of Sahlins’s work.
What is interesting about rereading “The Original Affluent Society” is the degree to which Sahlins’s economics take us to the point of leaving economic thought itself. Derrida’s comment that “before your eyes a demonstration ruins the distinctions it proposes”31 is equally relevant here. Indeed, Sahlins writes at one point that “the hunter, one is tempted to say, is ‘uneconomic man.’”32 The category or opposition of work and leisure, so central to his argument, begins to break down when we closely examine the qualitative nature of the work involved: telling stories to children, decorating a basket or spear so it will be more efficacious, waiting on the plains for a herd of buffalo to slowly drift close enough to the point where the hunters can jump up and frighten the buffalo into a stampede. So much of hunting, conceptualized in dominant culture around the climactic moment of the kill, involves waiting and patience that it is very difficult indeed to determine which waiting is leisure and which is work. Read, for example, Jenness’s description of the Inuit camp above and try to determine who is working and who is resting. This holds particularly (doubly) true for work in the domestic sphere, which within the dominant paradigm is uncountable even within so-called ‘advanced’ social formations, never mind social formations where the public/private boundary is as radically reconfigured or displaced as that of gatherers and hunters.
Within a few years Sahlins would come to challenge the very logic that gives explanatory priority to economic categories. In his Culture and Practical Reason, he argued that
the cultural scheme is variously inflected by a dominant site of symbolic production, which supplies the major idiom of other relations and activities. One can thus speak of a privileged institutional locus of the symbolic process, whence emanates a classificatory grid imposed upon the total culture. And speaking still at this high level of abstraction, the peculiarity of Western culture is the institutionalization of the process in and as the production of goods, by comparison with a ‘primitive’ world where the locus of symbolic differentiation remains social relations, primarily kinship relations, and other spheres of activity are ordered by the operative distinctions of kinship.33
From this, it was a small step to his work on ‘mytho-praxis’ and kpensee sauvage in books like Islands of History (1984), which attempted to interpret the mode of operation of a gatherer and hunter “locus of symbolic differentiation.”
In the present context, it is enough to summarize with the following: the concepts of mode of production and social formation allow us to think about different categories of social being; at least three modes of production—a gathering and hunting mode, a tributary mode, and a capitalist mode—have existed in human history; although the world today is dominated by the capitalist mode, the gathering and hunting mode exists as a vestige if not as a promise; gatherers and hunters have been systematically underestimated and devalued in dominant Western discourse, which has structured itself around a neolithic bias; it is possible to develop radically different assessments of gatherer and hunter economics, which would characterize them in much less ethnocentric terms; each step in thought towards gatherers and hunters moves us away from the structure and form of Western discourse itself.
To this it is necessary to add that Inuit and Dene in northern Canada, as gatherers and hunters, relied and rely far more extensively on hunting and fishing for subsistence than other gatherers and hunters around the world. That is, they relied less on gathering; this has had important consequences for the position of women in these societies, an issue to which I will return. Thus, although I still prefer the designation gatherer and hunter, it would not be inaccurate or necessarily sexist to refer to Dene and Inuit cultures as hunting cultures.
The concept of mode of production, particularly as it is deployed in anthropological theory and practice, has been the subject of intense debate in recent years. Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow have challenged the gatherer and hunter paradigm, provoking a spirited defence from Richard Lee and Jacqueline Solway. Wilmsen and Denbow argue that “by displaying objectified peoples as exemplars of this category . . . ethnography validates the epistemological program required by the ontological quest. Consequently, the intrinsic realities of these objects are in themselves of little or no interest.”34 This argument is a form of refusal that would deny the value of any analytical abstraction, replacing analysis and critique with a narrow particularism whose only interest would be in recording the presumably infinite variety of human experiences. Wilmsen and Denbow also suggest that the concept of mode of production is ahistorical and ignores “the process through which social formations realize their transformations,”35but this is precisely where the distinction between mode of production and social formation becomes critical, since the latter allows for a situating of the former in history, with all its contingencies, necessities, and particularities.
Another, related, assault on the gatherer and hunter model has emerged out of a tendency in contemporary social theory that has come in recent years to celebrate what are called ‘hybrid’ social forms rather than culturally bounded, seemingly closed or enclosing social forms of the gatherer and hunter type. For example, in his far-reaching critique of notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’, James Clifford has written:
Intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic’: caught between cultures, implicated in others. Because discourse in global power systems is elaborated visa-vis, a sense of difference or distinctiveness can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition. Identity is conjunctural, not essential. 36
This notion of the “conjunctural” implies that identities are better seen as hybrid than bounded, and the theorist of hybridity is Homi Bhabha, who argues that “the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.”37
While the notion of hybridity is a critical lever that certainly has value in debunking all-too-dangerous claims of cultural purity, the rush to celebrate creolization and metissage leaves many critical questions unanswered. As Clifford suggests, no cultures can be called pure since all are implicated, connected, related. Hence, all cultures can be called hybrid including the most reprehensible: Fascism may be called a hybrid culture. Degrees of hybridity give no critical purchase whatsoever. There is no doubt that global capitalism, precisely in its totalizing manifestation, is the strongest agent of hybridization in the world today. Celebrating insurgent hybrid forms solely or merely for the fact that they are hybrid misses the point: there has to be some substantive aspect of a culture that is to be valued or criticized, and one cannot determine such an aspect without returning to a language of cultural forms and boundaries. Bhabha himself implies an evaluative process that would distinguish hybrid forms when he suggests “the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy,”38 here valuing egalitarianism—or, at least, critical of hierarchy—much as those who subscribe to the gatherer and hunter model do. Elsewhere, though, he valorizes hybridity in and of itself, for example suggesting that “the margin of hybridity, where cultural differences ‘contingently’ and conflictually touch, becomes the moment of panic which reveals the borderline experience,”39 and for Bhabha this moment of panic, of doubt, of ambivalence and uncertainty, is the desired cultural position. While it may serve the critic and philosopher well, though, it seems as insufficient as the notion of ‘diversity for its own sake’ in discussing cultures. It is particularly insufficient when we come to think a political project that will be of some value to the people involved.
Hugh Brody has come closest to applying and popularizing a version of the concept of mode of production to Aboriginal politics in Canada in his The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the Modern World. Although he does not use the term “mode of production,” the critical basis of the book is a notion of profound difference between hunting peoples and farming peoples. For Brody, colonialism in Canada is a result of the necessity for expansion intrinsic to agricultural-based societies. The argument in many ways parallels the analyses developed here and in particular demonstrates how the concept of mode of production provides a materialist entry into the question of tradition. While “tradition” is a much-debated and -questioned term, rarely is it pointed out that the traditions of farmers are dramatically different from the traditions of hunters. Looked at from the vantage of the twenty-first century, all old habits are traditions that, depending on one’s political perspective, need to be swept aside or reinvigorated. Brody’s analysis makes clear that the “aggressive, restless agriculture”40 of farmers involves a dramatically different set of values from those associated with hunters. The single word “tradition” is today deployed to cover both these markedly distinct sets of social organization and values, while for much of history the two have been in conflict.
Although Brody notes that “more than ever before, this order seems to depend on restlessness,”41 in my own view he fails to appreciate that the distinction between industrial capitalist societies and farmers is as significant as that between hunters and farmers. The specific dynamic of Aboriginal cultural politics in our own era is driven by the specific nature of totalization associated with capitalist social forms. Hence, for example, in Nunavut and Denendeh the land of hunters is not required for agricultural purposes but as a resource base for ultimately industrial purposes. The ruthlessness, insidiousness, reach, and power of totalization have been dramatically exacerbated by the movement from agricultural to industrial production. Nevertheless, Brody’s powerful, expressive language and acute sensitivity to Aboriginal communities allow him extraordinary insight into the dynamics of struggle engaged in by Aboriginal people. Perhaps this work can be seen as marking a modest footnote or supplement to Brody’s.
We have travelled a long distance from Gina Blondin’s potatoes. The second story that Gina Blondin told me of relevance to this study was a political parable of sorts. The year 1967 was an important year in the history of the NWT. In that year, during Canada’s centennial, the government of the NWT (GNWT) moved from Ottawa, where its administrative base had been since 1921, to Yellowknife, the new capital of the territory. The year 1967 is usually represented as a major watershed in the development of responsible government in the north, the year when government was brought to the people and the political moment when the movement towards representative government gained a momentum that, in many respects, has not yet stopped. Thus, for those who like to see history as ‘every day in every way things get better and better’, 1967 represents a key moment in the north’s progressive narrative. The government could thereafter serve the people more effectively by being situated close to them.
Stuart Hodgson, then the newly appointed commissioner, said in his inaugural northern address that “the government has moved so much closer to our people,” noting that “this cannot help having a tremendous effect on the attitude of northern residents towards our government and indeed the effectiveness with which we operate.”42 Commenting on this, political scientist Mark Dickerson writes: “The theory was obvious: government from Ottawa had been distant, alien, and unresponsive. Now that government was centred in Yellowknife, it would be close and responsive, and, thus, residents would begin to identify with it. All this was not as simple as it sounded.”43 Gina Blondin, as she discussed this history with me, helped me understand why the issue was much more complex.
She saw ‘1967’ from the perspective of her own community, one of many to which the move north was designed to make a positive contribution. From the community perspective, ‘1967’ did not represent progress, it represented interference. Before 1967, Gina said, in Deline (Fort Franklin) you did pretty much what you wanted to do and you were left alone. No one disturbed you or worried if this or that regulation was being strictly adhered to. If you wanted to build a house, you built it. You didn’t worry about zones or lots or codes. You just built it. If there were regulations, if there were funds made available provided you followed certain guidelines, well, you might still get the funds. After all, who was going to check the regulations and ensure that guidelines were followed? There was no need to care about what distant administrators thought ‘reality’ looked like because, in the language of recent sociology, such as that associated with Michel Foucault and suggested by Anthony Giddens, mechanisms of surveillance were weak.
After 1967, all this began to change. Suddenly the ‘white hats’ arrived. A closer government meant a government more determined to ensure its edicts were followed. More and more external people were hired whose job was to ensure just that. Government people started coming to communities, checking things out; a colonial administrative apparatus was put in place. If a house was built in the wrong location, if building or other codes were flagrantly ignored, it started to matter. A more responsible government also added up to more government; more government meant more outside interference. A dynamic or process was set into play whose outcome continues to be uncertain but one element of which was and is a dramatic loss of power at the community level. And this in the interest of bringing officially sanctioned democracy.
The State occupies a critical position in northern Canada. One indicator of this is the extent to which public sector expenditures dominate the northern economy to a much greater degree than in the south. The Yukon, the NWT, and Nunavut have an ambiguous status within Canadian confederation; they are ‘territories’, enjoying something less than the status that their provincial counterparts enjoy. The federal government occupies a much more prominent place in the north, in part because of the territorial status question and in part because, in all three northern political jurisdictions, Aboriginal peoples, a federal responsibility since the British North America Act (1867), make up a significantly larger proportion of the population than in any province. A brief review of the history of the government of the Northwest Territories, out of which Nunavut was established, is necessary to appreciate its position.
The history begins in 1875, when the North-West Territories Act was passed to provide for governance of a vast territory in the Canadian northwest. By 1905, much of that territory had been carved up into provincial jurisdictions: the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. In that year the NWT Act was amended to provide for a commissioner and a four-member appointed council. Effectively, governance of the NWT was administered from Ottawa; the first commissioner was the comptroller of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Subsequent commissioners—after 1919—were drawn from the Department of the Interior. Until 1921, no council members were actually appointed; the positions existed only on paper. After non-Natives became aware of oil at Norman Wells in the summer of 1920—which would also spark the negotiations that led to Treaty 11, to be discussed below—members were appointed to the council. It had its first meeting in the spring of 1921 and recommended expanding its membership to six; by June the expanded council was meeting. Members were drawn from the government agencies that worked in the north: the RCMP and departments of the Interior and Mines were prominent. In 1929 a senior bureaucrat from Indian Affairs was appointed to the council. Mark O. Dickerson, quoting from a government source, notes in Whose North?:
As the Council was composed entirely of the senior officials of the various federal departments involved in northern administration, it acted as something much more than a legislative body. It became, through the years, an interdepartmental committee of consultation and co-ordination, a general advisory body on all northern administration. 44
Dickerson’s Whose North? provides a thorough review of the historical development of Northern government. Effectively, the GNWT started as a colonial government. Not only was it not in any way representative of the people of the north, who were primarily of Dene, Métis, or Inuit descent, it did not consist of political representatives at all, but, rather, administrators. These people passed the earliest legislation respecting the NWT. Dickerson notes that “Ottawa administrators ran a third of the landmass of Canada as though it were their own fiefdom” (57).
Things began to change in the 1950s. In 1947 a non-Native mine manager was appointed to the territorial council, setting in motion a process whereby non-Native northerners began to agitate for greater representation. By 1951 the council was expanded to eight members, three of whom were to be elected; in 1954 a fourth elected member was added. However, Dickerson points out, “Indians were barred from voting prior to 1960. In subsequent elections, however, they did become participants in the electoral process. Barriers prohibiting Inuit voting were removed in 1954, but no constituencies existed in the Central or Eastern Arctic, the home of most Inuit.” Hence, “it was not a democracy for Aboriginal peoples” (70). Slowly, the balance on the council between elected and appointed members began to shift in favour of the former, though most of these were non-Natives. In 1967, as a result of a protracted debate about dividing the territory that had led the government to establish a commission of inquiry, the Carrothers Commission, the GNWT was moved to the new territorial capital, Yellowknife, and a new political dynamic began to take shape.
Dennis Patterson, government leader of the GNWT from 1987 to 1991 and a member of the Territorial Assembly from Iqaluit in the eastern Arctic for many years before the creation of Nunavut, came to Trent University frequently in the winter of 1990 as a visiting Northern Chair. In one of his public lectures, he reviewed the history of the GNWT, pausing on 1967 as one of the watersheds in northern political history. The story of “the move” he told has it that the commissioner, Stuart Hodgson, along with administrators and council, got on a single plane in Ottawa, flew to Churchill, where they refuelled, and then flew the rest of the way up to Yellowknife. This is confirmed by Dickerson, who notes that “in 1967, almost the entire staff and their families (seventy-five people) flew on one plane from Ottawa to Yellowknife” (89). The state, in its local incorporation, came to the north by plane, and still, much of the time, travels to the communities by air, all in the name of something called democracy.
This is peculiarly appropriate. The State flies in, from high above, it circles and lands. The legitimacy of Western-style, liberal, democratic states rests on a specific abstraction (here abstraction stands for a form of intellectual flight: the flight from the qualitative, from the body): political commitment is reduced from the multivarious forms and responsibilities it takes in small communities, reduced and pared down and stripped until all that is left is a single gesture, repeated ritually in periodic intervals, the mark, the indicator, the vote. The existence of the vote then becomes the standard by which political systems are assessed: they are democratic if periodic voting for political representatives takes place; if not, they are not. The vote is an abstraction; it represents the whole political speech and activity of individual citizens, from whom other forms of political speech and activity are no longer required and, indeed, discouraged. The vote is then equated with democracy and invoked constantly as a new mantra: where there is a vote, there is democracy; where there is no vote, there is no democracy. In Canada, this mantra was deployed by the State through the late nineteenth century when it began imposing voting through the band electoral system on Aboriginal communities in the interest of “educating Indians about democracy” and, incidentally, undermining, through a veto, traditional leaders even when they were elected under the new rules. That Aboriginal communities often involved intensely participatory forms of community decision making that comparatively make “advanced” Western political forms look like a hollow joke on meaningful democratic standards, was and is never contemplated, especially by those who still wonder whether Aboriginal peoples are ‘ready’ for self-government.
Jameson, in this closely following Adorno, has noted that “abstraction is first of all collective and not individual; objectivity is present within the subject in the form of collective linguistic or conceptual forms which are themselves produced by society, and thereby presuppose it,” adding that “this has very much to do with the division of labour, and in particular with the primal separation of manual from intellectual labour which is the precondition of abstract thought itself.”45 The logical conclusion is that “abstraction in this sense is the precondition of ‘civilization’ in all its complex development across the whole range of distinct human activities (from production to the law, from culture to political forms, and not excluding the psyche and the more obscure ‘equivalents’ of unconscious desire).”46 This must be read ironically by those concerned precisely to—in Stanley Diamond’s words—reinvent the ‘primitive’ in the modern world,47 by those of us opposed to the ‘civilizing’ project. Perhaps our mission is a return to the body: embodiment as the reversal of abstraction.
Abstraction then—in this context—is a tool of totalization, by which the qualitative, lived world is reduced to that which can be counted and exchanged. Socially produced objects, in capitalist societies, are constructed through the lens of exchange value and assigned a number. Labour, whose rhythms and intensities constantly ebb and flow, is constructed as a commodity through the measure of a homogenously construed time. One effect of these processes is to make objects, to make labour, to make lived experience, take on the homogenous, serial, abstract, banal form that systemically represents them. Surely, some of this is what Adorno meant when he argued that “above and beyond all specific forms of social differentiation, the abstraction implicit in the market system represents the domination of the general over the particular, of society over its captive membership.”48 Hence, involvement in the community, in defining and carrying forward the project of the public, is reduced to a single gesture, an abstract representation of the multivarious forms of possible political involvement, the vote, which has become enshrined as the sole determining standard of democracy. In the dominant system, citizen involvement in the major public institutions is circumscribed to an extraordinary degree. The election becomes the nexus of political commitment and consumes whatever degree of political energy remains to a politically totalized, and hence apathetic, body of citizens. Even this meagre measure of democracy was extracted as a bitterly fought-for concession from the ruling powers in the Western world.
In small Aboriginal communities across northern Canada, a different political dynamic exists to varying degrees. Face-to-face politics and community commitments involving a much wider range of citizen responsibilities are, to some extent, the order of the day. The politics of speech prevail. This involves both the daily speech that assesses, announces, questions, challenges, proposes, and the formal speech at public meetings or assemblies. Curiously, at many of these meetings or assemblies, decisions can be made without a formal vote: discussion goes on until all who want to speak to an issue get a chance and the assembly knows if there is agreement or not. If there is consensus, a vote may be taken to solidify it; if not, frequently, no vote will be taken. Participants listen for strong words, effective speeches; the intense and intricate micropolitics of face-to-face exchanges among community members whose speech has the power to effect change, unlike the distant, pre-programmed speech of their representatives. Elections of public figures—mayors, chiefs, counsellors—become one aspect of the range of public engagements, reflecting the latest moment in a shifting political dynamic, rather than consuming the whole political energies of those who have a sense of or stake in political commitment.
From somewhere ‘above’ these communities, another form of politics announces that it has legitimacy and the power to confer legitimacy. Structures are imposed—these include band and municipal councils—and then adapted in different ways by the people. This State demands to be addressed in writing: its laws are inscribed in a language it alone can read. A political dynamic between these two political forms, one on the air and one on the ground, begins to take place.
If the period from 1905 to 1921 can be characterized as one in which the government was virtually non-existent, and 1921 to 1967 as one in which the government was largely an administrative apparatus, then the next period, roughly 1967 to 1979, was characterized by the transition from administration to government. Slowly, between 1967 and 1975, the balance between appointed and elected members of the territorial council shifted in favour of elected members. By 1975 the council, Territorial Assembly, consisted entirely of elected members (there were fifteen) led by an appointed commissioner. The council began to look and act less like a coordinating committee of federal civil servants and more like a northern government, albeit highly colonial in nature.
The colonial nature of council was evidenced in its early opposition to Aboriginal land claims. Through the early seventies, it acted in a manner that put the interests and ideologies of non-Native northerners first. Ideologically, this was justified, as it still is, by the code words “progress” and “modernization.” This became necessary to the colonial powers because it was at precisely this time that modern Aboriginal political organizations began to develop in the NWT: the Indian Brotherhood of the NWT (later Dene Nation) in 1969 to represent Dene; the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (COPE) in 1970 to represent Inuvialuit; the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada in 1971 to represent all Inuit in Canada, including the NWT; and the Metis Association of the NWT (later Metis Nation) in 1972 to represent Métis and some non-status Dene. Pauktutit and NWT Native Women’s Association developed later in the decade. Aboriginal people relatively quickly engaged in a massive organizational undertaking and became much more vocal about defending and advocating their interests. These included both land claims, covering the whole land mass of the NWT and Aboriginal self-government, a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the GNWT.
In the face of these events, the newly evolving territorial council initially retrenched, formally opposing Aboriginal land claims and in general adopting a ‘pro-development’ stance that contradicted the position of the Aboriginal organizations. The election of Aboriginal members to the council did little initially to change the approach, because the first Aboriginal councillors were isolated and faced with an entrenched, experienced political and bureaucratic non-Native elite. Two early Dene representatives, James Wahshee and George Barnaby, were elected in 1975 and resigned early into their terms. Nick Sibbeston, who would later become leader of the territorial government, called this a bad period when the government “didn’t give credence to Native views.” However, in the elections of 1979, a concerted effort was made to use the Aboriginal electoral majority to better effect. That year, for the first time, a majority of the members of the Territorial Assembly were of Aboriginal descent. Furthermore, this took place at precisely the point where the GNWT was making a qualitative leap in its ability to act as a responsible government. The new commissioner, John Parker, began to relinquish control, setting in motion a process whereby the appointed commissioner would, within a few years, effectively have his role reduced to the equivalent of a provincial lieutenant-governor, a head of State but not of government.
George Barnaby was one of two Dene members of the Territorial Assembly elected in 1975 who resigned because he did not think that the government was working for the people. He has written about his experience in the important book edited by Mel Watkins, Dene Nation: The Colony Within, and discussed his resignation with me almost two decades after the event. His frustration with the non-Native system of government remains strong. In Watkins’s reader, he wrote: “The first session of Council I went to, we spent two weeks on an ordinance that had no importance to the people I represented. At this time I asked for more control for the communities. This was voted down. I don’t know why.”49 Things only got worse:
At the second session of Council we talked of political development, where the Council would have authority over the whole north. I spoke against this, as it would make no difference to the people; it still would not give them any rights to decide for themselves. The power would be only to the Council to decide the future of the North, and people would be forced to follow, whether they agreed or not. I think it was a plan to keep the people oppressed. (121)
Barnaby has a clear, consistent, and powerful notion of what was and is wrong with the territorial government: “Sometimes I say, that if the commissioner and the top executives of the territorial government were all trappers and hunters things would be different, but I see it would make no difference. It is the system which is wrong: wherever only a few people decide for the rest of the population, it oppresses people,” or, again, “where the Dene law gives freedom for the individual to do what he decides and take responsibility for his action, the system from the south passes an ordinance which forces a person’s action and takes away responsibility. Where our system is set up to serve the people, the people from the south serve their system” (122). Barnaby clearly has a much higher standard of democracy than that adopted by most liberal-democratic polities, whose representative system is structured precisely in the interests of oppression of popular will rather than expression of it.
The 1979 territorial elections were another watershed event in the history of the GNWT. The Aboriginal majority that had been elected dramatically changed the government’s official policy positions in a number of areas and inaugurated a period where the territorial government offered official support for Aboriginal rights and for land claims, though its specific positions on these issues frequently differed from those of the main Aboriginal organizations. More remarkably, the politicians surveyed the structure of the Territorial Assembly and decided that, with minor modification, it could be characterized as “consensus government,” a form of government that in part reflected the values and traditions of Aboriginal northerners. As the powers of the commissioner ebbed and as more responsibility was devolved from the federal government to the GNWT, an executive arm of the assembly was developed to act as the equivalent of Cabinet, with a leader of government performing the function of premier.
In the early 1980s, it began to be possible to imagine that the public government of the NWT might act as a crucial vehicle of Aboriginal self-government, and that, in effect, the GNWT had been ‘captured’ by Aboriginal northerners—Dene, Inuit, Inuvialuit, and Métis working together—to achieve this goal. However, other forces were in play. One of these was the fact that although Aboriginal peoples had ‘captured’ the government, they had not taken control of the State. The State includes the government as only one element of its structure, which usually also consists of police and/or army, judiciary, administration, and public sector service agencies delivering health, education, social welfare, and so on. Hence, a strongly colonial bureaucracy remained in place after 1979 and although it had to respond to a changed climate and radically different leadership, it did so grudgingly, waging trench warfare against initiatives it did not like and engaging as a breaking mechanism on government in general. The tension between administrators and politicians was particularly acute in the early 1980s. Although through the exercise of the vote Aboriginal people could control the government, this did not give them control over the State in northern Canada, a situation that, while the dynamic has evolved markedly, persists.
Nevertheless, very interesting developments unfolded in the decade after 1979. Most of the government leaders of the NWT in the last twentyfive years have been of Aboriginal descent. Party politics, which are the core of the oppositional political dynamic that characterizes formal political discourse in most of the Western world, remain absent from the territorial political sphere. In this situation, the official ideology is one of consensus government in which the Territorial Assembly as a whole has much greater power compared to other political structures. And in this context a fourth watershed, of equal magnitude to those of 1921, 1967, and 1979, has taken place. A formal decision to divide the Northwest Territories into two separate political constituencies, effectively in response to long-standing Inuit demands for their own government and territory, was reached in 1991. The territory was divided beginning formally on April 1, 1999, when Nunavut in the eastern Arctic was created.
One of the Aboriginal government leaders in the mid-eighties was Nick Sibbeston, the member of the Territorial Assembly from the Nahendeh riding, which includes the community of Fort Simpson. Sibbeston had first been elected in 1970, took a term off between 1975 and 1979 to complete a law degree, and returned to the assembly in 1979, first as an ordinary member, then as a minister responsible for local government, and, between 1986 and 1988, as leader of the government. I interviewed him in the cafe at the Nahanni Inn in Fort Simpson in the late summer of 1994, a few years after he had retired from electoral politics. In 1994 he was working with the territorial ministry of justice on community justice in his old riding. I asked whether he thought, after all this time, that Dene and Métis involvement in the territorial government was a good strategy or whether it only served to legitimate an imposed system. He replied in a soft-spoken, quiet, and thoughtful manner:
I know there’s two approaches, one is just to stay away and say ‘look it’s not ours’ and the other approach is to get in there and take control. I’ve been always of the view that, and I guess my whole time in government has been that, to try to exert control and change things but it is a difficult task because you have civil service in place and systems and procedures and policies and so forth that were in place. Even in government, even as a minister, it really gets hard to change, so certainly during my time I did my best to change but I can’t really say that I was successful throughout. You know I managed to change things and improve things here and there but if I was to look at my time in government I would say ‘yeah, Nick, you had an effect on things but you didn’t change the system. You improved things’. You try to make the system work for people. . . .
The question of the relation of civil servants to politicians and some of the tension between the two emerged in Sibbeston’s comments as he continued:
So you do that but it’s still the government system and the bureaucracy that carries it out. Often there’s not very many Native people in the system. So when I look back I do see that I’ve influenced in small ways certain policies and procedures and decisions of government but the system’s still there and it’s largely non-Native bureaucracy. I think, on hindsight, it was the right decision to become involved because invariably in the long run Native people have to get involved in some kind of government system anyway. It’s a good experience. Through the years we did get many Native people in government. I remember in the early [to] late seventies when I became involved it wasn’t an honourable thing for Natives to get involved, you know. The best Native brains worked for the Dene Nation, the Indian Brotherhood in those days, but through time we slowly changed government so that it was okay for Native people. Then we went through a period here in Simpson where Native people went after government jobs, so in Simpson here as an example we have changed government where Native people are slowly becoming the majority in terms of government positions. I’m of the view that however you look at it Native people want self-government, they eventually will have to have the experience and get involved in government. I see it as having been good training and as a good, as a necessary evolution or development process to become involved.
Sibbeston’s comments represent an alternative Dene/Métis approach to that taken by Barnaby. Both see the dominant system as flawed. Barnaby argued that this made it inherently oppressive and abandoned it, while Sibbeston recognized its limitations but nevertheless became involved and made what changes he could.
Sibbeston stressed a final point, one that is interesting because he was describing the period in the mid-eighties when the territorial government was increasingly describing itself as ‘Aboriginal’ in form: “At one point we had Native majority, but you never did have that control, you know, that absolute majority Native control where you exerted and used that power, it was never a situation. There’s always compromising it seems and it’s always following rules that are set in place by the system, by establishment, sometimes by the federal government.” On this point, Sibbeston and Barnaby seem in perfect accord.
Nicos Poulantzas, in his last work State, Power, Socialism, sketched an outline for a theory of the State as a mechanism of totalization, as an instrument of totalizing power. This theoretical agenda deserves reconsideration, because it offers a variety of formulations that are of particular relevance to the social struggles of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. As opposed to Michel Foucault’s models and strategy, which involve a critical assessment of the dispersal of State power, Poulantzas offers a theory that remains indebted to the Weberian notion of the State’s holding a monopoly on legitimate physical violence. His thesis is that “State-monopolized physical violence permanently underlies the technique of power and mechanisms of consent: it is inscribed in the web of disciplinary and ideological devices; and even when not directly exercised, it shapes the materiality of the social body upon which domination is brought to bear.”50 This is, of course, relatively prosaic by now. What Poulantzas suggests, however, is the beginning of a theory of the State as a machinery of totalization. Two areas in which he demonstrates this are worth reviewing here: the processes of individualization and the construction of the nation through spatial and temporal matrices.
Poulantzas’s text contains an interesting discussion of the State as foundation of individual identity and familial form, effectively reversing the dominant view of the public as a condensation or accumulation of the private. In this regard, his analysis may be of particular value to feminists; in few places will the slogan “the personal is political” have such resonance. He argues that individualism “constitutes the material expression in capitalist bodies of the existing relations of production and social division of labour; and it is equally the material effect of state practices and techniques forging and subordinating this (political) body” (67). Poulantzas’s central thesis is that “there can be no limit based on law or principle to the activity and encroachment of the state in the so-called sphere of the individual/private” (71) and, further, “the very separation of public and private that is established by the State opens up for it boundless vistas of power. The premises of the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism lie in this separation and affect the countries in the East as well as the western societies” (72-73). His discussion of the constitution of the family is worth following in some detail:
Strictly speaking, the modern family and State are not two distinct, equidistant and mutually limiting spaces (private and public): contrary to the now-classical analyses of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse et al.), the one is not the base of the other. Although the two institutions are neither isomorphous nor tied to each other in a straightforward relation of homology, they are nevertheless part of one and the same configuration. For it is not the ‘external’ space of the modern family which shuts itself off from the State, but rather the State which, at the very time that it set itself up as the public space, traces and assigns the site of the family through shifting, mobile partitions. (72)
Poulantzas’s analyses of individualization, the constitution of public and private, and the construction of the family all position the State as a totalizing agency of capital. While Poulantzas himself rarely observes or takes note of the degree to which the process he points to is resisted, his analysis allows us to think resistance and agency in new and interesting ways. I will return to this point below.
Likewise, Poulantzas’s understanding of the nation positions the State in a key role as totalizing agent. Elsewhere (”Primitive Subversions,” 1992) I reviewed his argument about the State’s attempts to construct serial spatial and temporal matrices. He argues that “the modern nation appears as a product of the State, since its constitutive elements (economic unity, territory, tradition) are modified through the State’s direct activity in the material organization of space and time” (99). The State attempts to organize space and time along the same principles as the Taylorist assembly line: fragmented, serial, homogenous. Frontiers, borders, divisions assume a new fixity; time, a new linearity. Totalization again becomes a key implication: “genocide is the elimination of what become ‘foreign bodies’ of the national history and territory: it expels them beyond space and time” (114). The State constructs and naturalizes boundaries of space and time, which, in conjunction with each other, define an exclusive social regime:
In the modern era, demands for a national State are demands for a territory and history of one’s own. The premises of modern totalitarianism exist not only in the spatial and temporal matrices incarnated in the modern State, but also, or above all, in the relationship between the two that is concentrated by the State. (114–115)
Space and time become crucial tools in the construction of conditions suitable for the accumulation of capital and the generalized expansion of the commodity form. The State is the agency by which these conditions are, at times against considerable opposition, imposed.
Poulantzas’s formulations in State, Power, Socialism offer the outlines of a theory of the State as totalizing agent. As such, there is a great deal in them of relevance to Aboriginal politics in Canada. The stress on the degree to which physical violence continues to underwrite processes of normalization will come as no surprise in the aftermath of Kanesatake or Ipperwash: the latest of a long series of struggles where the State’s coercive side has been felt by those most outside its normalizing techniques of power. Understanding the crucial role of the State in the contested construction of modern individuality and modern forms of subjectivity will likewise seem appropriate to those who have studied this process, long incarnated in the history of the status provisions of the Indian Act in Canada, a process that continues to be enacted in Aboriginal communities. Finally, the passages about suspension of “foreign bodies” from the space and time of the nation seem particularly apposite to the structural position of Aboriginal people in Canada. Poulantzas allows us to see that the Western, liberal-democratic State is, precisely, a totalizing mechanism that contains at its heart the same structural exigencies we find in more explicitly totalitarian contexts. This is something that Aboriginal peoples, of course, have long seen or felt in their life experiences. Furthermore, he allows us to continue to recognize the strategic importance of the State in these processes, something that again accords with the situation of Aboriginal Canadians, for whom the State remains an overwhelming presence.
The spring of 1997 saw an unusual event take place in Nunavut: a public plebiscite over whether the new territory would have a legislative assembly structured around a formal principle of gender parity. This would be surprising to anyone who had read much of the anthropological literature on Inuit women, where they are most frequently treated as servile caricatures. Though in Diamond Jenness’s view, “ [Inuit] women had a well recognized position, less inferior to men’s than among any Indian tribe except perhaps the Iroquoians,”51 Jean Briggs’s later description of the “warmth and luxury of male dominance”52 seems to have gained greater acceptance. This acceptance was perhaps supported by the popular images of so-called “wife-trading,” the popularity of such images bolstered in turn by the degree to which they conform to dominant male fantasy projections. Not least of the attractions of such films as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North was the fact that the racial line of difference allowed for the public display and reproduction of Inuit women’s bodies, the imagined availability of these being constructed and reinforced by the ethnographically sanctioned stories of “wife exchange” (see my article on Jenness, “Anthropology at the Service of the State,” for a rereading of his observations in this regard, and a recoding of the practice as “partner exchange”). All told, ethnographic description of Inuit women remains a field of ideologically supersaturated discourse, rich with the possibility of rereading.
Similarly, descriptions of Dene women in the ethnographic literature do not do great service to their place in traditional times. Chipewyan women, in particular, inherited the description of them passed on by Samuel Hearne (see Rollaston, “Studying under the Influence”), which Jenness reproduces in the following remarkable passage:
Strong men plundered the weaklings, and forcibly carried off their women. The latter ranked lower than in any other tribe; separated from all boy companions at the age of eight or nine, married at adolescence, often to middle-aged men, and always subject to many restrictions, they were the first to perish in seasons of scarcity. In winter they were mere traction animals; unaided, they dragged the heavy toboggans. In summer they were pack animals, carrying all the household goods, food, and hides on their backs. 53
Little room here to imagine the emergence of female leaders and diplomats with the stature of Thanadelthur, or even the intellectual brilliance of Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned, whose stories and storytelling praxis, as told to Julie Cruikshank in the remarkable Life Lived Like a Story, go a long way on their own to explode these fantasy projections.
The dominant images of northern Aboriginal women served to underwrite a particularly male colonial State apparatus in northern Canada. In the eastern Arctic, almost exclusively men carried out the enterprise of colonialism in the mid-sixties with a northern frontier mentality that stressed male self-sufficiency (see Frank Tester’s and my Tammarniit). The territorial government was run by and for men. Inuit and Dene women—not, it seems, drawing upon their cultural traditions as they were constructed in Western discourse, but finding some other source of strength, perhaps in part from many grandmothers who did not conform to the caricatures—managed to force their way into the northern public space, to the point where a notion of formal gender parity could be considered for Nunavut, to the point where a whole set of issues at the local and territorial level—from family violence to housing allocation to forms of representation—are insistently a part of public discourse. At the local community level, the gender inflection of politics is particularly intense, interesting, ‘personal’ in a variety of deeply political ways. The cultural differences in constructing the distinction between public and private are no incidental aspect of this politic.
Among the most compelling recent critiques of colonialism produced by contemporary critical theory is the book Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The analysis refers to the “totalizing social processes of Empire”54 and offers a reading of the contemporary moment in the history of colonialism that sees both massive extension of colonial reach (hence: Empire) and extraordinary possibilities for global resistance. One of the central points that Hardt and Negri want to establish is that “there is no more outside,” suggesting that the logic of capital has reached a stage where it is no longer confronted by anything outside its own version of civilization. In regard to gatherers and hunters, they note that “modern anthropology’s various discourses on primitive societies function as the outside that defines the bounds of the civil world. The process of modernization . . . is the internalization of the outside, that is, the civilization of nature” (187), before going on to conclude that “the modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality” (187-188). Themselves writing from the position of the imperial centre—in the case of these authors, the United States and Europe—perhaps only adds to the irony with which these easy pronouncements are read as they reach the margins. While many aspects of their analysis, particularly the philosophical position on immanence that underpins it, do offer critical resources, on the whole Empire is informed by a weak anthropology and very weak sense of cultural difference. The book, therefore, is a testament to why a materialist analysis based on reinvigorating the concept of mode of production remains a central intellectual task of critical thought as it grapples with the latest phase of totalizing power.
Over the ten-year period in which this study was conceived, researched, and written, the force of history, or History in the Jamesonian sense as “what hurts, [what] refuses desire and sets inexorably limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention,”55 marched ever onwards. The most visible reminder of this is the road to the territorial capital, Yellowknife. In the summer of 1984 I drove from Calgary to Yellowknife and found that the pavement ended virtually at the border of then oil-prosperous Alberta and the NWT. Yellowknife has its own attractions as a dynamic, culturally and socially rich, complex, engaging and frustrating city.
In the years that followed, the government of the NWT became ever more responsible as more powers were devolved to it; a massive bureaucracy built up in the territorial capital, Yellowknife, and more and more public sector workers were hired to run its machinery. The town, dominated by working-class miners and Aboriginal peoples, suddenly developed a significant third subculture: that of white-collar workers. Yellowknife became a force of its own, a centralizing tendency, and a name for a political position. Yellowknife, created in large part to service widely dispersed Aboriginal communities, developed its own objective interest. A part of its raison d’etre came to be servicing itself. Yellowknife, capital of contradictions.
Yellowknife embodies antinomous directions and tensions, physically enacting the overlay of modes of production and evolving cultural dominants. The Dene bands, living in Detah outside the city, marginalized beyond marginality, across the bay, accessible by roundabout gravel road in summer or fairly direct road across the frozen bay in winter. N’Dilo (once called Rainbow Valley), the Dene sub-band, in prime real estate on the furthest reach of Latham Island, poor people on expensive turf: in 1984 it looked like a South African shantytown; in 1989 that got overlaid with a postmodernish transient centre and other housing emblematic of ‘economic development’. The other half of Latham Island is a refuge for the rich: lawyerville and doctorville and senior-civil-servantville, as well as a few hangers-on in the older houses, near squatters, and old Yellowknife money. Then, across the bridge from Latham Island, moving towards uptown, Old Town, a paradise for squatters (in summer), with old-style northern mining town construction, modernism in decay, modernism on the cheap and now looking well worn, a modernism we can feel nostalgic for in the context of Yellowknife. Squatters’ shacks squeezed together with mansion-sized houses squeezed together with tourist traps. This leads in turn to uptown, the new city core, a reproduction of any southern city except the buildings are prefabricated: mall culture brought north. A downtown that no comparative-sized southern town would have, so a downtown that physically registers Yellowknife’s status as a capital and points to its unusual cosmopolitanism. Here reside the bars and drinking establishments and in these resides one truth of Yellowknife. Beyond this, the mines that are Yellowknife’s other source of wealth and bring the third major population group: miners to join the Natives and bureaucrats; though now, of course, it is diamonds further north and a more transient miner population that passes through Yellowknife. And, in the space in-between the appropriately named ‘Con Mine’ and what I’ve called uptown, the suburbs. The ‘frontier’ ideology permeates to such a degree that real estate developers can get away with in the north what would likely be criminal most anywhere else in Canada. Hence, suburban structures densely packed together in a spacious landscape, next to monster houses. But it is not simply the real estate agents who create these suburbs. The occupants of the monster houses all busily put time and energy in reproducing neat little square tracts of empty land, lawns: covering over the—to them—unsightly rock and cutting down the scrub pines to replace them with imperialist grass.
Yellowknife, capital of contractions, its own world set like a dirty diamond north of sixty. In 1984 the talk was all about communities and how Yellowknife could service the communities. The post-1979 territorial governments were mandated to service the communities. Decentralization became a rallying cry, and a series of efforts to decentralize were initiated. But something funny happened. All the people employed to carry out decentralization came to Yellowknife. The bureaucracy had a logic of its own and no politician or group of politicians could easily surmount that logic. Northern politics immediately after 1979 were characterized, in my view, by a struggle for power between a colonial old guard of senior bureaucrats who had been hired by the territorial government in its colonial glory days and the new Aboriginal political elite. As government expanded in the post-1979 period, this old guard watched the gates. Spectacular battles unfolded, as Aboriginal politicians pushed back, hired their own people, and tried to take control of the apparatus of government power. And they were initially successful; the rhetoric of government changed, ‘aboriginality’ and ‘decentralization’ came in as local buzzwords. Several bureaucrats who could not make the transition were ousted. By the mid-eighties it looked almost like a new regime.
But success led to legitimation, legitimation led to increased funding, and increased funding led to, guess what, more bureaucrats. The new bureaucracy was different from the old. It was more liberal. It sympathized with Dene, Inuit, and Métis. However, every civil servant needed a house, needed a housing subsidy, had a career, had a family, had a set of needs. Yellowknife was there to fill them. So Yellowknife grew. It had a logic all its own: the logic of capital accumulation. While all around the north, small communities remained roughly the same, Kentucky Fried Chicken and MacDonald’s came to Yellowknife; shopping malls came to Yellowknife, and so did shopping mall culture. As well, a whole class of people who occupied the machinery of government came to Yellowknife. I met one of these in the summer of 1994, on the ferry crossing the Deh Cho. We struck up a short conversation, waiting for the ferry to return to our side of the river. She was francophone-Canadian, moving to Yellowknife because she had gained an administrative-support position in one of the more ‘progressive’ government branches, one dedicated to community government. And, it turns out, she was glad to be leaving Vancouver because it had changed in the last few years, become so much more unfriendly, all those Asian ‘foreigners’ moving in. . . . Someone whose job involved working in a branch of government devoted to the self-government of people from a non-Western culture, benignly proposing outright racist ideas: somehow this short encounter embodied something of the contradictory nature of the territorial government.
In 1994, when I drove from Fort Simpson to Yellowknife, I found that construction of a paved road had reached north of Fort Providence. Only about 200 kilometres were left to be paved on that trip (albeit, the most expensive stretch because it would have to be cut through the Canadian Shield bedrock). And by 2004 this had been completed. The distance between those who govern and those who are governed thus reaches a qualitatively new level, and this will be heralded in the name of progress. Yellowknifers now never need to leave the pavement. In Nunavut, meanwhile, a similar dynamic poses a similar problem for this new government. One of the most prominent issues aired in the summer of 1999, the first summer of the new era, related to the new territorial capital. The roads there are in a terrible state.