Decolonization in the Canadian context means engaging in the perpetual work of maintaining relationship, not so that it can be circumscribed and terminated, but so that it can carry us all into the future.
—Joyce Green, “Towards a Détente with History”
Among the cultural events that take place in the NWT capital of Yellowknife is an annual summer folk music festival, called Folk on the Rocks, in part because of the setting. Long Lake, just across from the airport at Yellowknife, is surrounded by the igneous rock and boreal forest typical of the Canadian Shield, providing a glorious background, midnight sun included, for the event. This is the landscape of my own northern Manitoban childhood, and one that therefore has extraordinary personal resonance. The festival places some emphasis on northern musical talent, including Aboriginal performers. Traditionally oriented Inuit throat singers and Dene drum groups join the usual folk-circuit blues, country, folk, bluegrass, jazz, and rock performers. Many of the latter are northern non-Natives or Natives as well.
On July 23, 1994,1 attended a drum workshop by Dogrib elder Gabe Doctor at that summer’s Folk on the Rocks. It was a mid-afternoon workshop, on a hot summer day. His niece was along and provided translation and commentary as Gabe Doctor worked a caribou hide, stretching the skin and fixing it to a wooden frame outside, near a stage, and then going inside a teepee where the hot coals of a fire allowed him to heat the drum, contracting the skin so that it fit tightly on the frame. The heat from the coals drove most of the sparse, scattered onlookers, including us, outside for that part of the workshop. Drum making takes skill and patience, we learned; when we returned inside, the niece beat a short song on the newly made, partially complete drum. Gabe had meanwhile gone outside, back to the stage, with a pre-made drum, to sing a song. A woman, likely his marriage partner, kneeled in the shade of a nearby tree the whole time.
On stage, he asks his marriage partner to join him; they stand together for a prayer, then they both sing as he beats the hand drum. At first, their voices sound thin and weak from the distance, but when a microphone is moved close so that the wind no longer drowns their song, the rich, full sound surrounds us. The song moves me through layers and ranges of moods. At first, I hear a kind of stark sadness, the nearness of death, a lament. Later, I hear the sound of still proudly beating hearts, voices weaker than when young, yet remaining strong enough to sing, to celebrate life. Two voices and a drum, distinct but blended: the song is long, and I can finally hear both of these moods—the sadness and the celebration—merged or walking the tightrope of ambiguity, reminding me of the Rembrandt self-portrait at sixty, where both the twinkle in his eye and an endless void of sadness can be found in one look.
The notion of Aboriginal self-government itself walks a tightrope. The name “self-government” has been given to State-sponsored institutional changes among Aboriginal governments, changes that work largely in the interests of totalizing power. At the same time, the concept of self-government has reached the national agenda as the result of agitation and persistence from Aboriginal activists because it bears the promise of representing a site of resistance. A few words on the historical dimensions of the appearance of the concept lay the groundwork for understanding this curious situation.
Within the broad sweep of the conquest-history of the northern part of North America, the status of self-government emerges from the status of the political moment itself. For much of the history of what would become Canada, affairs between Aboriginal and non-Native peoples were governed primarily by an economic logic, the exigencies of the fur trade. If an Aboriginal and non-Native person were talking, say in the period between 1600 and 1870, the chances were that the latter was a trader and the talk was about the terms of trade. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the fur trade declined in importance for Canada, though it remained critical to northern Aboriginal community economies. The economic logic was replaced by a political logic and the State replaced the fur trading companies as the most important hegemonic institution in the lives of Aboriginal peoples. In the twentieth century, if an Aboriginal and non-Native person were talking, chances were the latter worked for the State as Indian Agent or as social service provider of one sort or another.
The Indian Act became a critical tool in the State’s arsenal, though it was not applied to Inuit and Métis peoples. From the 1880s, the Indian Act included provision for local-level, municipal-style, band governance. The provisions were controversial from the beginning and were amended many times in the first few decades of their existence. Although they were justified as a mechanism that would teach the Indians about democracy, in fact they were deployed in an attempt to establish more pliable, comprador governments on reserves across Canada. The last major changes made to the band governance provisions took place in 1951, when the worst repressive elements of the Indian Act were dropped and Indian women were given the right to vote for band councils. Much of the language in the Indian Act, including the governance provisions, has been in place since the late nineteenth century. It is a one-size-fits-all model that leaves the minister ultimately with overseeing authority in most areas and a narrow range of delegated powers for band-level governments. With the historic struggle and victory to prevent implementation of the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969 (the so-called White Paper), Aboriginal people were in a position for the first time in over 100 years to seize the political initiative.
What policy makers and legislators in Ottawa desired was never exactly what took place in the communities. In Akwesasne, for example, the electoral band system was not operative until it was imposed, by force, in 1899.1In northern Dene communities, leaders were elected by show of hand until the sixties and even later. Frank T’Seleie is fond of telling me (as I reported in Chapter Four) how when he was elected chief in the early seventies, he was handed a plastic grocery bag full of all the band office files and documentation. That was it, no office, no phone: a small pile of papers in a plastic bag. The call for self-government came to national attention partly as a result of the patient, continuing assertions of Haudenosaunee peoples that they had never surrendered their sovereignty. It also came from the Dene, whose mid-seventies’ well-publicized declaration asserted, “We the Dene of the Northwest Territories insist on the right to be regarded by ourselves and the world as a nation.”2 Although officials at the time were skeptical, within a decade the language of self-government as a partial acknowledgement of the sovereignty concerns of Aboriginal peoples had become a part of the status quo. And increasingly Indian bands began calling themselves First Nations: the language of nationhood and governance was forced on to the agenda by Aboriginal leaders.
As might be expected, the State moved to co-opt the discourse. A major parliamentary report in the early eighties, Indian Self-Government in Canada: Report of the Special Committee (or the Penner Report, as it is commonly known, after committee chair Keith Penner), endorsed the idea of self-government and recommended constitutional entrenchment. Although its major recommendations were ignored, the report helped pave the way for broad public acceptance of the idea. By 1985 two pieces of community-based self-government were in place: the Sechelt Act based on delegated municipal-like powers for that BC First Nation, and the Cree-Naskapi Act that flowed from the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, a comprehensive land claim (or first of the recent treaties). Since the Cree-Naskapi Act was passed pursuant to the land claim, itself since 1982 constitutionally protected, there is an argument that the Act itself is the first constitutionally protected self-government legislation in Canada. Subsequent land claims, where they included sections pertaining to self-government, contained a clause specifically exempting self-government provisions from constitutional protection.
Progress on self-government was slow, partly because of the issue of whether deals would have constitutional protection. In a sense, the issue strikes at the core of the self-government debate. Without such protection, legislated self-government can be changed at the will of the federal government. Any time a First Nation engages in an activity that seriously challenges the logic of the established order, it could have its authority revoked. Such ‘self-government’ is barely self-government at all, but, rather, delegated authority. By the mid-nineties several things had changed. Amendments to the Indian Act in the mid-eighties to secure equality rights in marriage for Indian women had also included provisions allowing band councils to develop their own citizenship codes, as many moved quickly to do. The settlement of several major northern land claims in the early nineties led to agreements to negotiate self-government in the Yukon, the agreement to establish Nunavut (a public government in one of the Inuit homelands), and the federal government’s agreeing to recognize the ‘inherent right’ of First Nations to govern themselves.
Two recent events have sharpened the focus of debates. In the land claims or modern treaty era, settlements by the Nisga’a in British Columbia and the Dogrib (Tli’chon) in Denendeh have included self-government agreements. These have not been agreements to proceed with negotiations as in previous cases, but actual models of self-government included in the treaty and constitutionally protected. Both First Nations agreed to apply or adopt the constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which implies that at this historical point the trade-off for constitutional protection is adoption of the charter. Since the charter is premised on individual equality rights, there is reason for concern from a cultural perspective: effectively, these deals mean that the federal government will not have immediate authority but that the values it represents will be accepted by the First Nations governments themselves. It should be noted that some of those values might be intrinsic to traditional cultures: for example, among the Dogrib, traditional respect for individual autonomy might sit comfortably next to provisions of the charter. But the general stress on collectivity and community associated with Aboriginal culture will not benefit from such a deal. The language in the Tlicho Treaty is “7.1.2. In addition to anything else necessary in relation to the Tlicho government, the Tlicho Constitution shall provide for . . . (b) protection for Tlicho Citizens and for other persons to whom Tlicho laws apply, by way of rights and freedoms no less than those set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” In my travels around northern communities, I have been consistently struck by the many idiosyncratic Aboriginal individuals I have encountered. This leads me to the observation that the dominant society, which stresses the value of individualism as a social foundation, is nevertheless profoundly based on conformity in practice and produces cookie-cutter suburban subjects, while so-called collectively oriented Aboriginal communities appear to do a much better job of nurturing significant social differences and producing strikingly unique individuals.
The second recent event was the draft Governance Act, a legislative initiative late in the Chretien regime. The draft Governance Act technically was in response to the Corbiere case at the Supreme Court of Canada, 1999, which determined that status Indians living off-reserve had the right to vote for and participate in their band councils. Instead of merely changing or striking down the relevant section, as the Corbiere decision warranted, the Governance Act proposed replacing the whole of the electoral band system with a new model, determining three sets of codes that bands would have to develop and establishing the broad criteria for the codes. Specific elements of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ (RCAP) report were also incorporated into the Governance Act, particularly those pertaining to accountability (for example, recommendation 2.3.40 deals with codes of conduct for public officials and other accountability mechanisms that broadly resemble the approach used by the draft Act).3 Although the initiative was fought off by an Aboriginal leadership concerned about the one-size-fits-all aspects of the model, and its reassertion of a colonial ‘we know what’s best for you’ approach to dealing with community governance, it raises a concern that the State sees local Aboriginal government as a way of downloading responsibility while maintaining Western institutional forms of decision making.
Two large sections of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People’s (RCAP) voluminous report are particularly relevant to this discussion. Volume Two, itself composed of two parts, is called Restructuring the Relationship and deals with treaty relations, economic relations, lands and resources, and governance itself. Volume Four, Perspectives and Realities, which separates out particular Aboriginal interests, including those regarding women and youth, includes a section on “The North.” Taken together, the section on governance and the section on the north provide a strong analysis with detailed recommendations regarding Aboriginal self-government in Denendeh and Nunavut. The RCAP report was sometimes criticized for being too large to absorb (five volumes, with one of those divided into two parts), though given the likelihood that the federal government would not be responding favourably to it, a longer report with carefully thought-out positions on a whole range of areas made sense: the report will continue to inform debate into the next decade and its impacts are more than likely to be felt over the longer term. In general, here one can join with Alan Cairns in calling for the State to give more serious consideration to the recommendations. Furthermore, giving piecemeal attention can lead to undesired consequences, as the example of the Governance Act demonstrates. Rather, one must look at the whole trajectory of policies suggested by the RCAP and, while not being bound to implement each one, should look to them for guidance on a set of policies or a policy trajectory that would lead to meaningful change, to the betterment of Aboriginal communities. It should be noted that co-commissioner Georges Erasmus is from Denendeh and in general it is clear that northern models and experiences are certainly taken into account, if not central to the paradigms deployed. For example, the hunting economy gets serious attention, as in the manner in which the discussion of leadership in the RCAP borrows from the description of a good hunter and leader developed by the James Bay Cree Cultural Education Centre in Chisasibi.4
In terms of governance, although the commission recognizes that “many Aboriginal people see revitalization of their traditional forms of governance as playing an important role in reform of current governmental systems” (137), there is no specific recommendation dealing with “revitalization of … traditional forms” and the concluding paragraph in the discussion of this matter ends up somewhat weaker on this issue than might be hoped:
many Aboriginal people are in the process of revitalizing their traditional approaches to government as part of a larger process of institutional innovation and reform. While some nations propose to establish institutions based on traditional forms, others favour approaches that use contemporary Canadian models, while drawing inspiration from traditional Aboriginal governance. Written constitutions do not tell the whole story, however. Whatever form Aboriginal governments take, they will likely be influenced by less tangible features of Aboriginal cultures. The fact that some Aboriginal governments may resemble Canadian governments in their overt structure does not preclude their being animated by Aboriginal outlooks, values and practices. (139, emphasis added)
This is the exact point where, in spite of much excellent work, the RCAP takes a serious misstep. As I will argue below, the issue of forms is not one aspect of the struggle for self-government—”whatever form Aboriginal governments take”—but is the central issue. “Whatever” form indeed is the critical factor in determining whether this or that self-government model is in collusion with processes of totalizing power or whether they mark a moment of disjuncture and resistance. The notion that “written constitutions do not tell the whole story” is critical here: arguably, the “less tangible features” that will influence Aboriginal governments are themselves forms of writing. Totalization does its work by deploying one form of writing; Aboriginal resistance deploys another form, contradicting it in the very modality of its existence as embodied inscription. The commission entirely sidesteps the issue and makes a weak endorsement of Aboriginal forms of governance—in spite of an extensive discussion of the issue and much research about it—that ultimately amounts to no endorsement at all.
As noted, the recommendations do not include a specific endorsement of Aboriginal traditional forms as a basis for Aboriginal governments, though, to be fair, they do create a structure that would be much better than what currently exists at allowing those forms to flourish. The recommendations are strong in detailing the value and nature of the inherent right to self-determination and -government, and are sensitive to the varied circumstances of Aboriginal communities across Canada. The latter is one of the clear strengths of the commission’s report and the value of that should not be underestimated: very few commentators resist the temptation of using their own geographic area of experience as a basis for recommending national models (and this study itself clearly is based on northern circumstances). The most controversial position taken by the RCAP is to endorse national-level government rather than community self-government, largely as a capacity-building issue. But if democratic rather than administrative capacity were the central issue, community government would clearly be the best repository for any new models; this is one area of clear disagreement between RCAP and my own approach.
The section on “The North” in the RCAP report, while again useful in providing a relatively recent map of the northern context, is disappointing on several scores. Not least, the report, in my reading, tends to de-emphasize the extraordinary human strengths at the community level in Denendeh and Nunavut and, although it notes that “the North is the part of Canada in which Aboriginal peoples have achieved the most in terms of political influence and institutions appropriate to their cultures and needs” (Vol. 4, 386), it never seems to gain inspiration from that fact. While Thomas Berger’s Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland remains worth reading for the richness and variety of voices that inform the discussion, the RCAP report is more bureaucratic in inflection: though quotation is extensive, the majority of voices quoted are from the elected leadership level. Community voices are muted. Substantively, although the report emphasizes the value of the traditional hunting economy (3 89), few of the recommendations deal with it. There are recommendations suggesting that social assistance and income supplement programs be examined “to make them effective instruments in promoting a mixed economy and sustain viable, largely self-reliant communities.”5 Hunter-support programs are discussed, but there is no general recommendation that supports the hunting economy; the only recommendation specific to the traditional economy is 4.6.18: “Government employment policies accommodate the demands of traditional economic activities by increasing opportunities for job sharing, periodic leave and shift work” (493). The substantive discussion of what the RCAP calls the “traditional mixed economy” is very good, but it does not lead to any strong overall endorsement of its value and centrality to northern communities. There are additional recommendations in the “Lands and Resources” chapter of Volume Two regarding wildlife harvesting that would no doubt be better than the current systemic undervaluing of the hunting economy, as well as some in the chapter on “Treaties,” but even these do not place the issue anywhere near the centre and it remains surprising that so little is said of this issue in the chapter on “The North.”
By now, an Aboriginal self-government machinery exists in Canada. A branch of the federal department of Indian and Inuit Affairs is devoted to the issue. The federal government, with the support of many provincial governments, officially endorses the idea. Something, which will be given the name “Aboriginal self-government,” is unfolding. With this unfolding, a discourse is being produced. Specialization in Aboriginal self-government is now a possibility. Courses, seminars, and workshops are offered, papers and articles are written. Administrators are involved, can become specialists, and write reports. Politicians are certainly involved, can become specialists, and have written reports. Lawyers, not wanting to pass on such an important opportunity, have gotten involved, can become specialists, and have written articles and drafts of legislation and opinions. Academics, neither last nor least on this list, are involved, have become specialists, and have written academic papers and books. In these ranks this book may now be included, another cog in the Aboriginal self-government machinery.
Among the academic texts that precede this one, and which this one must necessarily respond to, is Menno Boldt’s Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self Government (1993). Although Boldt makes a series of complexly related arguments, the general thrust of his work points in a different direction from that I have suggested in the foregoing pages. To be fair, this is undoubtedly in part because Boldt’s work comes from the context of his situation at the University of Lethbridge, where the concerns of prairie First Nations, and their specific politics and history, must have had some influence. For example, Boldt suggests using the treaties as a key concept with which to orient Aboriginal relations to non-Natives, but this has only partial relevance in the north, since Inuit did not negotiate treaties and do not think of the comprehensive claim as a ‘modern treaty’ the way many other First Nations do. Similarly, Boldt’s text deserves respect and acknowledgement for its treatment of the problems of leadership in some Aboriginal communities. The Indian Act band electoral system was developed in part to ensure a class of leaders who would collude with government; there are many people involved in Aboriginal politics largely for the personal economic benefit they can derive from it, particularly in circumstances where opportunities are severely limited. Boldt does bring to bear extensive experience working with communities and offers insight into a range of problems they face.
The crucial difference between Boldt and the approach taken here is in our assessment of Aboriginal communities and what might be called a community-based approach. As an aside, in an argument that criticizes government, Boldt refers to “the horrendous conditions that prevail in all Indian communities,”6 a remarkably sweeping statement that could just as easily, or in my view more easily, be applied to most urban centres and the dominant society. Boldt dismisses the subsistence economy, noting that “while a few remote northern bands/tribes still derive part of their subsistence from traditional means, even these derive the largest part of their income from government social assistance” (229). Finally, these evaluations lead to Boldt’s dismissal of the democratic impulses at the community level. In one context, writing about elite and poor classes on reserves, he suggests that “perhaps the long habituation of both classes to colonial rule has functionally and psychologically incapacitated them to such an extent that revival of the traditional systems and norms of government is no longer a realistic goal” (144). Hence, self-government, in Boldt’s view, must be achieved from the top down:
During a century of colonial rule, Indian people have acquired a deep sense of alienation, and resignation and apathy about their future. To overcome this mind set, the people will need to be tutored in effective political attitudes, skills, and experience. This can come only from ongoing participation and influence in the decision making process in their communities. It will also require complete self-resocialization by Indian politicians and bureaucrats to traditional attitudes of service and accountability to their people. Only such a process can achieve the decolonization and emancipation of the Indian lower class. (160, emphasis added)
The re-education of Indian people, teaching them democracy: this was a project of the Canadian State in the late nineteenth century and led to the development of the band electoral system that self-government projects now seek to displace. If “the people will need to be tutored,” and a political project of consciousness raising is to be the foundation of the effort to achieve Aboriginal self-government, then the battle is already lost.
Hence, several of Boldt’s pronouncements about Aboriginal communities, which he does not sustain even with data, are dangerous and misguided. They imply a set of ethnocentric judgements about people’s capabilities and about what people think. How does Boldt know that Aboriginal people “have a deep sense of alienation, and resignation and apathy”? Certainly these feelings exist in Aboriginal communities, as they do among the poor in Canada generally, but they are not specific to Aboriginal people. Boldt repeatedly and consistently assumes he knows something about what Aboriginal tradition is, and what Aboriginal people think, that extends beyond what Aboriginal people themselves may know or think; hence, he offers statements like: “Indian leaders impose meanings on their concept of land title that are derived from the Euro-Western lexicon, not from traditional Indian philosophies and principles” (27, original emphasis). Interestingly, and to stress his point, throughout his book, Boldt deploys a certain kind of doubling method, writing Indian as Indian and Indian as Indian: “nor is such a definition required for the survival of Indians as Indians” (27, original emphasis). How Indian does an Indian have to be in order to be an Indian? By Indianing Indians, Boldt allows himself the authority to determine what is or is not traditional, and how viable traditional culture is in the world today. Boldt can charge Indian leaders with “proceeding from an acculturated perspective” (43) and, when he is not telling us what Indians think, can tell Indian leaders what they should think: “Indian leaders must always keep this in the forefront of their minds” (47). Absent the conceptual tools provided by the idea of modes of production, absent an anthropology; even a lucid, experienced, and careful thinker of Menno Boldt’s calibre can wander into a minefield of unguarded prescriptions.
At least in the communities I studied, those discussed in this text, it is precisely a sense that “the people need to be tutored” that limits and circumscribes a meaningful project of Aboriginal self-government. This is the basic, ethnocentric assumption that government officials bring with them when they visit these communities. It is the approach that continues to underwrite policy: the recent Governance Act proposals entirely reflected the same set of assumptions. In contrast, both something called “tradition” and something called a “subsistence economy” have relevance, indeed are, in my view, best seen as a foundation, of the project of Aboriginal self-government in the northern context.
Among the crucial texts produced by the Aboriginal self-government machinery is a book by Frank Cassidy and Robert Bish called Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice. Cassidy and Bish make a serious effort to put the concept of Aboriginal self-government into practice. Their work is largely based on a survey of a variety of band and tribal councils in southern Canada. It directly reflects the political position of many southern status Indian political organizations. For example, on the very difficult and politically fraught question of legal Indian status in the post-Bill C-31 context, they review band council criticisms of that legislation. However, they do not touch on the criticisms made of band councils by Aboriginal women’s organizations.7 The book focusses on four elements of governance—citizenship, policy development, service delivery, and financing—and tries to illustrate how these elements are now being dealt with and what implications Aboriginal self-government may have in each of the areas. As was the case with Boldt, their work largely ignores the differences between northern and southern approaches to Aboriginal self-government, and, also like Boldt, their work is concerned with ‘Indians’, not with Métis or Inuit.
Although Cassidy and Bish have a somewhat narrower vision of Aboriginal self-government than Boldt, their view more closely resembles that of southern Aboriginal political leaders. They argue that
Indian peoples and their governments have been quite clear about what they want from Canada. They want constitutional recognition of the inherent jurisdiction of their governments. They want to deal with Canada as First Nations on a government to government basis. They want an understanding of their diversity as well as their unique cultural and linguistic identities. They want a just settlement of their grievances concerning their traditional lands was well as compensation for past wrongs and due attention to the special status in law that arises from their aboriginal rights. They want to govern themselves. Their wishes have not been recognized.8
They start from the premise that Aboriginal governments already exist, even if in a form that remains highly circumscribed. This gives their analysis some force, as they orient themselves towards improving and strengthening what already operates, rather than attempting to project something completely new.
Cassidy and Bish do not recognize the objective interest of the Canadian State in vitiating a meaningful project of Aboriginal self-government. They situate the problem with achieving Aboriginal self-government as a problem of ‘inadequate’ federalism, of the tension between a federalist model of governance that predominates in Canada and the centralist biases that remain inherent in the Westminster model. For example, they suggest that
Federalism can accommodate different governments. It allows for a recognized basis for independent powers. It enables citizens to be citizens of two or more governments simultaneously. It uses judicial institutions as mediating mechanisms for disputes between citizens and governments as well as those between one government and another. Federalism, in fact, is characterized by all of these conventions; yet Canadian federalism, as practised, particularly in light of the Westminster model, has not accommodated fully recognized Indian government on the part of Indian peoples. (163)
There is a good deal offeree to this argument, which implicitly suggests that ethnocentric or racist logic underlies the refusal to provide Aboriginal governments with the same powers that provincial governments have, and also suggests a structural reason in the centralizing tendencies of parliamentary democracy, presumably, for example, in the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, on the Westminster model.
In another context, Cassidy and Bish note that “comprehensive [self-government] arrangements, at the present time, must be regarded as experiments aimed at more fully integrating Indian governments within the federal system” (155). But the Indian governments they discuss were created by the existing system, and integrating the governments as they stand has been a long-term policy objective of the federal government, embodied in the Indian Advancement Act of 1884, which sought to turn band councils into municipal councils, in the White Paper of 1969, which sought to turn responsibility for delivery of Indian social services over to provincial governments, and more recently in the Governance Act, which sought to strengthen “accountability” mechanisms in band governance. This is a policy objective that Aboriginal peoples have continually struggled—in practice—against.
There are, then, two critical problems with Cassidy’s and Bish’s approach. First, they do not recognize the politics of form. That is, Indian governments will be recognized within a federal system when they become governments that reflect the dominant view of what a government is or should look like. They understand that decision-making “procedures would likely show considerable variance across Canada because of widely differing traditions in First Nations communities. They would, however, reflect a strong emphasis on active citizen involvement and the use of consensus” (166), but they do not see the degree to which these kinds of “procedures” contradict the basic logic of the established order. Second, Cassidy and Bish do not see the State’s function as a totalizing mechanism in late capitalist society. Although it is true that “federalism can accommodate different governments,” it can only accommodate governments whose basic form meets certain requirements, it can only accommodate governments that resemble it, that speak to it in its own language, that write back and that work within the same logic, a logic conducive to the accumulation of capital and the expansion of the commodity form. Any governments or political groups that attempt to do something different will feel the relentless force of the State’s ideological or repressive apparatuses.
In a brief, intellectual autobiography in the introduction to Citizens Plus, Alan C. Cairns lets his readers know that early in his career he worked as a senior staff in the team that crafted the Hawthorn Report, which is credited with giving impetus to the idea that Aboriginal peoples should be considered “citizens plus” in the Canadian polity. For the next thirty years his research focussed on “federalism, the Constitution, constitutional reform, and the role of the courts in constitutional change.”9 He has now returned fall circle, deploying his depth of knowledge as a senior scholar in politics in an attempt to revive the abandoned concept, to respond seriously to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report, and, in effect, to bring a voice from the discipline of political studies into the debates about self-government. This is an ambitious undertaking, and one fraught with dangers. Revival of older concepts poses the possibility of being charged with “a failure of imagination” and the possibility of seeing the whole approach as “the last gasp of an imperial mentality”; to his credit, Cairns acknowledges these dangers.
That, indeed, is one of the strengths of this book. There is an honesty in this engagement, a tone of soul searching, that breathes life into what might otherwise be another dull-as-warm-summer-concrete Canadian constitutional analysis. Other strengths that a scholar of Cairns’s or Boldt’s experience brings to the table is breadth of knowledge—in Cairns’s case a range of references that spans from studies of Old Order Amish in the United States, theoretical material about cultural hybridity, demographic studies of ethnic minority marriage patterns—and depth of knowledge—particularly regarding the whole panoply of legal, political, and philosophical studies of Aboriginal rights and citizenship—that lend considerable gravity to their judgements and that, without fail, provide readers with valuable resources for pursuit of these issues.
What follows is a serious attempt to come to grips with my own considerable distance from many of Cairns’s positions: to take up the glove he has thrown down for a reasoned debate. If, then, I do not pull many punches, I do so out of respect for an enterprise of thought I presume would want to be read with a rigour and determination equal to that which informed the manner in which it was written. Let me state my differences with Cairns through six propositions, which counter some of the more deep-rooted positions he stakes and emphasize the issues from a northern community-based perspective.
First Proposition: at this historical juncture, the ground of relations between Aboriginal peoples and newcomers must philosophically be an acknowledgement of alterity. The most basic premise of Cairns’s approach is that “one of our essential tasks is to foster a sense of common belonging to a single political community, as well as the recognition of difference. If we achieve only the latter, our triumph will be pyrrhic” (180). A good deal of the book is devoted to a critique of Aboriginal separatism in the sphere of self-government discourse, but Cairns is not by any means an assimilationist. Rather, he wants the ‘plus’ of “citizens plus” to take cognizance of the ‘citizens’, he wants to promote the development of an Aboriginality firmly within the rhetoric of Canadian commonality. He advocates what he calls a “modernizing Aboriginality” in which “individuals and communities remake themselves by choosing from the options at hand” (105). This implies that those trajectories of policy that aim to promote autonomous, self-governing, Aboriginal political entities are misguided, for Cairns, because they rest on a notion of Aboriginality “defined in terms of an authenticity with roots in the distant past” (105).
The position is not without considerable philosophical power. Dominick LaCapra once argued that “the comprehensive problem in inquiry is how to understand and negotiate varying degrees of proximity and distance in the relation to the ‘other’ that is both outside and inside ourselves,”10 which could well encapsulate a moment of agreement between Cairns and my own position. However, given the history of colonial power relations that have created the current inequities, and given the continued extraordinary degree to which the culture of newcomers to Canada has simply not understood or respected Aboriginal cultural difference, it is disingenuous to the point of naivete to suggest that commonality rather than difference should be the ultimate objective of policy.
I share with Cairns a Western legacy: a respect for the tradition of civic humanism that shifts like an ineffable current through the last two millennia of north African and European thought and practice. But the cultural and historical perspective of Aboriginal peoples gives lie to the principles that the Canadian State enunciates as its own ground for being and pretends to inherit. For Aboriginal peoples, the State has not been a benign liberal-democratic arena where the nature of their insertion into the body politic as a whole may be freely debated. The State has been a totalizing agent, a structure of power relentlessly imposing its forms and logics on Aboriginal communities, bodies, lands. Cairns appropriates two Aboriginal analyses, that of John Borrows and of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, to suggest that (in this instance referring to a position paper by the latter) “only by becoming fully involved in the Saskatchewan community will Aboriginal peoples become part of the province wide ‘we’ community and thus have the moral levers to engage the majority as fellow citizens in tackling poverty and social malaise” (208). But their position, as I read it, is more that the dominant society must begin to learn from Aboriginal peoples and cultures for the betterment of both: this can happen only if Aboriginal cultures are not taken for granted, if there is an acknowledgement that there is much about those cultures not yet understood. That is, we must begin from the humility implied by a premise of alterity, the otherness in the sense of unknown or difference of the other, rather than from the arrogance of presuming a universal understanding, if there is to be any hope of a meaningful accommodation.
Second Proposition: the trend toward urbanization of Aboriginal peoples must not become a ‘fact’ deployed to diminish the particular claims of those in rural communities. Cairns argues that the tendency of the RCAP to focus on landbased models of self-government ignores “the choice of half the Aboriginal population” to live in cities, which may put it “on the wrong side of history” (185). The numbers argument is frequently deployed these days, by Cairns and others, to suggest that Aboriginal leaders who do not represent the views of urban Aboriginal peoples are out of touch with a growing reality. Here is another fact: in the twentieth century, numbers have rarely served a small group of people living for the most part in isolated parts of the country. The claim of Aboriginal peoples for justice was never based on their proportion in the population, but rather on qualitative claims of cultural difference and historical claims for legally enshrined rights. There are as many people now living in northern Aboriginal communities—more, actually—than there were at the turn of the century. They have been a minority for a long time. Now they may be, or soon become, a minority within that group of people who are descendants of the original occupants of this land. Their call, their claim for justice, remains as strong as it always was. The many and compelling issues regarding urbanization of Aboriginal peoples do demand a response, perhaps even a response along the lines delineated by Cairns, but that response must not be applied to those for whom the statement “ours is an urban civilization” continues to have no relevance.
Third Proposition: the notion of cultural hybridity is a dead letter that cannot provide a basis for any form of critical cultural politics. The time was sure to come when a liberal line of discourse would find the value in that stream of post-colonial thought, pace Homi Bhabha, that valourizes hybridity, the mixing of cultures. Hence, it comes as no surprise to see Edward Said’s statement that “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (quoted in Cairns, 103). The point that hybridity theorists have been trying to make is that, when in power, a cultural purist discourse can have reprehensible results; when deployed towards minority cultures, a cultural purist discourse can become a cage. The theoretical point that all cultures are, and have always been, marked by interaction with other cultures has a place. However, when raised to an uncritical celebration of the hybrid, the discourse implodes: I suggested in earlier chapters that Fascism was as hybrid a form, even in the manner it deployed a discourse of its own purity, as any postmodern cultural transgression. Hybridity on its own merits does not tell us anything—all cultures are and always were hybrid, it insistently repeats—about whether a particular cultural form is worth attention, respect, admiration. Only the substantive way a particular people have responded to their particular problems, and to the problems that appear to face most of us in our existential being, can give us a basis for engaging in cultural politics. For Cairns, the fact of cultural hybridity underwrites the modernizing Aboriginality he sees as an alternative vision: “now, with the new story line, going for a Big Mac, or becoming a lawyer, are simply contemporary ways of being Aboriginal” (104).
In the end, surprisingly, this view, coupled with the notion of urbanization, actually makes Aboriginality a matter of so-called ‘blood’ rather than cultural choice. An Indian working for a multinational corporation is as much an Indian as the Cree trapper he is dispossessing. There is a truth to this statement, of course, a truth for which Duncan Campbell Scott would cheer. Cairns wants to develop a politics for Aboriginal peoples that does not exclude the urban, hybrid individuals emerging. He ends with a politics solely for their benefit. And once again, the isolated and marginalized, too culturally pure to be in fashion, since, after all, many of them speak their own language, are comfortably silenced.
Fourth Proposition: Aboriginal nationalism and political agency, in its many diverse forms, is not imported. This is a point about history, and here we find Cairns repeating a discursive trope that seems particularly endemic to discussions of recent Aboriginal history. In his discussion of ‘how did we get to where we are?’ Cairns offers two explanatory points. The first he treats briefly: the notion that Aboriginal people were a vanishing race “lost credibility.” The second is that “domestic developments could not have brought us to where we now are without the support offered by the international environment” (40-41). He then reviews in a page or so the global history of decolonization as a context for Canadian decolonization. There can be no doubt that there is some truth to this. But how we got to where we are becomes a more compelling story if two other truths are foregrounded: material conditions of life, including poverty, and the emblems of oppression have always been the basis of social movements; and secondly, indigenous leaders, local women and men, are the primary makers of local history. They did not need someone from elsewhere—one thinks of Reagan’s mythic Cuban infiltrators in El Salvador—to tell them they were oppressed. This notion pervades Cairns’s historical account. Although, for example, he shows an awareness of the importance of the Dene Declaration in giving impetus to the language of nationhood that became common in Aboriginal politics (106), he still states that the “1976 Parti Quebecois victory gave Aboriginal peoples the opportunity and incentive to couch their demands in constitutional terms” and “reinforced a nation-to-nation definition of the situation” (171). Aboriginal peoples did not need incentive from Quebec (not to follow Cairns’s path and presume that both Quebec nationalist separatism and Aboriginal nationalist separatism are the same, does not likewise presume that the former is inherently problematic and the latter will lose its sheen if the two can be connected). And the nation-to-nation definition of the situation owes at least something—never mentioned by Cairns—to the fact that for centuries European powers in the Americas treated the Aboriginal peoples they encountered as nations.
Fifth Proposition: ecological and environmental grounds of Aboriginal self-government must inform the political dialogue. One thing absent, entirely absent, from Cairns’s account is a sense of the ecological field within which humans operate. This is convenient, since it allows him to ignore the fact that the small proportion of Aboriginal people who live in rural Canada are the effective occupants of a majority of Canada’s land mass. And what is the best way for them to live? Might it not be too presumptive to suggest that some use of local ecological resources may have the best chance of providing a sustainable economy in those places? Might not one of the issues that Aboriginal self-government is really about be the question of how that land is to be used: as a giant storehouse for the urban civilization that Cairns treasures, or as a homeland for distinct cultures, to frame the question in a manner that approximates Thomas Berger’s model? Perhaps the issue is not so much that the RCAP and others put too much weight on land-based models of self-government, but rather that the question of land base is one of the most fundamental questions in the discourse of self-government.
Sixth Proposition: Aboriginal peoples are peoples. A small point of linguistic moment: the term “Aboriginals” has steadily come creeping into everyday language. Cairns uses it interchangeably with “Aboriginal peoples.” I wish he wouldn’t. “Aboriginal” is an adjective. It qualifies another word.
That word is “people.” With “Aboriginals” we are a bare step to a word that became offensive in the Australian context and could become equally offensive here.
I have a variety of other concerns regarding Cairns’s book: why does he not challenge the work of Menno Boldt and Taiaiake (Gerald) Alfred, political scientists like himself who might have a stronger argument about the relevance of a nationalist discourse in Aboriginal matters? Why is he so unconcerned with Nunavut as a public government that in many respects might be said to meet his own standards of citizenship-inclusion, treating it rather as another exercise in separatist self-government? Why are some authors, Emma LaRocque, John Borrows, whom Cairns agrees with, identified as Aboriginal scholars while others, those he disagrees with, James (Sakej) Henderson, Mary Ellen Turpel, are never given the same acknowledgement? But these are of smaller moment.
In the midst of such radical disagreement, let me add some additional words that point to the considerable strengths of Citizens Plus. For newcomers to the field, the book does provide, for the most part, a sound overview of the issues, histories, and positions that have emerged in the debate regarding Aboriginal self-government. The chapter on the RCAP, in particular, does convey the main impulses of the voluminous report and is one of the better summaries and engagements with that work. I would echo Cairns’s view that “the federal government’s response to the Erasmus-Dussault commission is an embarrassment” (122). Cairns is very strong on the legal advocacy literature that deals with Aboriginal rights and the reader comes away from his text better informed on the many positions that derive from that arena.
What Cairns offers is a particular liberal perspective on a debate that passed him by. His view is that the notion of “citizens plus” was lost in the 1969 controversy over the White Paper, and was replaced in the next decade by a notion of Aboriginal rights, which focussed exclusively on the ‘plus’ part of the equation, and by Aboriginal nationalism. He does not seem to notice that, by the seventies, Aboriginal peoples were not interested in their Canadian citizenship for good reason: the State had spent a century trying to enforce citizenship on them at the expense of their rights. By winning the battle over the White Paper, they blew the lid off the whole range of discursive logics that confined their political aspirations and so a whole new terrain emerged. Finally, they were allowed to talk substantively about what Aboriginal rights meant. The notion that a reinvigorated concept of “citizens plus” offers a new or better path out of the current conflict is not compelling and raises more questions than it resolves: what is there in this polity that is supposed to attract the attention and loyalty of those whose values and ideals as embodied in culture it ruthlessly, relentlessly attacks?
In July of 1993 I had the opportunity to assist with a set of meetings sponsored by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples relating to Inuit issues. The meetings were held in Panniqtuuq. My main role was to act as official note taker for a workshop on Inuit self-government. The session was of interest to Inuit leaders and drew a remarkable crowd, including Zebedee Nungak, Rosemarie Kuptana, Vince Terry, Tony Anderson, John Amagoalic, Martha Grieg, and Jaypetee Akpalialuk (then mayor of Panniqtuuq). The discussion proved highly illuminating regarding Inuit perspectives on the issue of self-government.
At the first plenary session on the first day, representatives of each of the regions explained their position on self-government. In Nunavut, the process of setting up the land claim and the new government meant that the leadership was focussing on the issue of training; having Inuit with the skills to run corporations, joint management boards, and government itself was clearly the priority. Other regions were less enthusiastic, working to establish different kinds of framework agreements and not at the stage of worrying about the nuts and bolts of setting up a government. The Inuvialuit, who are not a part of Nunavut, were looking to negotiate a regional government based on an old concept, WARM, the Western Arctic Regional Municipalities. They were on the verge of having the federal government restart negotiations with them, something that would happen later that year. The Inuit of Nunavik spoke of frustrations in implementing their land claim, which had self-government implications. The Labrador Inuit were experiencing the greatest frustration, not able to even start land claims and self-government negotiations because they were dealing with an intractable provincial government in Newfoundland. Each of the Inuit organizations was looking at a model of regional public government, rather than what they saw as ‘ethnic’ governments or exclusive Aboriginal governments, in order to achieve their self-government aspirations.
At the self-government workshop, Zebedee Nungak spoke early on about the question of what its goals should be.
[Tjhis is a problem I had with thinking about this meeting. Do we make suggestions to the Royal Commission, and then the Royal Commission makes suggestions to the government, which it may not do anything with? Are we here to try to make history and force governments to recognize our legitimate aspirations, or do we talk a lot and nothing much happens, and even less when our ideas are floated through the Royal Commission, then floated through government. I think we should have a very free wheeling meeting, discuss everything on our minds. Self-government may be number 97 on the Royal Commission list, how can we say to them ‘let’s say yes, this is very important’. For instance, Labrador, when they talked yesterday, it made my heart cry. They have been dismissed for fourteen months. We’re too tolerant of letting our people be treated like that. I don’t want to belittle the Royal Commission.
Effectively, Nungak was arguing that the political talent assembled in the room need not be limited by the agenda—making recommendations to a body that might pass those recommendations on to another body— but, rather, should perhaps work towards establishing a self-government statement, manifesto, or declaration. This kind of statement is itself an enactment of self-government, a taking on of responsibility that reflects a determination to control the agenda itself.
By and large, although Nungak consistently returned to this theme over the day and a half of the workshop, his broadest suggestions were not followed. Discussion proceeded to the question of financing self-government, and then to the problem of barriers to self-government. On the latter issue, at the end of the first morning, Rosemarie Kuptana sounded one of her concerns, that “what’s so frustrating is that there is no self-government process, but if we are going to have true self-government in Inuit lands we must think of our governments having a third order position to the other two levels of government. If it’s going to have true powers or responsibility it’s going to need constitutional protection.” The fact that self-government discussion has been so focussed on band-level self-government, on status Indians, and revising the Indian Act, which is largely the mandate of the self-government directorate in the Department of Indian and Inuit Affairs, has meant that there is no negotiating process—apart from constitutional talks—that suits the specific circumstances of Inuit, who are attempting to establish regional public governments rather than band or tribal governments.
The afternoon session, on barriers to self-government, began with a very interesting discussion that went around the table and also, therefore, around each of the regions. Near the beginning, John Amagoalic spoke of four different kinds of obstacles, focussing on the first one:
Speaking from experience, we found that when we first started talking about land claims in the seventies our own people were an obstacle. They couldn’t support something they couldn’t understand. We had to spend a lot of time explaining land claims. Our problem was our own people, and the public at large. The Canadian government was reluctant to move without public support.
He added three other points, each of which he referred to in brief: “secondly, it was the existing level of government. People in Yellowknife were not enthusiastic. That was an obstacle. Not just politicians, but bureaucrats.” The final two were that the “constitutional status quo only recognizes two levels of government” and, “fourthly, financing. Someone has to pay for self-government.” The list identifies two kinds of obstacles, an internal one reflecting people’s readiness and an external one reflecting the commitment of the dominant society.
Martha Grieg then spoke: “I can’t add much more. These are the things we see, and also we deal a lot with the social issues. I want to emphasize that the people have to be ready and there has to be training.” This last point was re-emphasized by the next speaker, Rosemarie Kuptana.
We have to put things into perspective. As Inuit, we’ve been involved in the Canadian political process for the last twenty or thirty years and we’ve had to deal with many issues. Having a small population, [there are] many leaders dealing with the same issues. I see that as a main issue. We’re involved in land claims, environment, self-government, constitutional reform; in order to deal with these issues there are very few educated Inuit. I see training as a major issue, particularly now that we have Nunavut.
Once again, she emphasized that “there is no process at the national level for Inuit to negotiate with the Crown self-government agreements. There has been a process since 1986 for Indians to negotiate financing and self-government, but no process for Inuit. This is an inequity.”
Others added to these themes of internal readiness and external, structural impediments to self-government. An Inuk from Baffin, saying that he had ‘nothing new’ to add to the discussion, spoke at length about the issue of writing.
The major [barrier], looking at the Inuit perspective, the traditional values that haven’t been written on paper by GNWT or federal government. That in my opinion is an obstacle, that’s why they haven’t been able to understand us. Inuit haven’t been able to get their experiences or knowledge on paper. The guy on my right said there are a lot of people in the north and our representatives aren’t able to visit all of us and hear our concerns. I think if all of the people were able to have knowledge or hear each of our concerns all the Inuit would be able to understand and help each other in trying to correct some of these obstacles. It is very difficult, in a sense, in the Baffin region a lot of the elders are consulted with, in dealing with big issues, we’re only using consultants that have gone through universities. As Inuit, experience only comes in age, but Qallunaat attitude is that it has to be done on paper. We haven’t used our elders enough to give us their opinions.
Jaypetee Akpalialuk, then mayor of Panniqtuuq (now, sadly, deceased), then spoke about the importance of tradition: “as Inuit, we have to follow the rules and laws that are given to us. In my opinion we, I feel that, we need to do the things that we never had a chance to deal with. Like, our culture is very important. Our elders and traditions, it’s important that we keep them.” ‘Writing’ traditional law and culture in order to have paper to oppose to the writing of the State: in a sense, this was also Zebedee Nungak’s theme. Near the end of the discussion he suggested that “if we drafted a declaration of independence we would get noticed. Because we are such good citizens we often don’t get the government’s attention.” Another kind of writing against the State, or a writing that would ‘address’ that State, that would be seen, ‘noticed’, that would lead to an exchange, that would become self-government.
Nungak’s declaration of independence did not get drafted. Instead, a resolution was forwarded that proposed an Inuit-specific self-government process be established, and suggested how the Inuit self-government should and could be constitutionally entrenched. However, the Inuit leadership at the Panniqtuuq meetings demonstrated that incongruous combination of idealism and pragmatism, of Utopian aspiration and political realism that characterizes their political project and political culture in Canada today. It is clear that self-government means very different things for Inuit than it does for other Aboriginal Canadians, yet at the level of broad visions there are also remarkable similarities. It is equally clear that meetings such as this one have the potential to themselves become exercises in self-government, staging assertions of self-determination by speaking the words and demonstrating a speech ethics that reach beyond the structural constraints imposed by the State. For a few powerful moments on several different occasions in a small Arctic College classroom in Panniqtuuq, self-government ‘existed’ itself.
Jurgen Habermas is among the contemporary social theorists who have had a great deal to say about the politics of speech. In his Communication and the Evolution of Society, Habermas argues that “social systems can be viewed as networks of communicative action; personality systems can be regarded under the aspect of the ability to speak and act.”11 Habermas suggests that communicative competence refers to “the ability of a speaker oriented to mutual understanding to embed a well-formed sentence in relations to reality” (98) and distinguishes between ‘purposive-rational’ actions and ‘communicative’ actions (117-118). Of the latter, Habermas states,
communicative action is, among other things, oriented to observing intersubjectively valid norms that link reciprocal expectations. In communicative action, the validity basis of speech is presupposed. The universal validity claims (truth, Tightness, truthfulness), which participants at least implicitly raise and reciprocally recognize, make possible the consensus that carries action in common. In strategic action, this background consensus is lacking. . . . (118)
Habermas’s argument to this point provides an interesting framework through which politics in Aboriginal communities can be seen, drawing our attention to the ethics of speech in small northern communities as a central cultural politics consideration.
Unfortunately, Habermas constructs his analysis of communicative action in the context of a broad argument that seeks to preserve a deeply ethnocentric developmental or social evolutionary logic. The worst aspects of Marx’s historical materialism—though borrowed in this instance from the developmental psychology of Kohlberg—are preserved in Habermas, who suggests, for example, that “apparently the magical-animistic representational world of palaeolithic societies was very particularistic and not very coherent” (104) and ranks, in his terms, Neolithic Societies, Early Civilizations, Developed Civilizations, all with conventionally structured systems of action, and The Modern Age, with post-conventionally structured domains of action (157-158). Palaeolithic societies, in this view, implicitly fall within the domain of pre-conventionally structured domains of action, though, interestingly, they are not specified in the evolutionary discussion.
Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest that concepts associated with the universal ethics of speech, that is, the final stage that Habermas proposes in his philosophical reconstruction of the stages of moral consciousness, are more relevant to the gathering and hunting mode of production than to the (post)modern era. In effect, if “rationalization,” as Habermas argues, involves “overcoming . . . systematically distorted communication” (120) and if “the universal ethical principal orientation” means “at heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons” (80), and if the “universal ethics of speech” implies a level where “need interpretations themselves—that is, what each individual thinks he should understand and represent as his ‘true’ interests—also become the object of practical discourse” (90), then this level of communicative action is probably found far more commonly in community assemblies in the NWT than in the House of Commons in Ottawa. Systematically distorted communication, speech laced through with ideological (in the vulgar Marxist sense) interest, is the order of the day in the dominant, circumscribed public sphere of the (postmodern world. A speech ethics founded on mutuality, the attempt to achieve consensus, respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons, these are commonplace in the communities I studied.
This is one of the senses in which the communities of Liidli Koe, Fort Good Hope, and Panniqtuuq are ‘ready’ for self-government. In effect, to the extent that Aboriginal traditions and values still govern community politics, these communities all evidence a high degree of communicative competence and an ethics of speech that vastly surpasses that which passes as political speech in southern public forums. The officials who dominate the territorial and federal bureaucracies have no sensitivity or appreciation of this; more often than not, watching these functionaries interact with Aboriginal leaders and elders at the community level is a study in speech incompetence. Unintended disrespect, or, rather, a systemically structured disrespect, is built into the speech of these sometimes well-meaning officials. The protocols of speech that embody a speech ethics structured around mutuality itself presupposing respect: among the very few places in the world where this logic of speech can be heard to operate on an everyday basis in the public sphere are the Inuit and Dene communities in Denendeh and Nunavut.
If democracy—that is, a system whereby the members of a community themselves decide upon the course of action or direction their community will take—is the standard by which we were to assess the readiness of a community for self-government, then Panniqtuuq, Fort Good Hope, and Liidli Koe would appear to be vastly more ready for self-government than the dominant Canadian society. However, self-government as a political project in Canada’s north and specifically in the three communities in question continues to flounder on systemically ethnocentric assessments of those communities. The attention to leadership that seems so prevalent in the scholarly literature is, in my view, one of the ethnocentric biases that structures too much of the discussion: citizen participation, including citizen’s ability to influence the course of events between elections, would be a far better arena of attention.
Eric Menicoche provided me with my introduction to Liidli Koe, acting briefly as my research assistant and taking responsibility for boarding me. He had been a student in Native Studies at Trent University, where I got to know him and his then marriage partner, Cheryl Bonnetrouge, and their children Erica and Whitney. At Trent, he had studied community economic development, but by the time he was finished he had become more interested in dealing with the problem of drug and alcohol addiction. He returned home to Liidli Koe at about the same time I began this study. He is a courageous and determined non-drinker, often in atmospheres where there is very little social support for such a stance.
At a talk at Trent University, Ethyl Blondin-Andrew spotted Eric Menicoche in the crowd, another Dene a long way from home. She told a story about Eric: during the Dene halcyon times in the mid-seventies, when they gained international recognition in their struggle against the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project, a group of Dene speakers toured nationally and internationally. Ethyl and Eric are in the same generation, which came of political age in that struggle against the pipeline. During one talk, an elderly woman from the crowd complimented Eric, saying that he spoke very well for such a young man and asking his age. Eric said, “I’m twenty-five thousand years old!”
He still is.
The issue of the politics of form is crucial in the arena of Aboriginal self-government. The politics of form is raised by Aboriginal scholar Marie Smallface Marule in her important analysis of “Traditional Indian Government: Of the People, by the People, for the People,” in the book Pathways to Self-Determination. There, she makes the following powerful argument:
If we really want to help ourselves, we must revitalize our institutions. This does not mean that we have to return to the way we were two or three hundred years ago. Given our experience and knowledge about the failures of European institutional structures, systems, and processes, why should we repeat their mistakes? Why, for example, should we adopt an educational system that not only fails to meet the needs of its students but also alienates them in the process? Yet we are currently on a course of introducing that type of educational system into our Indian communities. I believe we are uncritically adopting European-Western institutional approaches because of our sense of inferiority. We are doing it because we do not have confidence in our ability to build something that will be workable, more appropriate to our needs, and more effective. I am convinced that Indians can find in their traditional philosophies and ideologies better and more meaningful approaches than those offered by the Canadian government. We have something to offer that even other Canadians can look to as a better alternative to their existing institutions.12
This is perhaps the real challenge of Aboriginal self-government, and it is nowhere stated more forcefully. In Mamie’s view, traditional Aboriginal political culture revolved around the notion that “authority was a collective right that could be temporarily delegated to a leader, under restrictive conditions, to carry out essential activities. But the responsibility and authority always remained with the people” (136).
Marule’s argument was expanded and elaborated by Menno Boldt and J. Anthony Long in an article called “Tribal Traditions and European-Western Political Ideologies: The Dilemma of Canada’s Native Indians.” They argue that
by adopting the European-western ideology of sovereignty, the current generation of Indian leaders is buttressing the imposed alien authority structures within their communities and legitimizing the associated hierarchy composed of indigenous political and bureaucratic elites. This endorsement of hierarchical authority and a ruling entity constitutes a complete break with traditional indigenous principles. It undermines fundamental and substantial distinctions between traditional Indian and European political and cultural values. The legal-political struggle for sovereignty could prove to be a Trojan horse for traditional Indian culture by playing into the hands of the Canadian government’s long-standing policy of assimilation. (342)
Boldt and Long recognize that “self-government” means very different things to different people and they provide a standard by which self-government proposals and projects can be assessed. To the extent that self-government involves the adoption of Western institutional governing forms, it will work to erode the culture, values, and traditions it is being established to supposedly enact.
In Marule’s, and Boldt’s and Long’s, view, the politics of form are of critical significance in the struggle for self-government. That means that the question of how much power will be ‘devolved’ or ‘recognized’ in Aboriginal communities as the self-government process unfolds, while not insignificant, does not solely determine what material effect the process will have. How power is deployed or distributed, how communities use whatever structural space is opened up to them in the sphere of political decision making, these are at least equally crucial questions, in the north as in the south. In each of the communities under consideration, there was strong commitment embedded in the political dynamic to community decision making, there were well-established structures of community decision making, and there was an intricate political speech ethic that remained operative. These are strong foundations for a project of Aboriginal self-government: it is crucial that the project build on these foundations rather than undermine them.
This issue can be staged by an example of children observing and learning to be successful social agents. Regardless of the substance of the decision being made—assume, for example, a decision to provide funding for Aboriginal language training at the community level—if the decision is made through the agency of a hierarchical, Western-rational, policy structure, the children will at one and the same time have their Aboriginal culture impressed upon them and undermined. While they are learning their language, they will also necessarily want to learn Western bureaucratic decision-making skills; these latter, they know, will be necessary if they are to be effective social agents. Every decision made in this manner, regardless of the substance of the decision, moves the community further away from its traditional values. The converse is equally true; every decision that enacts those traditional values, regardless of its substance, becomes an ongoing lesson to the next generation that they will have to learn a certain speech ethics if they want to be successful social actors. Aboriginal culture in this latter example becomes or remains a part of everyday life, rather than something to be trotted out on special occasions or to display for sale or in museums.
Bella T’Seleie worked as one of my research assistants in Fort Good Hope. I first met her in Yellowknife when I taught courses in Aboriginal self-government and Native Law for the fledgling Arctic College Native Studies program, which has sadly since been cancelled. She is recorded in Denendeh as saying the following about her background:
I was born in Fort Good Hope in 1953. When I was two years old my mother caught TB and was taken away. I was taken care of by the people of Fort Good Hope. The people here are like that. If a child doesn’t have a mother, it is everybody’s responsibility to make sure the child doesn’t starve…. The child is not taken off to some home, you know, to strangers either. I was kept by many families until my foster parent … learned about my situation … they were kind people and they knew I needed help, so they adopted me …. I was raised in Colville Lake. In the summer we lived in fish camps, always working together making dry fish, cutting wood, and I look back on those days as really happy. I was happy …. I look at Colville Lake today … (the people) still have their own lives, they still have their own pride. I don’t want my people to have nothing but memories of what their life used to be ….13
Bella’s marriage partner, Frank, had been chief of Fort Good Hope and was the son of Philip T’Seleie, who had been chief before him, who himself was son of’old’ T’Seleie, who had been chief before him, and after whom the community school was named.
They share a log house on the bank of the Deh Cho, away from the hustle and bustle of ‘downtown’ Fort Good Hope. Bella is frequently nostalgic for Colville Lake, and was one of those who confirmed my image of that community as a particularly important place in Sahtu. Bella is a very strong traditionalist, committed to understanding and enacting the cultural values of her people. She worked in a small house-office building next to the community centre, in the summer of 1993, on a mapping project. The project involved determining Dene place names in the vicinity of Fort Good Hope. Though the various funding agencies over the years no doubt expected more documentation of the results from her, in fact Bella worked in a much more traditional manner, gathering the knowledge and storing it in the rich recesses of her own powers of remembrance. Bella found, through this project, that many of the stories and indeed much of the culture were embedded in those place names. When she talked to elders, they would rarely just point at the map and say “this is called this”; rather, they would tell the story of how the place came to be, why it was named, and how it related to other places, other stories, different family networks, and more. To do the research properly would take a lifetime, and even then the nature of the project was such that it would never and could never be a ‘full’ record, but, in spite of that, one thing was clear: Bella was the right person to be doing it.
Postmodernism is the name for the end of a kind of writing that begins by reading ‘the name for the end of a kind of writing’ as ‘the name for the end of a kind of writing’ and ends by reading ‘the name for the end of a kind of writing’ as ‘the name for the end, goal, telos, terminus, finis of a kind of writing’ or as the ‘name for the end, goal, telos, terminus, finis of a kind of, “kinda” but not quite, class of writing,’ which has among its possible readings: ‘the name for non-created writing,’ or ‘the writing without a subject,’ or ‘the writing that is by no-one about no-thing.’ In its end, it is ‘the name for the goal of writing that is a simulacrum of itself,’ its own end.
—Stephen A. Tyler, The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and
Rhetoric in the Postmodern World
In his State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas emphasized the importance to the State of writing. Noting that “there has always been a close relationship between the State and writing, given that every State embodies a certain form of the division between intellectual and manual labour,” Poulantzas argued that “writing plays a quite specific role in the case of capitalism, representing, still more than the spoken word, the articulation and distribution of knowledge and power within the State. In a certain sense, nothing exists for the capitalist State unless it is written down—whether as a mere written mark, a note, a report, or a complete archive” (emphasis added).14 The State cannot be addressed but in writing. Nothing happens in the sense that no events take place unless they are inscribed in the sanctioned forms, no being is recognized as existent unless it has a signature or a written status. The written, the inscribed, is a material embodiment of the State. The disjunction between how things are ‘supposed to be’ as they are articulated on paper, and how they are on the ground, how they play out in everyday life, is the source of endless humour in northern Canada.
The argument regarding the State as a form of writing is of particular relevance to the relationship between the State and Aboriginal people in northern Canada, where writing is a critical site of power. Poulantzas wrote that
the anonymous writing of the capitalist State does not repeat a discourse, but plots a certain path, recording the bureaucratic sites and mechanisms and representing the hierarchically centralized space of the State. It both locates and creates linear and reversible spacings in the consecutive and segmented chain of bureaucratization. The massive accumulation of paper in the modern State is not merely a picturesque detail but a material feature essential to its existence and functioning—the internal cement of its intellectuals-functionaries that embodies the relationship between the State and intellectual labour. (59)
The State demands to be addressed in a specific form, or series of forms, which always are concretely embodied in writing. The anonymous, trivial, form itself—the fill-in-the-blanks application form that is the ground level of the State’s writing apparatus—embodies and stages this. Citizens must fit themselves into the predetermined categories of the form, abstractions that work to establish their relationship with the dominant form in its broadest sense. They thereby abstract themselves into what the Statedetermined categories demand. The application form is a material reflection of the whole notion of the ideology that interpellates subjects as a strategy of containment.
To the extent that community politics in northern Canada involves a mediated relationship with broader social forces, it is writing that acts as the mechanism of mediation. The modalities of writing that structure or demarcate what people can do, how they can live, in northern communities include treaties, land claims, a variety of laws—including the federal Indian Act and territorial communities legislation as well as a whole host of laws respecting hunting, fishing, trapping, and renewable resource management—policies, regulations, constitutional clauses, legal decisions, and more. One of my own ‘services’ to the Dene communities was to lend my writing abilities: working on a variety of funding proposals in Liidli Koe and drafting legal language for negotiations in Fort Good Hope.
From the perspective of these communities, the State is a certain kind of writing. It is anonymous writing: it has no author or signature. Even when it comes in the form of a letter, it is the office or function, not the individual, who is writing. It is the writing of comprehensive land claims. The State will respond, finally, only to writing: writing must be produced in order to get the State to act, the act involved usually itself being an act of writing. The conversations that circulate, that surround, that reflect, these documents are themselves utterly without meaning for the State unless a written commitment or embodiment is made. The writing of the State is in the most de-personal, objective, institutional, bureaucratic language possible: in its writing, rhetoric, irony, ambiguity, creativity must be tortured out of existence in favour of a semantics and a grammar that reflect instrumental rationality in its most refined (that is: banal) modality. Adorno’s comment regarding this mode of writing and its political implications is worth recalling here: “the direct statement without divagations, hesitations or reflections, that gives the other the facts full in the face, already has the form and timbre of the command issued under Fascism by the dumb to the silent.”15 This form of writing then presents itself as efficient, advanced, universalist, modern, and as the standard to which all writings must conform.
If Aboriginal self-government is a politics of form, then the written form itself is a critical mechanism by which the commodity form is being incarnated. The written form inscribes possessive individualism: this too comes with, in Derrida’s words, “the singularity of the signature and of the name.”16 The written form—the mark that is the vote that is the most basic and at the same time the most banal political gesture in late capitalist societies—circumscribes citizenship. While across the river from Fort Good Hope, the same trees still sway in the wind and on that ground nothing has changed, the written form has changed everything. Aboriginal title to that land has been extinguished. A signed document exists verifying this. The written form has determined that whenever the government or corporate interests want to construct their mine or oil well or hydroelectric project, they have the inscription that authorizes them to do so.
In response, another kind of writing is deployed: the syllabic writing of elders, the inscriptions on the landscape on the body, the material structure of communities incarnated in architectures and gestures, the narratives: the political declarations, the BCRS, the embodied deconstructions, the writing whose being as writing is itself encoded in its form as inscription and as text, the writing that insinuates itself within while at the same time deploying itself against other writings and other writing machineries.
Kayrene (Nookiguak) Kilabuk was my research assistant in Panniqtuuq. She had been a student in Native Studies at Trent University. When I arrived in Panniqtuuq in the late summer of 1993, having not been there since 1985 and not knowing if I would know anyone there, it was a great relief for me to find Kayrene at the airport, bidding a temporary goodbye to her partner Seeti Kilabuk, who was leaving on a short-term wage-work contract. Seeti is the son of Ipelee Kilabuk, one of the community’s political leaders, so Kayrene had become linked to a very large and important family in Panniqtuuq. Kayrene is originally from the nearby community of Qiqiqtarjuak. She left school and settled in Panniqtuuq to raise a family with Seeti. She was trained as a legal interpreter and worked as such for the court party when they passed through town. She was working part-time as well for the hunter’s and trapper’s association in Panniqtuuq in 1993. In early 1994 she gave birth to a son whom she named Imo after her father; a few years later a daughter, Ina.
Because she was now a mother, she would need an amaotik in which to carry Imo around. Amaotik are the traditional pullover outer garments worn by Inuit women, with small pouches in the back, near the hood, where children can be safely and cosily carried. Kayrene’s mother made her the grey nylon amaotik that she wore through the summer of 1994. It was in the Qiqiqtarjuak style and instantly identifiable as such to the people of Panniqtuuq, who admired it for its difference and its quality. Clothing, of course, is also a certain kind of writing and traces a certain kind of being. In this context, Kayrene’s amaotik could be read by any Qallunaat as saying that she was, in some way, connected to the traditions of her people. To Panniqtuuq Inuit, it could be read as saying that she was, in some way, connected to the people of Qiqiqtarjuak. To Qiqiqtarjuak Inuit, it might also be possibly read as saying she was connected to a certain family, or even specifically to her mother, who made it. So, the amaotik too is a certain kind of writing, a writing that evokes being, a local embodied writing that is posed beside, within, and in some ways opposed to, the universal, abstract, totalizing writing of the State.
The amaotik has other uses than as a signifying device, of course. Qiqiqtarjuak is far less windy than Panniqtuuq, so one of the distinguishing differences that mark Qiqiqtarjuak amaotik from Panniqtuuq amaotik is that the former have shorter front and back tails, since less wind protection is required. On occasion, Kayrene—ever the pragmatist—wished that her amaotik had been made to suit the conditions she lived in, in the Panniqtuuq style.
As noted in Part One of this book, late capitalist, postmodern societies are characterized by three distinct, interrelated, totalizing dynamics. Karl Marx analyzed two of these in his Capital. The other has been partially analyzed in a few studies by social theorists in recent decades, the work of Nicos Poulantzas and Anthony Giddens being of particular relevance. The dynamic of capital accumulation, the piling up of abstract wealth (which, of course, does not ‘pile’), is one of the three. The necessity for capital to accumulate, for abstract wealth to ever increase, remains a governing logic in the contemporary era: if capital does not increase, does not expand—and dramatically—then root structural crises that can not be resolved within the dominant systemic logic take hold. Accumulation can be facilitated by expansion, and expansion is a totalizing process. The development of the commodity form signals a second, closely related, totalizing dynamic. The commodity form refers to a relation between exchange value and use value where the quantitative, serial, abstract logic of the former dominates the qualitative, situated, embodied logic of the latter. Commodification is a continually spreading process; as more of the world becomes commodified, more capital can accumulate. The commodity form is not a form that refers only to objects: people and spaces, time and memories, are equally subject to its exigencies. And the expansion of the commodity form is not something that only takes place spatially, on the periphery of capitalist development: the interior of the human psyche is equally a battlefield for commodification. The world of generalized commodity production does not yet exist, though that world has been envisaged and characterized by a good deal of postmodern philosophy, which nevertheless underestimates the degree to which non-commodified realms of human existence persist, sometimes in self-conscious opposition to the processes of commodification. The general outline of this trajectory of thought was all established in Marx’s analysis over a hundred years ago and remains as relevant to the world today as it was in his time.
One area that Marx did not closely examine was the interrelated sphere of the State as a third totalizing dynamic, essential to the operation of the other two and presupposing the same logic. In northern Canada, capital accumulation does take place, though on a relatively limited scale, largely because of cost and of the structural position of the non-renewable resource economic sector in the post-war period. Commodification takes place, particularly as it is embedded in popular culture and the money-economic sector, both of which are important in daily life in the north. But in this specific context, it is the State that acts as the crucial locus of totalization, underwriting the serialization of social life, presupposing and thereby imposing the dominant logics of instrumental rationality and possessive individualism that work together in constructing the established order.
Gidden’s contribution to this analysis—which can be linked to that of Poulantzas discussed in Chapter One—comes through his focus on the importance of surveillance and deviance. Giddens has argued in The Nation-State and Violence that “totalitarianism … is a tendential property of the modern state.”17 His analysis is directed towards totalitarianism as a tendency rather than totalization as a structural feature, though much of what he says has relevance to the latter: “the possibilities of totalitarian rule depend upon the existence of societies in which the state can successfully penetrate the day-to-day activities of most of its subject population” (302). The writings of the State, and the responses it requires, can be situated in this context as mechanisms of surveillance:
The expansion of surveillance in the modern political order, in combination with the policing of ‘deviance’, radically transforms the relation between state authority and the governed population, compared with traditional states. Administrative power now increasingly enters into the minutiae of daily life and the most intimate of personal actions and relationships. In an age more and more invaded by electronic modes of die storage, collation and dissemination of information, the possibilities of accumulating information relevant to die practice of government are almost endless. Control of information, within modern, pacified states and very rapid systems of communication, transportation and sophisticated techniques of sequestration, can be directly integrated with the supervision of conduct in such a way as to produce a high concentration of state power. Surveillance is the necessary condition of the administrative power of states, whatever ends this power be turned to. (309)
This is, of course, a Foucaultian analysis, with the crucial difference that for Giddens the State remains the locus of power. The example that Giddens provides is also particularly apposite. He notes that “the provision of welfare cannot be organized or funded unless there is a close and detailed monitoring of many characteristics of the lives of the population, regardless of whether they are welfare recipients or not,” and suggests that this monitoring, particularly respecting those who rely on welfare, “can also be a means of regulating their activities in a co-ordinated fashion according to political doctrines promulgated by state authorities” (308). The process need not be so blatant or conspicuous: in Canada, the activities or lifestyle of welfare recipients are highly regulated by well-meaning welfare officials, who attempt to impose a State-sanctioned sense of what a ‘normal’ family life must be and who equally attempt to impose State-determined structures of what kind of home conditions must be maintained in order to establish social welfare eligibility.
The totalitarian tendency that Giddens writes of is, in my view, a totalizing structural feature of liberal-democratic States, certainly respecting Aboriginal peoples where they do not operate within the boundaries of the established order. It is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s insight that the foundation for the techniques of State power deployed by totalitarian regimes was invented in the project of European colonialism. The hegemonic logic of the dominant form, or all that falls within the rubric of the normal, has relevance to all citizens of liberal-democratic states. The ‘forms’ you cannot adequately ‘fill out’ mark you as a ‘deviant’ who must be policed. Deviancy is a necessary component of this structure, serving to consolidate an abstract-ideal ‘self in the dominant order as ‘normal’. Liberal-democracy is most clearly totalitarian from the perspective of those who do not follow the dominant serial exigency—as in, Dene and Inuit in northern Canada.
The critical lesson of this for those involved in the project of Aboriginal self-government is that there will never be a ‘final victory’ over ‘the enemy’, because the enemy is not embodied in specific social agents or specific government policies or even specific constitutional structures. All these reflect an underlying logic; since that logic is totalizing, it will never stop, it will never cease to attempt to absorb and incorporate Aboriginal realities into the dominant reality. From the perspective of totalization, Aboriginal peoples, Aboriginal cultures, must equally become commodities like every other aspect of social existence, sooner or later. Any victories will only be provisional. This is a process not directed exclusively at Aboriginal peoples, though from the structural margins they experience its blunt edges. It is only when there is a foundational structural change in the established order that replaces these totalizing dynamics with something else that Aboriginal peoples will feel a respite.
That which falls under the sign of resistance is as much a part of everyday life in the Aboriginal communities I worked with as that which falls under the sign of totalization. A gesture can be coded as either, depending upon the constantly shifting context. A civil servant, close to retirement, whom I interviewed in the mid-eighties in Ottawa, a verbose, blustery, nononsense type of the old school named Ralph Ritsie, who had run a residential school in Churchill, was proud of the fact that many of the current generation of Dene leaders had attended his school. Residential schools, ‘total institutions’ whose function was totalizing, generated an Aboriginal leadership who could more effectively stand against totalization and whose first demand was to end the residential school system. This points to the specific logic of resistance that takes place in Aboriginal politics in northern Canada: a logic of subversion, whereby structures or gestures or policies of the dominant order are turned against themselves, are operated so as to achieve an effect that is precisely the opposite of the one aimed for. It is as if, somehow, although all the arrows point in one direction—perhaps the very fact that there are so many arrows pointing in that direction—the reader of the sign gains a distinct, clear sense that she must turn and go the opposite way.
Subversion is one of the only forms of resistance available to those who are struggling against a dominant logic that is totalizing, that carries with it the power to define the totality, and that functions within a field of totalization. A direct confrontation will easily be smashed or smothered. Where the opponent determines the rules of the game, but does not hold all the cards, one must use every means at one’s disposal; the most effective means is to play the game while subtly turning the rules against themselves. This is a difficult and risky form of resistance. It involves using the dominant logic against itself; it is risky because that logic carries hidden within it unforseen totalizing exigencies and presuppositions, including a series of attractive incentives.
Self-government itself, in its recent history, is a concept that illustrates the dynamic of totalization and subversion. It was proposed by Aboriginal peoples like the Dene, who deployed the Western language of nationhood in a determined and largely successful effort to establish their political program in the Canadian national consciousness. The concept was then ‘captured’ by the State and deployed to justify models that were thinly disguised versions of much older attempts at wholesale assimilation: the Sechelt Act of 1985 compared remarkably well to the 1884 Indian Advancement Act. This version of the concept was resisted by First Nations, who used the notion of inherency to establish a conceptual indeterminacy for Aboriginal self-government. There are few terms in the Canadian public space that are so widely used while being so ill-defined.
Perhaps the accumulation of anecdotes itself comes to take on the weight of data. In any event, the following can serve as a supplement to the more extensive critique of the Sechelt Act elaborated in Cassidy’s and Bish’s Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice.18 A warning to gentle and sensitive readers should also preface this story: language unsuited to the sanctity of the academic text must be reported. Soon after the legislation was enacted, I met a Sechelt spokesperson at a conference. The spokesperson, a man, was eager to respond to criticism of the model and of the Sechelt, and stressed in his talk the difficulty of negotiations, the concessions they had achieved from government. Later, over coffee, he told a group of us that the Sechelt had made a flag for their band office and on the flag they had included the words, translated into Latin by their lawyer (and here’s where the foul language appears): “don’t fuck with the Sechelt.” We laughed and thought of it as a fine comment that reflected some trace of a sense of resistance. Whether the story has a literal referent or not, after some time bothering over this anecdote, I realized its significance for me is in the fact that in the story, Latin, the cherished ancient language of the colonizers, was chosen as a means of enunciating and hiding the slogan, rather than the ancient language of the Sechelt. Here, an outwardly subversive gesture reinscribes the logic of totalization. Perhaps so too the Sechelt Act.
One interesting position that has emerged from some Aboriginal scholars in the field can be characterized as an ‘indigenism’ position. For Taiaiake Alfred, the indigenist position “brings together words, ideas, and symbols from different indigenous cultures to serve as tools for those involved in asserting nationhood.”19 While at pains to emphasize that indigenism “does not… supplant the localized cultures of individual communities,” Alfred does stress that it “is an important means of confronting the state in that it provides a unifying vocabulary and basis for collective action.”20Patricia Monture-Angus, while agreeing with much of Alfred’s analysis, has criticized him for an emphasis on leadership as a solution,21 along the same lines of some of my own comments above respecting Boldt, as well as taking him to task for an inadequate inclusion of discussion of issues and roles pertaining to Aboriginal women. Nevertheless, Alfred offers a compelling message, particularly in his understanding of the ways in which the drive to accumulate wealth vitiates traditional Aboriginal values: “without a commitment to the development of economic self-sufficiency in a framework of respect for traditional values, money can do nothing to promote decolonization and reassertion of our nationhood.”22
This version of an indigenist position, then, recognizes the similarities that inform Aboriginal opposition to totalization, though, rather than doing so from a mode of production-based argument, grounds the analysis in similarities respecting Aboriginal values. Although the perspective is firmly rooted in Kanien’kehaka values, culture, and history—deploying, for example, the two-row wampum as a central metaphor for configuring a better way of managing relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples—it nevertheless offers a position that, with some modification, travels well into Nunavut and Denendeh.
While the struggle against totalization involves using its structures or language against itself, the struggle also depends on that which stands or can be defined or constructed as standing outside totalization. Here is where the maddening but essential (necessary and essentialist) concept of tradition takes its specific force in this field. The reconstruction of tradition— whether ‘invented’ or not—within a totalizing context provides a kind of ground from which political resistance can be staged. Of course, another tradition is called forth by the servants of capital accumulation, so it is not tradition for its own sake but the substantive form of the tradition being invoked that is critical here. The Aboriginal traditions being reinvented, reconstructed, re-enacted, and revitalized in the Aboriginal cultural renaissance taking place in Canada, to the extent that they are tied to the egalitarian moment of the gatherer and hunter mode of production, substantively offer both an attractive sphere for commodification and a powerful site of resistance. It is on this terrain that Aboriginal cultural politics are being staged. Denendeh and Nunavut alike derive their specificity from the fact that, while they are now more accessible than ever before, they remain slightly to the side of the major thoroughfares of capital accumulation. Dene and Inuit continue to have direct access to the means of subsistence, and have only partially been ‘proletarianized’. In Capital Marx continually emphasized:
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epochmaking that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs.23
The extinguishment of Aboriginal title is the latest mechanism by which the State—which, it seems, has consistently played a critical role in this particular and peculiarly crucial function for capital—attempts to secure the dispossession of another sector of society in this country, Canada, in this historical epoch, postmodernism. Extinguishment is a necessary moment or phase if Inuit and Dene are to become “free … rightless, proletarians,” sellers of labour power, human commodities.
In the distant future, culture will itself likely be the most valuable commodity. Just as signed artworks today on their own embody massive amounts of capital, in another century ‘genuine’ cultural artefacts and ‘authentic’ traditional ceremonies will have the same rarity and a collective-cultural signature-value (rather than an individual signature value). In a world of massively expanded commodity production based on even greater expansion of the commodity form into the sphere of cultural and interpersonal life, whatever traces of Aboriginality have remained will have an exponentially enormous capital value. This process has already begun, of course, but its dimensions are relatively small: we are not yet in the world of generalized commodity production that the social theorists take for granted. So, perhaps this whole politics ‘merely’ stages the deferral of totalization until such time as the commodity value of Aboriginal culture increases to the point where it is, literally, ir-resistible.
That future, however, is not the only one it is possible to envisage. The continued existence of societies that enact meaningful egalitarian social relations poses a specific threat to the dominant order. In spite of, or perhaps even within, their very marginality they may play a significant role in the project of structural transformation or transcendence of existing social reality. This latter possibility would then imply that this whole politics may direct itself towards shaping the future in a drastically different and opposed direction to the one outlined in the preceding paragraph.
These are the stakes in Denendeh and Nunavut today. Those without vision, the functionaries who now dominate but do not exhaust the State apparatus of the territorial governments, would like to ensure that in the north, the forms can be filled out in the same way as almost everywhere else in the world. Their job is to ensure that the paper flows. In a strange form of opposition that never confronts, in small communities scattered across the vast but well-used land, are people who have vision, and who ‘see’ the continuance of a way of life that has survived for years beyond memory.
It’s June 27, 1994, very late in the evening. I am with my friend Elizabeth in a canoe, gliding across the smooth, still waters of Back Bay on Tucho, at Yellowknife. We are out for our evening paddle around Latham Island. The sun is still up, but slowly, ever so slowly, setting. As we reach N’dilo, we begin to hear a steady pulse: the sound of Dene drums. We remember, then, that the Treaty 8 assembly is still convened, and one of the evening drum dances is on. We stop paddling, sit drifting and listening to the call of the drums, finally deciding not to go in and join the circle of dancers and friends, but to continue with our short trip, another circle that surrounds that of the dancers. As we pass the point of Latham Island, the drum songs still audible though faded, we catch sight of the waxing moon, near full, rising across the bay, and when we turn out of sight of the lingering sunset, the moonrise greets us. Along the other shore, we again move our paddles to the steady strong rhythm of the Dene drums, growing louder again. Finally, we reach the row of Twin Otters tied to the Old Town docks and paddle, squeezing our way, through the small tunnel under the road that connects Latham Island to Old Town, our journey at an end, though the drum songs continue long into the night, long after our passing.