The Paradigmatic Obstacles to Indigenous Justice
Glen Sean Coulthard, in his book Red Skin, White Masks critiques the colonial politics of recognition. These politics involve policy measures that recognize but do not fulfill indigenous demands for justice. For instance, land claims settlements have historically parceled out small plots of land to Native Canadians in the face of demands for the return of indigenous lands. This is simultaneously the continued failure to live up to a promise and an insufficient ‘compromise’ reparation that is made on the colonial government’s terms. Similarly, the legal recognition of independent Native nations within the framework of the colonial government was promised but not fulfilled. A part of what Coulthard critiques about the politics of recognition is that they paint a very thin veneer of respect without resolving vast wealth inequality and power differentials. The colonial government and corporations’ economic interests usually end up superseding indigenous justice, such as the insistence on developing oil fields in the Northwest Territories — despite the fact that this land had been legally recognized as belonging to the Dene Nation and despite the assertions of many members of the Dene Nation that this land is holy to them and constitutes an integral part of their existence. These continual decisions of colonial leaders to prioritize profit, and their addiction to growth and wealth, constantly widens inequality — the magnitude of this force incomparable to the minimal ‘compromise’ reparations.
Coulthard does not make these claims about wealth inequality so explicitly — that is something I have chosen to draw out — and he focuses more so on the original objectives of First Peoples versus the politics the colonial government is trying to draw them into. He describes discerningly the manipulation of approach that Canada attempts and has to some extent successfully carried out. Many of these political tactics are similar in the U.S., and a great number of Native North Americans have been coerced into accepting entirely insufficient settlements through endless bureaucratic talk and evocation of pity from colonial descendants. These politics involve severe cultural imperialism, as the cultural paradigm of settlers is imposed onto Natives, and indigenous cultural paradigms are refused by politicians.
Philip Blake (Dene) wrote in the testimonies of the Supreme Court of British Columbia Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (also known as the Berger Inquiry):
Do you really expect us to give up our life and our lands so that those few people who are the richest and most powerful in the world today can maintain their own position of privilege?
That is not our way.
I strongly believe that we do have something to offer your nation, however, something other than our minerals…For thousands of years we have lived with the land, we have taken care of the land, and the land has taken care of us. We did not believe that our society has to grow and expand and conquer new areas in order to fulfill our destiny as Indian people…
We have not tried to get more and more riches and power, we have not tried to conquer new frontiers, or out do our parents or make sure that every year we are richer than the year before.
We have been satisfied to see our wealth as ourselves and the land we live with. It is our greatest wish to be able to pass on this land to succeeding generations in the same condition that our fathers have given it to us…
I believe your nation might wish to see us, not as a relic from the past, but as a way of life, a system of values by which you may survive in the future. This we are willing to share.
Although some of these values, such as passing on land to succeeding generations in the same condition it was received, are beginning to be exalted by non-Native environmentalists and to a limited extent by the Canadian government, the neglection of economic growth and geographic expansion is far from being realized. Similarly, care for the land as for oneself is unimaginable to many non-Natives, and especially politicians. Which means that an identification of oneself with the land is probably unrealizable in the next generation. These are paradigmatic differences that inhibit full indigenous justice. They are deep-reaching beliefs constituting a worldview that may take a lifetime to comprehend if one is not significantly exposed to it in one’s formative years. Even then, full understanding is not guaranteed. And so, one path to indigenous justice (and one that is immediately feasible) actually requires cultural learning on the part of non-Native politicians. This could conceivably be addressed through a History, Social Studies, Experiential Learning, Philosophy curriculum in schools. The texts and passionate educators exist to create such a curriculum almost immediately. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and undoubtedly a wealth of further literature can provide an entirely sufficient basis to such a program. And the widely denied realities of present-day colonialism in North America certainly require such a sensitization of the guests to this land.
Robin Wall Kimmerer accessibly describes a number of indigenous philosophical perspectives, being Anishinaabe herself. Kimmerer tells stories from her life as a biologist, a gardener, a mother, and a neighbor. And into these stories she interweaves (or, rather, finds interwoven) indigenous wisdom. She teaches her reader that the land belongs to itself through the Creation Story of Sky Woman. Kimmerer imparts the significance and pervasiveness of cyclicality. And she illustrates the animacy of plants, rivers, and so many other entities all throughout the book. Kimmerer educates her reader on the volatile chemicals that trees use to communicate impending harm to each other, and the protective bitter compounds they can release into their leaves. Not only does Kimmerer communicate this animacy through encounters in nature (and her book provides concretely replicable experiences for an outdoor lesson plan), but she also examines the significance of the Potawatomi language in expressing such animacy. Puhpowee, for example, is a Potawatomi word for the force that pops mushrooms out of the ground — a sensitivity to the intricacies of flora that Kimmerer has not encountered in academic biology. In fact, Dr. Kimmerer shares that there is much that she has learned about biology from indigenous practices that she would never have learned in university research. There is a holism to Native views of nature that captures phenomena that cannot be described by the reductionism of academic sciences. Although Kimmerer never uses the word holism herself, she speaks of the “intertwining of science, spirit, and story” (11). Soon after completing her PhD, she hears from a Navajo woman at a gathering of Native elders:
One by one, name by name, she told of the plants in her valley. Where each one lived, when it bloomed, who it liked to live near and all its relationships, who ate it, who lined their nests with its fibers, what kind of medicine it offered. She also shared the stories held by those plants, their origin myths, how they got their names, and what they have to tell us. She spoke of beauty. (57–58)
Beauty, herbal medicine, and origin myths are elements of knowledge that are not commonly covered in the biological discipline. Yet Kimmerer points out that this woman’s knowledge was much deeper than what Kimmerer had learned from her academic studies, and that it engaged all the ways of knowing rather than just a few. Kimmerer maintains that “We see the world more fully when we use both [a scientific lens and traditional knowledge]” (60).
Zoe Todd theorizes too, though in another area of life, how academic discourse can become more accurate to reality by incorporating indigenous perspectives. In her article “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn” she explicates, as the subtitle announces, why “‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Beginning with a vignette of attending a talk by Bruno Latour at the University of Edinburgh, she is disappointed that he speaks of Gaia and “the climate as a matter of ‘common cosmopolitical concern’” but fails to credit indigenous thinkers and indigenous culture more broadly as the originators of these ideas. Zoe Todd is also disappointed that Latour does not reference the Inuit concept of Sila, which embodies the climate and “the breathe [sic] that circulates into and out of every living thing” (Qitsualik). Todd points out that our present-day understanding of climate has been significantly shaped by indigenous activists such as Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize that was finally awarded to Al Gore and the IPCC. But all throughout the talk, Latour does not credit any indigenous thinkers or knowledge systems for their significant contributions. And this constitutes another form of cultural imperialism that is all too common in the present day.
It appeared that another Euro-Western academic narrative, in this case the trendy and dominant Ontological Turn (and/or post-humanism, and/or cosmopolitics — all three of which share tangled roots…) …was spinning itself on the backs of non-European thinkers. And again, the ones we credited for these incredible insights into the ‘more-than-human’, sentience and agency, and the ways through which to imagine our ‘common cosmopolitical concerns’ were not the people who built and maintain the knowledge systems that European and North American anthropologists and philosophers have been studying for well over a hundred years…
No, here we were celebrating and worshipping a European thinker for ‘discovering’, or newly articulating by drawing on a European intellectual heritage, what many an Indigenous thinker around the world could have told you for millennia: the climate is a common organizing force!
Indeed, there is a long road to walk until academia is decolonized and ceases to actively colonize through academics’ assertions. And Dr. Todd shows the intricacies and the deep-rootedness of academic racism. As an anthropologist, she encounters the phrase ‘going native’ at several turns. Once, in the description of a conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, where it is used pejoratively in its original sense of an anthropologist losing perspective as they conduct field research. However, Dr. Todd is also personally criticized with this phrase by a professional peer with no rebuttal from an entire room of white colleagues. And Todd shares that this criticism that Natives cannot effectively write about their own cultures is made often. The intricacies of this racism are brought forth when Todd, in response to her critique of this phrase, is told to ‘lighten up” by a North American anthropology scholar. Todd shares an incisive poem by Sara Ahmed:
So many heavy words, we feel the weight of them; we feel the weight each time, every time, all the time.
Black, brown, race, racism: words that come up; words you bring up.
Heavy; down.
Slow, frown.
It is not that we only feel the weight through words. The load does not lighten when light remains white. Whiteness is a lightening of a load.
Light and dark is so linguistically wound up in Euro-cultural perceptions of positive and negative, that these racist associations are close to pervasive. Many people are not willing to acknowledge this level of racism because it is so deep-rooted and requires such significant cultural change to be alleviated, but this examination is vital. It is a linguistic pattern that has often come to my attention, and I am glad that Sara Ahmed outlines it so eloquently here. Zoe Todd points out, in combining this analysis with the critique of her colleagues, that academia widely respects indigenous knowledge more highly when it is conveyed by a white speaker. She points out, and I agree, that the experience of POCs is respected more in the mainstream when re-told by a light-skinned person. These dynamics may be beginning to change, if the changes we see today are to remain permanent. And yet, the voice given to POC thinkers today is nowhere near adequate to direct representation. There is much to be done yet.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “White Men.” Feminist Killjoys Blog, 4 Nov. 2014, feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston Beacon Press, 2015.
Glen Sean Coulthard. Red Skin, White Masks. Minneapolis ; London University Of Minnesota Press [20]17, 2014.
Qitsualik, Rachel. “Word and Will — Part Two: Words and the Substance of Life.” Nunatsiaq News, 12 Nov. 1998, www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/archives/nunavut981130/nvt81113_09.html.
Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Milkweed Editions, 2014.
Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 29, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 4–22, 10.1111/johs.12124. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.
