And will the profits of destruction
Forever make your eyes blind
Do you bow to the corporations?
‘Cause they pay their bills on time
God bless Elijah, with the feather in his hand
Stop stealing the Indian land
Stop stealing the Indian land
Stop stealing the Indian land
– Lyric from the lead track, “Fools Like You” from the 1992 Blue Rodeo album Lost Together
Cornell University anthropologist Paul Nadasdy has an interesting idea. The idea that First Nations should be ’empowered’ — thats the call to action in those last few triumphant lines of the Blue Rodeo anthem quoted above — may not be such a progressive idea after all. In fact, Nadasdy suggests that “empowerment” of First Nations might just be one more trick in the colonialist’s bag. “To the extent that it requires formerly disempowered peoples to alter their personhood and society as a prerequisite for the exercise of that power, ’empowerment’ must also be viewed as a form of subjection,” Nadasdy writes in a paper for the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, with a claim that echoes a similar one made in 2001 by Heiko Henkel and Roderick Stirrat. Henkel and Stirrat argued that “participatory approaches to development, far from marking a radical shift away from an ethnocentric concept of modernity, are intimately part of the process of modernization itself.”
The idea here, then, is that the colonial power has “won” on some level simply when some aboriginal societies agree to participate in the colonial power’s deal-making — even if the colonial power is prepared to give away the store!
“To be heard at all, [First Nations] have had to frame their arguments in a language intelligible to lawyers, politicians, and other agents of the Canadian state,” Nadasdy writes. “By and large, this has been the language of territorial sovereignty. First Nation political activists, like other marginalized peoples around the world, have found this language quite useful in their quest for an end to colonial oppression. Perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. and Canadian governments have generally accepted the notion of indigenous sovereignty, although the nature and degree of that sovereignty remains deeply contested, and there is, in fact, a long history of government-to-government relations between settler and indigenous governments in North America. .. However useful the language of sovereignty has been for indigenous peoples, it has also been to some extent obligatory … There has been considerable debate about whether concepts such as nation, state, and sovereignty are appropriate in the indigenous context, and many are skeptical of indigenous claims to sovereign status. In Canada, such skeptics range from conservative critics [and here, Nadasdy cites the work of Tom Flanagan, the University of Calgary scholar who has also served as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff and close advisor] opposed to granting “special rights” to what they see as a racial minority to some indigenous scholars who are wary of the cultural baggage that necessarily accompanies assertions about sovereignty and nationhood.”
But this idea, if you agree with it at all, raises some interesting questions for those non-native activists who blockade developers of native land and take other civil action in the name of aboriginal interests. If the “traditional Indian territory” concept is indeed inappropriate from a cultural standpoint, how can it be defended by those seeking to defend First Nations culture? In other words, if “empowerment” equals “subjection” and you are an activist working for empowerment, have you now become a colonial agent seeking the “subjection” of a First Nation?
Confused? I apologize. I’m certain that I’m not yet clear on the ideas Nadasdy advances here and I may be a little confused. And Nadasdy does not, I should point out, address the implications of his conclusion to those, like Blue Rodeo and the activists who inspired them and who they have inspired, who believe they are fighting for empowerment on behalf of First Nations.
And, it should be noted, Nadasdy explicitly focuses his work on Yukon First Nations. He makes no claim that his thesis applies to First Peoples on every continent or region. But for some distinct Yukon First Nations, Nadasdy says, “Northern First Nation people have had to restructure their societies in dramatic ways just to gain a seat at the negotiating table . To be heard at all, they have had to frame their arguments in a language intelligible to lawyers, politicians, and other agents of the Canadian state. By and large, this has been the language of territorial sovereignty.
Nadasdy quotes Bessie John, an elder from the White River band, who said this in 1995 as Yukon First Nations and the federal government were sorting out different boundaries for different Yukon First Nations. Nadasdy presents this as evidence that boundaries are incompatible with the cultural values of Yukon First Nations:
We are one nation to this country where we was born! That’s what they should tell the government, I say. Where is our mother? There was one that came from the ground to this earth here. And government people they think they’re our bosses.We should be boss of our country. One trail from all the way to Alaska. All the way down from Alaska to that river there. I talk about that river, that Yukon River, belong to Indian for Earth. God, who made that river for Indian food. That’s our food, that river. No one made for us, only Earth and God can make for us our food. Government should know that.…Every day I stay home I was thinking. We should share the land with each other. We are one First Nation. We are Indian on our land. We should share our land now, together.
So let me provide a few excerpts from Nadasdy’s essay (See “Joe Johnson gets a hunting license” posted yesterday for an extended excerpt) and see if it doesn’t provoke some new thinking on this interesting and controversial idea. Let’s start with this premise from Nadasdy:
Although many people—First Nation and Euro-Canadian alike—assume that these traditional territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not in fact composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory; such entities are a quite recent phenomenon in the Yukon. Land claim and self-government agreements are not simply formalizing jurisdictional boundaries among pre-existing First Nation polities; they are mechanisms for creating the legal and administrative systems that bring those polities into being. In fact, the agreements, conceived and written as they are in the language of state sovereignty, are premised on the assumption that First Nation governments must be discrete politico-territorial entities if they are to qualify as governments at all. Thus, although the Yukon agreements do grant First Nations some very real powers of governance, those powers come in the peculiarly territorial currency of the modern state. Not only does this implicitly devalue aboriginal forms of socio-political organization, it is also helping transform First Nation society in radical and often unintended ways. One of the most significant aspects of this transformation is the emergence among Yukon First Nation peoples of multiple ethno-territorial identities and corresponding nationalist sentiments.
If this intrigues you, do find a research library that subscribes to this journal for the rest of this article is locked behind the firewall of the publisher. (You can unlock it by paying the publisher $15.)
We continue:
…the territorial state has become virtually the only template available to indigenous peoples seeking a measure of self-determination, even when that template is culturally inappropriate. Thus, because they represent a tacit agreement to play by the rules of the political game as formulated by the colonizer, even those indigenous assertions of sovereign territoriality that are successful in practice can be viewed as part of the legacy of colonial domination.
And:
Although Yukon First Nation political organization did change in response to the fur trade, the pace of change accelerated markedly in the 1940s and 1950s when federal officials began asserting control over the lands and peoples of the Canadian north. To this end, they divided the nomadic indigenous population into distinct administrative “bands,” each with its own elected chief and council. These bands, created under the federal Indian Act, had no relation to any existing political units; rather, they were composed of different families who had in many cases very different patterns of seasonal movement and who had settled—or sometimes had forcibly been settled—in a number of central locations.
I would like a little more support, either in footnotes or with more in the essay, for the assertion that the bands created by the Indian Act had no relation to existing political units. Nadasdy does provide a footnote at the end of this paragraph but, reading the footnote, he seems to be contradicting himself when he says there is “no relation” by quoting another scholar, in the footnote, who says, “Most of the modern government ‘bands’ have probably been organized on the basis of aboriginal territorial groupings, in the sense that those individuals who most often came together in the past probably segregated into the particular local groups that first built their cabins around a particular trading post, mining centre, church or school.” Nadasdy concludes the footnote by saying, “The important point here is that Indian Act Bands did not correspond to any preexisting politico-territorial entities, since such entities did not exist.” Still, saying so doesn’t necessarily make it so though I concede that the problem for any scholar here is that the written record is scant or non-existent for the history of Yukon First Nations prior to the arrival of white Europeans. (And even then, any records about Yukon First Nations people were likely created by white Europeans intent on colonizing the area!)
It’s clear that we’re all in this together. I like the history of Toronto’s indigenous people. How they sold the land here for a dollar. How they would walk through town single file as though the wide avenues were forest trails. A competing narrative tells us they don’t exist anymore. I need more evidence to support that!