Tansi Nîtôtemtik,
Today, we are proud to present a two-part special to open our week. In part one, we interview Matthew Wildcat, a local scholar with some brilliant ideas about reconciliation, politics, and Indigenous governance. In part two, we feature Matt’s guest-authored article, “Reflections on a Shared Future Between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Peoples.” Enjoy!
Until next time,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
PART ONE
Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?
I'm from Maskwacis, AB which is a Nehiyaw (Plains Cree) community composed of four First Nations. I'm a member of Ermineskin Cree Nation and grew up on Ermineskin reserve. I cherish my upbringing and ongoing connection to Maskwacis and Ermineskin and these connections have shaped my identity and self-understandings in profound ways.
From an academic standpoint I was lucky enough to go through undergraduate and graduate training right when Indigenous professors were gaining a small but sizable foothold in the academy. I have an undergrad in Native Studies from University of Alberta, a Masters of Arts in Indigenous Governance from University of Victoria and will soon complete a PhD in Political Science from University of British Columbia. In those three degrees I was taught or supervised by nine different Indigenous professors and I feel extraordinarily lucky that I was able to benefit from the decades of hard work that Indigenous peoples put into the academy to set up the training I was able to undertake.
In your piece posted as part two of today’s blog, you call for an end to trauma-based narratives of reconciliation – can you summarize why you believe this to be such an integral part of decolonization?
It is not so much that we should do away entirely with narratives that discuss Indigenous trauma. This has been a central part of Indigenous histories. But when people attempt to learn about reconciliation solely through a focus on Indigenous trauma, we immediately skew the terms of what reconciliation should look like. If the problem of colonization is simply Indigenous pain and suffering, then we can go about addressing that without questioning bigger questions of how Canadian society sets up its political systems and economy - questions that Glen Coulthard explores in his recent book Red Skins White Masks. These questions would force us to question say how we use land or treat water, and question an orientation that prioritizes extractive development over Indigenous perspectives of land use. It will be hard to achieve decolonization without Canadian society transforming itself to make space for increased Indigenous power and influence.
The other part of focusing solely on trauma is that it hides the many contributions Indigenous peoples can make towards a healthier society. For instance, I was recently invited to do a talk for a class at a local organization. I think Nehiyaw traditions can greatly contribute to lessons on leadership, but most of the day focused on the history of Indigenous trauma. To be sure, when programs are planning curriculum, they need to ensure their students have a proper understanding of colonialism and this is difficult because in Canada today we can't assume people have an understanding of this past, so programs need to make sure that type of training happens as well. But when programs attempt to include Indigeneity in their training it cannot start and end with a focus on trauma.
As a last aside for people who want to understand these issues in much more depth and complexity, they should follow the newest work of Audra Simpson who looks at how reconciliation as a paradigm governs through affect (or in a more colloquial sense, how reconciliation is built around Native people shedding tears for white people).
In your talk at the Reconciliation: Wahkohtowin conference in September 2017, you spoke of “wahkohtowin as a political language” and advocated for “political decision-making that moves away from Indian Act governance towards relationship-based philosophies.” Can you expand on this?
It is relatively uncontroversial to say that we should get rid of the Indian Act. In the past, the Indian Act did give us protection against 'white paper liberalism' - the strategy where all forms of legal and political recognition for Indigenous peoples would end and Indigenous peoples would be assimilated into Canadian society. The Indian Act is a better alternative than our full elimination as peoples - as was articulated by Harold Cardinal - but as countless scholars have documented how Canadian governments and society has many strategies they follow in regard to their relationship with Indigenous peoples. This is not a peace pipe by Dale Turner is one such exploration. So I just want to start by acknowledging that some people may take a position that we should keep the Indian Act and that position makes sense if one believes the only strategy Canada is employing is white paper liberalism.
For myself, I think it’s clear that the generations of activism that Indigenous peoples have undertaken has forced Canadian governments to drop white paper liberalism as their main strategy. To be sure, I think the strategies Canadian governments employ always seek to maintain their dominance over Indigenous peoples. But achieving Canadian dominance can take many forms and we do ourselves a disservice when we assume Canadian governments blindly follow white paper liberalism. Rather, I believe the activism of Indigenous peoples, the sovereignties we enact through the ongoing collective life of our communities and nations, and the moral high ground we hold as the original inhabitants of this land forces Canadian society to change its strategies.
For the majority of Indigenous peoples who believe we should get rid of the Indian Act, there is another flaw that I think we can make. Simply replacing the Indian Act with other forms of legislation will not dramatically alter how Indigenous political orders operate. Sure, communities and nations will gain some greater powers and monies, but the way in which different Indigenous communities and nations relate to each other will not change. For Indigenous governance to dramatically improve we cannot think about how change will occur within a community, we've been working hard to enact these changes for a long time and it hasn't created a lot of change. Rather, we will have to change the relationships between communities. So it is very likely that simply getting rid of the Indian Act will do nothing to change how different communities and nations relate to each other.
Wahkohtowin simply translates as kinship, but it has bigger implications about how Nehiyaw beliefs around living in a world where everything is related and the work we have to do ensure all of these connections maintain good relationships. For myself, wahkohtowin is a political language Nehiyaw and Metis peoples already use to think about governance. Specifically, for me, it means we have to acknowledge the ways that our communities are always connected through kinship and have areas of shared concern. In Maskwacis we are just finalizing the process of merging four separate school systems into a single system, but one of the main reasons we were able to do this successfully is because Wahkohtowin was a normal everyday part of our conversation about whether merging the four separate systems into one was a good idea. On the other side, many people were concerned with maintaining a form of exclusive authority that would mean each Nation in Maskwacis should operate their own school system. The reason often given was that we needed to do this to protect the treaty right to education (with an assumption the Government was trying to enact white paper liberalism).
It could have been very easy for the community to revert to a logic where each nation valued their exclusive authority over sharing authority in order to create a stronger school system. But wahkohtowin ensured we had a way of discussing why shared authority and being in relationship with each other was enacting traditional philosophies.
When it comes to your knowledge of and experiences with current structures of Indigenous governance, what do you consider to be the most important factor for effective political praxis?
For me, we need to highlight and praise stories of successful Indigenous governance. If all we focus on is where we have fallen short, it becomes very easy to assume that will continue to happen in the future. If we believe that any time we attempt change that we will not be successful, then change is a huge risk. If we combine that with a philosophy that the government is always attempting to eliminate us as legal and political entities, the logical conclusion is that anytime we attempt major changes we are opening the door up for Canadian governments to further erode our rights and communities.
But if we acknowledge that as Indigenous peoples, we have many histories of successful governance, then we empower ourselves to believe we can enact changes that will continue these histories of success. And when we believe that, it becomes easier to believe that we can undertake various forms of shared authority and change the way communities and nations relate to each other for the purpose of creating a brighter future.
PART TWO
Historian Benjamin Madley (2015) has suggested ‘the emphasis on disease as the prime agent of American Indian demographic decline tends to overshadow the equally undeniable role of violence in the population catastrophe’ of Indigenous peoples’ (100).
Madley studies genocide against Indigenous peoples in North America through in-depth analysis of regions that undergo severe Indigenous demographic decline. He developed a typology that examines '1) Annihilationist statements 2) massacres, 3) state-sponsored body-part bounties, and 4) mass death in government custody … [in order to locate, and ultimately define], prima facie cases of genocide' (109).
An example of annihilationist statement by government leader would be that in ‘1886, [future president] Theodore Roosevelt announced, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth’ (110).
In 1890, 200-300 Lakota people were massacred at wounded knee in present day south Dakota, one of 49 incidents where at least 30 Indigenous people were massacred in the western United States in the 1800s (112). The last case of a known government body part bounty program in the United States occurred in 1885 (117). Cases of mass death in government custody include in 1884 - 400 of 2,600 Piegan people died while under government custody in Montana (119).
In Madley’s two specific investigations he provides in his article of Pequot and Yuki people, he found the presences of all four of these markers. For the Pequot of present day New England during the Pequot war in the mid 1600s somewhere between one quarter to 2/3s of all Pequot people were killed and all of the remainder were either enslaved or intentionally scattered (125). The Yuki of present day California experienced a population decline of 90% between 1854 and 1864 (132).
It is impossible to speak of reconciliation without mentioning how many Indigenous people are suspicious of the term. To be Indigenous in this country, is in part, a condition of living with disproportionate levels of violence. Indigenous peoples continue to be saddled with much higher rates of violence and premature death than the rest of the Canadian population, that impact and harm our communities and our personal lives in multiple ways.
And this trauma occurs within a non-Indigenous society that I feel is still largely hostile to Indigenous peoples' claims that a significant amount of change needs to occur to ensure we can live with dignity and that the political authority we hold as Nations is taken seriously.
So when Indigenous peoples hear the term reconciliation, it has led some to suggest reconciliation is a project of reconciling Indigenous peoples with Canadian colonialism (Alfred 2005, 154). Or that reconciliation is a project that assumes we are reconciling past harms, without seriously considering the harms against Indigenous peoples encounter in the present.
When I think about true reconciliation I think about decolonization. While in other contexts decolonization was achieved by colonizers returning to their home country and ceding political power to local people, in situations like Canada we don’t have that option. I refer to the context that we find ourselves in as settler colonialism, because colonialism in this context was built not on foreign rule, but the settlement of a population who did not seek to join a preexisting legal order, but rather sought to supplant the existing Indigenous legal order with the legal order of a settler population who came to stay (Veracini, 2011).
When this process was occurring in this area during the 1870s, Indigenous peoples viewed the arrival of new people as an opportunity for a partnership. For First Nations peoples in this area, the initial terms of this partnership were detailed during the negotiation of Treaty Six in 1876 (Venne 1997).
So in Canada, decolonization does not mean colonizers packing up and leaving (Mack 2010), rather it means the initial practices of settler colonization that are required to continually supplant Indigenous political authority, and have caused a great deal of harm in Indigenous communities, need to be replaced with new practices, structures and attitudes where we become treaty partners.
To do this, I think it requires four things:
- Repairing harm within Indigenous communities and proactively healing Indigenous communities. We cannot have a healthy treaty partnership if Indigenous peoples continue to suffer. This requires finding a way to talk about the harms Indigenous peoples experience without requiring colonial intervention in our communities (see Irlbacher-Fox (2009) on state dysfunction theodicy).
- We need to develop Intersocietal law and knowledge. From a legal standpoint it is easy to fall into a conceptual trap where we fully separate Canadian law and Indigenous laws. In the earliest stages of the relationship between Indigenous and European peoples, when power between the two groups was more equal, Indigenous and European peoples developed multiple forms of Intersocietal law (McNeil 2013). The struggle we have before us today is that power between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is no longer equal. To my mind, our challenge is to weave values into the fabric of Canadian society that respects Indigenous sovereignty.
- There will need to be a redistribution of wealth and reconceptualization of property. This is captured by the analogy that contemporary reconciliation is analogous to someone stealing your bicycle, and then asking for forgiveness but refuses to give the bicycle back. This is going to require a return of land to Indigenous control in some instances and the establishment of robust forms of Intersocietal law in other instances. This is not impossible to do because 89% of Canada is crown land.
- Finally, we need to abolish within Canadian law the doctrine of discovery, the idea that Canada law gained its legality simply by English people showing up on Canadian shores before other European people did (Asch 2004, McNeil 2013). If we want the legitimacy of Canada to rest on a treaty partnership, instead of on settler colonization, that is what needs to occur.
As parting words, I want to put forward a challenge for everyone. If non-Indigenous people want to authentically engage in reconciliation, a shared understanding of what Canada is will not be the vehicle through which we achieve decolonization. To be sure, if we hope to transform our relations, heal, and work toward decolonization with each other, we will have to talk about and create shared understandings, shared values and generate a shared feeling that we’re capable of living together in a good way. I’m not ruling out the creation of commonalities. What I am saying is that we will not work out a concept of ‘we-ness’ through a shared understanding of what it means to be Canadian or what Canada is.
I believe the impulse within Canadian institutions grappling with Truth and Reconciliation Commission is still a focus on reimaging what Canada is. But this impulse will always privilege Canadian interests that have a great capacity to (consciously or not) set the terms of the debate (Coulthard 2007). In particular, my fear is that a focus on reimagining Canada will simply mean a doubling down on the values and ideals that Canada likes to tell about itself and will not be sufficient to address colonial domination in Canada. What is required is not a reimagining of Canada, but a mindset that is okay with and allows Indigenous peoples to speak of themselves as separate, independent and as exercising a much greater degree of control over the decisions that impact us most.
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Taiaiake Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005).
Micheal Asch, ‘Post-Calder, Canada’s Judiciary Struggles to Reconfigure Native Rights’, Cultural Survival Quarterly (28.1 2004, p. 6-9).
Glen Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory (6.4 2007, p. 437-460).
Johnny Mack, ‘Hoquotist: Reorienting through Storied Practice’ in Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in the Constitution of Political Community, eds. Lessard, Johnson, Webber (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
Benjamin Madley, ‘Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods’, American Historical Review (February 2015, p. 98-139).
Kent McNeil ‘Indigenous Nations and the Legality of European Claims to Sovereignty over Canada’, in Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights: Critical Dialogues, eds. Tomson and Mayer (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox, Finding Dahshaa: Self-government, Social Suffering And, Aboriginal Policy In Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).
Sharon Venne, ‘Understanding Treaty 6: An Indigenous Perspective’, in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality and Respect for Difference, ed. Michael Asch (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997).
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Introducing settler colonial studies’, Settler Colonial Studies (1.1 2011, p. 1-12).
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