Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (6 page)

The conclusion begins with a reiteration of the main line of argument defended in
Red Skin, White Masks
—that the liberal recognition-based approach to Indigenous self-determination in Canada that began to consolidate itself after the demise of the 1969 White Paper has not only failed, but now serves to reproduce the very forms of colonial power which our original demands for
recognition sought to transcend. This argument will undoubtedly be controversial to many Indigenous scholars and Aboriginal organization leaders insofar as it suggests that much of our efforts over the last four decades to attain settler-state recognition of our rights to land and self-government have in fact encouraged the opposite—the continued dispossession of our homelands and the ongoing usurpation of our self-determining authority. I suggest that this conclusion demands that we begin to collectively redirect our struggles
away
from a politics that seeks to attain a conciliatory form of settler-state recognition for Indigenous nations toward a
resurgent politics of recognition
premised on self-actualization, direct action, and the resurgence of cultural practices that are attentive to the subjective and structural composition of settler-colonial power. I thus conclude my investigation in
Red Skin, White Masks
with “5 theses” on Indigenous politics that highlight the core features of this resurgent approach to Indigenous decolonization in light of the Idle No More movement that exploded onto the Canadian political scene in Canada in the late fall/early winter of 2012. What originally began in the fall of 2012 as an education campaign designed to inform Canadians about a particularly repugnant and undemocratic piece of legislation recently passed by the Canadian federal government—the Jobs and Growth Act, or Bill C-45, which threatens to erode Indigenous land and treaty rights as well as environmental protections for much of our waterways—had erupted by mid-January 2013 into a full-blown defense of Indigenous land and sovereignty. Idle No More offers a productive case study through which to explore what a resurgent Indigenous politics might look like on the ground.

1

The Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts

My introductory chapter began by making two broad claims: first, I claimed that since 1969 we have witnessed the modus operandi of colonial power relations in Canada shift from a more or less unconcealed structure of domination to a form of colonial governance that works through the medium of state recognition and accommodation; and second, I claimed that regardless of this shift Canadian settler-colonialism remains structurally oriented around achieving the same power effect it sought in the pre1969 period: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. This chapter further develops my first claim by providing a theoretical account of
how
the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of colonial power in the ways that it has. It is to this question, I claim, that Fanon provides a strikingly perceptive answer: in situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to
identify
, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly
asymmetrical
and
nonreciprocal
forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society.

Fanon first developed this insight in his 1952 text,
Black Skin, White Masks
, where he persuasively challenges the applicability of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition to colonial and racialized settings.
1
In contradistinction to what he viewed as Hegel’s abstraction, Fanon argued that, in
actual
contexts of domination (such as colonialism), not only are the terms of recognition usually determined by and in the interests of the master (the colonizing state and society), but also over time slave populations (the colonized) tend to develop what he called “psycho-affective” attachments to these master-sanctioned forms of recognition, and that this attachment is essential in maintaining the economic and political structure of master/slave (colonizer/colonized) relations themselves.
2
By the end of this chapter it should be clear in theoretical terms that the contemporary politics of recognition is ill equipped to deal with the interrelated structural and psycho-affective dimensions of colonial power that Fanon implicated in the preservation of colonial hierarchies. Once this theoretical ground has been paved, I can then proceed in chapters 2, 3, and 4 to evaluate Fanon’s critique against three empirical case studies drawn from the post-1969 history of Indigenous–state relations in Canada.

This chapter is organized into four sections. In the first section, I outline some of the underlying assumptions that inform the politics of recognition from Hegel’s master/slave to the work of Charles Taylor. In the second section, I apply the insights of Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition to highlight a number of problems that appear to plague Taylor’s politics of recognition when applied to colonial contexts. Although I tend to focus most of my attention on Taylor’s work, it should be clear that the conclusions reached in this chapter are by no means limited to his contribution alone. In the third section, I hope to show that the processes of colonial subjection identified in the previous sections, although formidable, are not total. As Robert Young argues, Fanon himself spent much of his career as a psychiatrist investigating “the inner effects of colonialism” in order to establish “a means through which they could be resisted, turning the inculcation of inferiority into self-empowerment.”
3
Here I argue that the self-affirmative logic underlying Fanon’s writings on anticolonial agency and empowerment offer a potential means of evading the liberal politics of recognition’s tendency to produce colonial subjects. The groundwork laid in section 3 will provide a launching point for my discussion in chapter 5 and my conclusion, where the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism as a resurgent practice of cultural self-recognition will be taken
up in more detail. And finally, in the last section, I address an important counterargument to my position through a critical engagement with the work of Anishinaabe political philosopher Dale Turner.

Recognition from Hegel’s Master-Slave to Charles Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition”

It is now commonly acknowledged that one of Hegel’s most enduring contributions to contemporary social and political thought has been his concept of “recognition.” In the words of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth: “Whether the issue is indigenous land claims or women’s carework, homosexual marriage or Muslim headscarves . . . the term ‘recognition’ [is increasingly used] to unpack the normative bases of [today’s] political claims. . . . ‘Recognition’ has become a key word of our time.”
4

For my purposes here it will suffice to limit my discussion of Hegel’s theory of recognition to his chapter “Lordship and Bondage” in the
Phenomenology of Spirit
.
5
This narrower approach can be justified on two grounds. First, although others have recognized the importance of Hegel’s earlier and later writings on recognition, Fanon was primarily concerned, following Alexander Kojève and Jean-Paul Sartre,
6
with recognition as it appeared in the master/slave dialectic of the
Phenomenology of Spirit
. In this respect, it has been suggested that Fanon’s work be read as an important, yet largely ignored, contribution to the so-called Hegel “renaissance” that occurred in France’s intellectual scene after World War II.
7
The second justification is that this chapter is not about Hegel per se. Rather, it concerns the contemporary appropriation (whether implicit or explicit) of his theory of recognition by activists, political theorists, and policy makers working on issues pertaining to Indigenous self-determination in Canada. Only once I have teased out the logic of recognition at play in Hegel’s master/slave narrative, can I begin to unpack and problematize this appropriation.

As suggested in the previous chapter, at its core, Hegel’s master/slave narrative can be read in at least two ways that continue to inform contemporary recognition-based theories of liberal pluralism. On the first reading, Hegel’s dialectic outlines a theory of identity formation that cuts against the classical liberal view of the subject insofar as it situates social relations at the fore of human subjectivity. On this account, relations of recognition are deemed “constitutive of subjectivity: one becomes an individual subject only in virtue of
recognizing, and being recognized by another subject.”
8
Our senses of self are thus dependent on and shaped through our complex relations with others. This insight into the intersubjective nature of identity formation underlies Hegel’s often quoted assertion that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”
9

On the second reading, the dialectic moves beyond highlighting the relational nature of human subjectivity to elucidate what Hegel sees as the intersubjective conditions required for the
realization of human freedom
. From this perspective, the master/slave narrative can be read in a normative light in that it suggests that the realization of oneself as an essential, self-determining agent requires that one not only be recognized as self-determining, but that one be recognized by another self-consciousness that is also recognized as self-determining. It is through these reciprocal processes and exchanges of recognition that the condition of possibility for freedom emerges.
10
Hence Hegel’s repeated insistence that relations of recognition be
mutual
. This point is driven home in the latter half of Hegel’s section “Lordship and Bondage,” when he discusses the ironic fate of the master in a context of asymmetrical recognition. After the “life-and-death struggle” between the two self-consciousnesses temporarily cashes out in the hierarchical master/slave relationship, Hegel goes on to depict a surprising turn of events in which the
master’s
desire for recognition as an essential “being-for-itself” is thwarted by the fact that he or she is only recognized by the unessential and dependent consciousness of the slave,
11
and of course recognition by a slave hardly constitutes recognition at all. In this “onesided and unequal” relationship the master fails to gain certainty of “being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.”
12
Meanwhile, as the master continues to wallow in his sluggish state of increased dependency, the slave, through his or her transformative labor, “becomes conscious of what he truly is” and “
qua
worker” comes to realize “his own independence.”
13
Thus, in the end, the truth of independent consciousness and one’s status as a self-determining actor is realized more through the praxis of the slave—through his or her transformative work in and on the world. However, here it is important to note that for Hegel, “the revolution of the slave is not simply to replace the master while maintaining the unequal hierarchical recognition.” This, of course, would only temporarily invert the relation, and the slave would
eventually meet the same fate as the master. Rather, as Robert Williams reminds us, Hegel’s project was to move “
beyond
the patterns of domination [and] inequality” that typify asymmetrical relations of recognition as such.
14
It is also on this point that many contemporary theorists of recognition remain committed.

In
Bound by Recognition
, Patchen Markell suggests that one of the most significant differences between recognition in Hegel’s master/slave and the “politics of recognition” today is that state institutions tend to play a fundamental role in mediating relations of recognition in the latter, but not the former.
15
For example, regarding policies aimed at preserving cultural diversity, Markell writes: “far from being simple face-to-face encounters between subjects,
à la
Hegel’s stylized story in the
Phenomenology
,” multiculturalism tends to “involve large-scale exchanges of recognition in which states typically play a crucial role.”
16
Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition” provides a particularly salient example of this. In this essay, Taylor draws on the insights of Hegel, among others, to mount a sustained critique of what he claims to be the increasingly “impracticable” nature of “difference-blind” liberalism when applied to culturally diverse polities such as the United States and Canada.
17
Alternatively, Taylor defends a variant of liberal thought that posits that, under certain circumstances, diverse states can indeed recognize and accommodate a range of group-specific claims without having to abandon their commitment to a core set of fundamental rights.
18
Furthermore, these types of claims can be defended on liberal grounds because it is within and against the horizon of one’s cultural community that individuals come to develop their identities, and thus the capacity to make sense of their lives and life choices. In short, our identities provide the “background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense. Without this orienting framework we would be unable to derive meaning from our lives—we would not know “who we are” or “where [we are] coming from.” We would be “at sea,” as Taylor puts it elsewhere.
19

Thus, much like Hegel before him, Taylor argues that human actors do not develop their identities in “isolation,” rather they are “formed” through “dialogue with others, in agreement or struggle with their recognition of us.”
20
However, given that our identities are formed through these relations, it also follows that they can be significantly
deformed
when these processes go awry. This is what Taylor means when he asserts that identities are shaped not only
by recognition, but also its
absence
, “often by the
mis
recognition of others. A person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning one in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”
21
This idea that asymmetrical relations of recognition can impede human freedom by “imprisoning” someone in a distorted relation-to-self is asserted repeatedly in Taylor’s essay. For instance, we are frequently told that disparaging forms of recognition can inflict “wounds” on their “victims,” “saddling [them] with a crippling self-hatred”; or that withholding recognition can “inflict damage” on “those who are denied it.”
22
And given that misrecognition has the capacity to “harm” others in this manner, it follows, according to Taylor, that it be considered “a form of oppression” on par with “injustices” such as “inequality” and “exploitation.”
23
In Taylor, recognition is elevated to the status of a “vital human need.”
24

At this point the practical implications of Taylor’s theory begin to reveal themselves. In his more prescriptive moments, Taylor suggests that, in Canada, both the Quebecois and Indigenous peoples exemplify the types of threatened minorities that ought to be considered eligible for some form of recognition capable of accommodating their cultural distinctiveness. For Indigenous peoples specifically, this might require the delegation of political and cultural “autonomy” to Native groups through the institutions of “self-government.”
25
Elsewhere, Taylor suggests that this could mean “in practice allowing for a new form of jurisdiction in Canada, perhaps weaker than the provinces, but, unlike municipalities.”
26
Accommodating the claims of First Nations in this way would ideally allow Native communities to “preserve their cultural integrity” and thus help stave off the psychological disorientation and resultant unfreedom associated with exposure to structured patterns of mis- or nonrecognition.
27
In this way, the institutionalization of a liberal regime of reciprocal recognition would better enable Indigenous peoples to realize their status as distinct and self-determining actors.