Glen Coulthard’s ”Red Skin, White Masks” (Part 1/3)

Hey everyone, back again, today I'm going to start three-part series on Glen Colt Hearts, red skin, white masks, colon, rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Now, some of you may know, I live in Montreal, in Canada, and I think that in this context it's certainly important to give a land acknowledgment, but before doing that, just know land acknowledgments don't do very much, as far as actually giving to these communities, so I'm going to include some links in the description of organized idonate to, that in case you thought of donating anything to me, as I normally plug my own stuff here, considering instead, considering instead giving to indigenous organizations, if you're in Canada, Canadian ones, ones within colonial Canada and the United States, similarly there, colonial United States, maybe Australia, anywhere, really, if you have the means to. But Montreal currently situated on the traditional lands of the Kanianehaka people, which is comprised up to name a few, the Haudenosaunee people, the Huron Wendat people that have a Naki and the Enishinabig people, including as well Mohawk nation in this area as well, and Algonquin people. Now, if you don't know who's land you're currently on, if you're in a colonial nation, then it's worth looking into. If you're interested, you can easily find out if you wanted to know which communities may be to donate to. And yeah, before jumping into it, if you found this on a podcast platform, you're going to be able to find it on YouTube, if you want the audio there, if you found this on YouTube, you're going to be able to find just the audio as a podcast, which, you know, might be preferable, easier to listen to, and so on. And if you want to follow me, you can do that on Instagram @theory_and_fluspy. And if you like what I do, you can like, share, subscribe, and yeah, that'd be great. You can see videos are at least every week, sometimes twice a week. I haven't actually explained what I do yet. I try to explain philosophical concepts and ideas in a way to make them accessible to you. So if that interests you, hit the subscribe button and you'll learn lots. Go check out however many episodes I already have up. So yeah, this three-part series is going to go through the entirety of Redskine White Masks by Glenn Colthart. And the intelligence of this text can't be understated. It's something I hadn't read before, which is embarrassing for me. But this is like super important to read, because Colthart's brilliance can't be understated here. And the subject matter is just so relevant. And it's so important to sink our teeth into and to really reckon with because it really makes us culpable for what is currently going on in colonial nations, with colonial histories, with existing indigenous populations in those places. So the first episode that I do is going to cover the intro in chapter one. The second episode I do is going to cover chapter two and three. And the third episode is going to cover chapters four and five in the conclusion. Now, despite the length, the many episodes I'll do on this, you know, to be totally honest, like I'm not even going to be able to really scratch the surface. There's a lot of historical detail here that I'm going to do my absolute best to pay respect to and to really highlight the important points. But to get the full experience, you really need to go and get the book. I highly recommend it. But in any case here, starting with the introduction titled "Subjects of Empire." So for about 40 years, indigenous groups in Canada have centered recognition in their struggle for autonomy. That is, centering recognition in the eyes of the Canadian state for their struggle for autonomy. Now, Colthart wrote this book in 2012, 2013. So 40 years before then is really the time period we're thinking of here. Now, indigenous populations, indigenous nations within the eyes of the colonial state want their nations, their autonomy, their sovereignty to be recognized and respected by the colonial state. And this is a new development within the history of Canadian relations with indigenous populations whom they've colonized or whom Canada has colonized. And we'll get into it in a little more detail, but for now suffice it to say that for a long time, Canada was just intent on assimilating or murdering indigenous people, which was just Canadian policy for a long time in both direct and indirect ways. So while this turn to recognition might appear to be a good thing, I mean, of course, you want to have your sovereignty or autonomy, your nationhood recognized. Colthart is suspicious of its acceptance by the colonial state. And he wonders to what extent that this rhetoric of recognition actually works to intensify an in equal correspondence or relationship between colonized people and the colonial state in order to maintain these rigid hierarchies instead of overturning them. Now, this isn't just a Canadian thing all across the world, indigenous groups have been fighting in recent decades for recognition for land rights in the eyes of the colonial states that they currently live under. Now, they're pretty distinct phases and distinct as maybe a little bit of a harsh word here or too confident of a term here, but there are phases within Canadians, Canadian policy about indigenous peoples and it has gone many, it has undergone many different changes. We're in the late 60s, the government put forward its statement of the government of Canada on Indian policy or what is also called the white paper, which sought to usher in a period of assimilation of indigenous people. Now, this happened under the leadership of Pierre Elliott Tudot, who no, no, allied to indigenous people, thought that the best way to improve the lives of indigenous people was to make it so that they just renounced their culture, renounced their heritage and just became quote unquote Canadian, just adopted Canadian beliefs and values. And of course, backfired like nothing else, because you can't just force people to assimilate in such a way, it is going to be violent. That is the violence that ensued after that with residential schools, which if you're not familiar, if you're listening from somewhere that doesn't know about residential schools, residential schools were state run in some cases, religiously run schools set up specifically to indoctrinate indigenous youth, indigenous children to the Canadian way of life. Now, this often meant that indigenous children would be taken from their family's homes in some cases in a forceful way, and they would have their identities stripped from them in order for them to become quote unquote Canadian. And this just tore families apart. It, you know, these institutions were rife with abuse, as though the very existence of them was not in itself, a kind of abuse, like on top of that abuse of being these assimilation machines, there was just rampant abuse of children within them. Now, it's ironic that the Trudeau government in the late 60s tried to put forward this entire system of assimilation, because that is to just ignore the fact that for centuries before that, it was about extermination or assimilation in the eyes of Canada with regards to indigenous people, like there was no way of permitting like a quasi-genital form of assimilation, it was just purely violent, which is just completely tone deaf to have suggested that assimilation could even be possible. Now, there might be, you know, there are other culpable governments here, even the one the administration right before Pierre Elliott Trudeau is, was part of this as well, at least starting this process, but it was met with so much resistance, the white paper that, you know, it was ultimately shelved in 1971, given very little possibility to be put into action for the good. Now, it's extremely ironic, because it was around the same time that, especially in post-war war two, Canada, when corporations started to really expand their operations into more remote places within Canada, and the very fact that I'm using the term remote is indicative of a colonial mentality, to think that, you know, there are like the four cities, four big cities in Canada, like the, you know, they're more than that, like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and you know, maybe Edmonton, like big cities, Ottawa, whatever. And then outside of that is just like desolate nothingness which contributes to the idea that it is just a ripe for the picking. There was a term for this. It was like Terra Nullis which was used to justify colonial expansion into the Americas. What would then be called the Americas because it was just believed that there was nothing there. There were people there but they weren't they weren't civilized according to these colonizers and therefore they didn't have a right to their own land. It was the colonizers who could just take whatever they wanted and there were figures like John Locke who was just screaming at the top of his lungs go and take all this land like why not. It's all there. There's nobody is nobody on it. It's fine. Of course totally ignoring the fact that people did live on it. But anyways I digress. So around the same time in the late 60s corporate expansion was starting to really really occur into the more lesser populated places within Canada. And what happened was there was great resistance on the part of Indigenous communities against this because corporate expansion and we'll get into this more as we go on but corporate expansion meant the desecration of sacred Indigenous sites, be they hunting areas, be they places to respect the dead, to conduct any kind of traditional ceremonies, anything like that. None of that was going to be respected not to mention resources just being totally taken away from Indigenous communities just desecrating wildlife and so on. And the government did very little to actually accommodate these people. The federal government certainly the provincial governments are culpable here too. They did very little to actually defend the rights of these people and one example that screams out to me is like the Cree nation in Northern Quebec and it was an entire fiasco there where Quebec was trying to have talks with Cree leaders to essentially just help them exploit, help corporations exploit their land. So in the face of this the federal government was doing very little to actually defend the rights of these people and so they're claimed to be wanting to assimilate them really showed that they actually didn't care about these people that they were just interested in stealing from them, taking their land, taking their resources for corporate benefit for the benefit of colonial Canada. Now the Indigenous opposition from various different nations at this time forced the government to shift its focus from this rhetoric of assimilation to one of accommodation and recognition. And there's so many great documentaries about this. One that I really recommend for anyone interested in the way that Canada just completely disenfranchised Indigenous communities every opportunity it could get was it's a documentary titled Trick-or-Treaty and it's about the ways that Canada was leveraging its imposition of its own judicial law to make it law that they could just take land from Indigenous people who in some cases didn't speak the language because it's not their language and they were faced with a colonial regime that was bringing a lot of fire power so those very little negotiating power there. But so far I've been talking about this as though we all know what a settler colonial relationship means, colonizer and colonized relationship or relations. And Coldheart defines it as a form of domination that has exerted itself through discursive and non-discursive strategies to secure a set of hierarchical social relations that disenfranchise Indigenous people. Now because there have been so many years of this occurring that it can continue to occur in ways that are rendered transparent from any kind of moral judgment on the part of settler Canadians so they grew up in a world in which they are told what the law is and they associate that law with being right. They then see anything that opposes that law as being wrong. So if technically through the law Indigenous land has been taken by Canada apparently legitimately according to the law then that is just seen as having as being right. So opposition to that is assumed to be wrong. And this is just one way that despite the fact that it's just in my eyes immoral this is just one way in which structural oppression continues to operate without necessarily people saying waking up in the morning and saying wow you'd be great if I could just disenfranchise from some Indigenous people today. The type of oppression that occurs is just so normal that it's not even seen. It's just it just happens through the very systems that have been put in place through decades through centuries of colonial occupation of Indigenous lands. And there are so many different incentives for this but really one of the big ones is the drive to access territory and resources for the accumulation of capital because despite what the Canadian identity or Canadian view of itself really is it is largely in tandem it is working alongside corporate interests in order to further their interests in order to seal corporate oil futures in northern parts of Alberta for example or to seal any other possible resources for corporate extraction. Now to understand this cold hard turns to Marx specifically Marx's idea about primitive accumulation. Now primitive accumulation was an idea put forward by Marx or a criticism by Marx of the ways in which that people like Adam Smith who was trying to imagine how the economy worked to figure out you know the origins of capitalism and so on. Adam Smith believed that it was a general accumulation of wealth and the part of royalties that started to really get spread around almost by magic in order for people to have their own wealth that they could open their own businesses from their higher people and we could see the capitalist system unfolding. Marx intervenes to say that it's not quite so neat is that. I mean the way that people actually secured resources enough so to get the capitalist system afloat to get it going it had to be violent and so it meant colonizing different nations for their resources taking what they had in slaving people for the benefit of the colonizers it meant taking people away from their own traditions and values it meant getting rid or stripping people of their ability to care for themselves to be able to grow on their own land you know because their land was probably just taken from them so they couldn't even grow their own crops they began to steadily lose the knowledge of how to actually live like humans are meant to live in on their you know with the with the earth alongside the earth with the resources that are made available to them all of this was steadily taken away from them in violent fashion so cold hard uses this idea to understand the ways in which Canadian colonial expansion did the same thing it stripped indigenous people of their land of their heritages stripped them of their ability to negotiate with Canadian Canadian government or with colonizers you know if we go before even Canada's conception all of these things worked to effectively undermine the autonomy of indigenous populations and this autonomy extends to their economic autonomy their political autonomy their judicial autonomy and so on now even though he's using cold hard as he's using marks here he sees some issues with marks and there are some very important things very important problems with marks especially with regards to colonialism where he says just outright and for more on this i've done an episode on a couple of episodes on any alumbas colonialism slash post-colonialism where she expounds on this a little bit but mark says in almost verbatim that in the case of english colonization of india that it was a good thing because it allowed it liberated indian people from their old traditions and brought them into essentially the capitalist form of production now for anyone listening to this who isn't necessarily familiar with this channel or with stuff that i've said that might seem totally strange you might say well i thought that marks didn't like capitalism and that's not true marks thought that capitalism was a necessary stage in human evolution human economic relations to arrive finally eventually at communism so it is necessary for all nations to enter into the capitalist mode of production no matter how violent like in the case of indian colonization of the colonization of India by the English. No matter how violent as long as people just adopted the capitalist model. So cold heart, I think legitimately, and this is criticism I've always held, sees this to be a pretty big problem in Marxist doctrine, where it treats people as a means to an end. It says that traditions, values, culture, none of that matters. Those are just means that have to be overcome to arrive at the final end that is communism. So cold heart uses Marx to understand the historical relationships that birthed what we see today in the colonial relations that we see today and the continued disenfranchisement of indigenous people. So cold heart wants to use Marx for that. But he also wants to advocate for a decolonial project that will re inaugurate, really revitalize indigenous sovereignty over land, culture, and people. So this isn't Marxist in that it doesn't see communism as being the end goal. It sees indigenous autonomy, indigenous sovereignty, a return back to the land as being the end goal. And decolonization is just going to be limited if it only accounts for your economic exploitation. It must also account in cold heart's work, which is really, I think, one of the most interesting things that he offers us is providing this intersectional analysis. But he suggests that we must also confront patriarchy and white supremacy when trying to imagine decolonization or possible decolonial futures. So cold heart wants to approach colonialism not as an overtly violent force within Canada today, but as one that works through normalized coercion and control through the kind of structural forms of repression that I mentioned earlier that don't assume very overt forms of violence, even though in some cases it does, like the police can inflict violence against indigenous people every day. But that, you know, notwithstanding the types of violence that cold heart is more interested in-- or not don't want to say more interested in-- but he's interested in these other structural forms of repression that go off and go unseen. So despite the fact that a figure like France Fennel, who I've covered a lot on this channel, if you're interested and you can go check out all the episodes I've done on Fennel, even though Fennel engaged with overtly forms-- with overt forms of colonial violence because when Fennel was writing, he was thinking about Algeria. He was thinking about his own history in Maltiniq, which were, you know, their violent conflicts unfolded, and there was violence inflicted against colonized people. Cold heart draws upon his work to understand the dynamics within Canada, even though they aren't quite as violent as the ways that Fennel was thinking about Algeria, thinking about Maltiniq, thinking about other-- thinking about countries within Africa, and thinking about Vietnam as well, and other countries that have experienced colonialism. But specifically, cold heart is interested in Fennel's critical look toward recognition, as it is put forward by Hegel. So Fennel doesn't want to frame liberation as a process to be recognized by an oppressor, but to be free of the oppressor's gaze, and cold heart wants to do the same. Now, for more on this, I've done an episode just a couple of weeks ago, I guess, on Fennel's critique of Hegel, which was meant to be a precursor to this episode, which I guess I should have mentioned earlier, but it's there. If you want to go hear more about cold hearts, or I guess about Fennel's critique of Hegel, that cold heart is really picking up on here. And that puts us here into chapter one, titled "The Politics of Recognition in Colonial Contexts." So here, cold heart is interested in using Fennel to understand how the post-69 period, that post-white paper, effort to assimilate, purely it through though, trying to just pretend as though indigenous people have no culture, that's worth saving, that's just about getting them to assimilate within a belief to be better Canadian context, which is all, you know, as problematic as it sounds. If problematic is even a term that can really encapsulate the horrors that are embedded within such claims, cold heart wants to use Fennel to understand how despite, or despite these efforts, the post-69 period saw an emphasis on recognition, and what exactly is wrong with recognition, and how you can use Fennel to understand why recognition is just another form of colonial control. But how can recognition possibly be good in an asymmetrical relationship like this one? Like clearly, you can't say something like, "Oh, the colonial state likes me, so therefore we're all good in the case of indigenous people." Like, it sustains the same hierarchical system that works every day to benefit the colonial state with the expense of indigenous people, whether or not they're being recognized. So to do this, he goes, cold heart goes into detail about Fennel's critique of Hegel's master slave dialectic, really should be understood as the Lord Bonzman dialectic, or the Lord Bonzman interaction, relationship, whatever. And to give you the very short story of that, what Hegel says is that despite how it seems in that dynamic between the Lord and the Bonzman, it is the Lord who's actually undermining themselves because they believe themselves to have arrived fully at like full enlightenment. Whereas it is the laborer, the Bonzman, who has opened up the possibility because they have an ideal in mind that they can aspire to. That is the Lord or the master. And this permits them to embrace growth and change and spirit. And so what appeared at first glance to be an in equal power relation between the Lord and the Bonzman, privileging the Lord, actually we see get turned on its head where it's actually the Bonzman who's opened up to more possibility than the Lord. Now, Fennel hears this and he says, well, that's okay, this mythical situation you are constructing of this, what seems to be a very happy Bonzman and a very depressed Lord. That's all well and good. But can we really use this idea to understand colonial relations where there's a colonizer and a colonized person or a master and an enslaved person? And I've covered the phenomenology of spirit if you're interested. I don't think that Hegel says in there that this is applicable to the colonial relations, but other people have taken this up. But in any case, Fennel is suggesting that within a colonial regime, within a colonial interaction, such a possibility for growth that Hegel affords to the Bonzman is disallowed to the colonized person because any possibility they have for growth is undermined by colonial exploitation. Because in the Lord Bonzman interaction, it's still assumed that they are existing in their setting that they probably, they may have even grown up in. They understand the setting, maybe they speak the same language too. All of these things are kind of taken for granted by Hegel that I think are important things to consider that could have really nuanced his discussion. But for Fennel, in a colonial situation, colonized people are gonna lose their culture in a lot of cases. They're gonna lose their language or they'll be punished for speaking it, like in the case of indigenous populations in Canada, especially with indigenous children who were forced into residential schools, they're gonna lose their entire history. And without history, is it really possible to attain spirit as per Hegel's formulation? If you don't have that base upon which to propel yourself into newness, what can really be done in your quest for spirit as per Hegel's formulation? And the answer for Fennel is that really very little can happen. So this was got a long-winded way of saying that Fennel is not too appreciative of the application of Hegel's idea of the Lord Bonsman dynamic two colonial relations. And Coldheart is really on the same page. Now we see such an idea play out in the work of Charles Taylor. Now Charles Taylor, for those of you, if some of you might know Charles Taylor, you might know Charles Taylor for being that Gaelian, pretty much, you know, he's a formidable dude for bringing Hegel into public consciousness or making Hegel popular back in the '70s, like Jess or earlier. I've actually seen him talk, but anyways, I don't know that much about Charles Taylor, but Charles Taylor has had a pretty significant role within Canadian policy making where Charles Taylor in a very like I think that he was guided by good intentions has done a lot of work in revealing the extent to which the Canadian state is not actually accommodating immigrants isn't treating indigenous people very well and so on and that you know these are you know he's done a lot of work on this stuff he's done some good work however cold heart is very clear to point out that there are some limitations in some of the assumptions that guide Taylor's work so for example in his work he he advocates for indigenous sovereignty and autonomy not at the level of like provincial autonomy mind you so Charles Taylor is not saying that like indigenous nations should be at the very least become their own like province he's not saying that because that would be there'd be too much instead he views indigenous sovereignty and autonomy as a way to maintain cultural difference and to foster therefore recognition of these cultural differences so autonomy and sovereignty for Taylor is culturally is only culture deep it's only as deep as culture not economic sovereignty not political sovereignty not judicial sovereignty so we're going to come back to this for now but suffice it to say that it is ironic to frame recognition is something that is given you know to give recognition already implies an in equal power imbalance or power balance where the dominant group is giving this possibility is giving cultural autonomy which just sustains it maintains that higher global organization that just operates to disenfranchise indigenous people and it's important to note and this is something I'm very much guilty of that when I discuss indigenous people I very much frame indigenous populations as being this homogenous group as though they all experience Canadian oppression in the same way and that's just not true for for one like I have my own experiences that have colored my that have informed me about this that really have been quite eye opening but for example the inuit people have a very different relationship to colonial regimes as the Mohawk people and this is partly due to just geography we're being geographically more north whereas all the kind of Canadian control centers are pretty well south there was some distance there and so their experience of colonial power was different nothing neither worse nor less neither worse nor better but different and so it's important to keep this in mind and as cult hard lays it out he goes we're going to get in a more detail about this but he hailing from the den a nation has a very different experience or understanding of the these types of interactions and he's very cognizant of this but it's just important for me to lay this out this way so it doesn't seem like indigenous people are just some homogenous singular group is comprised of many different nations languages cultures and so on so it is more ironic here to use pheno as a template for Taylor's effort and Taylor does draw upon pheno being a hegelian he draws upon that stuff as well so Taylor seems to forget phenos criticisms of recognition of the politics of recognition and difference given that these were employed to maintain racist dynamics and to subordinate black people all across the world so the politics of recognition for Taylor just makes the question of indigenous autonomy and sovereignty what about their culture he says like if we can allow them to embrace their culture then that'll be it of course it's not considering the economy your politics here it's just like saying that their culture is all they really need and this is like a way to just give a little bit like a little compensation to people while exploiting them bigly while exploiting them just incalculably in other ways so like I think it's important to acknowledge and this is something that coldheart I think would have also writes in fact is that it's not like what Taylor's doing is necessarily bad it's just one step in a bigger process and if it's recognized as such like I don't know if Taylor viewed his work as such I kind of doubted but he may have viewed it as just being like the first step in a broader process of indigenous sovereignty and decolonization but it is it's like good it's a good thing to recognize culture and and difference but you know like I've already intimated it doesn't strike at the heart of the structural problems and inequalities that persist like you know beyond just cultural recognition and it's also ironic in all of this because there are so many indigenous leaders and activists who call for an end to Western hegemony and capitalist exploitation but Taylor only focuses on cultural identity just not even listening to the broader claims the broader criticisms that these people are leveling just making it purely a matter of cultural identity so we must ask ourselves what is being recognized in someone else who is born into colonialism because colonialism has for centuries worked to destroy indigenous cultures and identities so after so many centuries where indigenous peoples and have just been totally met many of them have been just been eradicated what does it mean to demand recognition or to allow for recognition almost in the ashes of colonial violence which isn't to say that indigenous nations and cultures don't persist today they very much do and they are very lively like the you can go to so many different parts of colonial Canada and find so many different shows art music just by so many different indigenous communities but if recognition is placed as the end goal for Canadian politics the Canadian state it is going to frame indigenous people as being like frozen in time where it's going to imagine indigenous people as having a certain identity and then indigenous people are then going to be forced to just kind of freeze themselves with that identity lest they're just going to find themselves alienated once again by the Canadian state if they start to mutate if they start to transform culturally which cultures do like no culture is just going to stay the same forever that would just be silly and so when we ask what is really being recognized here we are concerned with the ways that the colonial state is going to limit possibilities for future growth development change that any culture might undergo in fact will undergo now in the flip side like by contrast if there was an actual concerted effort to allow for political social economic autonomy culture will just flourish so much better on its own because there would be a way for all of these things to come together to work alongside culture and to work fluidly with one another to inform all of these things not to just say that oh culture is this thing that can just be bracketed off from economic conditions from political conditions and it can just be frozen in time and everything else can just keep working around it like it takes it there's no one on earth who would I think agree with that like and this isn't something that's necessarily listened to by the Canadian government because it would demand more serious engagement with indigenous people and more serious consideration of how to give land back which they clearly don't want to do and it also reveals the another problematic element of the whole politics of recognition through Hegel thing because in this dynamic it's not as though Canada is looking for indigenous approval like they don't care they just don't care they're it's just as the as the history shows they just don't care and so it's not as though recognition is really playing out in a reciprocal way it's always in one direction always about the Canadian state approving what indigenous people how they're going to act and then saying okay we recognize that only after they've approved it so cold heart isn't like totally on board with pheno either and all this cold heart is not totally on board with all of the rhetoric of violence that pheno espouses where pheno is very clearly suggests that decolonization is a violent struggle cold heart wants to leave some room for other possibilities which you know can possibly be said that he himself is just taking like a more liberal route to to just get away from the necessary solutions like I don't know what a current pheno scholar scholar might say but in any case I think that cold heart would be totally aware of that but in any case what he offers us instead and this will come out later, especially at the end, is a road map for effectively engaging in decolonization, for having decolonization occur and to promote indigenous sovereignty at all levels, which is really his goal, like what he has in mind for indigenous nations within Canada and across the world. And yeah, that's going to put us here into chapter two. And so I'll stop here. If you like what I did, you can like, share, subscribe. If there's anything I excluded, I'd love to hear about it, anything I got wrong, I'd love to hear about it. Anything I said that was problematic or that I mischaracterized in any way, I'd really love to hear about it. If I participated in any violence against indigenous people, if you're willing to put in that work to teach me about it, maybe there was something in my language, like a word that I used that I shouldn't have. I would love to hear about it if you're willing to put in that work, yeah, but on that note, catch you next time. Take care.