By Michael (Mickey) Posluns, Ph.D.,University of Toronto at Mississauga.
Department of Political Science, Room 253 Kaneff Centre.
36 Lauder Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M6H 3E3, Daytime & Cell: (416)995-8613,
mposluns@accglobal.net.
Richard Drinnon’s 1982 opus, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building traces the language of hatred through the course of American history from the landing of the Pilgrims and their war against the Pequod to Vietnam and argues that the metaphysic he has in mind runs throughout American history and is embedded in the speech of the American leadership. Drinnon borrowed the term “The Metaphysics of Indian Hating” from the title of chapter 26 in Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence Man.
In this note I want to advance two arguments in regard to the Metaphysics of Indian Hating. First, I want to suggest that it would be useful for readers to collaborate on developing a list of persons – writers, politicians, judges, and just plain folks – who distinguished themselves in the periods of the darkest hating (whether in the U.S., in Canada, in Britain or elsewhere) whose lives and work ran against the tide of hatred. Since I want to return to this side project in a later piece I will simply offer as an example Melville for his novel mentioned above and his early attempt to describe this deeply embedded hatred. I invited all readers to contribute the names of others who they think stand with Melville in this regard together with a short sketch highlighting the pertinent work the person they are nominating.
Secondly, I want to explore the ways in which the metaphysics of Indian hating permeate contemporary public policy. My examples will focus on the area of my own specialty: First Nations relations and Canadian public policy. My focus on Canadian (and mainly federal) examples will serve to leave to others the discussion of examples from the jurisdictions in which they specialize as well as the larger question of whether my thesis – that a metaphysic of Indian hating continues to influence public policy – applies in the jurisdictions which they study.
I will, however, look not only to formally developed policy but also to the ways in which the legacy of hatred is embedded in the Canadian political discourse. Indeed, I follow Drinnon in the belief that hate as a mental condition is transmitted largely through the vocabulary of our political discourses. Since discourses are necessarily shaped by vocabularies, identifying the elements of hate embedded in the vocabulary is an essential step to addressing how that hate manifests in public policy.1
In this discussion I will focus only on current examples in the discourse surrounding Canadian federal public policy. (Those who are interested in the ways in which vocabulary has transmitted the metaphysics of Indian hating in Canada historically might wish to read the opening chapters of my forthcoming book Speaking with Authority: The Emergence of the Vocabulary of First Nations’ Self-Government.) I do not propose to offer definitive arguments in regard to my examples but only to elaborate on each example sufficiently to make its candidacy as an example clear. Since I hope that this note will spark a continuing debate in this journal, I look forward to the many opportunities to examine specific examples as well as to examine in greater depth the connection between vocabulary (political discourse) and the making of public policy.
Some Vocabulary Examples
The vocabulary examples that I am about to explore are ranked in an order based on chronology (when a certain practice surfaced) and logic (a usage that contributes to later usages). One result is that the more egregious examples are left until later. Bear with me. If I don’t reach an egregious instance by the end then please feel free to take issue with me.
In 1976, when Noel Starblanket was president of the National Indian Brotherhood, the then attorney general and minister of justice of Canada, Ron Basford, sponsored a set of Criminal Code amendments part of which threatened treaty hunting rights in the supposed interest of gun control. When Basford offered an amendment partially exempting “natives” engaged in “subsistence hunting,” Starblanket observed that the government was favouring the term “natives” in an effort to circumvent its treaty obligations with communities described, by King George III, in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, as “the several Indian nations with whom we are allied.” “Native” as used by Basford and other cabinet ministers, then and since, was identified by Starblanket as a weasel word offering a pretence of concession while denying the fundamental “nation-to-nation” relationship between those nations mentioned in the Royal Proclamation. (Hereafter, in deference to the small mammals of the same name I will abandon the term “weasel word” and adopt Uwe Poerkson’s term plastic words, meaning that those government officials constantly re-define to suite whatever political agenda they might care to follow.)
Canadian cabinet ministers and senior officials had taken a liking to the term “native” rather than “Indian” from about the mid-1960s. With the adoption of the Constitution Act, 1982 and, particularly, section 35 of that act, described in its subtitle as “The rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada” and, (in subsection 35(2)) defining “Aboriginal peoples” as “including Indians, Métis and Inuit” there has been a wholesale rush by ministers (whether Conservative or Liberal) and senior officials from the use of the term “native” to the term “aboriginal.” Quite often the term occurs in the phrase “our aboriginal people” or “Canada’s aboriginal peoples.” The word “aboriginal,” as written by journalists and in most, but not all of the official record of the debates of the Senate and the House of Commons is not capitalized.
The issue of whether or not “Aboriginal” should be capitalized might, at first, seem to be a somewhat fussy point. My preference for capitalizing “Native” and “Aboriginal” is that they are proper nouns that serve as substitutes for “North American,” a term that has been borrowed for other uses. My elementary school teachers held that proper nouns (names of particular persons, places or things) were capitalized as a matter of courtesy in English. Since a similar view has been held by government reports, the Canadian Native Law Reporter and the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage I feel entitled to question whether those who ignore the practice have chosen to abstain from courtesy in this discourse.
A note in an early issue of the Canadian Native Law Reporter observed that the editors proposed, apparently in keeping with my own elementary school teachers’ approach to this question, to treat “Native” as a proper noun, and, therefore to capitalize it.2 Since the editors intended to report all cases affecting the interests of any Native community I do not consider their use of the term to be a plastic word. Further, the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage, in its entry for “Aboriginal” cites a 1998 government report which stated that “Aboriginal” should be treated as a proper noun (or, more properly as a proper adjective commonly used as a noun in less formal forms of English). The Oxford Guide relates this more respectful and courteous usage to the recognition of the rights of the Aboriginal peoples in the 1982 amendments. I took this issue up with the Clerk of the Senate of Canada in an exchange of letters. He assured me that it was the practice of the Senate in its published Debates and in its committee proceedings to capitalize “Aboriginal.”
It is easy enough to dismiss the issue of capitalizing names but I do not think that many Euro-Canadians would dismiss the practice of referring to their ancestral homelands in terms that are, by the rules of the game of English, less respectful and less courteous than the treatment accorded to others. I suggest that there is, in this practice, a calculated disrespect at least when it is followed by those who should be expected to be familiar with the government style manual or who might be expected to be familiar with the standard rules of written English (journalism having rules of its own).
Another language issue that will appear far more serious, but which I believe grows from the same fundamental intention of discourtesy is the steadfast unwillingness to use the actual names of First Nations. There are, in fact, at least two difficulties in this context. The first is that almost all the names in popular usage are derogatory names Much as “Eskimo” is an insult for Inuit in Cree which the Canadian Government adopted. Likewise, “Maliseet,” (slow of speech) “Mohawk,” (raw meat eater) “Sioux” (snake-like) and a good number of other names are insults or epithets in the language of a neighbouring people (usually a people just east of the ones being named). Some epithets surface repeatedly: both “Eskimo” and “Mohawk” share the idea of “raw meat eater; both Sioux and Mohawk suggest the idea of “snake in the grass,” though in different languages. I suggest, however, that in certain contexts the use of these terms might be more appropriate than an all purpose generic term such as “native.”
In southern Ontario, for the last several months members of the Haudenausonee (Longhouse Confederacy) have been occupying a piece of land that was under construction as a housing development but which they claimed was part of the Haldimand Deed, a tract of land given to the Five Nations of the Longhouse (Iroquois) Confederacy in partial compensation for their support of the British during the war known in Mohawk as “the war among the English) and known in English as “the American Revolution.”
Newspapers, radio and television repeatedly refer to “native protesters” in a steadfast determination to deny the idea that the participants loyal citizens of the Confederacy and their own nation who (rightly or wrongly) were defending a portion of their homeland. “Native,” as it is used journalistically is an all purpose stereotype dedicated to the denial that these are human communities with as much particularity as the ones to which the reporter, writer, and editor all belong.
This discourtesy muddies any attempt at a serious discourse. And the evidence of this calculated discourtesy was demonstrated when the president of the haldimand lawyers’ association (I used his style and form in a twisted recognition of the principle of “do unto others”) complained about the lack or respect for the law. This was a most ironic charge to those of us who are painfully aware that Canada sent in the R.C.M.P. to arrest all the traditional Haudenausonee chiefs in 1923 when Deskaheh (one of the title holders of the Confederacy) was in Geneva seeking a reference of the case of Six Nations v. Canada to the World Court.
Canada’s response at that time – these chiefs are no longer in office and, therefore, their complaint is moot – became even more ironic when the Ontario and federal Canadian governments began to negotiate this issue with a traditional Confederacy chief, and the press began to demand that he become an enforcer of Canadian law.
First Nations leaders have been calling for “nation-to-nation relationships” with Canada since the 1970s. The steadfast determination to avoid the use of the names of these nations serves to make their demand (however consistent it may be with law, with precedent and with custom) incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen and, indeed, to the ordinary parliamentarian who considers him (or her) self to be largely dependent upon the briefings given by the minister and his (or her) officials. Likewise, when particular issues arise in the territory of any specific First Nation, the determination not to refer to the indigenous party by name makes the issue very difficult for citizens and parliamentarians to follow.
Many nations – from coast to coast – are seeking to promote the use of the names they use in their own language rather than the epithets adopted into English and French – from the language of their not very friendly neighbours. (The neighbours may even have had several names for them but, once offered, the least friendly and least respectful name was the one chosen by English and French political, religious, and military leaders). Although I would, naturally, prefer the names peoples choose for their own communities and nations, an epithet would, I believe be preferable to using no name at all. And the repeated use of lower case “native,” as in “native protester” serves to avoid the particularity that English-speaking people recognize when we refer to human beings and human communities by their names.
Why do I make such a fuss about the use of names of nations? Because the campaign to gain recognition by government of the need for “nation-to-nation relations” will not progress very far until government officials acquire a clear notion that there are different nations, that these nations have names, that there are about as many nations in Canada as there were in Europe before the consolidations of the 19th and 20th centuries and that learning the names of nations indigenous to the northern half of North America should not be much more difficult than learning the names of the nations occupying a comparable portion of Europe.
Even more important, the citizenry of Canada will not come to regard the indigenous peoples as being truly human until they learn the names of the First Nations, e.g., Anishinaabe (Ojibway or Chippewa), and First Nations communities (Shawanaga, M’chigeng).
There is, I believe, a direct relationship between the tendency of concerned Canadians to fall for much of the malicious nonsense spread about by government ministers and officials and the ignorance of these same concerned Canadians about the most basic features of indigenous cultures. (I do not suggest that all Canadians are engaged in the metaphysic of Indian hating. I do suggest, however, that Canadians of whatever ancestry, and however recent their arrival, inherit a culture that is, in significant part built on a foundation of Indian hating.)
In the interest of space I will offer but one example here. The Government and Parliament have been waging a campaign supposedly about their concern for the rights of First Nations women focused on the lack of rights for women in regard to matrimonial property in instances of matrimonial breakdown. When the Senate Committee on Human Rights held hearings into this issue they chose not to travel across the country hearing from indigenous witnesses but did go on an overseas junket. They were not interested in hearing from the association of women chiefs in Canada and they did not hear from any of the communities, particularly the Haudenausonee and various west coast nations which enjoy very formal matrifocal structures. Even more important, at a time when First Nations have been campaigning for self-government for more than 20 years, these women parliamentarians followed in the footsteps of their men folk by proposing to invent better rules for colonialism rather than to recognize that real First Nations self-government necessarily entails a policy of no-policy on the part of the federal government, i.e., a policy which protects First Nations territories from intrusion by outside forces but which does not attempt to decide what the rules of property law or the curriculum of First Nations schools should be.
Canadians might readily point to ways in which the metaphysic of Indian hating is less evident in Canadian culture than it is in United States culture. This is not the place to engage in a close analysis of that national mythology. I will happily concede that many non-Indigenous Canadians consider that they have great good will toward First Nations. However, this good will tends to dissipate quite rapidly when respect for First Nations threatens to entail any significant cost. The very notion that one or another land claim might actually weaken the title of non-Indigenous Canadians to a parcel of land can very quickly bring forth an invective that would strike a chord with any of the American political movements that use the language of civil rights to deny Aboriginal and treaty rights to tribal communities in the United States.
Canadians also suffer from an intense ignorance of our own history. If I were to write that Lord Dufferin, on his trip across Canada to initiate the Canadian Pacific Railway, met with leaders of the Nootka nation and carried a personal concern for their issues back to the Government in Ottawa, very few Canadians would recognize the name “Lord Dufferin” and even fewer would recognize the name “Nootka.” I would hazard a bet that a great many Canadians under 30 would not recognize that the initials C.P.R. referred to a railway more often than to a method of resuscitation.
“Race-based Legislation”: An Invective of the Far-Right”
Federal ministers recently stated, in reference to west coast fisheries regulations and a line of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada about Aboriginal fishing rights that the present government is opposed to “race-based rights.” So misbegotten is this language that I regret the need to explain the many faults of logic, language, courtesy and law that are embedded in the term.
The introduction of the term “race-based” into the current debate about fisheries regulations revived a term which had been the hallmark of the predecessors of the present Conservative Party – the Reform Party and the Alliance Party in earlier debates about fundamental issues of First Nations relations.
The major parliamentary debate in which the term “race-based” was most often invoked was the debate on the bill to ratify the Nisga’a Agreement, the second major “modern land claim and self-government agreement” between Canada and a First Nation. This debate raged for several weeks in the House of Commons and the Reform Party moved several hundred amendments all in an effort to undermine the effort of the Government, however half-hearted and belated, to recognize the need to make treaties with those First Nations which have never had a treaty recognizing their rights to land and resources and their rights as indigenous communities.
When the Nisga’a bill reached the Senate, Conservative senators who had made quite constructive contributions to a major report of the Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples entitled Forging New Relationships joined forces with the Reform and Alliance parties in the Commons to oppose the Nisga’a bill.
A major and recurring refrain of the right wing parties during the Nisga’a debate called on the Liberal Government to return to their own 1969 White Paper that proposed a termination of land rights and a repeal of all rights to membership in First Nations communities (Indian bands) and, ultimately a repeal of the subsection 91(24) in the Constitution Act, 1867 that established “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians” as exclusively federal matters.
The term “race-based legislation” is one of those hoary epithets that falls perilously close to the Great Lie Theory commonly attributed to Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf It is a difficult charge for many Canadian Liberals and New Democrats to deny precisely because their own educations have been so tainted by a curriculum calculated to white wash young minds and to foster the impression that the world came into being when the Loyalists moved north following the American Revolution.
The fact that Canadians are easy prey to the notion that special legislation guaranteeing Aboriginal and treaty rights are “race-based” is a direct result of their lack of any serious acquaintance with the Indigenous history of the land on which they/we presently live. Just as most constitutional lawyers, ostensibly concerned for the rights of Indigenous women, would be stumped if they were asked to locate the territories of the matrifocal nations, almost all Canadians fall prey to the notion that being “Indian” is a matter of race.
At the passage of the Constitution Act, 1867 by the British Parliament, the major “Indian” legislation in what is now Ontario and Quebec was a colonial statute entitled An Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indians. As one might gather from its title this act was certainly condescending and, in that sense deeply racist. It did not, however, offer a racially based definition of who is an Indian. An Indian was a person who lived in an Indian community and was accepted as a member of that community.
When the Indian Act was first introduced the Government set about creating more stringent standards. The purpose of these standards was primarily to reduce the Government’s liability under the treaties it had set about making. However, many of the restrictions imposed by successive amendments to the Indian Act had nothing whatsoever to do with race. A man who held a full time job, became a minister of a Christian religion, a civil servant or a soldier in the Canadian armed forces could be enfranchised by the Government.3
Likewise, a woman who married a self-supporting man lost her “Indian status” in keeping with the general EuroCanadian practice of the late 19th century that had wives following the legal status of their husbands. During hearings of a Joint Committee on the Constitution in 1970, Senator Therese Casgrain, an otherwise progressive Senator from Quebec and strong supporter of peace movements put forward the view widely shared by Liberal and Conservative women parliamentarians ever since that “the Indian Act was passed for the convenience of Indian men.” This outrageous notion serves, of course, to exempt small-l liberal parliamentarians from responsibility for the statute created by their own predecessors by the simple device of another Great Lie.
Although it is true that the definition of “who is an Indian” under the Indian Act from 1951 to 1985 focused on the eligibility of one’s male ancestors to be registered in 1876, it is, nonetheless, incorrect to state that the legal requirements for Indian status are “race-based.”
Far more important, however, is the fact successive public and parliamentary inquiries – the 1983 Penner Report on Indian Self-Government, the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and t he 2000 Report of the Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples entitled Forging New Relationships support the proposition that First Nations need to be entitled to write their own citizenship (membership) laws.
Even if one regards the present Indian Act of the Parliament of Canada as ”race-based legislation” one would need to acknowledge that no indigenous nation, in Canada or elsewhere in the world, has imposed upon itself a set of citizenship requirements that are, like the Indian Act, calculated to steadily diminish the number of persons eligible to claim citizenship.
The goal of the Canadian statute has always been to reduce the number of Indians in order to reduce the liability of the Canadian treasury, both under treaty and under various Canadian statutes. This is a policy objective of an imperial power and its Parliament No indigenous or tribal nation would ever adopt the same criteria as the exclusive definition of its citizenry because every nation has an interest in enlarging its own membership, not in diminishing it.
In this respect, the Nisga’a treaty is, quite possibly the least “race-based” Indian legislation ever adopted by Canada. The notion that it is race-based flows from the impulse common throughout the Conservative, Reform, and Alliance parties to deny the very notion of “the several Indian nations” with whom George III declared himself allied. Liberals in Canada have also sought, at times, to avoid anything resembling an alliance with an indigenous nation. When the Eeyou (Crees) in far northern Quebec offered to support the federal side in a referendum for Quebec sovereignty, the then Liberal Government would not touch their offer with a ten foot pole.
The Supreme Court of Canada, in the very first of what is now a long succession of cases interpreting the “recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal and treaty rights” in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, set out a series of tests and standards to determine whether an Aboriginal right was entailed in any given fishing rights issue, and if there were an Aboriginal or treaty fishing right at issue, whether there were other competing constitutional concerns that might justify some limitation, e.g., conservation. The Court observed, in its 1990 Sparrow decision, that “the fishing right was always regulated, albeit self-regulated,” i.e., the right did not belong to individuals such as Mr. Sparrow but to the community or the nation which might then regulate the exercise of the fishing right by its members.
Following Sparrow and a succession of later fishing rights decisions Canadian Governments have found themselves obliged to develop regulations that distinguished three fisheries: an Aboriginal fishery, a commercial fishery and a sports or angling fishery. This applies to each different body of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific and up to (and into) the Arctic Ocean.
The right to participate in an Aboriginal fishery is, following the court decisions, based on membership in an Indigenous community. That membership need not follow a “race-based” code and, when indigenous nations control their own membership laws, they do not follow race-based rules.
The Conservative Party, and the present prime minister of Canada, employ that epithet in order to further their own agenda of rolling back the very limited recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights that First Nations have succeeded in wresting from former Liberal and Progressive Conservative Governments.
The capacity of the Conservative Government to persuade their supporters in the House of Commons and across the country that federal fisheries regulations are “race-based” preys upon the ignorance of their supporters. To trace the origins of that ignorance would require a special kind of counter-history in which we would examine all the essential knowledge that was excluded from social studies and history curricula since Confederation. We would then also have to examine the speeches of ministers and others in Parliament and the testimony of officials and others before parliamentary committees to gradually accumulate all the various pieces of misinformation.
This is the same misinformation that leads the president of the Haldimand Lawyers Association to think that his members are more deeply steeped in law than the leaders and teachers of the Haudenausonee who follow the Great Law of Peace.
The Supreme Court has spoken in a number of cases of the need for reconciliation. Whether such a reconciliation is possible will depend, I suggest, first and foremost, upon the ability of Canadians to craft a vocabulary that is properly suited to a genuine dialogue with First Nations. Such a dialogue will also require that Canadians develop a command of our history as seen from a First Nations’ perspective. The Canadian Parliament has imposed, since Confederation, a longer list of civil disabilities on First Nations peoples and communities than upon any of the peoples whose suffering under Canadian discrimination has long been recognized, e.g., Chinese immigrants required to pay a poll tax, Japanese-Canadian citizens deported into the interior, etc. One place to start to work toward such a dialogue is with the development of an appropriate, respectful, and courteous vocabulary and an appreciation of why the words that meet those requirements are different from those that do not.
I would be pleased to carry on the discussion of the metaphysics of Indian hating, through this journal, both in respect to Canada, and also more largely in respect to other “post-colonial” states.
FOOTNOTES
1. I might mention that, in recent years, the Canadian Criminal Code has adopted a similar approach to “hate crimes,” defined largely as crimes motivated by hatred. A finding that a particular crime was a hate crime in this sense does not change the standards of proof, but it does carry a heavier sentence. I am simply proposing to shine on cabinet ministers and parliamentarians (and political pundits) the light that they have fixed on the Criminal Code.
2. Since the editors intended to report all cases affecting the interests of any Native community I do not consider their use of the term to be a plastic word. In this context, “Native” has commonly been equated with the term “Indian” in ss. 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867 in which “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians” is listed as an exclusively federal field of jurisdiction. Indeed, lawyers specializing in this field have referred to Metis and Inuit as “constitutional Indians.”
3. “Enfranchised” in this context means not so much that he gained a right to vote as that he lost rights of citizenship in his own nation, including the right to live on reserved land and whatever benefits might go with that residence. This is the hallmark of Indian Affairs newspeak in Canada.)