Global Anti-Indigeneity
Blaise Pascal uses
a striking image that ought to give us pause. Humans he points out both know
they are going to die and successfully pretend they are not. Imagine he says a
man running towards a cliff and holding a piece of paper in front of himself so
he does not see the cliff he is running towards. This is a complex act for to
hold the paper there the man must know, deep down, that the cliff is before
him. Yet the paper blocks the cliff out of his immediate consciousness so that
he can confidently barrel forward. He both knows and does not know he is
running to his doom. Pascal intends this is an image of how we deny to
ourselves on a daily the basis the one thing in this world we know for certain:
humans are mortal animals just like the famous syllogism says. I think this is
also an excellent image for the climate crisis which we know is hurtling upon
us even as we employ every weapon in our mental arsenal to block this from our
awareness. At a certain point though one needs to face reality: our current way
of life is unsustainable and if we want to leave a world to our grandchildren
(and I do at least) we can’t just do politics as usual. We need to look past
bought and paid for politicians and the interests they serve and look to
sources of real resistance to our own destruction. I do not care in the least
what pieties the Trudeaus and Bidens and Clintons of the world utter on this
question. They are part of the problem not the solution because they are boxed
in by the interests they serve (political parties, corporations, donors, private
school pals) and incapable of radical action no matter how well intentioned
they might be (or not be) as individuals.
If we look to who IS offering effective resistance to our own suicide as a species, we have to admit that indigenous peoples seeking sovereignty over their own territories are one significant brake on our current lunacy: if they were not the National Post and the CPC would not be propagandizing against them! Indigenous peoples are currently standing in front of the cliff we are about to topple over for which, of course, we repay them with slander and contempt. Indeed, we call loudly and angrily for our police to remove them from the cliff so we can throw ourselves over it and all our descendants with us: we do so, of course, because we respect ‘the rule of law’ so long as it applies to others not ourselves. With this in mind I think it is worth noting a. what I believe to be global anti-indigenous ideology and b. what is to be done about it. Anti-indigenous ideology comes in two forms: one religious one secular.[1] Certain people do not realize this or don’t care to realize it. They think residential school are a function of the innate evil of religion. They specifically think they are an expression of the innate evil of Catholicism with the other churches throwing in a few crumbs of wickedness here and there but keeping their respectability more or less intact. I need to note two things about this. The first is that it is a grotesque falsehood though obviously comforting to a certain demographic with a vested interest in deflecting blame. ALL institutions in Canada secular and religious are implicated in the cultural genocide of indigenous people because it was a policy formulated by the federal government on behalf of the entire nation. What is more, it was a policy that could end in nothing but torture and abuse because its purpose was to erase a culture and there is literally NO kind or gentle way to do that. Since the 19th Century it has been Canada’s policy to separate the Indian from the child and beatings and molestation are the quickest, simplest path to doing that. If sausage needs to be made no one asks how because it isn’t pretty (though they heartily approve the end product). It is simply delusional to think that residential schools run by nice, respectable people (as opposed to monks and nuns) would have produced any different result.[2] Is there a nice way to commit cultural genocide that should have been pursued instead of beating and starving? If a policy is intrinsically objectifying and abusive in theory it will translate into beating and starving in practice as night follows day. Of course, when people confront the enormity of an evil they fall back on stereotype and cliché. It is the cackling nuns and crafty, villainous priests of Gothic fiction who did this not Canada and certainly not ME.
Any criticism of the Catholic church or any other church that tries to separate their policy from the general colonial ideology of Canadian society is a form of bad faith and false consciousness. Does anyone REALLY think that the federal government designed a sensible and humane policy of assimilation only to have the wicked churches foul it up? The churches did nothing but what, we, as a society, asked and as I said above if you don’t like how sausage is made don’t look (and we didn’t!). So, I must ask, did Canadian society support policies of assimilation of which these atrocities were the foreseeable outcome? Can any Canadian cling to the belief that no one could have predicted those nuns and priests and pastors would be so savage in enforcing a deliberately racist policy that dehumanized the very people they were given despotic power over? Well, I think certain kinds of evil are highly predictable. For instance, I think given the way we speak about crime and how we construct the concept of a criminal makes it overwhelmingly likely that guards will abuse prisoners. We may think that this prison guard is a family man and a pillar of his church and would not behave that way but I think the evidence is overwhelming that any 'good' individual put in the context of dehumanizing institutional violence will quickly and remorselessly sink to the occasion. Especially clergy, I would say, because the vice of spiritual pride is so common among them: the people who think they are the best fall hardest.
However, I CAN and
WILL say something about what institutional Christianity has contributed to
this catastrophe before moving on to the second, secular part of the equation.
Guilt is not like butter and doesn’t get thinner the more you spread it. Nothing
I say, then, mitigates the guilt and institutional responsibility of the
Catholic, Anglican, United, Presbyterian and whatever other churches were
involved in this project. Canada’s ‘secular’ institutions are complicit too but
they will get their turn later. Here I will note one thing. The residential school
atrocities are a simple application of the idea we might call political Christendom.
Political Christendom is the notion that Christianity is a social identity
(often a quasi-naturalized one) upon which civic order can and must be founded.
Whether we want to blame this on the Emperor Theodosius or Charlemagne or
whoever (and historical blame of this remote kind is like Chinese food- only satisfying
in the moment) matters little. The age of political Christendom is past and
this may have been its final act (at least in North America). Here I need to
say something hard for the contemporary North American to grasp. I am NOT
saying political Christendom is bad in
the moralistic sense that a modern puritan would be saying it. I am not BLAMING
anyone for political Christendom. I DO NOT hold the naive and a-historical belief
that political Christendom was a phase that could have been avoided if only
people had been smarter or nicer or progressives avant la lettre. Political Christendom was constructed for reasons that
were pressing at the time and would have seemed unavoidable to people living in
past centuries. History is not a conspiracy of gargoyles. What we are observing
now is what we humans can only see in retrospect: the tragic consequences of
our ideological commitments, actions and decisions as we work them out in time.
If this were an issue simply about the immorality of bad people and not about
the logic of institutions and the tragic limitations of historical forms of
life it would be of no significance beyond the individual guilt of the persons
involved. At any rate what punishment can we issue to Charlemagne the
individual at this point? Cancelling Alcuin or pulling down the cathedral at
Aachen?
Here though we
must face a difficult question which is that of collective guilt. This notion
is a stumbling block to many trying to process this issue so I must say
something about it. In the Hebrew Bible the sins of the father are visited to
the fourth generation. It also says that each person’s sins are their own. This
is a tension in the Bible because it is a tension in life. The first claim
recognizes that we exist within a context created by the actions of others.
Orestes does not simply act for himself in Aeschylus’ trilogy: he acts out the
will and destiny of the family of Atreus as he acts out his own. Its shadow is
his own shadow as embodied in the Furies. At the same time though, he and only
he kills Clytemnestra. His family background structures his will in a certain
direction but only he completes the act. Still, he must be purged and purified
of the destructive side of his dubious heritage however personally ‘innocent’ he is and
however much he did not create his own situation. One might think here of
Smerdyakov in the Brothers Karamazov. He literally killed the old Karamazov but
was simply acting out the general will of his family, each of whom had their
own reasons for wanting him dead. Canada (as such) had such a murderous will
towards indigenous people using subaltern institutions and agencies to act out
that will on its behalf. We are all implicated in this to extent that we
explicitly or implicitly share that will and the values that underwrite it. We
are also implicated by benefiting knowingly or unknowingly from the
consequences of enacting this will. Thus, without imputing guilt to individuals
who were born after the events in question (that is a losing strategy for
starters- settler Canadians will tune out if they think they are being personally
shamed), we can certainly expect personal responsibility founded in the common
duties of a citizen or congregant in a church. For Christians this means
renouncing the hegemonic claims of Christendom. Christianity is not a cultural
identity to be enforced on others but a personal decision to follow Jesus
Christ. Indigenous people can make this choice or not but it is up to them. We exercise
no authority over them in the spirit. If they wish to be Christians (and some
do) that is on their terms not ours.
The good thing is that
now I think most thinking Christians (I can't vouch for unthinking ones) recognize this in some form if they have
not thought out its implications. Ideologically secular people are actually in a somewhat worse
state because they (as far as I can tell) do not seem to realize that they have
something to renounce too (else their ‘allyship’ is utterly in vain). Secularist people
must give up the claims to epistemic privilege that are the follow on and
consequence of the religious claims of political Christendom. A universal Christian
society is a society without indigenous traditions. A universal technocracy founded
on ‘science’, market economics and instrumental reason is also a society
without indigenous people. The second project is ABSOLUTELY as supercessionist and
assimilationist as the first. Any secularist person who fails to see this is
promoting an anti-religious or anti-clerical narrative to be sure but NOT a pro-indigenous
one. This can be seen from the treatment of indigenous people in the Soviet
Union and in the anti-indigenous thought of people like Francis Widdowson, Margaret Wente and
Christopher Hitchens.[3]
The privilege secular people have to renounce is the assumed superiority of
western scientific views of nature over indigenous knowledge forms. The Canadian
state has tyrannized over indigenous people using ‘science’ and ‘economic
progress and development’ as much as it has religion. BOTH political Christendom AND universal technocracy
are founded on the disappearance of indigenous people as indigenous.
This was the point
argued eloquently and (from his ‘atheist’ viewpoint entirely correctly) by
Hitchens. How could the enlightenment, freedom and prosperity take hold in North
America without land? And how was the necessary land to be acquired without
removing the people? One problem I have with secularists is that on their
terms this argument seems irrefutable as a piece of historical theodicy. If we
are REALLY to refute his point we have to reject his premise: that our form of
western society is THE universal society owing paternalistic tolerance, perhaps, but no intrinsic
respect and recognition to other forms of life that construe nature and the sacred
differently (AND by the way paternalistic tolerance is another of those things that inevitably expresses itself as abuse). Being a vessel of progress, reason, prosperity and freedom does
not and CANNOT give us rights of conquest or moral authority over any
individual who prefers to identify themselves otherwise. Force can establish
no right says Rousseau and that goes for subtle implicit force. It goes for
cultural erasure as much as for physical murder. In spiritual matters
indigenous people are sovereign. This sovereignty is inherent and
as such, applies radically and across the board to all things. From the facts of
the case this is the only conclusion I can justly draw. Indigenous people are
not beholden to our meta-narratives whether these are religious or secular.
They may participate in them or not to the extent that they wish. Any grand
narrative that gives one despotic power over the body of a child is one that must be jettisoned. In this essay I have identified the two narratives pertinent for our Canadian Society: Christendom and rational utopia. Both are 'utopian' forms of thought and the logical outcome of utopian thinking is abuse and murder. They are forms of totalization and the obstacle to any totalization is the bodies, lands and resources of the other. Critiquing these twin monsters is the primary debt we owe indigenous people and the sacrifice without which all our other acts of 'virtue' will be hollow pretension.
[1] I
will define global anti-indigenous ideology in this way. Anti-indigeneity is
the notion that a total and final form of human society justified by a
narrative of necessary progress must supplant all merely ‘natural’ societies in
their particularity and diversity as these are an obstacle to the land and
resources needed to fuel human development (to which the indigenous have nothing to
contribute qua indigenous). It does not matter whether such a society employs a
religious narrative or a secular one. It does not matter if it is capitalist or
communist. Indigeneity is an inherent obstacle to whatever totality it seeks to
achieve. Whether by brutality or ‘kindly persuasion’ the indigenous person must
be erased for she does not fit the narrative. She is rather, simple otherness.
If you are Kurtz in Heart of Darkness that
brute otherness is to be exterminated though if you are kinder, as the rulers
of Huxley’s utopia in Brave New World
are, you can put it in a park for the
edification of tourists.
[3]
Here is a screen capture of Hitchens' piece which The Nation does not appear to have archived: https://brianjohnspencer.tumblr.com/post/138574010898/the-christopher-hitchens-essay-on-the.
Nasty as it is in retrospect I do not know of any prominent secular author who
would deny its basic presuppositions about science, technology and prosperity
as embodying imperatives that trump all others. Of course, we do not approve of
the murderers and disassociate ourselves from them but we can all give a secret
sigh of relief (can’t we?) that the murders were committed. I suppose I must
commend Hitchens for being open in his attitude. At any rate, the kindness of
the secularist only lasts as long as it takes for an indigenous person the
challenge his views on archeology, biology or medicine. Then we find out that his
glittering crystal palace of reason makes room for certain persons but not
others. We find out that once again indigeneity is an obstacle to a willed
totality. Of course, we are not barbarians. Indigenous children should get
chemistry sets not lashings but our purpose, our underlying will, is no
different: erasure.
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