Respondeo

 

Since publishing my last piece “Global anti-Indigeneity”. I have received a number of questions about it. Since they are good questions I am happy to answer them to the extent that they have answers (we are dealing, after all, with an evolving conversation not an achieved, mature one). These are questions specifically to do with my piece and not the subject of indigenous rights in general. I make this distinction because there are questions about the latter that I cannot answer because it is not my business to answer them. I think that indigenous people are naturally sovereign yet we all recognize that natural justice exists in tension with positive law and political facts on the ground and that any society is a compromise between the two. Indigenous people are the ones to determine what sort of compromises are acceptable or even desirable to them. Thus, I will not be addressing such abstract (yet worrying to the National Post) questions as to whether indigenous people should be allowed to do 'whatever they want' on their own territories such as cannibalize themselves, burn witches or build nuclear weapons. As far as I can tell Canada’s indigenous want sovereignty over their own lands in matters that touch on the stewardship of those lands. I have never heard any indigenous person assert a right to arbitrary, despotic power in their domains and I would assume, say, that the spirit basic human rights legislation would apply on their territories as it does in the rest of Canada. Beyond that I will say nothing of how indigenous sovereignty should assert itself with respect to such matters as banking, currency, law enforcement, courts or other details of the external organization of society. The reason for this is that I do not know and that it is not my business anyway. On these matters indigenous people should decide among themselves what arrangements they think are both politically desirable and practical in the context of the nation state of Canada. Having settled that basic point, I will move on to matters that DO concern me and which touch on what I wrote in my essay.            

First Question: Do I accept or reject the universality of certain moral, scientific and political norms developed in the western world and if so is that not, in fact, a conceptual suppression or erasure of other cultures (such as indigenous ones) no matter how polite and progressive I might try to be? Will there not, still, be an erasure in speech and in concept that is no different in principle than a physical erasure? Well, in fact, I do believe in a global and universal ethical society and that things like reason and scientific inquiry should play a role in that society along with major religions like Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. I have no problem with the perceptions of humankind coalescing in a universal vision of good or even in a universal principle such as the perennial philosophies of Neo-Platonism and the Vedanta have taught and revealed. Is this then a conceptual erasure of the particularity of things like indigenous cultures? This is a problem not only for a Platonist like myself but for Marxists and socialists as well who also retain some nation of a global, though non-imperial, society.

My answer to this is that humans may receive the vision of the all-embracing one or aspire to an ethical global society. The problem lies with one particular construction of that vision that constructs and releases it as a certain relentless, pragmatic will. Humans, in this construction, do not graciously receive the vision of the good but rather constitute it pragmatically through projecting it as will (in the form of a historically determinate, specific project). For this project unity is the unity of a technical, economic system that, as Marx saw, had no inner principle of limit and could leave nothing outside its own totalistic determination as necessity, contingency, difference or chance. Thus, in a pro-indigenous society there may be universal principles, values, aspirations but no totalizing necessity founded on the control of human or non-human nature. Our projects, whether concerning the earth or other humans, will be founded on the recognition of inherent limits. This is not only a moral and spiritual necessity but a pragmatic one in the most pressing possible sense. In fact, if the West no longer sees the necessity of infinite growth demanding the appropriation and putting in play of every conceivable resource human or natural then there is no particular imperative to run indigenous people, or anyone else, off their territory.          

Second Question: Do I believe that indigenous knowledge is something incommensurate with western knowledge and if so, isn’t that an unintelligible concept? How can there be two incommensurate truths that are still both true? What meaning would truth have if there were? How could westerners and indigenous people even interact and communicate if they lived in two different realities? But, if westerners and indigenous people had commensurate forms of knowledge couldn’t they be taken up in some synthesis like that of Hegel and wouldn’t that be, yet again, another kind of erasure? If, say, we take indigenous cultures as a moment in the development of human consciousness of freedom then isn’t that now a superseded moment? And indeed, do not indigenous people themselves concede this point when they accept so many aspects of western culture as givens such as cars, social media or human rights legislation such as is contained in the Canadian Charter? Well, to be frank, I think we have all now accepted that ‘older iterations of spirit’ do not disappear even in the Hegelian vision of a universal, free society. Nor, I think, would they disappear even in the Marxist one though that is another matter.

The most obvious example of this is the general, though alas not universal, renunciation of ‘supersessionism’ among Christian theologians. Also, Islam is, in Hegelian terms, a regression to a religion of law and as such superseded by Christianity. Hegel may have conceived western freedom (in its specific European form) as a notion that encompassed and exhausted all previous modes of spirit but frankly, I don’t know many thoughtful people (and again I can’t vouch for the un-thoughtful ones) who don’t conceive of the freedom of ‘spirit’ (or as we now say ‘autonomy’) as something that can and must be enculturated in non-Eurocentric Christian forms. Jews will remain Jews. The Islamic world will remain the Islamic world. China will remain Chinese. These cultures will realize their own modes of freedom in terms acceptable to them and they may, or may not, resemble our familiar western forms. There is ZERO reason, in my mind, not to include indigenous people in the narrative of freedom on whatever terms they think fit. Thus, THEIR conception of freedom may involve granting personhood or moral status to land as an object of reverence and stewardship. Does that ‘break’ the Hegelian/Marxist narrative of universal freedom? Well frankly I don’t care either way. You can take this new moral demand as an extension or deepening of the Hegel/Marx narrative or as the refutation of it and I’m not concerned which position you take so long as you recognize it practically.  

Third Question: if I say this, I am asked, haven’t I admitted that indigenous culture is no longer indigenous culture ‘really’ because it has now been altered by contact with outsiders? Well here is where I must advert to the fact that I do not believe in radical incommensurability and that any position taken to the world is in principle intelligible to others at least to some degree. This is why I don’t hold to myths of cultural purity or authenticity for communication and interaction between humans is all that ever happens in the historical sphere and no two communicators are the same at the end of this process as they were at the beginning. This is indicated by the fact that if I am a hardened reactionary in response to the other I react to a much more sharply defined version of whatever my original stance was. The good thing is that the indigenous people I know are perfectly aware of this. This is because they watch T.V. and eat sushi and cheer for sports other than lacrosse and do so happily. I know some people take this as a universal “gotcha!” with which they can silence indigenous people in any argument whatsoever on any subject. How can you use technology and still be indigenous?

Well, I have never talked to an indigenous person myself who thought it either desirable or possible to turn back the clock to 1491 (with one exception but you get the general point). Most have accepted a principle of growth and development that allows for adaptation to new circumstances. Indigenous people in the distant past faced environmental or climactic changes and adapted to them. Now, if you say the product of indigenous adaptation to the fact of western culture produces something new that is true trivially. If you add, however, that this new thing is inauthentic or false I have to ask by what standard you make that judgment. What is ‘real’ indigeneity as opposed to ‘false’ indigeneity? Real indigeneity is the indigeneity being lived now and that is the status of people who may well recognize the universality and even attractiveness of certain principles of reason or freedom yet also recognize that the people who have been the historical bearers of those principles are driving a global extinction event. This raises a perfectly legitimate question: are indigenous philosophies really so ‘obsolete’ as we have hitherto assumed. People are free to answer that question and embody that answer in a form of life. They are free to embody their (modern) sense of themselves in indigenous thought forms and traditions as a valid alternative to western conceptions about land, resources and our stewardship nature. Nothing in that process of enculturation requires turning the clock back to 1491.