New Book Explores the Legacy of Colonization and Decolonization for Native American Rights

New Book Explores the Legacy of Colonization and Decolonization for Native American Rights
by Scott Neigh (originally published at Left Eye On Books)

There is enough book here – an arm-wearying 934 pages – that it is no great trick to find plenty to respect, admire, and learn from, while also not running short of elements that are disappointing and off-putting.

The best part of Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism, the second and final entry in Globalization Studies professor Anthony Hall’s “The Bowl with One Spoon” project, is his willingness to experiment with the telling of history. Much like its predecessor, American Empire and the Fourth World, this book rejects narrowly focused ways of studying history and takes a generalist approach that weaves back and forth across five centuries. Hall describes his orientation as “Aboriginal history,” where the use of the word “Aboriginal” does not necessarily reflect a focus on indigenous peoples but rather an emphasis on the importance of points at which new dynamics and new patterns are introduced into history. In North America, of course, the colonial dynamics set in motion by contact between indigenous peoples and European empires are a key example of such a point, and a central thrust of the book is to reexamine many crucial elements of world history, particularly those relevant to Canada and the United States, in light of this colonial encounter and its consequences.

Hall argues that there are multiple ways in which the colonial/anti-colonial struggle on Turtle Island (a native American term for the North American continent) continues to inform the practices of North America’s settler states, particularly the United States, in their dealings with the rest of the world. He draws connections between U.S. imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the original military efforts to conquer Turtle Island, for instance, and links the neoliberal capitalist drive to place any and all commons under private control in the service of profit to the drive to colonially privatize the commonly held lands of North American indigenous peoples for settler benefit and profit. Moreover, he argues that this is not simply a matter of analogous dynamics occurring at different moments. Rather, the pressures and struggles of the early colonial encounter gave birth to new social forms, new legal and social technologies, that took impulses already present in European societies and heightened their material expressions, creating the world in which we live and the institutions that dominate us today.

An important moment in that development, Hall argues, was the American Revolution, a civil war within Anglo-America, he posits, which resulted in the nation splitting into two (still tightly connected) sovereignties, both of which were committed to expansion and colonization but in markedly different modes. A key issue in the war was how the takeover of indigenous lands would proceed, with the imperial center giving at least some attention to negotiation and consent, as in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and the colonists interested only in conquest. This split resulted in the formation of the United States, a new polity driven even more than its predecessor towards the unfettered development of new ways to turn the earth, the commons – the Bowl With One Spoon – into private property, and to the recognition of rights adhering only to individuals and not to groups.

This challenge to re-think history in ways that excavate the importance of the early years of the North American colonial encounter from centuries of settler dismissal and erasure is, on its own, enough to make this book worth indulging. Even if not every detail stands up to further scrutiny, the overall shape of the connection painted by Hall between that moment and today is quite compelling.

I also like the book’s commitment to a complex worldview. It combines an unhesitant naming of oppression and atrocity with an interest in responding politically in a way that is grounded in both history and in the real choices that people can make today. This is a useful counter to the politics unmoored from practicalities and experience that all too often are heard from the settler radical left (and I don’t exempt myself) pertaining to indigenous struggles. However, I’m not always sure of the political places that Hall arrives at.

For example, I think there is subversive potential in the way the book stays grounded in the path we have already tread by seeking what is useful in the less bad of the two colonial traditions. It is, among other things, using a well-worn strategy to exploit contradictions among different groups of oppressors to advance the interests of the oppressed. Among ways that it does this is by pushing for a real, practical, substantive way of legally recognizing Aboriginal title and for seeing future treaty processes as about concretizing it, not extinguishing it. It also demands a recognition that settler-indigenous relations in North America properly belong in the realm of international law and not domestic law. These two demands are big but not inconceivable, and if realized could be important in gradually shifting dominant understandings of sovereignty itself in Western law and at least some features of core institutions of capital and the state. It’s not guaranteed, but the political implications could be far-reaching.

But I’m wary. I’m wary of expecting more from struggle organized through a legalistic framework than it can actually achieve, and more from the high-sounding but often hollow realm of international law than it can deliver. I’m wary that the book is sometimes insufficiently critical of the lesser-evil strand of colonization on Turtle Island. Sometimes it is very critical of it and often it cautions that even its best moments have still been flawed and oppressive, but even so, finding a political starting point by seeking the useful and the better within the bad feels like it might be giving up too much. Is it merely a practical stance that begins, as we must, from where we’re at and what has come before? Or is it capitulation, an insufficient rejection of colonization, a too-timid move towards true self-determination? As someone who is a settler and white, I don’t pretend to have any standing from which I can answer for the indigenous side (and, frankly, neither does Hall, who is also a white guy). Still, speaking just for myself, finding what we can build on in what is without an unflinching and consistent repudiation of the awful violence built into even the less-evil colonial tradition feels a little hard to stomach. (There might be something to be gained from relating to what is using John Holloway‘s notion of being within-and-against oppressive social relations – in this case, colonization. At least as I have understood this approach, it allows us to see clearly where we are, to draw on continuities, but not to be trapped by them. Past choices, past compromises, can be hated, can be the products of power and coercion, can legitimately be rejected now. This, one hopes, would avoid the danger of a total break from the past and its consequent violent imposition of abstraction from above but would maintain more space for grounded, from-below transformation that preserves desirable continuities.)

The more troubling aspects of this book are not insignificant, however. Perhaps the most viscerally off-putting to me is the author’s vigorous commitment to the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. It is not a huge part of the text – half a dozen mentions of a page or two through most of the book and a large part of one chapter close to the end. However, as someone who sits firmly with the majority of the radical left in fully acknowledging the capacity of elites to countenance the most awful of violence while still seeing the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement as epistemologically ungrounded and politically a dead-end, it’s hard not to let the author’s commitment taint everything else about the book. By and large, I don’t think it should and I don’t think it has to. However, I have two areas of wariness about knowledge production in the rest of the book that bear some resemblance to troubling approaches and practices commonly found in “9/11 Truth” materials.

One is the ways he draws many connections by noting similarities in widely separated actions and events across a broad range of contexts and times. I quite like that he is willing to do this in a less constricted way than, for instance, conventional academic history, but what I don’t like is that the text is not always very clear about what we are supposed to understand, what the noted resonances should mean, or how the indicated connections are, in fact, connected. At best, this can be confusing and can make arguments less persuasive and less useful, and at worst, it can encourage what skeptics call “magical thinking.” The other has to do with the question of how best to integrate discussions of nefarious doings by shadowy networks of powerful people into analyses that take a more resolutely social approach to understanding the world. The former does happen, after all, from the capitalists who tried to get General Smedley Butler (of war-is-a-racket fame) to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, to CIA involvement in coups against democratically elected governments, to torture and secret prisons in the Global War on Terror national security state. The trick is to deal in a politically responsible manner with this in light of how much we just cannot know, and of the danger of being subtly shifted from an active orientation grounded in the knowable and communicable everyday lives of oppressed and exploited people and into a more passive quasi-politics that gets lost in the details, real and imagined, of elite skullduggery. Other than the material related to 9/11, my concern about the book’s choices in these areas stays at fairly moderate levels, but I would still suggest reading with caution, especially in that handful of areas where it seems that sources from the political right (or at least conspiratorially-inclined populism) are being used.

All of that, thankfully, is a relatively minor part of the book, but I have a number of other concerns, too. It seems perverse to ask a book that already pushes a thousand pages to do more, but its relative lack of attention to social relations of gender over the last half millennium is disappointing, particularly given how tightly interwoven gender has been with colonization and capital, this book’s main preoccupations. I also have quibbles with some specific lines of argument. For instance, in a couple of sections, the text is organized around an opposition between understandings of “liberalism” and “capitalism” that felt somewhat counter-intuitive to me and were never adequately explained. I also felt that the section that talked about the history of the twentieth century European and North American left was flat and a bit simplistic.

My final criticism has to do with the extensive repetition in the text. The book’s dance back and forth over a great expanse of time, its emphasis on resonances and interconnections, and its disdain for certain features of conventional historical writing are all things I appreciate, even if I do not always agree with the details. Deliberate and strategic repetition of key points and arguments is a part of this, and in principle I like the idea of flaunting the convention of a singular and linear presentation of information. However, the execution in this instance was not good – by the end, I found it grating and boring. Perhaps future experiments with new forms for historical nonfiction – and I hope that Hall and others continue with them – might include greater attention to artistry in their use of repetition.

Given its size and given its problems, I suspect not too many people are going to read this book, outside of instances where it is assigned in classes. And there is enough good stuff in the book that this is kind of a shame – some of its re-visioning of North American history while refusing to erase colonization is fascinating, and some of its implicit and explicit vision for change in the future is well worth listening to and thinking about, even if there are elements with which I would not ultimately agree. Though I encountered a lot that was familiar, I also learned a lot. And that, after all, is the point of reading such a book.

Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer who lives in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, and blogs at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land.

Why Write About Gender and Sexuality?

Here's the situation: A year and a half ago I finished my first go at writing a book. How it might get published was unclear at that point, but I deliberately set the manuscript aside as I continued to pursue publication and I also turned to other forms and focuses of writing. I avoided committing to any new big projects but engaged in reading, experimentation, play, and work on smaller pieces with the intent of leading towards new big stuff eventually. One of the longstanding areas of interest that I decided to focus on was gender and sexuality, with particular interests within that but also a broad openness to following it wherever it might lead. Of the areas of focus that I came up with, this was perhaps the one that was least clearly defined in my mind when that interval of waiting and smaller projects came to an abrupt end in early spring of this year -- I signed a contract with a publisher and began to work furiously for around six months to split the book in two, cut extensively, and otherwise reorganize the material.

As I wrote recently, that process ended at the end of August, and with less than a week of breathing room between I've started an MA, notwithstanding my reservations about the academy as a site for doing intellectual work. Part of the point of grad school for me is to return to the centres of interest I identified last year and, through the reading and writing that school will require, to encourage the vague notions for future writing projects that had begun to coalesce last year to crystallize.

The tricky part, though, is that six months of working intensively on a project that, while not unrelated to gender and sexuality, was already clearly defined and well advanced, has meant that the tentative gelling, the amorphous maybe-what-ifs, the gently winding together of strands of possibility and meaning, have in large part dissolved. And here I sit, enrolled in (among other things) a course that focuses on gender and sexuality and that will bring a lovely list of readings and, I'm sure, a challenging series of discussions before me in the next few months. I will have not only opportunity to read and think and write about gender and sexuality, but I will be under an injunction to do so. And my interest in all of it is as strong as ever. But as I contemplate what I might write about, I reach for the tentative shape of meaning and interest that I had put together last year as a way to ground and guide my work in the course and most particularly to guide my writing -- I am very aware of the potential of "Oh, that's neat!" to dissipate my efforts and get in the way of what I want to accomplish with my return to school -- and it isn't there, or at least it isn't there in the form I wish.

So setting aside for the moment any concern for whether any of this might be realized by academic writing, the question is, why am I interested in reading and thinking and writing about gender and seuxality? What do I want to accomplish? What do I want it to lead to? What really matters to me when it comes to gender and sexuality?

When I try to answer those questions, I run fairly promptly into the ways in which my answers are all bound up in silences and shame. This is true for many of us, I think -- sexuality is by definition an incredibly intimate facet of life, and even the aspects of gender that are not as directly about sexuality are also often felt at their keenest in spaces that are heavily loaded with emotional intensity, such as family. And for me personally, silence and shame were woven through the ways that I learned how to live in the world via my family of origin, even when it comes to things that are much less core to self than gender and sexuality, but especially there. The erratic grip of this inability to speak is, in fact, central to why writing about gender and sexuality matters to me; it also makes it rather difficult at times. I write to not be silenced and not be silent, and I write to figure out how to write and to speak and to act to not be silenced and silent.

With that in mind, I want to write about these things because I want to think through acting in the world. It's not just abstract pondering, it is thinking about the living of life and about creating social change.

Given that I have been born largely into a place of privilege -- masculine and many other flavours -- how should I act in the world? How should I act as a parent? As a partner? As someone on a journey to overcome the massive constraints on desire I've felt all my life, but who recognizes that even before the first spark I am already in relation with those whom I might desire in ways that are, in many different senses, complicated and difficult and troubling? As a participant in little groups that dream of being part of big movements, that are relentlessly organized in gendered ways and that sometimes speak and think and act against gender (and other sorts of) oppression but that all too often are swept along in how-things-are, how should I act? As someone who sees building connections among people as a basic building block of struggle and who sees gendered social relations of power as one important barrier to that work, and moreover who experiences various manifestations of masculinity and shame as central personal barriers to forming connections, how should I act?

As I've done things and thought about them and read things and thought about them and done more things and thought about them over the last fifteen years, I've come to favour a way of thinking about social change that is about beginning from yourself and then building connections with others to radiate outwards into the world. From what I have seen, this model is most powerfully and effectively elaborated and acted upon by people who experience significant oppression. Moreover, even a cursory look at social movements, perhaps most relevantly the movements of the New Left and later that explicitly ground themselves in experience in particular ways, shows that applying something like this model tends to go rather quickly awry precisely in those areas in which a given person or group experiences privilege. Is it impossible? Does it, rather, require a radically different way of relating to experience, or of relating experience to analysis and action? What alternatives do we have? How do I, as someone who experiences white masculinity, begin from myself and from concern for my own liberation but also deep listening and connectedness with others and a commitment to collective liberation? Versions of these questions are relevant not just to "I" but to the various levels of "we" which I am or aspire to be a part of.

Moreover, how do I deal with the fact that it is all more complicated than I assumed when I first began to think deliberately and in consciously political ways about acting in the world? Though it certainly has its challenges, there is deceptive apparent simplicity to acting in the world from a political sensibility like mine when you're a middle-class white guy. A certain kind of knee-jerk self-effacement makes, or appears to make, a good first approximation of a plan for acting -- be quiet, listen, don't take up too much space, play well with others, foreground complicity, admit fault. It isn't necessarily easy but it is straightforward, especially when such practices are somewhat consistent with your personality anyway. And I still don't think that is such a bad place for middle-class white guys to begin. But it can't be more than a temporary refuge in the absence of significant enrichment and complication. Part of this approach to social change (and living) is valuing full presence. You must treat others as whole people and strive for social relations that value everyone as whole people, and it is hard to imagine that without striving to be present as a whole person yourself. Knee-jerk self-effacement and rigid, rule-based shoulding get in the way of that, often in ways that just lead you into other kinds of oppressive behaviours. Moreover, I've found that this starting place has made it easier, at least in certain respects, for me to talk about my experiences of privilege and about the ways that I unfairly gain than to talk about and make real, grounded political sense of the ways I don't. Take masculinity -- it is privileging but it is also damaging, and even as we are privileged by it we are damaged by it too. Figuring out how to admit that, how to talk about it, how to build relationships and groups and movements in the face of it, is a much trickier proposition than a unidimensional admission of privilege. (One facet of dominant masculinities makes it difficult to admit vulnerability, after all.) And when it comes to sexuality and to relationships of which it is a part -- well, I continue to wrestle with the ways in which my journey has brought me to a place that is no less infused with all of the privileges that shape the rest of my life but that also include practices and inclinations and spaces and moments that are also distinctly not-so-privileged in specific respects. Dealing with all of that complexity -- figuring it out personally, figuring it out politically, figuring out how to use it as a basis for building connections and making change -- is why I want to write about gender and sexuality.

I'm not going to try to figure out right now if or how any of this might be accomplished through academic writing. But I hope that having written this will help me keep connected with my underlying motivations as I figure some of that out.

To Supporters of "Progressive" Parties: You Need Movements

Part of the unprecedented outpouring of emotion after the recent death of federal NDP leader Jack Layton was about the loss of a good man who had done lots of good things and was poised to do more -- I differ from him politically in many ways, but I fully admit that he was all of those things and that his loss matters. However, another part of the widespread grief was less about the man and more about what he represented in this moment.

There is a significant minority of the population that sees how this country has changed in the last fifteen years and wants a shift in direction. Let's set aside for a moment that the narrative of nostalgia for a lost "good Canada" speaks to the experiences of some but not others (who have always felt Canada's oppressive weight) and recognize that even if the before was not as good as in (often privileged) rosy hindsight, it was better than today in certain ways that matter to the lives of ordinary people. For many folk out there, Jack and the unexpected surge of the NDP in this past spring's election represented hope that maybe that change could really happen after all, after many years of it seeming impossible. It's not clear how realistic this is, and I think more generally this hope is often detached from any tools to figure out how it might be realized -- indeed, part of the victory for those forces pushing things to get worse in the last three decades is systematically disconnecting such hope from material mechanisms to realize it and from grounded language to talk about it. But the hope is real and it is important, as is the grief it has spawned. It illustrates a reservoir of values and of energy that can combine with the hard-to-see potential of everyday resistance to everyday oppression to produce significant change.

In light of all of that, I want to make a narrow argument to a specific constituency. I want to speak to people who attach such values and hope to the NDP, to the Greens, even to the left-liberal wing of the Liberal Party (though I think a good hard shake is perhaps more appropriate for that last group, given the dominant role of the Liberals in making things worse since 1995). I want to argue that whatever I think about the pros and cons of your political choices in other ways, on their own working in support of those parties will not and cannot be enough to realize the core elements of the values and hopes that motivate you.

Before I get into that, I want to emphasize what I'm not saying. I am not, for example, trying to argue anyone out of their social democratic aspirations or their green politics or their "progressive" values. Do I see limits to all of those? Well, yes. Might I point out those limits in other posts at other times? Yes, yes I might. But I see limits in my own ways of understanding and acting in the world too and I don't claim to have all the answers and, anyway, that isn't the point of this post. Vote how you vote, donate how you donate, volunteer how you volunteer.

What I'm arguing is that even as you have the vision that you have, even as you do the things that you do, in order to really realize that vision you are going to have to do other things as well.

Limitations of Parties

The idea that there are things that limit the kinds and amounts of change that can result from the electoral process is not an original one, and I think most of us have a sense of at least some of them. For instance, one that receives some attention in the mainstream is the first-past-the-post electoral system that we colonially inherited from Westminster and the way that it limits options and inhibits the growth of new parties and new politics. I think this is actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but it is real.

Then there is the nexus of the electoral system, money, and the media -- campaigns require money, media access requires money, and money is highly unevenly distributed. Therefore the ability to shape electoral politics is highly unevenly distributed. Beyond that, there is the social organization of the media (along with other dominant organizations concerned with producing and disseminating knowledge, like schools), which results in the filtering out of non-elite voices, particularly of more oppressed people, and profoundly shapes our sense of the world and of what is possible and desireable. There is also the phenomenon of "capital flight" or "the capital strike," in which those with money pull it out of a territory if they don't like what the government or the population are doing, as a way of applying discipline and wrecking the peoples' ability to survive until they start behaving more to the liking of elites. Perhaps most importantly, there is the social organization of the state form itself, and its place within broader social relations. These limit what any government can do in ways that maintain the status quo and benefit elites (and, in a less spectacular but no less significant way, ordinary people with privilege).

These constraints create a range that defines what is possible electorally in any given era. The great trick of the electoral system is that differences within this range, even when it is quite narrow, do matter to the lives of ordinary people. Electoral hype from progressive parties often exaggerates this difference and works hard to erase the broad underlying similarities, but that doesn't mean that the difference isn't real or doesn't matter. I think an NDP government, for instance, would do certain things better were it to replace the Conservative government in Ottawa or the Liberal government in Toronto. Not everything, not enough -- not close to enough -- but a few things.

Constraints on electoral possibility like this have always been part of liberal-democracy and I think they are inherent and unavoidable in the context of social relations thus organized -- only a substantially transformed vision of democracy in the context of transformed social relations offers a way out, while tinkering with details of the system does not. However, the breadth and specific content of the range varies a great deal with time and place.

My argument in this post depends on my sense that, right here and right now, it is impossible to achieve mainstream core social democratic and green goals by purely electoral means.

It is possible, by the way, that this has always been true, but it seems so starkly the case today as to be nearly irrefutable. Decades back, when social democrats could point to a steady stream of reform victories, I could see why an electoral path to stable realization of core social democratic goals would seem plausible to lots of people (though still far from certain, and I would reserve the right to be critical on other grounds). And today? Well, can you point to anywhere in the developed world where devotion to electoral process alone has resulted in reliable, predictable, stable improvements in the everyday lives of ordinary people in the last few decades? (*) In Ontario under the NDP in the early '90s? Partisans may be able to cherrypick examples now to paint a deceptively bold progressive picture, but the party was loathed by many social democrats by 1995, including some who continued to work in elections and mouth the appropriate platitudes, and the evidence is that the party's neoliberalism was going to go from tentative to vigorous (though still less vigorous than Mike Harris', most likely) if they had won. What about New Labour in Britain? Hardly. Or Obama with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress from 2008 to 2010? Please.

Remember, I'm not saying these things weren't better than the electorally available alternatives, just that they did not win steady, reliable reform victories. Many, in fact, hastened the erosion of reforms won by previous generations.

These and countless other examples I could cite can't be fully explained by appealing to the excuse of good people navigating tough circumstances or making accusations of betrayal by corrupt leaders. If the reasoning was so local and specific, there would be more exceptions. And there just aren't. I mean, both may have been true at moments, but they aren't enough. To really understand what is going on, you have to see that the range of what electoral politics on their own can accomplish no longer allows what social democrats (and, in different ways, greens) really want.

Expand, Shift, Transform the Range

To expand the range, to shift it in positive directions (and, for those of us who dream such things, to have even a hope of transcending the range and transforming the social relations that are its basis), you need movements. You need people acting in ways that aren't constrained by the electoral imagination and its fixation on the politics of the possible. You need people working together but not constrained by all the things that constrain political parties (and other forms of organization that are tightly tied into the state). That doesn't require renunciation of electoral involvement, it doesn't require puritanical disavowal of anything vaguely state-related, but it does require a commitment to a certain functional, practical autonomy from institutions (like any political party with any electoral viability) that are integrated into ruling regimes. It requires being open to tactics that are about goals grounded directly in the lives of ordinary people, not policy positions filtered through all of the constraints of acceptability, electability, and plausibility to elites. It requires a capacity to impose consequences (broadly understood) on elites and to constitute growing collective spaces where we can figure out ways to do things otherwise in terms of how our lives are organized and how we relate to each other given the ways that power perpetually divides us. That will mean working with people less interested in your specific goals and visions, perhaps, and some even with rather stern opinions about your favoured party. It might mean thinking about things in new ways, participating in new networks.

But it doesn't mean giving up your practical vision for a green and socially just future. Sure, transformation in the course of struggle is bound to happen -- you and the people you differ from but work with talk as you work together, build shared understandings, define differences. You will change each other, a little or a lot. But you can still stay you. And not only can you remain a social democrat or a green while participating in movements, if you want to realize the goals that are central to those political identities, you really have no choice. It's the only way to shift the range such that electing your party-of-choice has even a remote chance of implementing the core elements of your vision.

And you know what? Those streams of reform victories of yesteryear that are part of why you are committed to a social democratic and/or green vision? Whatever role the party may have played, if you look closely at the historical context, few or none of them would have happened without the existence of movements, and movements that refused (at least for a time) to be subordinated to a party or to purely electoral imaginations. It is only through contributing to the reinvigoration of movements in the present that even modest reform victories are likely to occur, let alone the kinds of transformations necessary for a truly just, free, and sustainable world.

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(*) -- One obvious exception to this, definitely in Canada but certainly in other countries too, is victories in particular kinds of queer struggles. I'm not going to get into the whole argument here, but I don't think this example invalidates my point. Those victories are, without a doubt, extremely important to the lives of many ordinary people, but they largely involve extending a particular kind of liberal-democratic rights that have historically been denied to a certain population, in a way that is entirely consistent with neoliberalism. They are important, but they do not easily generalize to struggles -- including other forms of queer struggle -- that include less clearly liberal forms of redistribution of power and resources as important goals.