Random Thoughts on "Activist Lawyering"

A friend and I have been having an intermittent email dialogue on what it means to be an "activist lawyer" or a "radical lawyer." My interest in this conversation comes from the fact that one of the participants in my project has applied his professional skills as a lawyer to the cause of social change in Toronto and internationally for many years. My friend's interest is because she has been politically active for a long time and she is currently in the middle of law school.

You might have noticed that I haven't put up any original writing in the last week. I have something almost ready, but I read it over just now and it doesn't quite grab me the way I want it to so I'm going to let it sit for another couple of days. In the meantime, though, an email I wrote to my friend on this topic this morning might be of sufficient general interest to be worth sharing. Here it is:

Thanks for sending me your thoughts, and for forwarding that other email from _____. All of this is definitely helping to clarify my own thinking. It prompted me to go back and have a look at Staughton Lynd's book Living Inside Our Hope, where he talks in a few places about his decades of experience as a lawyer (and also as a historian, so I got distracted reading stuff about E.P. Thopmson as well).

I think one difficulty that I see emerging from our discussions on this issue so far is how we have been understanding the word "activist." In things that both of us have written, and in stuff you've forwarded me from _____ as well, we seem to be starting from a very privileged, middle-class version of what "activist" can/should/does mean. At various points all three of us have understood it to mean something like applying lefty politics to the lawyer's individual conduct in the course of representing an individual client, which has then been argued against by saying that to whatever extent that change in conduct makes a victory by the client less likely than if a strictly technical approach to lawyering was followed, it is unethical and should not be done -- don't sacrifice the client for some abstract greater goal that the client may or may not agree with. Fair enough.

I have had the sense from what you've said and from what you've forwarded an extreme wariness of the idea of an "activist lawyer" or a "radical lawyer." Often it has seemed the discomfort has been invested in questioning the appropriateness of linking those modifiers to the noun "lawyer." However, I think it might be better to use that wariness to deconstruct what we are assuming the word "activist" to mean, and to put together a broader and more liberatory definition. The idea of an activist waging a single-handed battle against Goliath, of activism understood largely as individual expression, is an idea grounded very much in privilege, I think. Rather, I think the modifiers "activist" or "radical" make much more sense if understood as indicative of being a member (loosely defined) of a larger collective or movement that is seeking certain goals. If understood in that sense, then being an "activist lawyer" or a "radical lawyer" is not at all inconsistent with focusing on the technical quality of the representation in a particular case or with genuine, collaborative listening to clients whose experiences of oppression have given them a much greater sense of political realities than the lawyer herself. Being an "activist" or "radical" in that sense means being part of a movement, and filling a role within the larger visions of the movement.


It also goes back to a point I made in an earlier email, that the tendency to narrow the idea of "lawyering" to "what you do in the courtroom" or "what you do with your client" is a symptom of precisely what makes me wary about the law, and about the ways that capitalism constitutes society in its functioning: the tendency to fragment, to separate, to make that which is whole and organic fit into arbitrary little boxes. Staughton Lynd choosing to live in a working-class neighbourhood, choosing to deploy his skills to the advantage of rank and file workers rather than of international union presidents or of capital, choosing to incorporate practices of radical listening and (in Lynd's vocabulary for something the latest email from _____ described beautifully too) accompaniment into both his lawyering and his work as a community-based historian -- all of that is part of "radical lawyering" it seems to me. He has chosen a social location in which to ground his practice, he has chosen to be part of a (admittedly at present loosely defined) movement, he has chosen to allow these collective realities to shape his lawyering even if, in the "courtroom moment" or the "giving advice to clients moment" he is informed only by technical considerations.

I would also add a couple of other factors that might contribute to "activist lawyering" or "radical lawyering." First of all, I think an openness to non-conventional tactics might be part of it. There is some history of integrating proceedings in courtrooms with mobilization in the broader community. Presumably, there are times when this sort of extra-legal support can be helpful and other times when it is not. I would imagine most "regular lawyers" would not be interested in such mobilization at any time, but an "activist lawyer" or "radical lawyer" would possibly have an analysis of when such mobilizations were a good idea, and would endorse them and even help organize them on such occasions.

As well, presumably one's lawyering -- and here I mean it in the narrow sense -- is informed by one's analysis of the law, which is presumably integrated with one's larger political analysis. Staughton Lynd's participation as a lawyer in community and movement efforts to socialize segments of the Pittsburg steel industry in the '80s were dependent on (a) him having political goals that include social control over the means of production, and (b) him having an analysis of the current legal framework that could be applied (and argued and expanded) to help make that happen. Lots of lawyers would not have either of those. It seems to me this is why the Christian Right has developed its own law schools in the United States in the last few years: to have environments in which lawyers-in-training are affirmed and reinforced in having particular political goals (their version of (a)) and there is effort put into developing and popularizing within the ranks of the legal profession arguments and analysis which can help shape the law in directions consistent with those goals (their version of (b)).

(Staughton Lynd, by the way, is a veteran activist in the United States, and was a minor icon in the New Left back in the '60s. He was an academic historian working in the south and he got involved in the civil rights movement. He did things like serve as one of the coordinators of the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. He ended up leaving the academy, became a lawyer, and spent thirty years involved in workers' struggles in that capacity, and has more recently become involved in supporting the struggles of prisoners. He visited Hamilton back when I was doing a radio show, and I had the pleasure of doing an hour-long interview with him. In fact, his concept of "long-distance runners" in social change, which he talks about in the book I mention above, helped me when I was initially defining how I wanted to focus my social movement history project.)

Quote: Southern Ontario

When you're from southern Ontario it's hard to escape, even living 3000 kilometres away. Geographically, it's almost an island, surrounded as it is by five miniature oceans that create systems of oppressive weather; humidity in the summer and impassable snow drifts in the winter. Culturally, there is this legacy of unbridled Protestantism; the pronoun I is strongly discouraged. The first time I visited a Hutterite colony in Alberta, I felt right at home and I realized: this place feels like southern Ontario. Lots of explicit rules but even more of the implicit type, and all emotions suppressed right down to the level of the water table. It's a bit like a club or a sect that you keep thinking you really should leave.

-- Marion Douglas

Yep...that's where I grew up...

More From Orkin

And as a follow-up to the op-ed linked in my last post, here is a letter by lawyer Andrew Orkin published in today's Hamilton Spectator on how the law actually applies to the Mohawk reclamation efforts in Caledonia, and how the Canadian settler state is flouting its own laws:

Re: 'Natives are subject to the law' (Letter, Brent Whetstone May 9, 2005).

Indeed. But there is much more to "the law" applicable in Caledonia than traffic laws or the terms of an injunction arising out of a one-sided ("ex parte") quickie hearing. And while governments know this, it appears that they aren't telling people in Caledonia.

The Crown's Treaties with the Iroquois, including those of Albany and Montreal in 1701, the Silver Covenant Chain and the Two Row Wampum are part of applicable Law. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 is part of the Canadian Constitution. So is Section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982, which recognizes and affirms Aboriginal and Treaty Rights.

These laws bind the governments of Canada and Ontario, and the rest of us. Our own Supreme Court repeats that they MUST be upheld, because "the honour of the Crown is at stake".

The Haldimand Grant is part of this law. Its "surrender" or "sale" in whole or part by the Iroquois may well be non-existent, fraudulent or invalid (even according to non-native Canadian law). I suspect the federal Crown knows this, but had simply planned over the intervening 160 years that the Iroquois would be assimilated and disappear.

The Iroquois Confederacy is centuries or millennia old. Its leaders, clan mothers and members (all reasserting their nation in Caledonia) are still telling us that in their view their own Iroquois structures and laws have never been legitimately displaced by Euro-Canadian ones. They are reminding us of solemn nation-to-nation Treaties that are no older or less important than the Treaty of Paris between England and France of 1763 (the ongoing basis for Quebec being part of Canada).

It is far from clear that the Iroquois Confederacy members re-occupying their lands are legally in the wrong.

If they are, why has the federal government spent the last 20 years or so frantically evading having to account to the Six Nations Band Council in Court for the Crown's (mis)handling of the vast Haldimand Grant that it holds in trust for the Iroquois people?

It is time that Canadians remind themselves of ALL of the applicable law, not just the bits that seem to justify our occupation and takings of others' lands.

The only alternative is the use of overwhelming military force against the Iroquois, to conquer them. But Canada's legitimacy and reputation would take a severe beating if the colonial and oppressive nature of its relationship with aboriginal peoples was thus laid bare.

Respect for the law is not a one-way, natives-only street. Non-natives and their governments must respect the law too, and all of it.

Andrew Orkin

Caledonia Op-Ed

This article, which is posted on Z-Net but I think originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, is by Andrew Orkin, a prominent attorney based in Hamilton, where I used to live. I have never met him but I know friends who know him. I also remember that years ago when a few of us were talking about options for finding a lawyer in some activism-related court proceeding, his name came up. I had never heard of him, but one of the people I was with had -- my friend said something to the effect that it would be great if we could get him because his courtroom reputation would intimidate the presiding Justice of the Peace. We didn't end up getting in touch with him, and frankly I don't even remember what the specific matter at hand was or what we did end up doing, but I doubt it would've made much difference because though he is not Aboriginal himself, Orkin's primary interest and expertise is in disputes related to Aboriginal peoples.

Anyway, the linked piece says, among other things:

Canada, it now seems to me, is a colonial country that is still insistently in the very depths of its colonial experience. It is not meaningfully discussing or commencing its long-overdue decolonization any more readily. Rather, it is still engaged in ignoring, perpetuating and entrenching, or even denying it. Wilson, Dussault and their fellow [Royal Commission on Aboriginal People] commissioners reported a decade ago that "We have before us an agenda of decolonizing the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in Canada -- an agenda that the experience in other societies demonstrates is not an easy road to follow."

Long Quote: Trading The Other

[T]he people and their culture, the material and the spiritual, the exotic and the fantastic, became not just the stuff of dreams and imagination, or stereotypes and eroticism but of the first truly global commercial enterprise: trading the Other. This trade had its origins before the Enlightenment, but capitalism and Western culture have transformed earlier trade practices (such as feudal systems of tribute), through the development of native appetites for goods and foreign desires for the strange; the making of labour and consumer markets; the protection of trade routes, markets and practices; and the creation of systems for protecting the power of the rich and maintaining the powerlessness of the poor. Trading the Other is a vast industry based on the positional superiority and advantages gained under imperialism. It is concerned more with ideas, language, knowledge, images, beliefs and fantasies than any other industry. Trading the Other deeply, intimately, defines Western thinking and identity. As a trade, it has no concern for the peoples who originally produced the ideas or images, or with how and why they produced those ways of knowing. It will not, indeed, cannot, return the raw materials from which its products have been made. It no longer has an administrative Head Office with regional offices to which indigenous peoples can go, queue for hours and register complaints which will not be listened to or acted upon.

...Maori indigenous culture is being prepared for trade in the 'new right' economic framework that dominates the New Zealand scene. These include the commodification of such things as: treaty rights, identity, traditional knowledge, traditional customs, traditional organizations, land titles, fauna and flora. While all of these items previously have been the subject of efforts to remove, control and assimilate, the 'new' attacks are aimed at what remains of the indigenous estate and are a very sharp reminder of how control over the agenda, the terms of reference, and the processes for settling the unsettled business of indigenous matters is still held and determined by the colonizing majority. Indigenous peoples who have actively resisted moves to create regional free trade areas as part of the global market place are viewed as a major barrier to free trade. Trading the Other is big business. For indigenous peoples trading ourselves is not on the agenda.

-- Linda Tuhiwai Smith

And though Smith is Maori and she cites the example of her own people, I'm sure examples from North America would differ only in detail.

Courts Encourage Child Abuse

Despite so-called "fathers' rights" rhetoric about men being treated unfairly by family court, the legal system and the political system continue to refuse to really deal with the endemic violence of men against women and children.

Here is an example from Britain, which talks about the sickening reality of courts forcing mothers to take children to see fathers who have abused them.

It begins:

Young children dragged kicking and screaming to visit their abusive fathers and mothers threatened with prison if they don't comply ... It's a world away from the image of wronged dads that the campaign group Fathers4Justice implanted in the public mind. Yet, as Decca Aitkenhead discovers, it's the harrowing reality for many families riven by violence or sexual abuse

(Found via PAR-L list)

Review: Conversations with Edward Said

[Tariq Ali. Conversations with Edward Said. New York: Seagull Books, 2006.]

Most of the books I review on this site, in fact most of the books that I read these days, are about plunging forward -- in my work, in how I think about the world, in how I act in the world. This one, for a change, is a step back from intensity, a chance to breath, a comma in life. It is fuel for an advance, perhaps, but of a different kind.

Edward Said was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was also the most significant Palestinian intellectual, perhaps the most significant Arab intellectual, to have worked in English, and an important figure of the international left. Tariq Ali, who conducted this interview, is also a prominent life-long leftist as well as a prolific writer of novels, plays, and political nonfiction. I have read some from both of them, and was delighted to receive as a gift this short snapshot of the two great writers in conversation.

I never had the pleasure to hear Said speak. I also have not read Said's principle books of politically relevant theory: Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Freud and the Non-European, though they are all on the football field long to-read list in my head. I have read some of his writings on Palestinian politics. But this book struck me most because it took me back to the experience of reading a collection of his essays. Both that book and this one acted as powerful reminders for me that political commitment is not and should not be inconsistent with the experience and appreciation of the richness of life.

Let me explain. When middle-class white men in North America somehow make our way to the diverse, mutually contradictory, and fascinating spaces that can be imperfectly summarized by a very broad use of the term "left," and when we deliberately incorporate into our lives discrete politically-oriented struggle that we get to call "activism" (as opposed to just "living") because of our privilege, we bring with us our masculinity and the puritanism of the culture that spawned us. These two things in combination can have a number of outcomes. From the former, you can get the masculine tendency to hide any hint of vulnerability, to hide all the sides of self that might reveal vulnerability, to hide the inherent complexities that make any actual human being inevitably deviate from the masculine ideal in its "purest" (most ridiculous?) hegemonic form and in cocktail with whatever optional lefty add-ons we might mix it. From the latter can come a tendency to venerate a certain singlemindedness, a certain inflexible approach to commitment, a certain tendency to equate politics with virtue and then make a competition of it. Together, these can lead to the stagnation of those sides of ourselves that are not most directly about the politics we cultivate, or it can lead us to perform their absence, to deny our wholeness, in any vaguely political spaces.

In this transcribed conversation they talk about Said's health, Ali pokes fun at Said's propensity for dapper dressing, and family reminiscences are an important piece. But as in Said's collected essays it is the willingness to focus on literature and music that really strikes me: Two staunch leftists whose credentials as such (by whatever ridiculous standard you might conjure to judge such things) are impeccable, talk and publish their talk about obscure (to me) points of classical music, the politically troubling brilliance of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and how everything Herman Melville wrote except Moby Dick was crap, as well as musings on politics, presidents, and Palestine. Yes, I'm sure there are feminist women who would point out that talking about this is still talking about the external, the professional, instead of having self fully and truly present in the conversation. As well, in the grand scheme of the world it is really nothing unusual, and I'm sure there are lots of people out there who are puzzled by my choice to note it in this way. But I still value the feeling of affirmation it provides for the importance of roses and not just bread, the reminder that part of the very reason why we are active is that beauty and pleasure deserve generous space in every life, and we do no one any favours by allowing them to wither or denying their existence in our own.

And part of my appreciation for this particular form of the reminder from this particular source is quite related to my own goals and desires. I am not so presumptuous as to aspire to acclaim or enduring significance on anything like the scale that these two have achieved -- I'll be happy just for the opportunity to keep doing what I want to be doing -- but the shape of their public lives attracts me very much as a goal for myself: political involvement and lots of writing of lots of different kinds.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Review: Circles of Time

[David T. McNab. Circles of Time: Aborginal Land Rights and Resistance in Ontario. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999.]

I have heard it said that God is in the details. I have also heard the same quote with the Devil in the starring role. In its methodical description of the details of dealings between representatives of the Crown and specific indigenous groups in Ontario around issues of land between the late 18th and late 20th centuries, this book seems to support the latter assertion -- colonialism is not just some massive impersonal force, but a devilish practice residing in the details of everyday decisions big and small, carried out by settler institutions with disgusting consistency of dishonesty and disrespect from the distant past to the present day.

David McNab is a white man who worked for the Native Affairs Secretariat of the province of Ontario in the '80s and early '90s. The NAS, as far as I could gather from the book, was largely responsible for answering the mail and for doing a bit of research. The actual important interactions between the province and indigenous peoples were handled by the Ministry of Natural Resources or one of the other powerful ministries, at least when they weren't handled by the Ontario Provincial Police. Then, in the Liberal governments of the late '80s, the NAS got drafted into engaging in a few negotiations around land disputes, for which it had no mandate or expertise. Some of it, according to McNab, went fairly well, only to have the province (and the feds, when they were a party to the agreement in question) completely renege on everything afterward. Most of it was unmitigated disaster. McNab left in disgust and became, again as far as I can tell from the book, a freelance historian and a paid consultant or researcher for the Aboriginal side of negotiations and litigation. This book seems to be a moderately reworked collection of some of the research papers that McNab has prepared over the years.

First let me explain the as-far-as-I-could-tells in the above. This book is a useful resource for what it is, but unfortunately the marketing geniuses at WLU Press decided it would sell better if folks thought maybe it pretended to be something else. The information and graphics on the cover go out of their way to maximize the ambiguity about whether McNab himself might be an Aboriginal person. I can think of no other reason why the blurb about him on the back cover and the information in the frontmatter of the book don't mention that he worked on these issues for the Ontario provincial government for many years. The text also works very hard to tie the book to the Oka crisis of 1990. Indeed, it is quite possible that this event was influental in the development of the writer's politics, but it has little to do with the actual book -- it does not talk about any land issues relating to the Mohawk Nation or the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, so I think that is just an attempt to tie into something that potential buyers might have heard of.

So. Despite not being these things that it kind of pretends to be, it is still quite a useful book. What you have here is an insider who came to realize how awfully the settler state treats Aboriginal peoples, so he got out, lent his skills to struggles against the settler state, and in this book puts some of his historical findings and contemporary experiences to paper. Isn't that enough without trying to appropriate authenticity to which you aren't entitled?

The book begins with a look at a particular Aboriginal conception of history, from which the title of the book is derived. It has, apparently, been expounded most fully by the Mayan Nation, whose territories are in Central America, but the ideas of history held by many First Nations in Ontaro are similar. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the explanation, and I read it twice, carefully. This should perhaps not be surprising, since complex philosophical ideas that have to do with the basic elements of a worldview not your own are notoriously difficult to convey in a few pages of text. However, it may also have to do with the unfortunate fact that the book's writing is not particularly good -- competent, but largely technical in its style, and better with bald facts than complex ideas or rich description.

The bulk of the book examines the histories of a number of groupings within indigenous nations in Ontario, particularly with respect to the land and to the treaty processes with the Crown -- i.e. the settler state's efforts to alienate them from their land. As I said, it does not talk about the Haudenosaunee at all, so there is nothing of direct relevance to the current reclamation efforts in Caledonia. One chapter is about the Walpole Island First Nation near Windsor, and most of the rest have to do with different peoples and territories of the Ojibwe Nation, mostly in Ontario's Near North.

The real value of this book is that it covers such a large span of time -- usually from before the first treaty in a given area, which might be the late 18th century or the late 19th century, until the present. The picture that it paints is absolutely and completely disgusting. The consistency of the behaviour of the Canadian state, through different eras and different governments, is striking. Fundamental differences in understandings of how human beings can and should relate to the land helped create situations where First Nations thought they were agreeing to one thing, while the Crown intended all along to interpret the agreements as if they meant something quite different and had the guns to make its interpretation stick. Even within the shoddy framework of the Crown's interpretation of the original and subsequent treaties, it seems like every territory of every First Nation has stories of land being taken without due process, rights denied, decisions made without consultation, on up to the present. For example, in the '80s, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources was denying the rights of First Nations people to harvest resources in the territories where their ancestors had been doing so for thousands of years, and then giving commercial fishing permits to the white relatives of MNR staff. Even land claims which were very clear even based solely on government documents, without the need to call upon oral history input from First Nations Elders, have gotten delayed and blocked for decades. Often enough in this period (late '80s, early '90s) when agreements were reached through negotiations -- usually against the advice of much of the provincial bureaucracy -- they were abandoned by the settler governments before being implemented. It should be noted for progressive readers that there was no noticeable change under the NDP government of 1990 to 1995. The list goes on and on.

I think that any one of these incidents on its own might be the sort of thing that most ordinary folks in their dealings with government would shake their heads at and understand as being one of those stupid things that bureaucracies sometimes do, and we should really make amends for that one mistake and go on our way. But the way in which this sort of thing seems to permeate every dealing between First Nations and the settler state, in the 1980s as much as the 1880s, is clear evidence that it is no accident, no bureaucratic error.

At one point McNab refers to a conference between the federal government and the provincial governments in 1913 which had the aim of clearing up all of the jurisdictional conflict that had surrounded First Nations issues to that point. Indeed, such conflict has been a frequent excuse by both levels of government for why issues are not getting dealt with. McNab then points out that most of the issues on the agenda for that conference remain unresolved as of the late 1990s when he was writing.

Politically, I have mixed feelings about the basis for the book. It is focused on looking at the treaty process. While from the point of view of learning the history, I think this is very useful, I am less sure about the author's view of a return to the treaty process being a basis for future progress. I mean, from the word go, at least as far as settler institutions have understood things, the treaty process has always been about taking, taking, taking. How is going back to that going to be an improvement?

But part of why I hesitate in dismissing this view outright is that, from what I understand, there are First Nations that share this view, or something similar to it, and it's not for me to disapprove of how other peoples choose to struggle. But I think I have a sense of where my confusion is based. I think a simple, technical return to negotations on its own is just a recipe for more colonialism (though I think holding the settler state responsible for meeting its own minimal standards of due process would be a good place to start). But I think what some calls for a return to the treaty process mean -- and I'm particularly thinking back to a much more sophisticated book I read a couple of years ago -- is a return to the Aboriginal understanding of the kind of relationship being negotiated, particularly in the pre-1812 treaties organized around the Covenant Chain. This, I think, could provide a basis for the peoples of northern North America living together in ways that manage to address and transcend colonialism. The big question, of course, is how settler institutions with centuries of built-in settler assumptions can be made to change those assumptions, those ways of being -- including basic assumptions about things like sovereignty and power in the nation state -- when said institutions have accountability mostly to other elite-controlled institutions first, to a white-dominated settler population whose majority consistently demonstrates opposition to anti-colonial struggle that challenges its own complicity second, and hardly at all (as this book demonstrates) to indigenous peoples, except when they take steps like setting up barricades and roadblocks.

So while this book leave somethng to be desired in terms of its writing and its politics, it is still extremely useful in showing the devilish details of how colonialism in Canada has functioned, in particular with respect to the land, and how present-day settler institutions behave in ways quite consistent with how they have always behaved.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Quick Minimum Wage Facts

"According to Statistics Canada data for last September, almost two-thirds of minimum wage workers in Canada are women. One in three teenagers age 15 to 19 work for minimum wage - accounting for nearly half of the minimum wage earners in the country, StatsCan says. ... Another 17 per cent of minimum wage workers are age 20 to 24, and nearly half of them are students."

-- Natalie Goldenberg-Fife, "Minimum wage hike is peanuts", The Gazette, May 1/06

(From an email on the OW-Watch email list.)

Review: Thunder in my Soul

[Patrcia Monture-Angus. Thunder in my Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1995.]

Patricia Monture-Angus is a Mohawk woman from the Six Nations Territory who is married into the Cree Nation, a legal scholar, and a mother. The period in which she wrote the essays in this book spans her time as an academic in the area of law and the beginning of her time in a Native Studies department.

In the essays she writes from this standpoint about legal education; education more generally; Canadian law, justice, and Aboriginal peoples; Aboriginal women and the mainstream women's movement; and the so-called child welfare system and Aboriginal peoples. Not surprisingly, most of what she writes relates to Canadian law, and her journey from seeing it as a possible way for her people to achieve liberation to a realization that Canadian law has been at the heart of every way in which northern North America's indigenous nations have been oppressed and is therefore integral to the problem and not a site to seek solutions. To a certain extent the book also talks about the ways in which related concepts and issues that European-derived societies link to our legal systems have traditionally been dealt with in indigenous nations in North America. And despite these huge topics, the book is deeply personal -- as Monture-Angus puts it, it is a "reflection on my own struggle to shed the colonized shackles which bind my mind, my spirit and my heart."

I have found this a difficult book to review. I'm not sure why. It is very well written. It is essental reading for people seeking to develop an understanding of the shape of colonialism in northern North America, particularly the role of the legal system and the education system in the process. It is even quite topical -- a fair bit of my reading right now is focusing on Aboriginal struggles not because Caledonia is in the news but because of where my project happens to be at, but if the combination of an acute phase of struggle with me reviewing this right now gets a few more people to read it, all the better.

I think part of the challenge for me in responding to this is a very important difference in language. Most political writing that I read, even most of that which sets itself up as in some sense oppostional to the heritage of the European-derived left, still in a broad sense is connected to the diverse conceptual geneology associated with or derived from that particular family of traditions. This book, on the other hand, is very deliberate in rejecting any link that is more than incidental to that collection of frameworks, and instead links its analysis to the tradtions of Mohawk (and Haudenosaunee and Aboriginal more generally) thought. This is not to posit some Samuel Huntington-like essentialist chasm between "civilizations" -- I'm not sure how appropriate that term is, both because it is a very unstable unit of analysis when you look at it closely, and because I'm not sure its vernacular sense really applies very easily to European-derived societies, given our genocidal barbarism over the last five hundred years. Rather, it is a very sensible demand that if the white-dominated North American left wishes to work in support of Aboriginal struggle, as every tenet of morality and politics says we should, then we have to do it on the terms of the nations we enter alliance with and not expect them to care that their traditions overlap strongly with anarchist this or radical that. They do, and we should care as we get busy seeking diverse sources of wisdom for saving ourselves, but we shouldn't assume indigenous nations have any interest in expending their already overstretched resources in making those linkages for us.

I also get the sense, both from this book and others that I have read, that what gets stated explicitly and what is left for Canadians to figure out for ourselves relates to the Aboriginal concept of respect, part of which seems to me to be about "good boundaries" as we might mean it in terms of interpersonal relationships except as applied to relationships between nations -- "This is how your laws, your institutions, oppress us. This is where we want to go and are going whether you support us or not. It's up to you to figure out how you respond to that."

This approach also seems to have to do with Aboriginal approaches to pedagogy. Monture-Angus writes:

The tradition of oral history as a method of sharing the lessons of life with children and young people also had the advantage that the Elders told us stories. They did not tell us what to do or how to do it or figure out the world for us -- they told us a story about their experience, about their life or their grandfather's or grandmother's or auntie's or uncle's life. It is in this manner that Indian people are taught independence as well as respect because you have to do your own figurng for yourself.

In other words, I think this book (and, like I said, others that I have read that seem to come from a similar standpoint) are oriented towards the political work that me and mine need to do in a different way than I am used to, which makes the task of responding meaningfully and comprehensively seem larger and less clearly structured by the text to which I am responding.

Add to this the fact that I remain convinced that the scope of the changes on the "Canadian" side necessary to bring the relationships into balance, respect, harmony -- or one might say to have them embody justice and liberation -- is much greater than many white Canadians might conclude from examining the Mohawk (or Haudenosaunee or general indigenous) standpoints. I can foresee one possible response from the Aboriginal side: "But what we want is simple..." And that's very true, from a sane perspective focused on valuing human beings and nature. But simplicity and sanity look much different from the inside of a predatory, psychotic system of 500 years duration, particularly when one is a beneficiary of that system. I don't think that we can achieve the relationships we wish to achieve while the liberal democratic, capitalist political economy remains intact -- I just don't believe the forces at work within those structures will allow a relationship among the peoples in northern North America that transcends colonialism, and therefore those forces and structures must be fundamentally changed. And that's a pretty big mouthful to bite off in a single short book review.

In any case, I recommend this book highly. It has been one useful stepping stone for me in trying to understand what it means to be a white Canadian living on stolen land.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]