Indigenous Identity and Resistance

Researching the Diversity of Knowledge

Brendan Hokowhitu, Nathalie Kermoal, Chris Andersen

• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780947522407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Indigenous Identity and Resistance brings together the work of Indigenous Studies scholars working in Canada, New Zealand and the Pacific in research conversations that transcend the imperial boundaries of the colonial nations in which they are located. Their lucid, accessible, and thought-provoking essays provide a critical understanding of the ways in which Indigenous peoples are rearticulating their histories, knowledges, and the Indigenous self. Hana O'Regan discusses a programme of language regeneration initiated by members of her iwi, Kai Tahu. Chris Andersen describes the power of Canada's colonial nation-state in constructing categories of indigeneity. Brendan Hokowhitu problematises the common discourses underpinning Indigenous resistance. Janine Hayward compares Indigenous political representation in Canada and New Zealand. This is just a snapshot of the forward-looking research in this reader. Taken together, it heralds some new ways of thinking about Indigenous Studies in the 21st Century.

IDENTITY

CHAPTER ONE

Mixed Ancestry or Métis?

Chris Andersen

In September 2003, the first court case on the constitutional boundaries of Métis rights (R. vs. Powley) came before the Supreme Court of Canada. The case attracted attention from diverse members of Canada’s legal community, including the federal and provincial governments, Aboriginal organisations and various hunting, fishing and conservation organisations. The question before the Powley court was a narrowly technical one about the right of ‘Métis’ to hunt for food in the Great Lakes region of Northern Ontario, but the decision was more broadly positioned as a test case for defining the boundaries of Métis identity¹ and thus setting the boundaries of who could be accorded Métis constitutional protections. The eventual decision was applauded and widely viewed as a ‘slam dunk’ for Métis litigants and, potentially, for Métis everywhere (who precisely this refers to, however, is the subject of this chapter). If the victory was one viewed as clear-cut however, the actual definition of ‘Métis’ was more ambiguous: ‘given the vast territory of what is now Canada, we should not be surprised to find that different groups of Métis exhibit their own distinctive traits and traditions. This diversity among groups of Métis may enable us to speak of Métis “peoples”…’.²

This chapter examines the power of a colonial nation-state generally, and the courts specifically, in shaping the contemporary constitution of ‘Métis’ as a category of indigeneity. My argument is based on the notion that colonial nation-states are so elementally powerful that nothing Indigenous exists ‘outside’ them. Our indigeneity (as Aboriginals, Māori, Hawaiians, Sāmoans, etc.) is thus constitutively shaped by the power within which our Indigenous societies remain embedded. This argument is deliberately provocative although not disrespectfully so – its intellectual impulse is grounded in the observation that the fundamental power of modernity/colonialism is not that as Indigenous people we live in it, but rather, that it lives in us.³ Two of the ways it lives in us, I argue here, include our internalisation of the symbolic violence of race upon which the ‘colonial divide’ between Europeans and Indigenous peoples rests; and our internalisation of Canadian constitutional categories like ‘Indian’, ‘Inuit’ and ‘Métis’ in common parlance. This latter internalisation is, I will also argue, exacerbated by the power of Canadian law in shaping more broadly the taxonomies we use to think and talk about indigeneity in Canadian society.

Perched on the analytical points of these two internalisations, this chapter is presented in four parts. The first explores the policies of the British imperial and Canadian nation-state governments that removed Indigenous people from the traditional communities and territories claimed by the Mi’kmaq in the Maritime provinces of (what has become) Eastern Canada (specifically Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). Exploring this history is necessary not least because Mi’kmaq ancestry constitutes a central pillar of contemporary claims of Maritime ‘Métis’. Such state policies have, as numerous scholars point out, exerted horrendous impacts on Indigenous communities and play a large role in the inability of those recently self-identifying as ‘Métis’ to gain political voice (or more pragmatically, social programmes and benefits) as First Nations/‘Indians’.

The second part explores Indigenous internalisations of the symbolic violence of race to show how a term used to identify a nationalist constituency – Métis – is so easily conflated with mere mixed Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal ancestry. The third part demonstrates the power of this symbolic violence in the specific empirical context of the Maritimes. The final part discusses the ways in which the symbolic power of Canadian law exacerbates and worse, seemingly legitimises this conflation. My intention is not simply to delegitimise their political struggles or critique their self-identification choices. This chapter seeks more fundamentally to understand the conditions – both material and discursive – under which Maritime Indigenous collectivities have begun to perceive and employ ‘Métis’ as a self-descriptor of their mixed Indigenous/European ancestry. It is to the issue of colonialism in the Maritimes that we now turn.

Colonialism in the Maritimes of Eastern Canada

The area of geographical focus for this chapter, the Maritimes, encompasses much of the southern coastline of Eastern Canada and includes the provinces of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. This region was home to (among other Indigenous peoples) the Mi’kmaq and the Maliseet. Wicken argues that evidence on early Mi’kmaq society is scant, largely due to the fact that the Mi’kmaq had little sustained interaction (other than trade) with European intruders during the period prior to the eighteenth century.⁴ The Mi’kmaq’s pre-existing marine-based seasonal economies were well-positioned to fill a niche in the economic desires of European fishermen and whalers⁵ – indeed, Mi’kmaq territories were considered strategic by European imperialists at least partly because of their adjacency to the rich Atlantic fish stocks.⁶

Map of Canada relating to the Métis population. Nuno Luzio

Upon the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713,⁷ the British made clear that they viewed their own claims to Maritime territory as superior to pre-existing Indigenous claims. Wicken argues that the Treaty of Utrecht exerted a profound impact on the social world of the Mi’kmaq and their allies in that it marked the beginning of more formal British attempts to assert political control over Indigenous territories.⁸ British intrusions led to armed conflicts by the Mi’kmaq and their Wabanaki allies and, in so doing, changed the very nature of warfare itself: ‘… the defeat of the French in Acadia in 1710 and the advent of English settlement had put another cast entirely on the conflict … [Mi’kmaq] and Malecite were now fighting for their land and for their very survival as a people’.⁹

Several features of seventeenth-century French colonial policy make this geographical region relevant for studying the conflation of Métis with mixed Indigenous/non-Indigenous ancestry and will be expanded upon in part three. For our purposes, however, the impact of British and later Canadian forms of colonialism on the formation of Indigenous collectivities in the region is particularly important. Tobias argued famously that Canada’s ‘Indian Policy’ was based on a three-pronged, teleological approach of protection,¹⁰ civilisation and assimilation. Canadian Indian policy was rooted in pre-confederation policies carried over from the exigencies of the eighteenth-century imperial rivalries between France and Britain that shaped much of the political character of the region.¹¹ Milloy argues, however, that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the predecessor of the Canadian government gained formal control. Prior to then, ‘Indian tribes were de facto, self-governing. They had exclusive control over their population, land and finances’.¹² More cynically, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples suggests a different take:

Former enemies of the victorious British, the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, were simply ignored, left to find their own way in the rapidly changing world. Dispossessed of much of their land, separated from resources and impoverished, they were also ravaged by disease and in the early 1800s they seemed to be on the road to virtual extinction.¹³

Tobias argues that by the beginning of the nineteenth century – coterminous with the end of their inter-empire rivalries with France and the United States and the waning need for Indigenous assistance, British colonial governors began to perceive and position Indigenous communities as ‘impediments to progress’. Part of their attempts to ‘civilise’ those they designated as Indians included a reliance on Christianisation (a tactic already long-used in Eastern Canadian Indigenous communities) as well as the establishment of Indian reserves as a means of turning them into farmers. Tobias suggests that these efforts were made in an attempt to ‘help’ Native communities withstand the onslaught of European civilisation. These attempts at civilisation soon turned to full-blown attempts to assimilate, the foremost avenue of which was the 1876 Indian Act and the previous legislative enactments it consolidated.¹⁴

Canadian policies like the Indian Act exacerbated the historical movement of formerly status Indian individuals (usually women) and their families out of the reserve Indian ‘bands’ created under the auspices of the Indian Act. One cause of this was the enfranchisement¹⁵ (voluntary or otherwise) of those categorised as status Indians, which in turn required their removal from their reserve. Enfranchise­ment in fact served as a key plank for Canadian state assimilation policies and was ‘bestowed’ upon those who gained a professional degree, served in the armed forces or left their reserves for more than five years.¹⁶ Moreover, by the twentieth century, status Indians could be removed by the Indian Agent without their consent and, by the middle part of the twentieth century, thousands of First Nations people had been stripped of their status and required to move off their reserves and away from their families.

These policies constituted a direct manifestation of the gender discrimination inherent in the Indian Act provisions, well-documented elsewhere,¹⁷ which essentially came in three forms: matrimonial property, community membership and political representation.¹⁸ The legal movement of Indigenous individuals and their families between categories also necessitated a geographical move. The main cause of this movement was the gender discrimination that applied to status and band membership for non-status Indian women. Status Indian women who married non-status men (whether Métis, Inuit or non-Aboriginal altogether) automatically lost their status under the Indian Act and, with it, various privileges (meagre though they were). Conversely, males categorised as status Indians faced no penalties upon their marriage to a non-status woman (whether ‘white’ or otherwise). Indeed, Jamieson notes, they ‘may marry whom they please without penalty and indeed by so doing confer on their non-Indian spouses and children full Indian rights and status’.¹⁹

Banishment from Indian reserves resulted in women moving into off-reserve communities. Over subsequent generations, thousands of ‘non-status’ Indians in Eastern Canada left or were forced out of their communities. More recently, the descendants of these families have banded together to pursue political objectives. Though many ‘detribalised’ individuals and collectivities²⁰ would rather be using the First Nation to which they were historically attached, this option is no longer available to them, since after 1985 Indian bands’ right to control their community membership was recognised through Bill C-31.²¹

As elsewhere, the enactment of Indian Act legislation in the Maritimes created a situation in which, generations later, numerous individuals continue to possess familial and kinship ties to relatives living in reserve band communities but lack any formal legal relationship. As such, they are denied not only the benefits that accrue from band membership but must bear the indignity of being defined as something other than what they are (and, as I argue in the conclusion, as something other than what they might be). Turpel writes poignantly,

[a] First Nations woman cannot necessarily look to her mother, gran­dmother or older aunties to help her because she may have been forced to leave the community through discrimination. Moreover, she may now have trouble reconnecting because of her experiences in a foreign culture, because poverty has led her to equate being a First Nations person with being worthless and because of lost self-esteem due to racism commonly experienced outside the community. She may also be excluded because her Indian Act-elected government will not let her return.²²

Though not the focus of this chapter, Turpel and others²³ explore powerfully the ways in which a patriarchal value system synonymous with British colonialism devalued the status of women and marginalised their political power. As I explore further in the next section, the symbolic power of patriarchy is not the only discourse to invest itself in Indigenous communities and in the associated formation of contemporary Indigenous subjectivities, there is also that of race. It is to that issue that I now turn.

‘Métis’ and the symbolic violence of race

The term ‘Métis’ is often (though for reasons I go into below, not just) associated with the Métis Nation. Although historians have traced the roots of Métis to eighteenth-century intermarriage between fur traders ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• LIST OF CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Indigenous Studies: Research, Identity and Resistance
• IDENTITY
• RESISTANCE
• Notes
• Glossary of Māori Words
• List of Contributors