Yet, I realize that you don’t really know the work that I do nor understand what I have been saying. I have no expectation that anyone else really should understand in that way unless you do come from the social world that I am from and remain a part of.

You point out that there are consequences to the things that I write and the things that I say and suggest, perhaps, that anthropologists such myself don’t accept nor do we understand the consequences of our actions. You say that to deny or ignore such consequences is irresponsible.

I work directly with my origin community as a researcher and as an adviser in matters related to cultural heritage and research. If this is irresponsibility on my part I will own that irresponsibility. Mine is an irresponsibility born of the north coast; its an irresponsibility that knows the intractability of the problems that one faces coming from where I did while also knowing that there are multiple alternative paths (both individually and collectively); it’s also an irresponsibility that is based in the ethic of care and the commitment to real positive social change through putting one’s ‘money where one’s mouth is.’

If I misstate or misunderstand what you have said or written then I take full responsibility for that.

———–

It is always difficult to balance between our academic work and the implications or consequences of the same. Nonetheless, some of us are in fact doing both -producing academic work AND having direct involvement in communities where our advice and work has real consequences for the everyday life of our friends and family.

In addition to my own work I have, on occasion taken students with me to do community-directed research projects. Yet each time I do so I am left with a sense of unease and concern -not because of any deficit or defect among the students. Rather, because of the process and the ways in which anthropological research becomes in that context too much like cultural tourism and the voyeuristic aspects of the discipline really shines through. Nonetheless, many people (an awkward quantity to express) publicly and privately state their appreciation for the work the students do and constantly ask each time I return home if more students will be coming and when.

That’s not all that I do. I am indeed one of those anthropologists who (paradoxically it seems to me) must be towing the neo-liberal line. I do research that focuses on the history and development of the industrial resource economy and the role that aboriginal people have played as labour in that same industry -from my 1994 article “Stories from Home” AE 1994 through to my co-authored piece in Labour/Le Travail in 2008 on the Indigenous Foundation of The Natural Resource Economy in BC. I have also written about the -apparently- neo-liberally influenced practices of traditional ecological knowledge where I have considered such things as the ways in which indigenous peoples dynamically incorporated market mechanisms with traditional knowledge to harvest Pine Mushrooms (in my own edited book published with Nebraska in 2006) to a consideration of the ways in which traditional ownership coincided and overlapped with industrial ownership in the context of the harvest of salmon to a more recent (and perhaps most archetypically TEK’y) piece in Human Organization (2010) on Abalone harvesting in BC.

My recent film, Bax Laansk, also must be criticized for towing the neo-liberal line as it charts the contradictions and ambivalence between local food harvest, the rise and collapse of the industrial economy locally and the call from community members to do more then just talk at their youth. And then, through the lens of one of my students we can see those same youth as they struggle in the urban centre with dislocation, despair and abuse in her hard hitting film For Our Street Family (distributed through DER).

There is a difference of perspective that arises in accordance with our subject locations. I hear the concerns and worries of my family (both of my immediate and my extended) about our community’s health and well being. I am asked many times to offer opinions and to do things to assist.

Yes, of course there is a bias (take a look at a comment on this blog about the type of anthropological work that is being done in BC). Kirk, you and I share more in common in our outlook then not. The solutions for the current malaise will not be solved by correctly pointing to the impact of history even as the conditions in and off reserve are the legacy of colonialism. As Fanon reminds us so many years ago colonialism is not simply an attempt to take economic and political power -it’s an attempt to disfigure and demean a people such that one loses all sense of self respect and dignity.

In the absence of any real revolutionary change in society people who are actively involved and concerned about the situation have to face up to reality (something that I think we are both saying) and get on with making a difference (and likely this is where we disagree). I have seen many things in my life that bring unhappiness and despair. One can succumb to a nihilist critical intellectualism, a crass opportunism, a sense of despair, or even the supportive critic. I choose to do somethign different -that is, to try to work with people that I know and have known for many, many years, to try and make our world just a tiny bit better place to be.

As one of my friends and colleagues here at UBC says: “We just want our kids to get the same lousy education that everyone else is getting.”

I am entirely unconcerned with a critique of elites in indigenous communities. They have their projects, make their decisions, and do the best they can, just like everyone else. The vast majority I have met are good, solid, concerned people who want very much to hear how political decisions are working out on the ground, and are very concerned with the state of the communities they live in, especially when plans for community development don’t work out they way they hope…which most don’t.

My concern is and has been with anthropologists…the only ones I feel entitled to talk to and criticize…hence the venue (hello?). My comments in the session follow most closely an article published in Anthropologica a couple years ago…interested readers can look there for the full argument. The gist of them is this…that alternative paths to community futures in indigenous communities–those that stand outside an open embrace of neo-liberal sorts of privatization and development–continue to be ignored by anthropologists working there, with very few exceptions, as do the consequences of the paths that are being chosen.

Rather, most anthropologists tow the neo-liberal line of private property and resource development, blame all the problems on dislocation from an ancient past, and in the mean time write the sorts of contemporary community representations that facilitate development strategies. The majority of TEK literature would easily fit within this characterization. It has ignored the context underwhich it is produced by remaining silent on the ways it will be used in contemporary political processes. This is, frankly put, naive and disingenous.

This is not to discount the past (recent or ancient), it is simply to wonder why so many anthropologists living in the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere are so resistant to writing about the present. The exception would seem to be Latin America, where viable alternative movements (apart from neo-liberal development and cooperation with a development state) exist. There, anthopology is all about the present. Here, where the possibility of organized, large scale movements toward an alternative future outside of neo-liberal sorts of development remain small scale, anthropological attention skips immediately to some distant horizon. This, I think, comes from a reluctance on the part of anthropologists to confront the neo-liberal project or its advocates (within or outside the communities in which they work)…which is a shame, especially when so many alternative voices in communities are being lost to the very processes at stake…moving away or being run out because they don’t fit the new mold.

This has nothing to do with a critique of elites or any particular emergent strategy as they come from Labrador or any other community. This is not about people or decisions. It is about structures. As decisions, I have always been clear: for the vast majority of community members, the current strategies of development are entirely understandable, as I have long pointed out. Ordinary people often have little choice but to participate in a state orchestrated plan, for reasons that have everything to do with the colonial history and current neo-colonial structures (again, structures that I have spent my career describing under the label “state-sponsored indigenism”). People do what they have to do to accommodate power, avoid it, hold it to its own laws, and so on.

But it is frankly irresponsible for anthropologists, like yourself, who unabashedly take on the spokesmen role for whole communities in that venue, to pretend that your representations do not have consequences for people in the communities you claim to represent. The representations you make ARE strategies, with consequences. Choosing the right ones is hard, but ignoring the consequences is far worse. I would not use the term romantic for so many such contemporary representations. Romanticism was an important arts/politics moment in the early critique of capitalism. Rather I would call much of the current representative trend “fantasy,” for its ability to ignore the political and legal context in which it is produced in the interest of feel good moments and characterizations. Apart from Nadasdy, few anthropologists in the TEK genre have been willing to own up to questions of the politics of producing TEK.

These are problems in anthropology, as the ignoring of alternative futures and those living them has consequences for their possibility. The streets of Alberta, Sydney, New York, Montreal, or, closer to your home, Vancouver are full of people from indigenous communities who didn’t fit into the currently envisioned indigenous future, yet entirely absent from ethnography. Once can read just about any portrayal of contemporary First Nation communities in Canada and not learn how roughly half the members of that Nation find themselves living far from home, some for better, some for worse.

I would like to have given a full historical background or even a review of the TEK literature to show where these issues apply, and where they do not….but in a 15 minute paper, are you kidding? So yes, there was much missing from my account there. For me the bigger question is what is missing in anthropology.

Sorry Charles. The meetings are full of grandstanding, but written follow-up requires some responsibility to what was actually said.

By Rolph Knight.
A Very Ordinary Life
Along the No. 20 Line. Reminiscences of the Vancouver Waterfront

More info is available on his website:
http://www.rolfknight.ca/

[ED: yes, though it still conforms to the idea of the exotic other. while being an excellent book to read.]

Here’s what I am learning from the disrobers as I read:

(1) F. Boas is a postmodernist. see page 60: “Over the last century Morgan’s theory has been gradually usurped by the postmodern theory of cultural relativism . . . It’s most significant proponent was Franz Boas. . .” Interesting. But Boas died before postmodernism reared its strange head (for a good read on postmodern theory take a look at Alex Callinicos’ Against Postmodernism or Bryan Palmer’s Descent into Discourse, both far better sources then the one’s the disrobers suggest. Oh, and it should be noted that the source that they quote to explicate Boas is John Bodly’s first year anthropology text book, not Boas’ actually writing (I’ve used the Bodly text, but wouldn’t want to base a unique interpretation of the history of anthropological theory on it.

(2) Critical eye not bleeding heart. I would agree, a firmly rooted historical materialism is much needed. But, I would like one that draws upon empirical facts not assumptions and partial truths drawn from such esteemed sources as the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, etc.

(3) hunting requires no planning, discipline, or cooperative labour (page 22). But even fellow curmudgeon Rolf Knight (a long time marxist who writes from a clear class perspective) would disagree with the assertion that aboriginal people had no useable skills and were shunted aside as the industrial economy took off. Even the latter day historian Andrew Parnaby, also writing from a marxist perspective, describes the role of coast salish longshoremen int he trade union. Interesting to note that these are the same people that the disrobers consider to lack skill and foresight.

(4) that one should be pleased that residential schools existed because “were it not for the education and socialization efforts [of] residential schools, aboriginal people would be even more marginal.” But there is no evidence to support this claim, not even a footnote to the National Post to support the assumption.

(5) on page 57 we are treated to an intriguing reinterpretation of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (originally formulated to help explain/understand how revolution was occurring in so-called ‘backward’ countries but not in western Europe and which then became linked to Trotsky’s important idea of ‘permanent revolution.’ But the disrobers turn Trotsky’s theory into a justification for assimilation. There have been other purportedly marxist writers who take an intriguing and iconoclastic theoretical turn -Bil Warrens Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism was another earlier example (though far better placed within the discipline of marxist theory then the disrobing book.

(6) and then some minor things like Lewis Henry Morgen described as the principle founder of anthropology. Really? That’s an intriguing and rather tendentious statement. What about Mallinowski? or maybe Cushing, or Mooney or R-B, or even F Boas? Go figure. Oh, and the teleological underpinnings of the disrober’s evolutionary model doesn’t reflect contemporary understanding of evolution. Evolution, simply put is cumulative change -it is not directional.

At the core of this book are, I think two enmeshed ideas (1) a rather crude mechanical determinism that draws from the most limited lines of marxist thinking and draws its inspiration from some of the worst of Engel’s writing, and; (2) a sense of disgruntlement. It’s hard to place a finger on this second piece put it seems that underneath the entire arguments, beneath the clarity of the prose and the structure of of the book is a sense of personal grievance, as sense of bitter disappointment.

The importance of reconciliation, both inside and outside the treaty process is the key concept of modern Aboriginal law as repeatedly stressed by the Supreme Court of Canada in its judgments:

In Haida Nation [2004] 3 S.C.R. 511, available on-line at:
http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc73/2004scc73.html
Chief Justice McLachlin writing for the entire Court said at paragraph 32:
“The jurisprudence of this Court supports the view that the duty to consult and accommodate is part of a process of fair dealing and reconciliation that begins with the assertion of sovereignty and continues beyond formal claims resolution. Reconciliation is not a final legal remedy in the usual sense. Rather, it is a process flowing from rights guaranteed by s. 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. This process of reconciliation flows from the Crown’s duty of honourable dealing toward Aboriginal peoples, which arises in turn from the Crown’s assertion of sovereignty over an Aboriginal people and de facto control of land and resources that were formerly in the control of that people.”

The central role played by reconciliation as the fundamental objective of the modern law of aboriginal and treaty rights was emphasized by Justice Binnie, writing for the Supreme Court of Canada in Mikisew Cree [2005] 3 S.C.R. 388,paragraph 1, available on-line at: http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2005/2005scc69/2005scc69.html
“The fundamental objective of the modern law of aboriginal and treaty rights is the reconciliation of aboriginal peoples and non-aboriginal peoples and their respective claims, interests and ambitions. The management of these relationships takes place in the shadow of a long history of grievances and misunderstanding.”

Despite the criticism aimed at the Provincial Government by some of those who seek to overturn the recent Reconciliation Agreement reached with the Musqueam, the negotiations that led to that Agreement is exactly what the Court has been urging the parties to do. The alternative is costly and adversarial litigation that, far from bringing reconciliation, merely perpetuates the history of grievances and misunderstanding that Justice Binnie referred to.