It was one of those moments that you wonder why bother, what’s the point of intervening, yet you do it anyway. Here I was enjoying myself skipping from session to session -marine protected areas in one session, women and democracy at a poster session, forestry, public anthropology and then -why not- a session on the circulation of indigenous though it’s others. It looked engaging. I knew some of the people. Why not go and have a listen to a set of papers that ranged from research in Labrador to research in Australia through Hawaiian soldiers and Navajo country singers.
I realized that my patience was being tested when my long time friend and fellow graduate of CUNY’s Grad Centre started talking about the parochialism of the sort of research that I engage in. That is, anthropological study of Indigenous issues is locked in a vantage point that reproduces elite knowledge within Indigenous communities and which does not examine the realities of violence, class, and social disruption. Fair enough, I’d be the first to agree that most of the research with and on behalf of First Nations is of limited appeal in the rarified worlds academic knowledge production and rarely rates the press given to sexy (literally and figuratively) subjects that inspire the many overheard corridor conversations.
Yet there was something about Kirk’s take that didn’t sit well with me. I can’t really put a finger on it, even now as I roll the words and ideas around in my mind, reflecting on them, reconsidering them. I agree with much of with Kirk said, yet, yet, somehow, somewhere there’s something amiss in the idea he presented. Perhaps it’s because I’m part of the Indigenous elite that he so strenuously critiques. I would like to think not; but I’ll at least consider it.
A few papers later came a paper on Labrador with the engaging title: “Hardly anybody never goes off anymore: time and belonging in a Labrador Inuit community.” The paper picked up from the title quote – “hardly anybody never goes off any more”- and chased down the idea that of the 300 people interviewed barely a half dozen or so actually engaged in hunting or ‘going off’ beyond the boundary of Nairn, Labrador. Fact was, those who were presented internally as knowledgeable either couldn’t or wouldn’t “go off.” Those who made it off were apparently part of the disinterested elites who were able to control or monopolize sufficient resources to buy fuel and supplies. Though the network plots presented (but not truly described) seemed to suggest a fairly wide distribution of food even if harvested by a handful of people, the focus was upon the dysfunction and abdication of responsibility by the elite. This is when I really started to connect the dots between my friend Kirk’s introduction and the apparent underlying theme.
The ‘we don’t go off’ paper picked up on the critique of the parochialism of Indigenous studies. This was achieved with a thorough going critique of the immorality of the political leadership (erstwhile called elites by the panelists). Not to miss a stone unturned traditional ecological knowledge literature was also soundly criticized. The fault – it doesn’t reflect the reality of practice. The critique – it is romantic nonsense. Yes there is a lot written by natural resource management types that takes a rather naive and simplistic perspective on TEK. But, I’m not certain that I’d be so quick to dismiss the reality of engaged and longstanding relationships with ecological and related social knowledge and then suggest that traditional knowledge is bunk.
Rather than sit silent and then leave I stood up and spoke. Usually, the extent of conference commentary is the ‘thank you for your paper, you did a great job, can you tell more about this or that.’ Sometimes there is a sharing of a similar case. People might even call some minor parts of a paper into question. Rarely does one stand up and, as I did this time, and lay out a full-blown critique of the panel and papers within it.
I began by saying straight out that my comment was a criticism.
“I’m not able to comment directly on the Labrador case but I can say from a decade of research and a lifetime of experience that there is something wrong with the picture being painted here today.”
Three points figure in my comments:
(1) The pattern of resource harvesting was presented as unusual. In fact is a fairly common and longstanding one of the development of community ‘experts’ in harvesting –the practitioners- on one side and the knowledge holders –best thought of as local intellectuals- on the other. Thus the model in the paper was fairly ahistorical –a snapshot in time- rather than one that placed the data into the sweep of history. Had the full sweep of time been considered it would have gone a long way toward explaining and then through explanation toward solution (if that was what was needed) of the problem presented.
(2) The critique of traditional ecological knowledge seemed to fetishize the idea of ‘tradition’ in the moniker. I suggested that we should not allow ourselves to be confused by the label of ‘traditional’ in the tag TEK. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a process of knowledge making that is dynamic. It is a process through which people actively shift and change. Irrespective of the internal discourses on cultural loss (a discourse that is in reality produced by the external process of colonials ideology represented in histories of salvage ethnography) the researcher would be well served by consider the nature of knowledge required to navigate the social world (which includes whether or not ‘one goes off’).
(3) In response to the idea that Indigenous Studies is parochial and thus those of us engaged in it are in some way self serving and blinded by the Elites I offered this –the forces shaping what kind of research to do are controlled by the colonizing states. That is, in the creation of legal frameworks for rights and title Indigenous communities in Canada and Australia are completed to engage researchers and to commission particular types of studies to prove that they are in fact real social beings with history, law, culture, and personhood. It is only from a narcissistic sense of one’s own academic importance that one can actually overlook this social reality.
No one -I think- is denying the existence of real problems in Indigenous communities. But what defines the situation is not really crises and mayhem. There are good things, positive things, things to pride and pleasure in. Of course the world is not all rosy. What I am questioning is whether the focus on Elites as the source of the real problems in Indigenous communities makes any real sense. I think that my anger arises at this point . It is so easy to cast blame and to find fault. But unless you are dealing with this on a day-to-day basis trying to work out real answers that work now I questions your criticisms that seem more suitable to the rarefied audiences of lecterns and classrooms.
What, I wonder, is the difference between conservative commentators who blame all the problems on corrupt leaders and self-serving Elites and academic radicals who identify corrupt and disinterested Elites as the source of the problem. If only things were so simple as giving free gas to impoverished hunters so that they could ‘go off again.’
