Battiste, Marie Ann. “Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization.” Introduction. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver: UBC, 2000. Xvi-xx. Print.
Marie Battiste is a Mi’kmaq educator and professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the Indian and Northern Education Program. She holds degrees from the University of Maine, Harvard University, and Stanford University, and holds honorary doctorate degrees from St. Mary’s University and the University of Maine at Farmington due to her international publications and lectures on Aboriginal languages, knowledge, and education. I cite Battiste’s academic achievements to provide an example of a classically educated scholar who is moving beyond what Charles Taylor calls “North Atlantic” literary theory.
Battiste’s introduction to a series of essays that were formulated after a ten-day conference of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations echoes our own class conference group’s exploration of epistemic justice. Rather than approach their Indigenous Populations conference as simply a forum to criticize the “trauma of colonization” (xvii), Battiste writes that the conference revealed that “there is more than one perspective to view a [six-sided] box holistically, [there are] many perspectives on how to map and diagnose colonization, how to heal the colonized, and how to imagine and invoke a new society” (xvii). In other words, Battiste shares how their 1996 conference intended to recognize the politics of colonization and through dialogue of “sharing, listening, feeling, and analyzing” (xvii), sought to move towards respecting different views of the metaphorical “box”.
Each of the participants of the conference are members of indigenous communities from around the world acting as “bridges” between Eurocentric and Indigenous models of thinking. This concept when combined with Battiste’s description of the Medicine Wheel process of organizing conference sessions reminded me of King’s four Cherokee headings at the beginnings of each quadrant of Green Grass, Running Water. By infusing his novel in English with non-English phrases, King demonstrates Battiste’s call to order for “bridges” between the Eurocentric and the Indigenous.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Fee, Margery. “Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions (review).” University of Toronto Quarterly 74.1 (2004/2005): 593-95. Project MUSE. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
“Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.
Brand, Dionne. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Print.
Keeping in conversation Coleman’s idea of mutual respectability, adopting—or perhaps adapting to what he cites as Lee Maracle’s “salish perspective” is a way to start to understand academia as an uneven surface. Coleman is arguing for a certain sense of instability in academia that can in a sense be embraced and wielded by the academy to understand new ways of coming to information. What happens then, when those who are so often cited in Canadian literature (Dionne Brand, Suzanna Moodie, Margaret Atwood*), are reimagined through a Salish perspective? These are the sorts of mutual interrogations that are not happening in Canadian literature.
For instance, Brand is constantly referenced in Canadian literature because of her afro-diasporic and queer readings of Vancouver, Toronto, and Canada as a whole, negotiating the ways in which her body circulates and intertwines this Canadian landscape. Toying with, or applying the idea of âtayôhkêwina (Coleman 2010), or “sacred story making” to Brand’s title poem of her collected works “Thirsty” (2002) , lets us not view Brand’s work as a queer, black writer, but as the maker or speaker in these conversations around what is sacred. Âtayôhkêwina then, lets us move past the politics of recognition (black, queer, woman), and begin to interrogate Brand’s words in relation to the Canadian nation state—sidestepping narratives of reductionisms.
This creates a “politics of respect” rather than a “politics of recognition” –it unsettles the idea that recognition or so-called ‘multiculturalism’ is the right or correct way to navigate diversity and different bodies in space. Respect, then is about moving beyond recognition, and formally beginning to work from indigenous ways of understanding. Coleman is arguing for and against a neocolonial “prison” system that intertwines the current academic industrial complex.
* See Atwood’s essay on Thomas King’s stories through PDF attached on linked page
Atwood, Margaret. “A Double-Bladed Knife: Subversive Laughter in Two Stories by Thomas King.” Canadian Literature 124-125 (1990): 243-50. CanLit. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. <http://canlit.ca/issues/124-125>.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Maracle, Lee. Oratory on Oratory. Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 55–70. Print.
Cairns, Alan. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State. Vancouver: UBC, 2000. Print.
Alain Cairns is a political science professor, having spent thirty-five years teaching at the University of British-Columbia, in addition to serving as a visiting professor at the University of Waterloo. Cairn’s scholarly endeavours have explored a variety of judicial issues within Canada, most notably issues with relation to citizenship and its impact on Indigenous rights and communities.
In Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State*, Cairns suggests that the Canadian government has ineffectively bounced between two extreme forms of Indigenous citizenship, that being an initial movement towards outright assimilation, later replaced by attempts at self-government on behalf of the First Nations. In this regard, Cairn’s argues that the inefficiency of both these measures suggests the solution lies somewhere in the middle.
Cairns argues total assimilation of the First Nations people into mainstream Canadian culture has already proved ineffective and generated significant backlash from First Nations communities. Furthermore, Cairns takes issue with the idea of First Nations self-government and nationhood for the reason that it erects barriers between Indigenous peoples and other Canadians, while at the same time excluding the diversity and involvement of First Nations people from Canadian society.
It is in this regard that Cairns aligns himself with Coleman’s call for epistemic justice and a politics of respect rather than recognition. Cairns critique of First Nations self-government identifies a scenario of politics of recognition, wherein a “we” and a “them” lie, dividing both sides. The solution, Cairns argues, lies somewhere between the complete disregard of First Nations culture exhibited by total assimilation, and the complete separation of two societies. Cairns refers to this middle ground as “Citizens Plus”, wherein First Nations people are afforded the same rights as Canadian citizens, in addition to several additional rights that embody their cultural past. This echoes Coleman’s approach to achieving a politics of respect, wherein understanding and assimilation of another’s culture is achieved, but done from a distance in order for it to remain understood in it’s own context.
* See “Introduction” in the link
Cairns, Alan. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State. Vancouver: UBC, 2000. Print.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Fagan, Kristina. Imagining Justice. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
McCall, Sophie. “Introduction: Collaboration and Authorship in Told-To Narratives.” Introduction. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship. Vancouver: UBC, 2011. 1-16. Print.
Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
Marie Clements is a Canadian playwright and screenwriter of Métis descent. She is the winner of several awards, most recently the Canada-Japan Literary Award for her play Burning Vision.
The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a play based on the murders of at least ten women by Vancouver barber Gilbert Paul Jordan. Jordan used alcohol to poison his victims (primarily middle aged First Nations women), whose deaths were dismissed by coroner’s reports as “unnatural and accidental.” Despite three Aboriginal women being found dead in Jordan’s barber shop, police did not investigate Jordan for the killings until his murder of a white woman. Jordan’s case is symptomatic of a deeply flawed Canadian criminal and judicial system.
Clements uses her play to give the women killed by Jordan a voice, with minimal focus on the killer. The women of the play exhibit vibrant personalities and bright senses of humour, even after death.
The voices of the dead women, often speaking in Indigenous dialects, as well as their crude sense of humour, are examples of what Coleman calls “a profoundly non-Enlightenment worldview”. This does not mean that these voices are less legitimate than others, or that they carry less of an ability to impact the way we view the world around us. On the contrary, being exposed to such voices “expands our field of vision”, as Lee Maracle puts it. It could be argued that exposure to non conventional voices such as these does more to expand our field of vision, and work towards the “spiritual objective of study,” than does a myopic preoccupation with traditional academic sources.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Maracle, Lee. “Oratory on Oratory.” Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 55-70. Print.
“Police Looking for Predator” CBC. Aug 9 2004. Web. Apr 8 2014.
“Gilbert Paul Jordan: The Boozing Barber” First Nations Drum. Web. Apr 8 2014.
LaRocque, Emma. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2010. Print.
Emma LaRocque is a professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. She is well-recognized for her studies in Aboriginal literature and its role in Canadian history and society.
LaRocque’s book: When the Other is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850-1990, examines historic literature and writings in Canada that, by way of the colonial context they were written within, serve to dehumanize Indigenous peoples. She suggests it is this de-humanized portrayal of Indigenous peoples that served to establish and legitimize negative stereotypes of First Nations people within literature, and eventually Canadian society. Consequently, LaRocque suggests this portrayal has enabled an internal rejection of Indigenous culture from the within the First Nations communities.
LaRocque argues the reaction by way of Native writers and literature expresses an overwhelming sentiment of anger towards their misrepresentation in colonial literature, in addition to a celebration of Indigenous customs and norms. LaRocque advocates for the removal of these colonial constructs within literature, in addition to cautioning non-Indigenous Canadians to read the literature with a keen awareness for the colonial biases that may be present within it. In doing so, LaRocque echoes a sentiment expressed by both Taylor and Coleman in their call for epistemic justice, wherein they suggest that by assuming that the standards are in place to pass judgment, we are adhering to a North Atlantic bias from which the standards initially belonged. Moreover, LaRocque’s call for an awareness of these biases in future Canadian literature and those who read it aligns itself with Maracle’s belief that a “broadened field of vision” and transformed perspective is the ultimate and spiritual goal of study.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
David, Daniel. “Thomas King, Still Not the Indian You Had in Mind.” The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail, 19 July 2012. Web. 12 Apr. 2014. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/thomas-king-still-not-the-indian-you-had-in-mind/article4426067/?page=all>.
LaRocque, Emma. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2010. Print.
“When the Other Is Me.” University of Manitoba Press. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2014
Neuhaus, Mareike. “Contemporary Indigenous Literatures, Textualized Orality.” That’s Raven Talk: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures. Regina: CPRC, 2011. 216-225. UBC Library. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. <http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action>.
Mareike Neuhaus’s book That’s Raven Talk: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures began as a dissertation in 2005 with the support of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada as a research stay at the University of Alberta.
Neuhaus’s interest in “textualized orality in contemporary Indigenous literatures composed in English” (1) is an example of Coleman’s reference to Lee Maracle’s proposal for “moving beyond the relentless reproduction of our cultural bias” (Coleman) because it demonstrates how Indigenous oral stories can be written in English and maintain “generic conventions of Indigenous oratures” (Neuhaus 216). In other words, Neuhaus suggests that textualized Indigenous literature maintains traces of the “’foreign tongue’” but can be read on a formal grammatical level as non-Indigenous literature in English.
On a functional level the textualized narratives can be read and understood in English by a wider readership (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) but maintain important Indigenous oratory conventions like narrative frames, cyclical narrative structures, and open discourse (that we see in King’s Green Grass, Running Water, particularly from Coyote). These formal elements of Indigenous literature signify a discrepancy in the stereotypes and cultural biases held against Indigenous society as primitive or less sophisticated than the Western. By emphasizing the openness and fluidity of the narratives and their cyclical nature, Neuhaus stresses how contemporary Indigenous literature is equally sophisticated to Western English literature and that when we critically read Indigenous literature from a Western academic tradition, we can identify these Indigenous conventions as literary devices.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Gingell, Susan. “Book Review: Aboriginal Storytelling.” Can Lit. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. <http://canlit.ca/reviews/aboriginal_storytelling>.
Rice, Waubgeshig. “8th Fire: Discovering Aboriginal Literature | CBC Books | CBC Radio.” CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, 26 Mar. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. <http://www.cbc.ca/books/2012/01/8th-fire-discovering-aboriginal-literature.html>.
Razack, Sherene “Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George” in Race, Space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society, edited by Sherene Razack, pp. 123-146, 278-283. 2002 Between the Lines
Sherene Razack is a professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses mostly related to social justice. She is the author of several books and the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Association of Political Science’s Best Book on Comparative Racial and Ethnic Research.
In” Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice” Razack discusses the 1995 murder of Pamela George, the legal proceedings following the crime, and the relation of these events to geography, gender and race.
According to Razack’s analysis, the killers of Pamela George (two white male university students) were given a lighter sentence due to George’s identity as Aboriginal and as a sex worker. Razack argues George’s race and occupation were perceived by the court as “naturalizing” her susceptibility to violence. George also points out that George’s frequenting of The Stroll, a neighbourhood of Regina similar to Vancouver’s DTES, demarcated her as spatially vulnerable to violence. In the trial, the judge actually instructed the jury to take George’s infrequent sex work into consideration while deliberating the fate of the accused. The result was that the two men were charged with Manslaughter, rather than first or second degree murder.
Razack’s article has several parallels to Coleman’s, which we are using as a focus of our research. Razack indicates how George is identified as possessing an at-risk identity, and is defined by her oppressor – this is an example of Coleman’s “politics of recognition”, rather than a “politics of respect”. Had Razack’s life been portrayed as inherently valuable, regardless of the labels assigned to her, a politics of respect could have been approached.
Razack moves beyond Coleman’s analysis, in that she acknowledges the reality of gender, race, and geographic oppression as being inescapable. Regardless of our approach to the situation, Pamela George is indicative of a legacy of violence against Aboriginal woman which stretches far back in Canadian history. While it is important to understand George as a human being, who’s life and story are sacred independent of our analysis, it is also important to acknowledge the systems of injustice which our “politics of recognition” are formed around.
Angus, Albert. “Saskatchewan Justice on Trial: The Pamela George Case” Saskatchewan Indian, 27:1 pp 5. 1997. Web. Apr 7 2014.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
“Canada Must probe cases of slain, missing aboriginal women” CBC. Nov 24 2008. Web. Apr 7 2014.
“Health officials seek answers to spike in Saskatchewan HIV cases” CBC. Mar 24 2009. Web. Apr 7 2014.
“Welcome Performance”. Cond. Skeena Reece. Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Mar. 2009. Performance.
Skeena Reece is a performance artist of Tsimshian-Gitskan and Metis-Cree descent. In addition to performance art, her multidisciplinary acts include spoken word, humour, “sacred clowning”, writing, singing, songwriting, video art, and arts administration. She creates provocative pieces that are often concerned with the treatment of Aboriginal women.
This particular performance piece took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery in March 2009 as part of FUSE. Invited to do a Welcoming to her other performance work that would take place later on in the gallery (“Cause that’s what native people do in this town… with a smile and an understanding that that comes from a really colonial place, no matter how Métis you are, I was like let’s do a welcoming” (Decoy)) Reece put her knowledge of stereotypes to work by dressing up and anonymously handing out “Welcome” cards. Dressed “like an eighties chick” (Decoy) listening to eighties music from a beat box and wearing “authentically native” hair tassels, Reece attempted to interact with the bourgeois public who came to see her show. Unsurprisingly and expected, yet still unsettling, most of the passersby refused to acknowledge her because they recognized Reece as the stereotypical poor “chubby Indian” (Claxton 956) girl trying to sell her trinkets. Some thought it was funny whether they knew it was her or not, some unaware people joined in and danced. “Some people were anthropologists and they sat next to me in a respectful manner… and said ‘hi, what are you doing?’ in a really creepy manner” (Decoy). Even the native people who were confronted with the anonymous Reece tended to look away, unable to handle looking at her in such a disrespectful place. She “won” her experiment when a gallery staff member recognized her and “thought [she was] a street person” (Decoy), because finally a person recognized that she was welcoming a group of people who don’t value Reece as a person, only as a performance artist who is well-known in the art community.
Reece forced (and continues to do so) her “audience” to confront their stereotypes when she walked through the crowd of people waiting to see her “performance” (Home Stay) and neglected to notice the real issues surrounding them. The crowd couldn’t move past their recognition and judgment stage when they first saw Reece to even accept her cards as a gesture of respect at a First Nations artist’s screening.
You can view photos and Reece’s own interpretation of the event by visitng the Flickr homepage (http://www.flickr.com) and entering “Skeena Reece Welcome Performance” in the search bar. Additional accounts of the event are found in the annotated Decoy magazine interview.
Burr, Miguel. “New Conversations: Fuck, You Too? – Skeena Reece.” Decoy Magazine. Decoy Magazine, 28 May 2012. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. <http://decoymagazine.ca/fuck-you-too-skeena-reece/>.
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.
Claxton, Dana. “NWC On the Up…Load.” Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Jennifer Kramer, and Ḳi-ḳe-in. Vol. 1. Vancouver: UBC, 2013. 947-62. Print.
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I really enjoyed this article choice. I am fairly familiar with the murder of Pamela George and the legal proceedings that followed the crime. The intersections of race, gender, and class that you and Razack discuss proved to be very influential within the courtroom. I find it troubling that certain descriptors of the people involved seemed to be left out, while others were overemphasized. “Had George’s life been portrayed as inherently valuable, regardless of the labels assigned to her, a politics of respect could have been approached.” Did anyone in the courtroom ask why Pamela George and other Aboriginal women are overrepresented in prostitution or “bad” parts of town? Did she have children to support? Was higher education easily accessible to her? How did family and friends describe her?
Situations like this force one to critically analyze the system and institutional issues we have in place. Would the charges be more severe if the roles had been reversed and the woman murdered was a white (female) escort and the two males were Aboriginal? These are the questions we truly need to ask while self-reflecting to mitigate instances like these from happening again. The extent of the crime and charges essentially came down to race, gender and class; signifiers that are not easily within ones control. These are the realities of many Aboriginal bodies in Canada. Great overall topic all!
Hi Sam
Thanks for your comment! You pose a lot of questions which should have been asked in the courtroom during Pamela George’s trial. Unfortunately, the case of Pamela George is not an isolated incident. In her article Razack describes a centuries-long tradition of sexual violence against Indigenous women in Canada. According to Razack this violence is systematized as part of the colonial process – it reinforces race and gender hierarchies and strengthens colonizer’s senses of entitlement. It could be argued that the questions you have brought up were not asked in the courtroom because the courts themselves are part of this overarching system of violence, control and colonization. I think that in order to step away from a culture of violence against minorities, one of the crucial steps we have to take is to reevaluate our criminal and judicial systems, so that they don’t serve to perpetuate existing injustices.