In the final chapter of If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories, Chamberlin asks that Canadians accept what he calls “underlying aboriginal title” to the land in North America. However, is a simple acknowledgement of this title enough? What are the implications of his choice of the word “underlying”? Why shouldn’t their connection to this land breach the surface of how Canada is organized today? This final chapter also suggests that such an acknowledgement would not necessitate a change beyond one of story or understanding, and that “it would be a fiction. The facts of life would remain the same” (231). This statement relies on an assumption that systematic stability is preferred, and that tangible change is unnecessary when we are able to find stories that place settlers and Indigenous nations on common ground. This sentiment is representative of a trap I believe much of Canada is caught in today: our government tells stories of reconciliation; Justin Trudeau poses for the media with Indigenous leaders; but meanwhile, in practice, our government funds pipelines which violate the consent of many First Nations’ communities and enacts violence against Indigenous land and water protectors. My overall impression of Chamberlin’s message in his final chapter, “Ceremonies”, is that while we need to change our stories, a point I agree with wholeheartedly, we need not expect large-scale, systematic change.
Words are important to Chamberlin, and “civilization” is one of the loaded words he discusses in his work. On page 31, he references a series of books called The Story of Civilization, which frame “civilization” as a result of agriculture. Reading these paragraphs reminded me of another exploration of the word “civilization” which is quite different from the one presented in Chamberlin’s text. Environmental activist Derek Jensen presents a contrasting definition of civilization in his work “Endgame; The Problem of Civilization” explaining its roots in the word “civil”, meaning “city”. This work explores the ways which being “civilized”, or having the majority of our populations living in cities, results in a need to import resources and creates an unsustainable relationship with the land that we live on. He also describes the ways in which civilizations are hierarchical and violent, deconstructing popular imaginings of the word as something progressive or positive. I find it interesting that while Chamberlin and Jensen’s dissections of the word take such different paths, one pointing to agriculture and the other to the formation of cities, both authors work to dismantle the idea that being “civilized” is somehow progressive or positive.
I have a question for you readers that also relates to Chamberlin’s focus on words and names: Despite acknowledging the problem with referring to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people as “Indians”, Chamberlin goes on to repeatedly use the word Indian to describe them throughout his text. Why do you think this is?
The word Chamberlin uses which I find most relevant to my discussion of his final chapter is “underlying”, which he uses frequently first in the phrase “underlying title” to describe settler responsibility to land, and then in the phrase “underlying aboriginal title”, to describe his desired shift in narrative to one which would “finally provide a constitutional ceremony of belief in the humanity of aboriginal peoples” (231). While I agree with his desire for a shift in narrative, a recognition of this land as Indigenous, and with his overall intentions for a change in ideology, what I wish to discuss further is his suggestion that a change in only story is enough. Chamberlin’s choice of the word “underlying” represents the type of change I see encouraged in his final chapter: one of our deeper understanding, but one which does not breach the surface, one which remains submerged and which fails to alter the systems operating on our lives today which are positioned in this work as above.
For me, the evidence of this issue lies in Chamberlin’s insistence that we can rely on settler institutions to follow through on this shift in ideology. He states that “the grumble about the practicalities of changing to underlying aboriginal title is beside the point. The lawyers would work it out, as they work out many other personifications and paradoxes that characterize our social and economic and political lives” (231). It’s clear that in these statements Chamberlin is attempting to quiet the worries of settlers who are resistant to change. However, the work of pleasing everyone cannot come before justice. We cannot dim the need for radical and systematic change as to not ruffle the feathers of those who the current system benefits most. Chamberlin posits that settler systems of law and government can simply adjust themselves, so that “contingent sovereignties could be articulated in law and reconciled with existing national constitutions” (231). However, attempting to simply “make room” for Indigenous issues within settler systems and failing to restructure these institutions on a large and meaningful scale may not be effective. As Michel Morden explains in “Indigenizing Parliament: Time to Restart a Conversation”, there exists “opposition to any project which seeks to envelop Indigenous peoples into Canadian institutions. This types of projects are often seen as diminishing the nationhood of Indigenous peoples and advancing the assimilationist project”. Simply hoping that our settler systems of law and government can do justice by Indigenous nations erases these institutions’ failures to do so historically and distorts the validity and importance of Indigenous forms of governance as well as the calls for self-sovereignty of many Indigenous nations.
At the end of Chamerlin’s book, he answers the question in its title, “If this is your land, where are your stories?”: the last lines of his text repeat this question and then read “on common ground”. It’s my opinion that this answer works to justify colonial violence, as would any argument against the Gitksan elder who asked this question while working to protect his nation’s home. This ending equates settler imaginings of this land as theirs to plunder with Indigenous relationships to the land as its kin and protectors.
While Chamberlin’s word choice frustrates me, perhaps the reason I take issue with some of this final chapter’s sentiments lies in his discussion of translation from earlier in the novel when he quotes W.E.H Stanner, saying “no English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and it’s homeland” (79). Perhaps it is not Chamberlin’s place to say what shift in wording and understanding can carve out a future of decolonization and whether or not a change in story is enough.
While my post today is overall critical of Chamberlin’s book, I should mention that there were many aspects I also appreciated and enjoyed reading, including his discussion of the importance of preserving endangered languages, his deconstruction of binaries like “them and us” or “oral and written”, and his exploration of what it means to be without a home, among other elements of the work. However, after finishing the book, it was the ending I found most puzzling and was most interested in discussing.
Did others feel similarly about the final chapter of this book? Were any of you also expecting larger calls to action and change than were presented?
Works Cited
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: Volume II Resistance. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2006.
file:///C:/Users/Suzanne/Downloads/Derrick%20Jensen%20Endgame%20vol.2.pdf
Michael Morden, “Indigenizing Parliament: Time to Restart the Conversation.” Canadian Parliamentary Review vol. 39 no. 2, 2016, http://www.revparl.ca/39/2/39n2e_16_Morden.pdf.