This Is Not a Peace Pipe by Dale Turner

Author:Dale Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2006-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

5 Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy

We have discarded our broken arrows and our empty quivers, for we know what served us in the past can never serve us again … It is only with tongue and speech that I can fight my people’s war.

Chief Dan George

Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change.

Edward Said

I began this book with a discussion of the White Paper, which Aboriginal peoples hold up as a paradigm example of colonialism under the guise of renewing the political relationship on more just liberal foundations. Subsequent attempts by Alan Cairns and Will Kymlicka to reshape liberalism while respecting the legitimacy of Aboriginal rights failed to address the central problem with White Paper liberalism: its failure to accommodate and respect Aboriginal voices on their own terms. More importantly, contemporary theories of Aboriginal rights continue to marginalize Aboriginal peoples’ philosophical views of justice. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was acutely aware of this problem, not only in theory, but also in Canadian legal and political practices. RCAP’s ‘vision’ of the renewed treaty relationship returned Aboriginal peoples to their rightful place in the relationship but had little to say about how this renewal was to take hold in mainstream Canadian society. Canadians need to be convinced that the nation-to-nation relationship is the just form of political relationship with Aboriginal peoples; generating cogent and useful defences for this position is one of the most difficult challenges facing those who support Aboriginal rights in Canada.

I have not provided yet another ‘theory’ of how the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state ought to look and evolve, because the question of who ought participate in the legal and political practices that determine the meaning and content of Aboriginal rights in Canada precludes the proffering of moral and political theories of justice. It matters who participates because the form and content of the difference (for lack of a better word, of our ‘indigeneity’) that Aboriginal peoples are demanding Canadian governments recognize must be explained to non-Aboriginal people. At least at this point in history, Kymlicka’s constraint is a reality that indigenous peoples have to address. I have suggested that ‘word warriors’ are in the best position to engage these non-indigenous legal and political practices simply because they have been educated in the dominant culture’s intellectual community and therefore ought to be more familiar with its discourses. More to the point, word warriors ought to be intimately familiar with the legal and political discourses of the state, and therefore able to use them to assert, defend, and protect the rights, sovereignty, and nationhood of indigenous communities.

But this form of participation generates an uneasy tension within indigenous communities. This tension arises because we are not at all clear about how the division of intellectual labour ought to be understood within indigenous communities and consequently how our ways of understanding the world ought to be expressed to the dominant culture.

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