Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Tuesday, February 25, 2020

“21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act.” A Review in light of Wet’suwet’sen voices.


As national bestsellers go, Bob Joseph’s book, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, provides valuable context to the history of our First Nations Peoples, particularly given the current Coastal Gaslink pipeline debate – or crisis, rather - that began in northern British Columbia, and which has since spread to other parts of the country with a number of strategic rail and road blockades.  Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs oppose the project, as they lay claim to considerable swaths of unceded land through which the proposed pipeline will run, while most elected Band Councils – which are products of the Indian Act – support it.
   
21 Things, which should be read by all concerned Canadians, methodically details how the Indian Act (1876), created when Sir John A. McDonald was Prime Minister, made Indigenous Peoples (in variation of an oft-repeated phrase) “wards of the state.”[1] Moreover, the subsequent legacy of the Residential school system robbed generations of youth of their family elders, ancestral values and cultural identity, confronted as they were by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so-called denominational educators - and by high rates of death, especially from TB.
    
Echoing the conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the words of Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief of the Supreme Court of Canada, Joseph – like many today – refers to this sordid episode in Canadian history as “cultural genocide”, a term I prefer not to use.  The important memoir, The Education of Augie Merasty, for example, which gives a child’s eye view of the Residential school system, does not compare to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, or Elie Wiesel’s terror-fraught Night, and here I am in accord with Merasty’s own co-writer and editor, David Carpenter, who concedes “Augie might differ with me on this”.[2]  The sheer industrial scale and deliberate mass destruction of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazi’s who were either gassed, incinerated - and sometimes shot, when considered cost-effective - or turned into soap products, suggests that a “genocidal” approximation of these two different historical experiences – Jewish and Indigenous –  is not quite tenable.

So what do we call the Indigenous experience in Canada since the Indian Act?  An “historical wrong” is a generic term Justin Trudeau sometimes uses.  A system of “apartheid” is perhaps a more valuable and historically generalizable designation employed by Tommy Douglas when he was Premier of Saskatchewan.[3] A form of apartheid persists even today, and we can make comparisons between the Indigenous and the Palestinians, as each are in their own ways “a landless people", or deterritorialized, to use the term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since popularized by legions of admirers of the two postmodern French thinkers who wrote a number of seminal works together – one as a philosopher and the other as psychiatrist.[4]

When looking at the greater nineteenth century context, “historical error” - or, in more modern parlance: “fake history” - is a term which apparently has its rightful place according to another French thinker Ernest Renan in his classic essay of 1882, “What is a nation?”[5]  He explains that “historical enquiry brings back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origins of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally …”[6] Renan insists that “the act of forgetting … is an essential factor in the creation of a nation” and he adds that “progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality.”[7]
 
In other words, Renan might be construed as someone who – at first blush - considers Indigenous studies at our schools and universities a threat to Canadian nationhood, but his notion of such is that it presupposes “all individuals have many things in common.”[8]  He is not a racialized thinker: in fact, he considers Europe to be a thorough mix of apparent “races”, and he argues that “the primordial right of races is narrow and full of danger for true progress”.[9]  Renan also goes on to anticipate a “European confederation” in the future.[10]  But, even more significantly, Renan promotes the right of national self-determination as first proclaimed by the French Revolution with an eye to revisiting Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.  “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle …. A nation is therefore a vast solidarity.”[11] More famously, as he puts it, a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”[12]

Even though the right to vote in the nineteenth century was restricted (only white men and those who held property or who payed taxes were eligible), the electoral principle - ostensibly a European construct, one could argue - was introduced into the Indian Act, thus disrupting existing traditional matriarchies. Not only were Indigenous lands in a number of provinces reduced to postage stamp-size reserves, the Indian Act specified that “First Nations must have an election every two years.”[13] This electoral principle (and Canadian Confederation) occurred – not by chance, I would argue - along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867 which enfranchised large numbers of the working classes in both England and Wales. Tragically, however, the right to vote beyond the reserve was not extended to all Indigenous Peoples until it was introduced by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1960, though Indigenous veterans of WWI were granted the vote in 1924.[14]

This electoral principle is still at the nub of the Wet’suwet’sen debate.  Band Chiefs, who have “status” according to the Indian Act, are elected to a limited term and support the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project.  Hereditary Chiefs, according to Bob Joseph, “have power passed down from one generation to the next along blood lines or other cultural protocols” (though in the case of the Wet’suwet’sen which of the two is not very clear), and they oppose the project because it runs through their traditional territory.[15] Josephs goes on to say – and this should be subject to further analysis - that the Hereditary Chiefs are “similar to European royalty”.[16]  Similar to European royalty when – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  Queen Victoria, as is well-known, chose the location of Canada’s capital, Ottawa; she also chose the name of New Westminster as the original capital of British Columbia, so she participated in the colonial process on one level at least.  She also enjoyed good relations with Benjamin Disraeli, so her influence was likely by means of protocol and supine deference. Overall, the British Empire represented colonial rule in the name of its monarch, which dates back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, also - and this is no coincidence - the mainspring for the Crusades which followed.

Today’s European royalty, however, are mere titular figures – constitutional symbols that have no real authority outside of ceremony.  The examples of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle suggest that pomp and circumstance are no shield from the invasive scrutiny of royals by the British popular press.  In other words, the Wet’suwet’sen Hereditary Chiefs who lay claim to an occupation of land that numbers in the thousands of years appear to exercise a kind of power that exceeds that of European royalty today, such that they can spark a national crisis – rather unlike Queen Elizabeth II whose role is to stay above the fray of politics (but who is also by no means marginalized).

European democracy advanced hand in hand with science – in particular positivism, with its focus on the observable, as found for example in Renan – in the nineteenth and later in the twentieth centuries. Central to this was the expanded electoral vote, which worked against hereditary influences in society mitigating the role of the Crown.  Today’s Supreme Court of Canada, with support from the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, indicates that there must be “nation to nation” dialogue with the First Nations. This brings us back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which indeed first articulated such a relationship between the Indigenous and “settlers”, a lapse in the longer tradition of British imperialism - later revived by the Industrial Revolution - following a costly Seven Years’ War.[17] In other words, Canadians are being held to account to an agreement when a monarchy, using its “soft power,” was apparently more inclined to recognize other hereditary chiefs, that is, when the English Crown still had a measure of influence.
  
Most of us in the modern world – with the exception of the Saudi royal family and perhaps Donald Trump's White House - have moved on from the idea of hereditary power.  Is the idea of an unlimited tenure with actual authority, or the hereditary chiefdom of the Wet’suwet’sen, consistent with Canadian democracy as we know it today? Or am I imposing my own Western values?  Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, himself, a kind of Liberal Party hereditary chief, eldest son to Pierre Trudeau?  These are questions we must ask ourselves as we – Canadians and First Nations – work towards Reconciliation, and with that in mind 21 Things is a good first step.




[1] Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam, BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018), p. 60.
[2] David Carpenter in Joseph Auguste Merasty (with David Carpenter), The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir, ed. David Carpenter (Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2015), p. xxxiv.
[3] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 45.
[4] François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives, tr.Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 258.
[5] Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? And Other Political Writings, ed. and tr. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 251.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid. The full sentence reads “Now, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”
[9] Ibid., p. 254.
[10] Ibid., p. 262.
[11] Ibid., p. 251.
[12] See Ibid., pp. 261, 262  Giglioli translates these key words mundanely as “an everyday plebiscite.” Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, points out that Hobsbawm in his Nations and Nationalism since 1780 offers a superior translation: “a nation is a daily plebisicite.”  In the original French: « L’existence d’une nation est (pardonnez-moi cette métaphore) une plébiscite de tous les jours. » See Renan, Oeuvre Complètes de Ernest Renan, I, ed. Henrietta Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [nd]), pp. 904,903.  See Stefan Collini , “The Enlightened Vote,” London Review of Books Vol 41, No. 24 (19 December 2019), p. 10. Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 7. 
[13] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 109.
[14] Ibid., pp. 81, 82.
[15] Ibid., p. 109.
[16] Ibid.
[17] For some text and discussion of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 see Joseph, 21 Things, pp. 82, 83.

Monday, February 10, 2020

Mitt Romney and “A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants”


Mitt Romney’s speech in the Senate on February 5, when, against the constitutional invertebracy of his fellow Republicans, he voted to impeach President Trump, draws inspiration from the classic Huguenot text in revolutionary literature, known as Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants,[1] published in 1579 during the era of the French religious wars. More particularly it appeared after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, along with other less-celebrated resistance documents.  Vindiciae was re-issued in mid-17th century England at the height of its Civil Wars, and it later helped shape Locke’s thinking in Two Treatises of Government (1690).[2]

It is not my purpose here to discuss the text of Vindiciae at any length, portions of which can be found in a previous blog entry of mine dated January 2012 (see the link below).  Rather, I wish to point out that Romney, who (as he says) is “profoundly religious”, and who believes the American Constitution to be “inspired by Providence” shares a central assumption with this historic text, as George H. Sabine puts it in his A History of Political Theory (1971): “Every Christian must agree that his duty is to obey God rather than the king, in case the king commands anything against God’s law.”[3]  In his work Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (1969), Julian Franklin makes much the same point but in a somewhat more explicit fashion echoing Romney, his love for family and country, and his deep conscience: “The Vindiciae, finally, begins very cautiously but clearly to anticipate resistance by private individuals who have been specially inspired by the call of God.”[4]

Click here for further text and discussion of Vindiciae:

Click here for Mitt Romney’s speech:



[1] For the sake of brevity and clarity I shall refer to the text here as Vindiciae.
[2] Although the first edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1690, it was written before the events of 1688 and the Glorious Revolution of 1689.  See Peter Laslett, “‘Two Treatises of Government’ and the Revolution of 1688” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 45-66, esp. p. 65.
[3] George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd ed., revised. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 380.
[4] Julian H. Franklin in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay, ed. and tr. Julian Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 43.

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Trump’s Senate “Acquittal” – a tweet


Given that neo-infantilism is all the rage at the White House, it’s not surprising to see a bunch of toddler-types (bar one) play follow the leader.[1]


[1] For more on Trump the “neo-infantilist”, etc., see Adam Shatz, “Too Important to Kill” in The London Review of Books, Vol 42, No. 2 (23 January 2020), p. 3 ff. 

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Greta Thunberg’s first inspiration: “The Little Prince”


Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, especially the speech “Can You Hear Me?” (delivered in London to the Houses of Parliament on 23 April 2019) evokes aspects of The Little Prince:

Throughout my life, I have been in touch with many kinds of serious people.  I have lived a great deal with grown-ups.  I have seen them intimately, close at hand.  And that, I’m afraid hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.[1]

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943).




[1] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: VIVI Books, 2018), p. 4.  See also Greta Thunberg, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (London: Penguin Random House, 2019), pp. 57-68.