Soft bigotry leads to hard suffering

Condescending to “natural man”

By

James Pew

Indigenous issues around the globe suffer a similar problem: Policies based on false analysis which distract attention from real local issues. 

Generally speaking, modern indigenous policies can be characterized as irrational. It is telling that they have been constructed within the Western Theoretical tradition; a deviation from the Western empirical tradition. This type of “Theory” undermines fact-collecting, evidence-gathering and philosophically sound argumentation. It cannot be squared with reality, or proven objectively. So what purpose does it serve?

It is my belief that Theory - capital “T” which, among other things, denotes the prioritization of subjective speculation over objective observation - is simply an effective way to impose, over a long arc of time, an unpopular political ideology or movement. There is perhaps no better example of this than the activist organized international movement of indigenous people - which sees its most poignant modern expression in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). An examination of the discourse and history of scholarship of “the Declaration,” and of the influence it holds on public policy concerning indigenous issues in countries like Canada, highlighting the inexorable connection local policies have to the international movement of indigenous people, illustrates the slow encroachment and concept-creep underpinning the general irrationality of modern indigenous politics.

As noted by a prominent critic, UNDRIP discussions “evolved from support for integration and nondiscrimination to indigenous cultural preservation and autonomy.”¹ Stated differently, UNDRIP discussions began in the world of the rational, but ended firmly in the irrational. To make matters worse, many countries, including Canada, have officially committed to UNDRIP implementation.

It is worth stating that the origins of this irrationality, in many ways, was rooted in a humanitarian desire for social justice. UNDRIP is meant to be an international framework for mediating this. But naïve and wishful romantic thinking, along with much corruption and opportunism, have resulted in a broken discourse unable to address the material needs of the indigenous underclass all over the world. Material conditions, while often used to point out the ongoing suffering of poor indigenous people, is not the focus of the discourse around indigenous policy.  Instead, addressing historical wrongs or Theorizing around ethnic inheritance of rights to self-determination or concerns over the maintenance of outmoded indigenous cultural features are said to be of consequential importance. Why?  Because, apparently, indigenous people represent the world’s only people living in man's “natural state.” And worse, contact with Europeans, instead of offering the advantages of civilization, represents a break with this highly revered and much sought after, natural, although racially determined, rendition of man. The implication being that Europeans are unnatural, and their presence poisons the ability of indigenous people to be natural - the way the creator intended I presume. Europeans can’t ever by nature become natural, and of course, as it is implied, natural is better than unnatural.

We all began as hunter-gatherers. This idea that indigenous people are ambassadors of natural humanity is ridiculous. Even if it were true, why would we design policies to keep indigenous people arrested in a “natural” (primitive) state? And how does this thinking lead to indigenous socio-economic issues being meaningfully addressed today? If the indigenous people of the world were at one point in time living in “man’s” natural state, that situation ended 15 minutes after contact was first made with any member of a more advanced group. Considering the Canadian context - where contact was followed by an era of co-dependence - the indigenous, once introduced to metal products like guns, tools and beaver traps, became dependent on European traders to supply them. On the other hand, the Europeans were dependent on the indigenous to supply furs and teach settlers how to survive in the hostile Canadian wilderness. But Theorists only see conflict, never the search for agreement, cooperation or any measure of harmony that may have existed.

The Theories around man’s natural state were once naively expounded upon by Rousseau who speculated that primitive man existed in edenic conditions. From him comes the “Myth of the Noble Savage,” where Theorists think and write in idealized terms when referring to indigenous people. They forever excuse indigenous acts of conquest or violence, while viewing those same acts committed by the more advanced civilizations of Europe as oppressive colonizing crimes against humanity in urgent need of redress through payment of reparations and returning of “stolen” land.

This tendency towards willful blindness or the downplaying of the crimes of indigenous people - either in a modern context or in pre-contact Canada - is fast becoming a tired routine. A fallacious habit involving treating European history in the opposite fashion by applying a gravely unfair level of scrutiny. Driven by toxic empathy - empathy convinced of its love of the other, by the hate for itself - there is no moral or logical justification for such condescension and irrationality. 

The patronizing extends to countless untruths. Indigenous “ways of knowing,” beyond being studied as cultural artifact, cannot be taken seriously in any shape or form, unless you first use a lever of condescension to engender a perceived rationality that would otherwise hold no weight. What are we to say to indigenous activists who contest the findings of anthropologists concerning the migrations of roughly 18,000 years ago across the Bering Strait? These migrations are the true beginning of colonization in Canada; the origins of modern people in the Americas. The facts of this are only challenged by activists. It is condescending to nod along with indigenous activists who claim “the creator” placed the indigenous in the Americas at the beginning of time. While this may be spiritual, it is also mythical and untruthful, and has real world modern implications affecting the false analysis that guides indigenous public policy. It is false and damaging to see the indigenous of the Americas as anything more than the first waves of explorers who lived a primitive existence in a brutally harsh environment until contact with Europeans catapulted them into modern civilization.

Before contact with European explorers of the modern period, there were at least three main waves of migration across the “land bridge” of a frozen Bering strait occurring over many millennia. Further, the initial waves migrated south to warmer temperatures, as Canada was covered in glacier until approximately 12,000 years ago. The arctic and subarctic were not inhabited by people until much more recently:

“The ancestral AleutInuit may have begun to colonize the far north only in the past 4,000 years. The ancestors of the Cree are dated from 3,000 years ago (Mason 2000), while the proto-Athapascans are dated from 2,000 years ago (Clark 2000)...However, it cannot be doubted that some of the First Nations were not merely immigrants but actually colonizers. Innu, for instance, entered the Quebec-Labrador peninsula only 1,800 years ago, displacing and assimilating earlier populations (Mailhot 1999:51). ”²

During this pre-contact period there was war, conquest, slavery, torture and genocide that went on for thousands of years across the Americas. To pretend otherwise, or to believe that “natural man,” the inherent capacity to perform the feats of a hunter-gatherer, still exists in the DNA of modern indigenous people, who have for many generations been cut off from such harsh primitive lifeways, is sheer madness. To further Theorize based on these inane assumptions, and promote a return to the moment before contact, where indigenous culture can develop anew, as a means of ameliorating the present day alienation and social strife, is an evil that begins with condescending idealized untruths and a soft bigotry of low expectations, but ends with real-world suffering.

Falsity and condescension is in the Theories, in the discourse, and in the policies. Until we get it out…God help the indigenous people of the world.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read Reconsidering Reconciliation: Weighing Canada's successes and failures

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1. Aboriginal Rights and Our Common Future - CPSA - Frances Widdowson.pdf

2.  kuper-native.pdf (unl.edu) (Page 4)