The Long Remembering

Tradition has declined permanent exhibition status

Reading context. Borrows dismantles false tradition by showing that categories of Indigeneity are context-dependent political, social, legal, linguistic, and cultural facts that change over time. He does not make them meaningless; he denies any single trait status as an unalterable core. The authenticity checklist has misplaced its eternal warranty.

Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism

In my view, there is no timeless trait, characteristic, custom, or idea that is categorically fundamental to being Indigenous. The categories of Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Cree, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine, Dakota, Secwepmec, Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nuulth, Gitksan, Tlingit, Haida, Dene, Metis, Inuit, etc., are all context-dependent classifications. They are political, social, legal, linguistic, and/or cultural facts that are fluid and subject to change through time. Indigeneity does not necessarily reside in any particular blood, language, land, culture, clan, family grouping, spiritual practice, economic activity, story, teaching, song, relationship, etc. – though these criteria are very important components of belonging in particular contexts. It is misleading to claim that Indigenous societies possess an unalterable central essence or core. This is what I label false tradition. While each category looks and feels relatively stable from the inside, if measured by short-term (centuries-long) metrics, changes in society, which may be gradual, can produce dramatic shifts over the longer term.

Borrows, John. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

PDF pp. 15–16; printed pp. 3–4; selected excerpt is the Introduction opening on PDF p. 15 / printed p. 3, from “In my view” through “dramatic shifts over the longer term”; stop before Borrows expands the argument.

Tradition has declined permanent exhibition status

Reading context. Borrows dismantles false tradition by showing that categories of Indigeneity are context-dependent political, social, legal, linguistic, and cultural facts that change over time. He does not make them meaningless; he denies any single trait status as an unalterable core. The authenticity checklist has misplaced its eternal warranty.

Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism

In my view, there is no timeless trait, characteristic, custom, or idea that is categorically fundamental to being Indigenous. The categories of Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Cree, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine, Dakota, Secwepmec, Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nuulth, Gitksan, Tlingit, Haida, Dene, Metis, Inuit, etc., are all context-dependent classifications. They are political, social, legal, linguistic, and/or cultural facts that are fluid and subject to change through time. Indigeneity does not necessarily reside in any particular blood, language, land, culture, clan, family grouping, spiritual practice, economic activity, story, teaching, song, relationship, etc. – though these criteria are very important components of belonging in particular contexts. It is misleading to claim that Indigenous societies possess an unalterable central essence or core. This is what I label false tradition. While each category looks and feels relatively stable from the inside, if measured by short-term (centuries-long) metrics, changes in society, which may be gradual, can produce dramatic shifts over the longer term.

Borrows, John. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

PDF pp. 15–16; printed pp. 3–4; selected excerpt is the Introduction opening on PDF p. 15 / printed p. 3, from “In my view” through “dramatic shifts over the longer term”; stop before Borrows expands the argument.

Tradition has declined permanent exhibition status

Reading context. Borrows dismantles false tradition by showing that categories of Indigeneity are context-dependent political, social, legal, linguistic, and cultural facts that change over time. He does not make them meaningless; he denies any single trait status as an unalterable core. The authenticity checklist has misplaced its eternal warranty.

Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism

In my view, there is no timeless trait, characteristic, custom, or idea that is categorically fundamental to being Indigenous. The categories of Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Cree, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine, Dakota, Secwepmec, Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nuulth, Gitksan, Tlingit, Haida, Dene, Metis, Inuit, etc., are all context-dependent classifications. They are political, social, legal, linguistic, and/or cultural facts that are fluid and subject to change through time. Indigeneity does not necessarily reside in any particular blood, language, land, culture, clan, family grouping, spiritual practice, economic activity, story, teaching, song, relationship, etc. – though these criteria are very important components of belonging in particular contexts. It is misleading to claim that Indigenous societies possess an unalterable central essence or core. This is what I label false tradition. While each category looks and feels relatively stable from the inside, if measured by short-term (centuries-long) metrics, changes in society, which may be gradual, can produce dramatic shifts over the longer term.

Borrows, John. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

PDF pp. 15–16; printed pp. 3–4; selected excerpt is the Introduction opening on PDF p. 15 / printed p. 3, from “In my view” through “dramatic shifts over the longer term”; stop before Borrows expands the argument.

The detached observer has misplaced the living world

Reading context. Cajete follows educational alienation into a structural redesign: detached content and perpetual observation give way to participation, sustainable foundations, holistic knowledge, process, systemic science, and networking. The move changes the relations that organize learning, not merely the vocabulary on a course outline.

Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education

This ideal of education directly contrasts with the dominant orientation of American education that continues to emphasize objective content and experience detached from primary sources and community. This conditioning, to exist as a marginal participant and perpetual observer, is a foundational element of the crisis of American education and the alienation of modern man from his own being and the natural world. In response to such a monumental crisis, American education must forge educational processes that are for Life's Sake and honor the Indigenous roots of America. A true transition of today's American educational orientations, to more sustainable and connected foundations, requires serious consideration of other cultural, life-enhancing, and ecologically viable forms of education. Traditional American Indian forms of education must be considered conceptual wellsprings for the “new” kinds of educational thought that can address the tremendous challenges of the twenty-first century. Tribal education presents models and universal foundations to transform American education and develop a “new” paradigm for curricula that will make a difference for Life's Sake. To begin such a process, American education must move from a focus on specialization to holistic knowledge; from a focus on structures to understanding processes, from objective science, to systemic science, and from building to networking.

Cajete, Gregory. Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Durango, CO: Kivaki Press, 1994.

PDF pp. 25–26; selected excerpt begins late on PDF p. 25 with “This ideal of education directly contrasts” and continues through the structural shifts ending in “networking” on PDF p. 26.

Land declines the position of background asset

Reading context. Coulthard shifts the analytic centre from proletarianization to dispossession and from land as commodity to land as reciprocal relations and obligations. Grounded normativity names Indigenous land-connected practices, not a scenic metaphor for anyone seeking ethical ambience. The resource industry’s brochure has been returned with several obligations attached.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

When this historical consideration is situated alongside the contemporary fact that there has been, first, a steady increase in Native migration to urban centers over the last few decades, and, second, that many First Nation communities are situated on or near lands coveted by the resource exploitation industry, it is reasonable to conclude that disciplining Indigenous life to the cold rationality of market principles will remain on state and industry’s agenda for some time to follow. In this respect Marx’s thesis still stands. What I want to point out, rather, is that when related back to the primitive accumulation thesis it appears that the history and experience of *dispossession*, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Just as importantly, I would also argue that dispossession continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has provoked. Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around *the question of land*—a struggle not only *for* land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land *as system of reciprocal relations and obligations* can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” I call this place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice *grounded normativity*, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

PDF p. 29; printed p. 13; Introduction; read the contextual revision of primitive accumulation on PDF pp. 28–30.

Secularization kept the old permissions table

Reading context. Gordon introduces this complete block quotation with ‘Writes Wynter:’. Wynter’s nested passage traces how a culturally specific Christian binary is secularized into Man and Human Other. The station inference is that secularization changed the interface while retaining a permissions structure; that sentence is deliberately outside the source excerpt.

Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections

Writes Wynter: Man as a new (and ostensibly universal because supracultural) conception of the human had in fact been invented by a specific culture, that of western Europe, during the sixteenth century…, the anthropologist Jacob Pandian notes that this invention had been made possible only on the basis of a parallel invention…. This had been so, he explains, because while western Europe was to effect the transformation of its medieval religious identity of the True Christian Self into the now secularizing identity of Man, it was confronted with the task of inventing a new form of binarily opposed Otherness to Man, one that could reoccupy, in secular terms, the place that its conception of the Untrue Christian Self had taken in the matrix of the religio-cultural conception of the human, Christian. In consequence, where the Other to the True Christian Self of medieval Europe had been the Untrue Christian Self (with the external Others being Idolaters and/or Infidels), with the invention of Man in two forms (one civic humanism, the other in the context of that of Liberal or economic humanism which took place at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century), Europe was to invent the Other to Man in two parallel forms. And, because Man was now posited as a supracultural universal, its Other had logically to be defined as the Human Other.

Gordon, Lewis R. “Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections.” In After Man, Towards the Human, edited by Anthony Bogues, 237–257. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2006.

PDF pp. 6-8; printed pagination not visible in the supplied chapter file; selected contiguous block on PDF p. 6 begins with Gordon’s ‘Writes Wynter:’ and retains the complete nested quotation through Human Other.

Confinement composed the category it claimed to contain

Reading context. Content note: historical mental-health language, confinement, segregation, and coercion. Foucault examines a European archive; this sequence cannot be transposed onto Indigenous confinement, carceral institutions, or colonial policy without Indigenous-led evidence of the specific history. Station limit: Foucault is a bounded diagnostic instrument for this European archive, not an Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, decolonial, or settler-colonial authority; route the mechanism back to Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, and settler-colonial analysis elsewhere in this field.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

There must have formed, silently and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, that suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement. To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

PDF pp. 65-66; printed pp. 45-46; Chapter 2, “The Great Confinement”; preceding paragraphs describe a heterogeneous population held in European institutions; next paragraph calls confinement a police matter organized around compulsory labor before cure.

Secularization kept the old permissions table

Reading context. Gordon introduces this complete block quotation with ‘Writes Wynter:’. Wynter’s nested passage traces how a culturally specific Christian binary is secularized into Man and Human Other. The station inference is that secularization changed the interface while retaining a permissions structure; that sentence is deliberately outside the source excerpt.

Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections

Writes Wynter: Man as a new (and ostensibly universal because supracultural) conception of the human had in fact been invented by a specific culture, that of western Europe, during the sixteenth century…, the anthropologist Jacob Pandian notes that this invention had been made possible only on the basis of a parallel invention…. This had been so, he explains, because while western Europe was to effect the transformation of its medieval religious identity of the True Christian Self into the now secularizing identity of Man, it was confronted with the task of inventing a new form of binarily opposed Otherness to Man, one that could reoccupy, in secular terms, the place that its conception of the Untrue Christian Self had taken in the matrix of the religio-cultural conception of the human, Christian. In consequence, where the Other to the True Christian Self of medieval Europe had been the Untrue Christian Self (with the external Others being Idolaters and/or Infidels), with the invention of Man in two forms (one civic humanism, the other in the context of that of Liberal or economic humanism which took place at the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century), Europe was to invent the Other to Man in two parallel forms. And, because Man was now posited as a supracultural universal, its Other had logically to be defined as the Human Other.

Gordon, Lewis R. “Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man? Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections.” In After Man, Towards the Human, edited by Anthony Bogues, 237–257. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2006.

PDF pp. 6-8; printed pagination not visible in the supplied chapter file; selected contiguous block on PDF p. 6 begins with Gordon’s ‘Writes Wynter:’ and retains the complete nested quotation through Human Other.

Freedom has misplaced its production records

Reading context. Lowe reads the archive’s organization as active political work: affirmation for liberal freedom, forgetting for seizure, slavery, migration, and differentiated unfreedom. The missing production records are not missing at random. They have been promoted to national innocence.

The Intimacies of Four Continents

To make legible the forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation, and independence, I devise other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories. In a sense, one aim of my project is to be more specific about what I would term the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalizes the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding. This economy civilizes and develops freedoms for “man” in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree. Liberal forms of political economy, culture, government, and history propose a narrative of freedom overcoming enslavement that at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness. The social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these processes through which “the human” is “freed” by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from “the human.” My study could be considered an unlikely or unsettling genealogy of modern liberalism, which examines liberalism as a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others. By genealogy, I mean that my analysis does not accept given categories and concepts as fixed or constant, but rather takes as its work the inquiry into how those categories became established as given, and with what effects.

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 16-19; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Chapter 1; begin with the method for reading omitted encounters and stop after Lowe defines genealogy as inquiry into how categories became given.

Modernity has a load-bearing underside

Reading context. Mignolo situates coloniality within the Latin American modernity/coloniality project and names European invasion, enslaved African trade, and the making of the Americas. Decoloniality here is a located argument and option, not a universal adjective for political goodness.

The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options

Coloniality names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, although downplayed, dimension. The concept as used herein, and by the collective modernity/coloniality, is not intended to be a totalitarian concept, but rather one that specifies a particular project: that of the idea of modernity and its constitutive and darker side, coloniality, that emerged with the history of European invasions of Abya Yala, Tawantinsuyu, and Anahuac; the formation of the Americas and the Caribbean; and the massive trade of enslaved Africans. Coloniality is already a decolonial concept, and decolonial projects can be traced back to the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It is one project that does not pretend to become the project. Thus, it is one particular option among those that I call here decolonial options. Modernity is a complex narrative whose point of origination was Europe; a narrative that builds Western civilization by celebrating its achievements while hiding at the same time its darker side, coloniality. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity. There is no modernity without coloniality.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

PDF pp. 43–45; printed pp. 1–3; Introduction, ‘Coloniality’; the route moves from Quijano’s concept to the thesis that modernity and coloniality are constitutive rather than sequential.

Confinement composed the category it claimed to contain

Reading context. Content note: historical mental-health language, confinement, segregation, and coercion. Foucault examines a European archive; this sequence cannot be transposed onto Indigenous confinement, carceral institutions, or colonial policy without Indigenous-led evidence of the specific history. Station limit: Foucault is a bounded diagnostic instrument for this European archive, not an Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, decolonial, or settler-colonial authority; route the mechanism back to Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, and settler-colonial analysis elsewhere in this field.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

There must have formed, silently and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, that suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement. To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

PDF pp. 65-66; printed pp. 45-46; Chapter 2, “The Great Confinement”; preceding paragraphs describe a heterogeneous population held in European institutions; next paragraph calls confinement a police matter organized around compulsory labor before cure.

The clinic reorganized what counted as visible

Reading context. Foucault traces a reorganization of seeing and saying in European clinical medicine. This is institutional history, not medical advice, an account of Indigenous medicine, or a free-floating theory of “the gaze.” Station limit: Foucault is a bounded diagnostic instrument for this European archive, not an Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, decolonial, or settler-colonial authority; route the mechanism back to Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, and settler-colonial analysis elsewhere in this field.

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Modern medicine has fixed its own date of birth as being in the last years of the eighteenth century. Reflecting on its situation, it identifies the origin of its positivity with a return—over and above all theory—to the modest but effecting level of the perceived. In fact, this supposed empiricism is not based on a rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible, nor on the predetermined rejection of systems and all their chimeras, but on a reorganization of that manifest and secret space that opened up when a millennial gaze paused over men’s sufferings. Nonetheless the rejuvenation of medical perception, the way colours and things came to life under the illuminating gaze of the first clinicians is no mere myth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, doctors described what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and the expressible, but this did not mean that, after over-indulging in speculation, they had begun to perceive once again, or that they listened to reason rather than to imagination; it meant that the relation between the visible and invisible—which is necessary to all concrete knowledge—changed its structure, revealing through gaze and language what had previously been below and beyond their domain. A new alliance was forged between words and things, enabling one to see and to say.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Translation originally published by Tavistock Publications in 1973.

PDF p. 16; printed p. xii; Preface; preceding page states the method as an inquiry into the historical articulation of medical language and its object; next paragraph tests the claim through descriptions of brain pathology.

Normality received a clinical appointment

Reading context. Foucault traces a European medical shift from health toward institutional standards of normal functioning. This does not authorize him over Indigenous health, disability, or colonial medicine. The following race and civilization material is outside this excerpt and requires separate source and cultural review. Station limit: Foucault is a bounded diagnostic instrument for this European archive, not an Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, decolonial, or settler-colonial authority; route the mechanism back to Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, and settler-colonial analysis elsewhere in this field.

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

It is important to determine how and in what manner the various forms of medical knowledge pertained to the positive notions of ‘health’ and ‘normality’. Generally speaking, it might be said that up to the end of the eighteenth century medicine related much more to health than to normality; it did not begin by analysing a ‘regular’ functioning of the organism and go on to seek where it had deviated, what it was disturbed by, and how it could be brought back into normal working order; it referred, rather, to qualities of vigour, suppleness, and fluidity, which were lost in illness and which it was the task of medicine to restore. To this extent, medical practice could accord an important place to regimen and diet, in short, to a whole rule of life and nutrition that the subject imposed upon himself. This privileged relation between medicine and health involved the possibility of being one’s own physician. Nineteenth-century medicine, on the other hand, was regulated more in accordance with normality than with health; it formed its concepts and prescribed its interventions in relation to a standard of functioning and organic structure, and physiological knowledge—once marginal and purely theoretical knowledge for the doctor—was to become established (Claude Bernard bears witness to this) at the very centre of all medical reflexion.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Translation originally published by Tavistock Publications in 1973.

PDF p. 59; printed p. 35; Chapter 2, “A Political Consciousness”; preceding page gives medicine a normative role in defining a model person and standards for life; following sentences trace the normal/pathological opposition into human sciences and descriptions of race and civilization.

The apparently empty space has begun taking minutes

Reading context. Ermine turns the space between distinct thought worlds into an object of ethical and legal attention. Recognition at the surface is insufficient because assumptions, interests, histories, and feelings continue to organize the encounter underneath. The empty meeting room has been carrying power the entire time.

The Ethical Space of Engagement

On the surface, the presence of the other is acknowledged, but it is space between people, at the unstated, unseen level of thought and feeling that is overwhelming in the picture. Poole directs our focus to that space and invites us to reflect on the electrifying nature of that area between entities that we thought was empty. It is the contention here that this similar schismatic ambience is created between peoples and cultures, and in particular whenever and wherever the physical and philosophical encounter of Indigenous and Western worlds takes place. At the superficial level of encounter, the two entities may indeed acknowledge each other but there is a clear lack of substance or depth to the encounter. What remains hidden and enfolded are the deeper level thoughts, interests and assumptions that will inevitably influence and animate the kind of relationship the two can have. It is this deeper level force, the underflow-become-influential, the enfolded dimension that needs to be acknowledged and brought to bear in the complex situation produced by confronting knowledge and legal systems.

Ermine, Willie. “The Ethical Space of Engagement.” Indigenous Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2007): 193–203.

PDF pp. 2–3; printed pp. 194–195; begin with “On the” at the foot of PDF p. 2, continue with “surface” on PDF p. 3, and stop before section II, “Ethics.”

Dialogue has been denied merger privileges

Reading context. Battiste, following Willie Ermine, frames ethical space as contentious encounter between knowledge systems, not fusion and not polite multicultural display. Assumptions, interests, harms, responsibilities, and boundaries must become speakable. The dialogue table has been informed that swallowing one participant is not a successful meeting.

Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit

Ethical space was theorized initially by Roger Poole in his book *Toward Deep Subjectivity* (1972), and applied by Willie Ermine (2007) to the two sets of intentions confronting the in-between space that connects Indigenous and Eurocentric knowledge systems. Ermine’s inspiration came from the space that is created when Indigenous and Western thought are brought together. It is not a merge or a clash, but a space that is new, electrifying, and even contentious, but ultimately has the potential for an interchange or dialogue of the assumptions, values, and interests each holds. Adding ethics to this space then speaks to the harms and enhancements, and “entertains our personal capacity and our integrity to stand up for cherished notions of good, responsibility, and duty. . .” (p. 195). In other words, it makes one consider the limits of the boundaries one chooses, and reconsider how what one chooses may infringe on another’s space or standards, codes of conduct, or the community ethos in each community. It is in this space that Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can begin to truthfully speak to the predicaments and issues that face them and the standards they speak for. It is an enabling space that needs to be a foundation for a first encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Battiste, Marie. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing, 2013.

PDF p. 107; printed p. 105; “Generating an Ethical Space for Decolonization”; continue to power and curricular authority.

Treaty refuses the past tense

Reading context. Mackey contrasts the Crown’s bounded, extinguishment-oriented treaty frame with treaty as an ongoing relation among nations. Selective OCR was proofed against rendered pages; the passage concerns land, Crown law, and settler expectation rather than a metaphorical promise.

Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization

to actually see and listen in new ways, and then be able to imagine new relationships that are not based on coloniality. This is what I mean by the necessity of unsettling epistemologies of mastery in order to participate in decolonization. In other words, participation needs to be attentive and critically self-reflexive. How treaty is conceptualized is important. The Crown saw, and often continues to see, treaty in very different ways from Indigenous peoples. Many Canadians, including the anti-land claim activists I spoke with, still ‘regard treaties as an extinguishment of rights, and acceptance of the supremacy of the crown, and a generous gift of land to the Indians so they might have land of their own’ (Government of Canada 1983, cited in Valaskakis 2005, 77). As discussed, the underlying assumption of Canadian law regarding Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty is that Crown sovereignty always trumps Indigenous sovereignty. Many governments and settler citizens thus see treaties as contained, completed and bounded objects that are not relevant anymore, and certainly not pivotal to an ongoing process of negotiating equal relationships between nations. Treaties are seen as past strategic performances, now delineated in time and in a manner expedient for nation-building. They are conceptualized with a kind of temporal fixity, reflecting perhaps ideas about the fixity and certainty of property entitlement in western property regimes. [...] Nevertheless, complex Indigenous meanings of treaty, and thus the building of ongoing relationships of mutuality and respect, have most often been occluded in assertions of superior Crown sovereignty. [...] many of the foundations of settler identities and practices need to be unsettled so that we can learn to live with, and even embrace, the uncertainty that is necessary in order to learn how to imagine and build decolonized relationships.

Mackey, Eva. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016.

PDF pp. 495–499; selective OCR checked against rendered pages; bracketed omissions retain the movement from epistemologies of mastery through Crown treaty finality to ongoing relation.

Origin has refused the return address field

Reading context. Brand refuses the fantasy that a recovered proper name could sew the rupture shut. The Door of No Return holds forced departure, lost traceable beginnings, and the making of Black diaspora as belonging and unbelonging at once. The origin form has encountered a history it cannot process.

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

My grandfather and I recognized this, which is why we were mutually disappointed. And which is why he could not lie to me. It would have been very easy to confirm any of the names I’d proposed to him. But he could not do this because he too faced this moment of rupture. We were not from the place where we lived and we could not remember where we were from or who we were. My grandfather could not summon up a vision of landscape or a people which would add up to a name. And it was profoundly disturbing. Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings. Beginnings that can be noted through a name or a set of family stories that extend farther into the past than five hundred or so years, or the kinds of beginnings that can be expressed in a name which in turn marked out territory or occupation. I am interested in exploring this creation place — the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings — as a site of belonging or unbelonging.

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

PDF p. 9 frames the Door conceptually; the stored excerpt is PDF pp. 14–16 only. The separated frame is context, not quotation.

The sorting machine cannot locate innocence

Reading context. Byrd refuses a classroom tribunal where everyone is handed a permanent badge and told history was a consent form. Cacophony holds non-consent, uneven benefit, colonial and imperial relations, Indigenous futures, and interlocking oppression together without purchasing clarity through equivalence.

The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

At its core, this book engages colonial discourses pertaining to indigenous peoples, particularly American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and Amerindians in Guyana. But in many ways my concern is much larger. It is all too easy, in critiques of ongoing U.S. settler colonialism, to accuse diasporic migrants, queers, and people of color for participating in and benefiting from indigenous loss of lands, cultures, and lives and subsequently to position indigenous otherness as abject and all other Others as part of the problem, as if they could always consent to or refuse such positions or consequences of history. And though I do critique the elisions and logics that have continued to inform settler colonial politics that have remained deeply rooted within liberal humanism’s investments in the individual, in the singular, and in the racializations of white possession, I also want to imagine cacophonously, to understand that the historical processes that have created our contemporary moment have affected everyone at various points along their transits with and against empire. If colonialism has forced the native to “cathect the space of the Other on his home ground” as Spivak tells us, then imperialism has forced settlers and arrivants to cathect the space of the native as their home. In drawing this distinction, my goal is to first activate indigeneity as a condition of possibility within cultural studies and critical theory and then deploy it to avoid the syllogistic traps of equivalencies on the one hand and the economies of racism, homophobia, sexism, and classism that continue to order the place of peoples on indigenous home grounds on the other. Such an approach, I hope, may provide possible entry points into critical theories that do not sacrifice indigenous worlds and futures in the pursuit of the now of the everyday. The pole is still leaning, and there is still further to go. How we get there depends on how we interpret the cacophonies colonialism has left us in the transit of empire.

Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

PDF pp. 104-106; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; final methodological statement of the Introduction; stop before Chapter 1.

Racism clocks in as infrastructure

Reading context. Memmi describes racism as a daily operating relation of French colonial rule in North Africa, not merely an explicit doctrine. His Tunisian and Algerian colonial frame must remain visible before this mechanism is carried toward another history.

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized. It is, however, not a matter of a doctrinal racism. Besides, that would be difficult; the colonialist likes neither theory nor theorists. He who knows that he is in a bad ideological or ethical position generally boasts of being a man of action, one who draws his lessons from experience. The colonialist has too much difficulty in building his scheme of compensation not to mistrust debates. His racism is as usual to his daily survival as is any other prerequisite for existence. Compared to colonial racism, that of European doctrinaires seems transparent, barren of ideas and, at first sight, almost without passion. A mixture of behaviors and reflexes acquired and practiced since very early childhood, established and measured by education, colonial racism is so spontaneously incorporated in even the most trivial acts and words, that it seems to constitute one of the fundamental patterns of colonialist personality. The colonialists are perpetually explaining, justifying and maintaining, by word as well as by deed, the place and fate of their silent partners in the colonial drama.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Expanded ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

PDF pp. 104–106; printed pp. 70–72; ‘The Colonizer Who Accepts’; the movement continues by naming the gulf, its exploitation, and its conversion into supposed absolute fact.

Consumption has exceeded its containment zone

Reading context. Content note: sexual violence and colonial violence named without narrative detail. Forbes defines wétiko through aggression and the consuming of lives, relations, and possessions, then tracks escalation across people, land, water, forest, air, and animals. The extraction dashboard has reached the awkward stage where every green arrow points toward a grave.

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

This is the disease, then, with which I hope to deal—the disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism, and I shall try to explain why. But whatever we call it, this disease, this wétiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man. The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same. And they are the same as the rape of the earth, the rape of the rivers, the rape of the forest, the rape of the air, the rape of the animals. Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Deceit knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in.

Forbes, Jack D. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Rev. ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008.

PDF pp. 22-23; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Introduction; begin with Forbes’s definition of the disease and stop before the quoted teaching that follows.

The satisfaction arrived pre-installed

Reading context. Marcuse argues that dominant institutions can install satisfactions that reproduce repression. The next page asks who can judge true and false needs and says individuals can answer only when free to give their own answer. This station does not authorize an instructor, expert, or state tribunal to decide anyone else’s real needs; the gendered generic is historical.

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control; the development and satisfaction of these needs is heteronomous. No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning—products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Second edition. Introduction by Douglas Kellner. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2002; reprinted 2007.

PDF p. 56; printed p. 7; Chapter 1, “The New Forms of Control”; preceding paragraph establishes needs as historically conditioned; next page asks who can judge true and false needs and says individuals can answer only when free to give their own answer.

The image and the budget must attend together

Reading context. hooks refuses the choice between changing material distribution and changing representation. Dignity cannot substitute for wealth and resources, but people should not be forced to wait for economic transformation before images cease manufacturing contempt. The studio has invited the budget committee because symbolism has been spending other people’s rent money again.

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

To change the devastating impact of poverty on the lives of masses of folks in our society we must change the way resources and wealth are distributed. But we must also change the way the poor are represented. Since many folks will be poor for a long time before those changes are put in place that address their economic needs, it is crucial to construct habits of seeing and being that restore an oppositional value system affirming that one can live a life of dignity and integrity in the midst of poverty. It is precisely this dignity Jonathan Freedman seeks to convey in his book From Cradle to Grave: The Human Face of Poverty in America, even though he does not critique capitalism or call for major changes in the distribution of wealth and resources. Yet any efforts to change the face of poverty in the United States must link a shift in representation to a demand for the redistribution of wealth and resources.

hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

PDF p. 182; printed p. 170; Chapter 15, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”; continue into exploited labour and self-worth.

The market has appointed itself curriculum

Reading context. Mbembe moves decolonization from the reading list to the ownership diagram. Global finance, mobile capital, transferable skills, and corporate collaboration assign the university a mission before the seminar begins. Curriculum reform inside this machinery can become a tasteful rug placed over the market’s electrical panel.

Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive

To better design the higher education landscape of tomorrow, we also need to pay close attention to deeper, systemic global dynamics. We cannot lose sight of the political economy of knowledge production in the contemporary world of higher education and pretend to decolonize either the university or knowledge itself for that matter. The flows and linkages in the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge are global. They are not global in the same way everywhere, but they are definitely global and the world of higher education itself is made up of different forms of geo-political stratifications. The university as we knew it is dead. Unaware of this fact, many countries might elect to keep living in the midst of its ruins for a long time to come. Spearheaded by global markets, notably speculation-driven finance and a push for hyper-profits, the global restructuring of higher education initiated at the beginning of the 20th century in America has now reached its final stage. Late orthodoxy has it that universities are too expensive, too fragmented and too nation-state-centric at a time when economic integration at a planetary level must become the new norm. The urgency, we are told, is to move towards a post-national or partially denationalized higher education space that would increase the availability of a skilled labor force and foster the transferability and compatibility of skills across boundaries while helping to set up intensive research collaborations between universities and transnational corporations. Within this paradigm, the new mission assigned to universities is to produce innovations that are necessary for the interests of transnationally mobile capital.

Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” Spoken-text manuscript for public lectures at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand; conversations with the Rhodes Must Fall Movement, University of Cape Town; and the Indexing the Human Project, University of Stellenbosch. N.d. 29 pp.

PDF p. 20; printed pagination not visible; “The age of global Apartheid”; continue into elite universities, debt, and defunding.

The lantern was a compulsory visibility device

Reading context. Content note: enslavement, corporal punishment, an unnamed man’s death, and legal exoneration. Browne shows visibility being imposed as a racial duty backed by discretionary violence, then shows law protecting the named owner John van Zandt through an exonerating story. The candle is not a quaint ancestor of the streetlight. It is a checkpoint with wax.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

Lantern laws made the lit candle a supervisory device—any unattended slave was mandated to carry one—and part of the legal framework that marked black, mixed-race, and indigenous people as security risks in need of supervision after dark. In this way the lit candle, in a panoptic fashion, sought to “extend to the night the security of the day.” Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than forty lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner, before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than fifteen lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgressions was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734, a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have “absented himself” from van Zandt’s dwelling in the nighttime. Although it was first reported that this slave was horsewhipped to death by van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that “the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God.”

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 274-276; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Chapter 2, “Torches, Torture, and Totau”; continue into black luminosity and the production of the human.

Primitive was doing acquisition work

Reading context. Geniusz exposes “primitive” as working colonial machinery. The label blocks community transmission, makes knowledge appear inferior, lowers its exchange value, and assists imperial institutions in acquiring what assimilation threatens. Destruction and preservation occupy the same archive, which has filed the theft under rescue for easier retrieval.

Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings

One multifaceted mechanism, which continues to maintain this power structure, is the colonization of knowledge. Those charged with carrying out various assimilation tactics were taught to view native knowledge as “primitive” or “evil,” and, as a result, they often prevented its continued dispersal within native communities. Native people were also made to view their knowledge as “wrong” or “inferior” and non-native knowledge as “right” or “superior,” and, having such views, many naturally chose what was made to look like the better knowledge. The colonization of native knowledge assisted the colonizers in assimilating native peoples, but it also gave them another important benefit: They gained this knowledge for themselves. When looking at the colonization of botanical knowledge, the subject of this text, one sees that the colonizers did indeed gain much knowledge. In *Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens*, Lucile H. Brockway argues that not only did colonizers benefit from native botanical knowledge, they also were able to use this knowledge to fuel their imperialist efforts. Brockway does not describe the mechanisms of colonization that forced native peoples and others to view indigenous knowledge as primitive, but her examples illustrate the tremendous benefit the elite colonizers gained by making native knowledge appear “primitive.” Once native people came to view their knowledge as inferior, some were willing to part with it, for a price reflecting its primitive, inferior nature. Others, seeing the devastating effects of assimilation efforts, chose to entrust this knowledge to researchers as a means of preserving it. In the end, the colonization process both destroyed and preserved native knowledge, and that is the beginning of this text.

Geniusz, Wendy Makoons. Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings. First edition. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009.

PDF p. 27; printed p. 3; Introduction; continue to the project of decolonizing botanical anishinaabe-gikendaasowin.

The state relation has stopped pretending to be customer service

Reading context. This replacement locates colonialism in relations among nations, state objectives, law, land control, legitimacy, and assimilation rather than in pathologizing descriptions of Indigenous people. Personal interfaces inherit that collective structure. The service counter may smile, but the land seizure is still running the ticketing system.

Colonialism and State Dependency

Whatever the particular situation, Indigenous people’s basic relationship to the state is as members of nations in a colonial relationship with a dominating external power. All Indigenous people’s personal interfaces with the state are channelled through and shaped by the collective relationship that their nation has, historically and currently, with the colonial regime. The laws and other types of institutions that give shape to First Nations life in Canada, and through which state agencies relate to Indigenous people, operate in a context that is historical and political and which reflects the objectives of the state in regard to the collective entities that make up the indigenous reality of Canada as economic, political and social facts. As such, the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state remains colonial and is for the most part one of conflict rooted in the state’s imperative to maintain its control over indigenous lands and to limit the power of First Nations. In such a colonial relationship, impositions of power and authority by the regime may be absorbed, tolerated, or accommodated by Indigenous people in various ways over time, but the conquest of the Indigenous population becomes inevitability only when settlers’ imperial claims to legitimacy are accepted and normalized by Indigenous peoples. Legitimation (acceptance and support for colonial institutions) is a fundamental mandate of the colonial regime. The most important and immediate imperative once the seizure of land is accomplished is to assimilate those Indigenous peoples who have survived the initial assault on their existences.

Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “Colonialism and State Dependency.” Journal of Aboriginal Health (November 2009): 42–60.

PDF pp. 9–10; printed journal pp. 50–51; “The Effect of Colonization”; continue through assimilation.

Inclusion has mistaken itself for the destination

Reading context. Grande refuses to let critical pedagogy absorb Indigenous praxis and call the merger complete. Hope is contingent with the past, and the political horizon is sovereignty and indigenization rather than premium access to the new world order. Inclusion’s destination board has been removed for false advertising.

Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought

The quest for a new Red pedagogy is, thus, at base, a search for the ways in which American Indian education can be deepened by its engagement with critical educational theory and for critical theory to be deepened by Indian education. While a Red pedagogy privileges “revolutionary critical pedagogy” as a mode of inquiry, it does not simply appropriate or absorb its language and epistemic frames, but rather employs its vision as one of many starting points for rethinking indigenous praxis. The aim is “to diversify the theoretical itineraries” of both indigenous and critical educators so that new questions and perspectives can be generated. Finally, what distinguishes Red pedagogy is its basis in hope. Not the future-centered hope of the Western imagination, but rather, a hope that lives in contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors as well as the power of traditional knowledge. A Red pedagogy is, thus, as much about belief and acquiescence as it is about questioning and empowerment, about respecting the space of tradition as it intersects with the linear time frames of the (post)modern world. Most of all, it is a hope that believes in the strength and resiliency of indigenous peoples and communities, recognizing that their struggles are not about inclusion and enfranchisement to the “new world order” but, rather, are part of the indigenous project of sovereignty and indigenization.

Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

PDF pp. 37-38; printed pp. 28-29; Chapter 1; begin with Red pedagogy as a living theoretical aperture and stop after sovereignty and indigenization refuse inclusion in the new world order.

Survival has interrupted the apocalypse tense

Reading context. Gross uses apocalypse to name imposed cultural-world destruction while insisting on survival and the building of new worlds. The concept holds personal, institutional, and worldview damage together without declaring Indigenous peoples relics or recovery complete. The end of a world is not the end of the people who name it.

Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being

One critical aspect of exploring the reality of Native American history is to correctly name the experience Native American societies suffered and which they continue to endure to this day. To put it in a word, Native Americans have seen the end of their respective worlds. Using vocabulary from the study of religion, this should be correctly termed an apocalypse. Just as importantly, though, Native Americans survived the apocalypse. This raises the further question, then, of what happens to a society that has gone through an apocalyptic event? The effects of the apocalypse linger on and that history of apocalypse continues to be the current-day reality for many Native Americans. They are faced with having to deal with the consequences of imposed cultural destruction. I have named the resulting personal trauma, social dysfunction, and crisis in worldview, “postapocalypse stress syndrome” (PASS). This chapter, then, introduces the theory of PASS and examines two other ideas about the experience of Native Americans: historical trauma response and the soul wound. Native Americans in general have seen the end of their worlds. There are no Native American cultures in the United States that remain wholly unaffected by the presence of Euro-Americans. While recognizing that some cultures have been able to remain intact better than others, there is no Native American nation that can claim to be living in complete accord with its precontact culture. Also, there is no nation that enjoys unabridged sovereignty, as existed in the past. In effect, the old world of their ancestors has come to an end. Thus, as Sidner Larson has argued, Native Americans are living in a postapocalyptic environment. This is not to say that the worldviews that previously informed the cultures have also become defunct. It simply means Native Americans are in the process of building new worlds, worlds that are true to their past history, but cognizant of present realities.

Gross, Lawrence W. Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.

PDF pp. 57–58; printed pp. 33–34; Chapter 2 opening through Gross’s definition and three-part account of PASS.

Spectatorship has been asked to leave the party

Reading context. The organizer talks, negotiates, gets angry, persists, and makes a public celebration where Nishnaabeg presence cannot be reduced to spectacle. The final impossible arrangement, a party with no watchers, turns participation into a political form. Shopping, tanning, and dragon boats have been notified that history is occurring without their supervision.

Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs

she work hard that woman. talking. negotiating. convincing. she go everywhere that one and she talk to everyone. all those big shots. not all those big shots think her idea good. and sometimes she get mad that one, ’cause nobody listening. everybody too busy. everybody gotta go shopping. everybody busy with dragon boats and wake boards and working on their tans. she never give up though, because she knows we can do better. we all can do better. she tells us “do better.” and we kind of scared of that woman, because she right. we can do better. then she makes this great big festival where we all gotta show we better. but it’s not just about that. it’s a party too. big party. big nishnaabeg party. big party celebrating big things. like we’re still here. that kind of a big party. and she says that this time, at this party, we’re not the watchers. that’s an important thing she say. we’re not the watchers. in fact, this party so big, there are no watchers. imagine that. a party with no watchers.

Simpson, Leanne. Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. Second printing. Winnipeg: ARP Books, August 2014. First published 2013.

PDF p. 139; printed p. 137; “gwekaanimad”; continue into the parade and children making birds.

The nation is not the only available horizon

Reading context. Walcott holds home and refusal together: Black people make Canada home while declining to deposit every hope in the nation-state. His grammar must account for many Blacknesses rather than totalize them. The national imagination has requested a single selectable identity; the form has been returned incomplete by design.

Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada

But the story does not end there. These new cultural shifts have to be read in light of and beside the earlier events I have recounted above. Failure to see the Toronto police’s practice of racial profiling; the inability of journalists and critics to read Clarke’s novel as Canadian; and the dismissing of a potential epidemic of black men killing each other as Jamaican crime as naked attempts to place blackness outside the boundaries of what is imaginatively Canadian, is dangerous. Such attempts do not accord with the lived realities of black people across the country, who insistently make Canada home even with all its difficulties. These same folks are quite aware of the limits of nation-states and thus refuse to place all their hopes and dreams in the nation. It was this simple point that I set out to make in 1997, as well as suggesting ways to read or interpret forms of black Canadian expressive culture based on such an acknowledgement. In Black Like Who? I did not set out to write a comprehensive study of black Canadian culture, nor to offer a comprehensive historical overview or discussion of black Canadian culture. However, I did set out to put into public space some conditions for making sense of the grand claims of anyone attempting such a huge project. Let me be clear: trying to write total stories of any cultural group is an impossibility and in the case of black Canadian cultures this impossibility presents itself from the first instance. Thus my project in Black Like Who? was and is a rather modest one. It was and remains an attempt to provide some grammars for thinking blackness in Canada. By doing so I hoped that discussions of blackness in Canada might proceed to account for the many blacknesses in Canada.

Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. 2nd rev. ed. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003.

PDF pp. 27-29; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; second-edition Introduction; begin with “But the story does not end there” and stop after Walcott calls for grammars able to account for many Blacknesses.

Original authority requires a repeat performance

Reading context. Bhabha reads colonial authority through an English missionary archive and the repeated English book. The cited colonial stereotypes are historical objects of analysis. Ambivalence names instability inside unequal authority, not a balanced encounter or an automatic victory for the colonized.

Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817

[…] its meaning after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be “original”—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor “identical”—by virtue of the difference that defines it. Consequently, the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. It is this ambivalence that makes the boundaries of colonial “positionality”—the division of self/other—and the question of colonial power—the differentiation of colonizer/colonized—different from both the Hegelian master/slave dialectic or the phenomenological projection of Otherness. It is a différance produced within the act of enunciation as a specifically colonial articulation of those two disproportionate sites of colonial discourse and power: the colonial scene as the invention of historicity, mastery, mimesis or as the “other scene” of Entstellung, displacement, fantasy, psychic defence, and an “open” textuality. Such a dis-play of difference produces a mode of authority that is agonistic (rather than antagonistic).

Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 144–165.

PDF pp. 8–10; printed pp. 150–152; the leading ellipsis marks the sentence fragment at the routed opening; the route moves from colonial presence as repetition and difference through transparency, dividing practices, and the English book’s regulation of ambivalent colonial space.

Confinement composed the category it claimed to contain

Reading context. Content note: historical mental-health language, confinement, segregation, and coercion. Foucault examines a European archive; this sequence cannot be transposed onto Indigenous confinement, carceral institutions, or colonial policy without Indigenous-led evidence of the specific history. Station limit: Foucault is a bounded diagnostic instrument for this European archive, not an Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, decolonial, or settler-colonial authority; route the mechanism back to Indigenous, Black, anti-colonial, and settler-colonial analysis elsewhere in this field.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

There must have formed, silently and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, that suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement. To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

PDF pp. 65-66; printed pp. 45-46; Chapter 2, “The Great Confinement”; preceding paragraphs describe a heterogeneous population held in European institutions; next paragraph calls confinement a police matter organized around compulsory labor before cure.

The image and the budget must attend together

Reading context. hooks refuses the choice between changing material distribution and changing representation. Dignity cannot substitute for wealth and resources, but people should not be forced to wait for economic transformation before images cease manufacturing contempt. The studio has invited the budget committee because symbolism has been spending other people’s rent money again.

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

To change the devastating impact of poverty on the lives of masses of folks in our society we must change the way resources and wealth are distributed. But we must also change the way the poor are represented. Since many folks will be poor for a long time before those changes are put in place that address their economic needs, it is crucial to construct habits of seeing and being that restore an oppositional value system affirming that one can live a life of dignity and integrity in the midst of poverty. It is precisely this dignity Jonathan Freedman seeks to convey in his book From Cradle to Grave: The Human Face of Poverty in America, even though he does not critique capitalism or call for major changes in the distribution of wealth and resources. Yet any efforts to change the face of poverty in the United States must link a shift in representation to a demand for the redistribution of wealth and resources.

hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

PDF p. 182; printed p. 170; Chapter 15, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”; continue into exploited labour and self-worth.

The movement enters; its heresy does not

Reading context. These two parts connect disappearance to reterritorialization. Wynter tracks how movements that contested the mainstream’s monopoly on humanity could be reincorporated as sanitized variants inside the same Liberal-universalist order, while the parts that challenged its authority became institutionally unmanageable.

Separate excerpt 1 of 2

On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project

The paradox here, however, was that in spite of the widespread popular dynamic of the Black Arts and Black Aesthetic movements, they were to disappear as if they had never been.

Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In A Companion to African-American Studies, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107-118. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996645.ch9.

PDF p. 3, printed p. 109; paired with PDF p. 6, printed p. 112

Separate excerpt 2 of 2

On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project

The implacable dimensions of this hostility were to lead swiftly, as Godzich further notes, to a “reterritorialization,” whose goal was to reincorporate these movements, sanitized of their original heretical dynamic, into the Liberal-universalist mainstream. However, while this reincorporation was effected, in the case of Black Studies, by its reinvention as “African-American Studies,” and as such as but one “Ethnic” Studies variant among a diverse range of others, all contrasted with, at the same time as they were integrated into, the ostensible universalism of Euro-American centered mainstream scholarship, the other two movements, by the very nature of their self-definition as a black particularism which called into question the mainstream art and aesthetics together with their “monopoly of humanity,” were not amenable to such pacification and reincorporation. As a result, their rapid disappearance, their extinction even, hastened along by Gates’s neo-universalist, poststructuralist critique, logically followed.

Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” In A Companion to African-American Studies, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107-118. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996645.ch9.

PDF p. 6, printed p. 112; paired with PDF p. 3, printed p. 109

The schema arrives and occupies the body

Reading context. In The Fact of Blackness, Fanon traces how legends, stories, historicity, and the white gaze displace a lived corporeal schema with a racial epidermal schema. The required route begins with objectification on printed p. 82, develops the bodily atmosphere on p. 83, and reaches the selected triple-person paragraph on p. 84 before continuing through classification and imposed limits on pp. 85–86.

Black Skin, White Masks

I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all *historicity*, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. . . .

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha. New edition. Pluto Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7453-2848-5.

PDF pp. 121–125; printed pp. 82–86. Selected paragraph appears on PDF p. 123, printed p. 84.

Universal humanity has opened a restricted entrance

Reading context. Lowe makes the universal human legible as a sorting operation. Liberal freedom protects citizens by producing colonial distance from those whose labor, land, and resources made that freedom possible. The entrance says universal; the access-control list has retained empire-era permissions.

The Intimacies of Four Continents

liberalism permits us to understand that as modern liberalism defined the “human” and universalized its attributes to European man, it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human. Even as it proposes inclusivity, liberal universalism effects principles of inclusion and exclusion; in the very claim to define humanity, as a species or as a condition, its gestures of definition divide the human and the nonhuman, to classify the normative and pathologize deviance. In this study of how liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire, I observe that the uses of universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty. We see the longevity of the colonial divisions of humanity in our contemporary moment, in which the human life of citizens protected by the state is bound to the denigration of populations cast in violation of human life, set outside of human society. Furthermore, while violence characterizes exclusion from the universality of the human, it also accompanies inclusion or assimilation into it. Such violence leaves a trace, which returns and unsettles the apparent closure of the liberal politics, society, and culture that establish the universal. Race as a mark of colonial difference is an enduring remainder of the processes through which the human is universalized and freed by liberal forms, while the peoples who created the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. The operations that pronounce colonial divisions of humanity—settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriations of many kinds—are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded.

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 29-36; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Chapter 1; selected continuous movement from liberal humanity’s divisions through the ongoing imbrication of seizure, slavery, and racial dispossession.

Treaty refuses the past tense

Reading context. Mackey contrasts the Crown’s bounded, extinguishment-oriented treaty frame with treaty as an ongoing relation among nations. Selective OCR was proofed against rendered pages; the passage concerns land, Crown law, and settler expectation rather than a metaphorical promise.

Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization

to actually see and listen in new ways, and then be able to imagine new relationships that are not based on coloniality. This is what I mean by the necessity of unsettling epistemologies of mastery in order to participate in decolonization. In other words, participation needs to be attentive and critically self-reflexive. How treaty is conceptualized is important. The Crown saw, and often continues to see, treaty in very different ways from Indigenous peoples. Many Canadians, including the anti-land claim activists I spoke with, still ‘regard treaties as an extinguishment of rights, and acceptance of the supremacy of the crown, and a generous gift of land to the Indians so they might have land of their own’ (Government of Canada 1983, cited in Valaskakis 2005, 77). As discussed, the underlying assumption of Canadian law regarding Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty is that Crown sovereignty always trumps Indigenous sovereignty. Many governments and settler citizens thus see treaties as contained, completed and bounded objects that are not relevant anymore, and certainly not pivotal to an ongoing process of negotiating equal relationships between nations. Treaties are seen as past strategic performances, now delineated in time and in a manner expedient for nation-building. They are conceptualized with a kind of temporal fixity, reflecting perhaps ideas about the fixity and certainty of property entitlement in western property regimes. [...] Nevertheless, complex Indigenous meanings of treaty, and thus the building of ongoing relationships of mutuality and respect, have most often been occluded in assertions of superior Crown sovereignty. [...] many of the foundations of settler identities and practices need to be unsettled so that we can learn to live with, and even embrace, the uncertainty that is necessary in order to learn how to imagine and build decolonized relationships.

Mackey, Eva. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2016.

PDF pp. 495–499; selective OCR checked against rendered pages; bracketed omissions retain the movement from epistemologies of mastery through Crown treaty finality to ongoing relation.

Tradition has declined permanent exhibition status

Reading context. Borrows dismantles false tradition by showing that categories of Indigeneity are context-dependent political, social, legal, linguistic, and cultural facts that change over time. He does not make them meaningless; he denies any single trait status as an unalterable core. The authenticity checklist has misplaced its eternal warranty.

Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism

In my view, there is no timeless trait, characteristic, custom, or idea that is categorically fundamental to being Indigenous. The categories of Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Cree, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine, Dakota, Secwepmec, Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nuulth, Gitksan, Tlingit, Haida, Dene, Metis, Inuit, etc., are all context-dependent classifications. They are political, social, legal, linguistic, and/or cultural facts that are fluid and subject to change through time. Indigeneity does not necessarily reside in any particular blood, language, land, culture, clan, family grouping, spiritual practice, economic activity, story, teaching, song, relationship, etc. – though these criteria are very important components of belonging in particular contexts. It is misleading to claim that Indigenous societies possess an unalterable central essence or core. This is what I label false tradition. While each category looks and feels relatively stable from the inside, if measured by short-term (centuries-long) metrics, changes in society, which may be gradual, can produce dramatic shifts over the longer term.

Borrows, John. Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.

PDF pp. 15–16; printed pp. 3–4; selected excerpt is the Introduction opening on PDF p. 15 / printed p. 3, from “In my view” through “dramatic shifts over the longer term”; stop before Borrows expands the argument.

The research question has declined to name its employer

Reading context. Smith moves methodology upstream. Before validity and reliability come decisions about the world, the problem, relevance, access, and who gains knowledge. The research question is therefore already governance, despite its habit of entering the room dressed as a neutral sentence with no known relatives.

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

The whole process of colonization can be viewed as a stripping away of *mana* (our standing in the eyes of others and therefore in our own eyes), and an undermining of *rangatiratanga* (our ability and right to determine our destinies). Research is an important part of the colonization process because it is concerned with defining legitimate knowledge. In Maori communities today, there is a deep distrust and suspicion of research. This suspicion is not just of non-indigenous researchers, but of the whole philosophy of research and the different sets of beliefs that underlie the research process. Even in very recent studies, this hostility or negative attitude to research in general has been noted. Research methodology is based on the skill of matching the problem with an ‘appropriate’ set of investigative strategies. It is concerned with ensuring that information is accessed in such a way as to guarantee validity and reliability. This requires having a theoretical understanding, either explicitly or implicitly, of the world, the problem, and the method. When studying how to go about doing research, it is very easy to overlook the realm of common sense, the basic beliefs that not only help people identify research problems that are relevant and worthy, but also accompany them throughout the research process. Researchers must go further than simply recognizing personal beliefs and assumptions, and the effect they have when interacting with people. In a cross-cultural context, the questions that need to be asked are ones such as: • Who defined the research problem? • For whom is this study worthy and relevant? Who says so? • What knowledge will the community gain from this study? • What knowledge will the researcher gain from this study?

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Second edition. London and New York: Zed Books, 2012.

PDF p. 193; printed p. 175; Chapter 7, “Responding to the Imperatives of an Indigenous Agenda”; continue into negotiated research relations.

Land declines the position of background asset

Reading context. Coulthard shifts the analytic centre from proletarianization to dispossession and from land as commodity to land as reciprocal relations and obligations. Grounded normativity names Indigenous land-connected practices, not a scenic metaphor for anyone seeking ethical ambience. The resource industry’s brochure has been returned with several obligations attached.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

When this historical consideration is situated alongside the contemporary fact that there has been, first, a steady increase in Native migration to urban centers over the last few decades, and, second, that many First Nation communities are situated on or near lands coveted by the resource exploitation industry, it is reasonable to conclude that disciplining Indigenous life to the cold rationality of market principles will remain on state and industry’s agenda for some time to follow. In this respect Marx’s thesis still stands. What I want to point out, rather, is that when related back to the primitive accumulation thesis it appears that the history and experience of *dispossession*, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Just as importantly, I would also argue that dispossession continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has provoked. Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around *the question of land*—a struggle not only *for* land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land *as system of reciprocal relations and obligations* can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” I call this place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice *grounded normativity*, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

PDF p. 29; printed p. 13; Introduction; read the contextual revision of primitive accumulation on PDF pp. 28–30.

Civilization has submitted an alibi

Reading context. The opening movement begins with Europe's inability to solve the problems it creates, names its principles as instruments of trickery, and asks whether colonization can be equated with civilization. On PDF p. 2, Césaire strips away evangelization, philanthropy, enlightenment, God, and law as declared purposes, then names merchants, shipping, appetite, force, and economic expansion as decisive actors. Later on PDF p. 2, he begins tracing the selective scandal by which colonial violence is accepted abroad before returning as a crisis within Europe.

Discourse on Colonialism

And since I have been asked to speak about colonization and civilization, let us go straight to the principal lie which is the source of all the others. Colonization and civilization? In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them. In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme (Editions Presence Africaine, 1955).

PDF pp. 1–2; printed pp. 1–2; opening movement

Original authority requires a repeat performance

Reading context. Bhabha reads colonial authority through an English missionary archive and the repeated English book. The cited colonial stereotypes are historical objects of analysis. Ambivalence names instability inside unequal authority, not a balanced encounter or an automatic victory for the colonized.

Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817

[…] its meaning after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be “original”—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor “identical”—by virtue of the difference that defines it. Consequently, the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. It is this ambivalence that makes the boundaries of colonial “positionality”—the division of self/other—and the question of colonial power—the differentiation of colonizer/colonized—different from both the Hegelian master/slave dialectic or the phenomenological projection of Otherness. It is a différance produced within the act of enunciation as a specifically colonial articulation of those two disproportionate sites of colonial discourse and power: the colonial scene as the invention of historicity, mastery, mimesis or as the “other scene” of Entstellung, displacement, fantasy, psychic defence, and an “open” textuality. Such a dis-play of difference produces a mode of authority that is agonistic (rather than antagonistic).

Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 144–165.

PDF pp. 8–10; printed pp. 150–152; the leading ellipsis marks the sentence fragment at the routed opening; the route moves from colonial presence as repetition and difference through transparency, dividing practices, and the English book’s regulation of ambivalent colonial space.

Blood quantum has entered the comedy department

Reading context. Vizenor moves from federal blood definitions and recognition to story, doubt, wonder, and comic survivance. Legal classification gives a colonial misnomer standing, then mistakes the standing for a person. Comedy does not trivialize the violence. It denies the category the tragic closure it ordered for everyone else.

Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance

The Indian is the simulation of the absence, an unreal name; however, the misnomer has a curious sense of legal standing. Some of the definitions are ethnological, racial, literary, and juristic sanctions. “To be considered an Indian for federal purposes, an individual must have some Indian blood,” wrote Stephen Pevar in *The Rights of Indian Tribes*. “Some federal laws define an Indian as anyone of Indian descent, while other laws require one-fourth or one-half Indian blood in order to be considered as an Indian for purposes of those laws. Still other federal laws define Indian as anyone who has been accepted as a member of a ‘federally recognized’ Indian tribe.” Clearly, the simulations of tribal names, the absence of a presence in a mere tribal misnomer, cannot be sustained by legislation or legal maneuvers. Postindian autobiographies, the averments of tribal descent, and the assertions of crossblood identities, are simulations in literature; that names, nicknames, and the shadows of ancestors are stories is an invitation to new theories of tribal interpretation. The sources of natural reason and tribal consciousness are doubt and wonder, not nostalgia or liberal melancholy for the lost wilderness; comic not tragic, because melancholy is cultural boredom, and the tragic is causal, the closure of natural reason. The shimmers of imagination are reason and the simulations are survivance, not dominance; an aesthetic restoration of trickster hermeneutics, the stories of liberation and survivance without the dominance of closure. Tribal consciousness is wonder, chance, coincidence, not the revisions of a pedate paradise; even so, for curious reasons some would hear confessions and the conversions of criminals as the evidence of a new tribal awareness.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. First Bison Books printing. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Originally published 1994.

PDF p. 36; printed p. 14; Chapter 1, “Postindian Warriors”; continue to printed p. 15.

The state relation has stopped pretending to be customer service

Reading context. This replacement locates colonialism in relations among nations, state objectives, law, land control, legitimacy, and assimilation rather than in pathologizing descriptions of Indigenous people. Personal interfaces inherit that collective structure. The service counter may smile, but the land seizure is still running the ticketing system.

Colonialism and State Dependency

Whatever the particular situation, Indigenous people’s basic relationship to the state is as members of nations in a colonial relationship with a dominating external power. All Indigenous people’s personal interfaces with the state are channelled through and shaped by the collective relationship that their nation has, historically and currently, with the colonial regime. The laws and other types of institutions that give shape to First Nations life in Canada, and through which state agencies relate to Indigenous people, operate in a context that is historical and political and which reflects the objectives of the state in regard to the collective entities that make up the indigenous reality of Canada as economic, political and social facts. As such, the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state remains colonial and is for the most part one of conflict rooted in the state’s imperative to maintain its control over indigenous lands and to limit the power of First Nations. In such a colonial relationship, impositions of power and authority by the regime may be absorbed, tolerated, or accommodated by Indigenous people in various ways over time, but the conquest of the Indigenous population becomes inevitability only when settlers’ imperial claims to legitimacy are accepted and normalized by Indigenous peoples. Legitimation (acceptance and support for colonial institutions) is a fundamental mandate of the colonial regime. The most important and immediate imperative once the seizure of land is accomplished is to assimilate those Indigenous peoples who have survived the initial assault on their existences.

Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “Colonialism and State Dependency.” Journal of Aboriginal Health (November 2009): 42–60.

PDF pp. 9–10; printed journal pp. 50–51; “The Effect of Colonization”; continue through assimilation.

Land declines the position of background asset

Reading context. Coulthard shifts the analytic centre from proletarianization to dispossession and from land as commodity to land as reciprocal relations and obligations. Grounded normativity names Indigenous land-connected practices, not a scenic metaphor for anyone seeking ethical ambience. The resource industry’s brochure has been returned with several obligations attached.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

When this historical consideration is situated alongside the contemporary fact that there has been, first, a steady increase in Native migration to urban centers over the last few decades, and, second, that many First Nation communities are situated on or near lands coveted by the resource exploitation industry, it is reasonable to conclude that disciplining Indigenous life to the cold rationality of market principles will remain on state and industry’s agenda for some time to follow. In this respect Marx’s thesis still stands. What I want to point out, rather, is that when related back to the primitive accumulation thesis it appears that the history and experience of *dispossession*, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Just as importantly, I would also argue that dispossession continues to inform the dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has provoked. Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around *the question of land*—a struggle not only *for* land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land *as system of reciprocal relations and obligations* can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.” I call this place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice *grounded normativity*, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

PDF p. 29; printed p. 13; Introduction; read the contextual revision of primitive accumulation on PDF pp. 28–30.

Racism clocks in as infrastructure

Reading context. Memmi describes racism as a daily operating relation of French colonial rule in North Africa, not merely an explicit doctrine. His Tunisian and Algerian colonial frame must remain visible before this mechanism is carried toward another history.

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized. It is, however, not a matter of a doctrinal racism. Besides, that would be difficult; the colonialist likes neither theory nor theorists. He who knows that he is in a bad ideological or ethical position generally boasts of being a man of action, one who draws his lessons from experience. The colonialist has too much difficulty in building his scheme of compensation not to mistrust debates. His racism is as usual to his daily survival as is any other prerequisite for existence. Compared to colonial racism, that of European doctrinaires seems transparent, barren of ideas and, at first sight, almost without passion. A mixture of behaviors and reflexes acquired and practiced since very early childhood, established and measured by education, colonial racism is so spontaneously incorporated in even the most trivial acts and words, that it seems to constitute one of the fundamental patterns of colonialist personality. The colonialists are perpetually explaining, justifying and maintaining, by word as well as by deed, the place and fate of their silent partners in the colonial drama.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Expanded ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

PDF pp. 104–106; printed pp. 70–72; ‘The Colonizer Who Accepts’; the movement continues by naming the gulf, its exploitation, and its conversion into supposed absolute fact.

Surveillance is manufacturing the line it observes

Reading context. Browne defines surveillance as productive: it does not merely discover racial boundaries but helps make, repeat, and police them across changing times and spaces. The apparatus observes a line, redraws it, and then submits the redraw as objective measurement. Foucault may keep his famous filing cabinet; Browne is naming this machine from Black studies.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

I want to add to these understandings of surveillance the concept of racializing surveillance. Racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place.” Being mindful here of David Theo Goldberg’s caution that the term “racialization,” if applied, should be done with a certain precision and not merely called upon to uncritically signal “race-inflected social situations,” my use of the term “racializing surveillance” signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance. To say that racializing surveillance is a technology of social control is not to take this form of surveillance as involving a fixed set of practices that maintain a racial order of things. Instead, it suggests that how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness. Racializing surveillance is not static or only applied to particular human groupings, but it does rely on certain techniques in order to reify boundaries along racial lines, and, in so doing, it reifies race. Race here is understood as operating in an interlocking manner with class, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity and their various intersections.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 72-74; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Introduction; continue into differential video surveillance and the hypermediation of Blackness.

Responsibility has been forwarded to improvement

Reading context. Content note: death, murder, and neglect. Razack shows how non-adversarial legal form can bracket responsibility and redirect attention toward prevention, care, vigilance, and colonial improvement. “Dysfunctional bodies,” “a dying race,” and “civilizing mission” name the institutional story she exposes; they do not describe Indigenous people. Responsibility has been transferred to Future Systems, where nobody has a direct extension.

Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody

In the face of such a damning indictment, many readers will immediately point out that inquests and inquiries are particular kinds of legal sites. An inquest is a legal process conducted by a coroner. Its purpose is to determine cause of death, and, as such, it is not a criminal trial in which suspects defend themselves. The aim of an inquest is to identify what would prevent death from happening under the same circumstances. An inquiry, while it shares with the inquest an investigative rather than an adversarial function, reviews deaths that have given rise to public concern. Typically led by a judge, an inquiry is a more public and broader judicial process than an inquest. As coroners and commissioners never fail to say, these processes are not trials, and thus they are not concerned with establishing innocence or guilt. Instead, they are devoted to the prevention of deaths, an apparently Sisyphean task. But if inquests and inquiries are structured to have little time for the past, they cannot get to the future without going back in time. The fiction, therefore, that they cannot attend to the matter of “who did it,” brackets the involvement of state professionals in acts of murder or neglect, and keeps the discussion in the more abstract realm of devising better systems of care and vigilance over dysfunctional bodies and a dying race. The inquest or the inquiry is tailor-made to present both the story of the disappearance of a race and the story of white settlers assisting Indigenous people into modernity. They occupy a specific site in colonial law, one devoted to that most quintessential of colonial activities: the improvement of the colonized, or, in an old phrase, the civilizing mission.

Razack, Sherene H. Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 46-48; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; Introduction, “Mapping the Official Story”; stop before comparative scholarship on inquests.

The archive has misheard the ending

This optional reading discusses suicide and colonial regulation of women. You can skip it and keep exploring.

Reading context. Image-verified OCR from separate rendered pages. The parts are deliberately non-adjacent: colonial protection and the fabrication of woman as subject on printed pp. 94–95 resonate with the Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri discussion and conclusion on printed p. 104. No adjacency is manufactured. The claim diagnoses representational capture and institutional listening; it does not deny that marginalized people speak.

Separate excerpt 1 of 2

Can the Subaltern Speak?

Imperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine the dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject? In other words, how does one make the move from ‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’? Even the attempt shows that imperialism is not identical with chromatism, or mere prejudice against people of colour. To approach this question, I will touch briefly on the Dharmasastra (the sustaining scriptures) and the Rg-Veda (Praise Knowledge). They represent the archaic origin in my homology of Freud. Of course, my treatment is not exhaustive. My readings are, rather, an interested and inexpert examination, by a postcolonial woman, of the fabrication of repression, a constructed counternarrative of woman’s consciousness, thus woman’s being, thus woman’s being good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus woman’s desire. Paradoxically, at the same time we witness the unfixed place of woman as a signifier in the inscription of the social individual.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1988.

PDF p. 15; printed pp. 94–95; image-verified OCR; first of two separate, non-adjacent parts. This part examines colonial protection, patriarchy, and the construction of woman as subject/signifier.

Separate excerpt 2 of 2

Can the Subaltern Speak?

In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga. […] The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read. I know of Bhuvaneswari’s life and death through family connections. Before investigating them more thoroughly, I asked a Bengali woman, a philosopher and Sanskritist whose early intellectual production is almost identical to mine, to start the process. Two responses: (a) Why, when her two sisters, Saileswari and Rāseswari, led such full and wonderful lives, are you interested in the hapless Bhuvaneswari? (b) I asked her nieces. It appears that it was a case of illicit love. […] The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1988.

PDF p. 20; printed p. 104; image-verified OCR; second of two separate, non-adjacent parts. Internal omissions are explicitly marked, and the intervening printed pp. 96–103 are not implied or silently joined.

The inquiry is staging truth under official lighting

Reading context. Razack reads inquiry not as a transparent window onto state failure but as ritual, theatre, archive, and pedagogy. It accumulates material, authorizes formulaic speech, and teaches the state’s truths while presenting itself as a neutral searchlight. The bureau has investigated itself and found the lighting exceptionally professional.

Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody

What then is the relationship between the settlers and those whom they have dispossessed and continue to dispossess? As I argue throughout this book, it is a relationship that is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. Mandated to resolve problems of governance, inquiries offer a wealth of information about how the state engages in the management of populations and how that engagement is accomplished, resisted, and contested by individuals and communities. Adam Ashforth proposed that commissions of inquiry are not simply or even principally policy-making instruments. Rather, they are best considered “as symbolic rituals within modern States, theatres of power which do ‘make policy’ but which do much else beside.” Inquiries are “ways of speaking about social life which makes possible the work of organizing political subjection.” Summoning “archival power” by what they accumulate around them, “inquiries mirror, even as they produce a colonial common sense,” suggests Ann Stoler. Observing that inquiries in colonial regimes utilize stock and formulaic phrases which “are faithful to the truth-claims of racialized rule,” Stoler reminds us, as does Ashforth, of the pedagogic value of inquiries: inquiries instruct us in the “truths” of the state.

Razack, Sherene H. Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

PDF pp. 147-149; printed pagination not visible in the reflowed file; early Chapter 1; stop before the sentence introducing the named case.

Spectatorship has been asked to leave the party

Reading context. The organizer talks, negotiates, gets angry, persists, and makes a public celebration where Nishnaabeg presence cannot be reduced to spectacle. The final impossible arrangement, a party with no watchers, turns participation into a political form. Shopping, tanning, and dragon boats have been notified that history is occurring without their supervision.

Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs

she work hard that woman. talking. negotiating. convincing. she go everywhere that one and she talk to everyone. all those big shots. not all those big shots think her idea good. and sometimes she get mad that one, ’cause nobody listening. everybody too busy. everybody gotta go shopping. everybody busy with dragon boats and wake boards and working on their tans. she never give up though, because she knows we can do better. we all can do better. she tells us “do better.” and we kind of scared of that woman, because she right. we can do better. then she makes this great big festival where we all gotta show we better. but it’s not just about that. it’s a party too. big party. big nishnaabeg party. big party celebrating big things. like we’re still here. that kind of a big party. and she says that this time, at this party, we’re not the watchers. that’s an important thing she say. we’re not the watchers. in fact, this party so big, there are no watchers. imagine that. a party with no watchers.

Simpson, Leanne. Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. Second printing. Winnipeg: ARP Books, August 2014. First published 2013.

PDF p. 139; printed p. 137; “gwekaanimad”; continue into the parade and children making birds.

The archive has confused absence with a person

Reading context. Vizenor separates Native presence from the colonial simulation called indian, then defines survivance as active continuance rather than bare survival. The archive is not merely mistaken. Its misnomer performs absence while claiming authenticity, a filing trick with the modest appetite of an empire.

Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance

Native American Indians are the originary storiers of this continent, and their stories of creation, sense of imagic presence, visionary memories, and tricky survivance are the eternal traces of native modernity. The first two names convey the historical creases of cultures, continents, and nations; the third name, *indian*, misgiven here in italics, insinuates the obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance. Manifestly, the *indian* is an occidental misnomer, an overseas enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or communities. Manifest manners are the course of dominance, the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as “authentic” representations of *indian* cultures. Manifest manners court the destinies of monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural conceits of savagism and civilization. Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy. The simulation of the *indian* is the absence of real natives—the contrivance of the other in the course of dominance. Truly, natives are the storiers of an imagic presence, and *indians* are the actual absence—the simulations of the tragic primitive.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. First Bison Books printing. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Originally published 1994.

PDF p. 9; unnumbered Preface opening aligned with printed p. vii; continue to PDF p. 10, printed p. viii.

The curriculum has mistaken itself for daylight

Reading context. Battiste defines cognitive imperialism as coordinated exclusion across language, curriculum, science, media, law, value, and measures of success. A school can therefore add content while leaving the foundation, ruler, and success machine untouched. The syllabus has installed one world and labelled the rest enrichment.

Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit

After taking a course in cultural imperialism at Stanford with Martin Carnoy, I had fashioned a name for that experience I had lived in and felt confined to and for which most Aboriginal students resisted with their feet. When Indigenous knowledge is omitted or ignored in the schools, and a Eurocentric foundation is advanced to the exclusion of other knowledges and languages, these are conditions that define an experience of cognitive imperialism. Cognitive imperialism is about white-washing the mind as a result of forced assimilation, English education, Eurocentric humanities and sciences, and living in a Eurocentric context complete with media, books, laws, and values. Indigenous people understand the crisis they live in and feel the urgency for reform. For many, their hopes were put into their own schools in their communities, yet for most they have had to have at least some of their education in public schools where changes are more about measuring success along the lines of their own content. The crisis is best described in a discourse of a decolonized education that seeks to reconcile contemporary education with the past and with the peoples’ present, ensuring that the ideological and self-interests within Eurocentric education are not imposed on Indigenous peoples and they build their own present with their own agency and power intact.

Battiste, Marie. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing, 2013.

PDF p. 28; printed p. 26; Chapter 2, “The Legacy of Forced Assimilative Education for Indigenous Peoples.”

Inclusion has mistaken itself for the destination

Reading context. Grande refuses to let critical pedagogy absorb Indigenous praxis and call the merger complete. Hope is contingent with the past, and the political horizon is sovereignty and indigenization rather than premium access to the new world order. Inclusion’s destination board has been removed for false advertising.

Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought

The quest for a new Red pedagogy is, thus, at base, a search for the ways in which American Indian education can be deepened by its engagement with critical educational theory and for critical theory to be deepened by Indian education. While a Red pedagogy privileges “revolutionary critical pedagogy” as a mode of inquiry, it does not simply appropriate or absorb its language and epistemic frames, but rather employs its vision as one of many starting points for rethinking indigenous praxis. The aim is “to diversify the theoretical itineraries” of both indigenous and critical educators so that new questions and perspectives can be generated. Finally, what distinguishes Red pedagogy is its basis in hope. Not the future-centered hope of the Western imagination, but rather, a hope that lives in contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors as well as the power of traditional knowledge. A Red pedagogy is, thus, as much about belief and acquiescence as it is about questioning and empowerment, about respecting the space of tradition as it intersects with the linear time frames of the (post)modern world. Most of all, it is a hope that believes in the strength and resiliency of indigenous peoples and communities, recognizing that their struggles are not about inclusion and enfranchisement to the “new world order” but, rather, are part of the indigenous project of sovereignty and indigenization.

Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

PDF pp. 37-38; printed pp. 28-29; Chapter 1; begin with Red pedagogy as a living theoretical aperture and stop after sovereignty and indigenization refuse inclusion in the new world order.

The state relation has stopped pretending to be customer service

Reading context. This replacement locates colonialism in relations among nations, state objectives, law, land control, legitimacy, and assimilation rather than in pathologizing descriptions of Indigenous people. Personal interfaces inherit that collective structure. The service counter may smile, but the land seizure is still running the ticketing system.

Colonialism and State Dependency

Whatever the particular situation, Indigenous people’s basic relationship to the state is as members of nations in a colonial relationship with a dominating external power. All Indigenous people’s personal interfaces with the state are channelled through and shaped by the collective relationship that their nation has, historically and currently, with the colonial regime. The laws and other types of institutions that give shape to First Nations life in Canada, and through which state agencies relate to Indigenous people, operate in a context that is historical and political and which reflects the objectives of the state in regard to the collective entities that make up the indigenous reality of Canada as economic, political and social facts. As such, the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state remains colonial and is for the most part one of conflict rooted in the state’s imperative to maintain its control over indigenous lands and to limit the power of First Nations. In such a colonial relationship, impositions of power and authority by the regime may be absorbed, tolerated, or accommodated by Indigenous people in various ways over time, but the conquest of the Indigenous population becomes inevitability only when settlers’ imperial claims to legitimacy are accepted and normalized by Indigenous peoples. Legitimation (acceptance and support for colonial institutions) is a fundamental mandate of the colonial regime. The most important and immediate imperative once the seizure of land is accomplished is to assimilate those Indigenous peoples who have survived the initial assault on their existences.

Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “Colonialism and State Dependency.” Journal of Aboriginal Health (November 2009): 42–60.

PDF pp. 9–10; printed journal pp. 50–51; “The Effect of Colonization”; continue through assimilation.

The archive has confused absence with a person

Reading context. Vizenor separates Native presence from the colonial simulation called indian, then defines survivance as active continuance rather than bare survival. The archive is not merely mistaken. Its misnomer performs absence while claiming authenticity, a filing trick with the modest appetite of an empire.

Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance

Native American Indians are the originary storiers of this continent, and their stories of creation, sense of imagic presence, visionary memories, and tricky survivance are the eternal traces of native modernity. The first two names convey the historical creases of cultures, continents, and nations; the third name, *indian*, misgiven here in italics, insinuates the obvious simulation and ruse of colonial dominance. Manifestly, the *indian* is an occidental misnomer, an overseas enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or communities. Manifest manners are the course of dominance, the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as “authentic” representations of *indian* cultures. Manifest manners court the destinies of monotheism, cultural determinism, objectivism, and the structural conceits of savagism and civilization. Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy. The simulation of the *indian* is the absence of real natives—the contrivance of the other in the course of dominance. Truly, natives are the storiers of an imagic presence, and *indians* are the actual absence—the simulations of the tragic primitive.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. First Bison Books printing. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Originally published 1994.

PDF p. 9; unnumbered Preface opening aligned with printed p. vii; continue to PDF p. 10, printed p. viii.