Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) by Glen Sean Coulthard Page A
Authors: Glen Sean Coulthard
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reconciliation, with apparent satisfaction. “See? Just like we taught them, they are able to talk in proper English without the help of a priest or of an anthropologist. Just look at what we have made of the backward savages—they sound like lawyers!” Whites did not doubt that the Natives would accept their ideals, since the Natives accused the whites of not being faithful to them. Settlers could still believe in the sanctity of their divine civilizing mission; they had Europeanized the Natives, they had created a new kind of Native, the assimilated Aboriginal. The white élites took this all in and whispered, quiet between themselves over dinner, as good progressive persons of the (post)modern world: “Let them cry and complain; it’s just therapy and worth the expense. It’s better than giving the land back!”
Now the sham is coming to an end. Native thinkers and leaders are coming on the scene intent on changing things, entirely. With the last stores of our patience, Native writers, musicians, and philosophers are trying to explain to settlers that their values and the true facts of their existence are at great odds, and that the Native can never be completely erased or totally assimilated. This New Indigenous Intelligentsia is trying to get settlers to understand that colonialism must and will be confronted and destroyed. It is not 1947; we’re not talking about reforming the Indian Act so that we can become little municipalities. It is not 1982; we’re not talking about going to court to explore empty constitutional promises.
It is the twenty-first century. Listen: “what is treated in the Canadian discourse of reconciliation as an unhealthy and debilitating incapacity to forgive and move on is actually a sign of a critical consciousness , of our sense of justice and injustice, and of our awareness of and unwillingness to reconcile .” Coulthard is talking about rising up, Seeing Red, about resurgence and the politics of authentic self-affirmation. This is a call to combat contemporary colonialism’s objectification and alienation and manipulation of our true selves. He understands that in Canada today “settlement” of conflict means putting the past behind us, a willful forgetting of the crimes that have stained the psyche of this country for so long, a conspiracy of collective ignorance, turning a blind eye to the ongoing crimes of theft, fraud, and abuse against the original people of the land that are still the unacceptable everyday reality in Canada. So how could we settle and accept and not question and challenge the naturalized injustice that frames and shapes and gives character to our lives? There isnothing natural about the dominance of white people on the North American continent and the removal and erasure of our people, our laws, and our cultures from our homelands.
Glen Coulthard is a leading voice of the new Indigenous Intelligentsia, and he has accomplished so much with this book. To have rescued Karl Marx from his nineteenth-century hostage chamber in that room in the British Library and to expose him to the full breadth of history and the light of the human landscape was enough to make this a great work of political theory. He’s gone beyond that accomplishment in correcting Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Frantz Fanon’s narrow vision—something you have to excuse them for given they were doing philosophy while in the midst of a ferocious physical fight—and brought Marx and Sartre and Fanon together with his Dene Elders and me and you, Reader, to show us all how our psycho-affective attachments to colonialism are blocking the achievement of a just society. As such, this book is a profound critique of contemporary colonialism, and clear vision of Indigenous resurgence, and a serious contribution to the literature of freedom.
Acknowledgments
The research and writing of Red Skin, White Masks would not have been possible without the insight and guidance offered by many friends and
Now the sham is coming to an end. Native thinkers and leaders are coming on the scene intent on changing things, entirely. With the last stores of our patience, Native writers, musicians, and philosophers are trying to explain to settlers that their values and the true facts of their existence are at great odds, and that the Native can never be completely erased or totally assimilated. This New Indigenous Intelligentsia is trying to get settlers to understand that colonialism must and will be confronted and destroyed. It is not 1947; we’re not talking about reforming the Indian Act so that we can become little municipalities. It is not 1982; we’re not talking about going to court to explore empty constitutional promises.
It is the twenty-first century. Listen: “what is treated in the Canadian discourse of reconciliation as an unhealthy and debilitating incapacity to forgive and move on is actually a sign of a critical consciousness , of our sense of justice and injustice, and of our awareness of and unwillingness to reconcile .” Coulthard is talking about rising up, Seeing Red, about resurgence and the politics of authentic self-affirmation. This is a call to combat contemporary colonialism’s objectification and alienation and manipulation of our true selves. He understands that in Canada today “settlement” of conflict means putting the past behind us, a willful forgetting of the crimes that have stained the psyche of this country for so long, a conspiracy of collective ignorance, turning a blind eye to the ongoing crimes of theft, fraud, and abuse against the original people of the land that are still the unacceptable everyday reality in Canada. So how could we settle and accept and not question and challenge the naturalized injustice that frames and shapes and gives character to our lives? There isnothing natural about the dominance of white people on the North American continent and the removal and erasure of our people, our laws, and our cultures from our homelands.
Glen Coulthard is a leading voice of the new Indigenous Intelligentsia, and he has accomplished so much with this book. To have rescued Karl Marx from his nineteenth-century hostage chamber in that room in the British Library and to expose him to the full breadth of history and the light of the human landscape was enough to make this a great work of political theory. He’s gone beyond that accomplishment in correcting Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Frantz Fanon’s narrow vision—something you have to excuse them for given they were doing philosophy while in the midst of a ferocious physical fight—and brought Marx and Sartre and Fanon together with his Dene Elders and me and you, Reader, to show us all how our psycho-affective attachments to colonialism are blocking the achievement of a just society. As such, this book is a profound critique of contemporary colonialism, and clear vision of Indigenous resurgence, and a serious contribution to the literature of freedom.
Acknowledgments
The research and writing of Red Skin, White Masks would not have been possible without the insight and guidance offered by many friends and
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