- Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard
Discourses of reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state have featured noticeably in both the legal and political domains over the course of the last two decades. The work of Yellowknives Dene political theorist Glen Sean Coulthard situates such discourses of “reconciliation” within broader liberal forms of recognition and accommodation, challenging not only naturalized assumptions regarding their strategic utility, but also the manner in which such seemingly neutral or “conciliatory” discourses and recognition frameworks have served to reproduce the very assemblages of power that Indigenous peoples continue to contest. In Red Skin, White Masks, Coulthard provides an important and theoretically rich account of the shifting forms of recognition offered by the Canadian state which should be required reading for students and scholars interested in Indigenous and Canadian politics, critical political theory and political sociology, as well as those engaging ongoing practices of settler colonialism.
For Coulthard, the “politics of recognition” signifies “the now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state” (3). In Coulthard’s estimation, however, such forms of recognition cannot easily be divorced from ongoing settler-colonial attempts aimed at acquiring Indigenous territories. As the “circumscribed” granting or delegation of rights to land and governance from the state to Indigenous peoples, such forms of recognition simply serve to slightly alter or modify colonial structures of power at the margins while leaving intact “a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (7).
It is in developing this temporal understanding of settler colonialism as a continuing form of “structured dispossession” (7) that Coulthard brings the writings of both Patrick Wolfe and Karl Marx together. For instance, as Coulthard notes (125), Wolfe’s work has characterized settler colonialism as a persisting structure that is not confined to a particular moment in time, but rather one which continues to sustain and reproduce itself through ongoing forms of Indigenous erasure and territorial acquisition. In fact, it is when reflecting upon the processes of this dispossession that Coulthard suggests the importance of revisiting Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. Coulthard argues that while Marx’s theory is useful for engaging a variety of forms of capitalist exploitation, it must be modified to show how the accumulation of capital within colonial contexts depends less on the exploitation of Indigenous labour than it does on the drive to secure and control Indigenous lands (12–13). Moreover, Coulthard also notes that Marx’s temporal confinement of the inaugural or originary violences behind dispossession and accumulation must be rethought in the context of colonial relations (9,15). It is within this temporal reconsideration that Coulthard poses the following perceptive question: “what are we to make of contexts where state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities such as Canada?” (15).
According to Coulthard, in settler-colonial contexts such as those found in Canada, state-orchestrated violence may no longer be visibly manifest, but rather continues to work itself through the bounded forms of recognition and accommodation provided by the state. Building upon the writings of Frantz Fanon, Coulthard argues that settler-colonial domination has been further sustained by the production and subsequent incorporation of colonial subjectivities. In Coulthard’s estimation, both the objective structures of colonialism as well as its subjective manifestations need to be targeted and transformed. In this regard, Coulthard argues that Indigenous peoples need to “turn away” (45) from the forms of recognition and accommodation offered by the state and instead work towards “critically reevaluating, reconstructing, and redeploying Indigenous cultural forms in ways that seek to prefigure, alongside those with similar ethical commitments, radical alternatives to...
