Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies

The Long March to “Recognition”: Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity

235 The Long March to “Recognition”: Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity Len Findlay I aim to accomplish three things in this essay. First, I seek to enhance the profile among Canadianists of the work of Sákéj Henderson, Director of the Native Law Centre at the University of Saskatchewan and advisor to the Assembly of First Nations, the Four Directions Council of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, and to innumerable groups of First Nations litigants, students, and interdisciplinary scholars. Second, I offer a reading of Henderson’s recent rerouting of his citizenship studies through a sustained reflection on and reassertion of First Nations jurisprudence and Aboriginal rights in his book so titled by the same phrasing, and his claim that these issues are essential (in the words the book’s subtitle that deliberately echo Pierre Trudeau and Harold Cardinal) to defining a just society. It is an effort that Henderson locates explicitly within a knowledge “ecology” placed in critical relation to the current knowledge economy that connects Canada through state policies and institutions to a world still taking its cues, or taking its lumps, from the white Enlightenment.Third, I wish briefly to illustrate how literary and cultural producers, educators, and activists can make use of such insurgent,indigenous-humanist work as Henderson’s in their own projects, especially through new configurations and inflections of recognition and redistribution capable of nourishing new (and much needed) pedagogies, new research agendas, new modes of consultation and collaboration on the dialectical interplay of literature broadly 236 Findlay defined, citizenship generously but critically construed, and institutions that understand and effectively advance Aboriginal and treaty rights as invaluable forces within confederation, forces from which all Canadians continue to benefit.1 The Indigenous Intellectual James (Sákéj)Youngblood Henderson is a major “public intellectual” and an arrestingly indigenous exemplar of that variously problematic expression (see Collini).The label “indigenous intellectual” is not Henderson’s self-description but my attempt to capture a distinctive dynamic in his thinking and strategic appropriation of Eurocentric terminology and knowledge systems in Canadian and international contexts, both within and beyond fresh understanding and recognition of “Indigenous intellectual property.”2 Henderson’s intellectual work derives from the rootedness of indigenous knowledge communities and the invasive swagger of imperialist ideas, but it is not confinable within the public–private distinction on which much writing about the public intellectual rests. Nor does allegiance to particular places allow the indigenous intellectual to be himself or herself exilic, at least not in the celebrated manner of Eric Auerbach or Edward Said.Henderson has not gravitated like Said to an iconically diasporic figure like Auerbach, nor to Said’s effort from the relative safety and marked liminality of Istanbul“virtually to see the development of Western culture at almost the last moment when that culture still had its integrity and civilizational coherence” (Orientalism 258). Nor would Henderson follow Auerbach and Said in looking to Hugh of St.Victor for a sense of his path:“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” (qtd. in Orientalism 259). Henderson would not be surprised that a twelfth-century articulation of a Christian transcendental knowledge system (Taylor,Didascalicon) could be used by two very different diasporic comparativists in the twentieth century to similarly personal ends.The flight from the Nazis and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 became occasions for the command performance of humanism as a wounded universal, a locus of transcendence and reimmunization against bad territoriality and the ruthless pursuit of cultural and “racial” purity. The implacable intellectual strengthens his resolve by appealing The Long March to “Recognition” 237 to a saintly precursor in Hugh, and in so doing creates a touchstone for his own embrace of homelessness as vocation.This is not to deny that Said would exercise a right of “returning again and again” to what he would later term this “hauntingly beautiful passage” (Said, Culture 335). However, beyond the opportunities it affords to detoxify notions of homeland (patria), soil (solum) and wholeness (totus), particularly after the fascist appeals to Blud und Boden and Gleichschaltung and the experience of al naqba on the ground and in the OccupiedTerritories, and to allude...