Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Coulthard (review)

Red Skin, White Masks immediately establishes itself as a cornerstone in the areas of Indigenous governance, political theory, and activism. Its importance, however, extends much further. For socio-legal scholars following the continual proliferation of Aboriginal law jurisprudence, treaty/land claims negotiations, and a rapidly developing body of scholarship that seeks to revitalize and revalue Indigenous peoples’ legal traditions, Red Skin, White Masks provides a persuasive new vantage point. As a Coast Salish (WSÁNEC) scholar working to strengthen and revitalize my own Indigenous legal order, I find Glen Coulthard’s work critically engaging and insightful.

Glen Coulthard, of the Yellowknives Dene and Assistant Professor of Political Science and First Nations Studies at the University of British Columbia, offers an intellectually rigorous critique of settler-colonialism and the liberal politics of recognition. Coulthard approaches settler-colonialism as a “form of structured dispossession” of Indigenous peoples “of their lands and self-determining authority” (p. 7). However, he asks, if this colonial dispossession is no longer maintained principally through state violence, as appears to be the case in Canada, then what accounts for the continued dispossession and the persistent reproduction of present-day colonial hierarchies? For Coulthard, the answer derives largely from the insights of Frantz Fanon on the role of “recognition.”

It is accepted that recognition has a role in identity creation insofar as human subjectivity is formed intersubjectively through our social relations. More contentious is that “relations of recognition can have a positive (when mutual or affirmative) or detrimental (when unequal and disparaging) effect on our status as free and self-determining agents” (p. 17). Working from this assumption, proponents of the liberal politics of recognition seek greater “state recognition” and “accommodation” of Indigenous identity claims in order to enable more mutual Indigenous-state relationships. Most often this is accomplished through litigation-based approaches for Aboriginal rights and title, or by a “delegation of land, capital, and political power” through “land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-government agreements” (p. 3). Coulthard challenges these approaches, arguing that instead of creating mutual relationships this form of recognition actually “promises to reproduce the very configurations” of colonial power that Indigenous “demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend” (p. 3).

Critical to Coulthard’s argument is his understanding of the dual-structure of colonialism. In line with Fanon, Coulthard finds colonialism to rely on both objective and subjective elements. The objective elements involve the aspects of domination constituted through the economic, legal, and political structures of the state. This means that “the terms of accommodation usually end up being determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner” (p. 17). The subjective elements of colonialism involve the creation of “colonized subjects” (p. 16) and a process of internalization through which the colonized come to accept and even identify with the limited misrecognition granted through state structures. In this way, contemporary colonial power and hegemony work through the inclusion and shaping of Indigenous peoples and perspectives by state discourses, as opposed merely to a process of exclusion.

Those committed to the liberal politics of recognition may find this difficult to confront given the implications of Coulthard’s arguments: he concludes, after all, that “much of what Indigenous peoples have sought over the last forty years to secure their freedom has in practice cunningly assured its opposite” (p. 42). However, a careful read of this work reveals not a bleak rejection of the recognition paradigm, but attention to the limits of recognition in the context of settler-colonialism and arguments for an empowering shift toward a “critical individual and collective self-recognition on the part of Indigenous societies” (p. 48). This vision of decolonization involves a significant turn away from state structures and discourses, and an emphasis on the resurgence of Indigenous cultural practices that may serve as a lasting alternative to the colonial present. Here Coulthard briefly but importantly sets out some concrete ways forward in the form of five theses...