Intent for a Nation

Intent for a Nation Len Findlay University ofSaskatchewan But a nation does not remain a nation only because it has roots in the past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present. There must be a thruSt of intention into the future. George Grant, Lament for a Nation, 1965 Oh God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments ofthe white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest seg­ ment of your society. ChiefDan George, Lament for Confederation, 1967 he in te n t behind m y “A lw ays In d ig e n ize ” essay was to create more space for making meaning and taking action within the terrain of the humanities and the university. I was aiming for robust critique of Euro-humanism, its formal settings and disciplines. Iwished also to affirm the legitimacy and necessity of critical collaboration between and among Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and sought to avoid eliding or minimizing Canada’s “Indigenous difference” well summed up by Patrick Macklem as “four complex social facts”: “Aboriginal cultural difference, Aboriginal prior occupancy, Aboriginal prior sovereignty, and Aboriginal participation in a treaty process” (4). The fact that others will be taking up (or putting down) in esc the exhortation to “Always Indigenize!” is deeply gratifying to me, and I look forward to further critique of such validity as my argument may still have. What I wish to do here is simply say a little more about the future of Indigenizing by means of a brief detour through its past, invoking a deliberately double origin in George Grant’s Lamentfor a Nation (1965; see Sugars xvi) and Chief Dan George’s Lamentfor Confederation (1967). However, in shifting my own emphasis via lamentation to intention, I do not mean to suggest that there is nothESC 30.2 (June 2004): 39-48 Len Findlay co-directs with Marie Battiste the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan. He is currently working on Indigenous and underclass resistance, historically and currently, in Canada. His edition of The Communist Manifesto will appear shortly from Broadview Press. ing lamentable in the current conjuncture, not least the federal Liberal hegemony which seems to reconfirm the claim of Aimé Césaire that “the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon” (Césaire 335). But there are also signs of the Canadian nation practising forms of sovereignty and commitment which may yet more effectively support political and economic agency as well as constitutional legitimacy for the co-architects (not orally ancillary “authors”) of treaty federalism and bearers of aboriginal and treaty rights.1 And the radical humanities and their Indigenous counterparts have an important role to play in this process. My focus here is Anglo-Indigenous for several reasons, all of them tactical. If you feel French Canada— or a less foundational Canadian eth­ nicity— only as a painful absence or ghostly travesty here, then that may help you empathize with how so many Indigenous people say they feel much of the time. If you feel my focus is needlessly exclusionary, then I refer you to Andrew Cohen’s much discussed recent book on Canada’s place in the world. For Cohen, Québec has functioned recently as a troublesome presence, a regrettable, parochial distraction from Canada’s traditionally strong internationalism, a view he shares with other much discussed authors of the moment like Margaret MacMillan and Michael Ignatieff (Geddes 2003: 24). In While Canada Slept, Cohen’s only refer­ ence to Canada’s Indigenous difference is a passing allusion to Louis Riel, a situation that suggests First Nations, Inuit, and Métis are not important enough to constitute even a distraction, far less a source of national pride and international leadership in the recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights. To understand how habitual this post-indigenous amnesia is, how a resurgent white enlightenment (Findlay “When I hear” 2004) is once again claiming to define Canada’s future, and how we can combat these 1 In recurring here to doubleness of origin, identity, entitlement, and outcome...