Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights

7. (Un)Making the Biopolitical Citizen

146 seven (Un)Making the Biopolitical Citizen the caribou follows her desire / crosses the pipeline / and the singing of wind rises in my ears —dian million1 On the website Self-Determination Theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s words appear and dissolve, intermixed with pictures of smiling, healthy people. Their words introduce the power of self-determination as a theory for well-being: “To be self determined is to endorse one’s actions at the highest level of reflection.” This insight is followed by a second observation: “When self determined, people experience a sense of freedom to do what is interesting, personally important, and vitalizing.”2 Anthony Mancini, a project director for a study of traumatic grief at Columbia University, considers self-determination theory “a widely researched and empirically validated theory of human need fulfillment.” Citing Ryan and Deci, he describes it as a “motivational theory that posits three fundamental human needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness to others),” which he observes “shows striking similarity to basic ideas on recovery.”3 In 2005 Charlene Crowe and Kim Ghostkeeper proudly announced the fifth Healing Our Spirit Worldwide (HOSW) Health, Healing and SelfDetermination gathering, to be held in Edmonton, Alberta, the following year. The announcement heralded the HOSW as “a cultural celebration inviting the world to share holistic healing experiences of Indigenous Peoples in the movement toward healthy lifestyles . . . a celebration of health, healing and self-determination . . . a testament of the resiliency, courage, tenacity and the will of Indigenous Peoples everywhere to overcome the barriers to achieving self-determination in health, healing and addictions.”4 (Un)Making the Biopolitical Citizen • 147 Similarly, Sharon Parker, an international human rights lawyer, speaks confidently of “the right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of human rights law, . . . an individual and collective right to freely determine . . . political status and [to] freely pursue . . . economic, social and cultural development.”5 Across a spectrum, from individual self-determination/ motivational and recovery literatures to Indigenous healing and principles in human rights theory, a shared common language posits optimism and concern. These documents can all speak some common language, constituting an issue I address here to return to some questions posed in my introduction . There I asked why in the last two decades sexual abuse became a primary site of affective articulation between states and Indigenous peoples for health, well-being, and Indigenous self-determination. To reiterate, what is indexical about this violence and the ways in which we witness it and speak it? Why is gendered sexual abuse so critical now to the discourse on our past colonization or our position within a global Indigenous politic , or to the politics of our self-determination? Why, additionally, is our political presence, a global presence, valorized now? What in particular is important about international Indigenous presence now? To begin to try to answer these questions, I must also return to the discussions that I illumine in my introduction. I wish to consider neoliberalism not only as a set of economic practices, but as a governance and an imaginary that infuses ways of life. It is here I would bring forward our Indigenous involvement with the biopolitic, as well as our affective attachments in such a biopolitic. The Biopolitics of Healing The kind of hope and optimism that can be attached to the above opening statements on self-determination has to be balanced with some knowledge of their attachments, histories, and valences. All are languages of the therapeutic as it poses movement beyond trauma in highly westernized nations. Self-determination articulated in the span from person to nation to international principle mirrors Phil Lane Jr.’s human development paradigm in Four Worlds literatures, bringing their reflexive relations into focus. The human potential movements that might now be associated with slightly embarrassing memories of Esalen and Timothy Leary were in fact highly successful. The human potential knowledges that provided a mixture of motivational and alternate spiritual mind-body practices for Aboriginal healing programs in Alkali Lake, for one, also successfully suffused western culture with their philosophy. They presciently foresaw or borrowed 148 • Therapeutic Nations insights from a then-emergent western science paradigm on the innate self-organization of life, on chaos and complexity. In Ryan and Deci’s approach: “SDT [Self-Determination Theory] is an organismic dialectical approach. It begins with the assumption that people are active organisms, with evolved tendencies toward growing, mastering ambient challenges, and integrating new experiences into a coherent...