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Indigenous Politics

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

Peter Kulchyski | March 5th 2009 | 10

It’s hard to know where to begin with this book, which purports to be a kind of “expose” of the use of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in policy making and ranges far afield into a critique of the idea of Indigenous rights and a survey of problems in the fields of Aboriginal healthcare, education, self-government, land claims, and so on. I had previously written these authors off as “kooks” from the far political right wing; but now they have been embraced by certain prominent left academics and have themselves started to gloss their opinions with Marxist rhetoric. Their work does an enormous disservice to the growing movement of socialist activists and theorists in Canada who are engaged in the real work of decolonization, and could potentially set back a growing oppositional movement for years. So, at a time when crises are escalating and the demands on our time are high, I’m forced to sit down and read this. What follows will not be pleasant.

The authors tout their experience working with the government of the Northwest Territories as a basis that inspired the study, beginning with an anecdote from their time there. I, myself, would not be so proud of working as a bureaucrat for a colonial institution. The two have no actual community-based experience that they refer to, and may very well have never spent a night in an Aboriginal community.

The agenda of the book is to attack the notion of Aboriginal rights in favour of a notion of universal human rights. The book dismisses Aboriginal culture as “primitive” and outdated, and relies on the evolutionary anthropology of a century ago. Its particular target is traditional knowledge — especially traditional ecological knowledge, which they argue does not exist except as forms of local knowledge that people from any culture can have.

This book is based on intellectual dishonesty. The authors can barely cite a living anthropologist who will agree with them, so the anthropologists they cite favourably almost all come from before the 1950s, when the now totally discredited doctrine of social evolution still left traces of its pernicious influence. The dishonesty comes through, because in each chapter where they tackle an issue, they refuse to actually grapple with the stronger scholars who deal with the subject matter, usually relying on newspaper accounts and non-academic works to act as straw dogs they can knock over. For example, the chapter on “justice” (they mean criminal justice; the idea of justice is foreign to this book) offers one dismissive paragraph to Rupert Ross’s carefully conceived arguments about traditional justice based on his lifetime of work as a crown prosecutor. The chapter on environmental management dismisses Harvey Feit and Fikret Berkes in a single paragraph, and implies that their work is based on a kind of “new age” spirituality. Rarely do they actually confront strong versions of the arguments they oppose. Although they frequently gloss from Clifton’s book, The Invented Indian (much of their own work is a Coles Notes version of it), to “debunk” what they perceive as myths about Indigenous contributions to contemporary life, they are quite happy to regurgitate myths like that of the Bloody Falls massacre, which twenty years ago scholars realized was largely an invention of Samuel Hearne’s London editors (they cite Hearne uncritically).

They are worried about being called racists, so they try to innoculate themselves from the charge by confronting it. They argue that they never presume an inherent racial difference; rather, all people are equal, and it is only the “developmental gap,” the nostalgic attachment of Aboriginal leaders and supporters to a romantic vision of Aboriginal culture, that is responsible for the “social dysfunctions” they see in all those communities they never bothered to visit. It is true that much of their argument, technically, is ethnocentric rather than racist: it presupposes the superior value of capitalism (strange idea for alleged Marxists to have) to “earlier” forms of social organization (unlike Marx, who always noted — even within the evolutionary anthropology he accepted — that “earlier” forms of society were far advanced when it came, for example, to community relations).

There are moments, however, when their ethnocentrism does slide over into overt racism, like when they begin chapter ten, on traditional knowledge, with a discussion of the book Why Cats Paint, effectively implying that elders have the same absence of ability to think as cats have to create art (shades of Sepulveda’s comparison of Indigenous peoples to monkeys back in the mid-sixteenth century, which is about where this book belongs).

There is a more pernicious racism when they name many Aboriginal leaders and gleefully “out” them for problems of alcoholism and sexual abuse. The book contains one mention of residential schools, and never draws any connections. By implication, they charge that the vast majority of Aboriginal leaders are corrupt and morally bankrupt. These parts of the book read so distastefully that it is difficult not to feel “slimed” simply in allowing ones eyes to slide over these pages. They never mention Conrad Black or Brian Mulroney, those standard bearers of the high moral values of contemporary culture. And they smugly, simply and blithely assume their own middle-class moral superiority.

Here and there, as in the closing two paragraphs of the introduction and the last paragraph of the book, they refer to themselves as historical materialists, and they refer to Marx. These read like graft-ons, and are generally out of tune with the rest of the text. But these authors are not in any way dissidents. Because, if all of Marxism gets tarred by this brush, we will have set back the critical cause of forging an Indigenous alliance with labour that offers real potential to destabilize the current capitalist regime in Canada.

Their “what is to be done” concluding chapter says nothing, except that the task is to reduce the “developmental gap” that holds Aboriginal people back. Uh, actually guys, this is what the federal government has been trying to do since about, um, 1867. So, it’s not really a new idea, nor one that has proven effective; it has been responsible for producing much of the misery that exists today. But they blithely ignore what is historically inconvenient to their argument — namely, history.

Very few on the social-movement Left will take anything but offense from these words, but many on the Right will happily wield them as weapons against the long-unfolding struggle for Aboriginal rights. In its sloppiness, ethnocentrism, racism and stupidity, this book does not reflect well upon its authors, the readers who endorsed it, the editors who proofread it, the scholars who supported it and the publisher who will allow this book to stand on their shelves next to the many excellent books in their Native and Northern Series.

10 comments

• With friends like this, aboriginal people don’t need enemies

  Beware of reviews that begin with the words “It’s hard to know where to begin with this book…”. This is code for: “I do not like the ideas in this book, but because my response is emotional, rather than intellectual, I cannot provide a substantive critique”.

  So goes Peter Kulchyski’s response to our book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Cultural Preservation (“The Emporor’s [sic] Old Clothes”, Canadian Dimension, March/April 2009). It is even hard to refer to Kulchyski’s piece as a “review”, as it consists mostly of personal attacks. The usual smear tactics of “right-wing”, “racist”, and “colonialist” are present, along with the irrelevant assertion that we “may very well have never spent a night in an aboriginal community”. Are we to infer that Kulchyski would accept our arguments if we had spent such a night (which, incidentally, we have)?

  It is true that our book “attack[s] the notion of Aboriginal rights in favour of a notion of universal human rights”. Is Kulchyski, an academic who supposedly embraces egalitarian ideals, opposed to the latter? Although our book never “presupposes the superior value of capitalism”, as Kulchyski proclaims, we do identify the cultures of hunting and gathering and horticultural societies as less productive, smaller and more simply organized than those that were influenced by advanced technology such as iron metallurgy, the wheel, and alphabetic writing. Why is Kulchyski refuting this obvious reality? Just because this theoretical insight was substantiated by anthropology and archaeology that was initiated a century ago (and updated in the 1950s-1970s by V. Gordon Childe and Leslie A. White), it does not mean that it is now “totally discredited”. After all, using this logic, one could make a similar accusation about the ideas of Darwin, Mendel and Galileo.(The “outdated” evolutionary theories that we use, in fact, form the basis of the arguments of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and the archaeological classification of the technological “ages” of humanity - stone, bronze and iron).

  We do not understand Kulchyski’s reference to our supposed “intellectual dishonesty”. We mostly refer to the works of anthropologists of the 1950s and the 1960s because we are convinced that these ideas are more valid - as opposed to popular - than those whose objectivity and rigour have been compromised by postmodern relativism (the perspective that all ideas and cultures are equally developed, just “different”). There is no substantiation that the theory of cultural evolution espoused has “left traces of pernicious influence”. We cannot respond to Kulchyski’s contention that we do not incorporate the views of “stronger scholars” or “stronger versions of the arguments” because these, conveniently, are not specified in Kulchyski’s “review”. However, we certainly do not think that such “strength” is represented by the works of Rupert Ross, Harvey Feit or Fikret Berkes, who are either prone to wishful thinking or members of the Aboriginal Industry.

  Kulchyski’s comments about our reference to Samuel Hearne deserve special mention because they provide a glimpse of Kulchyski’s double standard with respect to research. According to Kulchyski, we “are quite happy to regurgitate myths like that of the Bloody Falls massacre, which twenty years ago scholars realized was largely an invention of Samuel Hearne’s London editors…”. But our reference to Hearne, is merely the following:

  “The explorer Samuel Hearne witnessed a similar circumstance [of tribal violence] in the eighteenth century. A group of Chipewyans he was travelling with planned the massacre of a group of sleeping Inuit people and, to Hearne’s horror, killed them all, men, women, and children as they tried to escape. This occurred because the Chipewyan and Inuit were not connected by kinship. It is also apparent from Hearne’s account that the Chipewyan had genocidal intentions toward all Inuit, since they perceived Inuit women as too alien to entertain intermarriage with them” (p.263).

  Although it has been recognized that Hearne’s account was embellished by his editors to dramatize and personalize the incident, this did not pertain to the occurrence of the massacre itself, or the Chipewyan’s enmity towards the Inuit. In fact, Hearne’s field notes describe a group of Chipewyan who were intent on exterminating all Inuit they encountered. On what basis is Kulchyski declaring that this assertion is a “myth”?

  Kulchyski’s dismissal of our use of Hearne’s account on the basis that it is a “myth” is important because it indicates that he is concerned about historical accuracy and the need to support one’s assertions with evidence. But if he values making a distinction between a “myth” and a real historical event in the case of Hearne’s account of the massacre, why wouldn’t he also be concerned about making such a distinction with respect to the question of whether or not aboriginal peoples migrated here from the Old World? Kulchyski, however, like most “Native Studies” professors, adopts the postmodern line that unsubstantiated aboriginal “world views” must be respected whenever he analyzes “indigenous perspectives”. In a book co-authored by Kulchyski, for example, it is lamented that, in the past, books on aboriginal culture have paid

  “...more attention to the theory that early ancestors of Aboriginal peoples came to this continent by crossing the Beringia land mass (now Bering Strait) than to Aboriginal people’s rich heritage of stories relating to how and when they were created and placed on Turtle Island (North America)...We wanted to produce something different, something that listened to creation stories in a respectful way, without holding a so-called Bering Strait ‘truth’ in the back (or fore) ground” (Kulchyski et al, In the Words of the Elders, pp. xii-xiii).

  Kulchyski claims that we have attempted to “innoculate” [sic] ourselves from the charge of racism by “confronting it”. It is true that we took pains to explain how the evolutionary theories upon which our work is based (i.e. those embraced by Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. Gordon Childe and Leslie A. White) have nothing to do with race. This anti-racist character of our work is at first accepted by Kulchyski, who admits that our perspective is “ethnocentric” (without explaining what this is or how it is wrong), not racist. He then goes on to claim, however, that, at times, our “ethnocentrism does slide over into overt racism”. But the two pieces of evidence that Kulchyski uses to support this accusation are absurd. The first concerns our use of the book Why Cats Paint in our chapter on “traditional knowledge”. Kulchyski claims that the use of this book is “effectively implying that elders have the same absence of ability to think as cats have to create art (shades of Sepulveda’s comparison of Indigenous peoples to monkeys back in the mid-sixteenth century, which is about where this book belongs)”. People who take the time to read our book will find that our use of Why Cats Paint is not as Kulchyski infers. The book is used to illustrate how distortions and fabrications can be used to support dubious arguments. As we explain, “the important message behind this clever parody [Why Cats Paint] is that even the most improbable idea can be made to seem possible when huge amounts of pseudoevidential infrastructure are deployed to support it” (p.232). What we are referring to are the various claims that the Aboriginal Industry is making about “traditional knowledge” vis-à-vis the scientific method, and the deception that it uses to support them.

  Secondly, Kulchyski claims that pointing to the problems of alcoholism and sexual abuse among the native leadership is evidence of “pernicious racism” (he maintains, again without providing any evidence, that we do this “gleefully”). Kulchyski attempts to support this assertion with the fact that we did not link the social dysfunction of many aboriginal leaders to the residential school system, or mention Brian Mulroney or Conrad Black. But only a fraction of aboriginal people went to residential schools, and Mulroney and Black are not held up as representatives of non-aboriginal society (on the contrary, they are commonly ridiculed and disparaged as crooks). What, then, is Kulchyski’s point? We fail to see how any of this is an indication of “racism”, and it appears to be merely an attempt by Kulchyski to prejudice readers against arguments that threaten his own, socially destructive, agenda.

  The paucity of Kulchyski’s criticisms is an indication of the fact that there is little merit in the opposition to our book. It is either based on naked self-interest or a misunderstanding of left-wing ideas. Supporting aboriginal people in their struggle against oppression does not mean accepting everything that an aboriginal person utters or does. It also does not mean enabling a native leadership that has been corrupted by the Aboriginal Industry. This is apparently what the “social movement Left” favours as a political strategy, and why they will “take offence” at what we say.

  One of the most significant issues raised in Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry concerns the relationship between the Aboriginal Industry’s agenda and left-wing politics. (Interestingly, Kulchyski never once mentions the Aboriginal Industry, even though most of the book is about this self-serving group of non-aboriginal lawyers and consultants who benefit from maintaining aboriginal dependency and social dysfunction). Although Kulchyski contends that “forging an Indigenous alliance with labour…offers real potential to destabilize the current capitalist regime in Canada”, there is no evidence that this is the case. This is because aboriginal politics encourages the native population to identify in terms of ethnicity rather than socioeconomic class, and is divisive and reactionary. In fact, the isolation of aboriginal politics from any class basis means that privileged aboriginal leaders are often bought off and used as pawns by opportunistic capitalist enterprises. Members of the aboriginal movement tend to lack solidarity with working class struggles because they perceive themselves as aristocratic “landowners” who should benefit from the surpluses extracted from non-aboriginal labour.

  Kulchyski, as a “Native Studies” professor, cannot be objective about these matters because his career is tied to encouraging the expression of aboriginal “world views” and justifying the segregation of the native population from the mainstream. This is why Kulchyski is so offended by our view that aboriginal peoples’ “traditional ecological knowledge” is a kind of “knowledge that people from any culture can have”. In this statement one can see the actual racism that exists in supposedly left-wing discussions of aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations. This is the “aboriginal orthodoxy” described so well by Robert McGhee in the March 2009 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, which provides an actual review of our book. According to McGhee, this “aboriginal orthodoxy”

  “can be encapsulated as a belief that the Creator placed the ancestors of First Peoples in North America, giving them a mandate to live in harmony with one another and with their envi¬ronment, and to protect that environment from the incursions of rapacious Europeans. Europeans are a separate class of being, who are probably correct in their scientifically based belief that they are descended from African apes. Europeans lack most of the noble attributes—bravery, generosity, spirituality and the ability to think and deal with problems in a holistic rather than a simple linear fashion—that characterize aboriginal peoples” (“Blowing the Whistle: Two academics take on the Canadian elites who profit from Aboriginal poverty”, p. 11).

  Our attempt to identify the developmental gap that results in the marginalization of many aboriginal people is necessary for both addressing the aboriginal question and providing a common basis from which all people, regardless of their ethnicity, can join together to create a better future for all humanity. Although the federal government has paid a great deal of lip-service to addressing the developmental gap since 1867, as Kulchyski correctly notes, it has not devoted much thought or resources to this task. As we explain in our book, the government has never had the needs of the native population as its primary motivation, and so “a number of half-hearted schemes have been devised that never seriously and sensitively provided aboriginal peoples with the intensive programs and services that were required for them to become full citizens and economic participants in the modern world” (p. 60).

  Today, with the billions of dollars that are going towards aboriginal causes every year, there appears to be both the funds and the political awareness needed to address the developmental gap. Before this can occur, however, the self-serving research being promoted by the advocacy networks associated with academics like Peter Kulchyski will have to be exposed. Aboriginal people are not “spiritually different”, like most Native Studies programs imply; they have needs and aspirations just like all human beings and therefore suffer from social isolation. The Aboriginal Industry, however, is intent on denying our commonalities so as to keep aboriginal people separate, dependent and, as a consequence, forever in need of its “help”.

  #1. Posted by Frances Widdowson on March 15th 2009 at 3:38am

• Francis, it’s even harder to know where to begin with your latest. So let me clear, and use a few paragraphs that were not included in the published review. It originally included this:

  “Actually, the book is guilty of a worse crime than its widespread ethnocentrism and more occasional racism: stupidity. For example, the ‘disrobing’ in the title is a reference to the story of the emperor’s new clothes. They feel compelled to actually tell that story (7-8) duly citing Hans Christian Andersen, which is about the level of their overall ‘analysis’. I found myself keeping a list of howlers as the only entertainment I could give myself as I read this. Among the many many examples I could cite is this precious bit of text: they write, in an insipid and long outdated discussion of the way technology changes lead to “a significant advancement [advance is not enough!] in technology and facilitated the transition to food production” (12). “The transition to food production!” I fear life before food production must have been truly miserable…”

  Now, for your information, I know ethnocentrism is a really big word. It involves judging one culture from the standards of another. Your book is a textbook example.

  Racism is a smaller word and you do seem familiar with it. In the ‘Cats’ example I used, I charged that you were ‘effectively implying…’, not that you were saying. Implying comes from another big word, implication, that may be too much for you. But anyone apart from me who does manage to slog through the whole book will understand, when you spend pages arguing that elders have no worthwhile knowledge, what is meant when you then go on to discuss ‘Why Cats Paints’. It’s naivete at best, racism at worst.

  You argue that Rupert Ross’s lifetime of work with Anishnabwe, Harvey Feits’ outstanding work with Cree, and Fikert Berkes long engagements with a variety of communities in the north are not examples of ‘stronger scholarship’ and dismiss them all (and me) for being in the Aboriginal industry. This spares you from having to read carefully produced arguments (ie you do what you accuse your critics of) on the subjects you so blithely tackle. Since careful arguments are not your forte, here’s a pop quiz:

  Which authors started out working as bureaucrats for a largely colonial institution: answer: Widdowson and Howard

  Which ‘marxists’ are read approvingly by the likes of the National Post, Margaret Wente, Tom Flanagan, and Alan Cairns: answer: Widdowson and Howard

  Which ‘marxists’ don’t bother to show up at historical materialism conferences (do they know what the words mean?) but prefer paid dinners with the likes of the Frontier Institute: answer: Widdowson and Howard

  Which ‘marxists’ don’t bother to show up at historical materialism conferences (do they know what the words mean?) but prefer paid dinners with the likes of the Frontier Institute: answer: Widdowson and Howard

  Which ‘marxists’ have no actual relation or engagement with any actual Aboriginal peoples involved in actual struggles, or actual socialists involved in actual struggles: answer: Widdowson and Howard

  Which ‘marxists’ still trust Samuel Hearne’s view of a ‘massacre’ he never actually saw and could not have seen since he was miles away from the event? answer: Widdowson and Howard

  You are not Marxists and it will be easier on us all when you drop the label. Your ‘solutions’ have been around for one hundred years, have been adopted by the Canadian state repeatedly, and are still what the State would love to do, were it not for determined opposition from Aboriginal people and their actual socialist supporters. That is the actual Aboriginal Industry, the one you belong to, that says over and over like a puffing little train: progress puff puff modernity puff puff development puff puff

  In fact, my review, and even these words, are not aimed at you because you are past the point of any reasonable discussion. My review was aimed at those on the left who were so misguided and themselves so disconnected from any actual struggles that they endorsed you. I have to answer calls from actual people in actual communities who ask “why are you a Marxist when Marxism is saying these kinds of things” and it irritates me. Now I have to pick up Leo Panich’s droppings! I also wrote this in the original review:

  “Very few on the social movement left will take anything but offense from these words, but many on the right will happily wield them like weapons against the long unfolding struggle for Aboriginal rights. Now we are at a critical crossroads in that struggle. In Australia Aboriginal people literally faced away from then Prime Minister Howard, turned their back on him, when he spoke to them in the waning years of his reign. I suggest we socialists who actually work with actual communities turn our back on this text and these writings. Let them be embraced and nurtured by the political reactionaries they belong with and these books, like Flanagan’s, sink out of sight.”

  You have no idea why we are at a critical crossroads because you have no idea of what is going on at the material level of struggle. And, by the way, the work I and many of my socialist colleagues do in Aboriginal communities is pro bono (that means for free, at no cost, out of principle. The latter is another long word too complicated for me to explain).

  I will not reply to your inevitable reply to this, or read more of your drivel. I’m turning my back on you.

  #2. Posted by Peter Kulchyski on March 18th 2009 at 1:42pm

• It was funny when Peter noted in his response to the attack on him, “That is the actual Aboriginal Industry, the one you belong to.” Indeed, it seems as though both Widdowson and Howard are so oblivious as to not realize that they are part of the industry they are purportedly villifying; I mean, the struggles of Aboriginal peoples in the face of the totalizing state that have persisted for centuries since contact have not hurt their careers. In fact, Widdowson and Howard are profiting from their recently published polemic on a culture they clearly have no understanding of. They may have spent time in an Aboriginal community, as Frances notes in her reply, but unfortunately they didn’t learn anything about the people that live there or the culture. Like most people of the dominant culture, they can only disparage the socioeconomic conditions that Aboriginal peoples live in without critically assessing the causality of this outcome.

  As well, we shouldn’t be so disrespectful of one’s chosen scholarly focus. Putting Native Studies in quotation marks connotes a very condescending attitude; at least Dr. Kulchyski had the decency not to put quotation marks around the word book when describing Widdowson and Howard’s synthesis of recycled, antiquated, out-moded, and discredited tripe.

  #3. Posted by Ben McKenzie on March 19th 2009 at 1:12am

• Should a tailor be asked to review a book on the Emperor’s clothing?

  Peter Kulchyski’s review (“The Emperor’s Old Clothes,” Canadian Dimension March/April 2009) of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry requires a response from a reader who considers this book to be a vital contribution to the study of Canadian society. The review is not merely negative, but seeks to destroy the book and the credibility of its authors (Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard) who are dismissed as “kooks”, racists, poor scholars, and intellectually dishonest socialist imposters. Forced to read the book on our behalf, Kulchyski feels “slimed” as his eyes slide across the noxious pages. Such a visceral reaction is usually a symptom that something other than intellectual disagreement is going on beneath the surface, and in this case it is fairly easy to trace the ganglia that lead straight to the intellectual midbrain of autonomic response rather than to the forebrain of critical thought and rational argument.

  One of these nerves is stimulated by Widdowson and Howard’s distressing self-identification as Marxists, and their use of a Marxist perspective from which to criticize the cadres of government-funded lawyers and anthropologists who are employed in negotiating aboriginal treaties and self-government. In Kulchyski’s view such criticism derives naturally from right-wing politics and can be easily discredited. Criticism from a socialist source has much greater validity, so rather than deal with the critique Kulchyski chooses to recommend the comforting idea that the authors are only pretending to be socialists. Unfortunately, any reading of the text indicates that such a claim is absurd. In fact the major problem with the book, in the eyes of this reader, is the authors’ reliance on classic Marxist social evolution to characterize the disparities in social and technological development between Old and New World societies at the time of their initial contact.

  Contemporary socialist scholars distance themselves from this antique paradigm, but in pointing this out Kulchyski states an astounding non sequitur: “This book is based on intellectual dishonesty. The authors can barely cite a living anthropologist who will agree with them…” This nerve strikes deep into the sub-intellectual level of contemporary discourse on aboriginal rights and politics. Almost two decades ago James Clifton pointed out in The Invented Indian that “the aboriginal orthodoxy” on the unique qualities of indigenous culture and history was so ingrained that American social scientists and bureaucrats questioned it at the risk of their careers. The same situation exists in contemporary Canada, and it is no surprise that most employed or employable anthropologists maintain silence rather than query the claims of aboriginal leaders. As an archaeologist I can testify with astonishment that the majority of my colleagues hesitate to openly express their scientifically-grounded belief that the deep ancestors of aboriginal North Americans originated in the Old World and reached this continent from northern Asia. To indigenous believers in a unique North American creation of First Peoples, the scientific narrative is too closely tied to those of the genetic unity of humanity, the universality of human characteristics, and perhaps even of human rights. Anthropologists confront the same visceral problem in trying to align their scientific paradigm of human universality with a view that Aboriginal groups possess unique characteristics and rights. “Intellectual honesty” is perhaps not the best characterization of those like Kulchyski who have come down firmly on the side of aboriginal particularism. Kulchyski’s attempt to portray the authors as “racist” is clearly not based on a reading of the text, which provides significant evidence to the contrary. Here again the midbrain is forced to deal with the contradiction that the pejorative term “racist” is usually reserved for those who believe that certain groups have characteristics that are different from or superior to those of the rest of humanity, yet it is Kulchyski and his colleagues in “the struggle for Aboriginal rights” who insist on the unique characteristics and abilities of Aboriginal peoples. The contradiction is too painful to confront rationally, and is most easily dealt with on an emotional level.

  A final sub-intellectual response is elicited by this book’s questioning of aboriginal “traditional knowledge” as something other than the worldview and the accumulated knowledge of place that is acquired by rural persons in any society. In fact the book questions, with good reason, whether aboriginal knowledge, worldviews, thought patterns and social attainments are different in any significant way from those of non-aboriginal peoples. Kulchyski’s obvious problem is in suppressing from the rational mind the suspicion that the paradigm of aboriginal particularism on which he and his colleagues base their “work of decolonization” may be totally erroneous. What if Aboriginal peoples are not different in any significant way from non-Aboriginals? What if the idea of “Aboriginal” is simply an updated version of the old European notions of “Primitive Man” and “Noble Savage”? What if the struggle to resist the assimilation of Indigenous communities to the dominant society (“cultural genocide”) is misplaced, and that the well-intentioned actions of anti-colonialist social scientists are merely perpetuating the pain and trauma that afflict so many Aboriginal communities? These are very significant questions that are addressed by the authors of the book under review.

  Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry is a flawed book, but also a very important book and one that should serve as the basis for open debate on the relationship between Aboriginal and Canadian societies. The vehemence of its dismissal by Kulchyski demonstrates that such a debate is long overdue.

  #4. Posted by Robert McGhee on March 19th 2009 at 4:05am

• In response to Robert McGhee who states in the opening of his comment on Kulchyski’s review: “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry requires a response from a reader who considers this book to be a vital contribution to the study of Canadian society”. I ask, should we put quotation marks around ‘the study of Canadian society’, as in “Canadian Studies,” in the same manner that Widdowson puts quotation marks around “Native Studies” as though it is a fabricated and less than legitimate discipline? Of course, I am being facetious here.

  When we speak of scholarship in various fields, such as economics or physics, we don’t put quotation marks around these terms as though they are made-up. For some reason, however, Widdowson believes Native Studies warrants this treatment as though we are speaking of something fantastical and not real. I’m certain that the fine academics in the multitude of Native Studies faculties across Canada, and elsewhere (i.e., Harvard’s Native American Studies), might find offence in the usage of pejorative quotes to describe their field of expertise. Despite ideas such as manifest destiny, Duke University does not put quotation marks around Canadian Studies; we should be as respectful for Native Studies. Whether we like it or not, Aboriginal/Native societies actually exist and like all other things, invariably they will be studied; we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to believe the study of Native society is some voodoo-discipline.

  On another note, where McGhee ends with “such a debate is long overdue” with respect to the relationship between Aboriginal and Canadian societies, I wonder: has Dr. McGhee only just now discovered a debate that has been ongoing for decades within Canadian academia? Afterall, departments of Native Studies at several universities, as well as many other social sciences, did not spring up over night in response to this recent book. It is telling that Dr. McGhee believes this debate is long overdue: it tells us that he hasn’t paid much attention to developments in Native studies and has only just waded into the conversation to scrutinize the critique provided by someone (Dr. Kulchyski) who has been rather active (and not just by comparison to McGhee, Widdowson and Howard) in the field.

  #5. Posted by Ben McKenzie on March 19th 2009 at 7:24pm

• Please Ben McKenzie, try to keep your protests straight. The first two paragraphs of your response relate to your complaint about an earlier comment by Widdowson and Howard, and one that you have already used this venue to air. I didn’t put quotes around any academic field, and consider Native Studies as valid as Canadian Studies or Archaeology (my own particular discipline). However I feel that I should respond to your dismissal of me as a naïve newcomer to the field. I just calculated that it is forty-eight years ago that I first lived and travelled with a Cree family from Nemiscau in the Baie James. Since that time I have lived and worked with many indigenous people, including at land claims negotiation tables and on committees attempting to resolve the discrepancies between social science and native worldviews. I am very aware of the decades of discussion around the relationship between Indigenous and Canadian societies, and stand by my statement that an open debate on the subject—not a debate that is limited by the paradigm assumed by some scholars of Native Studies—is long overdue.

  By the way, if you found my response to Kulchyski’s article offensive, you might be interested in my article “Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology (American Antiquity 73 (4): 579-597, 2008). You can find it at http://www3.sympatico.ca/robert.mcghee/Resources/McGheeAmAnt08.

  #6. Posted by Robert McGhee on March 19th 2009 at 8:02pm

• I just finished reading the last response by Robert McGhee and I am bewildered, amongst other things. For starters, the book by Widdowson is about the ‘Aboriginal Industry’, a critique of individuals (namely lawyers and other professionals) involved in things like land claims. In his response to Ben McKenzie, Robert McGhee owns up to being part of this industry, the assumed target of Widdowson’s book (though Widdowson says the Aboriginal industry is the target, after reading I realized that Aboriginal peoples and their cultures were the target of this study).

  Second, to qualify your expertise by the time since you first went into a community is rather juvenile. I know many people that have worked in Aboriginal communities for decades, yet still know nothing about them or the people.

  Finally, I read Dr. McGhee’s article in American Antiquity. I’m not certain about others, but after reading I didn’t find it offensive at all. If you think about it, Archaeology might not have much to learn from North America’s indigenous population. After all, it isn’t the Aboriginal peoples that harbour an obsession for exhuming the remains of another’s ancestors or willfully removing cultural artefacts from another’s homelands. As far as I can tell, no indigenous people to Canada has come around to unearth the remains of the people I descended from; all graves of my relatives that have passed on remain intact and respected. For cultures that do not engage in Archaeology in the way we Westerners do, it does not surprise me that we have nothing to learn from the discipline. Rather, we could learn how to respect cultural differences of how we treat those that have passed on. It can be said with a great deal of certainty that we would not appreciate another culture doing such a thing to us.

  In the end, if Widdowson actually focussed on the Aboriginal industry, the collection of lawyers, bureaucrats, anthropologists, and so forth, then someone like Robert McGhee, someone that sat at the negotiation tables, would likely take greater offense. If the book in question had actually done the job it set out to do, then a fantastic discussion on the parasitic nature of this industry would ensue. Instead we get a regurgitation of ideas so old and out of date that, if they were artefacts or dinosaur remains, archaeologists would be in all their glory just to examine. The ideas used to support the authors’ assertions in this book are flimsy: they belong in a museum of social science theory.

  #7. Posted by Paul Robbins on March 24th 2009 at 6:26pm

• A journal sent me the book and I’m now in the process of reviewing it. I have a question though: when did Don Cherry find the time to write a book on Indigenous issues? Regardless of the content, that’s impressive.

  #8. Posted by GC on March 27th 2009 at 2:42am

• Now that’s offensive, GC. Don Cherry is much less of an idiot, far less racist, and wayyyy better dressed than Frances.

  #9. Posted by Taiaiake on March 27th 2009 at 3:15am

• Going back to the comment on Marx and capitalism. I think it is important to remember that Marx had a very Eurocentric, bordering on racist understanding of historical development. I think that Marx’s understanding of technological development is suited to books such as Flanagan’s or Widdowson’s. Petty colonial apologist literature.

  I think if one consults Marx’s writing, especially on Imperialism in India, it becomes abundantly clear that he supports capitalism as a necessary step towards communism. His problem with global economics is that it promotes perpetual underdevelopment to continue exploitation. This is basic “developmentalism” which is a reflection of the univeralist ethic underpinning most European thought including Marxism. We also need to face the facts that most leftists that have run a country have dealt horribly with Indigenous autonomy, I think of the Sandinista right away. I also think about how the USSR dealt with the the National question in relations to the Chechens as a good parallel example.  Since there has obviously been no anarchist state, i can’t really raise empirical evidence on how it would work, but theoretically anarchism has not yet been decolonized adequately. Regardless of whether it is the false caricatures of the primitivists or the blind industrialism of some syndicalists. 

  Simply put no leftist has really grappled with reconciling the two parts of communism (equality of access to resources, and from ability according to need) with one of the central basis of Indigenous rights prior occupancy.

  I think we need to be really honest and not shield Marxist from first decolonization and secondly an Indigenization of it as a theory. I have come to understand the need for this as a gichi-mookoomanag. Anyway, I will be working on this very thing, in a few days once I get to restart me thesis work.

  To Widdowson: you are being so pretentious it is unbelievable. This is the second most dishonest book I have ever read. First was Tom’s. Utter rubbish.

  #10. Posted by Alex Paterson in Winnipeg on April 15th 2009 at 12:48am

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