Red Skin, White Masks and Indigenous Recognition
Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks has quickly become a seminal work in Indigenous Studies. It won many awards in Canada and now gets passed around by one Political Science student to another.
Red Skin, White Masks, is an apt play on the title of Frantz Fanon’s classic Black Skin, White Masks. Coulthard draws heavily from Fanon’s work to build the fundamentals for his arguments. Specifically, he uses Fanon’s analysis of Hegel’s theories on “recognition” and his study of the effects of colonialism. He also draws from Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation.
In he rejects the liberal politics of recognition regarding indigenous communities. He defines this type of politics as an “expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state.” This type of politics implies that the Canadian state can satisfy the demands of Indigenous peoples and their sovereignty without allowing substantial material changes. Coulthard states that these politics of recognition have — rather than helped the Indigenous people of Canada — reinforced “the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous people’s demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.” Coulthard analyzes the demands and effects of three different Indigenous Rights movements in Canada and comes to the conclusion that, through their type of Indigenous anticolonial nationalism, the oppressive colonial powers adapted rather than conceded to their demands. Coulthard also argues that despite the Indigenous people’s efforts, their relationship with the Canadian state is still fundamentally colonial.
Coulthard applies Fanon’s analysis of the negative aspects of the politics of recognition to “colonial contexts.” Coulthard immediately lays out Fanon’s response to the following question: how has the politics of recognition come to help colonial powers instead of hinder them? The answer is this: when colonial rule is not reliant on state violence, it relies instead on making Indigenous people seek “asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition granted to them by the settler state.” Fanon critiqued Hegel for having never described the type of recognition that he applies to recognition-reliant colonial contexts like the one described above. Fanon does not see recognition as something that could be materially helpful to the colonized. Instead, politics of recognition help the state maintain its power by creating “colonized subjects,” oppressed people who have been indoctrinated into participating in practices that obstruct their own emancipation. Fanon specifies that the master is the one who decides the terms of recognition in real contexts of domination and that the colonized historically develop a “psycho-affective” attachment to this type of recognition. This specific attachment is one of the main reasons why liberal politics of recognition are so effective at preventing any real structural change regarding the master/slave or colonizer/colonized relationship.
Coulthard uses Marx’s theories on primitive accumulation to portray how the introduction of capitalism violently stole Indigenous people’s “means of production and subsistence.” He mentions how Indigenous labor played an enormous role in the history of Canadian “colonial-capital” accumulation. However, he also stresses that the issue is more complicated than capitalism exploiting people; it is exploitative “along racial, gender, and state lines.” He argues that Marx’s writings are better applied when they are shifted from the capital-relation to the colonial-relation. Coulthard’s analysis of primitive accumulation lends to his conclusion that indigenous emancipation is impossible under a capitalist system. Coulthard uses the Dene Nation’s struggle for national recognition as a case study in which he analyzes this theory. He concludes that the Dene Nation’s history shows that the process of primitive accumulation was helped by the liberal politics in recognition because of recognition-based negotiations taking place between the colonizer and the colonized.
Coulthard also uses feminist analysis for a large section of the book. He says one needs to keep race, gender, and culture open-ended to avoid essentialism, which Ann Philips states is a restriction on members of minority groups. He demonstrates how this issue can hinder a movement by analyzing the decade between “Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982 and the demise of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992.” Coulthard makes an important point in this analysis by stating that Fanon and the Dene Nation, despite having inspired and informed his arguments, made a mistake in failing to properly address the role of patriarchy in their analyses of how racism, capitalism, colonization, and the state are related.
Finally, Coulthard uses the final chapter to introduce five theses. This is where Coulthard’s book eventually converges. Up to this point, the book dealt with different topics that were seemingly only slightly related to recognition politics or Indigeneity. However, the conclusion of the book brings all the previous topics together in a way that emphasizes the links between his analyses. The first thesis is that direct action is a necessary part of Indigenous insurgency and that negative reactions from the dominant society are unavoidable. The second is that Indigenous people cannot be emancipated under a system of capitalism. The third is that Indigenous people must find a way to use solidarity and mutual aid to take advantage of the “strengths that urban and reserve-based Native people have developed.” The main point of this thesis is to reconcile urban and reserve-based Natives due to their different sociological circumstances. The fourth thesis is that we must stop violence and denigration against women in all forms. Coulthard claims that unless this happens, Indigenous people will “have reconciled [themselves] with defeat.” This includes listening to the demands of Indigenous feminists, which are for men to “stop conducting themselves in ways that denigrate, degrades, and devalues [their] lives.” The final thesis is a demand for Indigenous nations to renounce recognition and rights-based efforts of insurgency and instead seek forms of resurgence that “practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non-exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions.” This fifth thesis is Coulthard’s summation of the other four theses, implying that you cannot successfully use one without the other. All these theses must be used simultaneously to achieve successful Indigenous emancipation.
Coulthard’s book is expertly written and articulated. The main thing that helps it succeed — besides the profound understanding of the texts it cites and the expert critical application of their philosophies into historical events in Indigenous history — is its structure. Coulthard is capable of scaffolding every finding in a way that comes together in the end. The book almost functions like a Socratic conversation, where Coulthard gets you to agree with one small point to demonstrate the next and bring everything together into one package at the end.
Bibliography
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cover Photo courtesy of University of Minnesota.