Indigenous Political Thought: Critical, Romantic and Existential Approaches

• In Event: Indigenous Political Thought and Pluralism

Abstract

Indigenous political thought is plural. When it comes to Indigenous scholarship, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small number of contributions by a few well-known authors has today become a vast, complex field of ideas, with multiple origins, contested schools, and diverse relationships to existing colonial disciplines. There is no singular narrative across these in contemporary Indigenous theorizing, if there ever was any single story that could pretend to capture the ideas of Indigenous academics writing from diverse lands, peoples, and social locations. Like other intellectuals contributing to political thought, Indigenous scholars respond to urgent social and political questions, as much as they answer back directly to earlier arguments within a complex field. Tracing the intellectual genealogies within the field of Indigenous political thought therefore demands attentiveness to the historical context and to the unequal social relationship within which they are developed and against which Indigenous political thinkers rebel – or which they seek to transcend.

In this contribution, I compare and contrast three approaches to Indigenous political thought: critical, romantic and existential. Broadly, critical Indigenous theorists, like Dene political scientist Glen Coulthard, are concerned with critiquing colonial politics, for instance, pointing to the limits of the contemporary politics of recognition. Participating in anti-imperialist critique, they describe colonial institutions, relations and ideologies in order to unmask their negative consequences for Indigenous peoples or to deconstruct taken-for-granted ideological claims. Romantics, like the Anishinaabe writer Leanne Simpson or somewhat differently, the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe scholar Heidi
Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, are concerned with developing political imaginaries that challenge the colonial present through a re-valorization and re-vitalization of past Indigenous practices and ideals for the present. This approach draws upon and elaborates diverse teachings, in a normative political gesture that emphasizes the best of historical and existing Indigenous practices as vital to present and future political possibility. As Stark summarizes, in an article entitled “Marked by Fire”, this approach is about “what [an Indigenous people] were and what they hoped to become” (2012, p.122). Existentialists, like the Maori philosopher Brendan Hokowhitu and Métis feminist Emma LaRocque, are concerned with “facticity”, the immediacy of Indigenous circumstances and choice, freedom and responsibility. These scholars do not deny the weight of colonial history upon the present, but they reject what they see as naively romantic idealizations of Indigenous societies, past and present, instead insisting on the complexity of all human life and the inescapability of individual human agency.

In practice, Indigenous theorists may move across approaches. If this paper draws on specific scholars to illustrate each perspective, critical, romantic and existential Indigenous political thought are perhaps more usefully understood as modes of political theorizing. Each responds to partly distinct, if often related, political problems. Critical Indigenous theories critique the colonial world as it is; to repurpose a remark by LaRocque in her book When the Other is Me, this approach may “ten(d) to dwell on the no-so-beautiful effects of colonization on ‘[Indigenous] people’” (p.187, fn 40). Romantics look to an idealized past, or a past that is easily idealized when compared to the present, to imagine the world as it could be: as Simpson observes in her book, As We Have Always Done, “It sounds idyllic, because compared to now it was idyllic” (p.3). Existentialists are concerned, above all, with the human, “the interstitial space” (p.156), as LaRocque describes in When the Other is Me, where despite colonialism, Indigenous people express an always-personal capacity for agency and creativity.

These three approaches are sometimes complementary, mobilized at different times by a given Indigenous political theorist as equally, if distinctively, useful modes of political thought. In other cases, there are important tensions across them: existentialists like Hokowhitu and LaRocque, for instance, are critical of a romantic tradition that, in their account, naively idealizes Indigenous persons and so ultimately denies Indigenous people the contradictory possibilities inherent in actual human existence. In considering these debates, this paper describes the distinctive contributions of critical, romantic and existential approaches, but also the tensions and contradictions across them, as one useful entry point into an increasingly complex, differentiated field of contemporary Indigenous political thought.

Author

• Elaine Coburn, York University