The left's aboriginal blind spot

The left's aboriginal blind spot
Jonathan Kay, National Post Published: Tuesday, February 03, 2009

I don't usually use this space to praise the work of Marxists. But in the case of Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, I'll make an exception. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation--excerpted elsewhere on this page -- is the most important Canadian policy book I've read in the last decade.

It is one thing for National Post columnists to criticize land claims and native self-government. We can be sloughed off as reactionaries --or even racists. But such ad hominems don't work in the case of Widdowson and Howard, overt socialists whose theories are based on years of field work in the Northwest Territories.

Like many anthropologists working with aboriginals, the authors were pressured to act as advocates for native cultural empowerment. But what they saw -- sex and child abuse, violent crime, economic and social dysfunction, suicide, substance abuse and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome -- soured them on the mantras being peddled by their peers. The most urgent task, they conclude in their book, isn't heaping more powers and cash on band leaders, but providing natives with the education and cultural formation required to make it in modern society, so they can leave the reserves behind. Widdowson and Howard don't call this goal 'assimilation' --but I do.

But what's even more interesting to me than their policy prescriptions is the way the authors deconstruct the prevailing 'progressive' orthodoxy -- the idea that a return to authentic native culture is the key to aboriginal success --from a left-wing perspective. As they show, policies that emphasize segregation and race-consciousness contradict a host of venerable leftist dogmas -- and, in some cases, even blur into Fascism. Consider: - From bioethics to evolution, progressive advocates long have urged that government policies be formulated on hard, secular science -- not hidebound cultural traditions or religious fairy tales. Yet where aboriginals are concerned, this principle is ignored. Suddenly, myths about a Yahweh-like 'Creator' take precedence over clear evidence that North American natives migrated across the Bering Strait. 'Traditional medicine,' with all its quackery, is praised as if it were the equal of Western medicine. At Canadian academic conferences, militant leftists will gladly stand at solemn attention to honour a native shaman waving his feathers and intoning his prayers -- a spectacle that would be unthinkable if the holy man happened to be holding a Bible and talking about Jesus. - From the civil rights movement onwards, progressive forces in our society have weaned us off the toxic notion that a person's race dictates the content of his or her character. But this enlightened attitude is wilfully discarded in the case of natives, who are imagined to be inveterately enlightened environmentalists, pacifists and (as discussed below) socialists. This racist conceit is in turn used to justify segregation -- since any other policy would expose natives to the pollution of white values.

The result: We've turned the clock back to the early days of the 20th century. 'Because of their focus on ethnic isolation, these initiatives embrace a philosophy not unlike those promoted in Nazi Germany, South Africa and the southern United States,' write Widdowson and Howard. 'The concern with the preservation of culture through racial segregation, and the linking of racial hierarchies to some kind of dictate from 'the Creator' become disturbingly familiar ... The pervasive attempts at connecting 'ancestry' with 'land' comes very close to the fascist conception of Blut und Boden (blood and soil).'

Even the touchy-feely idea of 'traditional knowledge' is itself racist, for it 'assumes that all objects in the universe are governed by spiritual forces that cannot be seen by a white man.' My favourite example of this attitude at work: Canadian territorial governments that still 'authenticate' Inuit artworks with a tag guaranteeing customers that the sculptor was genuinely Inuit-- the equivalent of a soul-food restaurant guaranteeing its customers that the cook is black. - From Karl Marx onwards, Western thinkers of all stripes have cast human development through the prism of historical materialism -- the idea that societies pass through different stages, each of which brings greater technological advancement and division of labour. A Canadian-style welfare state comes at the end of this process, when advanced capitalist societies begin to socialize their abundant goods and services.

Yet when it comes to natives -- whose pre-contact societies have come to be imagined as hyper-egalitarian utopia -- the left instead imagines socialism as something that springs to life spontaneously in small, isolated pre-capitalist kin groups.

In fact, the tribal (which is to say, nepotistic) nature of aboriginal societies guarantees that the distribution of power and perks will generally be less equitable than in white societies: To the extent band leaders operate on 'traditional' hunter-gatherer values, they simply distribute their spoils to family members, and let others suffer.

This helps explain why, notwithstanding leftist cheerleading, natives comprise the one group in Canada that has systematically resisted unionization. As Widdowson and Howard write: 'Tribal identities ... conflict directly with the purpose of unions. A change in native leadership often results in mass firings of existing personnel, who are then replaced by cronies of the incoming chief and council. Unions pose a threat to these tribal dictatorships, and so leaders discourage their formation.' - One of the great triumphs of progressive forces over the last century has been the liberation and empowerment of women. Aboriginal reserves, on the other hand, tend to be openly sexist and patriarchal in a way that our own society deemed disgraceful

(and even illegal) generations ago. On reserves, women typically are evicted from their property following a divorce. Sex abuse is relatively common, with offenders often protected by the community.

As Widdowson and Howard note, this should hardly come as a surprise. Early accounts from missionaries and explorers describe native societies where 'the sexual autonomy of women was not respected, and wife stealing, wife lending and other forms of sexual coercion were common practices.'

Yet these are the same pre-contact societies that are held up as egalitarian idylls by guilty white leftists who see every evil as emanating from their own European heritage.

Given how enormous the ideological gulf between classic leftism and the Aboriginal Industry it supports, why did it take this long for such a book to appear on Canadian bookshelves?

The answer is that the entire analysis contained in Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry rests on the authors' willingness to write frankly on a topic that most Canadian academics regard as taboo: the massive difference in social and technological development between European and native societies at the time of First Contact.

'In archeological terms, various aboriginal groups were either in a Paleolithic or Neolithic stage,' they write. 'Isolation from economic processes has meant that a number of Neolithic cultural features, including undisciplined work habits, tribal forms of political identification, animistic beliefs and difficulties in developing abstract reasoning, persist despite hundreds of years of contact.'

In other words, the encroachment of Western values in aboriginal communities isn't the problem -- it's the solution.

Karl Marx, I dare say, would have agreed."