Constructing a Nativity: The Crèche of the Debate

Ever since Europeans made their first contact with 'Indians,' their political relationships have been unsteady and, often, one-sided. From Jamestown and onward, European settlers quelled land claims of prior ownership by fighting Indian history with colonial modernity. Assimilation was favored over coexistence, manifest destiny was favored over the defined borders of the Proclamation of 1763, and trails of tears were favored over negotiated resettlement (Samson in Cowan 243). Now, under reexamination, such practices seem undemocratic and illegal. Unfortunately, even the perspectives of democracy and law are biased against native cultures through their inherent ties to Western Liberalism (228). In order to form truly equitable agreements with indigenous people, lawmakers need to modify their discourse to better suit different cultural perspectives. Short of this solution, indigenous peoples must better exploit the modern paradigms that have been forced on them.

State institutions have always constructed the subjective category of the "native" to suit their needs. Invaders in tribal lands, settlers and their governments ruled over native populations with a self-endowed sovereignty. As armed resistance was a "dubious strategy" proven so at the Little Bighorn, native groups have had little choice but to cede their autonomy through treaties and agreements, implicitly agreeing to state constructs of indigeneity (Niezen 121). These constructs have, well into the last half of the 20^th century, implied a backwardness on the part of indigenous cultures and a plan for assimilation on the part of the state governments (120).

The Innu of Canada were such targets in the 1950s and 1960s. Perceived as "backward and destined to extinction," the Provincial authorities pursued aggressive sedentarization programs (Samson in Cowan 230). Nominally to protect and preserve the Innu people, the policy had the wholly intended side-effect of reining a nomadic culture that spanned an area the size of France into a much smaller area, leaving the balance to mining companies and hydroelectric projects. Drowning out native dissent with incomprehensible scientific jargon and larger budgets, the Provincial authorities were able to marginalize the Innu by giving them a democratic voice in the proceedings. Outgunned, outnumbered, and outmaneuvered, the last nomadic Innu folded to sedentary society by 1971 (233).

Less than fifty years before, even these 'rights' were unheard of on the international stage. When in 1923 the Iroquois Six Nation Confederacy under Deskaheh petitioned the League of Nations for membership, ambivalent Canadian and British authorities dismissed their claims and, using their clout within the League, prevented any real discussion on the topic (Niezen 123). The result was to be expected from the League of Nations. Only the defeated countries of Europe were required to protect their marginalized populations. The victors, unable to pay off their war debt without the spoils of exploitative colonies, were unwilling to grant similar rights until after the Holocaust, the establishment of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (126).

The post-war response to Nazism and the end of colonialism ushered in a new era of civil rights, more receptive to the plight of the native. In addition, the creation of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945 provided a more anthropological view of indigenous cultures and promoted a relativist respect for all groups, establishing a right to protection for ethnic and linguistic minorities (Eriksen 130). This new paradigm of inclusion and preservation presented a conversationalist view committed to reversing the work of previous assimilationist regimes (135). These advances, however, do not solve the problem of the essentialization of indigenous communities. Rather, they work in some cases to exacerbate it, reifying native cultures and painting them as monolithic entities devoid of internal identity conflicts or power struggles. Whose culture is UNESCO preserving? Few members of South Dakota's Oglala Sioux still hunt buffalo. Some live on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, where 97% of the population lives under the Federal poverty line (FEMA 1999). Most have moved off the reservations and into cities across the United States. Surely the poverty-stricken culture of the reservation is not the subject of protection, much less the metropolitan lifestyle of Oglala city-dwellers.

These new official modes of thinking are fraught with controversy and contradiction. Scholars are divided on how to best create a more equitable definition of the native. Opinion varies from maintaining the status quo to doing away entirely with the term 'culture' entirely in favor of more localized definitions. Eriksen voices the latter opinion, quoting Ingold in saying that "the concept of culture... will have to go" (Eriksen in Cowan 142). As it reifies native groups, it freezes them in time, or hurls them back into idyllic pasts. To be rid of the concept allows for a more pragmatic respect for each group or practice on its actual merits while at the same time allowing room for a global ethics promoting tolerance (143). This proposed ethics dodges the culture-based paradigm's contradiction of supporting both the tolerance implicit in a global ethics and the exclusivity implicit in the recognition of cultures. It does this by removing the broad, vague concept of culture entirely and adopting a more precise, localized language.

Samson would agree, writing that current Western constructs of indigenous identity are inherently exploitive and implicitly colonial, requiring "simulated cultural sameness" of native peoples (Samson in Cowan 226). This simulated sameness works the same way culture does for Eriksen, essentializing indigenous communities into idyllic pasts, thus making them the target for new assimilationist and exploitative practices. As Canada controls the land on which the Innu live, it imposes this paradigmatic assimilation on them in order to delegitimize, or simply defeat their concerns. For the Innu to deny the construct is to deny access to the most basic rights afforded citizens. To accept it is to welcome subjugation at the hands of commercial interests and municipal projects by entering into an unwinnable debate (244).

The picture is not so dismal for Brown. Rather than fight state-imposed definitions of native culture, he writes instead that indigenous groups can engage corporations and the state using Western concepts of copyright and cultural property to protect their own mythology, rituals, and symbology (Brown 194). Promoting his own anthropological agenda as a researcher, he falls short of endorsing the wholesale, "radical" copyrighting of culture and emptying museums of sacred artifacts and texts, suggesting instead the liberal western-biased philosophy supporting preservation of the public domain (206).

Niezen takes a more indigenous-friendly stance, agreeing with Brown that native groups should accept state-defined cultural frameworks, but further suggesting that those constructs be turned in favor of the groups themselves. He sees indigenous identity as a relatively new product of the post-Holocaust, post-colonial era, writing that new sympathies toward marginalized people created an environment more receptive to popular appeal in the 1950s. While the roots of this paradigm shift have precedent in Deskaheh's sensationalized campaign at the League of Nations, the balance of power did not shift until the establishment of the United Nations (Niezen 123). In this new International forum, small groups could band together under the new construct of the indigenous person as one oppressed by government-imposed assimilation (121). These coalitions, composed of groups too small to sway public opinion on their own, were able to organize effectively enough to gain a substantial voice in policy-making decisions.

Known as "strategic essentialism," the strategy allows small indigenous communities to unite in international fora under the essentialized common identity of subjects of forced assimilation. This essentialization is not imposed, but rather self-appended in order to achieve political goals. Then, having obtained the attention of international news media, speakers "engage in the politics of embarrassment," kicking off highly-organized public relations campaigns (128). Their general objectives are simple: protection from genocide and forced assimilation, restitution of cultural property, preservation of cultural languages, rights to tribal land, the right to self-determination, and, barring that, the right to government services. Indeed, all these tenets are laid out in 1993 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (129).

Niezen disagrees with strategic essentialist goal of self-determination, however, insofar as it is "antithetical to indigenous peoples' traditional political values." He writes that indigenous groups, for want of size and capital, lack the means to set up the institutions and bureaucracies required of modern states (142). Samson would argue that this view imposes Liberal and Modern frameworks of governance on cultures that might just as well return to nomadic life. Niezen's suggestion is pragmatic, though. It takes into account diversity within native groups, ranging from the urban to the traditional, while at the same time providing a framework through which they can attain political goals.

For want of a comprehensive and cohesive ideological framework free of contradiction, it would seem that the next best option is the most pragmatic. Niezen puts forth a strategy that turns new sympathies towards oppressed cultures into political capital that can be spent in the realization of indigenous goals. For all its essentialization, it seems to be the most favorable toward indigenous peoples as it allows them to use identity not as a restrictive excuse for oppression, but as a powerful political tool. If it is unrealistic to impose a new politics of identity, the most utilitarian solution is for indigenous groups to use existing identities and institutions to further their agendas.

Works Cited

Bell, Lynda et.al. Negotiating Culture and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Cowan, Jane et.al. Culture and Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Niezen, Ronald. "Recognizing Indigenism: Canadian Unity and the International Movement of Indigenous Peoples." Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan., 2000), pp. 119-148.