Intent for a Nation

Abstract

But a nation does not remain a nation only because it has roots in past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in present There must be a thrust of intention into future. George Grant, Lament for a Nation, 1965 Oh God! Like 'Ihunderbird of old I shall e again out of sea; I shall grab instruments of white marls success--his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into proudest segment of you[ society. Chief Dan George, Lament for Confederation, 1967 THE INTENT BEHIND MY ALWAYS INDIGENIZE essay was to create more space for making meaning and taking action within terrain of humanities and university. I was aiming for robust critique of Euro-humanism, its formal settings and disciplines. I wished also to affirm legitimacy and necessity of critical collaboration between and among and non-Indigenous scholars, and sought to avoid eliding or minimizing Canada's Indigenous well summed up by Patrick Macklem as four complex social facts: cultural difference, Aboriginal prior occupancy, Aboriginal prior sovereignty, and Aboriginal participation in a treaty process (4). The fact that others will be taking up (or putting down) in Esc exhortation to Always Indigenize! is deeply gratifying to me, and I look forward to further critique of such validity as my argument may still have. What I wish to do here is simply say a little more about future of Indigenizing by means of a brief detour through its past, invoking a deliberately double origin in George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965; see Sugars xvi) and Chief Dan George's Lament for Confederation (1967). However, in shifting my own emphasis via lamentation to intention, I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing lamentable in current conjuncture, not least federal Liberal hegemony which seems to reconfirm claim of Aime Cesaire that the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon (Cesaire 335). But there are also signs of Canadian nation practising forms of sovereignty and commitment which may yet more effectively support political and economic agency as well as constitutional legitimacy for co-architects (not orally ancillary authors) of treaty federalism and bearers of aboriginal and treaty rights. (1) And radical humanities and their counterparts have an important role to play in this process. My focus here is Anglo-Indigenous for several reasons, all of them tactical. If you feel French Canada--or a less foundational Canadian ethnicity--only as a painful absence or ghostly travesty here, then that may help you empathize with how so many people say they feel much of time. If you feel my focus is needlessly exclusionary, then I refer you to Andrew Cohens much discussed recent book on Canada's place in world. For Cohen, Quebec has functioned recently as a troublesome presence, a regrettable, parochial distraction from Canada's traditionally strong internationalism, a view he shares with other much discussed authors of moment like Margaret MacMillan and Michael Ignatieff (Geddes 2003: 24). In While Canada Slept, Cohen's only reference to Canada's difference is a passing allusion to Louis Riel, a situation that suggests First Nations, Inuit, and Metis are not important enough to constitute even a distraction, far less a source of national pride and international leadership in recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights. To understand how habitual this post-Indigenous amnesia is, how a resurgent white enlightenment (Findlay When I hear 2004) is once again claiming to define Canada's future, and how we can combat these twin tendencies, I want to turn first to Grant and his directive version of Indigene. Grant's work has great resonance and aptness still, in part because of persistence of declinism and defeatism (see Findlay 1997: 679ff. …