Redressing Redress: The Neoliberal Appropriation of Redress in the anti-Native Backlash at Caledonia

Abstract

What has become glaringly obvious ... is that within that province there are two tiers of justice, a preferential one for aboriginals and another, lower tier for non-Natives. Hus unequal treatment throws justice system into disrepute. dangerous message it sends is that, in some cases, whites seeking justice against aboriginals have no choice but to take law into their own hands. The Ongoing Disgrace of an unsigned editorial in National Pot, 28 November 2009 Since 28 February 2006, when Six Nations of Grand River Territory reclaimed a small parcel of land just south of their reserve in non-Native suburban town of Caledonia, town has become nearly synonymous with images, promoted by an increasingly corporatized and sensationalistic media, of burning tires, blockades, and standoffs between Natives and non-Natives, a hostile breach of civility that Daniel Coleman notes is held dear in Canadian imaginary (9). This paper examines response of predominantly white community at Caledonia in context of powerful discourses now circulating around redress and reconciliation and diverse avenues they offer for political contestation. I argue that local non-Native backlash against Six Nations' Reclamation (as it was termed by participants) sought to render itself intelligible as a redress movement in its own right. Investigating demands put forward by Caledonian community can help us think about redress as a genre of political activism within a neoliberal colonial-settler state like Canada. By understanding redress as a genre I am suggesting that it is a set of strategies, political discourses, and forms of activism, mostly addressed to governments, by which wronged groups make a call for justice and just compensation for past wrongs. However, in a moment marked by atomization, isolation, and individualism of neoliberal culture, and assertion of neoconservative social values to which neoliberalism frequently gives rise, genre of redress is ironically subject to cooptation and mobilization by dominant groups and privileged citizens against marginalized groups' calls for justice. This occurs in Canada in a context in which dominant discourses of state multiculturalism rely on and perpetuate racelessness that David Theo Goldberg defines as the attempt to go beyond--without (fully) coming to terms with--racial histories and their accompanying racist inequities and iniquities (217). redress genre, severed from racial histories and structures of oppression and exclusion, offers a readily appropriable form of political discourse. This ironic inversion of claims to persecution, abuse, and victimhood demonstrates rhetorical and logical contortionism akin to slander of reverse-racism that privileges white injury and facilitates historical amnesia that, in this case, perpetuates ongoing colonial injustice. After discussing global neoliberalism as foremost political project and ideology characterizing present political context in Canada, I elaborate an understanding of redress as genre and question degree to which land claims can be read in this register. I then provide a brief account of reclamation of Kanonhstaton at Caledonia, focusing my analysis on how local non-Native community residents and come-from-away agitators have staged a troublingly successful social movement that has taken up much cultural space and been favoured in local and national media at expense of Indigenous claims. Racially coded fears about diminishing property values and integrity of Canada's territorial sovereignty reveal unexamined entitlement characteristic of white privilege, in this case in literal sense of title to land, and dedication to preserving that entitlement. Ironically (albeit perhaps predictably), appropriation of redress tactics and strategies by Caledonians and their supporters--what I theorize as redressing of redress--has been remarkably successful in achieving immediate goals such as monetary compensation, sympathetic media representation, and audiences with various levels of political power. …