Native
peoples became ‘precarious’ with the inception of the settler-state
ENDING OUR STATUS AS INDIGENOUS HOMO SACERS?
Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | February 18, 2013
I have
told my students that instead of running away from the bare life, we should
rush toward it and embrace it.
The
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt
made two observations that are useful to fully understand the nature of white settler
colonialism and its calculated brutality against First Peoples. The first idea,
which of course has been taken up as the point of departure of the work of
Giorgio Agamben,[i] is that
after the Jewish Holocaust every parliamentary and liberal democracy exists in
a permanent state of emergency/state of siege. The second point is that under
such a regime, not only is there a suspension of the rule of law, the
constituted power of the sovereign is focused on the ability to decide,[ii] and
especially to determine who lives and who dies – hence, the concept of biopower as
developed by Foucault and his protégés is nothing short of prescient.
The
end of the rule of law is surely by now a more familiar condition to most
citizens in the U.S. and Canada who are dealing with the collapse of the Bill
of Rights in the aftermath of 9-11 and the advent of the never-ending ‘War on
Terror’. How many of those citizens are awakening to the systematic attacks on
the writ of habeas corpus, the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, or the
right to be free from government or police surveillance without lawful cause or
a court-issued warrant? How many citizens have too slowly arrived at the
realization that the “drone
memos” of the Obama Administration surpass even the “torture memos” of the
Bush II regime in their cold and calculated rationality seeking to establish
the praxis of the Unitary Executive as judge, juror, and executioner?[iii]
To
them I say, welcome to the condition of the ‘bare life’ routinely faced by
indigenous peoples for more than 500 years. Our experiences with the state of
exception did not begin with the end of WW II or the morass of the post-9-11
permanent war machine. The state of exception, and the reduction of our status
to the ‘bare life’, began with contact, conquest, and the imposition of the
laws and institutions of white settler colonialism.
The
Idle No More movement is therefore the most significant movement against the
sovereign power of the state of exception. It is the only movement that can
effectively and legitimately confront and challenge the Unitary Executive’s
desire to suspend the rule of law and determine who lives and who dies. This is
because the Idle No More movement invokes the return to the only legitimate
ethical, juridical, and political authority older than and therefore more
primal and autochthonous than that of the sovereign powers inscribed by the
U.S. and Canadian governments (or any non-tribal authorities). This is not
about tribal sovereignty – which is always still within the colonialist
construct – but rather the resurgence of autonomy.
Let
me be clear: Tribal sovereignty is a purely contrived political condition co-produced
with and for settler colonialism in order to establish a “government-to-government”
relationship for purposes of negotiating and signing treaties and other
administrative and trust agreements.[iv] Kanien’kehaka
(Mohawk) scholar Taiaiake
Alfred discusses the work of Canadian scholars Menno Boldt and Tony Long
among the Blood and Peigan peoples who have argued:
By adopting the European-Western ideology of
sovereignty, the current generation of Indian leaders is buttressing the
imposed alien authority structures within its communities, and is legitimizing
the associated hierarchy comprised of indigenous political and bureaucratic
elites. This endorsement of hierarchical authority and a ruling entity
constitutes a complete rupture with traditional indigenous principles. (As quoted in Alfred 1999:80)
The
contradictions and limits of native sovereignty are painfully and ironically
illustrated in Canada right now, by the actions of the Prime Minister who can feign respect for ‘aboriginal sovereignty’ by anointing Patrick Brazeau
as the chosen Senator to ‘represent’ First Nations within the Conservative
Party. Enrolled with the Omàmiwinini (Algonquin) Nation, Brazeau is perhaps
best known for his view that “The best way to get our land back is to buy it
back. Just like every other Canadian.”[v]
He is the quintessential neoliberal ‘Apple’ and embodies everything that is
poisonous via the embracing of the political projects of late modernist
sovereignty.
Autonomy
is a deeper daily lived experience and material-spiritual condition through
which first peoples realize and exercise the full breadth and depth of their
agency without permission of the so-called sovereign power. The autonomy of
native peoples resides beyond the reach or authority of the colonial settler
state or contrived tribal councils. Recognizing this key distinction between
sovereignty and autonomy is essential if we are to fully understand and engage
with the struggles unleashed by Idle No More.
Of
course, Alfred has his critics including Dale Turner, Teme-Augama Anishnabai
author of This
is Not a Peace Pipe (2006). According to Mark Rifkin, Turner’s argument
revolves around the idea “that the protection of Native peoples involves making
their concerns and representations intelligible within the legal and political
structures of the settler-state.”[vi] Turner’s
critique strikes me as highly problematic and, indeed, against the general
claims and demands of the Idle No More Movement. What’s more, Turner’s
criticism reminds me in no small manner of the brilliant arguments set forth by
James C. Scott in Seeing
Like a State, in which he notes how the power of the state to control
the ‘Other’ comes precisely from rendering indigenous cultures, landscapes, and
practices “legible”. Resisting legibility is critical to the practice of
autonomy and this means that sometimes we must choose to remain ‘strategically
invisible’ and opaque to power. That is the point of the direct action protests
and ‘flash mob’ organizational forms assumed by much of the resistance
associated with Idle No More.
The
matter of survival is no doubt at the heart of this entire problematic. If we
assume Dale Turner’s approach, then survival becomes a matter of bridging the
divide between indigenous and settler colonial fields of knowledge – he
explains this as a matter of “reconciling” disparate “ways of knowing”. I think
that Rifkin gets it right when he rejects this approach because Turner assumes
that all will be resolved as soon as “we explain our differences and in the
process empower ourselves to actually change” the settler-state (p. 111).
Turner’s
faith in the panacea of discursive politics is not just naïve it is actually
Eurocentric since it actually sounds like the Frankfurt School’s critical
theory approach to the forging of democracy. It is, after all, Jürgen Habermas,
who has envisioned the possibility of an “ideal speech community” leading
toward an imagined nirvana of equality within diversity.
With
Rikfin and Alfred, I remain more of a hard-core anti-materialist in the sense that I understand that discourse
politics and the ‘games of truth’ never exhaust the range of human agency – unfortunately,
bullets speak louder than words in oppressing us. But we are also not mere
ghosts of the primitive accumulation – in other words, capitalist violence has
harmed us, enclosed our lands, poisoned the waters, and killed off the
wildlife, but we are resilient and refuse to
disappear.
The
complications posed by the state of exception scenario can lead to a slippery
slope inducing theoretical confusion and political stasis. However, there is at
least one principal lesson we can derive from the Idle No More movement: The
‘bare life’ was always a part of us. It pre-dates settler-states and capitalist
enclosures.
The
‘bare life’ – understood as the condition of ‘just living’ and affecting the Homo sacer as the body forced to live
without a political existence by virtue of the sovereign’s ability to decide that a particular
body is excluded – is actually also in a prefigurative
way the way of being for a decolonial way of life. I have told my students that instead
of running away from the bare life, we should rush toward it and embrace it.
How is such an outrageous idea even possible you surely must be wondering?
Agamben
took the concept of the bare life (la
nuda vita in the Italian original) from the Greek philosophers who used two
terms to signify what we usually mean by ‘life.’ The first term is zoe, which expressed the simple fact of
living common to all living beings. The second term is bios, which implies a way of living that is social and political
because it pertains to the life of the person within a group, community, or
nation. According to Diane Enns, the “bare life recalls Aristotle’s distinction
between mere life and the good life; between private life and the public life
of the polis where justice arises from the human community’s capacity to
reflect on what is best and necessary for the common good.”[vii]
Fine,
except this means that the very definition of the bare life implies a
Eurocentric construct of the citizen and the citizen’s occupied body in relation
to the state and the sovereign. If political life is only possible under the
watchful gaze of the sovereign, then is this itself not antithetical to the
traditional indigenous concepts of autonomy, coevalness, and mutual reliance
interests? What if the bare life is actually the perfection of right
livelihoods and a heritage of simplicity (not simplemindedness) based on
respect for Original Instructions? Would not the bare life then constitute the
emancipation of the aboriginal from the state of exception rather than reducing
to the outcome of the sovereign deciding to determine the nature of the life of
the First Peoples?
From
this vantage point, the escape we seek is not from the bare life – understood alterNatively as a right
livelihoods state of autonomy – but rather a resistance against the reduction
of our bare life to a politically contrived condition of precarity or the
precarious life. I am attempting to draw a distinction here between the bare
life, understood in indigenous terms, as an autonomous life based on respect
for ecological limits and membership in a mixed community of many different
living organisms and the precarious life
understood as a condition of existence without predictability or security,
degrading material, psychological, and spiritual well being. In other words,
the bare life is our chosen way of living a simple life without excess
consumption. The precarious life is the result of conquest, colonialism, and
the imposition of a state of exception by the settler-state.
The
Idle No More movement has taught me to make this critical distinction between the
bare life and the precarious life and the lesson for me began with the use of a
hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence. After all, the hunger strike is that ancient
and proven tradition that embraces the bare life as a direct attack against the
artificially contrived condition of precarity, which all settler-states seek to
impose on occupied bodies subject to the political projects of late modernity with
a fatal obsession with the rule of law when it serves the aims of domination
and a fallback to the state of emergency when it does not.
Endnotes
[ii] Carl
Schmitt 1985. Political
Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT
Press, p. 5. For further discussion, see: David Martin 2008. The violence
within the sovereign decision. Anamesa
6:1:74-97.
[iii] The
so-called “drone memos” are the most serious controversy to face the Obama
Administration since they reveal the adoption of a policy in which the
President can basically order the targeted assassination via drone of U.S.
citizens abroad under the rationale of the War on Terror. The memos were leaked
to NBC on February 4, 2013. For a copy of the Department of Justice ‘white
paper’ establishing the rationale, go to: Lawfulness
of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen.
[iv] On the
distinction between sovereignty and autonomy, see Taiaiake Alfred 1999. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous
Manifesto. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, esp. pp. 65-119. Alfred notes:
The
concept of sovereignty as Native leaders have constructed it thus far is
incompatible with traditional indigenous notions of power. Nevertheless, until
now, it has been an effective vehicle for indigenous critiques of the state’s
imposition of control….Who would believe that indigenous nations could ever
successfully challenge Canada and the United States to win their sovereignty?
No one. Apparently, because even those who advocate sovereignty as a goal seek
only a limited form of autonomy, not independence; the goal relates only to
powers of self-government within a framework of constitutional law and
authorities delegated by the state. (1999:80-81).
[vi] Mark
Rifkin 2009. Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking sovereignty in light of the
‘peculiar’ status of native peoples. Cultural
Critique 73:3:88-124; discussion of Turner’s critique of Alfred is on pp.
110-111.
[vii] Diane
Enns 2004. Bare life and the occupied body. Theory
and Event 7:3:1-44; p. 21.
