Illustration: The Globe and Mail. Sources: Getty Images
Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s faculty of law. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book We Were Once Brothers.
Like most children, my kids did not have naturally curious taste buds. And like most children, they would often fall back on safe classics, like macaroni and cheese and instant noodles.
My son still enjoys the noodles, and he has remained loyal to the Mr. Noodles brand. That’s because Mr. Noodles alone offers his favourite flavour: “Oriental.”
One afternoon, as I stood stirring a pot of noodles, he asked, “What is Oriental, anyway?” Which is a good question. Because “Oriental” isn’t any particular flavour – it’s not soy sauce, not five-spice, but ... “Oriental.”
His question, in fact, was the subject of considerable examination by the late literary and cultural theorist Edward Said in the 1970s. He saw that the British Empire had expanded to include a significant portion of the world’s peoples. Mostly these were brown people, people from India, Persia, Asia and North Africa – the so-called “Orient.” Sure, there were also brown people from North and South America and Australasia, but these weren’t part of “the Orient.”
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The British Empire was an Enlightenment Empire – an Empire of geography, but also, an Empire of the mind. Plants, animals, languages and people were made the subject of methodical scrutiny. Amateur and professional scientists, for example, scoured forests and jungles hunting for new subspecies of butterflies to catalogue and pin to display boards and, in so doing, impose on those spaces a particularly English shape and meaning. And when it came to the study of the Empire’s various brown people, there developed an entirely new field of academic study: “Orientalism.”
Dr. Said turned the Orientalist gaze inward, applying the frameworks of anthropology and cultural theory not to the people and cultures of the Orient, but to those academics who had constructed for themselves the field of Orientalism. Dr. Said came to see that Orientalism was a projection: There was no “Orient” anywhere, only a European conception of cultural difference onto which Europeans could apply meaning. Orientalism, and the Orient, were projections of meaning, not meaning itself.
Today, amid a wave of revelations that high-profile Indigenous people are, in fact, not Indigenous, I struggle with a relevant question. Just as Edward Said wanted to know what Orientalism was, I wonder: what does it mean to be Indigenous?
In 1982, Canada repatriated the Constitution, including section 35, which declares: “the aboriginal peoples of Canada includes the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples ...” New fields of study were spawned, including Aboriginal law and the legal doctrines of Aboriginal rights and title.
But by the 1990s, there began to be an unease about the term “Aboriginal.” People didn’t want to be called Aboriginal. Incorrect Latin translation was in large measure to blame. People thought that “ab” meant “not,” as in “not original,” and thus, that the word “Aboriginal” was all part of colonists’ efforts to erase the history of native peoples in North America. In truth, the proper deconstruction of the term is “ab,” meaning “from,” and “origine,” meaning “the beginning.”
But the story about “Aboriginal” meaning “not original,” and the narrative of the evils of colonialism, together proved more compelling than proper translation. “Aboriginal” became a term of the oppressor.
Some new term had to replace “Aboriginal,” and the term settled on was “Indigenous.” This aligned with the language of the nascent UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) – though even that document papers over the profound differences between Indigenous populations in Africa and Asia, and Indigenous populations in North America, South America and Australasia. The final text of UNDRIP obscures the fact that even at the United Nations, “Indigenous” was a term open to self-definition rather than a term of settled meaning.
Newspapers and the courts had, since 1982, been using in print “aboriginal” – with a small, not capital, “a”. They did the same with “indigenous” – small “i”. Like many others, I argued that “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are proper pronouns, like the capitalized European or German. My stance was, I said at the time, grammatical, not political.
But eventually, I came to greater clarity about the grammar, just as I was becoming suspicious about how the term “Indigenous” was being deployed. I learned that with a proper pronoun, the noun in question denotes an identifiable subset of persons. People who are citizens of Germany are referred to by the proper noun “Germans.” You use the capital “G” because the term describes a knowable subset of persons: the citizens of Germany.
This sounds like a petty matter of semantics, but it’s more than that. “Aboriginal” has a specific legal meaning: “the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples of Canada,” a knowable subset of persons. “Aboriginal” is grammatically correct because “Aboriginal” is a proper pronoun, and proper pronouns are capitalized.
But there is no legal definition – no social scientific consensus – of Indigenous. Being Indigenous isn’t the same as being Indian, Inuit or Métis – those are broadly understood legal categories. Sure, we may still argue over who is Cree or Cherokee, but it is the Cree and Cherokee people who determine their own cultural membership. “Indigenous” is up for grabs.
Given a lack of precise meaning, then, the category of “Indigenous people” becomes available for definition. It allows people to assert an identity not rooted in tribal affiliation, but as a free-floating “Indigenous identity” that may or may not be loosely associated with an actual First Nation or a specific Métis or Inuit community. Indigenous is thus, like “Oriental,” a category onto which people can project meaning.
Worse still, this is happening at a time when the public is failing to distinguish meaningful difference between the individual cultures and traditions of First Nations. Sage, sweetgrass and dreamcatchers are now associated with a generic “Indigeneity.” Elders are regularly offered tobacco bundles, even when those elders are from communities that have no history of tobacco use. Phrases like “Mother Earth” or “spirit animal” may have no specific linguistic association to an Aboriginal nation, but people employ the term universally. These all have become shared cultural tropes of Indigeneity.
Then there’s the medicine wheel. In the late 1960s and 1970s, in response to a devastating epidemic of alcohol addiction, Alcoholics Anonymous became a force in tribal communities. But AA’s 12-step program required adherence to a religious norm, and since many tribal people associated Christianity with residential schools, a new pan-Aboriginal system of cultural meaning was needed. So an organization called White Bison created a program that used the AA principles, but framed them through the stone circles used in precontact ceremony, which were transmuted into posters touting representation of the four directions, and which have since been further adapted to represent the four peoples of the world, or the four directions, or four components of mental health, and on and on. None of which comes from any original systems of Aboriginal culture. In fact, the modern medicine wheel stems from a 1972 book by Hyemeyohsts Storm, the pen name of Charles Storm, who has falsely claimed to be Cheyenne.
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Today, the resurgence of genuine Aboriginal cultural practices must battle against the totalizing power of “Indigeneity” and all of those cultural tropes. Even powwows are relatively modern inventions, and while broadly based in our ancient seasonal tribal gatherings, these events are more Indigenous than they are rooted in any actual First Nations traditions. Some of these practices do have traditional antecedents, but they are by no means universal Aboriginal practices: they are the hallmarks of an Indigenous culture ungrounded by history, culture, or tradition.
Which brings us to the pretendians, who could be argued to be the true Indigenous people. Pretendians amalgamate cultural tropes as a kind of modern-day regalia. It has been said that you can spot pretendians because it looks like “an Etsy shop exploded” on them, so besotted are they with the beaded necklaces, the turquoise rings, and the leather medicine bag containing the mandatory collection of cedar, sage, sweetgrass and tobacco – a concoction with, you guessed it, no historical antecedents. But in reality, the best pretendians have learned to adopt just enough Indigenous regalia to look the part, and sadly, the image they present is how many people now expect Aboriginal people to look and dress.
Indigeneity has become such a powerful force that many contemporary Aboriginal people have come to share these same false beliefs: the power of Indigenous culture runs roughshod over our actual tribal and historic practices. And into this broken system of traditional knowledge has stepped the pretendian: the non-Aboriginal person who adeptly manipulates and deploys the fake culture of non-existent people.
Indigeneity, like Orientalism, was never a thing. Indigeneity is a projection of meaning, but our cultural embrace of capital-I “Indigenous” has created the conditions under which flourishes the very false identity and fake symbolism against which people rightly rage. If we hope to marginalize pretendians, we must all work to be more specific in our language, engage more deeply with individual Aboriginal communities, and render “Indigenous” as ineffectual as “Oriental.”