The 1AC’s concession of reform is drafted into a larger colonial politics of recognition, whereby symbolic gestures of redress are offered to delegitimize Native demands for structural transformation and perpetuate asymmetries of power.

For Alfred, colonial recognition politics serves the imperatives of capitalist accumulation by appearing to address its colonial history through symbolic acts of redress while in actuality “further entrenching in law and practice the real bases of its control.”11 As we have seen, over the last forty years Canada has recognized a host of rights specific to Aboriginal communities, including most importantly to land and self-government. Canada has always used this recognition, however, as evidence of its ultimately just relationship with Indigenous communities, even though this recognition continues to be structured with colonial power interests in mind. Simpson levels a similar charge against the more recent “turn to reconciliation” in Indigenous politics. “As reconciliation has become institutionalized,” writes Simpson, “I worry our participation will benefit the state in an asymmetrical fashion.”12 In Simpson’s view, the state’s approach to reconciliation serves to neutralize the legitimacy of Indigenous justice claims by offering statements of regret and apology for harms narrowly conceived of as occurring in the past, thus off-loading Canada’s responsibility to address structural injustices that continue to inform our settler-colonial present. In doing so the state can claim “that the historical ‘wrong’ has been ‘righted’ and further transformation is not needed.”13 In the end, the optics created by these grand gestures of recognition and reconciliation suggests to the dominant society that we no longer have a legitimate ground to stand on in expressing our grievances. Instead, Indigenous people appear unappreciative, angry, and resentful, as we saw in chapter 4.

The optics of recognition and reconciliation can also have a colonial impact on Indigenous subjects. For both Alfred and Simpson, settler-colonial rule is a form of governmentality: a relatively diffuse set of governing relations that operate through a circumscribed mode of recognition that structurally ensures continued access to Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources by producing neocolonial subjectivities that coopt Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession. According to this view, contemporary colonialism works through rather than entirely against freedom: In the “new relationship,” writes Alfred, the “rusty cage [of colonialism] may be broken, but a new chain has been strung around the indigenous neck; it offers more room to move, but it still ties our people to white men pulling on the strong end.” Alfred’s concern here is that many Indigenous people, particularly those leaders and community organizers heavily invested in the colonial politics of recognition, have come to associate this externally imposed field of maneuver with freedom or decolonization itself.

The biopolitics of settler-colonial recognition can also problematically inform our efforts at Indigenous resurgence. For both authors, recognizing this demands that we remain cognizant of the pitfalls associated with retreating into an uncritical essentialism in our practices of cultural revitalization. As Alfred states in Peace, Power, Righteousness: “Working within a traditional framework, we must acknowledge the fact that traditions change, and that any particular notion that constitutes ‘tradition’ will be contested.”15 A similar insistence on cultural dynamism informs Simpson’s work. Resurgence does not “literally mean returning to the past,” insists Simpson, “but rather re-creating the cultural and political flourishment of the past to support the well being of our contemporary citizens.”16 For Simpson this requires that we reclaim “the fluidity of our traditions, not the rigidity of colonialism.” Acknowledging culture’s malleability, however, does not mean that we cannot still identify certain “beliefs, values and principles that form the persistent core of a com- munity’s culture,” writes Alfred. It is this “traditional framework that we must use as the basis on which to build a better society.” The resurgence Alfred and Simpson advocate is thus a critical one: an intellectual, social, political, and artistic movement geared toward the self-reflective revitalization of those “values, principles and other cultural elements that are best suited to the larger contemporary political and economic reality.”18 Resurgence, in this view, draws critically on the past with an eye to radically transform the colonial power relations that have come to dominate our present.