Engage State good

Sheryl LIGHTFOOT Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights and Politics @ British Columbia – Anishinaabe from the Lake Superior Band of Ojibwe ’20 in Pessimism in International Relations eds. Stevens and Michelsen p. 156-170

Despite all of these activities designed to re-write the relationship between states and Indigenous peoples, some high-profile critical Indigenous political theorists reject all state overtures towards reconciliation and take extremely pessimistic approaches towards future Indigenous-state relations. They advocate that Indigenous resurgence through a return to Indigenous land-based forms of governance is the only path to decolonisation. I argue that while resurgence school theorists are strong advocates for Indigenous nations, and bring focus and clarity to a set of issues about power structures and dynamics, they are all caught in the same set of three ‘pessimism traps’ that unnecessarily limit their capacity to contribute to improved Indigenous-state relationships. These pessimism traps emanate from a reliance on Fanonian revolutionary thought and a problematic application of Fanonian theory from French-colonised North Africa to an entirely different context in the English-speaking settler states. Finally, I argue, these pessimism traps are diametrically opposed to the work and vision of Indigenous organisations who have been working on the ground for decades to assert Indigenous nationhood both domestically and internationally, in ways that often assertively and creatively challenge and shift the existing system of sovereign states. In sum, because the resurgence school remains trapped in a pessimism box of its own making, it remains significantly out of step with Indigenous movements and actually risks harming their efforts to advance Indigenous self-determination in creative and innovative ways.

Pessimism Trap 1: A Clear Demarcation of Indigenous Individuals into Only Two Categories, 'Authentic5 and 'Co-Opted5

For Indigenous resurgence theorists, these two categories are the only possibilities, and there is no grey area in-between. In their view, Indigenous peoples are co-opted if they hold elected office, make land claims or economic development agreements with governments or industry, or even sign treaties. Furthermore, co-opted Indigenous peoples are so co-opted, that they do not even recognise how they are being used and colonised by the state and its private-sector partners. On the other hand, authentic Indigenous peoples live on their traditional lands, speak their Native languages, practice their culture and govern themselves in traditional fashion. They are the only ones that have successfully resisted the overwhelming forces of colonisation and its powers of co- optation, and the only ones with the power to do so into the future.

In his 2005 book, Wasdse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Preedom, Taiaiake Alfred calls on the original people, what he calls Onkwehonwe in the Mohawk language, to unify in resisting the colonial structures that continue to oppress them.5 Relying on warrior imagery in the Mohawk tradition, Alfred confronts Indigenous people to recognise Western domination in our communities and resist it. He argues forcefully that Indigenous peoples have become overly complacent on, and even dependent upon, Western social, economic and political structures. He calls for a resurgence in Indigenous spirituality and political structures in Indigenous communities. As he sees it, a strong Indigenous warrior is not one that necessarily engages in war and violent resistance but, rather, is one that shows real courage by living a daily life grounded in the spiritual teachings and practices of our ancestors. The decolonis- ing revolution he calls for is rooted within the peaceful resurgence of traditional spirituality and governance. As he writes, ‘There are people in all communities who understand that a true decolonization movement can emerge only when we shift our politics from articulating grievances to pursuing an organized and political battle for the cause of our freedom. These new warriors understand the need to refuse any further disconnection from their heritage and the need to reconnect with the spiritual bases of their existences’.6 While at first glance, this book represents a powerful and compelling call to action by Indigenous communities and leaders, a closer examination reveals all three pessimism traps in play throughout the text.

Alfred draws a sharp line between authentic Indigenous approaches and co-opted ones. As he puts it, ‘Not all of us have been conquered. There are still strong Onkwehonwe who persevere in their struggle for an authentic existence and who are capable of redefining, regenerating, and reimagining our collective existences’.7 Yet, he warns, The colonizers stand on guard for their ill-gotten privileges using highly advanced techniques, mainly co-optation, division and when required, physical repression’ and ‘with its massive resources, the state can co-opt leadership and movement successes’.8

Furthermore, Alfred notes, the authentic Indigenous peoples and leaders are no longer the majority, as the co-opted ones seem to occupy most of the leadership roles in organisations and communities. Lamenting the constant temptations for co-optation on offer, from land claims agreements, to casino capitalism, to chief and council salaries, Alfred writes, Working for a cause that has indigenous integrity means sacrifice. ...This is the reality of an authentic indigenous existence in political terms. And, evidently, in our communities today, there are only a few people who are convinced that taking on the psychological and financial burden of being really indigenous is worth the fight’.9

Similar patterns appear in Alfred’s follow-up 2009 book, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto.10 In this work, Alfred walks the reader through Indigenous values, weaving a thesis that a new kind of Indigenous leadership, characterised by the resurgence of Indigenous forms of self-determination, is the only way to resist colonialism and preserve what still exists of Indigenous culture and lifeways today. In a Fanonian spirit, he challenges Indigenous peoples, and particularly leaders, professionals and academics, to be aware of how colonialism has impacted them and their communities on every level, including and especially, psychologically. He challenges Indigenous leadership and communities to recognise these multiple layers of colonialism in current contemporary practice, and to resist them.

As in his earlier work, Alfred divides Indigenous peoples, communities and leadership into two stark categories: authentic and co-opted. Indigenous leaders, he says, either actively resist, or they co-operate with the state. When they co-operate with the state, they ‘rationalize and participate actively in their own subordination and the maintenance of the Other’s superiority’ and therefore become co-opted.11

Further, he sees that as states have moved away from overt violent control of Indigenous communities, co-option has become the preferred method of control and subordination:

The fact is that neither the state-sponsored modifications to the colonial-municipal model ...nor the corporate or public-government systems recendy negotiated in the North constitute indigenous governments at all. Potentially representing the final solution to the white society’s ‘Indian Problem,’ they use the co-operation of Native leaders in the design and implementation of such systems to legitimize the state’s longstanding assimilationist goals for indigenous nations and lands.12

One of the deepest problems, according to Alfred, is that co-opted communities, leaders and professionals do not often even realise that they are, in fact, co-opted. Co-option, he says, ‘is a subtle, insidious, undeniable fact, and it has resulted in a collective loss of ability to confront the daily injustices, both petty and profound, of Native life’.13 As a case in point, Alfred engages in a substantial discussion of how the concept of sovereignty itself is Western in focus and therefore, when Indigenous leaders advocate for it, on behalf of their nations and communities, they are unwittingly engaging in a politics of co-optation. ‘Shallow-minded politicians’, Alfred writes, ‘are unable to grasp that asserting a right to sovereignty has significant implications’. When they assert a claim to sovereignty but not to resist the state itself, ‘they are making a choice to accept the state as their model and to allow indigenous political goals to be framed and evaluated according to a “statist” pattern’.14

Another prominent member of the Indigenous resurgence school, Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), was mentored by Taiaiake Alfred and their common philosophy is immediately apparent. As Alfred writes in his foreword to Coulthard’s 2014 book, Red'Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Polities of Recognition, ‘Coulthard is talking about rising up, ...about resurgence and the politics of self-affirmation. This is a call to combat contemporary colonialism’s objectification and alienation and manipulation of our true selves’.15

Coulthard critiques the current Canadian policy atmosphere of reconciliation as contemporary colonialism, ultimately the same as the old colonialism, but with a new mask. He argues the structure of the settler colonial invasion continues to dispossess and oppress Indigenous peoples, as it always has, but it now has a new face: the disingenuous liberal politics of recognition—which includes such current policy initiatives as the delegation of self-determination, economic development and the settlement of land claims. He begins by noting that over the past forty years or so, there has been an ‘unprecedented degree of recognition for Aboriginal “cultural” rights within the legal and political framework of the Canadian state’.16 Coulthard acknowledges that the increase in recognition demands coming from Indigenous intellectual and community leaders are largely responsible for these changes to the structure of the Indigenous-state relationship in Canada. Yet, Coulthard’s goal in this work is to challenge the notion that ‘the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state can be adequately transformed via such a politics of recognition’.17 Rather than ushering in a new relationship, he argues, the ‘politics of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend’.18

In other words, all of the work and struggle by Indigenous leaders and advocates in the past four decades to advance self-government, recognition of Aboriginal rights and title and economic development for their communities has not only been futile, but damaging to what would or should have been an ‘authentic’ struggle for Indigenous self-determination. Further, all of these advocates and leaders do not even realise how co-opted they have become in the ongoing structures of colonialism. Citing Alfred, and echoing Fanon, Coulthard notes that the dominance of the recognition approach over an extended period of time has produced a class of ‘Aboriginal “citizens’” who have come to define themselves in terms of the colonial state and its institutions rather than the culture and political traditions of their own Indigenous nations. He identifies a similar process with capitalist economic development initiatives that have created an ‘emergent Aboriginal bourgeoisie whose thirst for profit has come to outweigh their ancestral obligations to the land and to others’.19 Unfortunately, Coulthard pessimistically views Indigenous rights advancement as ‘bleak’, since ‘so much of what Indigenous peoples have sought over the last forty years to secure their freedom has in practice cunningly assured its opposite’.20

In a 2007 article, Cherokee political scientist Jeff Corntassel takes the co-option argument to the international level.21 Corntassel acknowledges that UN fora do provide opportunities for strategising and diplomacy among Indigenous actors from diverse parts of the world, especially important in storytelling, information sharing and building solidarity. Corntassel also acknowledges that there ^Vere a handful of instances in the First UN Indigenous Decade (1995-2004) where Indigenous peoples were able to successfully challenge UN protocols and procedures and insert themselves into the UN ‘on their own terms’. However, despite these acknowledgements, Corntassel concludes that the UN system, being made up of states, aims to co-opt Indigenous peoples into the norms and mores of the state, thereby distracting them from their proper focus on advancing their own nationhood. Like Alfred and Coulthard, Corntassel falls into the first pessimism trap which demarcates Indigenous political leadership into ‘authentic’ and ‘co-opted’ categories.

Pessimism Trap 2: The State is Unified, Deliberate and Unchanging in Its Desire to Dispossess Indigenous Peoples and Gain Unfettered Access to Indigenous Lands and Resources

In other words, colonialism by settler states is a constant, not a variable, in both outcome and intent. Further, the state is not only intentionally colonial, but it is also unified in its desire to co-opt Indigenous peoples as a method and means of control.

In 2005’s Wasase, Alfred presents the state as unitary, intentional and unchanging in its desire to colonise and oppress Indigenous peoples noting, ‘I think that the only thing that has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have lost heart’.22 Referring to current state policies as a ‘self-termination movement’, Alfred states, ‘It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our deep attachments to land’.23

Alfred’s Peace, Power; Righteousness (2009) also argues that the state is deliberate and unchanging, stating quite plainly that ‘it is still the objective of the Canadian and US governments to remove Indians, or, failing that, to prevent them from benefitting, from their ancestral territories’.24 Contemporary states do this, he argues, not through outright violent control but ‘by insidiously promoting a form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal mainstream’.25 According to Alfred, the state ‘relegates indigenous peoples’ rights to the past, and constrains the development of their societies by allowing only those activities that support its own necessary illusion: that indigenous peoples today do not present a serious challenge to its legitimacy’.26

Linking back to the aim of co-option, Alfred argues that while the state’s desire to control Indigenous peoples and lands has never changed, the techniques for doing so have become subtler over time. ‘Recognizing the power of the indigenous challenge and unable to deny it a voice’, due to successful Indigenous resistance over the years, ‘the state has (now) attempted to pull indigenous people closer to it’.27 According to Alfred, the state has outwitted Indigenous leaders and ‘encouraged them to reframe and moderate their nationhood demands to accept the fait accompli of colonization, (and) to collaborate in the development of a “solution” that does not challenge the fundamental imperial lie’.28

In a similar vein, Coulthard’s central argument is centred on his understanding of the dual structure of colonialism. Drawing directly from Fanon, Coulthard finds that colonialism relies on both objective and subjective elements. The objective components involve domination through the political, economic and legal structures of the colonial state. The subjective elements of colonialism involve the creation of ‘colonized subjects’, including a process of internalisation by which colonised subjects come to not only accept the limited forms of ‘misrecog- nition’ granted through the state but can even come to identify with it 29 Through this dual structure, colonial power now works through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, actively shaping their perspectives in line with state discourses, rather than merely excluding them, as in years past. Therefore, any attempt to seek ‘the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority’.30

Concerning the state in relation to Indigenous peoples on the international level, Corntassel argues that states and global organisations, for years, have been consistently framing Indigenous peoples’ self-determination claims in ways that ‘jeopardize the futures of indigenous communities’.31 He claims that states first compartmentalise Indigenous self-determination by separating lands and resources from political and legal recognition of a limited autonomy. Second, he notes, states sometimes deny the existence of Indigenous peoples living within their borders. Thirdly, a political and legal entitlement framing by states deem- phasises other responsibilities. Finally, he claims that states, through the rights discourse, limit the frameworks through which Indigenous peoples can seek self-determination. Like Alfred and Coulthard, Corntassel has concluded that states are deliberate and never changing in their behaviour. With this move, Corntassel limits and actually demeans Indigenous agency, overlooking the reality that Indigenous organisations themselves chose the human rights framework and rights discourse as a target sphere of action precisely because, as was evident in earlier struggles like slavery, civil rights or women’s rights, these were tools available to them that had a proven track record of opening up new possibilities and shifting previous state positions and behaviour. Indigenous advocates also cleverly realised, by the 1970s, that the anti-discrimination and decolonisation frames could be used together against states. States did, in no way, nefariously impose a rights framework on Indigenous peoples. Rather, Indigenous organisations and savvy Indigenous political actors deliberately chose to frame their self-determination struggles within the human rights framework in order to bring states into a double bind where they could not credibly claim to adhere to human rights and claim that they uphold equality while simultaneously denying Indigenous peoples’ human rights and leaving them with a diminished and unequal right of self-determination. But, because he is caught in the pessimism trap of seeing the state only as unified, deliberate and unchanging, Corntassel overlooks and diminishes the clear story of Indigenous agency and the potential for positive change in advancing self-determination in a multitude of ways.

Pessimism Trap 3: Engagement with the Settler State is Futile, if Not Counter-Productive

Since the state always intends to maintain, if not expand, colonial control, and is seeking to co-opt as many Indigenous peoples as possible in order to maintain or expand its dispossession and control, it is therefore futile, at best, and actually dangerous to Indigenous existence to engage with the state. Furthermore, all patterns of engagement will lead to co-optation as the state is cunning and unrelenting in its desire to co-opt Indigenous leaders, academics and professionals in order to gain or maintain control of Indigenous peoples.

Alfred argues, in both his 2005 and 2009 books, that any Indigenous engagement with the state, including agreements and negotiations, is not only futile but fundamentally dangerous, as such pathways do not directly challenge the existing colonial structure and ‘to argue on behalf of indigenous nationhood within the dominant Western paradigm is self-defeating’.32 Alfred states that a ‘notion of nationhood or self-government rooted in state institutions and framed within the context of state sovereignty can never satisfy the imperatives of Native American political traditions’33 because the possibility for a true expression of Indigenous self-determination is ‘precluded by the state’s insistence on dominion and its exclusionary notion of sovereignty’.34 Worst of all, according to Alfred, when Indigenous communities frame their struggles in terms of asserting Aboriginal rights and title, but do so within a state framework, rather than resisting the state itself, it ‘represents the culmination of white society’s efforts to assimilate indigenous peoples’.35

Because it is impossible to advance Indigenous self-determination through any sort of engagement with the state, Coulthard also advocates for an Indigenous resurgence paradigm that follows both his mentor Taiaiake Alfred but also Anishinaabe feminist theorist Leanne Simpson.36 As Coulthard writes, ‘both Alfred and Simpson start from a position that calls on Indigenous peoples and communities to “turn away” from the assimilative reformism of the liberal recognition approach and to instead build our national liberation efforts on the revitalization of “traditional” political values and practices’.37 Drawing upon the prescriptive approach of these theorists, Coulthard proposes, in his concluding chapter, five theses from his analysis that are intended to build and solidify Indigenous resurgence into the future:

1. On the necessity of direct action, meaning that physical forms of Indigenous resistance, like protest and blockades, are very important not only as a reaction to the state but also as a means of protecting the lands that are central to Indigenous peoples’ existence;

2. Capitalism, No More!, meaning the rejection of capitalist forms of economic development in Indigenous communities in favour of land-based Indigenous political-economic alternative approaches;

3. Dispossession and Indigenous Sovereignty in the City, meaning the need for Indigenous resurgence movements ‘to address the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples’ experiences in both urban and land-based settings’38;

4. Gender Justice and Decolonisation, meaning that decolonisation must also include a shift away from patriarchy and an embrace of gender relations that are non-violent and reflective of the centrality of women in traditional forms of Indigenous governance and society; and

5. Beyond the Nation-State. While Coulthard denies that he advocates complete rejection of engagement with the state’s political and legal system, he does assert that ‘our efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed, but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political configurations of power that we initially sought...to challenge’.39 He therefore advocates expressly for ‘critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution’ in a ‘resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically non- exploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions’.40

Corntassel also demonstrates the third pessimism trap, that all engagement with the state is ultimately futile. For the most part, however, Corntassel’s observation is that the UN system operates like a reverse Keck and Sikkink ‘boomerang model’ and ‘channels the energies of transnational Indigenous networks into the institutional fiefdoms of member countries’, by which an ‘illusion of inclusion’ is created.41 He argues that, in order to be included or their views listened to, Indigenous delegates at the UN must mimic the strategies, language, norms and modes of behaviour of member states and international institutions. Corntassel finds that ‘what results is a cadre of professionalized Indigenous delegates who demonstrate more allegiance to the UN system than to their own communities’.42 In his final analysis, he charges that the co-optation of international Indigenous political actors is highly ‘effective in challenging the unity of the global Indigenous rights movement and hindering genuine dialogue regarding Indigenous self-determination and justice’ 43

Finding that states deliberately co-opt and provide ‘illusions of inclusion’ to Indigenous political actors in UN settings, Corntassel comes to the same conclusion as Alfred concerning the futility of engagement, arguing that because transnational Indigenous networks are ‘channeled’ and ‘blunted’ by colonial state actors, ‘it is a critical time for Indigenous peoples to rethink their approaches to bringing Indigenous rights concerns to global forums’ 44

Imagining a Post-Colonial Future: Pessimistic 'Resurgence’ Versus the Optimism and Tenacity of Indigenous Movements on the Ground

All of these writers advocate Indigenous resurgence, through a combination of rejecting the current reconciliation politics of settler colonial states, coupled with a return to land-based Indigenous expressions of governance as the only viable, ‘authentic’ and legitimate path to a better future for Indigenous peoples, which they refer to as decolonisation. While inherently critical in their orientation, these three approaches do make some positive and productive contributions to Indigenous movements. They help shed light on the various and subtle ways that Indigenous leaders and communities can become co-opted into a colonial system. They help us to hold leadership accountable. They also help us keep a strong focus on our traditional, cultural and spiritual values as well as our traditional forms of governance which then also helps us imagine future possibilities.

As I have pointed out here, however, all three theorists are also caught in the same three pessimism traps: authenticity versus co-option; a vision of the state as unified, deliberate and never changing in its desire to colonise and control; and a view of engagement with the state as futile, if not dangerous, to Indigenous sovereignty and existence. When combined, these three pessimism traps aim to inhibit Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the state in any process that could potentially re-im- agine and re-formulate their current relationship into one that could be transformative and post-colonial, as envisioned by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The pessimism traps together work to foreclose any possibility that there could be credible openings of opportunity to negotiate a fairer and just relationship of co-existence with even the most progressive state government.

This pessimistic approach is not innocuous. By overemphasising structure and granting the state an enormous degree of agency as a unitary actor, this pessimistic approach does a remarkable disservice to Indigenous resistance movements by proscribing, from academia, an extremely narrow view of what Indigenous self-determination can and should mean in practice. By overlooking and/or discounting Indigenous agency and not even considering the possibility that Indigenous peoples could themselves be calculating, strategic political actors in their own right, and vis-a-vis states, the pessimistic lens of the resurgence school unnecessarily, unproductively and unjustly limits the field of possibility for Indigenous peoples’ decision-making, thus actually countering and inhibiting expressions of Indigenous self-determination. By condemning—writ large—all Indigenous peoples and organisations that wish to seek peaceful co-existence with the state, negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with the state, and/or who have advocated on the international level for a set of standards that can provide a positive guiding framework for Indigenous-state relations, the pessimistic lens of resurgence forecloses much potential for new and improved relations, in any form, and is very likely to lead to deeper conflicts between states and Indigenous peoples, and potentially, even violent action, which Fanon indicated was the necessary outcome. The pessimism traps of the resurgence school are therefore, likely self-defeating for all but the most remote and isolated Indigenous communities. Further, this approach is quite out of step with the actions and vision of many Indigenous resistance movements on the ground who have been working for decades to advance Indigenous self-determination, both domestically and globally, in ways that transform the colonial state into something more just and may eventually present creative alternatives to the Westphalian state form in ways that could respect and accommodate Indigenous nations. Rather, it aims to shame and blame those who wish to explore creative and innovative post-colonial resolutions to the colonial condition.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the Declaration or UN Declaration) was adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 after 25 years of development. The Declaration is ground-breaking, given the key leadership roles Indigenous peoples played in negotiating and achieving this agreement.45 Additionally, for the first time in UN history, the rights holders, Indigenous peoples, worked with states to develop an instrument that would serve to promote, protect and affirm Indigenous rights, both globally and in individual domestic contexts.46

Rhetorical engagement in civil society is a survival strategy for Natives and is key to hold settlers accountable – this does not preclude Decolonization.

Turner, 2006 Dale Antony. Associate Professor of Government and Native American Studies at Dartmouth - This is not a peace pipe: Towards a critical indigenous philosophy. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

The issue of participation generates epistemological problems of reconciling indigenous forms of knowledge with Western European philosophy. It also generates practical problems: How are indigenous voices to be accommodated in the legal and political discourses of the state? I contend that the intellectual work required to bring (or force) indigenous voices into the dominant intellectual community is the responsibility of a group of indigenous intellectuals called 'word warriors.' Word warriors reconcile the forms of knowledge rooted in indigenous communities with the legal and political discourses of the state. They do this for two reasons. First, our survival as indigenous peoples demands that in order to assert and protect the rights we believe we possess, we must engage the discourses of the state more effectively. Second, indigenous knowledge offers legitimate ways of understanding the world - ways that have never been respected within the legal and political practices of the dominant culture. To make matters worse, these ways have not played a significant role (except in the early treaties) in determining the normative language of the political relationship. Word warriors do the intellectual work of protecting indigenous ways of knowing; at the same time, they empower these understandings within the legal and political practices of the state. Word warriors listen to their 'indigenous philosophers' while engaging the intellectual and political practices of the dominant culture. 9

The aff acts as a mediator between civil society and anti-state politics – 2 impacts to this (1) It’s a survival strategy (2) It creates change through knowledge about problems in civil society.

Turner, 2006 Dale Antony. Associate Professor of Government and Native American Studies at Dartmouth - This is not a peace pipe: Towards a critical indigenous philosophy. University of Toronto Press, 2006.

This is where Tully's notion of a mediator is helpful. He is offering a way for philosophers, especially political philosophers, to see their own field of study in a way that includes - indeed, even demands -Aboriginal participation. But his mediator necessarily engages an Aboriginal mediator. An Aboriginal mediator - a word warrior - is an indigenous person who engages the imposed legal and political discourses of the state guided by the belief that the knowledge and skills to be gained by engaging in such discourses are necessary for the survival of all indigenous peoples. Tully's mediator and the indigenous word warrior both inhabit a social space that is difficult to define. Indigenous intellectuals must be citizens of an indigenous community, but how they will manage to move between languages, between ways of thinking about the world, remains to be determined in practice. Clearly, though, word warriors will have to assert and protect those ways of knowing the world that define indigenous peoples. This may well be a difficult task in a sometimes hostile world, but it is what we will need to do. Perhaps Edward Said' s idea of an intellectual as an exile is useful here: 'the exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.' Later on he adds: 'Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.'65