The aff is not a passive giving of rights but assimilation couched in the language of mutual recognition.

Over the last forty years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of “recognition.”1 Consider, for example, the formative declaration issued by my people in 1975:

We the Dene of the NWT [Northwest Territories] insist on the right to be regarded by ourselves and the world as a nation.

Our struggle is for the recognition of the Dene Nation by the Government and people of Canada and the peoples and governments of the world. . . .

And while there are realities we are forced to submit to, such as the existence of a country called Canada, we insist on the right to self-determination and the recognition of the Dene Nation.2

Now fast-forward to the 2005 policy position on self-determination issued by Canada’s largest Aboriginal organization, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). According to the AFN, “a consensus has emerged . . . around a vision of the relationship between First Nations and Canada which would lead to strengthening recognition and implementation of First Nations’ governments.”3 This “vision,” the AFN goes on to explain, draws on the core principles out- lined in the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP): that is, recognition of the nation-to-nation relationship between First Nations and the Crown; recognition of the equal right of First Nations to self- determination; recognition of the Crown’s fiduciary obligation to protect Aboriginal treaty rights; recognition of First Nations’ inherent right to self- government; and recognition of the right of First Nations to economically benefit from the use and development of their lands and resources.4 Since 2005 the AFN has consistently reasserted and affirmed these guiding principles at its Annual General Assemblies and in the numerous resolutions that these gatherings have produced.

These demands have not been easy to ignore. Because of the persistence and dedication of countless Indigenous activists, leaders, communities, and organizations, we have witnessed within the scope of four decades the emergence of an unprecedented degree of recognition for Aboriginal “cultural” rights within the legal and political framework of the Canadian state.5 Most significant on this front was Canada’s eventual “recognition” of “existing aboriginal and treaty rights” under section 35(1) of the Constitution Act of 1982. This constitutional breakthrough provided the catalyst that led to the federal government’s eventual recognition, in 1995, of an “inherent right to self-government,”6 as well as the groundswell of post-1982 court challenges that have sought to both clarify and widen the scope of what constitutes a constitutionally recognized Aboriginal right to begin with. When considered from the vantage point of these important developments, it would certainly appear that “recognition” has emerged as the dominant expression of self-determination within the Aboriginal rights movement in Canada.

The struggle for recognition has become a central catalyst in the international Indigenous rights movement as well. As the works of Will Kymlicka, Sheryl Lightfoot, Ronald Neizen, and others have noted, the last three decades have witnessed the emergence of recognition-based approaches to Indigenous self-determination in the field of Indigenous–state relations in Asia, northern Europe, throughout the Americas, and across the South Pacific (including Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands).7 Although varying in institutional scope and scale, all of these geopolitical regions have seen the establishment of Indigenous rights regimes that claim to recognize and accommodate the political autonomy, land rights, and cultural distinctiveness of Indigenous nations within the settler states that now encase them. Although my primary empirical focus in Red Skin, White Masks is Canada, I suspect that readers will find many of my conclusions applicable to settler-colonial experiences elsewhere.

On a more discursive plane, the increase in recognition demands made by Indigenous and other marginalized minorities over the last forty years has also prompted a flurry of intellectual activity that has sought to unpack the complex ethical, political, and legal questions that these types of claims raise. To date, much of this literature has tended to focus on a perceived relationship between the affirmative recognition and institutional accommodation of societal cultural differences on the one hand, and the freedom and autonomy of marginalized individuals and groups living in ethnically diverse states on the other. In Canada it has been argued that this synthesis of theory and practice has forced the state to dramatically reconceptualize the tenets of its relationship with Indigenous peoples; whereas before 1969 federal Indian policy was unapologetically assimilationist, now it is couched in the vernacular of “mutual recognition.”8

In the following chapters I critically engage a multiplicity of diverse anti-imperialist traditions and practices to challenge the increasingly commonplace idea that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state can be adequately transformed via such a politics of recognition. Following the work of Richard J. F. Day, I take “politics of recognition” to refer to the now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal plural- ism that seek to “reconcile” Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler- state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state.9 Although these models tend to vary in both theory and practice, most call for the delegation of land, capital, and political power from the state to Indigenous communities through a combination of land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-government agreements. These are subsequently the three broad contexts through which I examine the theory and practice of Indigenous recognition politics in the following chapters. Against this variant of the recognition approach, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the ideal of reciprocity or mutual recognition, 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.