The aff corrupts the alt! The state doesn’t gain its legitimacy by excluding Indigenous people but by including them via recognition politics – only refusing the aff’s rights-based orientation allows decolonization.

We are now in a position to revisit the concern I raised at the end of chapter 1 regarding a problematic claim made by Dale Turner in This Is Not a Peace Pipe. Turner’s claim is that if Indigenous peoples want the political and legal relationship between ourselves and the Canadian state to be informed by and reflect our distinct worldviews, then we “will have to engage the state’s legal and political discourses in more effective ways.”79 This form of engagement, I claimed, assumes that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous– state relations in Canada derives its legitimacy and sustenance by excluding Indigenous people and voices from the legal and political institutional/dis- cursive settings within which our rights are determined. Seen from this light, it would indeed appear that “critically undermining colonialism” requires that Indigenous peoples find more effective ways of “participating in the Canadian legal and political practices that determine the meaning of Aboriginal rights.”80

Yet, I would venture to suggest that over the last forty years Indigenous peoples have become incredibly skilled at participating in the Canadian legal and political practices that Turner suggests. In the wake of the 1969 White Paper, these practices emerged as the hegemonic approach to forging change in our political relationship with the Canadian state. We have also seen, however, 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, through our engagements and negotiations with the state, to challenge. Why has this been the case? Part of the reason has to do with the sheer magnitude of discursive and nondiscursive power we find ourselves up against in our struggles. Subsequently, in our efforts to interpolate the legal and political discourses of the state to secure recognition of our rights to land and self-determination we have too often found ourselves interpellated as subjects of settler-colonial rule.

What are the implications of this profound power disparity in our struggles for land and freedom? Does it require that we vacate the field of state negotiations and participation entirely? Of course not. Settler-colonialism has rendered us a radical minority in our own homelands, and this necessitates that we continue to engage with the state’s legal and political system. What our present condition does demand, however, is that we begin to approach our engagements with the settler-state legal apparatus with a degree of critical self- reflection, skepticism, and caution that has to date been largely absent in our efforts. It also demands that we begin to shift our attention away from the largely rights-based/recognition orientation that has emerged as hegemonic over the last four decades, to a resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions. It is only by privileging and grounding ourselves in these normative lifeways and resurgent practices that we have a hope of surviving our strategic engagements with the colonial state with integrity and as Indigenous peoples.