On Method and Militant Resistance: An Appreciation of Nuanced Engagement with the Uneasy History of Settlers and First Nations

Bryan D. Palmer, Trent University

The acclaimed novelist, poet, satirist, relentless oppositionist, and defender of all outsiders Ishmael Reed once proclaimed that “writin’ is fightin’.”¹ I am sure the essay that hagwil hayetsk/Charles Menzies has responded to, and the larger forthcoming book of which it is a distillation, will be the cause of some fights. As the author of these works, however, I have no quarrel with Menzies.

“Capitalism and Colonialism – Settler and First Nation; An Uneasy History” is exceedingly generous in addressing my remarks on colonialism and capitalism as they unfolded in Canada over the years between 1500 and 2023. It is also a significant and nuanced stand-alone contribution to the discussion of Indigenous-settler relations, deserving to be read as such. Situating this long history within a sophisticated periodization, Menzies rightly refuses to sidestep the violence accompanying the colonization of First Nations and their beleaguered confrontation with capitalism. He has controversial and critically important things to say about the contemporary politics of state agents, from their knee-jerk reactions at being confronted with the ugliness of the past to fostering initiatives of recognition that have divided First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, weakening resistance. In Menzies’ understanding of how a layer of Indigenous leadership has been co-opted, buttressing the needs of capitalism and colonialism, he develops an oppositional stand associated with Red Power militants of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Howard Adams.²

Where Menzies offers critical comment on my essay, it is always fair minded and insightful. To my way of thinking, some of this critique stems from our somewhat contradictory positionings around method. Menzies examines the limited terrain of a specific locale, his training as a sociocultural anthropologist focusing his writin’ and fightin’ on “an area the size of a small island or a coastal archipelago.” This allows for the illumination of specifics, and they emerge in his essay with striking effect. In contrast, I am fixated on presenting a larger, more generalized depiction of an admittedly long and unwieldy history. Humility dictates that I qualify Menzies’ suggestion that, in my account, “No place, no time, no struggle has been left behind.” Far from it. As Menzies’ discussion itself establishes, any attempt to reveal the entirety of the decisive imprint of colonialism and capitalism on the making of Canada is destined to be incomplete.

Striving to grasp totality may well come up short, but it is nevertheless a necessary endeavour, however much it lays one’s analytic head on the chopping block for critics less congenial than Menzies to lower their booms on. The interplay between the intricacies and detail of distinct, particularistic study and the generalization and abstraction of commentary that attempts to capture broad developments allows the significance of the discrete to be placed within a larger framework, even altering that framework. This is precisely the case, I believe, with Menzies’ imaginatively conceived, rigorously researched, and evocative study People of the Saltwater: An Ethnography of Git lax m’oon.³

The issue of method, I believe, frames Menzies’ suggestion that I have been led astray by “colonial orthodoxy,” falling prey to assumptions that Indigenous peoples existed within a state of “comparative abundance.” This colonialist view of the political economies of First Nations suggested that simple food production sustained them, liberating Indigenous peoples from the necessity of cultivating and developing the land, waterways, and resources of their habitats. Such misrepresentations became a staple of the argument of colonizers that First Nations lands were terra nullius, subject to the Doctrine of Discovery, in which European newcomers could claim such territories for ostensibly more advanced civilizations, capable of “development.” Menzies provides new and powerful evidence of how the people of the saltwater intervened in the coastal ecology to sustain fish stocks, investing their labour in altering environments so that harvesting resources would be facilitated. This was cultivation of a kind that Lockean colonizers either could not see or refused to acknowledge. It was reproduced in other Indigenous locales, where understandings of property, use values, and hereditary entitlements were anything but absent.⁴

My use of the terminology “abundance,” however, was not meant to convey acceptance of the colonialist ideology of political economies structured by nature’s supposedly easy gifts. My use of “comparative” was not at all utilized to situate Indigenous peoples and their environments alongside those of Europeans. Rather, it was the diversity of ecologies across the spectrum of Indigenous experience that I was concerned with. I was interested in comparative exploration of the lives of First Nations and Inuit peoples. It seemed to me important to recognize that while all such peoples shared something of the sensibilities of hospitality, the “bowl with one spoon,” and the Indigenous commons, there were political economies and related societal organization that exhibited differentiations. I was at pains to balance what seemed to me legitimate generalization alongside recognition of diversity.

In the southerly reaches of the Pacific Northwest, for instance, rare environments allowed for limited accumulation. As surpluses were possible, however precarious their longevity, coastal settlements in this region constituted one of the most densely populated, largely non-agricultural regions in the pre-capitalist world. Ranks and orders evolved, taking on the trappings of class/caste distinctions, with chiefs at the top and slaves, captured in war and held as labouring chattels of those marked by higher rank, at the bottom. Elaborate Indigenous dwellings, adorned with impressive artistry, not to mention rituals like the potlach, might be situated within this complex, differentiated, social formation, which developed out of a particular ecological context. Among the Inuit of the Arctic North, no such social differentiation existed – a product, I would suggest, of the more austere environment, where a kind of iron law of mutuality was intrinsic to survival.

Material contexts among Indigenous peoples thus varied greatly, however much they shared a common separation from the mores and sensibilities of European newcomers. As Indigenous environments offered up quite divergent quantities and qualities of necessities vital to human sustenance and survival, the societies and practices developing within them exhibited some unique characteristics as well as common features. These commonalities loomed large as all such First Nations and Inuit peoples ended up confronting colonialism and capitalism, albeit at different times and in particular ways, relying on resilience to weather a generalized process of subordination. But just how the distinctiveness of different Indigenous groups, rooted in material circumstances prior to European contact, structured the ways that First Nations encountered colonialism and capitalism is also important.

Menzies has rightly insisted that my language of description separate itself unequivocally from legacies of colonialism, a useful reminder that whatever our intent in writing and fighting for equality, our words can be taken to refract past meanings, even as we have something else in mind. I take this criticism to heart and have revised some of the wording around this issue of “abundance” in my larger book-length study.

1. Ishmael Reed, Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (New York: Atheneum, 1988); for an accessible introduction to Reed, see Julian Lucas, “Ishmael Reed Gets the Last Laugh,” New Yorker, 19 July 2021.

2. See, for instance, Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (Toronto: New Press, 1975). Note, as well, Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), bearing in mind the fraternal critique of this work in John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71 (February 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/2020/02/01/marx-and-the-indigenous/.

3. Charles R. Menzies, People of the Saltwater: An Ethnography of Git lax m’oon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

4. See, for instance, Menzies, People of the Saltwater, esp. 33–34, 96; Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 99–125; Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981); Chief Gary Potts, “Teme-Augama Anishnabai: Last-Ditch Defence of a Priceless Homeland,” in Boyce Richardson, ed., Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country (Toronto: Summerhill Place/Assembly of First Nations, 1989), 201–228. For a theoretical discussion of relevance, see Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

How to cite:

Bryan D. Palmer, “On Method and Militant Resistance: An Appreciation of Nuanced Engagement with the Uneasy History of Settlers and First Nations,” Labour/Le Travail, 93 (Spring 2024), 323–327, https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.014.