Introduction: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City

Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the CityThe Politics of Urban Indigenous Communities

Charles Horn

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Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City Charles HornUniversity of Victoria

Last revised June 8 2014

10/16/2022 11:46 AM

Introduction

But my project is precisely to bring it about that they 'no longer know what to do,' so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. Michel Foucault

Namôya mistahi ê-kiskêyihtâman….1

In September of 1896, more than 2,0002 Nehiyawak (Cree), Anishinabek

(Salteaux) and Nakoda First Nations people gathered in what is now

central Saskatchewan to debate the provisions of Treaty 6 with the

recently established country of Canada, a treaty that was eventually

signed by First Nations and the Crown’s representatives. The initial

negotiations took more than a week, as the Indigenous participants

tried to work out a collective response to the threat posed by the

encroachment of European populations and the possibilities represented

by the proposed treaty. Eventually, despite deep misgivings and

numerous differences amongst the tribes, Treaty 6 was signed, with

1 The words are Cree: they translate as “I don’t know very much’, a traditional Cree preface to a story. Cree text and translation provided by Cree scholar Neil McLeod. See Neil McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing. 2007.2 The number is given by Treaty Commissioner A. Morris. See his account at Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories. Toronto, 1880, reprinted Coles Canadiana.

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reverberations that resonate as strongly today as they did in the

years immediately following the event. Indeed, when the United Nations

decided in 2006 to follow up on a special report on treaties with

Indigenous peoples, it did so in a session convened in Treaty 6

territory.3 In a point with significance to this study, we can note

that the original negotiations and signing of Treaty 6 took place at a

traditional camping area the Cree called “pêhonânihk” or ‘the waiting

place’, a location which had long been a place4 where First Nations

gathered at the end of the hunting season, and as such served as an

important location for solidifying trading and diplomatic relations.

It was a place that had seen treaties before5, one possessed with a

cultural and political history that would have resonated with the

Indigenous participants, even if those significations would have

likely gone unnoticed by the Europeans who participated in the

negotiations and the subsequent signing of the Treaty.

I return to this place in more detail below, for I argue in this

Introduction that pêhonânihk and places like it are sites of significant

3 See also various documents prepared for the United Nations for this meeting,at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IPeoples/Pages/SeminarTreaties.aspx.4 The English word ‘place’ and other terms such as ‘land’, ‘territory’,and ‘earth’ are largely inadequate to articulate the pre-contact connection between Indigenous communities and their traditional territories. As I argue in these essays, the relationship is more complicated than these terms suggest, and part of the difficulty is precisely that we lack an adequate language to articulate the shifts in Indigenous spatiality brought about as a result of urbanization andthe impact of settler populations. 5 A discussion of pre-colonial treaty making processes can be found at Leanne Simpson, Looking after Gdoo-Naaganinna: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomatic and Treaty Realtionships, in Native Historians Writing Back: Decolonizing American Indian History, eds. Susan Miller and James Riding. Luboock: Texas Tech University Press: 96-112. 2011.

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political investment, but also significant political tension. Such

sites both disclose a world—for the interpreters of Treaty 6, of

treaty rights and obligations—and simultaneously disavow and obscure

another—the world of Indigenous emergence, motility and urbanity, or

so I argue. The issues I pursue in these essays thus range much wider

than Treaty 6 and its history, and if I return to pêhonânihk it is less

to add to Treaty 6 scholarship and more to open up a broader

problematic which I suggest profoundly troubles Indigenous politics in

the contemporary era. This study is above all concerned, to put its

core concern in its most abstract and simple form, with a tension in

Indigenous politics between the forces of territorialization and

deterritorialization, if I may use those densely coded terms

provisionally and without entailing any particular philosophical

commitments. And, I am concerned here to explore this tension as it

works itself out in a very specific political location: urban

Indigenous communities. But this tension and the various

manifestations of it that these essays canvass are easier to discern,

and their profits and costs easier to calculate, if we initially set

them against the backdrop against which they operate and which they

must eventually overcome.

The relevant backdrop is this: the ‘historic moment’ of Treaty 6, one

of the many that comprise the record of the treaty process between

Canada and First Nations, has been seen by many of its commentators,

and rightly so, as powerfully indexing both the bare fact and

intrinsic logic of Indigenous territorial authority, and as marking

the cultural differences between Indigenous nations and settler

society. In this sense the signing of Treaty 6 could be read as

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emblematic but also as an affirmation of the political status of

Indigenous communities as full political societies, different in form

but equal in standing to European nations states (Chamberlain 1997,

Miller 2009). Cree scholar Sharon Venne, likely the most influential

interpreter of Treaty 6 in Canada today,6 suggests that when both the

written and oral components of the Treaty are considered, the Treaty

can only be understood as an agreement between two sovereign nations,

the purpose of which was to specify how Indigenous lands and resources

were to be shared with settlers 7 (International Work Group for

Indigenous Affairs 1997, Venne 1997).

Indeed, in Venne’s rendering—as it was surely understood by the

participants in treaty negotiations—this mutuality could hardly be

otherwise: it was precisely the independent and equal political status

of both the British and Indigenous nations that made the negotiations

possible in the first place. This interpretation suggests that

notwithstanding the government’s subsequent prevarications and bad

faith, the Treaty was an agreement in which the Indigenous signatories

never ceded their connection to the territory nor abandoned the rights

and obligations that flowed from it: they were not surrendering their

power but treating with an equal (McLeod 1999, Venne 2011)8. Ted 6 But see also the work off Métis scholar Frank Tough, e.g., Arthur J Ray, JimMiller, et al., Bounty and Benevolence: A Documentary History of Saskatchewan Treaties. Vol.23. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP. 2000.7 Since Indigenous nations had a long history of treaty making, they would likely have understood the treaty with Europeans as an extension of a well-known practice, which gives credence to the view that the Treaties were never meant to extinguish wholesale the land rights of the Indigenous signatories, something that never would have occurred in inter-tribal negotiations.8 A written record from the Cree perspective of the promises made at Treaty 6 can be found at F. Ahenakew and H.C. Wolfart, Ana Kâ-Pimwêwêhahk Okakêskihkêmowina / the Counselling Speeches of Jim Kâ-Nîpitêhtêw. Publications of the Algonquian Text Society. Winnipeg, University of Manitoba

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Chamberlain, in turn, in a long and thoughtful piece on Indigenous-

state relations in Canada (1997), has supplemented this focus on the

sharing of land between equals as the primary task of treaty making

with considerations about the cultural autonomy and singularity that

treaties implied. Chamberlain suggests that we can only understand

treaty negotiations in the Canadian prairies if we understand that all

the parties to treaties, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were

primarily concerned with maintaining cultural continuity and a certain

kind of cultural order in their communities, even as the content of

those cultures differed between the English and the Indigenous on

almost every point, including the crucial point of the relevance of

oral agreements to implementing treaties (Carter 1996, Miller 2009). A

treaty and the processes that create treaties, these authors seem to

suggest, can be read, indeed must be read, as inscribing the central

‘Indigenous difference’, in particular the definitive and defining

facts of Indigenous sovereign authority and cultural continuity

exercised over a traditional territory by the political embodiment of

a singular Indigenous nation.

We might note, in passing, that in adopting this perspective authors

such as Chamberlain and Venne are simply following a much older

precedent, one adopted by the current adherents of the Treaty itself

and their ancestors. The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations, in

their modern day articulation of the principles that guide the

Press. 1998. An account from a non-Indigenous participant (an Anglican Missionary) can be found at John Hines, The Red Indians of the Plains: Thirty Years Missionary Experience in the Saskatchewan. Toronto: McClelland Goodchild and Stewart. 1916. As well, readers might consult the better known account of Métis translator, Peter Erasmus. See Peter Erasmus, Buffalo Days and Nights, as Told to Henry Thompson. Calgary: Fifth House Publishers. 1976.

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Confederacy, see the Treaty as simply reiterating and amplifying the

principles laid out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognize the

sovereign status of Indigenous Nations and the integral connection

between that status and the territories occupied by those Nations. In

the words of the Confederacy, both the 1896 Treaty and the 1763 Royal

Proclamation “recognized First Nations’ title, sovereignty, and ….

(a)lso established the relationship of mutuality between two nations

and the principle of consent between First Nations Peoples and the

Imperial Crown.”9 Consent, mutuality, sovereignty10, Indigenous

nationalism, territory: these are the core elements that defined that

moment in 1896, elements which have gone on to assume a defining role

in Indigenous political life in the contemporary11 era.

9 Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations. “Treaty Principles”. http://ct6fn.org/default.aspx?page=Treaty%20Principles&ID=6. Accessed June 29,2013. 10 I am aware that the term ‘sovereignty’ is highly contested with respect to its application to Indigenous polities. Alfred’s position is indicative: “Sovereignty is an exclusionary concept rooted in an adversarial and coercive Western notion of power”, the use of which leads Indigenous communities to occupy a ‘dependent and reactionary position relative to the state’. SeeTaiaiake Alfred, Sovereignty, in A Companion to American Indian History, eds. PhilipJ. Deloria and Neal Salisbury. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd: 460-474. 2007. For different reasons, and two decades earlier, Menno Boldt and Anthony Long also critiqued the application of the term to Indigenous communities, suggesting that this posed a paradox for the articulation of Indigenous aspirations. See Menno Boldt and J. Anthony Long, Tribal Traditions and Eurpoean-Western Political Ideologies: The Dilemma of Canada's Native Indians in The Quest for Justice : Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights, eds. Menno Boldt, J. Anthony Long, et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 333-346. 1985. Others, such as Corntassel, suggest that the term ‘nation’, or ‘nationhood’ better captures the nature of Indigenous polities. See Jeff Corntassel and Richard Witmer, Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challeges to Indigeous Nationhood. Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press. 2008. As discussed in more detail in a subsequent chapter, my use of the term ‘sovereignty’ is intentional, and is designed, not to contest or negate objections to this term, but to stress the political nature of urban Indigenous communities, including to mark it as an absent figure.

http://ct6fn.org/default.aspx?page=Treaty%20Principles&ID=6

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Such readings, as we shall see, are not uncommon (e.g., Cardinal 1971,

Cardinal and Hildebrandt 2000), and their ubiquity in Indigenous

political discussions means that the elements such accounts propose as

central are not just confined to treaty commentary, but also form an

important part of the larger trajectory of what we might describe as

‘Indigenous political thought’ in North America today. That is, as

Venne, Chamberlain, and the descendants of the signatories to Treaty 6

11 The use of the word ‘contemporary’ here should not be confused with the useof the word ‘modern’: non-Indigenous writings about Indigenous communities have for too long used the term ‘modern’ to mark Indigenous societies as essentially pre-modern, or at best on an inevitable path to modernization/assimilation. Such usage reflects, or so Michael Asch tells us, stadial theories of social change that were so dominant in anthropology and which went on to influence popular culture and, more importantly, a century ofjurisprudence on Aboriginal rights. On this point, see Michael Asch and Patrick Macklem, "Aboriginal Rights and Canadian Sovereignty: An Essay on R. V. Sparrow." Alberta Law Review 29 (2): 498-516. 1991. Needless to say, this stadial view is rejected in these essays. My use of the phrase ‘contemporary era’ is intended to reflect the period of Indigenous politics that followed the mobilization, in Canada, against the 1969 White Paper on Indian affairs, and in the United States, the occupation of Alcatraz Island. The definitive response to the white Paper was of course Harold Cardinal, Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada's Indians. Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall. 1971. For AIM, and the occupation of Alcatraz, see Troy R. Johnson, "Roots of Contemporary Native American Activism." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20 (2): 127-154.1996. Chikasaw scholar James Youngblood (Sakej) Henderson sets the decisive point for the emergence of the contemporary era of political mobilization, in Canada, at a similar time: Chief Dan George’s “Centennial Manifesto’, read outto a crowd in Vancouver in 1967, at the aptly named Empire Stadium. Henderson makes the argument in James Youngblood Henderson and University of Saskatchewan. Native Law Centre., First Nations Jurisprudence and Aboriginal Rights : Definingthe Just Society. Saskatoon: Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan. 2006. Chief Dan George’s speech is reprinted at Dan George and H. Hirmschall, The Best of Chief Dan George. Surrey: Hanock Press. 2004. One of the key outcomes of the enormous influence of Cardinal’s ‘Red Paper’ and The Unjust Society was to decisively orient Indigenous politics towards ‘treaty rights’ themes, and awayfrom the (social democratic and civil rights) politics that had structured earlier political mobilization in the prairies and elsewhere. On this point, see Murray Dobbin, The One-and-a-Half Men : The Story of Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, Metis Patriots of the Twentieth Century. Vancouver: New Star Books. 1981.

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suggest, the ‘event’12 of Treaty 6 and its aftermath have been read as

emblematic of much broader, and much deeper, features of the

relationship between settler society and Indigenous nations, features

which have become central organizing tropes for writings and advocacy

about Indigenous politics in the modern era. Today, if Indigenous

politics can be said to have a focal point, it is surely here: the

defense of the sovereignty, political status and political capacity of

a First Nation13 and its territorial base. Or to put it another way, if

12 I use the term ‘event’ in various places in these essays, not the least of which is to mark the emergence of urban Indigenous communities. My use of ‘event’ here (loosely) reflects Deleuze’s use of the term in The Logic of Sense: as"turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling” (see Gilles Deleuze, TheLogic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1990.). The ‘event’ for Deleuze was never an absolute new beginning, but rather something like a change in waves or a set of intersections already at play. This notion of ‘event’ also implies that the outcome of these changes (in intensity, scope, frequency, etc.) are not necessarily the result of conscious choices but of an emergence of a transformed series. Applied to the case of urban Indigenous communities, the emergence of a community was not a choice amongst various paths but an emergence. This does not eliminate choice, but rather implies that choice cannot be the final or definitive ground of an emergence. Further, this use ofevent is consistent with an Indigenous ontology in that it sees any separationof events from wider sets of relationships or entities (‘cutting away’) as suspect. See also Alain Badiou, "The Event in Deleuze." Parrhesia 2: 37-44. 2007.13 The invocation of ‘nationhood’ as a rubric for describing Indigenous political collectives does not imply that Indigenous communities saw themselves as ‘nations’ in the same way that Europeans did, either at the timeof treaty making in the Prairies, or now. As Heidi Stark points out in her analysis of Anishinaabe treaty making, ‘nationhood’ in Indigenous communities during the treaty making period but afterwards as well, entailed a whole series of other relationships and affinities, what she describes as ‘dense webof clans, kinship ties, and loyalties to non-Anishinaabe nations’, amongst other interrelationships, that constituted the body politic and that had no direct equivalent in European political thought. See Heidi Stark. “Marked by Fire: Anishinaabe Articulations of Nationhood in Treaty Making with the UnitedStates and Canada”. American Indian Quarterly, 36(2), 119-149, 2012. This line of analysis is supported by numerous analyses that distinguish both contemporary and historical Indigenous polities from European nation-states.

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we think of that moment on the prairies as a ‘constitutional

convention’, in the sense of a gathering of people (a convention) to

authorize a form of federation (a constitution), it was also

‘constitutionally conventional’, in the sense of producing a standard

practice of interpretation by which the law would henceforth be

interpreted.

To be sure, these elements are not the only legacy from the promise of

those early treaties. Other, more pernicious patterns and thematics

have also followed that moment on the Canadian prairies: the broken

promises, the continued and illegitimate dispossession of Indigenous

lands, and the attendant collective trauma that flowed from the

colonization of Indigenous communities, a colonization and territorial

displacement which only accelerated, rather than diminished, after the

signing of the early treaties (Deloria 1985, Germain 2001, Langton,

Palmer, et al. 2004, Miller 2009). These unhappy and violent features

of the troubled relationship between the settler state and Indigenous

peoples are also an integral part of the record of treaties in Canada.

They have also become definitive in setting the tenor and tone of

contemporary Indigenous politics, to the point where the two stories—

of sovereign political relationships, and of the trauma of

colonization—have become inseparable. These elements, both separately

and working together as a constellation of figurations, have become

inextricably woven into the stories we tell ourselves and each other

about Indigenous politics, indexing and condensing in a powerful way

the narrative arc within which to articulate the political status of

Indigenous communities, and which we use to establish the historical

trajectory of Indigenous anticolonial struggles.

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I invoke this sketch of the main threads that structure Indigenous

politics today as exemplified in the Treaty 6 literature, not for the

sake of analysing, yet again, the treaty process in Canada. Rather, I

take up some of the themes identified in that literature—sovereignty,

political embodiment, territoriality, and others—to throw into relief

a significant feature in the Treaty 6 negotiations that is less

noticed in accounts of that event and its aftermath, a feature that I

suggest can be read as emblematic of a decisive issue facing

Indigenous political thought, and one which I argue has profound

implications for the future of Indigenous communities.

This feature is the seemingly trivial detail of where the negotiations

occurred: the location of the negotiations at pêhonânihk, the ‘waiting

place’14, a place that would no doubt have had symbolic meaning for the

Indigenous people present?

What did this ‘waiting place’ represent to the tribes that met there

in the summer of 1896, and what relationship did this spatial location

have to the issues of sovereign authority, relation to territory,

unprecedented social and political change, and the trauma of

colonization at play in the negotiations and their long aftermath? Why14 The word pêhonânihk in Woodland Cree carries intonations of waiting and expectance (pêhon, she/he waits, expectantly), and of waiting for others. The description of the location and the Cree name appear in Blair Stonechild and B. Waiser, Loyal Till Death: Indians and the North West Rebellion. Calgary: Fifth House. 1997. Cree Elder Jim Kâ-pimwêwêhahk, in his ‘Counseling Speeches’, has the location as kâ-pitihkwêk ‘where there is a thundering sound’. In his oral account of Treaty 6, he describes it this way: “êkota ôta, nipiy kâ-pitihkwêk, êkota kâ-mâwacîhitohk kâ-wî-atâwâkêhk askiy, êkot ê-kî-âpatahk, kî-itwêw mâna kâ-kî-oyôhtâwîyân. ‘Here is where it was, where the water makes a thundering sound, that is where the gathering was,…”. It is not unusual for the Cree to give several names to a single place. I am grateful to Jeff Muehlbauer for clarification and translation of these terms.

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attend to this mundane feature of the treaty process, which hardly

appears decisive in the long unfolding of Treaty 6, when there are so

many other compelling stories to tell about Indigenous politics in the

current era?

‘Mundane’. Perhaps. But also mundus, ‘worldly’, ‘earthly’, and

‘cosmopolitan’, for the answers to these questions disclose some

surprisingly complicated terrain, one which lies at the heart of

Indigenous politics, and which we can only begin to open up in this

study. Moreover, the terrain I hope to open up here is largely

unexplored, meaning that the path I am attempting to sketch out will

no doubt entail reversals, uncertainties, hesitations, and numerous

blind alleys.

Complicated and uncertain, hesitant: it might be best in the face of

this to begin the journey with a single step, as the adage has it. And

so we can start with the simple but ultimately decisive observation

that, above all, pêhonânihk, this ‘waiting place’ was not in any sense

‘wilderness’, or ‘nature’, much less a ‘hinterland’ or ‘rural area’

for the Indigenous participants, even though it was clearly not a

permanent settlement for the Cree15, and, as far as we can tell, was a

functional rather than a particularly sacred space. Notwithstanding

this, and in sharp contrast to the idea that this location was just a

‘convenient gathering place’ to the Indigenous communities that met

there, it is important to remember that such gathering places were, in

fact, the metropolitan centres of Indigenous collective life. That is,

even though they were not residential settlements or sacred spaces, 15 Were it a residential place it would most likely have been rendered, in Cree, into something like wîkiwin.

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the pêhonânihk and places like it were places of signal meaning for

communities who had constant need to engage in intertribal

negotiations about this dispute or that boundary, this alliance or

that protocol, this resource or that trade, negotiations that were

later extended to include the representatives of European nations.16

And, since all Indigenous Nations in the Americas faced the need for

intertribal diplomacy and trade and, later, negotiations with the

Crown (Bauerkemper and Stark 2012, Epp 2001, Venne 1997), it seems

reasonable to conclude that such places could be found in many if not

all Indigenous territories.

In considering this issue, Ted Chamberlain (1997), for instance,

reminds us that we risk misunderstanding the nature of treaty

negotiations if we think they were just about land use or land

ownership. They were certainly about these things, at multiple levels,

but for Chamberlain, the prairie treaties were fundamentally

discussions of how to maintain and protect the Indigenous cultural and

political practices that (to borrow a legal phrase) ‘ran with the

land’. The land and the resources on it could be shared, sometimes by

choice, and sometimes by necessity, and sometimes with other

Indigenous nations and sometimes with settlers. But what was (supposed

to) remain undiminished, indeed, confirmed by treaties, was the

continued capacity of Indigenous people to make whatever space they used

politically and culturally meaningful, which in this case meant retaining the

capacity to weave centres of diplomacy and trading, such as the

16 Even though, as Simpson reminds us, such negotiations had always included treaties with non-human species. See Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing 2011.

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pêhonânihk, into the fabric of Indigenous society, rather than be woven

into someone else’s story.

Pêhonânihk and places like it were, in other words, as much a part of

the densely woven fabric of Indigenous collective life as any

residential settlement. And the fact that these cosmopolitan places

were clearly located within the boundaries of a particular Nation—that

they were not in any sense ‘everyone’s land’ and in no sense ‘no man’s

land’—did not change the metropolitan nature of such places even

though it inflected the protocols required to do business there.

What, after all, occurred at pêhonânihk? What did it accomplish? We

could think of this ‘densely woven fabric’ as reflecting a kind of

double gesture, or if you prefer, as marking a twofold set of

significations. On the one hand places like pêhonânihk would have been

used to constitute the complex and enduring nodes of symbolic relations,

some political, some military, others spiritual, that would have been

formalized and legitimized during those gatherings (e.g., the creation

of chiefly alliances or declarations of enmity), and the intricate and

multigenerational interconnections that flowed from these relations.

Such dense and ongoing patterns of interactions would have been

critical, particularly as European contact increased, in shaping how

the participating nations saw their own boundedness, how they

understood and articulated the limits and possibilities for collective

action, who participated in the sovereign authority of the community,

and who did not: in short, places like pêhonânihk were opportunities to

confirm or revise what the Indigenous political spatial imaginary

could include and what it could not. This is particularly true given

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the relational nature of Indigenous political ontology: a political

society was a political society in large part because it was in a

relationship of equality with other political societies, and it was in

places like pêhonânihk that this mutual recognition occurred.

On the other hand, pêhonânihk would also be inseparable from dense nodes

of material practices: the physical comingling of different tribes, the

flows of material goods and their transformation (e.g., pemmican

production, hide preparation), exchanges of technology, shifts in

patterns of land usage arising from diplomatic exchanges, the wearing

of regalia at the event, and the invocation of the place through the

physical retelling of the Treaty after its signing. We might recall in

this context the event that immediately followed the actual signing of

Treaty 6. In order to establish the rolls of those eligible for Treaty

benefits, the members of the tribes present physically lined up behind

their chiefs in an act of tribal self-identification which literally

embodied the political community. If we are encouraged to pay

attention to ‘where the bodies go’, if as Deleuze and Guattari amongst

others insist the spatial distribution of bodies biological and

politic are as worthy of attention as any discourse or text, then our

eyes and our ears should surely be directed to this ‘waiting place’.

And, as was true for the Englishmen who they negotiated with, the

Indigenous participants would never have considered separating the

military, diplomatic, and trade relations consummated at pêhonânihk from

the social and political relationships that structured life in other

parts of the territory. As with the English, Cree social and political

life was both thoroughly local and deeply cosmopolitan.

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I am suggesting that when we think of Indigenous spaces such as the

one that hosted the Treaty 6 negotiations, we should think about them

as resembling a city more than a rural area, as a place deeply

invested with both collective meanings and a range of material

practices, rather than a place that was understood as functional and

transactional and whose use was simply transitory and usufruct17.

This way of thinking about Indigenous social and political spaces as

dense nodes for managing flows of material goods and relationships

finds its way, for instance, into literary critic William Bevis’ well

known examination of “homing” as a distinctive structural and thematic

feature of contemporary narratives by American Indian writers. “Native

American nature is urban,” Bevis writes of the landscapes traversed by

Indigenous literature; he goes on to suggest that the “… connotation

to us of ‘urban,’ suggesting a dense complex of human variety, is

closer to Native American ‘nature’ than is our word ‘natural.’ The

woods, birds, animals and humans are all ‘downtown,’ meaning at the

center of action and power, in complex, unpredictable and various

relationships....” (Bevis 1987). If we think about pêhonânihk as a

significant place for the Cree, we should think about it as

representing an important cosmopolitan dimension to Indigenous

collective life, which me might label as, to use Wirth’s famous

phrase, ‘urbanism as a way of life’.

17 The view that the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land should be thought of only in terms of usufruct has been rejected by the Canadian courts: see Judson J.’s comments in Calder v. British Columbia (AG.) (1973), 34 D.L.R. (3d).

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Bevis’ point, one which I echo throughout these essays, is not just that

Indigenous societies would have never considered the social, material

and spiritual worlds as separate spheres: to the contrary, these

worlds were unified rather than divided for Indigenous communities.

The point is also not just that the various aspects of what seemed to

European eyes as ‘rural’ areas were actually deeply interwoven with

life in residential settlements, with the result that places like

pêhonânihk were not considered rural at all, but as an extension of

home.

Rather, I read Bevis as making an additional, important point: that we

should think of such spaces as ‘urban’, in the sense that they were

central places of power, of spirituality, of material transformations,

of relationality; in a word, spaces for the formation of the collective subject, and

further, spaces that invest that subject in relations of power and authority. In this, I

think, Bevis is telling us, if I might stretch his argument a little,

that if we are interested in understanding Indigenous sites of power,

nodes of relations, and locations of self-formation, we need not

confine ourselves just to spaces that look, to European eyes, like

‘traditional’ (i.e., pre-contact) residential settlements. We also

need to look at spaces that look, to European and Indigenous eyes,

like a city.

It is this specific ‘urban’ dimension of Indigenous life that I pursue

and expand in the essays that follow: above all, Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and

the City is a study of Indigeneity understood as an urban, cosmopolitan

phenomenon, a phenomenon that carries with it, as many commentators

have pointed out, a particular sharpness in the contemporary era where

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the majority of Indigenous people live in urban centres (Norris,

Cooke, et al. 2003). And, if there is a central point in this study,

it is that the urban dimension to Indigenous life, in its contemporary

form, has profound consequences for Indigenous political thought18,

consequences that have hitherto gone largely unrecognized.

Over the course of this study, I will be tracing some key dimensions

of urban Indigeneity,19 as they play out in one particular domain: the

political. My overall argument is that Indigenous politics is in the

midst of a profound transition, from an era in which where political

authority, political form, and political voice was determined by a

territorial political imaginary to one driven by the pressures,

dispersions, and concentrations generated by the emergence of

contemporary urban Indigenous communities. It is an era in which new

18 Some readers will note that I do not draw down in any substantial way traditional or community-specific Indigenous knowledges. The reasons are complicated, but a number of them are articulated by Dale Turner in his book “This is not a Peace Pipe”. In sum, Turner argues that some of that knowledge, specifically traditional or sacred knowledge, is not, and in some cases shouldnot be, available to outsiders, or is not suitable for general circulation in written form. To this I would add the issue of my own limitations; I am not versed in the details of enough Indigenous cultural traditions to use that knowledge to support the kind of broad and overarching arguments I am aiming at here. See Dale Turner, This is not a peace pipe: towards a critical indigenous philosophy. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2006.19 Howard and Proulx have argued for capitalizing ‘Urban’ when used in phrasessuch as ‘Urban Indigenous’, or ‘Urban community’ the authors suggest that thishelps to “reflect the significance of an identity marker, reifies the residence of individuals and families… and provides nuance to a highly politicized domain”. While I accept the point and concur with its objective, Iam less persuaded, perhaps, than Howard and Proulx of the power of capital letters to effect social change, and so have left ‘urban’ unmarked in the text. See Craig Proulx and Heather A. Howard, Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2011.

18


modes of political authority, forms of political embodiment, and other

dimensions of the political have not yet stabilized or emerged.

The four sites I analyze here—tropes of silence in Indigenous

literature; figurations of sovereign authority in an Indigenous

theatrical production; the troubles and hesitations of political

embodiment as enacted in the implementation of a specific government

program; the deployment of trauma discourses as a mechanism to

reconstitute Indigenous political temporality—can only be understood,

I argue, if we see them as marked by the ambivalences, tensions, and

fissures generated by this movement from one form of sovereign

authority to another, a ‘new’ form that has not yet taken on defined

contours or a settled into a clearly delineated political body. These

sites are both exemplary—they condense and exemplify anxieties

generated by broader dynamic of deterritorialization—and singular:

they refuse to unfold along the path set for them by the logic of the

state, or by the logics outlined in the dominant discourses of

Aboriginal rights and title as deployed by Indigenous activists and

scholars.

If the urban is emblematic (in ways that need to be fleshed out here)

of a crisis in Indigenous thought, a second, related problem is to

understand how the current stories of Indigenous politics—the plot

line, cast of characters, staging, dialogic possibilities, and

performative opportunities—available to us systematically work to

obscure the urban as site of the political, with the result that it is

only with great difficulty that we can see urban sites in political

terms. If we start from the idea that the contemporary era holds

19


multiple possibilities for the realization of Indigenous sovereignty,

then what is striking is how these have been insistently narrowed to a

singular pathway. In Indigenous politics, the roles have been

assigned, the characters developed, the staging set, and with respect

to the political, all the best lines have been reserved for other

players. It is this particular form of closure that these essays seek

to contest.

I am not alone in suggesting urbanity—however we might understand that

term—as an important dimension of Indigenous collective life, and in

the course of this work I will have occasion to turn to a range of

writers who draw attention to the connections between urbanity and

Indigeneity.

For now, we might perhaps begin with Indigenous historian Jack Forbes,

who, in writing about the urban experience in the Americas and against

the idea that ‘Indigenous’ means ‘rural’, tells us in fact that

urbanity is deeply embedded in Indigenous life (Forbes 1998). On

Forbes’ account, the Americas have witnessed large, dense settlements

of Indigenous people resembling cities in the European sense since at

least the 10th century,20 and that the practices and experiences that 20 Most recently, archeological work by Slater et al have provided evidence that the Mississippian polity of Cahokia (11-14th century) was, between the 11th and 14th century, home to as many as 15,000 residents, a significant portion of which were not permanent residents of the city or who had migrated there from elsewhere. It was, in other words, an urban centre comprised of multiple clans, families, bands, and cultural groups from outside the region. This evidence shows a polity that is distinctly like a current urban centre, and stands in sharp contrast to the assumption that Indigenous settlements arecomprised of local, kin affiliated groups. See Philip A. Slater, Kristin M. Hedman, et al., "Immigrants at the Mississippian Polity of Cahokia: Strontium Isotope Evidence for Population Movement." Journal of Archaeological Science 44 (0): 117-127. 2014. See also T.E. Emerson and K.M. Hedman, The Dangers of Diversity: The

20


we think of as typically urban have in fact always been an integral

feature of Indigenous community life (Chance 1976). Forbes is telling

us, in other words, that Indigenous people ‘have always been urban’,

even though, as the historical and archeological data suggests,

Indigenous communities in the Americas have gone through cycles of

urbanization and de-urbanization over time, and notwithstanding the

fact that the most current cycle of urbanization has features that

mark it as distinct from previous modes of Indigenous urbanity. For

Forbes, though, once we acknowledge this history, once we recognize

urbanity as a persistent pattern in Indigenous life, it is impossible

to see something like pêhonânihk as anything other than what it was: an

urban location in which the enduring cosmopolitan dimensions of

Indigenous life could play out. It is true that Forbes was talking

about permanent residential settlements, and his examples mostly refer

to archeological remains that evidenced Indigenous residential

patterns, but his analysis suggests that urbanity in Indigenous

history was as much about process—forms of interaction, mixing of

cultures and clans, webs of relationships, cycles of political

authority, management of material flows—as it was about residence.21

If there is an archive to be constructed of indigenous collective

life, if we are to ‘gather together the signs’ that contain both the

‘commencement and the commandment’ of Indigenous communities in the

Consolidation and Dissolution of Cahokia, Native America’s First Urban Polity,in Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, eds. J.A. Ezzo and T.D Price. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2014.21 What James Clifford has described as “older forms of tribal cosmopolitanism: “practices of travel, spiritual quests, trade, exploration, warfare, labour migrancy, visiting and political alliance”. James Clifford, Returns : Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2013.

21


Americas, Forbes’ analysis suggests we must take pains to include an

urban dimension in our archival labours.

What Forbes’ analysis and this pêhonânihk, this place in which Treaty 6

was negotiated, tells us is just this: that Indigenous people ‘have

always been urban’, and that we would do well to account for that fact

when we think about, not just the history, but also, as this book goes

on to argue, the future of Indigenous communities, in particular the

past and future of the political status of Indigenous collectives.22

22 In various places these essays refer to ‘settler colonialism’, or the impact of ‘settler society’. These terms, particularly ‘settler colonialism’, have shifted meanings over time, and have moreover been applied to very different contexts, from Rhodesia to the Canadian arctic. The ‘settler’ part of the term is relatively easy: it both distinguishes a particular strategy ofimperialism which relied on extensive settlement of European nationals in the colony—marking here the limitless expansion of the European global imaginary and the intention to make the colonial act a permanent one—and references the fact that the colonies so settled, like Canada and the US, were not in any sense ‘terra nullius’, that there were settlers precisely because there were Indigenous others - marking here the limits to that imaginary, and indexing, the permanence of the Indigenous presence. The ‘colonialism’ part, and certainly the compound ‘settler colonialism’, is, to be sure, much more complicated. In the context we are dealing with it certainly refers to the material exploitation and appropriation of Indigenous lands and resources, andthe denigration and suppression of Indigenous cultures: many Indigenous writers who use the term do so as a kind of shorthand for these practices, thestructures that support those practices, and the political and social subordination that follows or attends those practices. But as Veracini points out, ‘settler colonialism’ has evolved as a concept over time and is now mostly used to refer to countries like Canada or New Zealand that have Indigenous populations who are now within the boundaries of a non-Indigenous state: the term thus distinguishes places like Australia or the United States from former settler colonies like Rhodesia or Kenya (see Lorenzo Veracini, "‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept." The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2): 313-333. 2013.). My argument here does not rest on a precise definition of the concept, and so it is used in a loose sense to refer to the raw fact of the political subordination of Indigenous communities to the law making authority of the non-Indigenous state. In addition to Veracini’s work, see also Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London ; New York: Cassell. 1999. For a

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Earlier, I suggested that urban dimension of Indigenous life indexed

by pêhonânihk is ‘less noticed’. But ‘less noticed’ is too thin a term,

for the case is actually stronger than that. For what is most striking

about Indigenous political thought, that constellation of political

speeches, legal briefs, journal articles, policy papers, books,

manifestos, court judgments, pamphlets and blog sites, from both

Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors who focus on Indigenous issues,

is that it literally has nothing to say about the reading of pêhonânihk that I

have suggested here. For as I will argue, it is the case today that

Indigenous political thought is fundamentally unable to account in any robust way

for this ‘urban’ dimension in Indigenous political life: the urban is illegible as a

political site to its scholarly and policy gaze. In a yet more

provocative vein, and stating in the baldest terms the core challenge

this study attempts to address, we could say that what is astonishing

about this is the fact that no-one is astonished,23 that indeed, to

paraphrase Kant, it is the scandal of Indigenous political thought that it has not

yet come to terms with the emergence of urban Indigenous communities

discussion that is more specific to the Canadian experience, see Adam J Barker, "The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism: Settler Colonialism and the Hybrid Colonial State." The American Indian Quarterly 33 (3): 325-351. 2009. Finally, for an analysis of settler colonization that connects it to Indigenous peoplesand urban centres, see Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities. Vancouver: UBC Press. 2010. 23 Compare Taiaiake Alfred: “There is an “astonishing” contrast between the experience and difference in the kind of life a person lives when land-based cultural practices form the core of their existence, one in which negative experiences are very rare, as opposed to the experience of poor health, accidents and injuries, violence, and alcoholism in the very same individuals,that connection to the land is broken and they are forced to centre their lives in cities or on reserves”. Taiaiake Alfred, "Colonialism and State Dependency." Journal de la santé autochtone November: 42-60. 2009. p. 42 , p.42

23


as a permanent fixture of Indigenous political life.24 The peculiar and

central failure of Indigenous thought today is its failure to see the

urban as a political space.

To put it less provocatively, we might cite Alan Cairns, who describes

Indigenous politics in the conetmporary era as confronting two

possible roads, one urban, the other land based; his argument is that

the urban is the ‘road not taken’ (Cairns 2000). Cairns’ project,

including his work on Indigenous issues, was aimed at rescuing and

legitimating a kind of national Canadian identity over and against the

particularisms of region and ethnicity, a project that has little

bearing on my purposes here.25 But his phrasing is evocative, and makes

the point that Indigenous political thought has not yet taken the

urban road, and that taking such a road presents both a serious

challenge to current understandings of Indigenous politics, and an

opportunity to develop more adequate ways of thinking about the

political.

THE POLITICAL IN URBAN COMMUNITIES

If urban Indigeneity is an old story, as Jack Forbes suggests, it

appears to be an old story that many think too risky to tell, or not 24 In a point that I cannot pursue here, but one that is linked to the terrainthat this discussion covers, we might spot other aporias that represent a point of embarrassment for scholars of Indigenous politics. Eric Cheyfitz, in a move that finds a scandal but lays it at the feet of political theory, has suggested that the “surprising, if not complete... scandal” in studies of colonization in the new world is the failure of postcolonial studies to comprehend Indigenous issues. See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translationand Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1997.25 And in any event, his arguments about contemporary Indigenous politics havebeen effectively refuted, in my view, by Dale Turner, amongst others. See DaleTurner, This is not a Peace Pipe.

24


risky enough, with the result that the story of the urban as a

political site is made to disappear into… what? The mechanics of

organizational development? The micro-politics of contestation for

state resources? The delivery of therapeutic interventions? Endless

recitations of the ‘life experiences’ of community members and the

history of specific organizations? Into nothingness, into an age of

depoliticization? Whether the story of the urban as a political space

is too much or too little, or whether it is as story at all, it

appears that it is not one that merits serious attention, much less

one that should lie at the heart of Indigenous politics. If urban

Indigeneity has a role to play in the unfolding of Indigenous

resurgence, it is in its contribution to individual wellness,

community healing, or in its capacity to leverage the state, but not

as the reflection of a political society.

But of course it is not that simple. As any therapist will tell you,

making stories go away is easier said than done. Stories interact in

unexpected ways: they insert themselves where they are not wanted,

show up in dreams and in the uncanny moments of waking life, determine

more things than they should and become indeterminate just when their

solidity is most needed. We learn at least this much from, for

instance, Toni Morrison: in her searching examination of stories that

are ‘worth passing on’ and those that are not in her book Beloved, she

tells us that we should be wary of stories even as we are compelled to

tell them, for their transmission carries with it dangers and risks

that we might not be prepared to contemplate, that the story might be

both too much—it will unsettle all we have built—or too little—it will

25


leave us where we started, and we will remain weak but further

exhausted and traumatized by the retelling.

Morrison goes on to tell us—and here she draws from theories of trauma

that underpin her analysis of the Black experience in America—that

some stories, especially those ‘not worth passing on’, are supposed to

disappear, either by giving way to more powerful stories or by simply

fading away of their own accord. But instead, such stories repeat

themselves and insist on re-presenting themselves regardless of their

tactical value in political struggles, regardless of whether they

repeat the trauma they are supposed to diminish, regardless even of

what the speaker intends, and further, that this insistent and

traumatic reenactment indexes the impossibility of refusing to witness

what we see and of seeing what we refuse to witness. Which is to say,

with respect to the question at hand, that even as the urban is

consistently diminished as a political space, the ‘urban question’, as

Castells once called it, also refuses to go away as a political

problem: the majority of Indigenous people live in urban centres, and

urban Indigenous communities are a permanent feature of Indigenous

collective life, and, it seems, nobody really knows what to do about

this. In refusal, particularly the refusal to go away, there is always

trouble, and where there is trouble there is something to pay

attention to.

One of the things to pay attention to here is where the Indigenous

political goes when it encounters the urban. Assume, for the sake of

argument, that the political did not get left behind when Indigenous

people (re)established Indigenous communities in urban centres, that

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Indigenous people were incapable of not being completely Indigenous

(that they were, so to speak, ontologically complete when they left

their community and remained that way when they arrived), and that

their activities were aimed at making urban spaces politically and

socially meaningful, just like the activities of their relatives in

land-based communities.

One might recall in this context Michael Asch’s insistent argument

that if we are to keep faith with Indigenous communities and challenge

settler colonization, then we are obliged to assume ontological

completeness when we make law ( or attempt to reason) about the

political status of Indigenous communities (Asch 2014, Asch and

Macklem 1991). If we take this assumption seriously, as I do, we could

then go on to propose that the core issue in the emergence of urban

Indigeneity is not the absence of the political, but rather its distortions

and occlusions, the ‘swerves’, to use Schmitt’s term, introduced in the

warp and weft of Indigenous sovereign authority by the encounter with

the urban and the corresponding internal limits it encounters in the

territorial model.

Over the course of this study I will be tracking these moments of

tension in the fate of the political, arguing that these ‘moments’—

tropes of silence, an Indigenous theatrical production, a government

program, and trauma discourses—are really moments in which this

political dimension could not find symbolic space in the urban for its

proper expression. While this political dimension did not disappear

when Indigenous people moved into urban centres, as many assumed, it

was blocked or made inaudible in the realm of political

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representation: the symbolic resources of the Indigenous political

imaginary were not up to the task of incorporating the urban as a

political location. What we are facing, or so I argue in this study,

is what Eric Santner (2011), in his study of the transformations of

post-feudal sovereignty, has described as a ‘crisis of investiture’, a

failure of the ‘form and offices’ of political authority to transfer

from one place and time to another. The difficulties in knowing what

to do with the urban—is it a socio-demographic fact, a service

delivery problem, the traumatic outcome of colonial displacements, the

inevitable result of modernization, or something else entirely?—

testifies to this failure of the urban to cathect itself to the signs

of the political, but also of the failure of the political to find

ways to make the body politic of the urban audible or legible. If this

is so, then it remains to enquire what channels the political must

have taken, how it expressed itself in the convoluted and traumatic

moment of its transference from the old regime to…. the new?

What is at stake in the sites I assess, then, is not simply the life

experiences of community members, as the literature on community based

research insists, nor the impact of government policy, as activists

insist, nor the size, shape, and demographic composition of ‘the

community’, as everyone insists, but rather the tensions,

difficulties, distortions, the disturbance in the space of

representation, generated by this transformation of sovereign

authority. That is, what is at issue is not simply the question of the

source of authority for Indigenous governance26 (the usual question in

26 This question of how to ground the authority of an urban Indigenous community has been concisely laid out by Inuk legal scholar Gordon Christie, who argues that none of the sources of authority typically cited in

28


considerations of urban politics), but also, and more fundamentally,

the issue of the ability of members of urban Indigenous communities to

know that they are invested (in the sense of in-vestiture, of

rightfully wearing the regalia) politically in the Indigenous social

field. The problem at hand is to investigate this problematic, to find

ways to speak to it, and to identify a path towards the resolution of

this crisis.

If, as I will go on to argue in more detail, the issues raised by the

emergence of urban Indigenous communities can be fruitfully understood

as—at least in part—an issue of investiture, of the complex

relationship between systems of representations, systems of political

investment and recognition, and material practices both off and on the

jurisprudence on Indigenous rights are available to urban communities. Put briefly, he argues that: 1) an urban community can’t claim the continuity to apre-contact community necessary to make out a s.35 claim to an Aboriginal right; 2) it also can’t make out a (strong) claim to protecting an ‘Aboriginal’ way of life (Kymlicka’s well-known ground for Aboriginal authority) since it is not protecting the practices of a long standing singular cultural community; and 3) an urban community can’t claim to be protecting the autonomy of a group’s decision making, as there is no clear ‘decision maker’, or even a clearly bounded community that a decision maker could act on behalf of. Christie concludes that that the best course may be to set aside arguments rooted in jurisprudence or liberal theory, and adopt anIndigenous approach which would see the authority of urban structures arising from their inherent responsibility to care for, protect, and enhance the circumstance and activities of urban residents. See Gordon Christie, Challenges to Urban Aboriginal Governance, in Canada: The State of the Federation. Reconfiguring Aboriginal-State Relations, ed. Michael Murphy. Montreal/ Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 93-115. 2003. In part, my analysis follows Christie’s argument in that it does not pursue the question of grounding urbanIndigenous communal authority in Anglo-american jurisprudence, or in liberal theory, precisely for some of the reasons he raises. Christie’s suggestion of an approach based on ‘responsibility’ may hold promise (despite its unsettlingsimilarity to the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine), and deserves greater attention than it has received so far. This path is also suggested by Mbembe in On the Postcolony

29


traditional territory, I have also found it useful in these essays to

see this ‘crisis of investiture’ is itself derived from a prior

‘disturbance’, which I describe as an underlying process of

deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These terms, best known for their

deployment in the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, are used here to indicate the presence of active flows of

materials, people, legitimacy, cultural and political capital,

symbolic references, semiotic intensities, etc., from a settled place

within a territorial order into spaces that are not directly subject

to that order, on the one hand, and the subsequent resettlement of

those social forces and material assemblages into new (that is,

reterritorialized) social and material configurations. 27 We should

think of urban Indigeneity as indexing a broader problematic, then,

27 The term ‘deterritorialization’ and related terms are explicated in more detail in Chapter 3. For now, suffice it to say that while my use of it retains many of the resonances given it by Deleuze and Guattari, especially inA Thousand Plateaus, it has specific inflections here that arise from its application to the field of Indigenous politics. The meaning given to it here is ‘thinner’, and does not entail an automatic commitment to the ontological status of flows, dispersions, emergences, and the other entities that we find in Deleuze and Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari, at least in ATP, deterritorialization was the moment when energies or flows or assemblages (‘bodies’) that were previously captured in a strata leave a territorial assemblage to join or form a new one (see on this point, Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2004.) My use of the term is related, but narrower. I use the term ‘deterritorialization’ to refer to the specific moment when a political community is spatially separated from the territorial base which grounds or is the source of its political authority, on the one hand, and on the other, to those pressures, forces, or emergences that destabilize or erodethe relationship of an Indigenous political order to the traditional territory. Reterritorialization is the process in which new assemblages are formed, not as entirely ‘new’ entities or processes, but as the reconfiguration of previously deterritorialized elements. While this usage does not conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s usage (or even the subsequent literature on this topic), it does, I think, conform to their practice of leaving such concepts as significantly underdetermined.

30


one which effects all Indigenous communities and is located throughout

Turtle Island: the confrontation between Indigenous communities and an

insistent set of (settler/capitalist) forces that strip away the

codes, investments, and materialities assigned to particular actions,

events, and localities by Indigenous communities and tries to remake

them in the its own image (largely, but not exclusively, in the image

of the state or the market28).

Thought about this way, the dismissal of the urban as a site of the

political tells us, not where urban and land based communities differ,

but where they are alike: they share an insistent commitment to

‘reterritorialize’ in the face of an equally insistent

deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that in an urban context

shapes and changes, but does not erase, the relationship to ‘the

territory’ as the ground of the political. While the processes of

deterritorialization and the resultant reterritorialization operate

differently across land-based and urban communities according to

logics that needs to be worked out on each occasion (even if they can

be subsumed under more general capitalist or bureaucratic

articulations), they cross and structure both spaces. Framed this way,

we might say that the condition of the urban, which has often been

described in the most literal way as a space of deterritorialization,

is the general condition of Indigenous collective life.

28 “There is only one world market”, Deleuze and Guattari write, “the capitalist one”, which leads them to suggest that there is also only one kind of history, and one kind of polity, that which unfolds from capitalist axiomatics. See A Thousand Plateaus, p. 455. See also Eugene W Holland, "Deterritorializing 'Deterritorialization': From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "a Thousand Plateaus"." SubStance 20 (3, Issue 66): 55-65. 1991. Needless to say, my account differs from this perspective, which has the effect of erasing Indigenous polities from sight.

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THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS STUDY

As noted, the essays that comprise Indigeneity, Sovereignty, and the City are an

attempt to explore this problematic of the political in four different

sites: tropes of silence, an Indigenous production of King Lear, a

government program for urban Aboriginal people, and trauma discourses.

In the first chapter, I survey the academic and policy literature on

urban Indigenous studies. Here, I argue that this literature had two

specific effects. On the one hand, it enabled urban Indigeneity to

emerge as a distinct social and economic space, neither a fragment of

land based community nor simply another category of the urban poor or

the migrant. But it also had the effect of figuring this space as

essentially, non-political, a result that emerged both from the

stress, in the broader field of Indigenous studies, on territorial

possession as the defining feature of the political, and from the

specific effects of the dominant social technology in urban

communities: social programs and non-profit social action agencies. In

addition to reviewing these developments, I take the opportunity to

rethink the role social programs and Indigenous service delivery

agencies by rereading them through a political lens, using tropes of

voice and hearing to tease out an alternate view of the institutional

fabric that supports rather than denies their political possibilities.

Silence in the City

I suggested above that a kind of silence attends the political

character of urban Indigeneity. In Chapter Two, I take up this theme

at more length, using Tocqueville as an entry point and a range of

32


Indigenous authors as further points of departure. There, I suggest

the various tropes of silence that one finds in reference to urban

Indigeneity reflect something other than a failure of urban

communities to speak up for themselves. To the contrary, Indigenous

people in urban centres speak constantly of their collective

condition, and urban spaces are thick with speech acts invoking the

community: endless meetings, addresses, protests, proposals,

exhortations, demands, reports, letters, press releases, blog posts,

and assorted other hortatory texts. I suggest that what these tropes

of silence index is not, therefore, a lack of speech but rather the

problematic relationship, at this historical juncture, between a

particular set of signs and their referents, in this case the

territory as referent and the political collective as its sign. If we

have a hard time ‘hearing’ the call of the political in an urban

setting, this is so because the relationship of symbolic and material

determination which makes the isomorphism of the territory and the

political community mutually constitutive has come undone in the face

of the deterritorializing and reterritorialising pressures generated

by the emergence of urban communities, pressures which are themselves

reflective of deeper forces. I gloss this failure as a fissure in the

political imaginary, as Castioradis would have understood the term

(Castoriadis 1987, 1994). Thus, the silences I chart index, to put it

abstractly, not the vocative labours of Indigenous agents but a

historical fissure in the fabric of Indigenous political thought.

Lear in the City

In Chapter Three, I use a specific cultural event–an Indigenous

production of a Shakespearean play–to more directly confront the issue

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of sovereign authority in an urban context. The performance in

question is the first ever production of an all-Indigenous King Lear,

produced and staged by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in the

summer of 2013. Here, the analysis focuses on the question so

prominent in the playtext of Lear, of the fate of sovereign authority

when it is separated from its grounding in the land. Drawing from the

writings of Carl Schmitt, Jodi Byrd’s post-colonial readings of

Shakespeare, Jonathon Elmer’s analysis of the problems of sovereignty

in early American literature, and Santner’s discussion of sovereignty,

I argue that the thematics in the performance of King Lear as

emblematic of the political situation of urban Indigenous communities:

this all-Indigenous Lear is telling us something: that what is at

issue in Indigenous politics today is not just the familiar story of

the subaltern being excluded from the exercise of political power by

the colonizer (with the result that subject’s only recourse is to

learn the language of the oppressor, the better to curse in it29), but

the movement, transformation, and crises of sovereign authority

itself. This all-Indigenous Lear thus unwittingly marks an important

possible trajectory for Indigenous political thought while

simultaneously indexing its core problematic: the recognition that the

troubles of exercising Indigenous authority in the context of settler

society is more complex than just rehabilitating Caliban, but extends

to include the problem of the internal limits, tensions, and fissures

within Indigenous sovereign authority itself.

Here, following Santner, I make the argument that sovereign authority

in urban Indigenous communities is not simply a question of a lack, of29 Caliban: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse” (I.ii.366–368).

34


a missing connection, an absent centre. Rather, the Indigenous

sovereign authority that was supposed to disappear (by virtue of being

left behind) when Indigenous peoples moved into the city and formed

communities instead takes up a strange afterlife, adopting a position

as a kind of unaccomodated surplus, an excess that resisted

incorporation into the symbolic order of the political but that cannot

be reduced to other non-political sites, cannot be eliminated. I

explore these issues in this chapter, using these resources to make

the overall argument that Indigenous sovereign authority is both in a

moment of deep transition, and an active organizing force in urban

Indigenous communal life.

The Strategic Subject in the City

If the urban cannot attach itself to a embodied sovereign, a material

territory of its own, or the logic of racialization, then how does it

find its way into a body politic? How is it embodied, how does it

become legible, and what material forms are available to it? In

Chapter Four, I take up the issue of the ontological status of the

collective subject in urban Indigenous communities. If the urban has

been made to appear in discourse and material practices at all, it has

been made to do so largely in the guise of programs: programs for

health care, interventions in child welfare, initiative in economic

development, ‘capacity building’ projects, programs for this, that and

the other. The literature on urban Indigenous politics is consumed

with the question of how to provide for the service needs of urban

residents, and if the urban community has a ‘form’ it is in the

network of service delivery and advocacy agencies that form the

infrastructure for community activities.

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Accordingly, in this section I take up the development,

implementation, and failure of a particular program, the Government of

Canada’s Urban Aboriginal Strategy (UAS), using it as an entry point into the

question of the collective subject in urban communities. I argue that

the UAS did not succeed, despite its appealing offer of ‘becoming

strategic’, in part because ‘developing an urban strategy’ in the ways

the program offered, entailed a commitment by Indigenous participants

to a western, state-centered model of space, not an Indigenous one. If

Indigenous politics is essentially spatial, as Deloria and others have

argued, the story of the UAS tells us that there are limits to that

spatiality.

If the UAS implicitly offered up a particular form of spatial

practice, it also, and even more forcibly, offered up a specific

collective subject. My analysis of the UAS shows that despite the

pressure on urban communities to become ‘state like’ (e.g., by

adopting a coordinating committee of service professionals as a

governance model), the urban Indigenous community did not do so: not

because of some flaw in the capacity of community members, but because

the collective self in urban communities is uncertain, as yet

unformed, and ambivalent: it cannot adopt the state form lest the

community disappear as such, but nor can it find a form in the

repertoire made available to it by governments, service delivery

organizations, or land based Indigenous communities. This refusal to

adopt the state form is, I suggest, indicative of a shift in

Indigenous ontology, a rearrangement of the three key elements in

Indigenous politics: the elements of the Nation, the territory, and

36


the community. I explore this shift, invoking the distinction between

‘spirit’ and ‘spectre’—but also the language of hauntology—made famous

by Derrida in his reading of Marx, to probe the problems of embodiment

raised by the emergence of urban Indigenous communities.

Trauma and history in city spaces

In a fifth chapter, I address the issue of temporality and trauma. If

urban Indigeneity has been structured by its relationship to the

delivery of programs, that is, if the flow of political energies

unleashed by the deterritorialization of sovereign authority in

Indigenous communities has been channelled into service modalities,

and thereby depoliticised, it has not acted alone in this effort. I

argue that the structuring effects of service needs are matched, and

in a powerful way complimented by, the discourses of trauma that

routinely attend discussions of urban Indigeneity.

If the emergence of a legible political society has been blocked or

diverted in urban communities, as I have suggested, it seems

reasonable to ask where those political energies went. The lack of an

effective resolution to the emergence of a new kind of Indigenous

community, I argue, finds its expression in two ways, the first of

which I described above: the intensification of the territory, in all

its material manifestations, as the sole ground of Indigenous

politics. One can understand the dominance of the territorial/nation

model as a mechanism for managing the uncertainties and

vulnerabilities associated with the deterritorialized flows unleashed

by the impact of settler colonialism, principally represented by, but

by no means limited to, Indigenous urbanization. But the energies,

37


symbolic resources, processes of cathecting, etc., put into motion by

this historical encounter do not confine themselves to isolating and

intensifying the role of the territory in the grounding of the

political. Rather, this movement is accompanied by another ‘investment

strategy’: the intensification of tropes of trauma as a site of

material practices and a location for symbolic investment. I argue,

then, that the specificity of trauma discourses, and their historical

ubiquity in discussions of the urban, lies in the fact that such

discourses and practices are charged with a very particular duty: to

work out the evolving contours of temporality. That is, if trauma

theory and practice accomplishes cultural and political work, it does

so on the issue of time: the ways in which the future is allowed to

appear in the past, the role of collective memory, the degree to which

future and past are contingently related, or not. Trauma, in my

analysis, speaks to the issue of how events (individual dislocations,

but also collective emergences) are incorporated into an account of

history that, to use therapeutic language, makes the (collective)

person whole again.

Contingency and Radical Hope

In the sixth, and final chapter, I go on to suggest that the central

issue is one of contingency: that the urban opens up the possibility of

new emergences, that it forces us to recognize that Indigenous

communities can develop in ways that are not a strict derivation of

either traditional modes of political embodiment or of the state form.

Hannah Arendt has called this the ‘problem of the new’, about how to

understand the ‘riddle of foundations’ (Arendt 2006). I explore this

problematic, too, with reference to the ways in which the urban

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‘haunts’ Indigenous politics, both troubling it and giving it a

messianic character, an analysis that draws on Derrida’s discussion of

mourning and a hauntology.

I argue that we cannot confine our thinking about Indigenous urban

communities to actually existing spaces, and that the futural,

aspirational, and projective nature of the thinking required here is

both central to the project of decolonization, and is consistent with

the general character of Indigenous thought about politics. It is not

the current time that this is orientated to, not what Heidegger

described as “the current actual, which affects us and which we

stumble upon”, but also “the possible, which we expect, hope for, and

fear, which we can only anticipate, before which we recoil and yet do

not let go”.

In this discussion, I draw on Jonathan Lear’s insightful analysis of

the reinvention of Crow society in the face of the total

transformation in their nomadic, warrior lifestyle, as exemplified in

the actions and visions of its Chief, Plenty Coups, who died in 1885

(Lear 2006). Lear’s story about Plenty Coup’s story, and the larger

story of the Crow, reminds us that sometimes what is required for a

community to continue to be a community (in all its political

manifestations) and Indigenous is something of a decisive act of

courage, but also a reinvention of the terms, concepts, actions, and

meanings of what it means to be Indigenous, to see in a particular

community more than the community sees in itself. In a very specific

and concrete sense, the urban is an event (as Arendt thought about

history in general) that illuminates its own past, or in the case of

39


the Crow, its own future. This is in part the moment that faces urban

Indigenous communities, but as I argue in this study in various

places, it is a problem whose resolution or lack off, reverberates

through the central core of Indigenous political thought in North

America; it is this, not the need for more programs, that is the real

issue that lies behind the oft cited fact that more than half of all

Aboriginal people now live in urban areas. In this final chapter I

explore this issue of contingency, and of the kind of radical hope, of

an unjustified visioning, that is the ethical obligation imposed upon

us by the emergence of urban Indigenous communities.

Together, these chapters set out a series of locations through which

we can begin to rethink our understanding of urban Indigenous

communities, to see, in these locations, and in their relationship to

urban Indigeneity, processes, possibilities, and areas of contestation

that remain obscure or invisible if understood only through the

current, limited way of the politics of Indigenous communities.

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THE STAKES maybe put in conclusion ?

What precisely is at stake in this? Each of the four sites selected

here–the tropes of silence, the performance of sovereignty, the

particular figurations of space and agency in a government program,

the wounded Indigenous body—are included here because they are, of you

will, overdetermined locations for the expression of particular

problematics: tensions and gaps in the political imaginary,

ontological fissures introduced by deterritorialized sovereignty, an

uncertain and formative collective agent, shifting modes of

understanding historical time.

It goes almost without saying that there are immediate and

identifiable material consequences that attend these issues: the

traumatic, and traumatizing, story of serial killer Willie Picton and

the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Vancouver’s Eastside

reminds us that urban Indigenous people are some of the most

vulnerable population in North America, and surely require a political

voice to defend their material interests. Since it seems that settler

society will concede little without continuous, pointed political

pressure from Indigenous peoples, the weakness of our discourse on

urban communities leaves urban communities and in an untenable place,

both needing political power and systematically lacking access to it.

But if the material stakes are high, so are the intellectual. Running

throughout Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City is the argument that the issues

I identify in urban communities are not confined to urban places; the

processes of deterritorialization, for instance, wrack land based

communities as much as they structure urban ones, and to think our way

41


through the deterritorialization in the urban in ways that enhance

rather than reduce its political status opens up ways to think about

deterritorialization more generally, and more productively, as a

permanent feature of Indigenous collective life. The fate of urban

communities and land based ones are irrevocably intertwined. But we

might adduce another reason to link the two projects, one derived from

a principle deeply embedded in Indigenous worldviews: the principle of

holism30. As Indigenous scholars from Deloria onwards have argued, an

integrated and holistic worldview is central to an Indigenous ontology

and epistemology (Arabena 2008, Deloria Jr 1972): it is, as Norton

Smith (2010) has described it, a ‘world ordering principle’ for

Indigenous communities. Here, ‘holism’ names the belief that in

contradistinction to European philosophies which divide the world into

discrete phenomenon, Indigenous philosophies accept as central not the

separation of things but the ‘binding together of all elements’, not

the discreteness of things but their interconnections (Castellano

2000), not causality as the force of one thing acting on another but

relationality as one thing known by its relationship to another, as

heteroglossic wholes (Kastes 1993, Kovach 2009, Strathern 1992).

30 This principle is expressed frequently in writings about Indigenous methods and Indigenous epistemology. See for instance the various contributors to Anne Waters, American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Malden, MA., Blackwell Publishing. 2004. This point is also taken up at length by Seminole-Creek scholar Donald Fixico, who, interestingly enough, writes frequently about urban Indigenous communities. His analysis is the centrality of relationality or onto-epistemic holism is representative, even if his perspective is unfortunately marred by an overriding essentialism, including a repeated tendency to refer to ‘the Indian mind’, which he seems to want to confine to full blooded or tribal members. See Donald Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge. 2013. A more complicated, and ultimately more successful attempt at understanding this principle as it operates in one particular tradition (Nuu-chah-nulth) can be found at: Richard Atleo Umeek, Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. Vancouver: UBC Press. 2004.

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It is less important, I think, to understand this ontological and

epistemic commitment to holism and integration as uniquely Indigenous,

as a marker that separates the two social orders: after all, stressing

interconnections and relationality over and against division and a

kind of naïve pointillist empiricism was precisely what Marx, not to

mention Freud, Saussure and Darwin, sought to accomplish, and in any

event the history of western thought is surely too complex to be

captured by the single dimension of ‘division’ and a ‘preoccupation

with specifics’ (as for instance Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete has tried

to argue (Cajete 1999)). The point is not to establish exclusive

ownership of the principle of relationality the better to mark one’s

identity, but rather to suggest that Indigenous political thought, as

it evolves and changes over time should proceed in accordance with

this principle, rather than against it, as a matter of consistency.

But it also strongly suggests an ethical point: since a relational

ontology is not ethically neutral—it presupposes that positive

obligations and responsibilities flow from relationality (Walker

2008)—accepting holism as an operating principle means accepting an

ethical burden to ensure the relationship does not harm the other, or,

as in the case before us, leave the other in a place where they can be

neutralized politically.

But it is precisely on this basis that our current understanding of

the urban fails. Currently, the urban is not integrated into the

domain of the political in Indigenous communities, either at an

analytical level or a practical one. If the principle of holism is to

apply, it surely should do so, at a minimum, with respect to the

relationships between and amongst Indigenous collectives. What we find

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instead is a clear cut division: the space of the political occurs in

land based communities, but not in the urban; urban residents are

disconnected from material practices on the land, and thereby cannot

be included in our accounts of the political. Current thinking about

the urban ruptures the integrity of Indigenous communities, and denies

urban communities the capacity to act as full political participants

in an overall web of relations. Judged on its own principles,

Indigenous political thought about the urban fails the test. And since

such thought cannot complete itself, cannot come into itself, until it

meets this principle, it needs to find a way to grasp the implications

of urban Indigenous communities in order to finish its own project of

Indigenous resurgence. A partial Indigenous political thought is one

that risks not being Indigenous at all, at least on this dimension.31

And, this is in part why these essays don’t focus, as so many texts

about Indigenous issues do, on the question of how to rebuild or

develop the Indigenous subject of culture: such a focus risks

isolating the individual from its connections to nature, the cosmos,

and its surrounding social field, or perhaps more precisely, risks

inserting those connections into the subject where they become pale

and secondary: the general conquest of the object by the subject.

31 It might also be that this striving to a unity, towards a consanguinity or a conceptual oneness is merely another manifestation of what Derrida has termed archivalfever, which is to say an impulse to produce a sort of governmental order on natural variation or difference through identifying their subordination to their place in ‘theorder of things’, which we might think amounts to producing their subordination to theanalytic gaze. But while I think we should be alert to such impulses and their potential to sublimate contingency and emergences to order and stasis, we ought to take seriously the idea that a commitment to holism and integration is both useful (perhaps even necessary) to an adequate Indigenous political practice, and further, that accepting this principle does not entail a commitment to producing an archive or falling under the spell of archival fever.

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All this to say, that there are real costs to the current

understanding of urban communities, both material and intellectual,

and further, that this is not a problem that can be confined to urban

communities and their leaders. To the contrary, if this problematic is

not properly addressed, that is, if the limits of current thinking are

not recognized, all Indigenous communities will feel the effects. In

this sense, the failure to understand urban Indigenous communities as

political societies haunts Indigenous politics, and prevents

Indigenous political thought from coming to completion, to finding

itself through and in itself.

METHODOLOGICAL NOTES

I should remark here on a particular difference, a point of

contestation and evasion that organizes this text, one especially

pronounced for a non-Indigenous author not writing in the emic

tradition of a cultural or social anthropology. The issue is this: I

am not interested, in this text32, in the ‘external’ question of how—in what

ways, through which forms, on behalf of which people—Indigenous

communities have resisted the challenges and encroachments of settler

society. That is, Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City is not an analysis of

colonization or of Indigenous-state relations. It does not attempt to

catalogue (as though this was possible) the wrongs inflicted by the

state or civil society, nor necessarily to describe the creative,

subversive, and emancipatory responses from Indigenous communities to

colonial rule. I recognize that this sets me in sharp opposition to

the usual critical location adopted by non-Indigenous scholars and 32 As noted elsewhere, the majority of my working life has been spent negotiating between Indigenous groups and government, on both sides of the table. If I set the issue of the actions of the settler state aside here, it is not because I am unfamiliar with the issues.

45


activists, who usually take great pains in emphasizing their role as

handmaidens to the anti-colonial struggle; I can only plead here that

as central as this question is, it is not the only one available for

inquiry, and that to focus too deeply on the actions of the colonizer

and the Indigenous reaction to it is to give the settler state more

air time than it deserves.

Rather, we might describe the essays here as responding to an

‘internal’ challenge, in distinction to the ‘external’ one of

resisting the impact of the colonizer’s practices, in that the issues

I am probing here are ones that now haunt Indigenous politics from a

place that cannot be completely understood through or finally resolved

by reference to settler society, even as we recognize that the current

mode of urbanization was clearly driven by the actions of the settler

state. The issue of how to think about the political in the context of

urban Indigeneity is, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, one that is

now ‘ownmost’ to Indigenous communities, and one that cannot be

addressed solely through a focus on the non-Indigenous state. Or, to

put it in the reverse, these essays assume that no resolution of the

relationship to the settler state will be sufficient for Indigenous

liberation in the absence of a sustained reflection about how the

political should be understood, within Indigenous communities and

without, in light of urban Indigeneity. In this, I am following the

path set out by Mdembe in his analysis of the state of scholarship on

Africa, about which he has this to say: “(i)ndeed, any serious

critique of the West entails, of necessity, a critical revisiting of

our own fables and the various grammars which, under the pretext of

46


authenticity or radicalism, prosaically turn Africa into yet another

fiction” (2006; 153).

The Provisional Nature of this Study:

Before turning to the substance of my arguments, I should pause to

acknowledge the otherness of my project: by which I mean not merely

that it does not appear to follow the norm in writings about

Indigenous politics, but also, and more importantly, that it is

something that I do not completely possess, or have a hold of. This is

where I confess—to echo Heidegger again—that I am not certain that

what I have to say will turn out to be correct, even if I am convinced

that it is true. In this sense, my discourse on the political status

of urban Indigenous communities, by virtue of addressing a ‘community

to come’ that is not easily discernible in the terms currently

available to it, ‘speaks too soon’, and so takes the liberty (if you

are Heidegger) or commits the crime (if you are Habermas) of speaking

without adequate warrant. Thus my commentary will perhaps appear from

the perspective of an intellectually engaged activism, as

anticipatory, as running ahead of itself, as speaking of something

that I do not quite understand. Or as the French poet Mallermé once

put it, I have taken up the unenviable task of reporting in

‘breathless gasps’ of an event that is still unknown.33 Mallermé here 33 The comments are contained in a lecture to an audience at Oxford; they were first published in 1895, and are reprinted in Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres Completes. Trans. S. Felman. Paris: Gallimard. 1945. The translator goes on to note in a subsequent articlequoting these remarks that Mallermé’s French contains a deliberate ambiguity, which makes it difficult to discern who the agent is that testifies, witnesses, experiences,writes, etc., and that this ambiguity has the effect of creating his testimony as precocious, as something that does not issue directly from consciousness. See ShoshanaFelman, Education or Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York:Routledge: 1-56. 1992.

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is referencing a radical shift in French poetry, which for him was a

long delayed effect of the French Revolution, but his words apply to

our present project: “Should I stop here, and where do I get the

feeling that I have come relatively to a subject vaster and to myself unknown – vaster

than this or that innovation of rites or rhymes; in order to attempt to

reach this subject, not to treat it….” (p. 645).

Mallermé’s words were aimed at elucidating the relationship between

poetry and politics at a time of radical political change, at

describing how—at last—the dogmas of the Alexandrine poetic form in

France were crumbling under the impact of the Revolution, but his

‘breathlessness’ could equally well apply to our circumstances here,

where we are attempting to grasp the consequences of an event whose

particularity has not yet been granted political space for its

expression, and whose implications have not yet been adequately

comprehended by contemporary thought. To belabour the point, in a

suitably poetic remark that strikes at the issue of the limits of the

rhetorical imaginary that his literary innovations confronted,

Mallermé goes on to say “(c)onsciousness in us is lacking of what,

above, explodes or splits” (1945: 646).

Indeed. And whether in fact the political space of urban Indigeneity

is something that is ‘split’, or ‘explodes’, or does something else

altogether, it remains something that is extimate to consciousness (it

is ‘above’ it, or perhaps ‘before’ it), that is, both in it and

outside of it. It is a lack that stiches the past to the future. Of

necessity, this element of precociousness, of speaking in advance of

something not yet grasped (or as Indigenous scholar Margo Greenwood

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once put it, being satisfied with ‘touching the mountaintops’ of our

topic), is the ground upon which the essays here operate. We shall see

later that this problem is structural, that the political imaginary that

constitutes and organizes Indigenous political thought is blocked from

including the urban within the ontology of the political, so that if

we attempt to grasp it only the anticipatory mode remains, but for now

it suffices to mark the precarious, untimely nature of the

propositions put forward here.34 It is not merely that my remarks are

provisional. It is also that they are intended not to set out a

program, but to open up a path, to indicate possibilities, to provoke

alternate readings of urbanity in Indigenous thought, to instigate

conversation, not close it. In this sense the essays here were not

written as a series of chapters that build towards an ineluctable

conclusion, as a mounting argument which winds tighter and tighter on

itself, but rather as a series of probes that explore what might be

possible in thinking seriously about the relationship between the

political and the urban.

On this point, we might note as an aside that this attempt to pose a

different way of thinking about urban Indigenous communities, is

necessarily temporal in its anticipatory nature and its relationship to

the ground from which it seeks to differentiate itself. But this

discourse actually has a double character to it with respect to its

location in time. Most obviously, it has some of the characteristics

of a testimonial, since it witnesses something that has occurred, that is

still occurring, an ‘event’ in Indigenous history that is not only 34 Or as Lacan puts it in his Preface to the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: “All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn’t so—I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same....”

49


being witnessed but, as the word ‘testimonial’ suggests, is also being

‘attested’, that is, reported out. But since one can only ‘report out’

on events that have already happened, it follows that testimony also

has a constitutive relationship to the past, to the latency of the

event (or more properly in our case, to the latency of the emergence)

that it attempts to grasp and make knowable. But just as obviously, my

discourse has the characteristic of an invocation, of attempting to bring

about one of the multiple possibilities that lie in the future, or

perhaps more precisely, haunt the present. This ‘calling forth’ as an

active event is, as Shoshan Felman reminds us, intimately connected to

the practice of testimony; in testimony of the sort that we are

concerned with there is an intrinsic connection between text and

event, in that testimony aims to perform or enact as much as it aims to

relay or transmit. Testimony as performative: it is this attempt to

call forth something as much as report out it that marks my text as an

intervention, not just a description. This calling forth of something

unclear or futural is not unfamiliar to Indigenous cultural practice

even when it is not common to Indigenous political writing, since

prophecies of various sorts occupy are often cited in discussion of

the proper path for the decolonization strategy.

In the overall trajectory of this text, in my attempt to open up the

new ways to conceptualize urban Indigenous communities, therefore, I

am following Linda Smith’s call “for new theoretical discussions of

Indigenous cosmopolitanism in ways that expand nationalism beyond

rural and reservation ‘homing’ or ‘in-between’ urban ambivalence and

articulate more thorough understandings of political, cultural, and

personal sovereignty, even in unexpected surroundings” (2001).

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‘Unexpected surroundings’ indeed: it is the great joke on settler

society, Sioux scholar Philip Deloria (2004) implies in the title to

his seminal text, when settlers encounter ‘Indians in unexpected

places’, but this joke and the sharp jolt to consciousness that is its

intended effect can itself appear in unexpected places, can itself

surprise and shock and disrupt playing out and rebounding in

unanticipated ways, including having Indigeneity appearing—perhaps in

the disguise of the sovereign—in places we thought were bereft of such

matters, like ‘cannibals in the city’35.

For if ‘Indians’ can appear in unexpected places like urban centres

there is no reason to think that the Indigenous political does not

also find its way into such spaces; that the urban can surprise us as

well. But if there is the potential for ‘surprise’ at stake here, if

thinking about the urban leads us to think differently about the

continuities and ruptures in Indigenous politics in the contemporary

era, that potential lies on a road that has been travelled before. For

if, as I have argued above, the urban finds itself set against a

backdrop that systematically subordinates its political status, it is

also set against a backdrop of a literature, at once scholarly, policy

orientated, and activist, that concerns itself directly with urban

Indigenous communities. It is to these two literatures that I now

turn, in order to trace the ways in which the literature on Indigenous

politics has understood the figure of the Indigenous polity in land

based settings, and in urban locations.

35 The reference is to a song by Mohawk artist Robbie Robertson.

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Introduction: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City

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Transcript of Introduction: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the City