Glen Sean Coulthard
Recognition granted by a settler state does not end colonialism but makes the colonised accept its terms; freedom begins with land-based practices and relations that Indigenous peoples maintain themselves.
Placement
Political theorist from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, at the University of British Columbia: in “Red Skin, White Masks” (2014) he argues with Fanon that state recognition of Indigenous identity reproduces colonial rule, and that resistance has to start from land-based practices – “grounded normativity”.
Key ideas
- Critique of the politics of recognition
- Settler colonialism as ongoing dispossession
- Grounded normativity
- Indigenous resurgence
Influence
Influenced by 5
Karl Marx
influenced by
Coulthard reworked Marx’s primitive accumulation in a place-based way: in settler colonies the decisive relation is the ongoing dispossession of land, not the making of wage labour (2014). G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014); K. Marx, Das Kapital I (1867), on so-called primitive accumulation
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Frantz Fanon
influenced by
Echoing Fanon’s title, Red Skin, White Masks (2014) uses his remark that the master wants ‘not recognition but work’ against recognition granted by the colonial state. G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014); F. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952)
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Vine Deloria Jr.
influenced by
Coulthard followed Vine Deloria Jr. in treating land as an ontological framework for understanding relationships, not merely a resource (Red Skin, White Masks, 2014; God Is Red, 1973). G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014); V. Deloria Jr., God Is Red (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Vine Deloria Jr. › 1933–2005
Taiaiake Alfred
influenced by
In Red Skin, White Masks (2014), with a foreword by Alfred, Coulthard drew on Peace, Power, Righteousness (1999) and Wasáse (2005) for tradition-based self-determination against liberalism and capitalism. G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014), foreword by T. Alfred; T. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999); Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (2005)
Evidence: AI draft
Taiaiake Alfred › b. c. 1964
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson influenced
influenced by
In the conclusion of Red Skin, White Masks (2014), with its ‘five theses on Indigenous resurgence’, Coulthard builds on Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011). G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014), conclusion; L. B. Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
influenced
Simpson took up Coulthard’s ‘grounded normativity’, the ethics generated by land-based practices and knowledge, in As We Have Always Done (2017), after their joint article of 2016. L. B. Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017); G. S. Coulthard & L. B. Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity”, American Quarterly 68:2 (2016)
Evidence: AI draft
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson › b. 1971
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Brian Burkhart
criticised by
Burkhart objected that Coulthard traces the shift from land as relationship to land as property to state power alone, not to Western concepts of land (Transmotion, 2017). B. Burkhart, contribution to “Red Pens, White Paper: Wider Implications of Coulthard’s Call to Sovereignty”, Transmotion 3/2 (2017); G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014)
Evidence: AI draft
Brian Burkhart › contemporary
Criticizes 3
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
criticised
In Red Skin, White Masks (2014) Coulthard followed Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master–slave parable: in colonial settings, recognition granted by the state reproduces domination instead of overcoming it. G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), ch. 1 and conclusion
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Charles Taylor
criticised
Drawing on Fanon, Coulthard argued against Taylor’s ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1992) that recognition granted by the settler state reproduces colonial rule (Red Skin, White Masks, 2014). G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (2014), ch. 1; C. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism (1992)
Evidence: AI draft
Charles Taylor › b. 1931
Nancy Fraser
criticised
Coulthard applied his objection to the politics of recognition also to Nancy Fraser’s model: recognition granted within a settler-colonial order reproduces that order (Red Skin, White Masks, 2014). G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014); N. Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition”, New Left Review 3 (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Nancy Fraser › b. 1947
Works
Why recognition by the settler state does not decolonise – and why Indigenous resistance draws on land as a system of relations.
Position
Coulthard’s starting point is the turn in Canadian politics since the 1970s towards recognising Aboriginal rights, land claims and self-government, and its best-known philosophical defence, Charles Taylor’s essay “The Politics of Recognition” (1992). With Fanon, who observed that what the master wants from the slave is “not recognition but work”, he argues that recognition granted by a colonial state does not free the colonised; it leads them to identify with the terms on which they are recognised, and so reproduces the power it was supposed to transform. He applies the same objection to Nancy Fraser’s model of recognition. Against an orthodox reading of Marx he proposes a “place-based” version of primitive accumulation: in settler colonies the decisive relation is not the making of wage labourers but the ongoing dispossession of land. Following Vine Deloria’s contrast between spatial and temporal world views and the Dene struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, he describes “grounded normativity”, the ethical frameworks that come from land-based practices and knowledge, in which land is a system of reciprocal relations and obligations. Negotiated land claims, he argues, turned a struggle informed by land as relationship into a struggle for land as property. He defends Indigenous resentment against an official language of reconciliation, examines the gendered politics of self-government, and ends with theses on Indigenous resurgence drawn from Idle No More (2012–13). Brian Burkhart objected in 2017 that Coulthard locates the change from land as relationship to land as property only in the power of the state, not in Western concepts of land and being; reviewers have also noted that the argument is worked out mainly for Canada.
Life & context
Glen Sean Coulthard was born in 1974 and is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories of Canada. He studied at the University of Victoria, first in its Indigenous Governance programme, and then in political science, where James Tully supervised his doctorate (2009). He teaches Indigenous studies and political science at the University of British Columbia. His article “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada” (2007) won the annual prize of the journal Contemporary Political Theory. He is a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a land-based university programme in the Northwest Territories, where he has spent part of each teaching year since 2015. Red Skin, White Masks (2014) received the C. B. Macpherson Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association and the Frantz Fanon Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Further main works
- “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada” (Contemporary Political Theory, 2007)
- Introduction to George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (new edition, 2019)
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