Taiaiake Alfred

Works

• 1999Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto

  Drawing on the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, the book criticises Indigenous leaders who adopted the state’s agenda of self-government, rejects state sovereignty as a goal and calls for a leadership grounded in traditional values of consensus and non-coercive authority.

• 2005Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom

  Named after a Kanienʼkehá:ka war dance, the book calls for a non-violent but uncompromising “warrior ethic” and a spiritual revolution starting in individuals and communities, and rejects “Aboriginalism”, the integration of Indigenous peoples into the state, for an “anarcho-indigenist” politics.

Position

Alfred is on the map as the thinker who gave Indigenous resurgence its name and programme. “Peace, Power, Righteousness” (1999), drawing on the teachings of the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, argued that self-government negotiated on the state’s terms had produced Indigenous leaders and “citizens” whose rights and identities were defined more by the colonial state and its law than by the traditions of their nations. The aim should instead be to protect values that, in Alfred’s view, resist the homogenizing pressure of Western liberalism and free-market capitalism: the autonomy of individual conscience, non-coercive authority and the interconnection of human beings with the rest of creation; state sovereignty, a European idea of power, appears in the book as the wrong goal. “Wasáse” (2005) turned the critique into a call for action – a non-violent but uncompromising “warrior ethic”, a spiritual revolution beginning in individuals and communities, and an “anarcho-indigenist” politics against the integrationist ideology Alfred calls “Aboriginalism”. In an article with the Cherokee scholar Jeff Corntassel (2005), Alfred described resurgence as the restoration of Indigenous presence on the land and the revival of land-based practices. Glen Coulthard, in “Red Skin, White Masks” (2014), for which Alfred wrote the foreword, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson built on this work; the Anishinaabe philosopher Dale Turner objected that turning away from state institutions leaves the definition of Indigenous rights to others (see “Context & critique”).

Life & context

Taiaiake Alfred was born in Montreal in 1964 (one biographical note gives 1965) and grew up in Kahnawà:ke, the Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) community on the south shore of the St. Lawrence; Alfred’s own biographical statement speaks of a Mohawk philosopher, writer and political strategist from Kahnawà:ke. After three years in the United States Marine Corps, Alfred studied history at Concordia University in Montreal and took a master’s degree and a doctorate in government at Cornell University. Alfred taught political science at Concordia, founded the Centre for Native Education there, and from 1999 to 2015 was founding director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria, described as the first graduate programme of its kind; from 2003 to 2007 Alfred held a Canada Research Chair. Since 1987 Alfred has also advised the government of Kahnawà:ke and other Indigenous communities. Alfred received a National Aboriginal Achievement Award for education in 2006. In March 2019 Alfred left the University of Victoria and, according to Alfred’s own statement, academia, to work with Indigenous communities; in that statement Alfred acknowledged having done harm to people.

Further main works

• Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (1995)
• Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism (with J. Corntassel, Government and Opposition 40, 2005)
• It’s All about the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence (2023)