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| Coulthard's essay can be found here. |
This is a difficult question to wrestle with. Answering it helps answer other questions. As students and teachers of American Indian Studies, are we trying to incorporate Native ways of being into the dominant culture? Are we trying to incorporate the dominant culture into Native ways of being? Are we working toward assimilation or resistance? Toward change or conservation? Toward cosmopolitanism or nationalism?
The answers depend upon who is asking, and many times the answer involves a complicated, ever-changing mix of the options I just mentioned. (And those are just a few of the options. There are many.)
I thought about this question of compatibility when I saw a passage from an essay by Glen Coulthard, "From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition: Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Dedendeh."
Although he is writing about Native communities in Canada, his point remains true south of their border. His essay discusses the ways First Nations people have tried to work with the Canadian government in securing their rights and protecting their homelands from appropriation and exploitation. It seems that working within the dominant culture's political and economic system can be a trap -- because of the difference between the fundamental assumptions of Native epistemologies and those of the dominant culture, specifically the dominant culture's practice of capitalism. If Native communities work for their rights within the dominant system, they can lose even when they think they are winning, because they then are subject to a system that operates under very different assumptions and expectations.
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| Coulthard later expanded on these ideas. |
("Onto" is related to the Greek word for "being," and "logy" is related to the Greek word "logos" -- word. Ontology, then, would be the way we speak about being, or the study of being.)
As an example, Coulthard cites the word for "land" in his Native community's language. This word means not only the land (as a material object) but everything on it, "people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on." Not just passively on it; these things exist on it together in a web of dynamic relationships. He writes:
"Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we have obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time."
This is where I thought about that question of incompatibility, and it is where I thought about Karl Marx.
I thought about the fundamental difference between thinking of land as a relation (as an entity with which you have a reciprocal relationship) and thinking of land as a commodity (a thing that can be bought and sold). For Marx, humans have social relationships through commodities and money, but they do not have social relationships with the commodities. This assumption, which is at the heart of the social and economic systems dominant in the United States and Canada, seems irreconcilable with the Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes.
The dominant American ontological framework includes the assumption that people are free to do as they wish with the things they own. That includes land. The limitations placed on land-use relate not to the owner's responsibility to the land but to their responsibility to other people, such as neighboring land owners. A landowner can be sued by their neighbors not because they have harmed the land but because their use of the land has negatively impacted the lives of their neighbors or the value of their property.
The Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes has commodities, too. Objects have been traded, bought, and sold by Native people for centuries. But land is not a commodity. If you have social obligations to the land, just as you have social obligations to other people (such as your family), selling it becomes difficult. How can you sell it to someone who will value it differently? Someone who will not have a sense of obligation to it? Someone who will think of it as a commodity rather than a relative?
This is where I find another idea from Marx useful in my understanding the dilemma I mentioned at the beginning and that Coulthard considers in his essay. The concept of alienation is important to Marx's thinking about industrialization, socialism, and capitalism. There are several kinds of alienation that Marx writes about -- people being alienated from their own bodies or minds through the process of wage labor; people being alienated from the goods and services they produce (for instance, being paid to make objects you could never afford to buy on the wage you are paid to make them); and, perhaps most importantly for Marx, people being alienated from each other because of the class structure of their industrialized society.
I find the concept of alienation useful in understanding many aspects of modern life. I think about what the word means. To alienate means to make something alien, to make it a stranger, to place it outside regular social obligations. Marx apparently used the German word for "estrangement" in this sense. To make something strange. When I looked up alienation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I saw that in its Latin origins "alienate" meant to transfer ownership of something. That seems especially relevant for this discussion about land.
To sell something, then, means to separate it from you. In a sense, to make it a stranger to you. In American capitalism, it seems everything is for sale. Objects, animals, land, services, your time (in the form of your labor). All of these things can be purchased by another person. All of these things can be alienated from you. Even our own bodies can be sold, figuratively and literally. It may be illegal, but you can sell your organs. Everything can be alienated. Everything can be made a stranger for a price.
This ability to sell anything leads people to sell everything, to seek new things to sell, and always to sell them for as much as possible. American capitalism is built upon the desire for immediate maximized profit.
The notion that some of these commodities are due social obligations is, in a real sense, inconceivable to American capitalism. The idea that humans can and should have reciprocal relationships with these commodities seems impossible.
"Immediate maximized profit" and "mutual social obligations" seem incompatible to me.
Perhaps this can change. Wikipedia tells me there is a concept called "environmental personhood," This bestows legal rights onto elements of the environment, such as rivers. For example, the Yurok Nation in California recently recognized the legal rights of the Klamath River. (Rivers in other countries, such as India and New Zealand, have been awarded similar status.) The Yurok Tribal Council stated its desires for the Klamath River as an act of reciprocation, as Coulthard discussed: “This resolution provides another powerful tool to protect our river, which has sustained the Yurok people since time began."And the Council described its desires for the Klamath River in very human terms: "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve."
That sounds kind of like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," doesn't it?
I do not expect environmental personhood to become very popular in the United States any time soon -- although the personhood of corporations is the law of the land -- because that idea limits the ability of people to exploit something for profit, and that seems unAmerican.
As Native nations and the federal governments of the United States and Canada continue to work out their vexed relationships, I do not expect them to ever resolve their fundamentally different relationships to the lands they live on. I think everyone involved would be healthier if they worked toward the Native ontological framework that Coulthard discusses. In my classes I encourage students to at least understand this Native ontological framework, or perhaps even consider incorporating some of it to their ways of being in the world.
I thought about the fundamental difference between thinking of land as a relation (as an entity with which you have a reciprocal relationship) and thinking of land as a commodity (a thing that can be bought and sold). For Marx, humans have social relationships through commodities and money, but they do not have social relationships with the commodities. This assumption, which is at the heart of the social and economic systems dominant in the United States and Canada, seems irreconcilable with the Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes.
The dominant American ontological framework includes the assumption that people are free to do as they wish with the things they own. That includes land. The limitations placed on land-use relate not to the owner's responsibility to the land but to their responsibility to other people, such as neighboring land owners. A landowner can be sued by their neighbors not because they have harmed the land but because their use of the land has negatively impacted the lives of their neighbors or the value of their property.
The Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes has commodities, too. Objects have been traded, bought, and sold by Native people for centuries. But land is not a commodity. If you have social obligations to the land, just as you have social obligations to other people (such as your family), selling it becomes difficult. How can you sell it to someone who will value it differently? Someone who will not have a sense of obligation to it? Someone who will think of it as a commodity rather than a relative?
This is where I find another idea from Marx useful in my understanding the dilemma I mentioned at the beginning and that Coulthard considers in his essay. The concept of alienation is important to Marx's thinking about industrialization, socialism, and capitalism. There are several kinds of alienation that Marx writes about -- people being alienated from their own bodies or minds through the process of wage labor; people being alienated from the goods and services they produce (for instance, being paid to make objects you could never afford to buy on the wage you are paid to make them); and, perhaps most importantly for Marx, people being alienated from each other because of the class structure of their industrialized society.
I find the concept of alienation useful in understanding many aspects of modern life. I think about what the word means. To alienate means to make something alien, to make it a stranger, to place it outside regular social obligations. Marx apparently used the German word for "estrangement" in this sense. To make something strange. When I looked up alienation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I saw that in its Latin origins "alienate" meant to transfer ownership of something. That seems especially relevant for this discussion about land.
To sell something, then, means to separate it from you. In a sense, to make it a stranger to you. In American capitalism, it seems everything is for sale. Objects, animals, land, services, your time (in the form of your labor). All of these things can be purchased by another person. All of these things can be alienated from you. Even our own bodies can be sold, figuratively and literally. It may be illegal, but you can sell your organs. Everything can be alienated. Everything can be made a stranger for a price.
This ability to sell anything leads people to sell everything, to seek new things to sell, and always to sell them for as much as possible. American capitalism is built upon the desire for immediate maximized profit.
The notion that some of these commodities are due social obligations is, in a real sense, inconceivable to American capitalism. The idea that humans can and should have reciprocal relationships with these commodities seems impossible.
"Immediate maximized profit" and "mutual social obligations" seem incompatible to me.
Perhaps this can change. Wikipedia tells me there is a concept called "environmental personhood," This bestows legal rights onto elements of the environment, such as rivers. For example, the Yurok Nation in California recently recognized the legal rights of the Klamath River. (Rivers in other countries, such as India and New Zealand, have been awarded similar status.) The Yurok Tribal Council stated its desires for the Klamath River as an act of reciprocation, as Coulthard discussed: “This resolution provides another powerful tool to protect our river, which has sustained the Yurok people since time began."And the Council described its desires for the Klamath River in very human terms: "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve."
That sounds kind of like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," doesn't it?
I do not expect environmental personhood to become very popular in the United States any time soon -- although the personhood of corporations is the law of the land -- because that idea limits the ability of people to exploit something for profit, and that seems unAmerican.
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