I was going over my various newsfeeds, and this article came up on the Angry Indian’s site:
By any political estimate, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act commonly known as the Akaka Bill is dead in the 112th Congress.
For Hawaiian sovereignty claimants, it is another opportunity to prove they can establish a Hawaiian governing entity that is representative of Hawaiians and their priorities.
The key to the opportunity is President Barack Obama’s decision in December to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in September 2007, the declaration is largely a statement of principles “as a standard of achievement to be pursued in a spirit of partnership and mutual respect.”
I had not known that Obama had endorsed the UN Declaration. I have been sort of out of the loop on news in the last months, and to be sure this got no press that I’m aware of in the mainstream media, certainly not in any tall headlines. It’s very important, because, broadly speaking, indigenous people don’t exist as far as the United States, the actually existing United States, is concerned, as political subjects. This is not about particular people in the United States, but about how the society functions.
The critique of Enlightenment universals has a lengthy, broad, and deep history by this point, so I don’t feel a need to rehearse it. Some particular points are worth making here, however. The critique as it stands often notes the function of universals to elide difference, which has political, social, and economic implications. Among other things, it allows genocide, because people who don’t conform to a universalized notion of humanity aren’t, the logic goes, human. One can clear them out like–in one’s own, universalizing mind–one weeds a garden, which as a historical process is the story of any settler colony, and in this case, the United States. This is also the story, obviously, of Nazi Germany.
Almost entirely, indigenous peoples are modern peoples. There certainly are exceptions, and many of these are shown in National Geographic documentaries. So, too, are there uncontacted peoples, that is to say, people who have refused contact with modern people absolutely. It is very important that the people who today continue to live in our original means of existence as a species–following food–continue to do so. Modern people need to learn the basic lesson that that existence teaches, which is that we are, in fact, part of nature, not separate from it. That said, the vast majority of indigenous people are modern people, but modern, as groups, with a lengthier, specific, and conscious connection to particular land. That connection is not a matter of opinion and not simply an idea.
Watching events in Egypt unfold, or rather reading about them and watching a few video clips, it was clear how important they were, but I also started thinking that the whole discourse in this country about freedom, defined politically, economically, or in absolute, human terms (i.e., Marx’s Marxism), totally lacks an indigenous dimension. One speaks of these things with a sense that revolutions push things forward, and, without any discussion of the implications of that notion, one makes the question of indigenous people, in the modern conception “peoples without history,” evaporate. Progress is an entirely subjective idea, as in fact in history there is movement but no direction. I would argue that this fits with Marxian dialectic as Marx, as opposed to Engels or any number of others, presented it.
The individual political subject, the atom such as it is of modern political discourse, is on the one hand the means to human liberation, rather than the ends. That bourgeois representative governments and capitalist economy posit the individual subject as the ends is a sign of the absolute short-sightedness of both systems, which don’t in practice even deliver on that promise. No good in the long-term placing your bets on something with an expiration date 75 years or so after its creation. Better to bet on peoples rather than individual people.
I would note that modern types approach social organization with a delusional, dualistic approach. Practically, it becomes racist, or rather is racism as it actually exists as a system. One speaks of “individualistic” societies, i.e., the modern “West,” so-called, or in America, the world of white people, and on the other hand “collectivist” societies, which, implied in a dualistic model, denies and oppresses the individual. This is nonsense, to be sure. China’s government oppresses individuals because it uses political coercion, not because of an ontological position.
Indigenous societies provide a social context in which individuals can manifest as social beings. Humans are social beings, and therefore our liberation must manifest socially. There cannot be human freedom for an individual. Modern societies to actually produce human freedom, defined positively, have failed spectacularly. The American Revolution produced a Bill of Rights and capitalism unvarnished. We end up with corporate control and a sense that we are what we buy. That’s not freedom. The Soviet experience gave us a centrally, i.e., politically, planned economy without changing the fundamentals of capitalist labor relations. That plan conformed to the planners’ notions of what was needed rather than to laborers’ own sense of what they needed as human beings.
It is important to remember that for roughly 95% (give or take…) of our history as a species we were all indigenous people. The Great Spirit, to use the indigenous North American language, gave each people a land on which to live, each particular, the people and the land. 70% (give or take…) of what makes us as individuals a physically existing being is water. Therefore, it is important for each of us as we understand our existence, to focus on that. This leads me to Buddhism, or rather keeps me coming back to it–what led me to it was that I was going out of my mind with stress and anxiety and I found a meditation group where I was living. In any event, 70% of what we actually are is water. It doesn’t die, and it predicates life on this planet. That’s us. Historically, we as humans are 95% hunter, gatherer, fisher, and forager. It may not form what is most of our conscious existence today, but as a species, that’s who we are, and if we are to free ourselves historically it will have to be in a way that incorporates that history even if it adds to it.
I would note once more that indigenous people are absolutely part of the modern world, but, the meaning of what it means to be indigenous has taken on added meaning since 1500, or so, since we developed capitalist societies. Above all, the problem is genocide, defined as Ward Churchill does, which is as the United Nations Convention of Genocide does:
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that killing is only one of the issues at hand. Critically, for our world and particularly, because I live here, the United States, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” I would add that social destruction as a people is the same as physical destruction, because this is true but also because the Convention notes the “group conditions of life.” Human liberation means a world without genocide, among other things. The Great Spirit gave each people a land on which to sustain themselves as a people. Nationalism in Herder’s sense is compatible with this truth (however one formulates it), but not that of Fichte, let alone an Andrew Jackson or an Adolf Hitler. The movement in Egypt certainly conforms to the former rather than the latter, explicitly in the popular encouragement of other peoples to seek their own political freedom.
I write all this not to diminish the importance of what is happening in Egypt but to note that there’s a lot more to discuss than is part of the modern discussion of revolutionary change. I began by noting that Obama had actually adopted the UN Declaration, and it is indeed a big deal. I don’t expect a real discussion of the matter in American public discourse, but it may someday constitute a precedent for one.
For the moment, modern types such as myself, far away from my own ancestral lands, need to educate ourselves by listening. Start with the Angry Indian’s podcast, read Vine Deloria, Jr., and tell your friends to start conceiving of their humanity more broadly than modern capitalist society conditions us to.
