Media and "think tank" attack First Nations using discredited hate literature
Racist literature being dressed up as an "academic" publication is now being used by mainstream media writers and other groups with their own agendas to once again attack First Nations. The book, "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry" published by McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008 is now under attack by those who understand the real agenda behind this type of hate material.
Four reviews of this "book" need to be read to better understand what the mainstream media and others are doing as they present their agendas to the public.
- Presentation at Mount Royal College, December 1, 2008. (by J.S. Frideres, University of Calgary) - The following is the text of a presentation made on a panel discussing the book Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, by Widdowson and Howard, 2008.
When I received an invitation to participate in this panel and was told of the title of the book to be discussed, I was excited and looked forward to reading a solid academic piece of research on the topic. I would like to note that there are lots of “businesses” out there in the world and the Aboriginal industry is just one of many. There is the “Cancer Industry”, the “Diabetes Industry”, the “Green Business”, the “air traffic business”. And how are all these dealt with? How different are they from the Aboriginal business? I thought the authors would take a comparative perspective to see how these various industries emerged, evolved and are structured. Alas, it turns out the authors are not really interested in the “Aboriginal industry,” they are more interested in arguing that Aboriginal people have no culture, have no language, are degenerate Canadians, sucking out money and power from the good middle class folks (who by the way don‟t really care about Aboriginal people until they do something that actually impacts their way of life.) and informing good Canadians that their tax money is not being well spent on Aboriginal people. Their interest is in telling the reader how bad lawyers and anthropologists are and the fact that Aboriginal people actually have the audacity of using them to support their legitimate rights. Lawyers can‟t be used because they have a self interest in the issue of Aboriginal business. As though those people interested in cancer research don‟t have the same self interest. In short, if they (Aboriginal People) were good Canadians they would just accept the decisions of the government and private sector and “suck it up.”
When I received the book, I noticed the sub title (The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation) and then upon opening the book I reviewed the chapter titles and sub headings. It was then that a small clue told me that this was not an academic piece of work but an opinion piece that was cloaked in scholarly footnotes and academic jargon to make it look like a scholarly piece and thus be able to make outrageous claims under the guise of “scholarship.” And, after reading the material, my suspicions were correct! It is NOT a scholarly piece of work but it is a disrespectful piece of journalism. ... Click here to read the entire presentation
- Redressing Racist Academics, Or, Put Your Clothes Back On, Please! - A Review of Widdowson and Howard’s, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008).
From the excited, glowing reviews of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry I had seen in The National Post, and as a critic of parasitic white lawyers and consultants, sell-out aboriginals, and collaborationist Aboriginal politicians, I was prepared for a hard-hitting critique and useful deconstruction of the complex of injustice that has been built up around Indigenous-state relations in Canada. Instead, I found a collection of distortions, omissions, and exaggerations, that provides a reading experience like that of slogging through an undergraduate essay by, say, a kid from Alberta ruminating on Québecois nationalism, or an Alabama schoolgirl writing on the root causes of black-on-black violence. What a disappointment. ...
Click here to read the entire review by Gerald Taiaiake Alfred and the comments by others
- Turning Contempt Into a Career - Posted by balbulican on January 31st, 2009
... The world first heard about Frances Widdowson when she was suspended in the mid-nineties from a contract position with the Government of the Northwest Territories. The GNWT has a formal policy of taking traditional knowledge (TK) of Aboriginal people into account in its studies and policies, and Widdowson was suspended when she publicly derided that practice, and claimed that her Charter Right to freedom of religion was being compromised by having to take into account native “superstitions”. She claimed to speak from the perspective of a “scientist” (I believe she was working on a master’s degree in sociology back then). ... Since her GNWT days, Widdowson has attempted to brand herself as a lonely voice of objective scholarship, fighting a huge and corrupt Aboriginal “industry” bent on muzzling “the Truth”. She is, in fact, a mediocre writer, a poor researcher, and a bitter ideologue with an axe to grind.
Click here to read the entire review posted by balbulican and the comments by others
- The Emperor’s Old Clothes, Peter Kulchyski | March 5th 2009 http://canadiandimension.com/articles/1710/
It’s hard to know where to begin with this book, which purports to be a kind of “expose” of the use of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in policy making and ranges far afield into a critique of the idea of Indigenous rights and a survey of problems in the fields of Aboriginal healthcare, education, self-government, land claims, and so on. I had previously written these authors off as “kooks” from the far political right wing; but now they have been embraced by certain prominent left academics and have themselves started to gloss their opinions with Marxist rhetoric. Their work does an enormous disservice to the growing movement of socialist activists and theorists in Canada who are engaged in the real work of decolonization, and could potentially set back a growing oppositional movement for years. So, at a time when crises are escalating and the demands on our time are high, I’m forced to sit down and read this. What follows will not be pleasant.
The authors tout their experience working with the government of the Northwest Territories as a basis that inspired the study, beginning with an anecdote from their time there. I, myself, would not be so proud of working as a bureaucrat for a colonial institution. The two have no actual community-based experience that they refer to, and may very well have never spent a night in an Aboriginal community.
The agenda of the book is to attack the notion of Aboriginal rights in favour of a notion of universal human rights. The book dismisses Aboriginal culture as “primitive” and outdated, and relies on the evolutionary anthropology of a century ago. Its particular target is traditional knowledge — especially traditional ecological knowledge, which they argue does not exist except as forms of local knowledge that people from any culture can have.
This book is based on intellectual dishonesty. The authors can barely cite a living anthropologist who will agree with them, so the anthropologists they cite favourably almost all come from before the 1950s, when the now totally discredited doctrine of social evolution still left traces of its pernicious influence. The dishonesty comes through, because in each chapter where they tackle an issue, they refuse to actually grapple with the stronger scholars who deal with the subject matter, usually relying on newspaper accounts and non-academic works to act as straw dogs they can knock over. For example, the chapter on “justice” (they mean criminal justice; the idea of justice is foreign to this book) offers one dismissive paragraph to Rupert Ross’s carefully conceived arguments about traditional justice based on his lifetime of work as a crown prosecutor. The chapter on environmental management dismisses Harvey Feit and Fikret Berkes in a single paragraph, and implies that their work is based on a kind of “new age” spirituality. Rarely do they actually confront strong versions of the arguments they oppose. Although they frequently gloss from Clifton’s book, The Invented Indian (much of their own work is a Coles Notes version of it), to “debunk” what they perceive as myths about Indigenous contributions to contemporary life, they are quite happy to regurgitate myths like that of the Bloody Falls massacre, which twenty years ago scholars realized was largely an invention of Samuel Hearne’s London editors (they cite Hearne uncritically).
They are worried about being called racists, so they try to innoculate themselves from the charge by confronting it. They argue that they never presume an inherent racial difference; rather, all people are equal, and it is only the “developmental gap,” the nostalgic attachment of Aboriginal leaders and supporters to a romantic vision of Aboriginal culture, that is responsible for the “social dysfunctions” they see in all those communities they never bothered to visit. It is true that much of their argument, technically, is ethnocentric rather than racist: it presupposes the superior value of capitalism (strange idea for alleged Marxists to have) to “earlier” forms of social organization (unlike Marx, who always noted — even within the evolutionary anthropology he accepted — that “earlier” forms of society were far advanced when it came, for example, to community relations).
There are moments, however, when their ethnocentrism does slide over into overt racism, like when they begin chapter ten, on traditional knowledge, with a discussion of the book Why Cats Paint, effectively implying that elders have the same absence of ability to think as cats have to create art (shades of Sepulveda’s comparison of Indigenous peoples to monkeys back in the mid-sixteenth century, which is about where this book belongs).
There is a more pernicious racism when they name many Aboriginal leaders and gleefully “out” them for problems of alcoholism and sexual abuse. The book contains one mention of residential schools, and never draws any connections. By implication, they charge that the vast majority of Aboriginal leaders are corrupt and morally bankrupt. These parts of the book read so distastefully that it is difficult not to feel “slimed” simply in allowing ones eyes to slide over these pages. They never mention Conrad Black or Brian Mulroney, those standard bearers of the high moral values of contemporary culture. And they smugly, simply and blithely assume their own middle-class moral superiority.
Here and there, as in the closing two paragraphs of the introduction and the last paragraph of the book, they refer to themselves as historical materialists, and they refer to Marx. These read like graft-ons, and are generally out of tune with the rest of the text. But these authors are not in any way dissidents. Because, if all of Marxism gets tarred by this brush, we will have set back the critical cause of forging an Indigenous alliance with labour that offers real potential to destabilize the current capitalist regime in Canada.
Their “what is to be done” concluding chapter says nothing, except that the task is to reduce the “developmental gap” that holds Aboriginal people back. Uh, actually guys, this is what the federal government has been trying to do since about, um, 1867. So, it’s not really a new idea, nor one that has proven effective; it has been responsible for producing much of the misery that exists today. But they blithely ignore what is historically inconvenient to their argument — namely, history.
Very few on the social-movement Left will take anything but offense from these words, but many on the Right will happily wield them as weapons against the long-unfolding struggle for Aboriginal rights. In its sloppiness, ethnocentrism, racism and stupidity, this book does not reflect well upon its authors, the readers who endorsed it, the editors who proofread it, the scholars who supported it and the publisher who will allow this book to stand on their shelves next to the many excellent books in their Native and Northern Series.
And here is how the media and the Frontier "think tank" writes about this same book ...
How two Marxists disrobe native industry
Joseph Quesnel - February 06, 2009
For those interested in a serious debate about Aboriginal politics in Canada, it's evident the discussion is skewed. One need go no further than the Aboriginal issues section of any local bookstore, or academic journal articles on the topic.
Most publications tend to rarely deviate from the following narrative: Aboriginal societies existed as nation-states and were just as advanced as European societies; all of the problems which beset indigenous communities can be attributed to "cultural loss" and colonization; and to restore full powers to First Nation communities will solve everything. To dispute any of the above assumptions is to be a "racist" or "Eurocentric" or against Aboriginal people.
Occasionally, some thinkers take these shaky assumptions to task. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry --The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, is such a work. Written by Frances Widdowson, a political scientist from Mount Royal College, and Albert Howard, a former Aboriginal and government consultant, the work is clear in its thinking and is a direct assault on so-called Aboriginal Orthodoxy.
What sets it apart is its candour and honesty on the cultural issues and the wealth of experience from which the book is derived. This book is also the first critical look at Aboriginal politics from a leftist point of view. Widdowson and Albert Howard self-identify as historical materialists --Marxists, in layman's terms-- and argue economic forces determine culture.
The authors assert that real left-wing analysis of Aboriginal policy requires a "critical eye rather than a bleeding heart." They make the case that the problems which afflict First Nations are more cultural than political.
For example, insofar as Aboriginal communities remain focused on pre-capitalist, kinship-based thinking still attached to traditional conceptions of governance, corruption is the result in the modern context. It is, Widdowson and Howard assert, what keeps indigenous people from enjoying the benefits of modernity.
The authors bring a unique perspective to the debate. They both worked within Aboriginal communities and witnessed first-hand many of the problems now analyzed.
Widdowson and Howard recount an experience while they worked with the Northwest Territories government. There, they discovered that the government was interested in aboriginal "traditional knowledge," despite not being able to define it and which anyway interfered with actual science. The main problem, as they see it, is that this knowledge is derived from pre-scientific animistic beliefs. A central problem for the authors is the unavoidably spiritual dimensions of so much thinking on Aboriginal issues which, they caution, inform public policy and make empirical observations problematic.
They note the central problem with First Nation issues is the denial of the "developmental gap" between indigenous peoples and European societies at the time of contact. Being hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist, these societies could not integrate into a capitalist mode of production. These societies were and still are also based on kinship-based reciprocity. That means political leaders serve their family and friends first because there is no separation between the public purse and private political needs. This, argues Widdowson and Howard, explains much of the nepotism and bribery on modern First Nations reserves. They also take issue with the tribal nature of modern indigenous politics. This is negative because it prevents First Nations from seeing beyond their differences and toward an inclusive identity.
This hunter-gatherer focus is why Widdowson and Howard have such a problem with Aboriginal solutions, as when it focuses on "retreating to culture or the past." Self-government arrangements, education and child welfare devolution are all assaulted in this work; they are seen to perpetuate hunter-gatherer cultural traits that are unsuited for modern life. Before anything else, argue the authors, First Nations need to accelerate their cultural evolution into modernity.
My only criticism against this book is the absence of specific solutions. The work is big on critique but short on ways to improve. They criticize "right wing" critics of Aboriginal problems for their solutions but offer nothing beyond massive investments in education as their own solution. One also wonders if their Marxist ideology prevents them from seeing how free markets could help First Nations, such as how property rights provide an economic base for prosperity.
Beyond that caveat, Widdowson and Howard have produced a substantial work, one that will endure. Critically, by speaking candidly about the cultural gap that exists between pre-modern life and the 21st century, they open up a new avenue for exploration of dysfunctional Aboriginal life.
Joseph Quesnel, of Metis ancestry, is a policy analyst on aboriginal issues at the frontier centre for public policy. fcpp.org.