A few people have pointed out that most of the media commentaries about the recent public inquiries into Boyden’s identity claims are from men. This is not accidental; the cost for women to speak out not only about identity and Indigenous law (ie: the intertwined realities of co-constituted kinship, ongoing personal and collective responsibilities, and living forms of collective accountability) but also to speak back to patriarchy is very high. The issues that have been raised in the last few weeks regarding Boyden go far beyond appropriation (though this matters), but delve much further into questions of the continued assertion of white, male, liberal discourses of what Indigenous peoples can and should look like, speak like, think like, and perform in order to affirm and assuage the Canadian settler state itself.
Boyden was (is?) the perfect male, white, settler colonial mirror for the settler Canadian psyche. He arguably performed a kind of Indigeneity that was affirmed not only by the settler state (Trudeau even added a copy of Boyden’s ‘Three Day Road’ to Barack Obama’s library), but was also affirmed by very highly placed Indigenous and non-Indigenous male politicians, artists, media personalities and writers. He performed a kind of hyper masculine ‘indigeneity’ which was, perhaps, given a pass because it re-inscribed his body with the vague notion of a romantic Indigenous past without any of the hassle of contemporary, critical, polyphonic, pluralistic, dynamic and often contradictory narratives that come from the necessary and ongoing expression of Indigenous life, laws and philosophy from the over 630 different Indigenous nations in the country today.
For women to speak back to the intertwined whiteness, settler colonialism and patriarchy swept up in issues like Boyden’s shifting claims (and swept up in many other complex issues today) is not only to challenge settler paradigms, but to also delve into the performativity and power of patriarchy as it cuts across settler and Indigenous contexts.
So, I suppose writing this post is to court a kind of controversy. But, I also think it’s important to insert a Métis feminist perspective into discourses of where we go from here, since Boyden did identify as “Métis” for a very long time. Each time the Métis are claimed, it shapes how settlers come to understand who the Métis are and what we represent in the political landscape of neocolonial Canada.
I have been thinking a lot in the past few weeks about the fractures and fissures within my own nation — the Red River Métis — which make it prohibitive for women (or for critical scholars) to critically engage Métis legal traditions, membership, and the legal and political orders through and within which we strive to live and reproduce an ongoing people/nation/society. There is a pervasive kind of anti-intellectualism in this. Academics are accused of everything from ‘lateral violence’ to ‘identity policing’ when writing about questions of appropriation, identity fraud and liberal expropriation of Métis law and identity. Instead, we are encouraged to be ‘open’, which I see as a code for ‘uncritical’ in this particular case. To this end, common refrains over the last few weeks have been that Boyden ‘did no harm’; or that ‘we have room in the circle’; and ‘we can’t question a person’s identity claims’. Those are assertions that can only be made when we forego acknowledgement of the damage that fraudulent claims to being Métis have on the co-constitution of Red River Métis law, relationships and stories.
What hasn’t been asked is ‘how is it that settlers can game our political discourses so expertly that they become the national face of Indigenous issues?’.
One of the easy answers to the above question is: patriarchy. Numerous people have pointed out that the response from many Indigenous peoples in defence of Boyden is noticeably different from how many people responded to the Andrea Smith scandal last year. We love to defend men. We especially love to defend famous men. The second answer, drawing from the works of Glen Coulthard and Elizabeth Povinelli, is also relatively straightforward: the politics of recognition strive to affirm existing status quo settler understandings of Indigenous lives, laws and philosophies (or to completely erase the existence of Indigenous law and philosophy entirely and frame Indigenous peoples as objects within a universalist euro-western paradigm).
But a harder question to answer is: people who perpetuate various forms of Indigenous identity fraud often knowingly and cloyingly hijack the trauma and struggles of individuals and communities making their way back to the laws, political orders and relationships of their respective nations which settler colonialism purposefully imploded through dispossession, relocation, residential schools, the 60s scoop, and the genocidal machinations of the Indian Act. How is it that we fail to employ the robust tools of dynamic Indigenous legal traditions to question these extractive and manipulative claims of frauds?
We fail to mobilize these legal traditions to interrogate problematic claims against our flesh because we are inculcated with the liberal dogma that identity is an individual (and indivisible) and intensely sacred (‘sacred’ in the neoliberal/capitalist context of property — identity is the fee-simple terrain of the heart) and intensely personal claim. We are also inculcated with the notion that identity is consumable. A friend shared this quote from James Tully, which I turn to here:
“Rather, the demands of democratic-constitutional legitimacy are now met in the space of ‘lifestyle politics’ opened up and made possible by globalisation and juridification. One may now turn one’s individual or collective life into a democratic enterprise; deliberating about, caking on and revising a wide range of careers, work relationships, consumption patterns, lifestyles, identities and voluntary associations around gender, cultures, languages, hybridity and the environment, and being free to change these as one chooses. Citizens, individually and in groups, enjoy the market ‘freedoms of the moderns’, especially of mobility, consumption and change, and are free to invent themselves as they move from role to role, and thus to live life like an actor, as Nietzsche predicted.” (Tully 2008: 105)
As Chris Andersen points out in a recent talk, this notion of the inviolable terrain of the personal claim to Indigenous identity runs counter to the collective, co-constitutive nature of Indigenous kinship, law, and political orders. The self-identification dogma is, frankly, the most pure liberal iteration of self.
“I think (I’m Metis), therefore I am!”
Boyden stated, following the release of APTN journalist Jorge Barrera’s in-depth investigative piece into Boyden’s ‘shapeshifting’ identity claims over the last decade, that he apologizes for mistakenly employing the term Métis to describe himself as a mixed-blood person. We were, it seems, a fashion. A coat to put on and remove at a whim. This is a deeply non-reciprocal claim to being Métis. And it is hardly an isolated incident. There is a pervasive phenomenon of non-reciprocal settler claims to Métis (and other Indigenous) identities. It is increasingly fashionable to be Métis.
I struggle with how to approach these non-reciprocal claims to Métis people. My life remains deeply connected to the past, present and future iterations of Métis life, law and imagination. My life remains messily, painfully and joyfully connected to the disagreements, fractures, contradictions, and epiphanies of Métis life (specifically within the spheres I grew up in, or which my immediate family is connected to in central Alberta — Edmonton/amiskwaciwaskahikan/pehonan and St Paul des Métis settlement). It is not a trend for me. It is who my family is and who we have been for generations, through many twists and turns. Increasingly, I feel there must be space to welcome and reconnect with those kin and family members deliberately removed from Indigenous communities through adoption and state violation of Métis kinship and law, while also holding space to ask critical questions of those trying to fraudulently extract perceived ‘benefits’ from Métis political and legal orders.
Our Red River Métis laws were robust enough to challenge the State in two armed resistances. I think we can handle tough but loving questions about those claiming us as a kind of fashionable ‘settler move to innocence‘(Tuck and Yang 2012).
One thing is certain: there will be more Boydens. These future spokespeople will perhaps be Indigenous, or they might be settlers performing a vague kind of Indigeneity to curry favour or a perceived kind of ‘benefit’ in their chosen field of work. But what is certain is that they will perform a perfect kind of wounded romantic suffering for settlers to consume, a perfect kind of performance rooted in an inviolable personal claim to the right to speak on behalf of 1.4 million Indigenous people in Canada. And they will likely be men. These future spokespeople will mobilize their position to affirm the settler state’s white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal notions of Indigenous laws, stories, philosophies and futures as less-than, dispossessable, and consumable. It’s important to ‘move beyond Boyden’ for the very reason that the current investigation into his claims and position raises myriad questions regarding the ways in which nations, like the Métis Nation, can openly and forthrightly ask questions not only of how we co-constitute ourselves, but also about how we ask tough questions regarding ourselves and the pervasive presence of patriarchal settler colonial thinking in our day-to-day lives.
I’d like to hear more from those who have been accused of ‘violence’ for asking these hard questions. I’d like to hear more about how we mobilize meaningful processes for asking tough questions and maintaining robust and dynamic reciprocal relationships which move far far beyond the anemic logics of recognition. I’d like to personally thank the folks who have fearlessly expressed really nuanced thoughts on the issues raised in the last few weeks. This is hopeful, this is necessary. And it lays the groundwork for future work within and through painful but important struggles.
In the months and years to come issues of environmental violence, resource extraction, law, gender, narrative, voice and other issues will continue to impact diverse Indigenous communities. Being able to ask tough questions and address them fearlessly will be necessary. And making sure that we aren’t just listening to a handful of settler-approved spokespeople will be very necessary.
So, though perhaps some people feel that the last few weeks have been a ‘witch hunt’ or a ‘sideshow’, I think that actually the issues raised are deeply relevant to myriad facets of Indigenous law and self-determination. We need to ask hard questions about who we are, who claims us, and about the logics through which we are building and living our laws and relationships. These are terrifying things to dedicate oneself to. But as recent events demonstrate — and as many of my colleagues and friends have demonstrated through the last few weeks — it is more than possible to ask tough questions with grace, love and resolve. That’s a future I can commit to.
