1
1
Glen Sean Coulthard
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
“Indigenous peoples have always fought to survive against imperialism’s imperative of spiritual and physical annihilation. In this respect, today’s fight is no different from that of previous generations
– it is a struggle to defend the lands, the communities, and the languages that are the essence of authentic indigenous existences.” 2
Taiaiake Alfred
“Essentialism, it seems, has become the bogey word of the human sciences, an accusation generating a virtual paranoia.” 3
Pnina Werbner
Introduction
The Indigenous peoples of Great Turtle Island (North America) have always fought to maintain their freedom within and against the structure of domination imposed on them by the colonial state. Over the last forty years these efforts have increasingly been cast as “struggles over recognition", 4 with more and more Indigenous groups demanding to be legally recognized as equal and self-determining peoples with the right to develop and govern their distinct identities and ways of life in a context free from exploitation and
1 Paper prepared for the Consortium on Democratic Constitutionalism (DEMCON) Conference,
“Consent as the Foundation for Political Community,” Victoria, October 1-3, 2004. VERY ROUGH
DRAFT –- please do not cite without permission.
2 Taiaiake Alfred, “Indigenous Resurgences,” Paper presented at Colonialism and its Legacies: A
Conference on Contemporary and Modern Political Theory (Chicago: April 23-25), 1.
3 Pnina Werbner, “Essentializing Essentialism, Essentializing Silence: Ambivalence and Multiplicity in the Constructions of Racism and Ethnicity,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism , edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (New York: Zed Books,
2000), 226.
4 James Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue: The Emergence of a New Field,” CRISPP , 7: 1 (2004).

2 domination.
5 Moreover, the last fifteen years has witnessed a proliferation of scholarship aimed at fleshing out the underlying logic and political significance of Indigenous and other identity-related struggles. Regardless of whether theorists have aligned themselves in support or against these struggles, one thing is certain: the language of
“recognition” has come to occupy a central place in recent theoretical efforts to comprehend the nature of contestations over identity and difference.
6
However, the newfound importance placed on notions of “identity,” “cultural difference,” and “recognition” in recent political, social, and constitutional theorizing has not emerged without controversy. Cultural historian James Clifford, for example, has identified the following three problems commonly thought to plague contemporary approaches to the politics of recognition/identity.
7 The first problem is that identityrelated claims seem to privilege minority interests above those of the majority. As a result, many advocates of this position tend to see demands for recognition as a corrosive assault on more widespread, “national” traditions.
8 The second problem has to do with the seemingly insular character of most identity-related struggles. The concern here is that the parochial nature of the politics of recognition has served to undermine a more universal, egalitarian, and “cumulative politics of resistance.” 9 Seen in this light, recognition struggles are “serving less to supplement, complicate, and enrich [equality-
5 See Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Sharon Venne, Our Elders Understand Our Rights: Evolving International
Law Regarding Indigenous Rights (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1998); and Dene Nation, “The Dene
Declaration,” in Dene Nation: The Colony Within , edited by Mel Watkins (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1977).
6 For an assessment of the theory and practice of the “politics of recognition” more generally, see
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Recognition or Redistribution? A Political-Philosophical Exchange
(London: Verso, 2003).
7 James Clifford, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall , edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000).
8 Ibid., 94.
9 Ibid.

3 based struggles] than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them.” 10 The third problem, which I intend to focus on in this paper, has to do with the “essentialist” understanding of social identity that often anchors demands for the recognition of cultural difference.
According to social constructivist proponents of this position, when struggles for recognition are founded on reified and essentialist notions of collective identity they run the risk of sanctioning repressive and non-consensual demands for group conformity, as well as unjust practices of exclusion and marginalization.
11 Accordingly, the only way to avoid this potentially authoritarian feature of contemporary identity struggles is to ensure that the conceptions of “culture,” “tradition,” and “nationhood” that ground demands for recognition remain fluid, open-ended, and never immune from contestation and deliberation. Struggles for recognition, in other words, must reflect the constructed nature of our social identities.
In the following paper I hope to illuminate some of the problems that arise when social constructivist critiques of the politics of recognition are employed in the context of
Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. In doing so intend to defend the following two interrelated claims: First, I contend that when examined through the lens of Indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonial rule, the social constructivist critique of the politics of recognition/identity may not only over-estimate the emancipatory potential of anti-essentialist political projects, but it also fails to confront the oppressive relations of power that often serve to proliferate exclusionary and authoritarian identity formations to begin with. And second, I argue that when social constructivism is universalized and then employed as a means of evaluating the legitimacy of claims for recognition against the colonial state, it can inadvertently
10 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Displacement and Reification in Cultural
Politics,” in Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency, and Power
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003), 22.
11 Ibid., 94-95.

4 sanction the types of domination and inequality that most constructivist theories attempt to mitigate.
Social Constructivism and Multicultural Democracy
Social constructivist approaches to the politics of culture and identity transverse a broad range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. In the following sections, however, I want focus on the recent work of political theorist Seyla Benhabib because it represents an attempt to move beyond the politics of cultural criticism by infusing the best aspects of social constructivist thought in an actual framework for deliberative democracy. To this end, the Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era , sets out to establish a model of deliberative democracy capable of accommodating both universal demands for individual freedom and equality and identity-specific demands for the recognition of cultural difference.
12 According to Benhabib, the task of those who are simultaneously committed to multiculturalism and democratic equality should be “to create impartial institutions in the public sphere and civil society where [the] struggle for recognition of cultural differences and the contestation of cultural narratives can take place without domination.” 13 In order to accomplish this task, however, Benhabib insists that we reject claims for recognition founded on essentialist and therefore potentially authoritarian conceptualizations of culture and group identity, and instead adopt a constructivist and more inclusive approach to the politics of difference. From this perspective, “intercultural justice between human groups should be defended in the name of justice and freedom and not of an elusive preservation of cultures”.
14 According to Benhabib, identity
12 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
13 Ibid., 8.
14 Ibid.

5 movements that do seek to preserve the “purity or distinctiveness of cultures” are simply
“irreconcilable with both democratic and more basic epistemic considerations.” 15
Benhabib begins her critique by challenging the empirical foundation upon which most contemporary theories of “mosaic multiculturalism” 16 are based – what she terms the “reductionist sociology of culture.” 17 Quoting the work of Terrance Turner, Benhabib contends that advocates of this form of multiculturalism often embrace an overly simplistic and clearly delineated conception of cultural identity, which, when institutionalized in the form of public policy, 18 risks essentializing the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or race; it risks reifying cultures as separate entities by over emphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures in terms that potentially legitimize repressive commands for communal conformity; and by treating cultures as badges of group identity, it tends to fetishize them in ways that put them beyond the reach of critical analysis.
19
Beyond potentially legitimizing “repressive commands for group conformity”, the reductionist approach yields a number of other illiberal consequences, including: “(1) the drawing of too rigid and firm boundaries around cultural identities; (2) the acceptance of the need to ‘police’ these boundaries to regulate internal membership and ‘authentic’ lifeforms; (3) the privileging of the continuity and preservation of cultures over time as opposed to their reinvention, reappropriation, and even subversion; and (4) the legitimation of culture-controlling elites through a lack of open confrontation with their cultures’ inegalitarian and exclusionary practices.” 20
15 Ibid., ix.
16 Ibid., 7-8.
17 Ibid., 4.
18 Political scientist Alan Cairns levels a strikingly similar claim with regard to several problems that he suggests arise when essentialist conceptions of Aboriginality inform the development of public policy in Canada. Alan Cairns, Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 2000), 8.
19 Turner quoted in Benhabib, 4.
20 Ibid., 68.

6
Against the reductionist approach, Benhabib defends the constructivist view that all cultures constitute fluid systems of meaning and representation that are continually constru cted and reconstructed through “complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures”.
21 Cultures are therefore “fluid, porous, and contested” 22 phenomena, “which are internally riven by conflicting narratives.” 23 This does not, however, imply that cultur es are unreal or fictional entities. “Cultural differences run very deep and are very real. The imagined boundaries between [cultures] are not phantoms in deranged minds;
[they] can guide human action and behaviour as well as any other cause of human act ion.” 24
Also unlike the reductionist perspective, Benhabib views social justice not in terms of cultural preservation or autonomy, but rather as the “inclusion” of traditionally marginalized groups into a widening “democratic dialogue” with the institutions and cultures of the surrounding society.
25 In order to facilitate this inclusion, Benhabib proposes a “dual track” model of deliberative democracy that stresses “maximal cultural contestation in the public sphere,” as well as “in and through the institutions and associations of civil society.” 26 So long as recognition-based claims adhere to the constructivist/inclusion paradigm and allow for the contestability of cultural norms, practices, and boundaries, then certain forms of “legal pluralism and institutional power sharing through regional and local parliaments” can be accommodated.
27 To ensure that pluralist institutional arrangements meet this standard, Benhabib proposes three
“normative conditions” which must be met by any group seeking institutional accommodation of it distinctiveness. These conditions are:
21 Ibid., 184.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., ix.
24 Ibid., 7.
25 Ibid., ix.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.

7
1. egalitarian reciprocity. Members of cultural, religious, linguistic, and other minorities must not, in virtue of their membership status, be entitled to lesser degrees of civil, political, economic, and cultural rights than the majority.
2. voluntary self-ascription . In consociationalist or federative multicultural societies, an individual must not be automatically assigned to a cultural, religious, or linguistic group by virtue of his or her birth. An individual’s group membership must permit the most extensive form of selfascription and self-identification possible. There will be many cases when such self-identifications may be contested, but the state should not simply grant the right to define and control membership to the group at the expense of the individual; it is desirable at some point in their adult lives individuals be asked whether they accept their continuing membership in their cultural communities of origin.
3. freedom of exit and association . The freedom of the individual to exit the ascriptive group must be unrestricted, although exit may be accompanied by the loss of certain kinds of formal and informal privileges. However, this wish of individuals to remain group members, even while out marrying, must not be rejected; accommodations must be found for inter-group marriages and the children of such marriages.
28
After outlining these normative requirements Benhabib concludes that, although “cultural groups may not be able to survive as distinct entities under these conditions” they are nonetheless “necessary if legal pluralism in liberal-democratic states is to achieve the goals of cultural diversity as well as democratic equality, without compromising the rights of women and children
.” 29 Under Benhabib’s deliberative democratic model, only demands for recognition that adhere to the above standards and “do not deny [the] fluidity” 30 of cultural identities and group boundaries can ensure the well being of individual group members. Under Benhabib’s deliberative framework, then, the cultural
28 Ibid., 19.
29 Ibid., 20.
30 Ibid., 184.

8 preservationist impulses of essentialism are portrayed as overly repressive and the inclusive domain of social constructivism as democratic and emancipatory.
Assessing the Politics of Anti-Essentialism
“[I]t seems that [social constructivist] theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries of essentialism…have been outflanked by strategies of power.” 31
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
At this point I would like to develop the first claim I posed at the outset of this paper: that in certain contexts the social constructivist position may not only over-estimate the emancipatory potential of anti-essentialist political projects, but that it may also fail to confront the underlying power relations that often serve to perpetuate exclusionary and repressive cultural formations to begin with.
Benhabib’s discussion of the current debate in Canada over the citizenship rights of First Nations women proves useful in elucidating some of the problems underlying the constructivist approach when employed in colonial contexts. To summarize, prior to
1985, all First Nations women who married non-Native men were forced to relinquish their Indian “status” under the provisions of the federal government’s 1876 Indian Act.
32
As a result, Aboriginal women who married non-Native men were legally denied benefits commonly associated with membership in a federally recognized Indian community, including the right to live on reserve, the right to federally subsidized health and dental care, post-secondary education, reserve housing, and so on. In 1985, the federal government was forced to repeal the provision of the Indian Act dealing with outmarriages on the grounds that it discriminated against Aboriginal women “on the basis of
31 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 138.
32 Benhabib, 54.

9 their sex and marital status.” 33 Not surprisingly, following the amendment to the Indian
Act (known as Bill C-31) thousands of First Nations women and their children rightly applied to have their Indian status reinstated. Since the implementation of Bill C-31, however, several First Nations communities have refused to grant reinstated women access to the rights and privileges associated with band citizenship on the grounds that band governments have the fundamental right to determine who does and does not constitute a member of the community.
34 To complicate matters further, many First
Nations leaders have employed the language of “self-determination,” “tradition,” and
“cultural survival” to justify these exclusionary practices.
35
Under Benhabib’s model, the situation described above is unacceptable.
36 In fact, one could argue that it provides a textbook example of why preservationist demands for recognition should not outweigh the universal rights of individual group members. Furthermore, it also appears to demonstrate how the institutional accommodation of essentialist expressions of cultural identity (through self-government, for example) can lead to the exc lusion and marginalization of a community’s lesspowerful members, especially when this form of accommodation does not adhere to the normative conditions of egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association. But is this a sufficient account of what is truly at stake in this scenario? Would an anti-essentialist politics of recognition that adhered to a fluid conception of cultural identity and Benhabib’s three normative conditions necessarily alleviate the condition of unfreedom and inequality represented here?
33 Ibid.
34 Gerald (Taiaiake) Alfred, Heeding the Voices of our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1995), 177.
35 Joyce Green, “Canaries in the Mines of Citizenship: Indian Women in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science , 34:4 (2001), 726-730.
36 Benhabib, 59.

10
Before proceeding, I would like to state outright that I think the exclusion and marginalization of Aboriginal women and children from the life of their national communities is profoundly unjust and unacceptable. However, unlike the social constructivist stance advanced by Benhabib and others, I do not believe the development of a political order that polices a more open-ended, fluid and contestable understanding of cultural identity can subvert the deeply entrenched colonial relations of power that are work here. In other words, I do not think that the maintenance and preservation of essentialist identity formations represents the core problem here.
Let me explain. As I have come to understand it, like many poststructuralist and postcolonialist proponents of social constructivism, Benhabib’s critique of essentialism in identity movements represents both an empirical statement about the constructed nature of cultural identities and a normative project aimed at social transformation. Indeed, for
Benhabib (as well as for theorists such as Homi Bhabha 37 and Stuart Hall 38 ) recognizing the social fact of cultural contestability, hybridity, fluidity, and so on, seems to be a necessary (although insufficient) condition for cultivating a healthy democratic order. In this sense, for Benhabib, “culture,” like the institutions of deliberative democracy itself, must, “in principle be open to appropriate processes of public deliberation by free and equal citizens.” 39 In oth er words, the conventions and practices of one’s cultural community, like any other political community, must adhere to the democratic norms of individual freedom, equality and consent. Seen from this light, it seems that only by acknowledging culture’s in-betweenness can we open up the very possibility of cultivating a truly progressive and emancipatory politics. However, as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri convincingly argue in Empire , this sort of constructivist project assumes
37 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
38 See Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft,
Garreth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995).
39 Benhabib, 106.

11 that oppressive power relations operate in a very precise manner.
40 More specifically, the transformative potential of constructivist theories rests on the assumption that oppressive relations of power are produced and maintained primarily through the construction of essentialized identities and binary oppositions: Self-Other, Black-White,
Man-Woman, Colonizer-Colonized, Gay-Straight, and so on. In contexts where oppressive relations are sustained through these divisions, the affirmation of “hybridity and [the] ambivalences of our cultures and senses of belonging seem to challenge the binary logic of Self and Other that stands behind colonialist, sexist, and racist constructions.” 41
But what about situations where relations of dominance and subordination are neither primarily produced nor sustained through these essentialized identities and binary divisions? In the context of Aboriginal women’s struggle for full citizenship rights, the binary logic of oppression is not so clear. There is no doubt that certain segments of the male Na tive elite have problematically employed essentialist notions of “tradition” and “cultural identity” in their attempt to justify exclusionary practices, but I think that the reification and misuse of culture in this context is better understood as a symptom, rather than the source of the problem. What is at issue here is the structure of colonial domination and inequality that anchors the Canadian state’s relationship with Indigenous peoples, not the production and maintenance of essentialist identity formations. The brutally impoverished conditions (both psychological and physical) that the colonial relationship has created in Aboriginal communities makes it impossible for band governments to adequately support the members they have now, let alone thousands of reinstated women and children. In fact, by thrusting these disadvantaged members into the hands of the communities without rectifying the relationship of domination and
40 Hardt and Negri, 137-150.
41 Ibid., 139.

12 inequality between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, the federal government has simply served to undermine and fracture these communities even further.
42 In contexts such as these, I do not see how the constructivist strategy of embracing cultural hybridity and contestability as a means of resistance can subvert the underlying power relations that have spawned these unjust practices. Indeed, even if we were to deconstruct and expose the Native elite’s self-serving misuse of culture as a means of maintaining patriarchal privilege, we would still leave intact the underlying social relations that prompted the misuse to begin with. In this case, at least, it appears that the underlying “structure and logic of power” is largely “immune to the ‘liberatory’ weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference.” 43
Kanien’kehaka scholar Patricia Monture-Angus makes a related point in her pathbreaking book, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks . Here she argues that the sexist use of culture and tradition as a means of justifying the exclusion of reinstated women and children from their communities cannot be understood outside of the context of colonial rule. “Understanding how patriarchy operates in Canada without understanding colonization is a meaningless endeavour from the perspective of
Aboriginal people. The Canadian state is the invisible male perpetrator who unlike
Aboriginal men does not have a victim face.” 44 However, as Monture-Angus continues on to explain, instead of developing an emancipatory strategy based on an acute understanding of the complex interrelationship between colonial and patriarchal forms of exploitation and domination, organizations like the Native Women’s Association of
Canada (NWAC) chose to adopt a state-centred legal approach which focused primarily on attacking the unconstitutionality of sexist provisions of the Indian Act and the
42 Patricia Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood
Publishing, 1995), 184.
43 Hardt and Negri, 142.
44 Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul, 175.

13 discriminatory actions of band governments.
45 This strategy, although arguably appropriate for the short term, has, in the long term, served to reinforce the logic of colonial and patriarchal rule in Aboriginal communitie s. “The efforts of Aboriginal women against the oppression of the Indian Act have only succeeded in achieving a more equal access to the [patriarchal and colonial] system of band membership and Indian registration for women previously enfranchised.” 46 Howe ver, “equal access to oppressive laws”, Monture-Angus concludes, “is not progress.” 47
The failure of some social constructivist theories to adequately confront the underlying power relations that often produce repressive identity expressions extends beyond the context of Indigenous struggles. This point is made well by Bhikhu Parekh in his Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, when he suggests that even essentialist forms of religious fundamentalism cannot be fully comprehended without considering the power context within which these forms take root and flourish.
“The fact remains”, writes Parekh, “that western culture today enjoys enormous economic and political power, prestige and respectability. Its interactions with other cultures occur under grossly unequal conditions, and those at the receiving end often find it difficult to make autonomous choices. Unable to arrest the disintegration of their traditional cultures which have hitherto given meaning to their lives and held them together as communities, they experience a veritable moral panic and become vulnerable to peddlers of a fundamentalist return to a pristine past.” 48 Again, I think the important point to take from Parekh’s observation here is that any constructivist approach to the politics of recognition that fails to deal with the unequal conditions that
45 Ibid., 181-183.
46 Ibid., 183.
47 Ibid.
48 Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 164.

14 help produce certain forms of essentialism will be limited in terms of their ability to effect long term social change.
The emancipatory potential of the constructivist approach is even less convincing in contexts where Indigenous people have employed seemingly essentialist notions of
“tradition” and “culture” in an effort to transcend entrenched forms of exploitation and domination. For example, in offering an alternative to the adversarial legalistic strategy adopted by NWAC, Monture-Angus proposed that communities deal with gender oppression in a manner that conformed to the “cultural understanding of Aboriginal reality.” 49 For her community specifically, this would involve the re-institutionalization of pre-contact cultural values and political traditions.
50 According to her nation’s oral histories, Kanien’kehaka traditional government was based on kinship systems within which women enjoyed the right to “select and even dispose chiefs, and had competence in such matters as land allotment, supervision of field labour, the care of the treasury, the ordering of feasts and the settlement of disputes.” 51 Thus, for MontureAngus “the concept of kinship relations is an important key in understanding traditional justice mechanisms and establishing those relations…is necessary to restore women’s respected position in First Nations society.” 52 However, as Eve Marie Garroutte reminds us, from the standpoint of cultural constructivism (as well as liberal democratic theory) there is perhaps nothing more controversial than implicating kinship systems in the operation of Indigenous governing structures.
53
Many Indigenous struggles over the recognition and preservation of seemingly essentialist expressions of cultural identity also contain a radical critique of capitalist
49 Patricia Monture-Angus, Journeying Forward: Dreaming First Nations’ Independence (Halifax:
Fernwood Publishing, 1999),148.
50 Monture-Angus, Thunder in My Soul , 241.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Los Angles:
University of California Press, 2003), 120-127.

15 social relations.
54 In the 1970s, for example, the Dene developed an incisive analysis of colonial-capitalist development in northern Canada and applied it in their struggle for recognition and self-determination. During this period many Dene viewed the destruction of their culture, land, and way of life as a by-product of extensive northern capitalist nonrenewable resource development. In a presentation made to the Mackenzie Valley
Pipeline Inquiry (the “Berger” Inquiry) in 1975, for example, Dene chief Frank T’Seleie linked the ongoing “genocide” of the Dene peoples with the actions of southern corporate executives looking to profit off the exploitation of Denendeh’s (Northwest
Territories) land and resources: “There will be no pipeline because we have plans for our land. There will be no pipeline because we no longer intend to allow our land and our future to be taken away from us so that we are destroyed to make so meone else rich.” 55
Dene leader Philip Blake levelled an analogous line of criticism when the Berger Inquiry arrived at Teetl’itzheh (Fort McPherson):
We are threatened with genocide only so that the rich and powerful can become more rich and powerful. Mr. Berger, I suggest that in any man’s [sic] view, that is immoral. If our Indian
Nation is being destroyed so that poor people of the world might get a chance to share this world’s riches, then as Indian people , I am sure that we would seriously consider giving up our resources. But do you really expect us to give up our life and our land so that those few people who are the richest and the most powerful in the world today can maintain and defend their own immoral position of privilege? That is not our way .
56
Although the political and economic analyses provided by the Dene during this period resembled the position advanced by their Marxist supports in southern Canada, the ideological basis of their critique was informed by a traditional system of values
54 Richard Day, “Who is this we that gives the gift? Native American Political Theory and the Western
Tradition,” Critical Horizons, 2:2 (2001).
55 Frank T’Seleie, “Statement to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry”, in Dene Nation: The
Colony Within, edited by Mel Watkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 13.
56 Philip Blake, “Statement to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,” in Dene Nation: The Colony
Within, edited by Mel Watkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 7-8. [emphasis added.]

16 rooted in a firm understanding of what it meant to be Dene. Because the Dene conceptualized the land as an essential element of their collective identity , any harm inflicted on the environment was viewed as a literal attack against their freedom, wellbei ng, and way of life. In the words of Dene leader Richard Nerysoo: “To the Indian
People our land is really our life. Without our land we cannot exist as a people. If our land is destroyed, we too are destroyed.” 57 It was this essential relationship between the
Dene and their homeland that provided the foundation of their radical critique of colonialcapitalist development in the north.
The notion of traditionalism underlying the 1970s Dene self-determination movement has been revive d more recently in the work of Kanien’kehaka scholar
Taiaiake Alfred. In Peace Power Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto , for instance,
Alfred argues that the goal of any traditionally-rooted Indigenous self-determination movement should be to protect that which constitutes the “heart and soul of indigenous nations: a set of values that challenge the destructive and homogenizing force of
Western liberalism and free market capitalism; that honour the autonomy of individual conscience, non-coercive authority, and the deep interconnection between human beings and other elements of creation.” 58 Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle envisions a similar path based on the cultural teachings of her “foremothers”, who “were absolutely opposed to waste of any sort. Their standards of honesty were established by those people who contributed most to the well being of the community and the nation as a whole. [For them] it was criminal to use another to enrich oneself; by this, I understand that exploitation of the land or people , in the interest of profit, was prohibited.” 59
57 Quoted in Martin O’Malley, The Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry into the
Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Ltd., 1976), 53.
58 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness , 60.
59 Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Vancouver: Press
Gang Publishers, 1996), 41.

17
Instead of further entrenching hegemonic relations of power, then, in all but one of the above cases, seemingly essentialist notions of tradition and cultural provided a radical sense of individual and communal agency that was geared toward the abolition of what bell hooks has forcefully called, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” 60 In these contexts it seems that the essentialism/constructivism dichotomy underlying Benhabib’s conception of social justice in multicultural contexts – where essentialized identities are viewed as repressive and cultural hybridity is heralded as a necessary condition of democratic politics – does not present a very illuminating or constructive way to approach the forms of injustice faced by Indigenous peoples. It is also important, however, to acknowledge that this oversight is not limited to Benhabib’s theoretic contribution or the context of Indigenous peoples alone. Again, as Bhikhu Parekh has insightfully suggested, there is a tendency in much (but not all) postmodernist literature to “romanticize” the constructivist approach to culture, “based on the mistaken belief that all boundaries are reactionary and crippling and their transgressions a symbol of creativity and freed om.” 61
Social Constructivism and Colonial Domination
“In-betweeness, universalized as the human condition and extended over the past, is thus naturalized in the process and becomes a new kind of determinism from which there is no escape.” 62
Arif Dirlik
In the previous section I suggested that, like many poststructuralist advocates of social constructivism, Benhabib’s critique of the politics of recognition represents both a sociological statement about the fragmented nature of cultural identities and a normative
60 bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 197.
61 Parekh, 150.
62 Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 205.

18 project aimed at social transformation. However, unlike the many postcolonial theorists who tend to view cultural criticism as a potentially transformative act in itself, 63 Benhabib moves beyond the realm of deconstructive critique and applies what she sees as the best insights of social constructivist thought (that identities are constructed, hybrid, fluid, contested, and so on) in the development of a deliberative democratic model capable of accommodating justifiable demands for cultural recognition. Here I think she makes a very interesting and problematic move: once she establishes the constructedness of cultural identities as a universal feature of social life, she then proceeds to ground her
“normative views on what political order ought to be [based] on that universal description.” 64 What should this political order look like? As noted previously, for
Benhabib it should be comprised of “impartial institutions in the public sphere and civil society where [the] struggle for recognition of cultural differences and the contestation of cultural narratives can take place without domination .
” 65 If group demands for recognition meet this standard, there is no reason why the state should not provide legal and institutional accommodation for the group in question.
66 This, again, is quite different from the standard poststructuralist/postcolonialist position, which tends to view the institutionalization of any claim to universality with suspicion.
67
In the following section I argue that by employing the social fact of cultural fluidity, narrativity, and contestability as a standard against which democratic theorists, politicians, policymakers, and the state should assess claims for recognition, Benhabib’s theory may inadvertently serve to sanction the very types of domination and inequality
63 Take, for instance, Bhabha’s suggestion that by deconstructing and exposing the fractured and inbetwe en spaces of social identities we “open up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture, 4. For a discussion of Bhabha’s project, see, Hardt and Negri, Chapter 2.4.
64 Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Judith Butler,
Ernesto Laclau, and Slazoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality (London: Verso, 2000),
14-15.
65 Benhabib, 8.
66 Ibid., x, 19-20, 184.
67 Butler, 15.

19 that social constructivist theories are supposed to mitigate. By placing the burden on claimants of recognition to prove that their identity movements do not deny the fluidity of cult ural identities and are “democratic, liberal, inclusive, and universalist” 68 before they are eligible for constitutional recognition, Benhabib’s model potentially renders recognition unattainable for Indigenous groups whose cultural expressions do not adhere to this form. More problematically, however, even if Indigenous claims for constitutional recognition do manage to meet these criteria, her theory takes for granted the colonial state political structure that is predicated on the white supremacist assumption that Indigenous peoples did not constitute equal and self-determining nations in relation to the European powers that eventually colonized them.
69 I will now briefly address each of these problems in turn.
As we saw in the previous section, in many c ases Indigenous peoples’ claims for recognition and self-determination simply defy all protocols associated with social constructivist criticism. “Not only do [they] affirm the possibility of a “real” native identity,” writes historian Arif Dirlik, but they also assert for the basis of such an identity a native subjectivity that has survived, depending on location, as many as five centuries of colonialism and cultural disorientation. Not only [do they] believe in the possibility of recapturing the essence of precolonial indigenous culture, but [they] also base this belief on a spirituality that exists outside of historical time.… In all of these different ways, indigenous ideology would seem to provide a textbook case of “self-Orientalization”.
70
We also saw that in some instances Indigenous leaders have defended these seemingly essentialist notions of culture to legitimize the exclusion of disenfranchised women and children from full participation in the life of the community; and in other cases they have
68 Benhabib, 65.
69 Nancy Fraser establishes a similar burden of proof for claimants of recognition in her reformulation of recognition as deconstruction. See particularly Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity
Politics: Redistribut ion, Recognition, and Participation,” in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth,
Recognition or Redistribution? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), 38-40.
70 Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories , 207.

20 been invoked as a means of resisting hegemonic relations of dominance and subordination.
Benhabib, however, focuses solely on the non-democratic and repressive aspects of essentialist identity formations, and this understanding is subsequently reflected in her model of deliberative democracy. The potential problem here, of course, is that by theoretically and institutionally privileging recognition claims that adhere to a fluid and inclusive conception of culture it is unclear as to what Indigenous claims
Benhabib’s deliberative model would be willing and able to accommodate. For one, almost every Indigenous demand for recognition that I can think of is couched in the vernacular of “cultural survival, “ “preservation” and “autonomy” – and rightfully so, given that, historically, Indigenous cultures have been the target of genocidal state assimilation policies. My point here is simply this: as it stands, without distinguishing between hegemonic and antihegemonic forms of cultural essentialism, Benhabib’s model would likely deem problematic any Indigenous claim for recognition that even remotely adhered to a essentialistic, and therefore potentially repressive, notion of indigeniety. For example, in the Canadian context, would the recognition claims of First Nations that demand to be exempt from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the grounds that it clashes with Indigenous cultural norms be acceptable under Benhabib’s model? What about the implementation of traditional justice initiatives that clash w ith “liberal” norms?
Or, what about communities that want to revise the traditional roles of hereditary chiefs in their governance institutions? Even though the use of culture and tradition in all of these examples represents a potentially powerful means motivating Indigenous resistances against the corrosive effects of colonialism, as it stands all of them would be suspect under Benhabib’s liberal deliberative framework.
In the concluding chapter of Claims of Culture Benhabib recognizes the chal lenge that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition and self-determination

21 present for her theory. “These peoples”, writes Benhabib, “are seeking not to preserve their language, customs, and culture alone but to attain the integrity of ways of life gre atly at odds with modernity.” 71 She continues:
While being greatly sceptical about the chances for survival of these cultural groups, I think that from the standpoint of deliberative democracy, we need to create institutions through which members of these communities can negotiate and debate the future of their own conditions of existence…. As I have suggested…the self-determination rights of many of these groups clash with gender equality norms of the majority culture.
[However, if] self-determination is viewed not simply as the right to be left alone in governing one’s affairs, but is also understood as the right to participate in the larger community, then the negotiation of these ways of life to accommodate more egalitarian gender norms becomes possible.
” 72
It is important to note that although Benhabib recognizes the limits of her approach in colonial contexts, in the end she is still appears committed to a conception of deliberative democracy that views justice for Indigenous communities in terms of their greater inclusion into the institutional framework of the larger society. In fact, she seems to suggest this inclusion is necessary so that Indigenous cultural norms, practices, and boundaries remain fluid and open to contestation by less powerful, individual group members.
73 Although Benhabib’s constructivist/inclusive framework may avoid the some of the pitfalls of cultural essentialism, I contend that it problematically assumes that the colonial state constitutes a legitimate and unproblematic background against which
Indigenous peoples make demands for the recognition of their collective identities.
Ironically, however, the state’s assumed position in these struggles is premised on the profoundly racist and essentialist understanding that Indigenous peoples were too uncivilized to constitute equal and self-determining nations when European powers
71 Benhabib, 185.
72 Ibid.
73 One could also arg ue that the “universal” status of Benhabib’s project also rests on this necessity.

22 unilaterally (that is, without the consent of local populations) asserted their sovereignty over North America.
Let me elaborate in the Canadian context. When the first Europeans arrived in what is now Canada, survival required that they immediately enter into political and economic relationships with the multiplicity of vibrant, sovereign, and self-governing
Indigenous nations that they encountered. Over the following four centuries the relationship between Aboriginal nations and the growing settler-society would undergo substantial changes, shifting from “mutually beneficial associations…between equal nations to the coercive and imposition of a structur e of domination.” 74 As the settler society grew in numbers and strength, their dependence on the technologies and knowledge of Indigenous peoples started to wane, and the relationship began to shift from one premised on peaceful coexistence and equality between peoples, to a colonial relationship “in which Aboriginal peoples and their cultures were treated as unequal and inferior.” 75
Over the last decade, a number of scholars have persuasively argued that the colonizing power’s conceptualization of Indigenous peoples as inferior constituted an essential component of Canadian state formation.
76 As philosopher James Tully has suggested, by theorizing Aboriginal societies as uncivilized, settler nations were able to justify unilaterally asserting supreme jurisdiction over Aboriginal peoples and their territories because they were deemed too “primitive” to have legal title to property,
74 James Tully, “Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation,” in Canadian Politics, 3 rd Edition, edited by Alain-G Gagnon and James Bickerton (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 419.
75 Ibid.
76 For instance, see Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness ; Patrick Macklem, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); James Tully, “ The
Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom,” in Political Theory and the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples , edited by Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders (Cambridge UK:
University of Cambridge Press, 2001). For a survey of literature in the American context, see Robert
Williams, The American Indian In Western Legal Though: The Discourses of Colonization (New York:
Oxford University Press); Ward Churchill, Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-
American Law (San Francisco: City Lights, 2003). In the Australian context, see Henry Reynolds,
Aboriginal Sovereignty: Three Nations, One Australia? (Sydney: Allan and Unwin Publishers, 1996).

23 governing institutions, and political jurisdiction over lands and citizens.
77 In essence, because Indigenous peoples were considered so low on the natural scale of social evolution, settler powers felt justified in claiming North America legally vacant, or terra nullius , “and sovereignty was acquired by the mere fact of discovery.” 78 Legal theorist
Patrick Macklem draws a similar conclusion when he writes:
Native inferiority was the justification for the assertion of sovereignty by discovery by European nations. Native people were constructed as the other, and as inferior to the colonizing powers. Native inferiority provided the justification for treating native people as subjects of the Crown. Sovereignty was asserted over the indigenous population by a denial of former equality of people by the colonizing powers.
79
In “From ‘Calder’ to ‘Van der Peet’: Aboriginal Rights and Canadian Law,”
Michael Asch persuasively demonstrates how the racist concept of terra nullius is still used to maintain a relationship of domination between Aboriginal peoples and the
Canadian state. More specifically, Asch illustrates how, between 1973 and 1996, the
Supreme Court of Canada consistently refused to recognize Aboriginal peoples’ right to self-determination based on its adherence to legal precedent founded on the assumption that Indigenous societies were too primitive to bear abstract political rights when they first encountered imperial powers. Thus, even though the Supreme Court has secured an unprecedented amount of protection for Aboriginal cultural practices (mostly in the form of subsistence rights) within the state, the Courts have nevertheless consistently refused to challenge the racist and colonial origin of Canadian sovereign authority over
Indigenous lands and peoples. Asch explains:
Despite such crucial events as the patriation of the Constitution and constitutional conferences on Aboriginal rights, the
Aboriginal rights discourse of this period has achieved no progress with respect to fundamental political rights flowing from
77 Tully, “Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation,” 419
78 Ibid.
79 Patrick Macklem, “Ethnonationalism, Aboriginal Identities, and the Law,” in Ethnicity and
Aboriginality, edited by Michael D. Levin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 14.

24 abstract principles. … The problem may be described this way: indigenous peoples must be presumed to hold fundamental political rights from their original self-determining status.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon those who deny them these rights to demonstrate either that indigenous peoples, unlike other peoples, never held them or that the rights were legitimately extinguished after European settlement.
80
Unfortunately, rather that taking a progressive step to challenge the assumption of
Aboriginal inferiority undergirding the state’s assumed jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples and territories, the Court decided to simply define the problem away by
“proposing that, in law, indigenous peoples never held such rights.” 81
Here we arrive at a paradox. If, as I have argued, Benhabib’s embrace of social constructivism represents not only an empirical statement about the nature of cultural identities, but also a means of potentially undercutting those forms of domination and inequality that are legitimized through the construction of essentialist identities and naturalized binary oppositions, then her theory has failed to serve its purpose in the context of Indigenous struggles for recognition and self-determination. In fact, by treating the state as a natural and unproblematic arbiter in struggles for recognition – or as Richard J.F. Day puts it, by assuming that “the state somehow ‘inherently’ occupies a pole of universality, [providing an] appropriate ground for dialogue between [Indigenous peoples,] ethnic groups, regions, and so on” 82 --
Benhabib’s model of deliberative democracy has firmly imbedded Indigenous peoples within the structure of domination that their claims for cultural recognition render unjust and illegitimate.
80 Michael Asch, “From ‘Calder’ to ‘Van der Peet’: Aboriginal Rights and Canadian
Law, ”in Paul Havemann ed. Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
(Auckland: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), 438.
81 Ibid.
82 Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000), 222.

25
Conclusion
In order to avoid some of the problems that have come to the fore in the preceding pages, I think it is crucial that social constructivists acknowledge that, as discourses, both constructivism and essentialism can function to maintain or subvert hegemonic relations of power.
83 Seen in this light, no discourse on identity should be cast as inherently progressive or repressive prior one ’s consideration of the historical, political, and socio-economic context and actors involved.
84 Paying closer attention to context when studying the logic of identity-related movements would better enable critics to distinguish between “discourses that naturalize oppression and discourses that naturalize resistance.” 85 This is particularly relevant in the context of Indigenous struggles, for as we have seen, in certain circumstances Indigenous peoples employ seemingly essentialist notions of culture and tradition, not as a means of maintaining oppressive relations of power, but as a way of overcoming these relations.
83 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation”, in Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 44.
84 Dianna Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge,
1989).
85 Jeffrey T obin, “Cultural Construction and Native Nationalism”, Boundary 2, 22:2 (1994), 131.

26
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