Description
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition examines how recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term recognition shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Coulthard examines an alternative politics, one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization utilizing the ideas of Marx and Fanon. Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred offers the foreword. Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) is assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.