Ideas - How global liberation efforts helped shape the Dene fight for self-determination

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

The Dene fight for self-determination and sovereignty has deep historic ties to liberation efforts around the globe. Yellowknives Dene author and scholar Glen Coulthard traces those influences — and how they shape our current political moment. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

My presentation tonight draws off of work that I've been doing relatively in fits and starts since the publication of my first book at the end of 2014. Glenn Coulthard is a Yellowknives Dene scholar and author in British Columbia. That first book, which won multiple awards, was titled Red Skin, White Masks, Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. In that book, I set out to make sense of the ways that colonization, as a structure of dispossession, continues in a largely different form than it has in the not-so-distant past.

Glenn's work drew on the philosophy of Karl Marx and of Frantz Fanon, a Black francophone theorist of anti-colonialism from Martinique. As the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, he felt compelled to return to the work of Frantz Fanon, this time to explore the ways Fanon and other Black intellectuals influenced the political thinking of the Dene in Canada. I was sitting out one afternoon with an elder from Dene and we're sitting in my cabin on Chief Jaegi's territories just outside of Yellowknife. And he's looking at my bookshelf and he's like, who's that guy?

And it was David Macy's biography on Frantz Fanon. And I was like, oh, you would recognize that from the heyday of Dene activism in the 1970s because he was quite an important theorist to make sense of the struggle of the Dene for recognition during the time. Glenn Coulthard delivered this year's Jackman Humanities Institute annual lecture.

His talk was called For the Land, Dene Self-Determination Struggles in an International Context. This is a critical history to retell, given the demands of solidarity that unraveling our colonial present requires. colonial present requires. Today on Ideas, we bring you Glenn's talk and my onstage conversation with him, all recorded at Innis Town Hall in Toronto. So for today's lecture, then, I want to revisit some important political work undertaken by the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories in the 1970s, but this time through a global lens. I hope to show that this period of intense Dene activism in the North drew profound inspiration from the traveling theories of

decolonization in the Third World, and with certain Maoist concepts like self-reliance have in particular salience. In other words, like many radicalized communities of color during this period, the Dene molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from these struggles, articulated them with their own traditions of travel and exchange, and in doing so formed their own unique critiques of capitalism and internal colonialism at home. So the 1950s and 60s witnessed several profound changes in the economic and political landscape of Dene and A, all of which would come to shape the character of Dene activism in the years to follow. It was during this period that many Dene found themselves having to increase their involvement

in the wage economy of the emerging settler society due to an increase in the cost of trade goods and a decrease in the price of furs following World War II. As a result, by the late 1950s, many families had to supplement their income drawn off the land from hunting, trapping, and fishing with the combination of wage labor, welfare, and family allowance. It was at this time that the federal government began to push policies aimed at forcefully establishing Dene communities,

arguing that to do so would better integrate adult workers into the wage economy, and at the same time provide a context conducive to educating native children in the skills that were required for attaining menial employment in an emerging industrial capitalist society. Both required breaking the Dene people's ties which we had with the land. Even with this being the case, however, by the late 1960s, the full effects of this colonial policy had yet to take hold, and a delicate balance was struck between a way of life that was sustained by traditional land-based harvesting activities on the one hand, and income generated from state transfers and seasonal paid employment on the other.

Politically, northern development was occurring in a far more unequal manner. The clearest example of this came in 1967, when Canada announced its plans to transfer the administrative centre of the NWT from Ottawa to Yellowknife, without consulting the majority of the indigenous population. Prior to this, of course, the sole political authority over issues concerning the administration of the NWT rested with the federal government in Ottawa. After the transfer, the size and power of both the government of the Northwest Territories and its non-native constituency increased quite dramatically. The influx of administrative staff and families significantly affected the area's general population, which jumped from roughly 29,000 to 35,000 between 1966 and 1971, and a lot of this population growth and settlement

occurred in the general area of Yellowknife. As the settler population continued to grow, many of the newcomers began to pressure the federal government to push northern economic projects, most notably in the form of non-renewable resource development and extraction. After all, the settler society needs jobs, and the types of work that the south had in mind for the north was resource extraction. Now this, of course, would generate feelings of discontent and alienation within our own communities, as we soon found ourselves a

numerical minority in our own homeland and with little influence over the issues essential to the well-being of the land and our way of life. Meanwhile, as the feds prepared to establish Yellowknife as the political capital of the NWT, widespread excitement was mounting over the possibility of future petroleum discoveries off the north slope of Alaska. This excitement was well founded, and in 1968, an absolutely huge reservoir of oil and natural gas was discovered below Prujo Bay off the north slope of Alaska. Both the government and industry were absolutely ecstatic. In the years immediately following the Prujo Bay find, the demand for domestic source for fossil fuels

was exasperated by the oil crisis spawned in part by the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which prompted the Arab nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, to place an embargo on oil exports to the U.S. for providing increased military aid to the Israeli war machine. As Lee Maracle and Ray Bob wrote at the time, and I quote, the ripening of contradictions and the growth of the struggle in the Middle East, the main source of oil for imperialism, brought about an energy crisis in the imperialist nations. From that time, we could detect an alteration in their profit-making strategy.

They redirected their investments in oil explorations from the Middle East to the imperialist nations. The rationale for this was that the growth of national liberation and social revolution in the third world was creating a, quote, unsafe political climate for investment here at home. To maintain sources of raw materials, it is necessary to find safe areas for investment. The focus for this redirection is the Canadian North, and by and large it has been already explored

and decisions have been made on the division of the North amongst the various imperialist interests. The only impediment holding up a wholesale corporate invasion is the fact that the North is, and has been for tens of thousands of years, the legitimate domain of Native people. It represents the only or one of the only vestiges of genuine national territory for Native people where they can realize the aspiration to which all peoples are rightly

entitled, their nationhood. Now almost immediately Canada enthusiastically started sorting plans from a consortium of corporations to construct a multibillion-dollar pipeline that would transport the gas via the Mackenzie River Valley to markets throughout southern Canada and the United States. At the time, it was considered to be the largest public-private development project in the world. was considered to be the largest public-private development project in the world. Unfortunately, however, for the Dene, Inuit, and Métis of the area, the proposed pipeline was cut across the entire western half of our homelands. All of this meant nothing to the federal government or the territorial governments, both of which would maintain their tradition of ignoring our demands in the north. maintain their tradition of ignoring our demands in the North. The federal government's ability to ignore the voices of the North's indigenous populations, however,

would soon suffer a major setback. In 1969, 16 Dene chiefs convened at Fort Smith and decided that they needed a more independent and aggressive political body to represent their concerns. It was at this meeting that the leadership established the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, or IBNWT, and it renamed the Dene Nation in 1978. Now on July 19th, 1975, at the second annual Joint General Assembly of the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories and Métis and Non-Status Association of the NWT, over 300 delegates unanimously voted to adopt what quickly became known as the Dene Declaration, a political manifesto demanding our recognition as a self-determining nation within the country of Canada. Soon after, the Indian Brotherhood provided federal government

with a land claim proposal designed to accommodate the robust form of recognition that was expressed in the Dene Declaration. The proposal was titled Agreement in Principle Between the Dene Nation and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. And I called upon the federal government to negotiate with the Dene in accordance with an expansive list of principles, including the recognition of a right to retain ownership of a significant portion of our traditional territories, the right to exercise political jurisdiction over the territories in question, the right to exercise political jurisdiction over the territories in question, the right to practice and preserve our languages, customs, traditions, and values,

and the right to develop our own political and economic institutions. All of these rights, we claimed, would be exercised within Confederation through the establishment of a denny government vested with political authority over land and subject matters that were currently split between the federal and territorial governments now the 1976 agreement in principle outlined in broad terms the foundation for building a relationship with the state that would secure a degree of economic and political autonomy unprecedented in the history of land claims then or today. Although the specific form that this autonomy would take remained unspecified in the proposal, a number of statements made and research reports produced by the Dene during this time suggested that it would be radically different than the economic and political institutions of the dominant Canadian society. In terms of political development, for example, the IBNWT emphasized the need to construct contemporary political

institutions on traditions of principles of popular sovereignty and consensus decision-making. So this would include as many Dene as possible in the formation of governmental policy. This commitment to the construction of alternative governance forms cashed out in 1976, when the Dene Nation announced that it would officially boycott participating in the territorial government, arguing that it was a colonial institution that did not represent the participating in the territorial government, arguing that it was a colonial institution that did not represent the perspectives of the Dene, and that this was reflected in the style and structure of government itself. The boycott lasted until 1979. It was the Dene Declaration combined with this agreement in principle that evoked a wide array of responses. On the one hand, our communities were greeted with enthusiasm and an unprecedented display of support by progressive political organizations from across the country.

of support by progressive political organizations from across the country. This support was largely due to the solidarity and outrage of Dene field workers like Gina Blondin and Phoebe Nahanny and their engagements in the South, making sure our struggles at home were connected with a network of support work happening to link the Third and Fourth World struggles in general. At the same time, however, there were several institutions that were openly hostile to our transformative message underlying our claim. Then Minister of Indian Affairs, Judd Buchanan, for example,

dismissed the Dene declaration as gobbledygook that a grade 10 student could have written in 15 minutes. Respected Cree political leader Harold Cardinal condemned the declaration as an intrusion of left-wing thinking that is perhaps much closer to the academic community in Toronto than it is to the Dene. The government of the Northwest Territories added to this slander by suggesting that the Indian Brotherhood be named the radical left. And at one point, there were even rumors circulating amongst many northern residents that some of our community members were being trained in tactics of guerrilla warfare and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had

employed undercover operatives amongst the Dene Brotherhood. Here is a representative press clipping expressing the general sentiment at the time. The Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territory is circulating for discussion purposes only, a draft plan of action for a war of liberation. The purpose is to establish special nation status, at this stage at least, within the Canadian Constitution. The document is a draft manifesto based on communist revolutionary philosophy of Mao Zedong and the experience of revolutionary movements in countries such as Tanzania the manifesto stops short of saying that force and violence should be used to change the government in the north to stop pipelines and to establish the separate status of the Dene

how experience of almost all such revolutionary movements, whether in Tanzania, Cuba, Northern Ireland, or elsewhere, has been violence in the form of murder and throwing bombs becomes acceptable, as peaceful attempts to overthrow the present political system are frustrated. illustrated. This general assumption extended to the writing of the Declaration itself, which at the time was believed by many non-Natives to be drafted by one of the Dene Nation's political consultants, a white guy named Peter Puxley, based on his adaptation of Tanzania's 1967 Arusha Declaration. The thrust of the argument here again being the same, that these cross-fertilizations could not have been grounded on Dene ethics or values and interests, but had to come from the ideological influence of our more

advanced white consultants. Dene activist Gina Blondin strikes at the core of such claims when she writes in an op-ed to the Calgary Herald that, quote, to someone with a frame of mind like this, all Aboriginal peoples are less than human and easily controlled by expert advisors. Such a position is paternalistic, racist, inhuman, and completely without merit. But what about the rumors insisting that the Dene Declaration was at least partially inspired

by Tanzania's Arusha Declaration, or even the thought of Mao Zedong? This claim has more merit, and I suspect that the influence came not from the Brotherhood's white consultants, but through the Dene Nation's working relationship with Sepulchre leader George Manuel. Manuel's foundational 1974 book, The Fourth World and Indian Reality, lays out the political and cultural foundations of Indigenous resistance to colonial occupation over the last four centuries. He argues that colonization set in motion a struggle between the colonizer and indigenous peoples that was propelled by two fundamentally incommensurable ideas of land.

Land as a commodity, as something that can be speculated, bought, sold, mortgaged, claimed by one state, surrendered or counterclaimed by another, and land as relationship, that is, land as our Mother Earth. Now, politically, the Fourth World developed and deepened through Manuel's extensive international travel and solidarity work, of which a 1971 trip to Tanzania was particularly important. Tanzania and the third world would not have likely had the impact that it did on Manuel, if not for the influence of his National Indian Brotherhood colleague and close comrade, Maurice Smallface Marule. As a member

of the blood tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Smallface Marule was one of the first Indigenous women to earn a bachelor's degree in sociology and anthropology from the University of Alberta in 1966, and was also one of the first Indigenous women to travel to Africa with the Canadian University Services Overseas, or CUSO, which was a Canadian-based non-profit development organization established in 1961 to work internationally with local communities to fight poverty and other social inequalities. Small Face Marule was stationed as a volunteer in community development and adult literacy in Zambia, where she served in this capacity from 1966 to 1970

before returning to Canada to work with George Manuel as his executive assistant in the Indian Brotherhood. While in Zambia, she met her life partner, Jacob Marule, who at the time was an exiled member of South Africa's National Congress and deeply immersed in the influence of the non-aligned movement of the day, which at the time had a strong intellectual and political presence in Zambia's capital of Lusaka. Small-faced Marule's connections with Tanzanian diplomats in Ottawa allowed her to arrange an opportunity for Manuel to travel to Tanzania as part of a small delegation of Canadian diplomats invited to attend the commemoration of Tanzania's 10-year anniversary of independence. This access provided Manuel with an opportunity to gauge in one-on-one conversations with key government ministers,

including Julius Nyerere himself, about the respective colonial experiences and what a genuinely post-colonial form of economic, social and cultural development might look like. One that refused to take its cues from mimicking European models or white masters. Tanzania's 1967 Arusha Declaration was built on the twin foundations of socialism and self-reliance, which, as Priyalal's work has demonstrated,

it had culturally adapted and transformed from Mao and the People's Republic of China. The declaration outlined what was to be a culturally informed model of socialist political economic development called a jama or familyhood in Kiswahili, which was to draw off the communal social relations of traditional African societies in building a post-colonial state and economy. Now, while the first few years of Tanzania independence were shaped by the economic and social policies inherited from British colonialism, from the Arusha Declaration until at least 1974, Tanzania had established itself as a veritable epicenter for freedom fighters, non-aligned movement militants, U.S. black nationalists, Marxist intellectuals, and pan-Africanists. Socialism and self-reliance, democracy, unity, and peasant empowerment at home, pan-African and third world solidarity abroad. Now characteristic of his leadership and political work more generally,

Manuel was a strong supporter of the Dene Nation's land struggle and worked as his capacity as NIB president to promote our bid for self-determination. Manuel's commitment to our cause was demonstrated most clearly in the pages of testimony that he gave in Yellowknife at the public hearings for the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in 1976, Yellowknife at the public hearings for the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in 1976, where he criticizes the government for its colonial approach to resolving Dene land claims, its political support for the rights of corporations and not the Dene, and the importance of ensuring the Dene people's economic, political, and cultural self-reliance through a just resolution to the land settlement. Our links with Tanzania extended beyond mere fascination, however.

As suggested in an April 14, 1975 correspondence between Arthur Manuel, George Manuel's son, and then Vice President of the Dene Nation, Richard Neruso, detailed plans were in the works to send Dene field workers to Tanzania to learn from their experience in development for a period of two to three months, and likewise with Tanzanian activists. The letter was included as part of an information package compiled in 1977 by the NWT Legislative Assembly to generate public concern over the communist nature of the Dene self-determination movement. Also included in the package was a list

of reading materials that then Dene Community Development Program Director George Erasmus suggested might be useful in constructing a development philosophy for the Dene Nation. This list of readings included, among others, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized, Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution, and also included in the materials were books on Tanzania specifically, including Nyerere's

collections of speeches, Freedom and Socialism, Freedom and Unity, Nyerere on Socialism, and Ajama Essays on Socialism. According to Erasmus, these alternative sources of development were meant to supplement but not replace research and perspectives drawn from the land-based knowledge of community members. Many alternatives must be looked at, wrote Erasmus, in a memo addressed to the field workers, especially examples from our culture, the approach to development and the distribution of material and ownership that our forefathers took.

We may wish to keep some aspects of these old ways in this industrial era. Now I think that this quote from Erasmus is telling. It hints at the ways in which solidarity was informed by a deep history of Dene political practice that emphasized the necessity of relationship and solidarity building that transcended both time and space. The ethic of Dene relationship building draws from oral histories and storytelling that represented a period in Dene history and cosmology when spiritually powerful humans and other than human animals lived and communicated with one another on the land, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in

harmony, learning and laboring together to better enable the mutual well-being of all over time. A classic figure in the stories is of course that ofaroya, or Yamaja, known in many Dene regions as the lawmaker. Yamaja traveled the world and was dedicated to establishing the laws that would best facilitate the Dene and animals sustainably living together in peace and reciprocity. Yamaja, like many other characters in these stories, existed at a time when the world was new, prior to the rapid transformations that would be brought on by colonial development and eventually settlement. In such a context, these stories are meant to teach us things, teach us about politics, teach us about law, ethics, political economy, and maintaining healthy communities.

ethics, political economy, and maintaining healthy communities. They are supposed to inform us how to conduct ourselves safely and ethically in our present. So why rehash this particular story or history? First, I think that while indigenous anti-colonialism has always been at its core, informed by a normative import of indigenous relations to land and place, we must also recognize, following Leon Simpson, that our struggles have and always have been intrinsically linked to and informed by global developments, and vice versa.

Internationalism has always been part of our political practices, she writes, because our existence as nations has always been an international one, regardless of how rooted in place that we are. And second, I also think that the instances of global political exchange depicted in this story identify a critically important history of solidarity, one in which indigenous land and sovereignty struggles are thought to interact with other liberation efforts. In this era of radical indigenous internationalism,

to borrow Lakota historian Nick Estes' terminology, that I have hoped to illuminate for you today a tradition that dared to imagine a world altogether free of colonial hierarchies of race, class, and nation, and which sought to align ourselves with colonized communities at home and abroad, committed to achieving similar ends. And of course for us, in the end, the solidarity we formed during the long 70s was able to stop the McKenzie Pipeline

from moving forward. Thank you. You're listening to Ideas and to the Jackman Humanities Institute annual lecture delivered by Yellowknives Dene author and scholar Glenn Coulthard. His lecture is titled For the Land, Dene Self-Determination Struggles in an International Context. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayed. about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. The black and indigenous radical traditions, the struggles of the Third and Fourth Worlds, have a long history of political engagement and intellectual exchange that transformed lives and built alternative worlds that we still inhabit today.

In the mid-20th century, a powerful exchange of ideas took place between the Dene in Canada and communities of colour throughout the developing world. Like many radicalized communities of colour during this period, the Dene moulded and adapted the insights they gleaned from these struggles, articulated them with their own traditions of travel and exchange, and in doing so formed their own unique critiques of travel and exchange, and in doing so, form their own unique critiques of capitalism and internal colonialism at home. I joined Glenn Coulthard on stage at Innes Town Hall in Toronto to talk about that historic

exchange and how it informs our current political moment. political moment. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for such an insightful presentation and for sharing your knowledge. Thank you so much. Could you expand a little bit more about how you think viewing the Indigenous struggle for self-determination in a global lens might change the conversation here in Canada with the state? Well, part of the operating logic of colonial power has to render Indigenous peoples domestic problems instead of international ones. So we've been excluded from the realm of decolonization efforts

that expanded across the third world from 1960s onwards. And we've been excluded on that because we were represented in a colonial imaginary as non-political, non-landowning or whatever sort of perspectives that you have. So to show that domestication was a colonial strategy is a very important effort in a process of kind of epistemic, at least, decolonization, resulting in a more material sort of form. This is still the case, although done in a more tricky language. So you see the movement, for instance,

in the reconciliation discourse of the Canadian state. In BC, reconciliation has been domesticated to inform or supposedly inform the policies of the BC government, or even my university has looked at domesticating the concept of reconciliation and how it's supposed to unplay itself to the level of the university administration. administration. Now, all this is a means of taking our claims legitimately out of the realm of international actors. And to say that, don't worry, these institutions, these levels of government will effectively take over responsibility through constitutional recognition, through courts or whatever, for interests that pertain to indigenous peoples. So it's a form of domestication that has been central to the establishment of the state itself since as long as indigenous peoples have had to contend with its power.

Can you speak to how important engagement with other struggles for self-determination, how important that is back in the 60s and 70s compared to what it is today? When is it more effective or alive as a period of history? Now or then? I, like the pessimist in me would say that it was more informed the politics and ethics of indigenous struggles back then. Whether or not that's actually the case, I don't know. It's just because this is where I've turned my attention to.

But I would say that, like, the commodification of indigenous people's lands through state policies like the Comprehensive Land Claims Policy create indigenous peoples in an idiom of private property as owners to the exclusion of others. And this has had a long time effect on our communities in terms of articulating our claims as this is ours versus we're kind of struggling in this together. So for instance, during the Berger era, Philip Blake gave this testimony, he's a Dene man, and gave this testimony at the Berger inquiry, which said that if our land, understood in that relational sense, was being

used to better the people like us who have suffered similar sort of effects from imperialism and colonial powers abroad, then it would be our obligation to open up our land for a redistribution of resources because that is our way. And the whole apparatus of land claims make you draw a sharp distinction between what is now yours as a possession and to the exclusion of others. So I think that there's reasons to believe that that ethic of reciprocity that stems from and for the land has taken a hit through our colonial engagements with the state.

But this is also not a total situation. So, for instance, I was going to talk about this in the talk, but time kind of prohibited me, was in the late 1990s, George Blondin, who was a very, very influential and important elder from the Satu and Klitschow regions, wanted to organize a trip to Japan for the commemoration of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And this is because, unbeknownst to the people of Delaunay, they were central in extracting minerals from the Port Radium mine that were secretly being transported down the Mackenzie River to construct the bombs that eventually decimated those two cities. And

decimated those two cities. And there's prophecies about this in the Delaunay community, but George Blondin found, or the people that went on this delegation, found that it was important to show up and apologize for this act of extreme violence because it was their land that contributed to it and, for that matter, their labor that contributed to it unbeknownst to them.

And then, following this delegation, which was very successful, the powers that be, again, from the state or even maybe the Delaonate Land Corp, I'm not certain, made that gesture of solidarity stop because of the exploration of certain minerals and, again, uranium on their territory.

So it wasn't the proper PR. So this is to show how these longstanding traditions of travel, this relational concept of land, created ethical obligations or political obligations that extend well beyond the territory in question. That's extraordinary, yeah. I was really struck by the comment, I think you were quoting the minister at the time,

talking about the Dene Declaration, saying that any grade 10 student could have written it, or written it in 15 minutes. I wonder if you could draw a line between that kind of thinking and the way, whether that kind of thinking still exists in a different form, kind of as a descendant of that sort of thinking from back then. Yeah, of course. There's a lot of, like, Canadian society is steeped in white supremacy

and racism of that sort. Like, I was asked to comment on, I forget what the organization is, a frontier policy for social blah, blah, blah, blah, or political policy analysis that is just like filled with that sort of analysis where we're apolitical people. We're just reactionary in the sense that we're drawing on the inspiration of now it's eco-terrorist before it was communist sort of vernacular to discredit our claims.

Like even in that, like the gobbledygook sort of comment, like they're like, they saw us as politically undeveloped, as non-political beings that just roamed the earth and struggled to survive, and that we couldn't have such left-wing inclinations unless we were under the sway of our white saviors sort of thing. And so this talk has shown like, well, no, we did use experts in order to articulate certain aspects of our claim, particularly in the legal field. But what sort of right-thinking person who's trying to get something done wouldn't hire experts outside of one's expertise.

And it also wanted to attribute that to, again, in this kind of white benevolence sort of thing, all of our white advisors, when in fact it came from in part George Manuel's extensive worldly travels and his connection with third world liberation movements. And then it was rung

through a view of this long history of Adené travel and internationalism that go back to our origin stories and the nature of law itself. I have several more questions, but one last one for me and then I'll go to audience questions. If you take us back to that moment in your cabin when you were having that tea and looking at the cover of that book and compare the thoughts you were having then with what you at the cover of that book and compare the thoughts you were having then

with what you presented tonight, have you lived up to the message or the information you wanted to impart both to Indigenous people but also to Canadians about the importance, not just then but now, of solidarity with the Indigenous struggle for self-determination? I think this project, like both as an academic but also an activist sort of project,

I'm less concerned with what, like, your standard, like, non-Native or particularly white Canadian has to say about this stuff. That was important for my first book and as a scholar cutting his chops in the literature and so on. But now it's more I want to get at the relationships that I think are profoundly transformative and generative, which has been with other peoples of struggles

fighting against like institutions and structural injustices. So that's what I want to show, and what I want to show is that I want to animate that spirit of solidarity, especially in today's day and age with the genocide assault on Gaza and the indigenous activism that historically draws significant material and not just moral linkages with those struggles

like the 1973 oil crisis, for example. So it's like the base of this, as far as moral solidarity or moral sort of reasons for linking efforts are important, there's a very, very, very material basis and a history of these cross-fertilizations that I would hope comes through this work and structures our efforts today. If I may, just as a follow-up,

surely that effort to animate that solidarity with global movements changes as Canada's demographics change. Yes. Yeah, full stop, yes. I think that that's the case, and that's why it's important. In our work with the Chinta, at some point we were in consultation,

or the GNW, I think, was asking us if we could run a land-based course drawing off community knowledge and elders' expertise as a form of naturalize, like as a course that would naturalize people of color, immigrants that have increasingly found the North their home. And I thought that that was an excellent idea because we would essentially go to the source

rather than have it be mitigated by certain assumptions by the Canadian state or the GNWT or even worse, like extractivist corporations. So I think that that, yeah, that's important. And that's why I think a history of this, a longer history of these movements is also important to impart on folks. Thank you for taking my questions. I would like to take some questions from all of you,

if you have any. Thank you so much for your lecture today. I was wondering if you could comment on contemporary spaces of indigenous internationalism that are relevant for the DNA today. That's a good question. Like and this isn't to be like overly pessimist. Like I think that a lot of internationalist sort of activities have

have been filtered through the indigenous international rights movement. So they've been managed and some might even say co-opted by the UN system in certain ways that cut against its more grassroots liberatory potential. At least some might argue that. So this is why, for instance, like with the land-based education that I've been part of and helped establish in the last 14 years,

just before the pandemic, we held the Solidarity Gathering, which Leanne Simpson writes about it a little bit as we have always done. But it looks at what happens when you meet outside of these halls, you're hosted by a community, you let these land relations take hold in shaping the interactions that happen between participants

and we gather out on the land hosted by the Yelena Yvstene the interactions that happen between participants. And we gather out on the land hosted by the Yelenaivstene and just are animated by the question, what is to be done? Like, how can we support you? And the conversation shifts or whatever. So a contemporary example would be our efforts with that. And then in June, we're having another gathering, hopefully, which does a similar kind of political experiment with solidarity

gathering with an emphasis on Palestine. Thank you for that. Right in the middle here, I think there was... Thank you, Professor Coulthard, for your talk. For me, listening to you giving this history of both third and fourth world solidarity movements and tracing, you know, the sort of histories of George Manuel going to Tanzania, I was just wondering, like, if there's like a historical absence that you've encountered in this kind of archival, what I'm assuming is mostly archival research. I think that you're right in that particularly the absence of this from the public record,

the absence of the Dene from the public record, like if you look at Aboriginal rights discourse, If you look at Aboriginal rights discourse, the Dene and its leadership are absolutely central to even the concept of Aboriginal rights as encoded in or recognized in Section 35. Like George Erasmus went on to co-chair the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. There's kind of a lost

sort of absence of this period of activism in the development of indigenous rights in Canada, both positive and negative in its mainstream sense. The super surprising thing is the influence and the importance of, say, red power organizations like the Native Alliance for Red Power, based out of Vancouver, who have absolute juggernauts in terms of folks

that went on to be absolutely essential in advocating for indigenous rights to land and freedom, like Lee Maracle, for example, was cutter-chops in this Maoist indigenous organization that started before the American Indian Movement in 1967 and was in operation until 1975, for instance. Or her sister, Joan, who goes on to, I think, I'm not sure if she is,

but I'm like a run for the NDP on an indigenous rights platform. She's a super well-known activist who's married to the chief of the Union of BC Indian chiefs and been central to political organizing in the province forever. And it surprises me that that history is absent from public record as well, largely. Not entirely, but for the most part. So yeah, it's trying to kind of unearth

these subaltern histories through archival work, but more importantly, like archiving the perspectives of indigenous peoples themselves as they're getting older and may, because of health or whatever, not be able to share their incredibly important stories and perspectives. There is one more right in the middle here. Yeah, I hope this isn't too boringly empirical a question.

But at the same time as this is happening in Dene territory, in Latin America, there's large Maoist guerrilla movements who are reading Fanon and Freire and all of these same books. And I'm struck that there doesn't seem to have been any kind of connection between those movements. And I'm wondering if that is true or if there was a connection or whether the language... I mean, anyways, I'm just so curious about that.

There was a connection in terms of the knowledge of, like particularly from a north to south sort of transition. So there was a, like, I remember in the exchanges between George Erasmus and the field workers, like it would always have kind of an update, like the people of Colombia have liberated themselves or they've struck a win against the beast of US imperialism or whatever. So it was knowledgeable. But the way in which these theoretical traditions traveled had a very specific trajectory. So like Maoist influences that shaped red power activism in Vancouver, for instance, was far more through the black radical tradition or black powers relationship to Maoism vis-a-vis visits to China and their own visits to China in 1976. So that's how self-reliance comes into the discourse on the Native Alliance for Red Power,

for example's articulation of self-determination. Whereas in the interior BC, these certain, like the conceptual travels of self-reliance and socialism or whatever came directly through Manuel's engagements there. And then this filters into the north partially through Manuel, partially through Puxley and others, and the influence of Tanzania on a global stage as a beacon.

And it's a very, very material sort of dissemination of travel and ideas that were specific to the experience of the people and regions in context or in their specific context. I would say in general, my inkling would be Latin America, particularly Cuba and Latin America, was more influential in the eastern part of the country rather than in the west. So you have these exchanges between the Caribbean and black activists and native activists in Toronto and particularly Montreal in the 1960s, activists in Toronto and particularly Montreal in the 1960s, which didn't really happen in Vancouver, for instance, or up north. So it also depends on the people and where they went and what they were reading and so on.

So, yeah. Thank you all for your questions. Thank you for taking our questions. Thank you for being here. And thank you to Glenn, of course. Thank you for taking our questions. Thank you for being here. And thank you to Glenn, of course. You've been listening to this year's Jackman Humanities Institute annual lecture delivered by Yellowknives Dene author and scholar Glenn Coulthard.

He's the 2023-2024 Distinguished Visiting Indigenous Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto and an Associate Professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of Political Sciences at the University of British Columbia. His lecture was titled, For the Land, Dene Self-Determination Struggles in an International Context. This episode of Ideas was produced by Greg Kelly and Annie Bender. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.