Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation.

• Author: Decoste, F.C.
• Position: Book review

The reviewers challenge and condemn the major premise and the proposal put forward by Widdowson and Howard in their unhappily widely received Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. The authors challenge the premise that the "root cause" of the past and present circumstances of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is their "neolithic" culture and traditions (the perpetuation of which the authors lay at the feet of what they style as a parasitic and self-serving Aboriginal Industry of lawyers and consultants). The authors condemn the proposal that redemption for Aboriginal peoples resides in government instigated and managed wholesale abandonment of Aboriginal culture and traditions. The reviewers criticize Widdowson's and Howard's scholarship and their proposal, offer in their stead an account that accords with the real history of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and that is informed by a theory of just rectification, and by a survey of the literature on the meaning and significance of tradition.

Les auteurs remettent en question et refutent les principales premisse et proposition mises de l'avant par Widdowson etHoward dans leur publication largement decriee intitulee Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. Les auteurs remettent en question la premisse selon laquelle la << cause premiere >> expliquant les circonstances passees et presentes caracteristiques des peoples autochtones au Canada serait leurs culture et traditions << neolithiques >> (soit la perpetuation de ce que les auteurs affirment etre une << industrie autochtone >> parasitaire et egocentrique d'avocats et de consultants). Les auteurs refutent la proposition voulant que la redemption des peoples autochtones passe par la decision du gouvernement a entamer et administrer la renonciation complete de la culture et des traditions autochtones. Les auteurs charges de cette critique desavouent les travaux de recherche et la proposition de Widdowson et Howard et offrent a la place un compte rendu qui s'accorde avec l'histoire authentique des peoples autochtones au Canada, qui est guide par une theorie du juste redressement et par une analyse approfondie de la litterature relative a la signification et a l'importance de la tradition.

Table of Contents I. THEIR ANSWERS II. ROOT CAUSE A. Cause B. Content III. THE NATURE OF CULTURE AND TRADITION IV. THE RELEVANCE OF TRADITION IN THE REAL WORLD V. CONCLUSION: REPAIRING THE PAST As recently as 2004, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights slammed Canada's treatment of its First Nations population. (1) The social, economic and cultural conditions that gave rise to that judgment--disproportionally and depressingly high rates of "[p]overty, infant mortality, unemployment, morbidity, suicide, criminal detention, children on welfare, women victims of abuse, [and] child prostitution" (2) among Aboriginal peoples in Canada--continue, however, to elude the national imagination, and international disgrace has occasioned neither national shame nor national resolve. There may, of course, be many reasons for this obdurate moral delinquency, but ignorance, especially among the population at large, will surely figure prominently among them. Knowledge, and then responsibility and action, can come only in our answering, correctly, three questions. The first question addresses the past (whence do the present circumstances of First Nations people and communities "arise" or "come" or "derive"?), the second, the present (what is wrong with present policies and strategies?), and the third, the future (what must now be done, as a matter of national honour and duty, to rectify the situation?).

In Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, (3) Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard--she, a faculty member of the Department of Policy Studies, Mount Royal College, Calgary, and he, a former instructor at Kennedy College of Technology, Toronto, and now residing in Calgary offer answers to all of these questions. Though they proceed from what is no doubt a sincere acknowledgement of "the terrible social conditions in aboriginal communities," (4) their answers are, unhappily, wrong, and in the final analysis, pointless. We shall dwell briefly on each of their answers before proceeding to a detailed analysis of their major argument regarding "root causes" (5) and then to the matter of the future and the requirements of rectification. By way of situating our criticism, we should indicate straightaway that though this book appears under the imprint of a university press, it is not, in our view, a work of scholarship. (6) It sounds rather in the political and takes shape as a polemic that occasionally flirts with diatribe and screed. Recognizing this is important not because polemic is undeserving of a university press (indeed, McGill-Queen's University Press is to be lauded for publishing trade titles, like this one, that seek to join and influence the public debate) or because of the topic at hand (where pieties of identity and difference so often hold sway). Rather, it is important because the authors adopt a scholarly pose throughout in order, it appears to us, to immunize themselves from anticipated criticism. (7) Such a move is undeserving polemic which, by its very nature, should stand unabashedly ready to take as well as to give.

1. THEIR ANSWERS

   According to Widdowson and Howard, First Nations are "an oppressed people." (8) It turns out, however, that in their view, First Nations people are themselves the final cause of their own oppression. This must be so because they identify Aboriginal culture and tradition as the originating cause of the post-contact circumstances, both past and present, of First Nations people and communities. Though they state the matter variously and endlessly throughout the piece, the nuts and bolts reside in the following four claims: first, that "at the time of contact aboriginal peoples in what is now Canada were in an earlier stage of cultural development in comparison to Europeans who were making the transition from feudalism to capitalism;" (9) second, that this earlier cultural stage is properly identified as either "paleolithic or neolithic;" (10) third, that this original "gap in cultural evolution ... led to the marginalization of aboriginal peoples;" (11) and fourth, that "the persistence of obsolete cultural features has maintained the developmental gap, preventing the integration of many aboriginal peoples into the Canadian social dynamic." (12) The last claim permits Widdowson and Howard to itemize the features of cultural obsolescence and then inquire why the obsolescence persists. This inquiry frames their answer to our second question concerning present policy, which we will come to in a moment. First, however, it is important to cite chapter and verse, their take on the obsolete survivals of Aboriginal culture, bred initially of the cultural gap and subsequently by continuing marginalization. They put the matter thus:

   Isolation from economic processes has meant that a number of neolithic cultural features, including undisciplined work habits, tribal forms of political identification, animistic beliefs, and difficulties in developing abstract reasoning, persist despite hundreds of years of contact. (13) Important too, since the whole of their book depends upon this root cause argument, is the precision as to its structure. Widdowson and Howard are in fact making two claims, one concerning the content of Aboriginal cultures and traditions and the other concerning their status as the cause of the social and economic conditions that beset First Nations communities and individuals. Both claims will draw our criticism shortly, and harsh it will be.

   Widdowson and Howard condemn present policies--which they properly identify as land claims and self-government--on grounds both of efficacy and of origin. So far as efficacy is concerned, their logic is simple. Neither land claims nor self-government will do because each fails first to acknowledge and then to address the "evolutionary gap between aboriginal culture and the modern world." (14) From this descends their view of reserves, however much they may be augmented by land claims settlements, as incubators of continuing cultural obsolescence. As put by them:

   Dependency and social dysfunction are the norm in aboriginal communities because these areas were developed to warehouse people who lacked the requirements to engage in the developing economy.... The reserves exist because aboriginal people who retain neolithic cultural characteristics are unable to participate in the wider society. (15) Their view of self-government restates this genealogy and diagnosis. "Proposals for self-government," they declare, "do not attempt to bridge the developmental gap; instead, they devolve responsibility to aboriginal organizations to hide it." (16) Not only that, the result here too is "to keep aboriginals isolated from Canadian society, entrenching the tribal character of aboriginal culture, preventing the native population from acquiring the attitudes, skills, and values needed to work ... in a national political system." (17) Based as it must be on "religious mythology and romanticism," (18) and with that, suffused with "racist tendencies," (19) self-government, they conclude, "is not consistent with the objective interests of native people." (20) The wealth of the remainder of the book--Chapters 5 through 9, which account for hall of the book's ten chapters--s devoted to assailing the performance of self-government on several policy sites, (21) and it is here that the text too often bleeds into diatribe and screed. (22) But no matter: since their efficacy argument stands or falls in both respects on their claim regarding "root causes," we will restrict out riposte to out argument against that foundation.

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