WSTB05 Abstract assignment 1

WSTB05 Abstract assignment 1 Order Description Read the attachment "WSTB05 Abstract assignment instructions"for instructions and detail description. Also, "Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2008 (1999). “Colonizing Knowledges.". WSTB05 Abstract assignment Choose an article to write up and submit in abstract form. You are also encouraged to adopt the process of writing abstracts Format: These abstracts should be 1—2 pages total (typed and double-spaced), regardless of the length of the reading. However, only the first 1—2 paragraphs will a conventional abstract; the rest will be critical reflection. For the abstract portion, you should summarize the major points of the reading, and then provide your own critical analysis of the article’s major points or claims. Note that being critical does not require you to be negative about the author or article, but is about taking a questioning stance. For the abstract portion, you will be assessed on?• how well you pull out the main ideas of each reading, • how clearly you present each idea in your writing Critical analysismight include some of the following:?• your thoughts on possible applications of the article;?• questions you have about the author’s/authors’ chosen approach to their topic; • connections you see to other course materials;?• gaps between what the author(s) set out to do and what the article delivers;?• oversights in the author’s/authors’ analysis;?• possible other directions for the author’s/authors’ ideas. Please include specific citations in your abstracts, though for course readings, you only need to provide the author’s/authors’ last names and page number in brackets. Though it is not necessary to draw on non-course materials for this assignment, if you do mention other articles, provide complete reference information. No cover page is required, but please put your name and student number, as well as the name of the author(s) and article you are abstracting, at the top of the page. F a i r D e a l i n g ( S h o r t E x c e r p t ) Title: Colonizing Knowledges Author: Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 1950 Course: Approches to Research in WGS Course Code: LEC01 Term: Department: WST Thank you for using the University of Toronto Libraries Syllabus Service. We are pleased to be able to offer this service to interested faculty. It is important to note that the materials provided here are only to be made available on a password protected platform such as Blackboard, and only to students enrolled in the class. If you have any questions on whether your use of these materials is consistent with University Policy, please contact the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office at copyright@library.utoronto.ca. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) CHAPTER 3 Colonizing Knowledges We have a history ofpeople putting Maori under a microscope in the same way a scientist looks at an insect. The ones doing the looking are giving themselves the power to define. Merata Mita1 In the previous chapter the metaphor of an archive was used to convey the sense by which the West drew upon a vast history of itself and multiple traditions of knowledge which incorporate cultural views of reality, of time and space. This chapter argues that the form of imperialism which indigenous peoples are confronting now emerged from that period of European history known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment provided the spirit, the impetus, the confidence, and the political and economic structures that facilitated the search for new knowledges. The project of the Enlightenment is often referred to as 'modernity' and it is that project which is claimed to have provided the stimulus for the industrial revolution, the philosophy of liberalism, the development of disciplines in the sciences and the development of public education. Imperialism underpinned and was critical to these developments. Whilst imperialism is often thought of as a system which drew everything back into the centre, it was also a system which distributed materials and ideas outwards. Said's notion of 'positional superiority' is useful here for conceptualizing the ways in which know ledge and culture were as muchpart of imperialism as raw materials and military strength. Knowledge was also there to be discovered, extracted, appropriated and distributed. Processes for enabling these things to occur became organized and systematic. They not only informed the field of study referred to by Said as 'Orientalism' but other disciplines of knowledge and 'regimes of truth'. It is through these disciplines that the indigenous world has been presented to the West and it is through these disciplines that indigenous peoples often research for the fragments 58 COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 59 of ourselves which were taken, catalogued, studied and stored. It is not the intention of this chapter to tell the history of Western knowledge but rather to draw that history down into the colonized world, show the relationship between knowledge, research and imperialism, and then discuss the ways in which it has come to structure our own ways of knowing, through the development of academic disciplines and through the education of colonial elites and indigenous or 'native' intellectuals. Western knowledge and science are 'beneficiaries' of the colonization of indigenous peoples. The knowledge gained through our colonization has been used, in turn, to colonize us in what Ngugi wa Thiong'o calls the colonization 'of the mind'.2 Establishing the Positional Superiority of Western Knowledge The project of modernity signalled the end of feudalism and absolutist authority, legitimated by divine rule, and announced the beginning of the modern state. The new state formation had to meet the requirements of an expanding economybased on major improvements in production. The industrial revolution changed and made new demands upon the individual and the political system. The modern state was wrested from the old regime of absolutist monarchs by the articulation of liberal political and economic theories.3 Asa system of ideas, liberalism focuses on the individual, who has the capacity to reason, on a society which promotes individual autonomy and self-interest, and on a state which has a rational rule of law which regulates a public sphere of life, but which allows individuals to pursue their economic self-interest. Once it was accepted that humans had the capacity to reason and to attain this potential through education, through a systematic form of organizing knowledge, then it became possible to debate these ideas in rational and 'scientific' ways. The development of scientific thought, the exploration and 'discovery' by Europeans of other worlds, the expansion of trade, the establishment of colonies, and the systematic colonization of indigenous peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are all facets of the modernist project. Modernism is more than a re-presentation of fragments from the cultural archive in new contexts. 'Discoveries' about and from the 'new' world expanded and challenged ideas the West held about itself4 The production of knowledge, new knowledge and transformed 'old' knowledge, ideas about the nature of knowledge and the validity of specific forms of knowledge, became as much commodities of colonial exploitation as other natural resources.5 Indigenous peoples were classified alongside the flora and fauna; hierarchical typologies of humanity and systems of representation were 60 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES fuelled by new discoveries; and cultural maps were charted and territories claimed and contested by the major European powers. Hence some indigenous peoples were ranked above others in terms of such things as the belief that they were 'nearly human', 'almost human' or 'sub-human'. This often depended on whether it was thought that the peoples concerned possessed a 'soul' and could therefore be 'offered' salvation and whether or not they were educable and could be offered schooling. These systems for organizing, classifying and storing new knowledge, and for theorizing the meanings of such discoveries, constituted research. In a colonial context, however, this research was undeniably also about power and domination. The instruments or technologies of research were also instruments of knowledge and instruments for legitimating various colonial practices. The imaginary line between 'east' and 'west', drawn in 1493 by a Papal Bull, allowed for the political division of the world and the struggle by competing Western states to establish what Said has referred to as a 'flexible positional superiority' over the known, and yet to become known, world.6 This positional superioritywas contested at severallevels by European powers. These imaginary boundaries were drawn again in Berlin in 1934 when European powers sat around the table once more to carve up Africa and other parts of 'their' empires. They continue to be redrawn. Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to 'see', to 'name' and to 'know' indigenous communities. The cultural archive with its systems of representation, codes for unlocking systems of classification, and fragmented artefacts of knowledge enabled travellers and observers to make sense of what thev saw and to represent their new-found knowledge back to the West through the authorship and authority of their representations. Whilst colonialism at an economic level, including its ultimate expression through slavery, opened up new materials for exploitation and new markets for trade, at a cultural level, ideas, images and experiences about the Other helped to shape and delineate the essential differences between Europe and the rest. Notions about the Other, which already existed in the European imagination, were recast within the framework of Enlightenment philosophies, the industrial revolution and the scientific 'discoveries' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When discussing the scientific foundations of Western research, the indigenous contribution to these foundations is rarely mentioned. To have acknowledged their contribution would, in terms of the rules of research practice, be as legitimate as acknowledging the contribution of a variety of plant, a shard of pottery or a 'preserved head of a native' to research. Furthermore, according to Bazin, 'Europeans COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 61 could not even imagine that other people could ever have done things before or better than themselves'.7 The objects of research do not have a voice and do not contribute to research or science. In fact, the logic of the argument would suggest that it is simply impossible, ridiculous even, to suggest that the object of research can contribute to anything. An object has no life force, no humanity, no spirit of its own, so there fore 'it' cannot make an active contribution. This perspective is not deliberately insensitive; it is simply that the rules did not allow such a thought to enter the scene. Thus, indigenous Asian, American, Pacific and African forms of knowledge, systems of classification, technologies and codes of social life, which began to be recorded in some detail by the seventeenth century, were regarded as 'new discoveries' by Western science.8 These discoveries were commodified as property belonging to the cultural archive and body of knowledge ot the West.9 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also constituted an era of highly competitive 'collecting'. Many indigenous people might call this 'stealing' rather than 'collecting'. This included the collecting of terri tories, of new species of flora and fauna, of mineral resources and of cultures. James Clifford, for example, refers to ethnography as a science which was fa] form of culture collecting ... |which] highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement. Collecting - at least in the West, where time is generally thought to be linear and irreversible - implies a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay or loss."1 The idea that collectors were actually rescuing artefacts from decay and destruction, and from indigenous peoples themselves, legitimated practices which also included commercial trade and plain and simple theft. Clearly, in terms of trade indigenous peoples were often active participants, in some cases delivering 'made to order' goods. The different agendas and rivalries of indigenous groups were also known to have been incorporated into the commercial activities of Europeans. Hence, muskets could be traded and then used to pursue traditional enemies or one group of people could be used to capture and assist in the enslavement of another group who were also their traditional rivals. Indigenous property is still said to be housed in 'collections', which in turn are housed either in museums or private galleries, and art and artefacts are often grouped and classified in the name of their 'collector'. These collections have become the focus of indigenous peoples' attempts to reclaim ancestral remains and other cultural items (known in the West as 'artefacts') belonging to their people. 62 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES It is important to remember, however, that colonialism was not just about collection. It was also about re-arrangement, re-presentation and re-distribution. For example, plant species were taken by Joseph Banks for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Here they could be 'grown, studied, and disbursed to the colonial stations, a centre of plant transfers on the scientific level, and of the generation and publication of know ledge about plants'.11 The British Empire became a global laboratory for research and development. New species of plants and animals were introduced to the colonies to facilitate development and to 'strengthen' indigenous species. This point is worth remembering as it contrasts with the view, sometimes referred to as a diffusionist explanation, that knowledge, people, flora and fauna simply disbursed themselves around the world. This botanical colonization had already been successfully carried out in other places: for example, maize, sweet potatoes, and tobacco from South America had been widely distributed. In the centre of this collection and distribution network was the imperial 'home' country. The colonies were peripheral satellites which gained access to these new knowledges and technologies through 'recourse to the writings of authors in the centre'.12 One effect of this system of redistribution was the interference caused by new species to the ecologies of their new environments and the eventual extinction of several species of bird and animal life.13 In the case of New Zealand, Cherryl Smith argues that, ecologically, the indigenous world was colonized by weeds.14 Among the other significant consequences of ecological imperialism —carried by humans, as well as by plants and animals —were the viral and bacterial diseases which devastated indigenous populations. This devastation or genocide was, in the accounts of many indigenous peoples, used deliberately as a weapon of war. Stories are told in Canada, for example, of blankets used by smallpox victims being sent into First Nation communities while the soldiers and settlers camped outside waiting for the people to die. There were several ideologies which legitimated the Western impact on indigenous health and well-being. These supported racial views already in place but which in the later nineteenth century became increasingly legitimated by the 'scientific' views of social Darwinism. The concept of the 'survival of the fittest', used to explain the evolution of species in the natural world, was applied enthusiastically to the human world. It became a very powerful belief that indigenous peoples were inherently weak and therefore, at some point, would die out. There were debates about how this could be prevented, for example, through miscegenation and cultural assimilation, and whether this, in fact, was 'desirable'. Judgements on these issues circled back or depended upon prior considerations as to whether the COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 63 indigenous group concerned had souls, could be saved, and also could be redeemed culturally. Influential debates on these matters by Catholic scholars such as Bartolome de Las Casas took place during the sixteenth century. In nineteenth-century New Zealand someof the debates delved rightdown into the supposed fecundity rates of indigenous women and the better prospects for racial survival if miscegenation occurred. There were very serious scientific views put forward to account for the demise of the indigenous populations. Some views included: sterility caused by the 'licentiousness' of the women, a vegetable diet, infanticide and abortion. Other causes were put down to a sense of 'hopelessness' and lack of spirit, which came about through contact with 'civilization'.15 But there were also state policies (federal, provincial and local) of 'benign neglect' which involved minimal intervention (the 'infected blanket' strategy) while people suffered and died. There were also more proactive policies based around such ideas as 'Manifest Destiny' which sanctioned the taking of indigenous lands by any means.16 Ward Churchill and other indigenous writers classify these actions as part of the Columbian legacy of genocide.17 In relation to the diseases and dis ease which the West is said to have introduced to indigenous peoples, the bigger question has always been the extent to which the impact of disease is an inevitable consequence of contactwith the West. The signifi cance of the issues which this question raises emerges when we examine, in a later chapter, the world-wide search currently being undertaken amongst indigenous populations for genetic solutions to Western dis eases. Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes has an 'acid test' for the Western impact on indigenous health which consists of two lists: one a list of diseases introduced by Europeans to Aboriginal people, the other a list of diseases introduced by Aboriginal people to Europeans. There are no itemslisted on the secondlist. That emptyspace tells a very potent story.18 The globalization of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West's view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of 'civilized' knowledge. This form of global knowledge is generally referred to as 'universal' knowledge, available to all and not really 'owned' by anyone, that is, until non-Western scholars make claims to it. When claims like that are made history is revised (again) so that the story of civilization remains the story of the West. For this purpose, the Mediterranean world, the basin of Arabic culture and the lands east of Constantinople are conveniently appropriated as part of the story of Western civilization, Western philosophy and Western knowledge.1'' Through imperialism, however, these cultures, peoples and their nation states were re positioned as 'oriental', or 'outsider' in order to legitimate the imposition of colonial rule. For indigenous peoples from other places, the real '^ 64 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES lesson to be learned is that we have no claim whatsoever to civilization. It is something which has been introduced from the West, by the West, to indigenous peoples, for our benefit and for which we should be duly grateful. The nexus between cultural ways of knowing, scientific discoveries, economic impulses and imperial power enabled the West to make ideological claims to having a superior civilization. The 'idea' of the West became a reality when it was re-presented back to indigenous nations through colonialism. By the nineteenth century colonialism not only meant the imposition of Western authority over indigenous lands, indigenous modes of production and indigenous law and government, but the imposition of Western authority over all aspects of indigenous knowledges, languages and cultures. This authority incorporated what Said refers to as alliances between the ideologies, 'cliches', general beliefs and understandings held about the Orient and the views of 'science' and philosophical theories.2" For many indigenous peoples the major agency for imposing this positional superiority over knowledge, language and culture was colonial education. Colonial education came in two basic forms: missionary or religious schooling (which was often residential) followed later by public and secular schooling. Numerous accounts across nations now attest to the critical role played by schools in assimilating colonized peoples, and in the systematic, frequently brutal, forms of denial of indigenous languages, knowledges and cultures. Not all groups of indigenous peoples, however, were permitted to attend school —some groups being already defined in some way as 'ineducable' or just plain troublesome and delinquent. Furthermore, in many examples the indigenous language was used as the medium of instruction and access to the colonizing language was denied specifically. This policy was designed to deny opportunities to participate as citizens. Colonial education was also used as a mechanism for creating new indigenous elites. It was not the only mechanism for producing elite groups, as the traditional hierarchies within an indigenous society who converted to the colonial ideology also formed part of the elite group. Schooling helped identify talented students who were then groomed for more advanced education. Many of these students were sent away to boarding schools while others were sent to the metropolitan centre in Europe for their university studies. In these settings, and through their learning, students acquired the tastes, and sampled some of the benefits and privileges, of living within the metropolitan culture. Their elite status came about through the alignment of their cultural and economic interests with those of the colonizing group rather than with those of their own society. COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 65 School knowledge systems however, were informed by a much more comprehensive system of knowledge which linked universities, scholarly societies and imperial views of culture. Hierarchies of knowledge and theories which had rapidly developed to account for the discoveries of the newworldwerelegitimated at the centre. Schools simply reproduced domesticated versions of that knowledge for uncritical consumption. Although colonial universities saw themselves as being part of an international community and inheritors of a legacy of Western know ledge, theywere also part of the historical processes of imperialism. They were established as an essential part of the colonizing process, a bastion of civilization and a sign that a colony and its settlers had 'grown up'. Attempts to 'indigenize' colonial academic institutions and/or individual disciplines within them have been fraught with major struggles over what counts as knowledge, as language, as literature, as curriculum and as the role of intellectuals, and over the critical function of the concept of academic freedom.21 Colonizing the Disciplines Academic knowledges are organized around the idea of disciplines and fields of knowledge. Theseare deeply implicated in eachother and share genealogical foundations in various classical and Enlightenment philoso phies. Most of the 'traditional' disciplines are grounded in cultural world views which are either antagonistic to other belief systems or have no methodology for dealing with other knowledge systems. Underpinning all of what is taught at universities is the beliefin the concept of science as the all-embracing method for gaining an understanding of the world. Some of these disciplines, however, are more directly implicated in colonialism in that either they have derived their methods and under standings from the colonized world or they have tested their ideas in the colonies. How the colonized were governed, for example, was determined by previous experiences in other colonies and by the prevailing theories about race, gender, climate and other factors generated by 'scientific' methods. Classification systems were developed specifically to cope with the mass of new knowledge generated by the discoveries of the 'new world'. New colonies were the laboratories of Western science. Theories generated from the exploration and exploita tion of colonies, and of the people who had prior ownership of these lands, formed the totalizing appropriation of the Other. Robert Young argues that Hegel articulates a philosophical structure of the appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge which uncannily simulates the project of nineteenth century imperialism; the construction of knowledges which all operate 66 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES through forms of expropriation and incorporation of the other mimics at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non- European world by the West.22 David Goldberg claims that notions of the Other are more deeply embedded in classical philosophy but became racialized within the framework of liberalism and the ideas about people and society which developed as disciplines through liberalism.23 In an interesting discussion on the discourses which employ the word 'civilization', John Laffey suggests that the word 'civilization' entered Anglo-French usage in the second part of the eighteenth century, enabling the distinction to be drawn between those who saw themselves as civilized and those who they then regarded as the 'savages' abroad and at home.24 As a standard of judgement, according to Laffey, the word 'civilized' became more defined with the help of Freud and more specialized in the way different disciplines employed the concept. One such use was comparative and allowed for comparisons between children and savages or children and women, for example. This way of thinking was elaborated further into psychological justifications for the distinctions between the civilized and the uncivilized. Freud's influence on the way disciplines developed in relation to colonialism is further explored by Marianna Torgovnick, who examines the links between Freud and anthropology in her analysis of Malinowski's book 'The Sexual Life of Savages'.25 According to Turgovnick, Freud's explanation of the human psyche in terms of sexuality undergirded their endeavors and influenced the structure of many ethnographic enquiries at this stage of the discipline's development even when those enquiries suggested (as they often did) modifications of Freudian paradigms, such as the Oedipus complex.26 Other key intellectuals have also been referred to as not so innocent philosophers of the truth. Henry Louis Gates Jr names Kant, Bacon, Hume, Jefferson and Hegel as 'great intellectual racialists' who have been influential in defining the role of literature and its relationship to humanity, 'The salient sign of the black person's humanity ... would be the mastering of the very essence of Western civilization, the very7 foundation of the complex fiction upon which white Western culture has been constructed....'2" Of all the disciplines, anthropology is the one most closely associated with the study of the Other and with the defining of primitivism.28 As Adam Kuper argued, 'The anthropologists took this primitive society as their special subject, but in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror.29 The COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 67 ethnographic 'gaze' of anthropology has collected, classified and represented other cultures to the extent that anthropologists are often the academics popularly perceived by the indigenous world as the epitome of all that it is bad with academics. Haunani Kay Trask accuses anthropologists of being 'takers and users' who 'exploit the hospitality and generosity of native people'.3" Trinh T. Minh-ha makes similar references to anthropology and anthropologists, including those whose intent now is to train Third World anthropologists. 'Gone out of date,' she says, 'then revitalised, the mission of civilizing savages mutates into the imperative of "making equal".'31 In writing a history of geography, Livingstone refers to this discipline as the 'science of imperialism par excellence'.32 His comment relates to geographical studies into such things as the mapping of racial difference, the links which were drawn between climate and mental abilities, the use of map makers in French colonies for military intelligence and the development of acclimatization societies.33 As suggested above in the Introduction, history is also implicated in the construction of totalizing master discourses which control the Other. The history of the colonies, from the perspective of the colonizers, has effectively denied other views of what happened and what the significance of historical 'facts' may be to the colonized. 'If history is written by the victor,' arguesJanet Abu-Lughod, 'then it must, almost by definition, "deform" the history of the others.'34 Donna Awatere claims that, 'The process of recording what happened auto matically favours the white occupiers because they won. In such a way a whole past is "created" and then given the authority of truth.'3d These comments have been echoed wherever indigenous peoples have had the opportunity to 'talk back' to the academic world. While disciplines are implicated in each other, particularly in their shared philosophical foundations, they are also insulated from each other through the maintenance of what are known as disciplinary boundaries. Basil Bernstein has shown how this works in his paper on the 'classification and framing of knowledge'.36 Insulation enables disciplines to develop independently. Their histories are kept separate and 'pure'. Concepts of 'academic freedom', the 'search for truth' and 'democracy' underpin the notion of independence and are vigorously defended by intellectuals. Insularity protects a discipline from the 'out side', enabling communities of scholars to distance themselves from others and, in the more extreme forms, to absolve themselves of responsibility for what occurs in other branches of their discipline, in the academy and in the world. In the context of research and at a very pragmatic level researchers from different projects and different research teams can be in and out of the same community (much in the way many government social 68 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES services are in and out of family homes), showing 'as a collective' little responsibility for the overall impact of their activities. At other levels criticism of individual researchers and their projects is deflected by the argument that those researchers are different in some really significant 'scientific' way from others. How indigenous communities are supposed to work this out is a mystery. There are formal organizations of disciplines, researchers and communities of scholars, many of which have ethical guidelines. These organizations are based on the idea that scholars consent to participate within them as scholars, as professionals, or as ethical human beings. Not all who carry out research in indigenous communities belong to, or are bound by, such collegial self-discipline. Disciplining the Colonized The concept of discipline is even more interesting when we think about it not simply as a way of organizing systems of knowledge but also as a way of organizing people or bodies. Foucault has argued that discipline in the eighteenth century became 'formulas of domination' which were at work in schools, hospitals and military organizations.3" Techniques of detail were developed to maintain discipline over the body. The colonizing of the Other through discipline has a number of different meanings. In terms of the way knowledge was used to discipline the colonized it worked in a variety of ways. The most obvious forms of discipline were through exclusion, marginalization and denial. Indigenous ways of knowing were excluded and marginalized. This happened to indigenous views about land, for example, through the forced imposition of individualized title, through taking land away for 'acts of rebellion', and through redefining land as 'waste land' or 'empty land' and then taking it away. Foucault suggests that one waydiscipline was distributed was through enclosure. This is the other side of exclusion in that the margins are enclosures: reserved lands are enclosures, schools enclose, but in order to enclose they also exclude, there is something on the outside. Discipline is also partitioned, individuals separated and space compartmentalized. This allowed for efficient supervision and for simultaneous distinctions to be made between individuals. This form of discipline worked at the curriculum level, for example, as a mechanism for selecting out 'native' children and girls for domestic and manual work. It worked also at the assessment level, with normative tests designed around the language and cultural capital of the white middle classes. The deepest memory of discipline, however, is of the sheer brutality meted out to generations of indigenous communities. Aborigine parents in Australia had their children forcibly removed, sent away beyond reach ^ COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 69 and 'adopted'.38 Native children in Canada were sent to residential schools at an age designed to systematically destroy their language and memories of home. There is a growing body of testimony from First Nations people in Canada which tells of years of abuse, neglect and viciousness meted out to young children by teachers and staff in schools run by various religious denominations.39 These forms of discipline were supported by paternalistic and racist policies and legislation; they were accepted by white communities as necessary conditions which had to be met if indigenouspeople wanted to become citizens (of their own lands). These forms of discipline affected people physically, emotionally, linguistically and culturally. They were designed to destroy every last remnant of alternative ways of knowing and living, to obliterate collective identities and memories and to impose a new order. Even after the Second World War, when the post-colonial period was beginning according to some cultural studies theorists, many indigenous peoples around the world were still not recognized as humans, let alone citizens. The effect of such discipline was to silence (for ever in some cases) or to suppress the ways of knowing, and the languages for knowing, of many different indigenous peoples. Reclaiming a voice in this context has also been about reclaiming, reconnecting and reordering those ways of knowing which were submerged, hidden or driven underground. Colonialism and 'Native' Intellectuals The position within their own societies of 'native' intellectuals who have been trained in the West has been regarded by those involved in nationalist movements as very' problematic. Much of the discussion about intellectuals in social and cultural life, and their participation in anti-colonial struggles, is heavily influenced by Marxist revolutionary' thought, is framed in the language of oppositional discourse, and was written during the post-war period when struggles for independence wereunder way.40 Included within the rubric of 'intellectual' by liberation writers such as Frantz Fanon are also artists, writers, poets, teachers, clerks, officials, the petit bourgeoisie and other professionals engaged in producing 'culture'. Theirimportance in nationalist movements is related to their abilities to reclaim, rehabilitate and articulate indigenous cultures, and to their implicit leadership over 'the people' as voices which can legitimate a new nationalist consciousness. At the same time, however, these same producers and legitimators of culture are the group most closely aligned to the colonizers in terms of their class interests, their values and their ways of thinking. This view was restated in 1984 by Donna Awatere who wrote that '[Colonial Maori] ... are noticeable because they have succeeded as white in some 70 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES section of white culture; economically, through the arts, at sport, through religion, the universities, the professions.'41 There were con cerns that native intellectuals may have become estranged from their own cultural values to the point of being embarrassed by, and hostile towards, all that those values represented. In his introduction to Cesaire's Return to My Native I^and Mazisi Kunene wrote that, 'those [students] who returned despised and felt ashamed of their semi-literate or illiterate parents who spoke inelegant patois'.42 In New Zealand the few Maori who were trained at universities in the last part of the nineteenth century are generally viewed positively as individuals who retained a love for their culture and language and who were committed in the context of the times to the survival of indigenous people. What is problematic is that this group of men have been named by the dominant non-indigenous population as individuals who represent 'real' leadership. They have been idealized as the 'saviours of the people' and their example remains as a 'measure' of real leadership. As Fanon has argued, the problem of creating and legitimating a national culture 'represents a special battlefield'43 and intellectuals are important to this battle in a number of different ways. In recognizing that intellectuals were trained and enculturated in the West, Fanon identifies three levels through which 'native' intellectuals can progress in their journey 'back over the line'.44 First there is a phase of proving that intellectuals have been assimilated into the culture of the occupying power. Second comes a period of disturbance and the need for the intellectuals to remember who they actually are, a time for remembering the past. In the third phase the intellectuals seek to awaken the people, to realign themselves with the people and to produce a revolutionary and national literature.45 In this phase the 'native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his [sic] own people'.46 Fanon was writing about Algeria and the structure of French colonialism in Africa. He himself was trained in France as a psychiatrist and was influenced by European philosophies. One of the problems of connecting colonialism in New Zealand with its formations elsewhere is that New Zealand, like Canada and Australia, was already privileged as a white dominion within the British Empire and Commonwealth, with the indigenous populations being minorities. Whilst geographically on the margins of Europe, they were economically and culturally closely attached to Britain. Within these states the indigenous people were absolute minorities. The settlers who came arrived as permanent migrants. For indigenous peoples in these places this meant a different kind of experience with colonialism and different possibilities for decolonization. What it also points to is that indigenous intellectuals have emerged from different colonial and indigenous systems. In the COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 71 Pacific Islands, for example, scholars come from majority cultures and independent island nations but they have also been incorporated at a regional level into the metropolitan cultures of Australia and New Zealand.47 Hau'ofa argues that 'the ruling classes of the South Pacific are increasingly culturally homogeneous. They speak the same language, which is English; they share the same ideologies and the same material life styles....'48 Currently the role of the 'native' intellectual has been reformulated not in relation to nationalist or liberationary discourses but in relation to the 'post-colonial' intellectual. Many intellectuals who position themselves as 'post-colonial' move across the boundaries of indigenous and metropolitan, institution and community, politics and scholarship. Their place in the academy is still highly problematic. Gayatri Spivak, who writes as a post-colonial Asian/lndian intellectual working in the United States, argues that Third World intellectuals have to position themselves strategically as intellectuals within the academy, within the Third World or indigenous world, and within the Western world in which many intellectuals actually work. The problem, she argues, for Third World intellectuals remains the problem of being taken seriously. For me, the question 'Who should speak?' is less crucial than "Who will listen?'. 'I will speak for myself as a Third World person' is an important position for political mobilisation today. But the real demand is that,when I speak from that position, I shouldbe listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism....49 Spivak acknowledges that the task of changing the academy is difficult: 'I would say that if one begins to take a whack at shaking the structure up, one sees how much more consolidated the opposition is.'"'" The role of intellectuals, teachers, artists and writers in relation to indigenous communities is still problematic, and the rhetoric of libera tion still forms part of indigenous discourses. Indigenous communities continue to view education in its Western, modern, sense as being critical to development and self-determination. While criticizing indige nous people who have been educated at universities, on one hand, many indigenous communities will struggle and save to send their children to university on the other. There is a very real ambivalence in indigenous communities towards the role of Western education and those who have been educated in universities. This is reflected in many contexts in struggles over leadership, representation and voice between those perceived as 'traditional' and those seen either as the 'radicals' or simply as having Western credentials. In Australia, the term 'flash blacks' encompasses both those who are well educated and those who have high-flying jobs. In NewZealand one struggle over the value of Western 72 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES education was played out in the 1980s through a process of reprivileging of 'elders' and a reification of elders as the holders of all traditional knowledge and a parallel deprivileging of the younger, frequently much better educated members (in a Western sense) of an iwi (tribe). Maori academics who work away from their tribal territories can easily be criticised because they live awayfrom home, and are perceived therefore as being distanced from the people. At the same time they are drawn into tribal life whenever a crisis occurs or there are additional demands for specialist knowledge and skills. The bottom line, however, is that in very fundamental ways they still remain members of an iwi with close relations to families and other community ties. The 'Authentic, Essentialist, Deeply Spiritual' Other At a recent international conference held in New Zealand to discuss issues related to indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights, the local newspapers were informed and invited to interview some of the delegates. One news reporter thought it would be a good idea to have a group photograph, suggesting that it would be a very colourful feature for the newspaper to highlight. When she and the photographer turned up at the local marae (cultural centre) they were so visibly disappointed at the motley display of track suits, jeans and other items of 'modern' dress, that they chose not to take a photograph. 'Oh, I forgot to come as a native', joked one of the delegates. 'My feathers got confiscated at the airport when I arrived.' 'I suppose my eyes are too blue.' 'Are we supposed to dress naked?' As we have seen, the notion of 'authentic' is highly contested when applied to, or by, indigenous peoples. 'Authorities' and outside experts are often called in to verify, comment upon, and give judgements about the validity of indigenous claims to cultural beliefs, values, ways of knowing and historical accounts. Such issues are often debated vigorously by the 'public', (a category which usually means the dominant group), leading to an endless parading of 'nineteenth century' views of race and racial difference. Questions of who is a 'real indigenous' person, what counts as a 'real indigenous leader', which person displays 'real cultural values' and the criteria used to assess the characteristics of authenticity are frequently the topic of conversation and political debate. These debates are designed to fragment and marginalize those who speak for, or in support of, indigenous issues. They frequently have the effect also of silencing and making invisible the presence of other groups within the indigenous society like women, the urban non-status tribal person and those whose ancestry or 'blood quantam' is 'too white'.51 In Tasmania, where experts had already determined that Aborigines were 'extinct', the voices of ^ COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 73 those who still speak as Aboriginal Tasmanians are interpreted as some political invention of a people who no longer exist and who therefore no longer have claims. Recent poststructural and psychoanalytical feminist theorists have argued against the claims made by earlier generations of feminists that women as a group were different, because their essence as women was fundamentally, undeniably different, and that therefore their 'sisterhood' would be a natural meeting place for all women. Pedagogically, essentialism was attacked because of its assumption that, because of this essence, it was necessary to be a woman and to experience life as a woman before one could analyse or understand women's oppression. Third World women and women of colour also attacked this assumption because it denied the impact of imperialisms, racism and local histories on women, who were different from white women who lived in First World nations. The concept of authentic, which is related to essentialism, was also deconstructed but more so from psychoanalytic perspectives because the concept assumed that if we strip away the oppressions and psychological consequences of oppression we would find a 'pure' and authentic 'self. One of the major problems with the way words are defined is that these debates are often held by academics in one context, within a specific intellectual discourse, and then appropriated by the media and popular press to serve a more blatant ideological and racist agenda.52 As Trinh T. Minh-ha put it when writing of anthropologists in particular, 'But once more they spoke. They decide who is "racism-free or anti-colonial", and they seriously think they can go on formulating criteria for us....'33 In the colonized world, however, these terms are not necessarily employed in the same way that First World academics may have used them. The term 'authentic', for example, was an oppositional term used in at least two different ways. First, it was used as a form of articulating what it meant to be dehumanized by colonization; and, second, for reorganizing 'national consciousness' in the struggles for decolonization. The belief in an authentic self is framed within humanism but has been politicized by the colonized world in ways which invoke simultaneous meanings; it does appeal to an idealized past when there was no colonizer, to our strengths in surviving thus far, to our language as an uninterrupted link to our histories, to the ownership of our lands, to our abilities to create and control our own life and death, to a sense of balance among ourselves and with the environment, to our authentic selves as a people. Although this may seem overly idealized, these sym bolic appeals remain strategically important in political struggles. Furthermore the imputing of a Western psychological 'self, which is a highly individualized notion, to group consciousness as it is centred in many colonized societies, is not a straightforward translation of the 74 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES individual to the group, although this is often the only way that Westerners can come to understand what may constitute a group. The purpose of commenting on such a concept is that what counts as 'authentic' is used by the West as one of the criteria to determine who really is indigenous, who is worth saving, who is still innocent and free from Western contamination. There is a very powerful tendency in research to take this argument back to a biological 'essentialism' related to race, because the idea of culture is much more difficult to control. At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contra dictory. Only the West has that privilege. The concept of essentialism is also discussed in different ways within the indigenous world. It is accepted as a term which is related to human ism and is seen therefore in the same way as the idea of authenticity. In this use of the word, claiming essential characteristics is as much strategic as anything else, because it has been about claiming human rights and indigenous rights. But the essence of a person is also dis cussed in relation to indigenous concepts of spirituality. In these views, the essence of a person has a genealogy which can be traced back to an earth parent, usually glossed as an Earth Mother. A human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate and, in the Western sense, 'inanimate' beings, a relationship based on a shared 'essence' of life. The significance of place, of land, of landscape, of other things in the universe, in defining the very essence of a people, makes for a very different rendering of the term essentialism as used by indigenous peoples. The arguments of different indigenous peoples based on spiritual relationships to the universe, to the landscape and to stones, rocks, insects and other things, seen and unseen, have been difficult arguments for Western systems of knowledge to deal with or accept. These arguments give a partial indication of the different world views and alternative ways of coming to know, and of being, which still endure within the indigenous world. Concepts of spirituality which Christianity' attempted to destroy, then to appropriate, and then to claim, are critical sites of resistance for indigenous peoples. The values, attitudes, concepts and language embedded in beliefs about spirituality represent, in many cases, the clearest contrast and mark of difference between indigenous peoples and the West. It is one of the few parts of ourselves which the West cannot decipher, cannot understand and cannot control ... yet. COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES Notes 75 1 Mita, M. (1989), 'Merata Mita On...', in the NewZealand Listener, 14 October, p. 30. 2 Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (1986), Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics ofLanguage inAfrican Literature, James Currey, London. 3 (aggar, A. (1983), Peminist Politics and Human Nature, Harvester Press, Sussex. 4 Hall, S. (1992), 'The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power', Chapter 6 of Formations of Modernity, eds S. Hall and B. Gielben, Polity Press and Open University, Cambridge, pp. 276-320. 5 Goonatilake, S. (1982), 'Colonies: Scientific Expansion (and Contraction)', in Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter, pp. 413-36. 6 Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York, p. 7. 7 Bazin, M. (1993), 'Our Sciences, Their Science', in Race and Class, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 35-6. 8 Goonatilake, 'Colonies'. 9 Adas, M. (1989), Machines as the Measure ofMan. Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. 10 Clifford, J. (1988), The Predicament ofCulture, Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p. 231. See also on the topic of collection, Ames, M. (1986), Museums, The Public and Anthropology, University of Columbia Press, London. 11 Brockway, L. H. (1979), Science and Colonial Expansion. The Role ofthe British Royal Botanical Gardens, Academic Press, New York, p. 187. 12 Goonatilake, 'Colonies', p. 432. 13 Crosby, A. W. (1986), 'Biotic Change in Nineteenth Century New Zealand', in Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, Winter, pp. 325-37. 14 Smith, C. W. (1994), 'Kimihia te Matauranga, Colonization and Iwi Development', MA thesis, University of Auckland, p. 23. 15 Pool, D. L. (WIT), The Maori Population of New Zealand 1769-1971, Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, Auckland, pp. 75-105. 16 Churchill, W. (1994), Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America, Common Courage Press, Maine. 17 Ibid., pp. 28-42/ 18 Sykes, R. B. (1989), Black Majority, Hudson Hawthorn, Victoria, p. 185. 19 Bernal,M. (1991), Black. Athena, The Afroasiatic Roots ofClassical Civilisation, Vintage, London. 20 Said, E. Orientalism, pp. 205-6. 21 See, for examples of these debates in relation to indigenous issues, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1986), Decolonizing the Mind. The Politics oflanguage in African Literature, James Currev, London, and Haunani Kay Trask (1993), From a Native Daughter, Common Courage Press, Maine. 22 Young, R. (1990), White Mythologies, Writing, History and the West, Routlcdge, London, p. 3. 23 Goldberg, D. T. (1993), Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics ofMeaning, Blackwell, Oxford. 24 Laffey, J. F. (1993), Civilisation and its Discontented, Black Rose Books, New York. 25 Torgovnick, M. (1990), Cone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 26 Ibid., p. 7. 27 Gates, H. L. (1994), 'Authority (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: It's All 76 DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES Greek to Me', in Culture/Power/History, eds N. Dirks, G. Eley and S. B. Ortner, Princeton University Press, New Jersey. 28 Stocking, G. Jr (1987), Wictorian Anthropology, The Free Press, London. 29 Kuper, A. (1988), 'The Invention of Primitive Society, Routledge, London, p. 5. 30 Trask, H. K. (1993), Trom a Native Daughter, Common Courage Press, Maine. 31 Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1989), Woman, Native, Other, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, p. 59. 32 Livingstone, D. (1992), The Geographical Tradition, Blackwell, Oxford. 33 Ibid., p. 216. 34 Abu-Lughod, J. (1989), 'On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past', in Remaking History, Dia Art Foundation, Bay Press, Seattle, p. 118. 35 Awatere, D. (1983), 'Awatere on Intellectuals: Academic Fragmentation or Visionary Unity', article in Craccum, Auckland University Students' Association, 3 May, Auckland, pp. 6-7. 36 Bernstein, B. (1971), 'On the Classification and Framing of Knowledge' in Knowledge and Control: NewDirections for the Sociology ofEducation, ed. M. F. D. Young, Collier Macmillan, London, pp. 47-69. 37 Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline andPunish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Penguin, London, p. 137. 38 This practice is known popularly as the 'stolen childfen' policy but an official inquiry was conducted by the Australian government called 'A National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families'. This was completed in 1997. 39.A government commission to investigate the abuses in the residential school system for Indian children was recently completed by the Canadian government. For further background read Furness, E. (1995), \'ictims of Benevolence: The Dark Legay ofthe Williams Lake Residential School, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver; Haig- Brown, C. (1988), Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, Tillacum Library, Vancouver in L. Taine, ed. (1993), Residential Schools: the Stolen Years, University of Saskatechewan Press, Saskatson. 40 Gramsci's views on the intellectual have been influential, among other Marxist views. So too have the existentialist views of Jean Paul Sartre who wrote the introduction to Fanon's book, 'The Wretched of the Earth. A critique of these influences on Fanon, in particular, can be read in Young, White Mythologies. 41 Awatere, D. (1984), Maori Sovereignty, Broadsheet, Auckland, p. 83. 42 Cesaire, A. (1969), Return to My Native Land, translated by |ohn Berger and Ana Bostock, introduction bv Mazisi Kunene, PenguinBooks, Harmondsworth, p. 24. 43 Fanon, F. (1990), The Wretched ofthe Earth, Penguin, London, p. 193. 44 Ibid., pp. 178-9. 45 Ibid., p. 179. 46 Ibid., p. 193. 47 Hau'ofa, E. (1987), 'The New South Pacific Society: Integration and Independence', in Class and Culture in the South Pacific, eds A. Hooper, S. Britton, R. Crocombe, J. Fluntsman and C. Macpherson, Centre for Pacific Studies, Uni versity of Auckland, Institute for Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, pp. 1-15. 48 Ibid., p. 3. 49 Spivak, G. (1990), 'Questions of Multiculturalism', in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. S. Harasayam, Routledge, New York, pp. 59-60. ^ COLONIZING KNOWLEDGES 77 50 Spivak, G. (1990), 'Criticism, Feminism and the Institution', in 'The Post-Colonial Critic, p. 6. 51 'Blood quantum' refers to the 'amount' of native blood one has and is used in places such as Flawai'i to determine eligibility access to Hawai'ian lands and identity. It is based on racial beliefs that the more indigenous peoples inter married the more assimilated or 'watered down' they became. Conversely if they did not inter-mam' thev remained 'pure'. 52 Similar debates occur over a word such as 'invention', where anthropologists may talk to each other about the invention of culture; the media can then accuse indigenous people of inventing culture to serve their own interests at the expense of the dominant group. This occurred in New Zealand over an article written by A. Hanson (1991), 'The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and its Logic', in .American .Anthropologist, pp. 890—902. One of the larger dailv newspapers took the article and turned it into the following headline: 'LIS EXPERT SAYS MAORI CULTURE INVENTED', Dominion, Saturday 24 February. 53 Minh-ha, Trin T., Woman, Native, Other, p. 59.