"No," the old fisherman said to the young grad student. "No, I'm not going to answer your questions. I know your prof. He's into all that Indian crap. So no, I'm not going to participate," he said.
I had given the student a list of names of local fishermen she might track down for her graduate field school project in Prince Rupert. I knew many of the white men in town had 'issues' with Aboriginal Rights and Title. I figured a few of them would decline to participate. The student's project was looking at a fisheries management tactic, not Indigenous/settler relations, so I didn't expect the old fisherman's response.
"All that Indian crap" was a reference to both my personal and political practices. The student wasn't quite sure how to respond. I also suspect the student 'translated' the actual words and deleted the less civil phrases. The student was an unknowing third party to a local struggle over racialized boundaries in which the white men I had worked with as a commercial fishermen made clear their views on who was an Indian and what rights those Indians 'really' had.
As a grad student I had published a paper, Stories from Home (1994), about the racialized conflict in Prince Rupert over Aboriginal Rights and Title. In that paper I explicitly acknowledged my white and First Nation background, even as I took an equivocal stance on the issue:"The object of the article is not to convince the reader of the rightness or wrongness of Euro-Canadian opposition to First Nations' land claims but rather to create a space in which their fear of and their reactions to land claims can be better understood."
I grew up in a multi-racial multi-ethnic working class town. WASPyness defined the local elite, but Prince Rupert was demographically intersectional. I'm not saying this was a harmonious inter-racial community, nor am I saying it was a war zone. It was, as John Porter famously called Canada, a vertical mosaic in which race and ethnicity were entwined with class and power. The boundaries were fiercely policed.
Growing up in this environment I was well aware of all the racialized and sexualized taunts and insults that permeated so much of our daily lives growing up (and later working lives). There's a part of a child that ignores the implications of these things. Yet they lurk there and at times they intrude in ways that disrupt and disturb. From playground to family dinner to stray looks and comments in the street - we are all inundated with racialized sentiments and affects. As an old timer now looking back I see more than I did as a child, but that child stays with me even as I write this.
As a child our memories are as much memories of feelings as they are memories of events. It took me years to appreciate why a phone call at any hour of the night would have me answering the phone, even before I was properly awake.
My father was a distant water fisherman when I was young. When his boat slipped the lines at the dock and set sail Dad was gone for a month. There was no reliable communications until the boat was heading home. We never knew when the call would come. We never knew if it would be good news or bad. Any communication of an accident or mishap would fall to my mother to tell the other wives and girlfriends. I dreaded those calls even as I looked forward to them. Even knowing why late night calls affect me so strongly doesn't help with the sense of dread of the ringing phone.
Racilized memories are like that.
In a town of multi-ethnic immigrants there was a strong desire to be white. A desire among those 'less' white to climb the vertical mosaic into the power of WASPyness. Trying to step outside that intersectionality was policed tightly. People worked hard to keep the lines between white and not white clear.
My background is an interracial one - not just the sense of the place I am from, but also my home. In addition to growing up in an environment in which people were intensely interested in difference, my family was its own microcosm of racialization. At home difference and combination was celebrated. At school and at work difference was codified and social separation enforced by those with power.
Dial forward a couple decades.
I'm a newish prof at UBC taking a group of graduate students home for a fieldschool in Prince Rupert. Some are doing projects with Gitxaała, the rest in ’Rupert with First Nation and Settler participants. I’m co-teaching with a new UBC graduate. It’s exciting to come home and be there with a group of earnest and passionate students. Then the young student returns to report the old fisherman's refusal and how he explained it.
At the time I took it in stride and focussed on working with the student to ensure they had a project that would work and people to interview. But the old man's message hit home, I knew he had intended me to hear both his distain and his criticism. It also made me reflect on how my father thought of this man as a friend. What would I say, if anything, to my father? I doubt that the old fisherman would have said anything to my father about 'Indian crap,' but he certainly felt entitled to tell the young women student off and in a way that implicated me in his refusal.
Behind that old white man's anger was a racialist ideology in which 'real Indians' were few in number. An ideology that considered most current 'Indians' as fakes. Fake Indians were, in that old white man's mind, people like me from 'mixed' homes with university educations. Similar to the argument used by Widdowson and Howard in Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, the old white fisherman thought 'all that Indian crap' was made up. In his mind there weren't any 'real' Indians left.
In this context settlers who pretend to be Indian confirm and perform the old white fisherman's cynical imaginings and essentiallized beliefs. These pretendians make real the cynical belief there are no 'real' Indians anymore. But it's not just racist old white men who harbour these ideas. I've met many erstwhile liberals who, once they learn I am First Nation, try to drill down to figure out by 'how much.' In a presentation (ultimately published as Standing on the Shore with Sabaan) a progressive colleague shared in the Q&A, 'But aren't they [First Nations] part of the modernist project,' i.e. no longer authentically Indian.
People who search their family lore for traces of an Indigenous past and then 'reconnect' themselves to an invented Indigenous identity are part and parcel of the old white fisherman's misconception. They share a racialized belief in a kind of blood identity. Membership and belonging requires real connections, involvement, and acceptance- not merely some forgotten genealogical link.
Pretindianism and settler conceptions of authentic identity are part of what Hugh Brody labeled colonial folklore in The Peoples's Land. Brody tells us that colonial folklore involves
“illustrations. Repeated, retold, reworked, they are a confused form of folklore: each storyteller shapes events and meanings according to his own preoccupations. … Considered alongside more reliable accounts of traditional Eskimo life, or viewed in the light of northern history, they must be judged inaccurate. But the teller of such stories does not attempt to judge accuracy, he is not concerned with the possibilities or niceties of objective validity; he has not studied the books and the articles. The stories and views expressed by northern Whites are the product of a living social context; they inform and are being informed by it" (1975:79).
The old white fishermen shares with other settlers this confused form of folklore.
The reality of First Nations identities is that we are indeed part of the modern world. I am a university professor. I have several relatives who are teachers. Some family work as longshoreman. Others in the trades. Our families interconnect with settlers and have for generations. We also maintain deep connections to our history in this place, in our home territories. Traditional practices continue and transform is ways unique to our experiences as First Nations people in a colonial world.
The wider oral history of the Tsimshian peoples is replete with narratives of unions between supernatural beings and human, with accounts of travellers arriving and becoming part of already existing communities, of people leaving for long periods of time and returning with spouses from far away. These are histories of adoption, alliance, and relationship building. These are concepts of belonging and membership that are not biologically based, but relationally-based. They were possible becuase Indigenous peoples controlled ones' own territories and thus could decide from places of authority who was a member and who wasn't. These were collective decisions, not individual identifications.
The old fisherman's attempts at boundary maintenance fits a settler world (conservative and progressive both) that locates the idea of Indigenous authenticity in a racialized past that has been degraded through admixture. The ultimate result is the erasure of First Nations people. Constructing identity in the old fisherman's manner runs counter to Indigenous understandings of belonging that are based on relationships, not biology.
