The Idea of Indigeneity, Jazz Sabbath, On Hanging Out, and Rewriting Canadian History - Dinner Table Digest № 44
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Below are three good pieces and one incredible musical performance to get your week started off right!
Sections: Rethinking the Idea of ‘Indigenous’ / Jazz Sabbath / On Hanging Out / Rewriting Canadian History
It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous” - Manvir Singh - The New Yorker
Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of reading about far-right nationalism. While I have spent most of my time on Christian Nationalism, I have noticed how nationalist ideas sometimes look a lot like claims of Indigeneity. This is explicitly the case in Hindu Nationalism, which relies on a long-debunked Indo-Aryan origin story which sees Hindus as Indigenous to northern India. However, I had not come across any readings explicitly linking the two, until now.
A politics built around indigeneity, many organizers fear, can reify ethnic boundaries. It encourages people to justify why their ethnic group, and not another, deserves particular resources and accommodations. It weakens domestic ties, which are otherwise critical for oppressed minorities. But it also contributes to one of the stranger consequences arising from a rhetoric of indigeneity: its co-option by far-right nationalists. As peoples like the Maasai have lost confidence in the rhetoric, ethnic nationalists worldwide have come to embrace it. Writing for a Hindu Right propaganda Web site in 2020, a columnist observed, “In the game of woke, we Hindus actually hold all possible cards. We are people of color. We come from an indigenous culture that is different from the organized religions. . . . How could we not be winning every argument?”
More centrally to Singh's argument, however, is how the colonial settler association of 'backwards primitivism' with Indigeneity, despite being a supposed selling point with respect to preservation of culture, actually prevents some people groups from living their best lives. Singh takes the case of the Adivasis, also in India, as a prime example.
Yet the English-born anthropologist Verrier Elwin, starting in the nineteen-thirties and forties, favored an account that was both idealized and soaked in primitivist imagery. He imagined Adivasis to be the inverse of modernity: free, primordial, attuned to the rhythms of nature. The image appealed to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and the conception has stuck. To this day, the Indian government defines “Scheduled Tribes”—an official designation that, for many Indians, is largely equivalent to the Sanskrit-derived term Adivasi—based on five criteria: “(i) indications of primitive traits, (ii) distinctive culture, (iii) geographical isolation, (iv) shyness of contact with the community at large, and (v) backwardness.” …
Many of the problems start with image management. To secure their status as Indigenous, Adivasis have needed to look tribal and non-modern. Urban activists necessarily endorse images of them as children of the forest. The resulting policies can be a boost for activists, intent on building domestic and international platforms. But they can also lead to what Shah calls “eco-incarceration,” reinforcing Adivasis’ marginalization. Consider their elephant issue. In one year, in a village of about five hundred and fifty people, Shah saw elephants destroy five houses. They devoured crops. They kicked a woman, leaving her with serious back injuries. Nearby villages were similarly terrorized, with nine people trampled to death.
The Mundas were not happy. They told Shah they wanted to chop down trees to stop the elephant incursion, but government policy, ostensibly aimed at helping them preserve their traditions, prohibited them from doing so. When she asked how they could survive without the jungle, many Mundas told her that she had it backward. They remembered a past when they cleared the trees rather than living surrounded by them. “After all, not so long ago there were no elephants here because there was no forest,” one villager told her.
There's a lot to think about in this piece, that's for sure.
Jazz Sabbath
The origin story of Jazz Sabbath is hilariously fascinating in its own right, but the music is just sublime!
The Case for Hanging Out - Dan Kois - Slate
Making and keeping friends as an adult is hard work. As a disabled person that is already socially isolated, I have been intentional about reaching out to “the guys” as well as reconnecting with friends from previous lifetimes. By and large, ‘hanging out’ with my friends one-on-one or in a small group setting is the way that I socially recharge.
… it was not because I thought her book was interesting that I had reached out to Liming. It was because I passionately believed that her book was right. “I’ve become an accidental witness to a growing crisis,” she writes in Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. “People struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” I, too, see a crisis brewing, among not only people my age but among the peers of my teenage children and the college students I teach. Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit. I agree with Liming that no one is down to hang out anymore, and agree with her that it’s a “quiet catastrophe.”
Canadian history was overdue for a rewrite - Charlotte Gray - The Globe and Mail
Some time ago I found, in my mother-in-law's small library, an old Ontario textbook on the history of Canada, published in 1921. A fascinating piece of pedagogy, it tells a grand narrative of the founding of a great country, built out of the blood, sweat, and tears of hardy French and British explorers, tamed by great European statesmen. Those who already lived on this land were called 's×vages,’ both in the textbook and by the white men who originally encountered them. These various Indigenous people groups, all lumped together as if they were functionally identical, were to be brought under European domination, otherwise know as ‘civilization.’ We understand now, as I am sure some understood then, that this forced cultural assimilation was wrong, that it was, in fact, cultural genocide.
So maybe we should stop thinking about Canadian history in terms of Grand Narratives of British and French Conquest?
At the Governor-General’s History Awards ceremony, Ms. Simon encouraged the teachers to keep building “platforms for inclusivity,” and for addressing head on “inequality, diversity and inclusion.” She said that those who bemoaned “what they call a ‘rewriting’ of history or questioning historical figures from our country’s past” were missing the point. “We are telling a fuller history.”
It is certainly a larger history, and I would be happy to see any child taught by the teachers I met. But it is also a radically different approach to history than the one I absorbed in my own education, during which teachers drew on the past to shape national pride and literary skills.
Today’s history educators in Canada put the emphasis on “critical thinking skills”: They teach students to gather, analyze, interpret and assess diverse historical evidence. These are skills essential for an informed citizenry in the age of social media, conspiracy theories and polarized politics. The narratives I was taught certainly had a propaganda element, but the Canadian history being taught today has abandoned any attempt at a modern, integrated narrative that encompasses a far wider range of experiences.
Perhaps such a narrative is impossible in a sprawling, diverse country like Canada, with a demographic churn that transforms communities from one generation to the next. Yet there are distinct, common values that have persisted and evolved through the years – support for gun control, bodily autonomy, compromise rather than conflict, health care as a common good. The roots of those shared values, which make Canada the country it is, lie in the past – back to Confederation and beyond.
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