The ‘Indian thing’: on representation and reality in the liberal settler colony

Abstract

This paper constitutes a theoretical intervention into the politics of indigenous representation in modern Canada. My aim is to provide a conceptual alternative to the persistent critical reliance on notions of misrepresentation, factual rectification, and intercultural reconciliation, each of which is implicit in various popular, institutional, and academic appreciations of ‘Indian’ representations and realities. I contend that such humanistic understandings of representation and mediation are grounded in the same metaphysics of absence and presence that authorise the state's vocabularies of authenticity and liberal correction. Instead, I propose to explore the fleeting character of what I call the ‘Indian thing’. This ‘thing’ corresponds to that constantly deferred presence of the self, which emerges from the interstices of a racial−colonial relation of power each time Natives and non-Natives attempt to designate that which is truly Indian and that which is not. In such a context, the politics of indigenous representation can circumvent the logic of a corrective or restorative justice under the aegis of the Sovereign. To represent Indians thus becomes a contest not so much for the truth of Indianness (or for the thing itself). It rather constitutes a polemical act of appropriating the power to designate what that Indianness will allow and authorise within and without the liberal settler state – a state which, despite its attempt to self-supersede its own conditions of operation (to paraphrase Lorenzo Veracini), can nonetheless never be freed from the challenges, anxieties, and exigencies of Indianness.