Jonathan Schell is turning my crank these days. His latest book, The Unconquerable World is a stunning survey of the efficacy of non-violent action as it tore down the institutions of British and Soviet Imperialism in the 20th century.
What I’ve been getting out of the book is a bunch of springboards for my current thinking on freedom, decolonization, and organizational and community life. Starting today you’ll read a series of posts here inspired by Schell’s writing, and more often by the writing of his sources.
I’ll start here with a quote from Schell, which begins with four lines of verse from Kipling:
And before the cannons cool,
They walk unarmed by twos and threes,
to call the living to school.
As this practice of massacre to educational uplift suggests, the imperial policies of the European democracies were founded on a thoroughgoing contradiction. Claiming democracy and national independence, they denied it to the colonial peoples, who unsurprisingly resolved the contradiction in favour of independence.
— Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World p. 66
The image of the survivors being led away to school is absolutely heartbreaking. As you may know, in Canada, this took the form of residential schools in which First Nations children were herded and scrubbed inside and out. They were thoroughly indoctrinated in the ways of European Christian culture, from the language to the prayers and, most importantly, right down to the indoctrination into the very process of colonial life. The kind of process embodied by the archetype of the expert standing at the front of the room and the audience being empty vessels to be filled with the God given knowledge of the teacher. There was no acknowledgement that there was already an important understanding of learning, knowledge, leadership and expertise in First Nations communities, except perhaps in the negative; why try so hard to “cleanse” these kids if there wasn’t a powerful draw to an ancient and practical set of stories and knowledge that intimately tied these children to their land?
Ripping all of that apart, ripping kids from their families and their territories and ripping their psyches clean in two was a brutal act of colonial violence, the repercussions of which continue to haunt our communities to this day.
This collection of acts, in short, sums up colonization. Colonization CLOSES SPACE. It places limits around everything: fences on the land, permissions on behaviours, boundaries on language and cultural practice. To colonize, you must fence something in.
But I’m no pessimist. One can see that the long drive to colonize First Nations in Canada has resulted in some powerful openings. For if colonization is closing space, then freedom and liberation is opening space. And opening space is an irrepressible instinct. As Samuel Adams once said about the United States:
— Schell p. 65
Truth be told we are seeing a renaissance in First Nations communities and cultures these days. It is not a colonial uprising in the traditional sense of the word but perhaps more interesting than that. It is a broad opening of space, living in truth, and evolutionary movement that transcends both traditional First Nations cultures and mainstream Canadian society.
This renaissance combines a powerful position of asserting Aboriginal title in traditional territories (supported by the Delgamuukw court decision of 1997) with the demographic certainty that within 20 years cities like Prince Albert, Saskatchewan will be majority Aboriginal, making more and more public governments in Canada accountable to Aboriginal populations (as the Inuit elected to do with Nunavut in 1999). There is both an assertion of uniqueness with a reach towards transcendence of the status quo. Powerlessness is seeping away through court decisions, demographics, economics and Realpolitiks.
All of this is supported by an emerging sense of leadership (link is a .pdf) and opening that I can feel in the broader sense. Certainly there are daily struggles to be won and lost but in general the project is well underway, and every gain sustains and feeds that that spirit that Adams wrote about 230 years ago: the human intolerance for remaining a colonial subject.
