Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry

The National Post has been running excerpts from Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, by Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard. The last one appears today.

I look for reviews of the book on Amazon. One reader suggests that Widdowson and Howard “get up in the morning and eat a dog’s breakfast of outmoded communist ideology and rotten anthropological theories washed down with strong racial prejudices inherited from their own unexamined colonial upbringings.” Another puts the matter more simply: “This book is not worth the paper it’s written on. It is but another ignorant screed by so-called experts. When in fact it is but drivel.”

And so it goes. I begin to get a sense of what the atmosphere must have been like at that Canadian Political Science Association meeting last spring at which Widdowson read her paper on the “aboriginal industry.” The session started as an orderly academic meeting we’re told, and ended in angry tears.

In 2004, Tom Flanagan’s First Nations, Second Thoughts got the same kind of reception. The editor of McGill-Queen’s University Press tells me that he has drawers-full of angry letters about Flanagan. Here’s what Joyce Green said about Flanagan (the same Green who features in the accounts of last spring’s CPSA meeting): “These aren’t second thoughts … They’re the same old first thoughts that the colonizers came with from Europe. It’s a celebration of the original arguments that supported the subordination of indigenous peoples.” (My source for Green’s comment is an article by Marci McDonald in The Walrus of October, 2004.)

It’s a central part of Widdowson and Howard’s argument to show that anthropologists, lawyers, bureaucrats, aboriginal leaders – the “aboriginal industry,” in short – attempt to preserve aboriginal culture in unchanging form because doing so yields concrete benefits in the form of government funding. The “industry” rejects books like Disrobing in an effort to preserve its livelihood. But Widdowson and Howard don’t argue that greed is the sole motif. They believe a disinterested Romantic vision at work. See the February 4th excerpt in the Post. The teaser reads: “Alienated by the Industrial Revolution, eighteenth-century Europeans romanticized primitive hunter-gatherers as Noble Savages. The cult they created persists to this day.”

What we’re looking at in the vituperative reaction to Disrobing and First Nations, Second Thoughts, is the centuries-old quarrel between Liberals and Romantics. We’re looking at a deep and largely unacknowledged cleavage in Canadians’ political thinking. Widdowson and Howard in Disrobing, and Flanagan in First Nations, are heirs of the seventeenth-century Liberal Enlightenment. They are arguing that everyone, regardless of race, origin, creed, is equally entitled to the benefits of participation in the economy and the political life of Western nations. In brief, they make the case for allowing members of the First Nations to assimilate to the broader Canadian society.

The critics adhere to the Romanticism of the eighteenth-century Counter Enlightenment. Though they sometimes contend that there are no universal norms by which cultures can be compared or ranked, just as often they suggest that pre-modern ways of living are superior to the modern. They seldom address the crucial fact that their ideas about “special rights,” diversity and multiculturalism cannot be reconciled with the central tenet of the Enlightenment, the argument for equal freedom.