PHLA11 Introduction to Ethics Lecture Slides (PDF)

PHL A11 Introduction to Ethics October 17 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Leanne Betasamosake Simpson A Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and activist whose ethic is grounded in the interconnections of land, life, and community. 2 ● Meet Simpson Lecture plan ● Idea 1: settler colonialism ● Idea 2:...

PHL A11 Introduction to Ethics October 17 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Leanne Betasamosake Simpson A Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and activist whose ethic is grounded in the interconnections of land, life, and community. 2 ● Meet Simpson Lecture plan ● Idea 1: settler colonialism ● Idea 2: Nishnaabewin (grounded normativity) 3 ● Recap of ideas 1 and 2 On Thursday… ● Idea 3: Nishnaabeg anticapitalism ● The midterm exam 4 ● Simpson was raised in Wingham, Ontario. Her mother was Indigenous, her father of Scottish ancestry (which meant, under the Indian Act, that her mother’s—and her own—Indian status was revoked). ● Simpson is an award-winning author, poet, and musician. Her books include: ○ Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back ○ As We Have Always Done ○ The Accident of Being Lost (a poetry collection) ○ Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (a novel) 5 Simpson is a member of the Michi Saagig (Mississauga) part of the Nishnaabeg (Anishinaabe) First Nation. The ancestral territory of the Michi Saagig is the northern shore of Chi’Niibish (Lake Ontario). Indigenous territories didn’t have fixed boundaries, and different nations often shared the same lands. Visit native-land.ca for a visualisation of overlapping territories of Indigenous nations. Map from Wikipedia 6 Simpson was active in Idle No More, an Indigenous protest movement that formed in 2012 in response to a federal bill (C-15) that eroded environmental protection laws and Indigenous sovereignty. 7 We’re reading parts of Simpson’s book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017). 8 Simpson’s big idea 1: Settler colonialism 9 Two types of colonialism Extractive colonialism Settler colonialism Extracting resources and/or human labour from colonized territories to generate wealth for colonial powers. Displacing Indigenous populations to secure new territories for settler populations. Examples: The “scramble for Africa” and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Examples: British and French settlement in North America, Australia and New Zealand. This isn’t a sharp distinction: there are many mixed cases. Canada’s early colonial history was extractive, centred on the fur trade. 10 Simpson begins by describing life for the Michi Saagig before colonialism: ➔ The Michi Saagig fished salmon and eels from the great lakes, harvested wild rice and maple syrup (sugar bush), and hunted deer and other wild animals. ➔ “Our way of living was designed to generate life—not just human life but the life of all living things. Michi Saagig were travelers; we rarely settled, and this was reflected in our politics and governance, in our diplomacy with other nations, and even in the protection of our land” (3). 11 “Over the past two hundred years, without our permission and without our consent, we have been systematically removed and dispossessed from most of our territory. We have fought back as our homeland has been stolen, clear-cut, subdivided, and sold to settlers from Europe and later cottagers from Toronto. The last eels and salmon navigated our waters about a hundred years ago. We no longer have old-growth white pine forests in our territory. Our rice beds were nearly destroyed. All but one tiny piece of prairie… has been destroyed. Most of our sugar bushes are now under private, non-Native ownership” (4). 12 “We live with the ongoing trauma of the Indian Act, residential schools, day schools, sanatoriums, child welfare, and now an education system that refuses to acknowledge our culture, our knowledge, our histories, our experience” (5) If you’re unfamiliar with this history, here’s a helpful overview from UBC. “The Scoop” by Kree artist Kent Monkman 13 A shifting series of processes Later in the book, Simpson describes settler colonialism as “a series of processes for the purposes of dispossessing” (45). ➔ The processes change over time, shifting from violent dispossession to the Indian Act to residential schools to “state-controlled processes of reconciliation” (46). ➔ But Simpson doesn’t think that the structure of settler colonialism has fundamentally changed: ◆ “The state uses its asymmetric power to ensure it always controls the processes as a mechanism for managing Indigenous sorrow, anger, and resistance, and this ensures the outcome remains consistent with its goal of maintaining dispossession” (45). 14 A vision of resurgence Simpson describes this history and process of settler colonialism as context for what she calls the resurgence of Indigenous ways of life. “This is a manifesto to create networks of reciprocal resurgent movements with other humans and non-humans radically imagining their ways out of domination, who are not afraid to let those imaginings destroy the pillars of settler colonialism” (10). Medicine Bear Healing Sick Person (1979) by Ojibwe artist Norval Morrisseau 15 Settler colonialism: study questions Interpretative questions (about what the author means): What is settler colonialism? How has settler colonialism shaped present-day Ontario, in Simpson’s telling? What does Simpson mean when she calls settler colonialism “a series of processes for the purposes of dispossessing”? Critical questions (about whether the author makes a good argument): Which parts of this text stand out to you to the most? Why? 16 Simpson’s big idea 2: Nishnaabewin (grounded normativity) 17 Nishnaabewin is “all of the associated practices, knowledge, and ethics that make us Nishnaabeg and construct the Nishnaabeg world” (23). To explain this idea, she draws on a concept from Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard: grounded normativity. “Normativity” = an ethic or way of living. So what does it mean for a normativity to be “grounded”? 18 In Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Coulthard writes: “Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of land—struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way. The ethical framework provided by these place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge is what I call ‘grounded normativity’” (60). 19 Aspects of Nishnaabewin For Simpson, Nishnaabewin is ethic of connect and responsibility, an “ecology of relationships”(8). This includes connections to, and responsibilities for, non-human life and the natural environment. “Our nationhood is based on the idea that the earth gives and sustains all life, that ‘natural resources’ are not ‘natural resources’ at all, but gifts from Aki, the land. Our nationhood is based on the foundational concept that we should give up what we can to support the integrity of our homelands for the coming generations. We should give more than we take” (8-9). 20 Aspects of Nishnaabewin Part of this ethic is a norm against waste or excess. “Going back, even one generation in my family, I see a way of life that was careful, frugal, full of making and self-sufficiency, and one that frowned upon waste, surplus, overindulgence” (78). This value of making is expanded on in another passage: “Living is a creative act, with self-determined making or producing at its core. Colonized life [in contrast] is so intensely about consumption that the idea of making is reserved for artists at best and hobbies at worst…” (23). Simpson uses the concept of making quite broadly, to refer to “making politics, education, health care, food systems, and economy” (23-4). 21 These ethical lessons are often communicated through stories, passed down in an oral tradition. Indigenous legal scholar John Borrows argues that these stories are sources of law: they contain principles to guide the community. ➔ An important difference to European law: anyone, not just the judges, is positioned to interpret (and debate the interpretation) of the principles in the stories. ➔ An example (from Borrows’s book Recovering Canada): Bears, Bees et al v. Rabbits 22 Aspects of Nishnaabewin Simpson also stresses that the ethic of Nishnaabewin is flexible or fluid. “Our ethical intelligence is ongoing; it is not a series of teaching or laws or protocols; it is a series of practices that are adaptable and to some degree fluid… I don’t know it so much as an ‘ethical framework’ but as a series of complex, interconnected cycling processes that make up a non-linear, overlapping emergent and responsive network of relationships of deep reciprocity, intimate and global interconnection and independence, that spirals across time and space” (24). “Its strength is measured by its ability to take care of the needs of the people, all the peoples that make up the Nishnaabeg cosmos,” which includes “plant and animal nations” (24). 23 Notice that Simpson describes both Nishnaabewin and settler colonialism as processes that change and adapt, but for different purposes. “Our [Nishnaabeg] way of living was designed to generate life—not just human life but the life of all living things… Stable governing structures emerged when necessary and dissolved when no longer needed” (3). “Settler colonialism as a structure necessarily has to shift and adapt in order to meet the insatiable need of the state for land and resources… The intention of the structure of colonialism is to dispossess” (46). 24 Nishnaabewin: study questions Interpretative questions (about what the author means): How does Simpson understand the concept of “Nishnaabewin”? What are the different aspects of this idea? How does the concept of “grounded normativity” help to explain Nishnaabewin? Critical questions (about whether the author makes a good argument): Are you persuaded by the contrast Simpson draws between Nishnaabewin and settler colonialism? Could non-Nishnaabeg people take valuable lessons from her Indigenous ethic? In what ways does Simpson’s presentation of Nishnaabewin compare and contrast with the other ethical theories we have studied in this course? 25