Treaty and the Poetics of Social Transformation

Treaty and the Poetics of Social Transformation contends that treaties are important sites of collective, imaginative, and material struggle for anti-colonial social change in Canada. The Numbered Treaties are both crucial legal relationships and political concepts in critiques of Canadian settler colonialism. In this dissertation, I offer a historical materialist analysis of the Numbered Treaty agreements. I not only suggest that “we are all treaty people,” but, I ask: “how will the organization of Canadian social life need to change in order for non-Indigenous peoples to live treaties in meaningful ways?” By challenging colonial common-sense ways of interpreting treaty as a contract, I call into question the presumption that honoring treaty obligations is possible in the contemporary moment while also clarifying how Indigenous treaty visions are social critiques of the transactional logics of settler colonial capitalism. At the heart of the dissertation is what I term the social contradiction of treaty: on one hand treaties must be honored in accordance with their original spirit and intent; on the other the material conditions of settler colonial capitalism make this impossible. In the first half of the project, I create a framework for understanding this contradiction and then develop a method of reading able to make sense of its intricacies. The dissertation’s second half turns to works of contemporary Indigenous poetry in order to explore how this social contradiction plays out at the level of poetic form in the work of Billy-Ray Belcourt (Cree), Dallas Hunt (Cree), Emily Riddle (Cree), and Matthew Weigel (Denesuline / Métis). Drawing from Indigenous political science, Cree and Anishinaabe intellectual traditions, and Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism, I suggest that that there are two dominant primary ways of understanding treaty as a political concept and social form in the Canadian context: the relational and the transactional. In the first case, relational treaty visions are rooted in autonomous traditions of Indigenous governance and treaty making which are sublated into the language of sovereignty through treaty making with the settler-colonial state. In the second case, transactional treaty sensibilities are overdetermined by settler colonial capitalism’s central logics of abstraction, accumulation, and exchange. Through close readings of discourses in Indigenous studies and Marxian political economy, I elaborate the difference between relational and transactional interpretations of treaty in order to show that they are not different in a neutral way, but rather that they are animated by two fundamentally antagonistic ways of organizing social interdependence. In my framework, treaties are social and political forms that organize and arrange the content of social life. I contend that poetry is a privileged site to analyze the limits and possibilities of treaties because it is an literary category explicitly concerned with the relationship between form and content as well as how social relations are mediated through language. Against the violent harnessing of treaty by the settler-colonial state and its political economy of Indigenous (dis)possession, my dissertation argues for a reading of Indigenous poetics that disrupts settler colonialism’s articulation of treaty to capitalist grammars of property and pays attention to how Indigenous poets enact resurgent and decolonial visions of treaty that refuse the insidious logics of reconciliation and recognition that undergirds dominant discourses of treaty in Canada.

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