Re-Centring Indigenous Ideas

Canada deliberately echoes—with a strategic difference—Tom Flanagan’s contro-versial book First Nations? Second Thoughts, which argued against Aboriginal self-determination. Almost one decade later, this new collection of essays resoundingly displaces the unmitigated Eurocentrism of Flanagan’s assimilationist agenda by asserting the primary importance of Indigenous epistemologies and intellectual debate in Canada. In particular, the volume is concerned with the broad reach of Indigenous thought, examining its impact “on Canadian public discourse ” and in “public institutions ” (1). Respecting the capacious potential of Indigenous thought to exceed the limits of disciplinary boundaries, the book features the work of a range of intellectuals writing from within and beyond the fields of education, his-tory, anthropology, health, and Indigenous politics and governance. First Nations, First Thoughts also attends to the varied locations of intellectual labour, highlight-ing contributions from writers working within (and often negotiating multiple positionalities across) academia, government and Indigenous cultural and political institutions. In her introduction, editor Annis May Timpson, director of the Centre of Cana-dian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, outlines the objectives and organiza-tion of the collection. The essays, Timpson asserts, collectively “encourage ” readers “to look closely at the development of Indigenous thought, to consider its impact on Canada, to assess current realities of integrating Indigenous thought into Canadian institutions, and to pursue intellectual interpretations that take Aborig-inal perspectives into full account ” (14). In this context, the collection aspires to nothing less than furthering “the ongoing process of decolonization in Canada” (1). While such goals are urgent and laudable, some of the language Timpson employs to frame this project—namely, the repeated invocation of the terms “inte-gration ” and “absorption ” (in phrases such as “the institutional absorption of Indigenous thought”)—does not do justice to the stakes of the task at hand (3). In

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