Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 248 pages. ISBN 978-0-8166-7965-2. $22.50 USD paperback.The content and substance of Glen Sean Coulthard's book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, not only yields some thought-provoking observations but also provides the reader with number of compelling arguments that force us to consider and at times reconsider issues related to colonial practices, Aboriginal identity, self-determination and ultimately, Aboriginal peoples' sovereignty. Coulthard does not shy away from the pressing and controversial practices of Aboriginal recognition politics across Canada, as he builds convincing (albeit at times somewhat arduous) argument that the contemporary liberal manifestations that strive for recognition serve to merely reflect colonialist outcomes.Among the strengths of Red Skin, White Masks is its intense and prothe longed analysis of the concepts of power and tension as they relate to contemporary and historical settler/colonial relationships in Canada. The author positions Aboriginal worldviews related to the sanctity of land to juxtapose the problematic nature of interactions between colonial relations of power and the respective implications on the identity of First Nations people. By interrogating multiple theoretical lenses (of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal thinkers, I might add) Coulthard's analysis is characteristic of thoughtfully developed logic that brings the reader to comprehensive examination of difficult topics. Fanon's critiques and Hegel's dialectic are complemented by references to Taylor's politics of recognition, Foucault's views on discourse and identity, and Benhabib's political theory that together serve as reliable contexts from which to consider the various cases presented in the book from the post-1969 history of colonial and Aboriginal relations in Canada. The historical body of the work is well-suited for the academic and rational observations that the author shares in each chapter. We learn, as Coulthard's arguments evolve, about the adverse consequences of derogatory internalized images, the piercing effect of the settler's gaze on Aboriginal societies, and the often self-serving practices of the colonial government that continue to marginalize Aboriginal communities. The author is frank in his discussion of the consequences that various land claims shaped by neocolonial ambitions have had in northern Canada. Coulthard very effectively sprinkles the wisdom of elders and Aboriginal scholars (Alfred, Montour and Simpson, to name few) to describe the ideological tensions that arise when issues of Aboriginal self-determination threaten colonial interests.Relatedly, Coulthard challenges the internalized perceptions of some Aboriginal peoples who have redefined self-determination from perspective rooted in land to one of market and capital values, as he does the tension between the human rights of Aboriginal women and the broader right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. The final chapter of the book represents paradigm shift of sorts as the authorial voice intentionally reframes the previous discussions in what is self-described as a resurgent approach to Aboriginal decolonization; interestingly, Coulthard incorporates Marxist understanding of class structure as platform from which to discuss specific case-issues and bring to light different manifestations of tension and resolve that are interwoven in the previous chapters. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".