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Canadian anthropologists, the First Nations and Canada's self-image at the millennium

Abstract: Canadian anthropology attains its unique character by virtue of the discipline's embedding in debates over Canadian national identity and unity. This paper explores Canadian national identify in relation to the First Nations as a third founding force dissolving the binary of French vs. English. First Nations values, it is argued, must be incorporated within the reflexive self-image of Canada, both in interests of social justice for the First Nations and as part of what makes Canada a richly complex intersection of standpoints (ethnic, class, regional, etc.). As a result of this social and cultural complexity, Canada is ideally poised to meet the challenges of globalization and Canadian anthropologists are well-situated to mediate and explicate this process.Resume: L'anthropologie canadienne acquiert sa distinction du fait de l'insertion de la discipline dans des debats sur l'identite et l'unite nationale canadienne. Le present article explore l'identite canadienne par rapport aux Premieres Nations comme une troisieme force fondatrice tendant a dissoudre la tension binaire entre francais et anglais. Il soutient que les valeurs des Premieres Nations doivent etre incorporees a l'image que le Canada projette de lui-meme, a la fois dans l'interet de la justice sociale pour les Premieres Nations et en tant que composante de ce qui fait du Canada une intersection de perspectives d'une grande richesse (ethnique, de classe, regionale, etc.). Comme resultat de cette complexite sociale et culturelle, le Canada est place dans une situation ideale pour faire face aux defis de la globalisation et les anthropologues canadiens sont bien places pour mediatiser et expliquer ce processus.The Canadian national character has consistently denied simple definition. Politicians, civil servants, historians, literary scholars, and ordinary citizens alike bemoan the inherent complexities and contradictions of the Canadian predicament while simultaneously defending the Canadian way of life against all external critique. Paradoxically, Canadians seem to take pride in not naming or pinning down their common sense of identity.Canada's difference, implicitly measured in relation to the United States, often appears nearly invisible. At least on the surface, its culture is non-exotic and its variability can be subsumed under the overarching binary of French versus English. The unintelligibility of the not-quite-other plays out within anthropological discourse, in internal politics, and in international relations. From an American standpoint, disparity in economic power discourages intense strategic attention to aligning Canadian policies with American interests; compliance can usually be taken for granted. From a Canadian point of view, however, dependency on the United States is the salient reality of everyday life, the national nightmare.A brief examination of some representative Canadian versions of the so-called national unity or national identity debate will demonstrate how integral the First Nations, and a more general acknowledgment of internal diversity, are to Canada's vision of itself. We will then turn to how this anthropologist has come to think about Canada as an anthropological problem.(f.1) A characteristic anthropological (that is, cross-cultural and comparative) framework focusses on the oddity of Canada, defamiliarizing the national imagination through ethnographic examination of some of the country's multiple and crosscutting constituent communities. From such a perspective, Canadian social cohesion resides precisely in the intersecting binaries which divide Canada along multiple axes. The nation itself consists in a working out of the implications of these variable standpoints, defined by situationally specified contrasts and subject to shift of position at a moment's notice--or so it may seem to the hapless outsider attempting to get a handle on how things work. Once one stops expecting alliances and dimensions of identity to stand still, the underlying pattern within which shifts occur begins to emerge and the (external) observer's sense of aberration abates. …