You Don't Look Indian

Detail of Painting by Greg Deal.

During the recent American Anthropological Association meetings in Denver (Nov. 18-23, 2015) I took some time to visit the Denver Art Museum.  Leaving aside the touristic complements - it is a great museum- I was struck by the Native American art section, tucked discretely to the edges of the main complex. It is striking in its breadth and force of the works on display.

What caught my eye was the active installation by Greg Deal. He wasn't there during my visit but the studio and works underway touched on troubled issues of identity and who is the arbiter of our Indigenous identities.  This was an installation that gave me serious pause for thought.

All throughout my personal and professional life matters of my own social identity have lurked and disrupted. What child wants to be confronted with racialized slurs on the playground? More disruptive are the stories in families hidden in the background. It is as though they wait, like a malevolent being, for that moment to derange our sense of well being. Most people are familiar with these sorts of stories. Yet there is something about racialzied stories that intersect with and become entangled in the struggles of working class lives that feel heavy, they adhere to our own lives even as those childhood memories fade. One can close our eyes to these injuries but they adhere nonetheless.

It wasn't until I was in my late teens that my mother told my why it had been important to my father that I participate in Scouts. She told me this after some friends and I challenged what we felt was a racially discriminatory plan by our Scout Group's advisory committee.

My father sat at the dinner table saying nothing as my mother said "When your father was a boy his father took him up to the church to sign up for Cub Scouts. But within a few minutes of arriving your grandfather stormed out and took your father home saying that was  waste of time."

"Didn't want any half breeds," my father said.

"That's why we wanted you join Scouts," my mother said.

That was it. That was the story. There is so much more.  If only racial violence and discrimination was about joining or not joining Boy Scouts. As I grow older I have been able to review in my mind the many stories told to me, the things I have witnessed, the half finished accounts, the fragments of thought and see in them the violence of self doubt and self hatred engendered by the settler. Writing about this past, especially as it intersects with my present, is one way to excise the ghosts of racism and violence.

Several decades later I was sitting down with an uncle of mine. We were working together on a project concerning aboriginal rights and title in the Prince Rupert area. In preparation for a series of interviews with elders and hereditary leaders we were discussing the various questions we wanted to ask, how to best phrase them in our Indigenous language, and what issues best left to another time.

"Can you think of any special places, areas of town important to know about?"

"Well, my father always told us that when we got off the boat here at Cow Bay, to walk straight up town along 3rd. He told us about places not to go, where we need to keep away from. Some parts of town you had to stay away from. It wasn't safe."

From a conversation about traditional territory we shifted seamlessly to a story about navigating a dangerous settler landscape and keeping safe.

Racism is more than discrimination, it's a transposition of the landscape that we have sprung from. Racism is about challenging our right to name our places and to name ourselves. In the same manner that a new grid of markers and names have been laid overtop of our Laxyuup (land/home), so too settlers are constantly trying to lay new names and markers upon our very bodies.  "You don't look Indian. . ."

Greg Deal's art confronts playfully, sarcastically, pointedly, ironically, the hypocrisies and violence of the settler and their society.  Coming across his installation in Denver was a breath of fresh air that took me away from the injuries of race and class and allowed me to laugh with him at this common pain we feel as Indigenous people today.

NWC Diorama Denver Art Museum

Navigating Collegial Waters

"It's the same everywhere," a trusted mentor said to me many years ago. We were chatting over coffee after spending time listening to conference papers.  I'd been complaining about the run of the mill academic politics.  In his trade mark fashion my mentor cut right to the chase, "Go into your class room, close the door, and get on with your teaching. Write, research, and ignore the politics.  It doesn't get any better then where you are."

I wasn't really willing to believe him, our department was moving toward a reasonably polite, but stressed, parting of the ways between Sociology and Anthropology. The grass looked greener at a lot of different places.  I listened to him anyway, hunkered down, did my academic work, found my research feet, and looking back at it I realize it was one of the best pieces of academic advice anyone ever gave me.

My mentor's advice took me through tenure and finally to promotion as a full professor.

His was hard advice to follow. It is really easy to get sucked into the meaningless webs of gossip, intrigue, accusation, and posturing that constitutes the white noise of departmental politics. There are times that I wished I had paid more attention to his advice as I found my self strangely isolated or pulled into maelstroms of conflict. There are other times when I thought I was following his advice but then got pulled up short when colleagues took a different view and acted in ways that seemed to suggest I was very much involved. Yet throughout all of this I have tended to effect what I considered to be disinterested engagement with departmental politics.  Doing so in fact has allowed me the space to focus on things that matter to me as an Indigenous scholar.

I  do a good deal of work on behalf of and within my home community. I also do work with and for other First Nations and Native American Tribes. This is exciting work.  It is also work that can be intensely conflictual. University politics still flame out on who can represent. But in community conflicts are just as likely to be between neighbouring communities as between communities and non-Indigenous people. The stakes are not based in academic prestige. No, in these conflicts real dollars, lives, and community wellbeing are on the table. These are not situations for the faint of heart. They are, however, important and have real implications for Indigenous people and also for our wider society.

It seems that the contemporary university has a difficult time coming to terms with these critical issues and concerns. Within the university we tend to focus on saying rather than doing. I confess to finding it hard to get excited about word smithing 40 word vision statements when many Indigenous people simply want dignity in one's life.  I want the university to count back home even as I want it to be a real place for debate, discussion, and learning. Yet, I am at times disappointed by the way things turn out.

I've written about these kinds of situations. In one paper, Standing on the Shore with Sabaan, I decry the continued use of our Indigenous communities as sources of data for outsiders to experiment with. In a second paper I discuss the history of collaborative research and point to ways in which anthropology and anthropologists still have a long way to come. In a more recent paper I appropriate anthropological techniques and subsume them fully within my own Indigenous perspective calling attention to the blindness of non-Indigenous colleagues. These are works that can offend and for that I do not apologize: why is the colonized always asked to apologize to the colonizer?

True, there is something about an assertive and vindicationist Indigenous perspective that challenges fellow travelers and opponents alike. It compels me to develop a more interested engagement in university politics.   Universities need to be safe places for Indigenous peoples, not battle grounds. But, as our African American cousins are showing us throughout the US universities are not safe spaces for the colonized.  We must first engage in order to make over the university.

Almost 20 years after receiving my mentors advice I realize that part of his directive to close the door on departmental politics was so that I could focus on what it really means to be an Indigenous scholar navigating the foreign waters of the western academy. Let me assure you it can be done: I've managed so far.  It can be a rough ride; like  a boat running with a following sea with the threat that we might swamp with each roll.  But with the armour of position, and such little power it might accord me, I shall now turn my gaze onto the mundane word of academic politics so that those who come after me might never experience the same obstacles and injuries my generation has.

UBC Legal Counsel Responds to Moral Rights Question

[This is in response to my concerns about UBC's Moral Rights Waiver in publication agreements. See previous post here.]

Oct 26, 2015
From: Lai, Hubert

Dear Charles:

Thank you for your e-mail of September 7, 2015 expressing your concerns with regards to a moral rights clause contained in the BC Studies Manuscript Publishing Agreement.

As you know, UBC has provided you with an exemption from the moral rights clause, and I understand that BC Studies published your work in its October 30 issue.  In addition to providing this exemption, I would like to also respond to your request for an explanation as to why UBC includes a moral rights clause in its Manuscript Publishing Agreement template.

Moral rights are category of rights granted under the Canadian Copyright Act (RSC 1985, c. C-42).  Section 14.1 of the Copyright Act defines these rights (and the effect of a waiver) as follows:

Moral rights
        14.1 (1) The author of a work has, subject to section 28.2, the right to the integrity of the work and, in connection with an act mentioned in section 3, the right, where reasonable in the circumstances, to be associated with the work as its author by name or under a pseudonym and the right to remain anonymous.
No assignment of moral rights
        (2) Moral rights may not be assigned but may be waived in whole or in part.
No waiver by assignment
        (3) An assignment of copyright in a work does not by that act alone constitute a waiver of any moral rights.
Effect of waiver
        (4) Where a waiver of any moral right is made in favour of an owner or a licensee of copyright, it may be invoked by any person authorized by the owner or licensee to use the work, unless there is an indication to the contrary in the waiver.

Moral rights protect the "integrity" or an author's work and the right "where reasonable in the circumstances" to be, or not be, associated with the work.  Under Section 28 of the Copyright Act an author may bring a claim for infringement of his or her moral rights. "Moral rights", in addition to copyright, are therefore a part of the bundle of intellectual property rights dealt with under the Canadian Copyright Act.

Publication of an author's work requires that UBC comply with the Copyright Act.  In particular, to publish a work, it is necessary for UBC's journals to obtain either an assignment or license of an author's copyright in the work.  However Section 14 of the Copyright Act makes it clear that such an assignment or license alone does not confer a right or license with regards to an author's moral rights.
 Without an express waiver of such moral rights, UBC's journals could therefore face the risk of possible legal claims for infringement of an author's moral rights.  For example, such claims could be alleged to arise from a journal's:

• ordinary editing of the author's (or authors') manuscript for publication;                     
• reformatting of the published work for publication in other media; or
• digesting or précising of the work for an index or for archival purposes.

Furthermore, it is also possible that an author's moral rights could be asserted to inhibit a journal's ability to publish a formal correction or retraction in connection with a previously published work. This could be of particular concern in cases where the published work has more than one author.

To avoid such disputes UBC’s journals include a waiver of moral rights in their publishing agreement templates. In doing so, UBC is not unusual, as many other publishers include similar wording in their publishing agreements. To balance these legal concerns against the concerns which you have raised, we have also maintained a policy of considering, on a case by case basis, exemptions from the moral rights clause.

Finally, I would like to emphasise that UBC and its journals are strongly committed to ensuring that authors are fully credited for their publications.  UBC recognizes that authorship is very important to the academic reputation of individuals who submit their work for publication and that correctly attributing authorship is essential to the scholarly process.  The inclusion of a moral rights clause in the publishing agreement template was never intended to detract from these principles. To affirm this we are reviewing the language in the publishing agreement template with a view to clarifying that the moral rights clause is not intended to diminish an author's right to be associated with their published work.

I hope that this letter provides you with a better understanding of the reasons for including the moral rights wording in UBC's journal publishing agreement.

Regards,

Hubert
_________________________________________________________
Hubert Lai, Q.C.
University Counsel
The University of British Columbia
6328 Memorial Road
Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z2
Tel: (604) 822-0687
Fax: (604) 822-8731
E-mail: hubert.lai@ubc.ca
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