Regarding Minister Robinson's public comments
"A crappy piece of land." A letter to the Premier.
This is a letter written to BC’s Premier, David Eby. This version is slightly longer than that sent as I have added additional explanatory and contextual material. The core point and message remains unchanged.
Dear Premier Eby,
I’m writing in response to Minister Robinson’s recent remarks about pre-1948 Palestine, as reported by the CBC, and their apparent intervention in a faculty dismissal.
I write as Professor of Anthropology at UBC, also as a First Nation person born and raised in BC. Much of my professional research and teaching has involved the examination of colonialism and its legacy for First Nations people. I often encounter non-Indigenous people who articulate beliefs about the emptiness of BC before settlement, the lack of civilization of the pre-settlement populations, and about the ‘benefits’ (like residential schools) settlement has brought [I call this colonial folklore1]. When I listened to Minister Robinson’s comments about Israel/Palestine I hear a version of the same colonial story that I have grown up hearing about my people, only this time it was not about my family and my people, but about another people who were said to live in “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.” The idea that those settlers were themselves refugees was mentioned by the Minister by way, it seems, to underscore how marvellous the work of colonial betterment was.
I appreciate the Minister apologized for their ‘flippant’ comment. However, upon viewing the footage over and over I do not see or hear a flippant person, instead there is a sincere, authentic, and serious Minister of the Crown expressing a colonial settler narrative of justification. As a First Nation citizen I have lost confidence in the Minister to effectively carry out their responsibility for post-secondary education. The Minister has allowed their personal and inaccurate beliefs to take a larger role in public then the commission of their duties to manage a publicly accessible quality post-secondary education system open and welcoming to all be they settler or Indigenous.
I am also concerned by the chill on academic freedom that I have personally observed in the workplace at UBC since the Minister began communicating to university and college presidents following the brutal Hamas attack. In various ways faculty have been advised to be quiet and to say nothing that might be inferred as empathetic of the residents of Gaza or the wider Palestine. It has been made know that we may be disciplined for our public statements that are considered distasteful by the Minister. The Minister plays an important role in shaping university administrative practices (formally and informally) and their public views cast a long shadow over administrators wishing to be in the good graces of the government.
It is particularly important that a Minister of the Crown does not involve themselves directly in operational matters of a university or college or create the impression that they have. Universities are not supposed to be partisan, nor should the government of the day intervene beyond setting general policy expectations.
The Minister’s public statements about dismissing an instructor further diminishes my confidence in the Minister’s ability to conduct their duties and obligations unfettered by their personal beliefs. Academic freedom allows for expression of sentiments and perspectives and the conducting of research and teaching across a wide spectrum within the law, even if we find what a colleague says or does distasteful or discomforting. Public statements from a Minister of the Crown calling for an instructor to be dismissed creates an environment of fear.
I note that on social media Bill Tieleman has spoken to the good work Minister Robinson has done and to their dedication.
I share this admiration for the Minister’s past work and have publicly commended the Minister on their empathy and approach.
Just the same there are moments when, despite the good work and care we may have accomplished and demonstrated, we should really step aside. I would humbly suggest this is just such a moment for Minister Robinson.
Yours,
hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies)
Vancouver Point Grey constituent.
cc. Minister Robinson; Mr Bill Sundu, Chair UBC BoG; Constituency Assistant for MLA Eby
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Disclosure: this is written in my personal capacity. Occupational information provided by way of identification only. In no way is this to be taken as representing (or having been approved by) UBC or any of the university governance bodies I may sit on.
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BC Green Party MLA, Adam Olsen published a statement on February 4, 2024 that very nicely elaborates on some of the same points I make in my letter about the offensive colonial folklore that is implicated in Minister Robinson’s comments:
“Premier @dave_eby must address the deep-rooted issues in Minister Robinson's remarks. Her "crappy land" comment isn't just hurtful, it's a reflection of a racist ideology that fuelled colonialism in BC for centuries.”
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Last fall I was teaching an introductory anthropology course. Mid-way through the course Hamas attacked Israeli communities adjoining Gaza killing over 1000 people in the few hours of their attack. It was and remains a terrible moment, a moment that may be explained but one that cannot be excused. During this time I restrained from commenting and requested that the TAs working with me keep their focus on our course content.
As part of my pedagogical philosophy I consider discomfort part and parcel of learning. Learning, especially in a subject like anthropology, will disquiet, upset, and make uncomfortable any learner as we are asked to confront our core understandings and cherished beliefs. That said there is no virtue in upsetting learners just for the sake of upsetting them.
In a ‘A Pedagogy of Care in Troubled Times’ I suggest that “we need to reflect very carefully on the subject matter we present, especially if it deviates from the core content of our course. What purpose does it serve to discuss an issue that might inflame emotion and lead to upset? Is there a pedagogical reason to do this? If there is a solid reason, then what mechanisms do we have to manage the discussion? Are there ways to achieve the same learning outcome by use of different subject matter?”
Ministers of the Crown should also reflect on these matters. Many don’t. In ‘normal’ times it might not really matter that politicians utter all manner of unfounded, unreasonable, and inaccurate things, but in the matter of the Israel/Hamas war underway in the Levant one might expect a higher level of care and attention to detail than Minister Robinson has demonstrated.
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On the subject of settler colonialism I take an ambivalent view. In my comment ‘Settler, Settler Colonialism and the Indigenous,’ I outline the thorough empirical academic work that documents the myriad of ways Palestinians have been marginalized and discriminated against by the State of Israel. I mention this here to clarify the distinction between understanding colonialism as a tactic within capitalism vs the ontological belief in a thing called settler colonialism. I consider colonialism a political tactic -not a strategic end. That is colonialism needs to be understood within the wider social and political economic contexts. It is a tool of a large project, not the specific end goal.
In my comment I also briefly interrogate the idea that the experience of muslim Palestinians is conceptually equivalent to the experience of First Nations in Canada and the driving force is a thing called settler colonialism which is presented as a kind of strategic end. I consider the term flawed: “the term carries with it a fundamentally flawed analysis. A range of diverse experiences with particular histories are lumped together to imply a conceptual similarity that blurs important differences. … Settler colonialism places the emphasis on displacement and repeopling. It ignores the historical moment in which an act of colonialism may have occurred. It posits the primary contradiction of struggle as between settler and displaced. It ignores the class formation within both the colonial state and the the society of the displaced. It is a recipe for perpetual conflict in which there is no practical resolution. It is, almost, a natural outgrowth of a state that deliberately constrains, marginalizes, and displaces one people in favour of another.”
The flip side of settler colonialism is colonial folklore (see footnote for details). In the same way the concept of settler colonialism focusses on displacement, colonial folklore highlights an erasure of the past, a kind of forgetting and silencing, a diminishment of previous peoples, and a claim to have built something out of honest hard work while denying the underlying expropriation.
Minister Robinson’s account of a ‘crappy empty land’ and the miracle accomplishments of the State of Israel in making the land prosperous is a narrative firmly within the colonial genre.
From one of my ANTH100 lectures on colonialism. Colonial folklore is a pernicious culture. Yet it is subtle in its delivery of harm, often protesting that the colonial folklorist is himself the victim of harm. The colonial folklorist often fails to see his own privilege and entitlement and is quick to take offence.
Here I think of two classic works of anthropology. The first called the People’s Land is about white/Inuit relations in Canada’s arctic. In it anthropologist Hugh Brody documents the white colonial folklore in the north. These stories, Brody tells us are “Repeated, retold, reworked, they are a confused form of folklore: each storyteller shapes events and meanings according to his own preoccupations. … the teller of such stories does not attempt to judge accuracy. He is not concerned with the possibilities or niceties of objective validity; he has not studied the books and the articles. The stories and views expressed by northern Whites are the product of a living social context” in which they are the beneficiaries of occupying Inuit land and in the process, they see the legacy of their colonialism as being the faults of the Inuit themselves.
Michal Taussig, in his book that talks about (in part) the brutal colonial occupation of the Amazonian basin by settler colonialists says this: “What is put into discourse through the artful storytelling of the colonists, is the same as what they practised on the bodies of [the colonized].” This is the paradox of colonial contexts - colonizers present themselves as having some kind of divine right (think of American Manifest Destiny, for example) and often present themselves as unwarranted targets of abuse at the hands of the colonized.
By way of an example. In the early 1980s I took a women’s studies course at SFU - the precursor to today’s ‘gender studies’ programs. It had taken almost a decade at SFU for women scholars to organize and create a women studies program. It was bult on the foundation of a feminist theory that highlighted the role of men in subjugating, exploiting, and oppressing women. It was unusual to have any male students in the class - yet there were two of us. The prof, Eleanor Wachtel recently retired as CBC Radio’s host of Writers and Company, a position she had held since 1990. The TA, today know as Aaron H Devor, is a prof at U.Vic and a leading expert in trans-studies. The two of us men were tolerated but mostly ignored - which was fine. I still remember the books -Loving with a Vengeance (a feminist take on soap operas) and Margarete Atwood's’ then new book, the Handmaid’s Tale. At the time SFU allowed students to drop a class as late as ten weeks into the semester. I vaguely recall the other male student telling me I should go while the going was good, these women won’t grade fairly he said, they don’t listen to anything I say, they ignore me - it’s not a safe place to be. He felt uncomfortable, threatened, and defensive. He dropped the course rather than trying to hear the lesson’s being taught. I’m no saint in this story. Yes, I stayed in the class. I enjoyed it. But I also shared some of the same feelings of the other male student. The difference was I held my tongue. I thought about the lessons Wachtel and Devor shared with the class. I read the books and assigned papers. It was an important course that helped shape my thinking and who I subsequently became. Learning is like this - we often have to face truths about ourselves we might not like - but the folklore of colonialism is strong, even as it is based in half-truths and inaccuracies, rooted in denial.
A crucial aspect of this denial is to accuse the colonized and their supporters of being violent or racist while ignoring the inherent violence of the colonial dispossession built upon a foundation that itself denies the humanity of the colonized. Across the spectrum of social causes from the women’s movement to black liberation or Indigenous sovereignty those holding power often decry the assumed violence of the oppressed. As Michael Tausig puts it the settlers’ accounts of the violence of the colonized is the same as what they (the colonizers) practice on the bodies of the colonized.