In Indigenous Nationhood Pamela Palmater describes some of the challenges facing Indigenous nations in the Canadian context. Structurally, the book is divided into five sections and compiled from her personal blog posts over the last decade. She has two central arguments. First, she argues that decolonization must occur at the individual and community level through consciousness-raising practices at the community level, which are guided by the various traditional practices of each nation. Second, she sees consensus-building as a process that must be reintroduced to Indigenous politics (3). Overall, Palmater contends that grassroots citizens within Indigenous communities and Canadian citizens must hold their respective leaders accountable for policy failures and broader injustices. The central concern of her book is the political relationship, which she argues must be a nation-to-nation relationship, has become one of subjugation and dispossession by the former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This review will examine her analysis of colonial racism, the politics of resurgence and the issues of gender-based violence. Foundationally, the work is an excellent primer for those who are not aware of trends in Indigenous Canadian politics over the last decade.
Palmater's book draws attention to a neoconservative political project that has been operating through the media, legislation and public discourse. Her critical discussion of the rhetoric of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, failure to enact the demarcate health care jurisdictional responsibility and mass overrepresentation of Indigenous men and women in prisons draws attention to the tensions this project is generating between Indigenous peoples and Canadians. Her critique of the rise of the neoconservative advocacy group, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, reflects a keen analysis of the rise of neoliberal and neoconservative backlash against Indigenous self-determination (22). Her discussion of the failure to implement an overarching federal-provincial framework for assessing health care funding points to numerous failures around child welfare and on-reserve health care. This trend, in particular, suggests the role structural racism plays in legitimizing this systemic gap within Canada's social safety net. By studying the connection between policy and racism she works to critically unpack how structural racism produces a direct impact on Indigenous peoples (93). Finally, Palmater conducts a thorough critique of the 79 per cent increase of men and 151 per cent increase of Indigenous women in custody from 2001–2011 (101). She attributes this to the tough-on-crime agenda and the numerous protests by civil liberties organizations. These three areas reflect the strength of her analysis. These three strands of argument work to illustrate a broader shift in relations between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state.
Her work reflects a critical engagement with Indigenous resurgence theory and charts a distinct way forward from other contemporaries. Resurgence theory represents a dialogue between various Indigenous scholars with regard to cultural rejuvenation and governance. Palmater's work distinguishes itself from other works in Indigenous politics by calling for a direct engagement with the state through political organizing and activism. She offers an alternate possibility from turning away from the state by arguing for the need to healing Indigenous nations and take back Indigenous nations from colonial elites while ensuring that the Canadian state is held accountable for socioeconomic and legal inequalities. Palmater's argument for organizing and democratic alliances represent a more expansive and open-ended set of political movements that can deal with different intersections of colonial power.
Her analysis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls reveals a number of policy failures. Palmater links the devaluation of Indigenous women under the Indian Act, single-mother headed Indigenous households, the rise of female incarceration and the rise of children in foster care as drivers of violence facing Indigenous women (130). She also sees the termination of funding for the Native Women's Association of Canada by the federal government as a political move by the federal Conservatives to block deeper research into violence against Indigenous women (130–31). She also discusses police reporting on violence against Indigenous women. Palmater critiques the various misidentifications of Indigenous women by police as a major limit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police attempts to measure the scale of the problem of violence against Indigenous women (146–147). In effect, her analysis challenges the credibility of the RCMP data as underrepresenting the scale of the problem.
Overall, Palmater provides an in-depth discussion of various trends across Indigenous-Crown relations over the last decade. She points to the rise of neoconservative policy and racism as key sites of division in Canadian politics. Her discussion of federal mismanagement of missing and murdered Indigenous women reveals multiple problems around data collection and enacting policy through consultation. Lastly, her theoretical engagement with Alfred's resurgence theory opens up a space for Indigenous grassroots activism and advocacy as well as a space for non-Indigenous Canadians to support Indigenous struggles for self-determination and challenging injustices. Her work proves extremely useful for deconstructing the political landscape of the last decade in an accessible and dynamic way.
