This book goes inside Aboriginal self-government negotiations in Northwest Territories, Canada. It is about much more. At the heart of Finding Dahshaa, is the search for justice and reconciliation. The arguments made in this book are bold and pointed. Irlbacher-Fox argues that a just Canadian society will not be achieved until the settler-controlled state discontinues the practice of relegating indigenous suffering, knowledge and ways of life to the past. Indigeneity is not a historical construct stubbornly resisting modernization, she states; it is a thoroughly contemporary world view.
According to the author, pressure by the state for Indigenous change and modernization errs in two ways. First, casting injustice as a historical problem does not allow contemporary agents of the state to recognize how persisting injustices continue to act as causal agents in the creation of present-day suffering. Second, government policy intent on modernization only seeks to perpetuate a fundamentally unjust relationship based on colonialism.
The theoretical solution proposed by Irlbacher-Fox is to examine more carefully the sinews of suffering. To that end, the term “social suffering” is introduced to the literature on Aboriginal–state relations in Canada and Indigenous–settler relations generally. Social suffering is an analytical category intended to displace terminology such as social dysfunction, which “distance[s] the state's causal role in suffering and present[s] that suffering as a rationale for ongoing state intervention” (11). Alternatively, the term social suffering “recognizes that the social pathologies endemic to Indigenous peoples are the reasonably expected result of ongoing injustice and are not a dimension of indigeneity” (30).
The political consequences of failing to distinguish between these two distinct concepts are convincingly demonstrated over three empirical chapters in which the reader is taken inside NWT self-government negotiations on matters such as resource revenue sharing, child and family services, and jurisdiction over language and culture. Anyone who has worked or studied in a post-colonial political environment will respond to these chapters. Consider remarks made by one government official: “The abuse and damage issue is hard to take. I completely understand how it is so present all the time—they are not wrong to raise it… I can't do anything about what happened—I'm there to negotiate self-government” (114). Statements such as this are hard-hitting and, as a result, this book cannot be read without experiencing a certain level of discomfort.
Enter the title of this book. Dahshaa is a Gwich'in word for a type of dried rotted spruce wood used in the Dene cultural practice of tanning moose hides. The author's reflections on hide tanning are provided in the second chapter as well as in field notes at the end of each subsequent chapter. The tanning ritual is intended to ground the “discourse analysis, narrative evidence, and ethnographic description” (2). Moose hide tanning serves the author as a “cultural referent” to contextualize self-government negotiations. The author tells us that tanning moose hides is hard work, and that finding dahshaa in the bush requires considerable experience, knowledge, and patience, as formidable a task as reconciliation. Although this is an innovative device and the accounts are insightful, the field notes can be distracting and the metaphor sometimes feels forced.
Some of the political analysis presented in this book is hard to accept. For example, the claim that “Indigenous peoples in Canada often have had to rely on civil disobedience to draw government and public attention” (55) undermines the considerable constitutional change achieved by Indigenous peoples in Canada through incredibly patient negotiations and sophisticated legal persuasion.
Often the arguments carry a tone of advocacy rather than dispassionate inquiry. For example, Aboriginal negotiators are referred to by their first names and have rich personal histories, but negotiators for the territorial or federal government are portrayed as faceless bureaucrats. Government negotiators are constrained by rigid formal mandates, while the mandates of Aboriginal negotiators are portrayed as responding to community needs. Perhaps it would be more valuable to view government (including Aboriginal government), not as an institution for social good, but as a political institution, that does some social good, but where policies and mandates are conceived, in part, to advance the interests of political actors.
Given that this book is directed towards “policy makers, scholars, and activists” (12), the prescriptions advanced in the concluding chapter seem surprisingly uncertain as to the ultimate position of the author on a viable future policy framework. Although the author claims to “part ways” with those who view modern treaties as colonial traps, she then endorses the “Indigenous resurgence paradigm” as the way forward (see 164 and 169). Yet, overall, this contradiction is a minor shortcoming and does not diminish the valuable contribution made by this book. And perhaps it is only further confirmation that finding dahshaa indeed requires patience. In Finding Dahshaa, Irlbacher-Fox has offered an original and thought-provoking conceptual tool to help us in our search for meaningful reconciliation.
