Review

Libby Porter, Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 192 pp.

Reviewer: Michelle LeBaron lebaron@law.ubc.ca

Stories are told, and retold, by victors. In Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning, Libby Porter challenges readers to consider how stories are understood, told and enacted in communities in ways that perpetuate colonial systems of privilege. Informed and legitimized by planning theory and practice, hegemonic relations between European settlers and indigenous peoples continue.

Dr. Porter looks at Canada, the United States, and Aoteoroa—New Zealand and Australia—all former British colonies where indigenous people were dispossessed. She does so with an acknowledged standpoint, aiming for congruence between her personal and political project of unlearning colonial culture and her methodology. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, she analyzes “practices of everyday life” (p.5) and “webs of significance” (p. 6) as they are situated and take on power in planning contexts. Her expressed objective to work from passionate interest and methodological rigor is largely met through her sensitivity to perspectives and unacknowledged, long-buried assumptions in the everyday practices of planning theory and practice.

Porter argues that the only way to defensibly meet the challenge she sets herself is through deconstructing the cultural ethos of planning itself. To do otherwise, she contends, would be merely to move playing pieces around on the same table. As an example, she points out that the current focus on bringing traditional and scientific knowledge into dialogue in the service of land management will always reproduce the subordination of traditional knowledge unless power relations themselves are up for renegotiation. Nor are readers let off the hook by recent trends toward collaborative planning and meaningful engagement of diverse parties in decision-making. Porter frames these trends as dangerous unless those with power—typically people of European descent aligned with institutions—are willing to unsettle their ways. It is not only ways of doing business that need to change, she argues, but also ways of conceiving and enacting relations to land and social production.

Provocatively, Porter defines culture as “structures of feeling” (p.12). The implications of defining culture in this way remain undeveloped, leaving readers reaching for elaboration. What are the implications of this definition and how do structures of feeling incorporate multiple dimensions of culture—time, ethos, patterns of thought, identity, and meaning-making processes—to name only a few? Porter’s thin definition of culture as centered in feeling is mirrored in her final plea for planning to proceed from a radical ethic of caring and love. These two references to positive affect seem rather stark in the context of the book, which overall adopts a voice of critical, analytic deconstruction. Porter’s passion about her post-colonial project is expressed in abstract and theoretical arguments that do not always meet her stated aim to unsettle existing approaches precisely because they fail to adequately address symbolic, relational and affective dimensions.

One of the chief contributions of this book is its continual return to the question, not of differences between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, but of the differences that differences make. Her accounts of the development of land tenure systems and mapping as political acts buttress this theme, demonstrating how European settlers privileged commodification, fragmentation and production-based utility in their approaches to occupying, managing and improving land. Her striking repetition of the insistence of European settlers in Australia that they had ‘discovered’ an empty land (terra nullius) underlines her thesis: that settler cultures have rendered indigenous people invisible in many ways over a long time. Her disturbing conclusion is unavoidable: the continuity of approaches that perpetuate unequal relations is maintained, in part, by planners and the social power they wield.

One central problem, as Porter acknowledges, is diversity within the subject groups. Indigenous people are diverse; their cultures are in constant flux and continual exchange with others around them. Settler populations, too, are in the midst of rapid change, as social and economic structures and relational cleavages are contested globally and locally. The economic crisis, in particular, has the potential to shift long-held assumptions about systems and relationships in settler-dominated societies, just as environmental crises spawn questions about how indigenous wisdom might have prevented some of the damage. Perhaps the very disruptions caused by rapid change and systemic strains can foster new opportunities for dialogue and recast processes for making and enacting policy among people with multiple metaphors about space, place and relations.  Porter is right that this promise would be realized if those with political and institutional power were willing to acknowledge the hegemony of their worldviews as constituting ‘normal and acceptable’ ways of managing land. As she recognizes, even if those in power were willing to examine the assumptions that animate their worldviews, the project of meaningfully engaging multiple worldviews in public decision-making is—at best—a work in progress.

Porter is alive to the danger of reifying images of indigenous people and their relations to space and place as distinct from settlers’. Yet her work strays into essentializing indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Her examination of processes related to the Wadi Wadi people and the Nyah Forest in Australia is a case in point. Porter’s account positions the Wadi Wadi people as more legitimate than some other indigenous counterparts, with their respective political positions correspondingly more and less legitimate. While it appears that the Wadi Wadi people were not included in meaningful shared decision-making in relation to the Nyah forest, Porter’s framing of the process casts them more as victims than agents, more as maligned heroes than complex and multi-positioned actors. Her work in this section would be strengthened by the inclusion of more voices from indigenous and non-indigenous people representing a spectrum of views about the contested activities in and around the Nyah Forest. Additionally, in her case study of the Clayoquot Sound/Meares Island conflicts in British Columbia, Porter falls victim to essentializing, attributing ecologically holistic values to indigenous people that have not been realized in practice.

Porter further develops her thesis by arguing that the habitual divide between environmental and cultural values, aligned with non-indigenous and indigenous interests respectively, perpetuates unequal power. She problematizes the definition of ‘sites’ as discrete locations, citing indigenous perspectives that sites may be diffuse areas still to be identified in the future, given incomplete inventories arising from the ill effects of colonialization and the subsequent need for comprehensive surveys. Similarly, Porter argues against ubiquitous approaches that freeze traditional interests at particular points in history while failing to recognize the ongoing dynamism and diversity of interests. Finally, she criticizes collaborative approaches to planning for not going deep enough to question buried assumptions that reproduce the hegemony of European ontologies and epistemologies. These examinations of the bases of planning and public policy decision-making raise some important and thoughtful questions. How the answers might be operationalized is not explored, but is vitally important to her argument.

Porter’s book precedes the new volume by Canadian historian Paulette Regan titled Unsettling the Settler Within. Regan uses her own experience as a descendent of European settlers and a federal government employee working on residential school reparations to deepen her account of the unsettling process. Read together, the two books complement each other well in their arguments and core concerns. Regan’s book does something that Porter’s does not; it not only identifies standpoint, it uses narrative to bring the standpoint alive. It is hard to imagine how the theoretical ideas Porter meticulously documents will manifest a field-changing revolution in practice. At the very least, her book – if taken on board by the planning profession – may generate more work for conflict resolution practitioners.

Unfortunately, Porter provides very little practical material for those who would like to unsettle planning practices. A short and diffuse section at the end of the book includes suggestions of how this might be accomplished without wrestling any of the demons that arise whenever policy and decision-making structures and frameworks are contested.

I anticipate that Porter’s book will be read by many of her fellow professionals who see themselves as well-intended and even as advocates for those whose identities and voices have been ignored. Setting aside the skepticism or defensiveness with which they may read her work, I wonder what it would mean if they were to take it seriously. Porter acknowledges that one unavoidable implication is that planners need to include more indigenous people—and their ideas about relations, place and space – in their ranks. Surely it is true that the planning discourse itself needs to be more permeable and adaptable to growing legal and social awareness of indigenous rights, and Porter’s discussion of the emergent Gariwerd/Grampian collaboration in Australia raises glimmers of hope. Anchoring the argument for (post)colonial approaches to planning in this example of relative success strengthens her work.

Even if these ideas are accepted as both sound and self-evident, the question remains how the settler majority of planners in the subject countries should conduct themselves. Should education and continuing study for professionals be directed to unsettling settler attitudes and practices? How would this be done, and by whom? Surely educational reform—even if successful—would be insufficient. Porter envisions a wholesale unsettling of the field of planning through reviewing and rethinking its cultural assumptions. In her advocacy, she fails to fully explore how planning is itself a practice embedded in legal, regulatory and policy structures that would need to change alongside planning education and practice to create the radical de-centering she advocates. As well, she fails to seriously engage the substantial literature on collaborative decision-making in ways that would reveal its potential contributions to the unsettling project.

Stories are told—and retold—by victors. Porter suggests a radical re-ordering of the victor identity. In doing so, she poses many questions that will spawn new questions as they are engaged. Her contribution to the field of planning and related areas of public decision-making is substantial. It would be even stronger if she made a clear case for a truly collaborative practice; at the end of the day, the book leaves the impression that indigenous people should re-emerge as victors, replacing colonizers’ hegemonic domination. Here lies the central challenge of the book: the need for co-existence between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples exists in all the countries about which she writes. Planners and publics urgently need to find ways to work meaningfully together in modalities that respect multiple systems of meaning, diverse identities and different worldviews. They need to bring nuance and complexity into their work in ways that do not reproduce unfair and exclusionary histories. In the end, Porter leaves this challenge unanswered.

Michelle LeBaron is Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Dispute Resolution at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

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The following reflections describe the experience of the authors at the protest of a columbus day parade in Denver in 2007. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, in which author Mark Freeland is a member, has engaged in protest of this parade since the late 1980s in alliance with numerous progressive social change groups. 2007 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the columbus day holiday, which originated in the state of Colorado. Author Julie Todd was among a number of students organized for the protest by Mark Freeland at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where they are both still doctoral students. Mark and Julie wrote these words in 2010. They used them as materials for a required course at the school called Identity, Power and Difference during one session of the course that deals with allyship and solidarity. The protest of the columbus day parade in Denver continues. For more information, go to: http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/ and http://www.colorado-aim.blogspot.com/.

Disclaimer: Language used in the publication below
might be considered offensive to some readers.[1]

Our stories tell us who we are.  They hold the past, present and future together, and give continuity and meaning to what might otherwise be isolated moments in time.  If my story as a Native woman has a theme, it is loss—of  Indian status, of visibility, of culture, of language and of resources.

My grandmother, Margaret Paul, grew up on the Lennox Island Reservation in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was sent to a Catholic residential school in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, where she and her sister, Muriel, were beaten for speaking Mi’kmaq, their native tongue.  In the 1930s, when my grandmother was thirteen, she and Muriel ran away and joined Bill Lynch’s Show, a travelling carnival and fair. Through the 1940s she ran a speakeasy from a converted barracks in Halifax. She didn’t tell her children they were native.  By the time I was born, in 1973, nobody in my family spoke Mi’kmaq.  I learned about my ancestors in school, as a brief unit in Canadian history.

I grew up on the land and lived in a house my father built from wood and tarpaper.  In the summer I carried buckets of drinking water from a spring and in the winter I melted snow in a pot on the stove to wash in. My parents supported us by selling handmade crafts and by occasionally growing marijuana.  Poverty taught me to see class oppression. My family’s criminality taught me to question authority, and to distinguish between what was illegal and what was immoral.  This perspective has been invaluable as an activist.

I discovered racism in 1979.  I had just turned five.  Our primary class was lined up in the hallway waiting to be led to the washroom.  The students of Mrs. Cameron’s grade three class stood next to us.  To me, these eight years olds seemed impossibly tall, mature and sophisticated.  As they went, Mrs. Cameron addressed Nikki, a girl with tan skin, “And wash your face while you’re down there,” she said. “I can’t tell if you’re dirty or if it’s the colour of your skin.”  Her statement would stay with me forever, as an example of the power of white supremacy.  In their view, to be brown was to be physically and morally tainted. As a woman with white skin, my Nativeness isn’t visible to others.  My grandmother often praised my skin as pretty and feminine, and warned me to avoid the sun, lest my true nature be revealed.  Her bias got me thinking about the connections between race and gender at an early age.  Being treated as white, while knowing that I wasn’t, has made me self-reflexive.  I’ve grown up with white privilege, yet also been aware of white supremacy which society insists whites to be blind to.  While my scholarly activism often examines Native racialization, I also deconstruct whiteness, which is too often permitted to pass unexamined as if it were a neutral state of being.

The realization of what I’ve lost due to of generations of government-mandated assimilation has been a gradual process for me.  For years, the most obvious effect was financial—without band funding I incurred $52,000 of student debt.  In my thirties I began to realize that I had also lost a cultural inheritance.  I speak only a few words of Mi’kmaq. My white mother has spent more time on the reservation than I have. Yet I’ve also been fortunate.  I know my Mi’kmaq name, have made quillwork birch-bark baskets and bobcat tooth necklaces with my father, and got to witness my parents take an active role in Native politics when I was a child. I grew up rural, and experienced the ties with nature that our traditions take as a given, but which many urban Natives have not experienced.  Even my family’s parenting style was decidedly Native. Reflecting upon these experiences has led me to change how I define “Mi’kmaq tradition.” I examine the ways my family has of doing things, and realize that these traditions are no less Native for being off the Rez. I think of the bravery it must have taken for my grandmother and her sister to leave their abusive school without knowing where they would go, and I try to embrace that bravery in myself.

Moving to Toronto for university took me 1,264 km (785 miles) from the Mi’kmaq nation, so I couldn’t simply stop into the Native Friendship Centre and be sure of meeting a Mi’kmaq elder. Without access to other Mi’kmaq people, I turned to academic sources of support.  I became a voracious reader, seeking out scholarly articles, books, websites and blogs that discussed the Mi’kmaq.  I read about Native feminism, indigenous self-government, the pan-Indian and American Indian movements, Native Spirituality, and Native health. Sometimes I am disappointed by the lack of material available.  One side-effect of having an oral tradition is that it isn’t always available to people who have been assimilated. I am learning Mi’kmaq through online lessons, but have no one to whom I can speak it.  Like many native people before me, I find strength and inspiration in the Black Power movement.  I read Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton.  I read womanist and black feminist authors, such as bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. I listen to Public Enemy and Paris or find hybrids, such as Native hiphop groups Reddnation, Short Dawg Tha Native, or Slangblossom.

As a bisexual woman I’ve been involved in queer activism and community building for over 20 years, so when I focussed on my Mi’kmaq identity, I approached it from a similar angle.  Much as I did when I first came out, I started by seeking community.   I found my home in Native feminism and among two-spirited people.  Sharing a common sexuality or politics made it easier for me to bond with the Native people I met. I join groups online that discuss issues relevant to two-spirited Native women, share resources and compare experiences.

I join with other Native people in protesting our oppression, in part because I feel I need to embrace the visibility that my grandmother could not.  I out myself at every opportunity.  On valentines day I attend the March for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women as we walk from police headquarters to the coroner’s office, protesting the lack of government response to the 580 native women who have been murdered or have gone missing over the past 30 years.  I march with fellow Natives, carrying flags of the American Indian Movement, in Take Back The Dyke and the Slutwalk.[1] I form bonds with other Natives, especially women and queers.  I go to the two-spirited meetings and the drum circle at the Native Canadian Centre. I go to the Annual General meeting for Two-Spirited People of The First Nations, where I cry when a man leads a closing prayer in which he thanks the Native peoples of the east coast for bearing the brunt of colonialism.

My activist work also involves producing work from my political and social perspective as a non-status feminist queer native woman. I co-chair a presentation on two-spirited identity at the University of Toronto’s Multifaith Centre.  I present scholarly papers on Mi’kmaq legends, Aboriginal gender and sexuality, and psychological decolonization at academic conferences.  I draft course syllabi on Native feminism.  I write articles about psychological decolonization and postcolonial theology and I write poetry about colonialism.  This kind of scholarly activism is a conversation, not only between myself and other Native scholars, but among many people inside the academy and outside, whose work reflects on the impact of racialization and imperialism on spirituality and sexuality. Native women, whether we are perceived as women of colour or not, need to join with women who have shared the experience of living under racism and colonialism. Their experiences do not have to be the same as ours for us to learn from one another.

Those who would join me in solidarity can do so in five specific ways:

1)       Learn about the history of colonialism in North America. This isn’t just “Native history,” it’s everyone’s history.  Don’t rely on Native people for this information.  People of colour are often expected to act as free educators for people whose racial privilege enables them to be ignorant of the lives of racialized others.  Go to the library or read from a reliable online source.

2)       Know the content of the treaties that relate to the land on which you live.  It’s something every adult should do, like reading the fine print on your lease or mortgage.  Know what the contract you have with the First Nation in your area is, and insist that your government representatives and the private businesses with whom they work honour that contract.

3)       Tell your political representatives to support Native cultural programs.  For generations government legislation outlawed Native language, culture and practices.  Insist that your government put at least as much effort into preserving and promoting Native language and culture as was put into eliminating it.

4)       Challenge anti-Native and imperialist remarks when you hear them.  Don’t wait for a Native person to do it for you.  There is no such thing as a neutral stance on racism, colonialism or genocide.

5)       Join with Native groups in protesting on key issues, such as land claims, self-government, poverty, or murdered and missing women.