Howard Adams, Métis activist and Marxist

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The following appreciation of the late Howard Adams is scanned from the
current (Summer 2002) issue of Studies in Political Economy, A Socialist
Review, published at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
http://www.carleton.ca/spe/current.htm
Referenced notes are at the end of the article.

In Tribute to Howard Adams

by Deborah Simmons

Howard Adams -- Metis academic, activist and leader of the Red Power
movement in Canada during the 1960s and 1970s -- died of a sudden stroke on
his 80th birthday, 8 September 2001. Adams's book Prison of Grass: Canada
from a Native Point of View,[1] published at the climax of Aboriginal
radicalism in the mid-1970s, became a key text in the field of Native
Studies. At the time of his death his ideas were gaining renewed resonance,
as seen in the popularity of his most recent book Tortured People: The
Politics of Colonization.[2] Adams had recently returned to the stage of
national politics, participating as a speaker at one of the founding
conferences of Rebuilding the Left in Toronto a year earlier. He maintained
a courageous and principled adherence to his politics of radical Aboriginal
nationalism to the end, despite decades of relative intellectual and
political isolation.

The reaction to Adams's writings in the academic sphere has been less than
enthusiastic. Adams has been criticized for weak historical scholarship and
over-generalization. In his 1992 review of the revised edition of Prison of
Grass, Barnett Richling describes the work as a programmatic piece of
political rhetoric: "Whatever its merits as history, its politics are clear
enough"[3] I would suggest that Adams is well worth rereading for his unique
and seminal contribution to the understanding of the dialectics of
Aboriginal oppression and resistance. Drawing from what Sekyi-Otu calls the
"dramatic narrative" form developed by Frantz Fanon,[4] Adams was able to
move beyond descriptive apprehension of the condition of Aboriginality in
the Canadian state to reflective comprehension of this condition at the
level of totality. This was accomplished by way of the colonial trope, which
allowed Adams to trace a particular genealogy of race and class.

Adams's starting point in both Prison of Grass and Tortured People is
autobiographical, a description of his own experience of oppression as a
young man in the Metis community of St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Like the
Manichean world of Frantz Fanon's colonial Algeria, racial divisions in St.
Louis are structured spatially in Adams's depiction. Adams grew up in what
he calls a "halfbreed ghetto," a community "absolutely shunned" by white
people.[5] Yet this colonial ghetto was a product of the colonizer. It was a
Dantesque limbo, "a world of shadows, of pseudo reality-of
nonconsciousness."[6] From the standpoint of immediacy, the only escape from
this world appeared to be through an act of substitution, a crossing over
into the domain of whiteness, "happiness and beauty."[7]

Eventually Adams was able to use his own appearance of whiteness to make a
complete break from the Metis "halfworld," joining the RCMP for a time
(though this is not mentioned in his writings) then obtaining a teaching
certificate. But when he began graduate studies at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1962, he was brought face to face with the growing
Black Nationalist movement. After hearing Malcolm X speak, he was inspired
to reappropriate his Metis identity. For him, radical nationalist politics
offered a way to counter the alienation of the colonized consciousness. In
the midst of the political ferment of Berkeley in the 1960s, Adams
discovered decolonization as what Fanon calls "a historical process,"[8] or
in Sekyi-Otu's translation "the movement of historical becoming [le
mouvement historicisant]."[9] Adams began to read about the history of
Aboriginal people in Canada. He traced his heritage to his
great-grandfather, Maxime Lepine, who led the Metis rebellion of 1885
alongside Louis Riel. And he became anxious to return to Saskatchewan,
"where I would be at home among Metis people."[10]

Adams's narratives oscillate between the autobiographical and historical
modes-between the particularity of the colonized consciousness, frozen in
the immediacy of its own fragmented and unintelligible existence, and the
process of decolonization by which identity is collectivized, and
historically comprehended: "Colonized people usually express their political
frustrations and abuses in personal terms in their early stages of
decolonization. We must first release our anger and pain before we can hold
objective discussions on the colonized institutions and how they must be
changed."[11]

In structuring his narrative to reflect the process of decolonization at an
individual level, Adams dramatized the dialectical reversals that have
constituted the history of Aboriginal oppression and resistance. The world
is turned upside down: an identity that had been a source of self-hatred
becomes a point of pride; the hellishness of the colonial space beckons as a
home and base for resistance, a dispossessed people becomes an agent of
history. This dialectical approach distinguishes Adams's work from the
canonical historiography of defeat.

In 1965, Adams completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of education
in Canada, published in 1968 as The Education of Canadians 1800-1867: The
Roots of Separatism.[12] Adams was working strictly within the discipline of
historiography in writing this work; he had not yet found his dramatic
voice. The genesis of the residential school system for Aboriginal children
is not mentioned. What is notable though is Adams's analysis of the role
played by state education policy, in collaboration with the Catholic Church,
in reinforcing the segregation and oppression of the Quebecois. This work
outlines the beginnings of Adams's conception of the English Canadian state,
and explains his strong support for Quebec self-determination. To the end,
Adams remained a lone Aboriginal voice linking the oppressions of Quebec and
Aboriginal peoples. In Tortured People Adams argues, "In Canada, the
Aboriginal and Quebecois people constitute the most advanced groups of
anti-capitalist forces."[13] In 1998, Adams also added his signature to an
"Open Letter in Support of Self-Determination for Quebec," published in a
variety of Canadian periodicals in opposition to Ottawa's get-tough policy
on Quebec sovereignty, known as "Plan B."[14]

Adams returned to Saskatchewan soon after completing his doctorate to take
up a teaching position at the University of Saskatchewan. Almost immediately
he found himself in the thick of regional Metis politics. He inherited the
legacy of Metis activists Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, who had been
organizing in Metis communities since the 1930s, influenced by the politics
of the Communist Party and the Canadian [sic -- Cooperative] Commonwealth
Federation. These two men had experienced the betrayal of Metis interests by
the CCF and the CP. They had failed in efforts to unite Metis with other
First Nations. And under the machinations of Premier Ross Thatcher's Liberal
government, they had lost a bitter internal struggle for organizational
independence of the Metis Association of Saskatchewan when it was
amalgamated with the Liberal-controlled Metis Society of Saskatchewan.
Nevertheless, in the process of researching social conditions in the
communities of the north, Adams soon discovered that Norris and Brady had
left behind a heightened level of political consciousness: "I hadn't
expected this at all but it was obvious that they had been involved in real
political struggle."[15]

This encouraged Adams to participate in the founding of the Saskatchewan
Native Action Committee (SNAC) in 1968. SNAC emerged into the public eye
with a radical nationalist pamphlet entitled "Up the Revolution."[16] Adams
played a high profile role in a series of "Speaking Out" gatherings in 1967.
In the lead-up to federal elections the following year, SNAC put forward a
candidate for the Meadow Lake constituency, Carole Lavallee. Although
Lavallee was defeated, the campaign provided a further platform for public
discussion of Aboriginal rights in the province. A year later, Adams
snatched the Metis Society from the control of Liberal supporters by winning
the presidency of the organization. Premier Thatcher sought to win his
support by offering him a position as deputy minister of the Indian and
Metis department but Adams declined to compromise his political
independence. He remained a vigorous opponent of government funding for
Aboriginal organizations, claiming that this was an insidious instrument of
suppression.

During this period, Adams became involved in a number of battles at a
grassroots level. This experience became the foundation for the development
of Adams's political ideas. Despite the eventual disintegration of the Red
Power movement in the 1970s, Adams was continually drawn to reflect upon the
lessons to be learned from the struggles of the movement at its peak. A
failed struggle of Aboriginal seasonal employees at Cochin Provincial Park
in the summer of 1969 became a lesson in the relationship between race and
class, and the challenges of mobilizing class consciousness when the labour
movement is racially divided. A contrary example was the Flour Power
Operation of 1970, where the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union ground and trucked
flour to hungry Metis communities despite the vigorous opposition of the
provincial government. Adams saw this experience of solidarity among whites
and Metis people in organizing against poverty as a key turning point in the
development of Metis "counter-consciousness."[17]

As the Red Power movement went into decline in the 1970s, Adams was
increasingly attacked and marginalized by official leaderships of
government-funded Aboriginal organizations. Adams persisted in articulating
a scathing critique of the corruption in these organizations. This was
linked to an analysis of class formation in Aboriginal communities,
facilitated by government-imposed structures. For Adams, the nationalist
struggle had to be fought on a united class basis, crossing racial
boundaries. Unfortunately, the bureaucratism and racism of the white labour
movement at the time meant that this possibility receded into the future.
Finally in 1974 Adams went into political exile, teaching Native American
History at the University of California until his retirement to Vancouver in
1987.

The defeat of the Red Power movement did not lead Adams to reject Marxist
theory, as it did for many of his former Red Power comrades in Canada and
the United States. A popular 1983 collection of essays attacking Marxism
edited by Ward Churchill exemplified the dominant attitude among Aboriginal
intellectuals during that relatively quiescent period. Adams responded with
a six-page critique of the book, charging the authors with presenting a
simplistic caricature of Marxist thought, and pointing out the relevancy of
Marxism to the understanding of Aboriginality.[18] He then proceeded to
deepen his understanding of critical Marxism in his reflections on the
condition of "post-coloniality" in Canada. In Tortured People, Adams
explores the complex relationship between economics, ideology and culture.
While celebrating the dynamism of the cultural renaissance of the 1960s,
Adams describes the ways in which traditional culture has been commodified
and emptied of radical content.

In Prison of Grass, Adams concludes that the concrete and democratic
practice of organizing for change at a local level is the greatest task of
Aboriginal activists, for only this immediate experience will lead to
understanding broader contradictions in the capitalist system: "We have to
learn for ourselves through experience, rather than being dependent on the
teaching and information of so-called specialists and experts ... It is from
locally based struggles that true revolutionary theory evolves, a
revolutionary theory functional for those people who must liberate
themselves."[19] This perspective places Adams squarely in the socialism
from below tradition theorized by Hal Draper,[20] who was himself influenced
by his involvement in the student movement at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Adams emphasized the particularity of Aboriginal experience and struggles,
but at the same time was a confirmed internationalist. Originally inspired
by the American Black Power movement and the anti-colonial struggles of the
Third World, Adams consistently stressed the linkages between local
struggles and global capitalism. Adams was enthusiastic in his support for
the Zapatista uprising in response to NAFTA in 1994, and spoke on the
national question at a conference of Aboriginal activists entitled
Contemporary Aboriginal Struggles in North America in Mexico City in 1995.
Adams had no sympathy for the kind of exclusive nationalism advocated by
state-sponsored Aboriginal leaderships. For him, authentic nationalism is a
moment in the journey from the colonized to critical consciousness, which he
defined "in its ultimate sense" as "a perception of the totality of an
experience unencumbered by capitalist ideology."[21]

Adams's socialist politics were forged in the experience of political
struggle. In the decades of defeat, he steadfastly and unapologetically
maintained his belief that new struggles in the future would vindicate the
socialist strategy. He glimpsed the possibility for such a future in the
young Aboriginal people whom he continued to teach in Vancouver and
Saskatchewan for many years after his retirement. And he saw real hope in
the new youth-led movement against globalization -- an international
movement of unprecedented diversity. He believed that such a mass movement
would only help to strengthen Aboriginal struggles. In his words,
"Sovereignty or self-determination ... can only be realized by a mass
political movement which includes labour and other natural allies of First
Nations."[22]

Notes

Deborah Simmons first had occasion to meet Howard Adams in 1995 when she
invited him to speak at the conference of Contemporary Aboriginal Struggles
in North America in Mexico City. This was the beginning of an inspirational
friendship and exchange of ideas that lasted until his death.

Thanks to Marge Adams for her assistance at a difficult time. The annotated
bibliography put together by Inkster House Education Services[23] was an
invaluable resource in the preparation of this tribute.

1. Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View,
Revised Ed. (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1975, 1989).

2. Howard Adams, Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization, Revised Ed.
( Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1995, 1999).

3. Barnett Richling, review of Adams, Prison of Grass, in The Canadian
Journal of Native Studies 12/1 (1992), p. 148.

4. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1996).

5. Adams, Tortured People, p. iii.

6. Adams, Tortured People, p. vi.

7. Adams, Tortured People, p. vi.

8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, (trans.)
(New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963), p. 36.

9. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon's Dialectic, p. 53.

10. Adams, Prison of Grass, p. 153.

11. Adams, Tortured People, p. 73.

12. Adams, The Education of Canadians: 1800-1867 (Montreal: Harvest House,
1968).

13. Adams, Tortured People, p. 44.

14. Various, "Open Letter in Support of Self-Determination for Quebec"
(http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHBI/5202/queletter.html Summer 1998).

15. From 1976 interview, Murray Dobbin, The One-and-a-Half Men: The Story of
Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, Metis Patriots of the 20th Century (Vancouver:
New Star Books, 1981), p. 237.

16. James M. Pitsula, "The Thatcher Government in Saskatchewan and the
Revival of Metis Nationalism," Great Plains Quarterly 17 (Summer/Fall,
1997), p. 223.

17. Adams, Tortured People, p. 95.

18. Adams, Review of Ward Churchill, (ed.), Marxism and Native Americans
(Publisher unknown, 1985), pp. 1-6.

19. Adams, Prison of Grass, p. 183.

20. Hal Draper, Socialism From Below (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992).

21. Adams, Tortured People, p. 12.

22. Quoted in Marcel Hatch, "Government Stops Native Sovereignty in British
Columbia," Freedom Socialist News (http://www.kstrom.net/isk/
canada/gust/gusl0.html, 24 September 1995).

23. Inkster House Education Services, Howard Adams: A List of Publications,
Articles, Speeches, Book Reviews and Interviews (Mission, BC: Unpublished
bibliography, 2001).

-- Richard Fidler
rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx



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