The country of Canada in which I was born and currently reside has a sordid past that continues in the present. The Idle No More movement that emerged in December 2012 shone an international spotlight on how for the past 500 years and more settlers of European descent have occupied unceded territory of Turtle Island; have repeatedly violated treaties made with the original keepers of the land; have sequestered the descendants of these original landkeepers on “reservations” that lack basic amenities such as clean drinking water and adequate sanitation; have governed them according to the terms of racist legislation known as “The Indian Act;” and, meanwhile, have taught generations of settlers an historical narrative that covers over and distorts all of this violence and deceit.
Earlier this week, the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)--an independent body under the auspices of the Canadian justice system--was released. Over the course of the past six years, the TRC has held hearings and discoveries during which its members listened to the testimonials of survivors of “residential schools” and First Nations band leaders, as well as gathered other historical evidence that documented how, from the late 1800s until the mid-1990s, more than 150,000 descendants of the original landkeepers—that is, more than 150,000 First Nations children—were taken from their families and communities and forced to live in these boarding schools that were operated by the Catholic church and other Christian churches, institutions where thousands of these children were sexually and physically abused and where an estimated 6,000 of them were murdered or died of neglect, disease, and starvation.
In some cases, these children were taken hundreds of miles away from their families and loved ones and, in all cases, they were prohibited from practising their traditional ways of life and speaking their own languages. Some of these stolen children committed suicide; many of them ran away from the schools, some disappearing and likely dying in bitter winter weather conditions. The TRC was unequivocal in its condemnation of the policies of Canadian governments that had condoned the schools and funded the churches to run them, proclaiming that these governments had articulated policies whose goal was “cultural genocide.” In its 381-page report, furthermore, the TRC issued 94 recommendations whose design and promulgation aims to motivate the process of reconciliation with and reparation to First Nations people here. Many First Nations people and members of the larger Canadian population are skeptical about the extent to which and even whether the ultra-conservative federal government of Stephen Harper will implement any of the TRC’s recommendations.
Because of my own family history and my work on genealogy as a transformational methodology, I have for some time now and over the past several days especially been thinking a great deal about the relation between the past, present, and future; what is owed in the present and for the future to the victims and survivors of past collective crimes; and how philosophy (and philosophers) should make reparations for its past and present in the present and for the future. In particular, I have been considering this question: what does philosophy owe to the victims and survivors of its past and present? To ask this question about the discipline and profession of philosophy in the same context as a discussion about the grievous harms visited upon First Nations people in Canada, and indeed, upon indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and elsewhere may seem as if it unethically appropriates these harms in order to serve another end and thereby continues the legacy of denial about the formative role that the harms have played in global nation-building and empire, minimizing their gravity, trivializing them.
If my dear friend and esteemed colleague, Jay Dolmage, is correct, however, the associations that I wish to draw between the survivors of philosophy’s past and the survivors of settler colonialism are neither contrived nor erroneous. For in his brilliant keynote lecture to the Canadian Disability Studies Association yesterday, Jay traced the lineage of, and the associations between, the settler colonialism and racism exacted upon the original inhabitants of Turtle Island and their descendants; the eugenic practices and policies that past Canadian governments, scientists, and teachers have systematically designed to eliminate disabled people; and the present practices and policies of the mercenary neoliberal university in Canada, asserting that over the span of a dozen decades these states of affairs, practices, and policies have colluded to incrementally advance a certain conception of for whom the earth exists, by whom it should be inhabited, and how.
Given that the recent and current practices and policies—including hiring practices—of philosophy departments in Canada and internationally are products of this mercenary neoliberal agenda and also reproduce it—a mercenary agenda that increasingly determines the shape and direction of universities and the philosophy departments within them—it seems reasonable to think that philosophy has committed crimes in the service of this agenda and thus has produced its own victims and survivors.
How are the victims and survivors of professional philosophy’s past to be located and identified? One place to look was suggested in my blog post of May 3, entitled “Philosophers Need a New Vocabulary,” in which I drew attention to the fact that at present disabled philosophers, nondisabled philosophers of colour, and philosophers of other underrepresented groups are disproportionately confined in positions of precarious employment. Given that disabled philosophers and philosophers of colour (among other underrepresented philosophers) have in the past been excluded from secure and well-paying employment, sequestered in temporary jobs despite their qualifications—qualifications that have themselves been made more difficult for them to attain—one way in which philosophy can begin to repair its sordid past and reconcile with its victims and survivors is to change criteria that it uses in its hiring deliberations and decisions. In particular, rather than place at the bottom of the pile the applications from disabled philosophers and nondisabled philosophers of colour who have worked in temporary positions for 5, 10, 15, or more years, hiring committees should give these applications priority, or, at the very least, give them the serious consideration that in the past they have not received. My hope is that the philosophers who read this blogpost will think of other ways in which philosophy can begin to reconcile its past injustices against disabled philosophers and members of other underrepresented groups in the form of reparations to its victims and survivors.
Shelley Tremain
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