The New Indian Problem
How Marxist/feminist Ideology Recolonized Indigenous Politics
The Great Inversion
Picture two rooms. Separate them by sixty years. Same bloodline, different tongues.
Room one: a smoky band hall in British Columbia, 1965. The leader—call him Joe—stands in a wool suit, tie knotted tight. He’s got a ledger in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He tells the room, plain:
“We need a sawmill. We need our kids reading at grade level. We need the treaty money Ottawa owes us, and we need it in a bank account we control.”
No poetry. No tears. Just the arithmetic of survival.
Room two: a lecture theater in Toronto, 2023. The speaker—call her Jade—wears a ribbon skirt and a Bluetooth mic. Behind her, a slide titled Decolonizing Epistemic Violence. She says:
“The settler-colonial matrix reproduces itself through cis-heteronormative knowledge structures. Land Back is not a metaphor.”
Applause. Phones up. Hashtags.
Same word, freedom, two different animals.
Joe wanted a mill that paid wages. Jade wants the mill abolished because lumber is extractivist.
This essay is about the switch. How a movement that began with ledgers ended with liturgy. How grievance became a growth industry. How the Indian Problem—once a question of land and law—turned into a subscription service.
Call it ideological contagion. The virus arrived in footnotes, grew in grant applications, and now infects the immune system it claims to cure.
The rhetoric got louder. The results got smaller.
When the Cause Was Honest and Clean
Go back to the postwar thaw. The reserves were poor, the treaties ignored, the residential schools still open sores. But the politics were adult.
George Manuel, Secwepemc, president of the National Indian Brotherhood in 1970, wrote a position paper titled The Fourth World. It is 120 pages of maps, budgets, and legal citations. He wanted constitutional recognition of aboriginal title; yes, but he also wanted hydroelectric co-ownership, vocational schools, and tax exemptions that actually built something.
Harold Cardinal, Cree, age twenty-four, published The Unjust Society in 1969. The book eviscerated the Trudeau government’s White Paper, but its tone was parliamentary, not performative. Cardinal demanded control over education, child welfare, and resource revenue. He quoted Blackstone more than Fanon.
Across the border, Vine Deloria Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, mocked the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the dry wit of a tax attorney. His Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) contained a chapter titled “Missionaries and the Law.” The punchline: the missionaries took the land, the lawyers took the paperwork, and the Indians were left holding the hymnals.
These men were not saints. They were negotiators. They spoke the language of contracts because contracts can be enforced. They spoke the language of competence because competence pays the light bill.
Psychologically, this was the ego in ascent. Jung would recognize it: the conscious self wrestling the shadow, trauma, dispossession, rage, into a usable form. Not denial. Integration. The wound acknowledged, then harnessed. The psyche striving toward individuation: a people becoming a subject in history, not objects of perpetual pity and puerility.
They lost plenty of battles. But they fought on terrain they chose: courtrooms, band councils, co-op boards. Their moral power came from restraint. You do not beg for dignity; you demonstrate it.
The Age of Bureaucracy and Dependence
Then Ottawa blinked.
In 1969, Jean Chrétien’s White Paper proposed to abolish the Indian Act, end reserves, and assimilate. The backlash was volcanic. Fair enough. But the victory was Pyrrhic: the Act stayed, and with it, the Department of Indian Affairs, now metastasized.
By the mid-1970s, “consultation” became a profession. A new caste appeared: the professional Indian. Fluent in acronyms—DIAND, INAC, CIRNAC—less fluent in balance sheets. Their habitat: the Delta Hotel conference suite, the government Boeing 737, the funding proposal that must never end.
The movement went institutional. Local elders who once fixed tractors now attended “capacity-building workshops.” Rebellion was line-itemed. A band that wanted a greenhouse filled out Form 4B in triplicate. The state became both adversary and employer.
Notice the psychology: the child archetype takes the stage. The movement petitions the same paternal authority it condemns. “Daddy hurt us, now Daddy must pay.” The rage is real, but the posture is infantile. The state, ever the anxious parent, doubles the allowance to keep the tantrum off the evening news.
Result: reserves with 80 percent unemployment and 100 percent Wi-Fi for filing grievances. The bureaucracy grows; the sawmill rusts.
The Ideological Infection
Enter the university and the white, liberal academic steeped in Marxist/feminist groupthink.
In the 1980s, a new discipline is born: Indigenous Studies. The syllabus: Fanon, Freire, Foucault, spiced with Judith Butler and a dash of liberation theology. The required affect: righteous exhaustion.
The old guard read law. The new guard read theory. The shift was linguistic and lethal.
Old sentence: “We demand enforcement of Article 35.”
New sentence: “We demand the dismantling of settler-colonial epistemologies.”
Translation: the first can be litigated; the second cannot be falsified.
The vocabulary arrived fully formed: intergenerational trauma, systemic whiteness, cis-heteropatriarchy. Words designed not to clarify but to signal. They worked like lodge poles: plant them in the right order and you have a structure no one can live in.
Activism became performance art. A protest that once blockaded a road to stop a pipeline now blockaded a library to remove a statue. The pipeline got built anyway. The statue got a content warning.
Jung’s term for this behavior: shadow possession. The unintegrated rage; valid, historical, stops being material for growth and becomes the whole personality. The wound is no longer a chapter; it is the book. Every achievement is suspect because achievement smells of complicity.
Quote from a 2022 academic panel: “Economic development is a colonial metric. We reject GDP as a measure of well-being.”
Translation: we reject the sawmill Joe wanted because someone might make a profit, and our families might have warm, dry houses and the kids, good schools that prepare them for life in the modern world.
The movement now punishes its own success stories. A Cree entrepreneur who builds a hotel chain is lectured on “internalized capitalism.” A Mi’kmaq fishery that turns a profit is accused of “lateral violence.” Excellence is betrayal.
The Church of Reconciliation
By 2008, the bureaucracy needed a sacrament. It found one: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Ninety-four calls to action. A $72 million budget. Seven years. The final report weighed eight pounds and changed exactly zero water-treatment plants.
But it birthed a ritual: the land acknowledgment. Every school board meeting, every corporate retreat, every yoga class now opens with a disclaimer:
“We acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples…”
The script is identical from Whitehorse to Windsor. It is the new Lord’s Prayer—recited without belief, insurance against cancellation.
The TRC spawned cousins: the MMIWG Inquiry, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Another $92 million. Another doorstop report. Another round of apologies.
Apologies are cheap; infrastructure is not. Between 2015 and 2023, the federal government spent $32 billion on Indigenous programs. Auditor General: 60 percent of First Nations are still under boil-water advisories in 2021. The money? Vanished into “consulting fees,” “knowledge mobilization,” and “community engagement sessions.”
The wound became a brand. Trauma is now moral capital. The more you suffer, the louder you speak, the larger the grant.
Psychologically: repetition compulsion. The psyche trapped in the original crime, reenacting it for catharsis without resolution. The confession is the point; the repair is optional.
The Real Victims
Drive north from Winnipeg on Highway 6. Turn left at the reserve sign. You will see plywood over windows, a school gym with no heat, and a dialysis clinic that closes on Fridays because the nurse is in Ottawa testifying.
That is the real cost.
While professors debate “epistemic sovereignty,” a fourteen-year-old girl in Attawapiskat sniffs gasoline because the youth center lost its lease to a “healing lodge” that hosts poets from Toronto.
While activists demand “Land Back,” a band council in Saskatchewan cannot drill a well because the environmental assessment is tied up in court—filed by an NGO that fundraises off the delay.
The statistics are brutal and boring, which is why they are ignored:
Suicide rate on reserve: 5 times the national average
Youth incarceration: 50 percent of federal inmates under 30 are Indigenous, 8 percent of the population
Clean water: 28 long-term advisories still in place, in 2025
The activist class holds conferences in Marriott ballrooms. The people hold funerals.
The tragedy is circular: the worse the outcomes, the louder the ideology, the larger the budget, the worse the outcomes.
The Shadow at Work
Carl Jung said the shadow is the thing a person does not wish to be. For the movement, the shadow is complicity in its own helplessness.
Everyone projects:
The government projects onto “historical structures”
The academy projects onto “whiteness”
The activist projects onto “internalized oppression”
No one dares look in the mirror.
Real decolonization is psychic. It means owning the parts of the self that prefer pity to power, that reward rhetoric over roads. It means confronting the inner child who would rather burn the house than learn plumbing.
A culture that identifies solely with its wound remains colonized—by its own past.
The Way Out (It’s Not Theoretical)
The cure is older than the disease.
Work. Competence. Trade. Family. Faith. Governance that governs.
Look at the quiet successes no one tweets about:
Osoyoos Indian Band: Nk’Mip Cellars, golf course, 60 percent employment
Membertou First Nation: hotels, fisheries, Cisco partnerships
Tsuut’ina Nation: ring-road deal, Costco, $1.2 billion trust
These communities still acknowledge land. They just do it after the ribbon-cutting.
The path is simple, not easy:
Measure justice in kilowatts and graduation rates, not apologies.
Fire the consultants; hire the plumbers.
Teach kids compound interest before critical race theory.
Let bands opt out of the Indian Act the way corporations opt out of bankruptcy protection, by demonstrating solvency.
Freedom is a habit, not a hashtag.
Stop Complaining; Do Something
A nation can survive conquest. It can survive famine. It cannot survive being taught to prefer pity to pride.
Joe in 1965 wanted a sawmill. Jade in 2025 wants the sawmill decolonized and ‘whiteness’ outlawed.
One choice gets you grants and a TED Talk.
The other gets you a future.
Every people must choose.