What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.

KEYWORDS:

• Social inclusion
• diversity
• Indigenous policy
• Indigenous governance

Acknowledgments

We presented an earlier version of this article to the Canada Colloquium on “Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Peoples: Sovereignty, Sustainability, and Reconciliation,” Mauna Lani Bay, Hawai`i, March 7, 2018. We would like to thank Michael Hawes, Christopher Kirkey, Stephanie Ben-Ishai, and anonymous reviewers for their comments on our article, and Fulbright Canada for organizing the Colloquium and inviting us to participate. We owe thanks as well to the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation for its continuing support of the research carried out by the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Some of these programs—the allotment of tribal lands in the United States is a primary example—got support also from groups with no stake in social inclusion but happy to give it support when it served their interests.

2. In contrast, it has been argued that there are Indigenous community-specific social determinants of health that may matter a great deal for life chances but are not typically addressed in the prevailing social inclusion model. For example, within the Indigenous population as a whole: the experience of historical trauma; at the First Nation or tribal level (i.e., at the level of a specific political collective): access to ancestral lands, sacred spaces, or traditional plants. See, for example, Rainie (2015a, 2015b).

3. Cf. Humpage (2005, 159), writing about Indigenous policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and arguing that: “In attempting to address the relative disadvantage of Māori, government policy has traditionally applied a needs-based discourse to Māori. This conceptualizes Māori as just one of many disadvantaged groups whose ‘needs’ can be met by activating equal citizenship rights.” At the time of her writing, New Zealand policy toward Māori was called “Closing the Gaps” and focused on “‘helping’ Māori peoples gain access to the kind of socio-economic status their non-Māori counterparts enjoy.”

4. A similar point to ours is made by Robert Williams in his “singularity thesis” applied to American Indians (see Williams 2005, xxxv-xxxvi, 170–71).

5. The work of scholars such as Prindeville (2004) suggests that privileging positional politics over distributional politics allows for Indigenous nation-driven cultural change and forestalls the “sanitization” of Indigenous cultures through the imposition of human rights regimes (see Gana 1995).

6. See Senate of Canada Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples (2010, 6). “Custom” in this case does not necessarily mean traditional; it simply refers to chosen as opposed to imposed.

7. Visit by one of the authors to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Division of Tribal Government Services, Washington DC, 1994.

8. See, for example, the Northwest Intertribal Court System at https://www.nics.ws, accessed February 15, 2018, and the Intertribal Court of Southern California at http://www.sciljc.org, accessed February 15, 2018.

9. In the late 2000s, under the Obama administration, the US government required all cabinet departments to establish policies governing consultation with American Indian nations. While it has taken time, most have done so. Nonetheless, these policies lack true government-to-government substance of the type we argue for here. Consultation occurs when a US government department decides that its actions would have an impact on a Native community, and US government departments are obliged to take tribal views into consideration, but they are not obliged to act on them as long as they can substantiate that “consultation” has occurred. See, for example, the consultation policy of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development available at https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/public_indian_housing/ih/regs/govtogov_tcp, accessed February 15, 2018.

10. In the United States, this sort of support has come variously from the US Department of Health and Human Services through its Administration for Native Americans, from specialized legislation as in the Osage case (see Dennison 2012), and from philanthropic sources, but there is at present no consistent source of funds for such re-constituting activity. In Canada, some efforts have occurred through bilateral negotiations and treaty processes, but there is no consistently available funding there either for this kind of work, and in some cases First Nations must repay monies they “borrow” from provincial and federal governments to support their own governmental reform processes.

11. For discussion of some of the political and legal issues involved in such plural orders see Bruyneel (2007), Gover (2012), and Simpson (2014).

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Cornell

Stephen Cornell is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Faculty Chair, Native Nations Institute, at the University of Arizona, and co-founder and co-director, Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. The authorship of this article is joint; the listed order of names is solely alphabetical.

Miriam Jorgensen

Miriam Jorgensen is Research Scientist at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona and Research Director of both the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. The authorship of this article is joint; the listed order of names is solely alphabetical.