The Birth Of The Noble Savage Analysis

On November 9th 2016, I attended Professor Taiaiake Alfred’s talk titled The Death and Rebirth of the Noble Savage at the University of Ottawa’s annual Bronfman Lecture. The lecture was hosted by the university’s Institute of Canadian and Aboriginal Studies. During my time at Carleton University, I have grown to admire his authentically Onkwehonwe¬-minded scholarship as an important contribution to the field of Indigenous Studies— particularly as it pertains to rights, resistance, and resurgence— in the context of the Canadian state. Alfred’s writings are unapologetically critical of the persisting colonial agenda of the Settler state and emphasize the importance of land-based practices in living an authentically Indigenous life. In the following …show more content…
He informed the audience that he did not intend to provide us with a lecture, but rather hoped to provoke us and encourage us to reflect on the ideas he was to share with us. Alfred argued in his talk that notions of indigeneity (e.g. the construct of the ‘noble savage’) have been built into Canadian policy and have even gained traction in Indigenous consciousness. The construct of the Indian, according to Alfred, is not a monument of the past, but is just as problematic in the 21st century as it was 200 years ago. Alfred considered that we must clarify what exactly the problem is in Indigenous-Settler relations to be able to address it. Many settlers and the Canadian state as an entity fail to realize that Canada has a genocidal past characterised by the deliberate erasure of Indigenous peoples from the political and social landscape of the settler state. We must all accept that Canada has been founded on this premise, and that the central object of the colonial project was, and continues to be, dispossession as manifested in settlement, treaties, and other legislation. This dispossession is made possible through the settler’s denial of the existence of Indigenous peoples as nations with established laws, governance, and institutions. Native people continue to be treated as a challenge to Canadian identity and therefore must be changed into something more amenable to the dominant colonial …show more content…
It is for this reason that decolonization must begin on an individual, personal level. In accepting the legal configuration of the “aboriginal”, some Indigenous people have grown to identify themselves solely through their political relationship to the colonizer rather than their ties to their land and community.12 In conceding to and even mimicking the social, political, and legal frameworks of the colonizer, Indigenous peoples are unable to transcend the construct of the ‘noble savage’.13 Healing is made possible, per Alfred and Corntassel, in their article “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism,” by “identifying the old and new faces of colonialism that continue to distort and dehumanize Indigenous peoples”.14 Indigenous people must overcome the more subtle face of contemporary colonialism which tries to strip Indigenous peoples of their sense of self by reconnecting to land-based cultural