Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term "recognition" shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment.