Antioch University AURA - Antioch University Repository and Archive Student & Alumni Scholarship, including Dissertations & Theses Dissertations & Theses 2014 Decolonizing the Empathic Settler Mind: An Autoethnographic Inquiry Norman George Dale Antioch University - PhD Program in Leadership and Change Follow this and additional works at: http://aura.edu/etds Part of the Indigenous Studies Commons, and the Leadership Studies Commons Recommended Citation Dale, Norman George, "Decolonizing the Empathic Settler Mind: An Autoethnographic Inquiry" (2014).edu/etds/154 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student & Alumni Scholarship, including Dissertations & Theses at AURA - Antioch University Repository and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations & Theses by an authorized administrator of AURA - Antioch University Repository and Archive. For more information, please contact dpenrose@antioch.edu, wmcgrath@antioch. DECOLONIZING THE EMPATHIC SETTLER MIND: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY NORMAN GEORGE DALE A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Ph.
in Leadership and Change Program of Antioch University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2014 This is to certify that the Dissertation entitled: DECOLONIZING THE EMPATHIC SETTLER MIND: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY prepared by Norman George Dale is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership and Change. Approved by: ___________________________________________________________________ Philomena Essed, Ph., Chair date ___________________________________________________________________ Carolyn Kenny, Ph., Committee Member date ___________________________________________________________________ Lorenzo Veracini, Ph., Committee Member date ___________________________________________________________________ Gabriele Schwab, Ph., External Reader date © Copyright 2014 Norman G. Dale All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements While dissertations usually bear only one name on the title page, they do not grow well in solitude, not even one like this, so narcissistically about myself. I have learned from indigenous storytellers and postmodern thinkers that stories are never only one person’s.
My narrative and intellectual debts are many. I can mention but a few who stand out like stars against life’s skies. Looking back at the genealogy of this dissertation, I see three, now sadly-departed mentors in particular who changed my thinking, moving it out of comfort into productively disquieting reflections: Donald Schön who inscribed in his book that he gave me, The Reflective Turn, “with appreciation and great expectations for your reflective turn”—I will always be “turning” Don, but hope and believe you’d like the path so far. Another dear MIT-based mentor, Aaron Fleischer, taught me that the most serious intellectual analysis compels one to humor and irony; and, finally, Dan Bar-On whose story-telling amidst trauma was exemplary and who inscribed my copy of his book, Tell Your Life Story: “Norman: You were with us, every moment, Love D,” as you still are with me, Dan! My dissertation committee was made up of the most nurturing, helpful and patient of souls! I asked Philomena Essed to be committee chair not just because of her demanding standards which, when one survives them, means one’s work and mind have been tempered like steel, but because of her spirit of bighearted caring and respect.
Bedankt Philomena! Carolyn Kenny helped me in so many ways along the rocky borderlands of Native and Settler realities. Incalculable Haw’aa’s to her. I am indebted and send a warm grazie to a man I never met, Lorenzo Veracini, for working patiently with me as my eyes reluctantly opened to the grim mental and political structures of settler colonialism. With gratitude, may we actually meet sometime! And danke schön to Gabriele Schwab my external with whom by institutional rules I i was to have no contact, yet whose book, Haunting Legacies, brought her right into my little office to shake my world with the pain, truth and relevance of her stories and scholarship about the unmourned ghosts of trans/historical trauma.
The Antioch program faculty, students and staff provided a great home for study, dialogue and reflection for an unexpected number of years. To all I’m grateful but I will first single out several from the program community who are not on my final dissertation committee: • John Wergin, my advisor for several years and friend for life, even if and when we can’t breakfast at the cabin talking Dewey, hot-spiced peanuts and life; • Peter Vaill, who pushed me to thinking poetically on even the most technichological-seeming scholarly matters. He and I still walk the dunes of Corsons Inlet together in mind. • Merrill Mayper, who has always been there for me and vice-versa, in work and in forays into Ohio graveyards and barbecue joints; • Naomi Nightingale, tough, gentle narrator and confidante, who shared with me her stories and pictures of the Senghalese Gate of No Return, damn fine cornbread, and lots more; • All my fellow cohort 6ers and especially those with whom I convened in mutual support each Sunday during the last year of this work including the aforementioned Naomi as well as sister Janet Bell, Carolyn Goings and Camilla Vignoe; and • Carolyn Benton, a student from our program’s Cohort 8, who attended a session I gave on autoethnography and stayed after to open my eyes and heart to the vital role of simple love in decolonizing an estranged friendship.
ii I have strived to make this study not about indigenous people as I have no right to try to be their voice, a lesson I slowly and painfully learned. But without the work and friendships I shared with them, this dissertation could not have happened. From so many who have guided me, I single out friends Wedlidi Speck (Kwagu’l) , Chief Robert Duncan/Hamdzid (Da'naxda'xw), Gitsga/Ron Wilson (Haida) and Sam Moody/Anuximalous (Nuxalk). Most of all, I am ever in debt to artist, and dear Gitxsan friend, Tom Mowatt, who is among my greatest teachers.
Of course, there are a countless family and friends alive and not, whose love and support were so vital starting from long before I worked on this dissertation—my mother and great teacher, Roberta Howatt Dale (d. 1990) my father, Bernard (Deutsch) Dale (d. 2004), relentlessly pressing and underwriting my education; and my first wife, Lea Dawson (d. 1989) who abided my halting tries at doctorality.
Their memories are with me always. And among the living, my brother Peter Dale, a unique scholar and critic himself and my sister Dr. Ari Dale, healer and proud olah, have always shaped my life and thought and, regarding this work, were critical consciences, ready to be both supportive and inquisitorial all along the path to completion. I have three daughters, Faith-Hannah Dale, Sari Dale and Eden Dale, whose lives give mine meaning and who, contrary to pop-psych malarkey about parents and their children not being “friends,” are most singularly mine.
I have reserved for the prominence of the last word, the impossible expression of gratitude due my wife, Sue-Ellen Cassidy, for her patience all these years and rants later. Borrowing a story from L’Arche founder, Jean Vanier’s book ENOUGH ROOM FOR JOY: Sue Ellen, I could stand on the largest beach anywhere but if asked to scratch in the boundless sands how much I love, owe and thank you, could only answer: “There is not enough room!” iii Dedication I dedicate this to the young and the unborn settlers who, in their yet-to-be-even-imagined relations with First Nations, will render the stories told here quaintly antiquated. iv Abstract Public and scholarly analysis of the troubled relations of Natives and non-Natives (settlers) has been predominantly directed to the former, long-framed as “the Indian Problem.” This dissertation takes the different stance of focusing on the mind-sets of settlers and their society in perpetuating the trans-historical trauma and injustice resulting from foundational acts of dispossession. The approach is autoethnographic: after considering the settler world in which I grew up, critical episodes and developments in my career working with British Columbian First Nations are described and analyzed.
This includes working with Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Wuikinuxv, Nuxalk and Lheidli T’enneh Nations over a 25-year period. I also look closely at my friendship with a Gitxsan artist, which painfully surfaced our differences and the dangerous colonial practice of settlers’ telling indigenous life stories. Critical themes and learning drawn from this account indicate both some pitfalls and opportunities for empathic settlers to decolonize their minds and actions and thereby contribute to the broader decolonization story of the settler state of Canada. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at Ohiolink ETD Center, http://etd.edu and AURA http://aura.edu/ A video introduction by the author accompanies this document.
v Table of Contents Acknowledgements.v Table of Contents.vi List of Tables.x List of Figures.xi List of Unpublished Poems by Norman Dale.xii List of Supplemental Media Files.xiii Chapter I: Introduction.1 The Setting: Just Who Is the Problem?.1 The Purpose of This Dissertation.5 Locating Empathic Settlers in the Dominant Society.9 Overview of the Dissertation.15 Chapter II: Situating My Work.18 A Life History Approach to the Literature.18 A Settler Child Is Born Into the History and Ideology of Colonialism.19 And Grows Up Immersed in Settler Popular Culture and Consciousness.29 Yet Also With a Father, a European Jew, Who Fled the Sho’ah.40 To Mature in the Milieu of Settler Colonialism.45 After Working for First Nations, Takes Aim at Decolonizing His Own Mind.53 Chapter III: Un-Settling Methods.56 The (Re)Turn to Story.60 The Autoethnographic Flight From Colonial Ethnography.60 Variants of Autoethnography.63 My Approach to Autoethnography.67 Why, Then, Autoethnography? .74 Ethical Considerations in a Settler’s Autoethnographic Research.76 Chapter IV: Growing Up Settler.78 What Am I Doing Here? .78 Immersed in Our Historical Milieu: Can the Settler Really Decolonize?.81 My Approach in This Chapter.84 Growing Up Settler: An Interview With My Younger Self.85 The World I Was Thrown Into.86 Buried Family Secrets and Their Disinterment….90 Peter and the Picanninis.93 Cowboys, Indians, and Frontiersmen in Movies and on TV.96 Indians in the Funnies.106 Indians and Colonialism in the Fiction I Read.109 Politics in the Dale Household.112 Rescuing Kahn-Tineta Horn.115 Popular Music About Squaws, Scalping, and Demise.120 Arabia to Africa: The Post-Colonial Flâneur.125 Summary of Themes of Growing Up in Canadian Settler Society.131 vii Chapter V: The Incomplete Making of an Empathic Settler.134 In Limbo or Incubation: Two Ways of Viewing the Hiatus, 1967-1985.135 Experiences in Working With First Nations, 1986-2002.143 The Beginning: After Native Claims? .143 The Owl Calls My Name: Kwakiutl Territorial Fisheries Commission.149 Haida Gwaii: South Moresby Regional Development Initiative.163 An Ignominious Interlude: The Return of the Settler.173 Oweekeno-Kitasoo-Nuxalk Tribal Council: Back to the Empathic Settler.178 Key Themes in the Incomplete Making of an Empathic Settler.193 Chapter VI: Towards a Post-colonial Friendship.196 From Bella Coola to the Lost/Lone Wolf.198 Meeting Tom Mowatt.202 Collaborative Autobiography and the Dan Bar-On Seminars.205 The Friendship Grows—With a Little Help From Colonialism.208 Clouds Gather: The Antioch Essay as “Insulting Semantics Hail Storm”.215 What Went Wrong in a Not-So-Post Colonial Friendship.226 Chapter VII: Performing the Empathic Settler: Working for the Lheidli T’enneh.240 The BC Land Question: A Short Look at a Long Problem.241 The Lheidli T’enneh First Nation: History, Lands, and Treaty Involvement.247 River of Tears, River of Change: Engaging the Lheidli T’enneh.254 About the Governance Working Group.256 Proclaiming and Performing an Altered Settler Identity.258 Becoming Trans-Historical.266 viii Letting Go of Expert (White) Authority in the Lheidli Engagement.275 Reframing the Engagement and Treaty Challenge as Relationality.279 Summing Up: What a Settler Learned Among the Lheidli T’enneh.289 Chapter VIII: Inconclusion.291 Speaking Back to My Interlocutors.292 Forenote: Riffing as Conversing.294 Speaking to Settler Colonial Studies.295 Speaking to Critical Indigenous Scholarship.307 Speaking to Scholars at the Nexus of Colonialism and the Sho’ah.320 Scaling Up and Reaching Out: Lessons on Decolonizing My Settler Mind.336 Appendix A: Copyright Permissions and Exemptions.337 Appendix B: Transcript of Author Video Introduction.344 ix List of Tables Table 2.1 Thematic Issues Related to Author’s Life Stages 18 Table 4.1 Two Ways of Viewing Lack of Connection to First Nations (1969-1985) 136 x List of Figures Figure 1.1 Schematic of Types of Canadian Settlers 9 Figure 2.1 Galle’s 16th Century Engraving, Amerigo Vespucci Discovering America 23 Figure 4.