Colonial Obliteration

Paige Raibmon effectively demonstrates how the discourse of “authenticity” significantly altered the trajectory of Aboriginal development within a stifling colonial context. She correctly points out, for example, that while the hop pickers of Puget Sound regularly engaged in “playing Indian” for the vast crowds of “Indian watchers,” they had little choice but to operate within the dominant discourse (10). According to Raibmon, “Aboriginal people were far less likely to gain access to [the] public sphere when they did not ‘play Indian’” (11). As the book implies throughout, this “playing along” would have the long term, detrimental effect of reinforcing many of the stereotypes of the day and, in turn, help bolster dominant society’s binary framework of authenticity—one is either authentic or inauthentic, civilized or uncivilized. These dialectical struggles are all the more bewildering because their ever-shifting rules are controlled by the dominant class. This battle ultimately leads to, perhaps, the most damaging effect of so-called authenticity on Aboriginal peoples: its ability to obliterate their past, while simultaneously writing them out of the future. If Aboriginal people are relegated to an authentic and thus savage and uncivilized past they can be “categorically excluded from the transition into the modern present” (125). If, on the other hand, Aboriginal people attempted to assimilate into modern society “they became something else entirely” (125). Within this either-or framework it would appear impossible for Aboriginal people to continue to exist into the future. The historical and psychological toll this intricate process has on the Aboriginal is tremendous. These colonial tactics combined with Aboriginal acquiescence, whether deliberate or unwittingly, form the dehibilitating context so well discussed by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Despite the difference in time period and place, Fanon's observations largely ring true for the effects of authenticity on Aboriginal Americans. Distinguishable patterns can indeed be found throughout the history of colonialism no matter time nor place.