the traditional systems of government as a specific responsibility vis-à-vis their communities. Accordingly, the bears have the tendency to be in charge of provisions, where the wolves have a penchant for politics. But the most interesting is without doubt the fashion in which the clans, beyond their filiation and exogamous function, intersect not only the communities themselves, but also linguistic families. Thus an Anishinaabe beaver is bound by a spiritual affinity with an Iroquois of the same sub-clan, bypassing their national, cultural, and genetic belonging: ethical affinity supplants ethnicity.
As we see it, far from a modern conception associating territoriality with community confinement, the essentially fragmentary character of the Indigenous conception of “a people” is associated with a large capacity for mobility. Just as the gendered polarization is not necessarily associated with sex, territorial belonging is not limited to lineage. Very much to the contrary, the way in which Indigenous peoples name themselves overcomes the genetic divide, moving it to the level of their traditional mode of living, which embraces the specific uses of a given territory, in all its shapes and forms. To the generic name of “veritable human beings” (Onkwehonwe in Mohawk, Anishinaabe in Algonquin, etc.) follows a definition linking them to the soil: the Mohawks are “those of the land of flint,” as the Senecas are “those of the big hill,” the Oneidas “those of the standing stone.” Thus the people does not just designate the territorial fraction of a generic species, of which indeed only the white men—these souls without bodies—are excluded. At this point, and from this perspective, it can no longer be a question of “Nation,” a concept that emerges from birth. The blood-right is invalidated by the earth (mother), to which human beings belong.
It is necessary to take the full measure of what differentiates this nomadic conception of territory, defined by usage without claims to property, from modern nationalism, on which Quebecois nationalism is dependent, as well as much of anticolonialism (through Marxism). In the absence of borders—and against those who traverse numerous communities in their hearts (provoking daily conflicts between the border guards and the traditionalists who refuse colonial passports), the nomadic mode of impropriety involves an intensive dose of circulation. It is only through perpetual movement beyond one’s “plot of land” that nomadism can hope to attain an exhaustive understanding of the interdependence of natural processes in their smallest ramifications, an intelligence whose spiritual counterpart is animism, and whose political consequence is the rejection of development.
Nothing could be further from progressivism, obviously. Yet it is not any more conservative than progressive, since this nomadic conception by definition is in constant movement. For in the absence of movement, all that is solid melts into air: the trail of hunting tracks would be lost, the animals would not offer themselves anymore, the connections with other peoples would be poisoned, and isolation would lead to entropy. Songs and stories would soon be lost if a continual remembrance, a migration of thought in the mode of transmission, did not constantly call them back to memory. So goes the movement of tradition, which is forgotten as soon as it loses contact with the other to bring the self back to its original otherness. Such a practice, lost to some, will return to them through others, who will lose it in turn if the first ones do not come to remind them. This is because nomadism is the quintessential form-of-life of contact, which revives tradition at the point of touch: the time of tradition is carried in the flesh.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, if the nomad is the “one who does not depart” (A Thousand Plateaus), the tradition’s necessity for contact is far from confining beings to their immediate environment: on Turtle Island, the fluxes were considerably distended, at the level of the river network that supplies most of the continent, from the Yukon to the Mississippi. But the fact is that despite the distance, these relations passed inevitably through touch. For example, the presence of Cherokee culture (from the southeastern United States) among the Potawatomi (based at the south of the Great Lakes) would not have occurred without the movement of real bodies having traveled—through an effort hardly imaginable to us—up to “their” territory. As a result, the relationships found themselves to be highly exposed, in all of their vulnerability, as well as—if we are to think in terms of power relations—their violence.
Our hypothesis is that the reason for this necessity of contact in a nomadic-animist regime, which makes Native separatism an ungovernable tradition in the eyes of the imperial powers, lies in its self-destituent nature. The art of proximities, as a situation-oriented ethics, is a mode of non-government characterized by the material impossibility of a concentration of prestige beyond a certain threshold that would enable it to reach subjugated subjects. This is the nature of what Pierre Clastres calls the “continual effort to prevent chiefs from being chiefs, it is the refusal of unification, the endeavor to exorcise the One, the State” (Society Against the State). Here, there are no more subjects than there are objects, but one purely subtractive multiplicity (Deleuze’s “n – 1”), where decisions (under the traditional horizontal systems pillaged by American democracy) take the time they need.
This idea is crucial in order to grasp the intrinsic difference between destituent separatism and constituent sovereigntism. In a “materialist” perspective—in a sense much broader than Marxism understands it—the constitution of a mode of government capable of projecting and imposing its operations on distant peoples must be understood through the material means by which it spreads and enforces itself. If relations, within the mode of non-government proper to a time of tradition, are held in the flesh, the governmental regime of colonial time must disincarnate them. Which is to say, turn them into inert matter, disanimate them. Animism, however, does not know any “matter” as a separate category: matter is always already there, living and shaped in a way that is inseparable throughout all relations—familial, ritual, political, or hunting. The first colonists, who landed on Turtle Island imbued with a scholastic-intellectual tradition, had only such inanimate matter on their minds, most of their thought struggling to distinguish it from the soul. Thus, from the outset, they searched for that which they could develop on this continent, an attitude that only intensified over time, while 95 percent of Americas’ Indigenous population was annihilated. Only then could the romantics mistake a cemetery for a “wilderness” (William M. Denevan, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492).
Against the tradition of contact—against all tradition—particular to a territory, colonialism had to substitute an empty and abstract space to make place for the infrastructures that would take the place of traditions once held in the flesh. This relegation of contact to infrastructures would tend toward an inexorable monopoly, which continues to be pursued today through those infrastructures that we fallaciously call “virtual.” By forcibly changing relations—which then become “social”—to make themselves the go-betweens, the infrastructures and facilities obstructed the possibility of contact in favor of this inextricable entanglement of optimization that we call technology. Evidently, the maintenance of this system of interdependencies presupposed and required the constitution of a state to ensure its functioning. In this way, contact turns out to be more separatist than infrastructure, insofar as it immediately and entirely carries in its smallest fragments the entirety of a culture.
This phenomenon is the logistical setback of the materialism applied by Benedict Anderson in his reading of the emergence of modern nationalism (Imagined Communities). If Anderson reveals the determining role of print capitalism—first and foremost the daily newspapers—in the constitution of the homogenous time and language through which a national entity can be imagined, his focus on the field of representation leads him to underestimate the infra-symbolic material conditions that allow it to unfold. Newspapers, which inculcate the feeling of a quotidian continuity in a given cultural unit, would be nothing without the roads—and eventually the trucks—that distribute them to the four corners of the “imagined” nation.
Benedict Anderson’s analysis—which attributes the imagination of the nation primarily to the unification of language brought about by mass printing—allows us to pinpoint what, in separatism, “makes a difference.” In effect, in indigeneity, it is not only because of the extrinsic links
