In Memory: George Manuel, Secwépemc (Shuswap) Leader and Author
Grand Chief George Manuel led multiple Indigenous organizations, local, national and international
Grand Chief George Manuel passed on 15 November 1989. He was a Secwépemc leader who led multiple Indigenous organizations, local, national and international. He was a president of the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada (now Assembly of First Nations) and founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.
George Manuel’s seminal 1974 (2019) book, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, was the first to develop the concept of the “fourth world” as an alternative to the ‘new world’, the ‘old world’, and the ‘third world’.
In it, Manuel described the Judeo Christian tradition of Western civilization against which he championed Indigenous civilizations:
The Christian view of the world, as we have received it, is a vertical triangle with each level of leadership being closer to God.
The state, as we have seen it, is the perfect mirror image of this triangle.
This is not the shape of our world.
An excellent illustration of the “vertical triangle” described by Manuel is the 1510 Spanish Requerimiento, which set the tone and the process for violent invasion and colonization of the ‘new world’
The Requerimiento was an ultimatum issued by the Council of Castile, ordered to be read in Latin and Spanish under a notary’s supervision as soon as conquistadors encountered any of the Original Peoples of the “New World”.
The Requerimiento opened with a description of the Spanish king and queen as “subduers of the barbarous nations.”
It said that “they make known to you . . . that the Lord our God . . . gave charge to one man, called St. Peter, that he should be lord and superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race.”
It added that the pope, as successor to St. Peter, had made a “donation” of the Native lands to “the aforesaid King and Queen,” who are now “the kings and lords” of these lands.
The Requerimiento commanded, “We ask and require …that you . . . acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world.”
But if you do not do this . . . we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses;
We shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their highnesses may command;
And we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him.
To top it off, the Requerimiento concluded:
We protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.
Were the Spanish Requerimiento not the preface to violent subjugation of the Original Peoples and their lands by the Spanish Christian invaders, its preposterousness would be laughable.
Indeed, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who became an ardent critic of the conquistadors, responded to it by saying, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity.”
But Manuel said Christianity might have a role in the Fourth World… if it changed…
“It will be easier to believe that [Christianity] can take on a shape that more closely resembles the world around us when we receive a sign that the leaders of the church have joined in the dance of life.
“Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us.
“It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”
Manuel insisted on ‘material recognition’ of Indigenous peoples and said that Indigenous peoples cannot “be brushed off with the multicultural broom.”
He spoke of “the difficulty of developing a new language” to speak the truth of Indigenous realities.
He repeatedly called for something more profound than “cultural” rights.
He called specifically for “recognition of Native title [as] the mainspring and material base” of Indigenous existence.
Anthropology professor Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk) echoes Manuel’s critique of ‘multiculturalism’, in her 2014 book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States.
Simpson writes:
The state did not want Indians to remember, let alone act upon, other political traditions and authorities, to pick up weapons, to stand ground on their ground.
This was not the ‘culture’ that multiculturalism sought to protect and preserve.
This, rather, was sovereignty and nationhood, something that was and still is to say the least an uneasy fit within a state that wishes to be singular, even when it imagines itself ‘federalist.’
Simpson also echoes Manuel’s critique of the “vertical triangle” in her analysis of the “top down . . . statist forms of recognition” that entrap Indigenous peoples.
She writes:
The alternative to statist forms of official “recognition” is “the grounded …recognition that produce[s] the authoritative nexus within the community”.
[This is] “a space shaped by political authority… drawn from their own traditions, their interpretations of that tradition, their shared archive of knowledge of each other, their genealogies, and their relationships with each other through time.”
A 2016 Declaration on Lakota Nationhood and the Dakota Access Pipeline Conflict, issued by a group calling itself the Independent Lakota Nation, exemplifies Indigenous community political authority in the face of statist domination.
The Declaration rejected the notion that encampments at Standing Rock required state or federal permission.
“We do not recognize United States or state permits to gather, pray, or otherwise demonstrate our cultural, social, and political institutions on our own aboriginal lands.
“This includes the permit given by the United States Government Army Corps of Engineers to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Government for the Sacred Stone protest encampment and/or Red Warrior encampment against the Dakota Access pipeline.”
Hadn't heard of Manuel, so i appreciate your bringing awareness of his good works.
What a great man!