George Manuel - The Fourth World

The Fourth World

An Indian Reality

GEORGE MANUEL AND MICHAEL POSLUNS

INTRODUCTION BY GLEN SEAN COULTHARD

FOREWORD BY VINE DELORIA JR.

AFTERWORD BY DOREEN MANUEL

Map by Maralyn Horsdal and Frank Zsigo

Originally published in 1974 by The Free Press

Published in 2019 in the United States by the University of Minnesota Press

Copyright 1974 by George Manuel and Michael Posluns

Introduction copyright 2019 by Glen Sean Coulthard

Afterword copyright 2019 by Doreen Manuel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Manuel, George, author. | Posluns, Michael, author.

Title: The Fourth World: an Indian reality / George Manuel and Michael

Posluns; foreword by Vine Deloria Jr.; introduction by Glen Sean

Coulthard; afterword by Doreen Manuel.

Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, [2019]

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020840 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0606-1 (pb)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North AmericaCanadaGovernment relations.

Classification: LCC E92. M36 2018 | DDC 323. 1197/071dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020840

These words are written for my grandchildren and for their childrens children.

G.M.

To the memory of three grandfathers who do not otherwise appear in the story: Abraham Posluns, Samuel Brenzel, and John McIlvride. Stories about Zeide Posluns and my recollections of Zeide Brenzel and Granda McIlvride nurtured in me the feelings that we have both tried to convey in this book.

M.P.

This edition is dedicated to land, air, and water defenders who protect our Aboriginal title and Indigenous rights from the colonization of deforestation, mining, and pipelines.

DM.

GLEN SEAN COULTHARD

The Fourth World

VINE DELORIA JR.

DOREEN MANUEL

GLEN SEAN COULTHARD

OVER THE PAST ten to fifteen years, Indigenous resurgence has emerged as a central theoretical framework in much Indigenous writings on colonization and decolonization. Resurgence calls on Indigenous people and communities to combat the violence of colonial social relations through the revitalization of Indigenous epistemologies, political structures, and place-based economic practices. As an ethicopolitical practice, resurgence demands that we decolonize on our own terms, to quote one of its core theorists, Nishnaabeg scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, without the sanction, permission, or engagement of the state. For Simpson, then, resurgence must be vigilantly global in scope, both ethically and politically.

Secwepemc leader George Manuels foundational book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (cowritten with Michael Posluns and provides an early, paradigm-setting example of Simpsons resurgent internationalism. Indeed, the theoretical cross-fertilizations Manuel draws between the Third and Fourth worlds are productive precisely because of their grounding in the normative frameworks informed by Indigenous connections to land and place. The same goes for Manuels critique of colonization and his views on decolonization: as a globally layered and interconnected phenomenon, settler-colonization operates simultaneously at the local, national, and international levels, intersecting with other colonial social formations and relationships. For Manuel, this requires that we confront the violence of colonialism at all scales of operation, with the support of and in solidarity with all those affected by it. Manuel spent most of his life putting these insights into practice.

This new Introduction to the long-awaited republication of The Fourth World by the University of Minnesota Press will situate the text in the historical ideological and political context within which it intervened, both domestically and internationally. It is productive to read the book as a crucial Indigenous intervention into the ideological influence that the decolonization struggles of the Third World had on the North American lefts critique of racial capitalism and imperialism in the 1960s and early 1970s. I suggest that the inherited conceptual apparatus associated with this turn to the Third World provided Indigenous organizers with an appealing international language of political contestation structured around the concept of self-determinationeconomically, politically, and culturallythat they not only inherited but also fundamentally adapted and transformed through a critical engagement with their own local, land-informed situations. Despite this intervention, the right of self-determination has since been interpreted, indeed institutionalized, in such a politically narrow manner at both international and domestic levels as to render its critical purchase minimal, at least in relation to the transformative potential of its original articulation and aspirations.

The fact that The Fourth World is only now being reissued for the first time since its original publication in 1974 is shocking given that it is unquestionably one of the core texts in the wave of Red Power literature that emerged from the tumultuous politics of the global 1960s and 70s. Such core books (all of which, to my knowledge, are still in print) include Vine Deloria Jr.s classic Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969; Deloria wrote the original Foreword for The Fourth World, reprinted here); Harold Cardinals The Unjust Society (1970); Maria Campbells Halfbreed (1973); Vine Deloria Jr.s Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974); Howard Adamss Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (1975); Lee Maracles autobiographical Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizs The Great Sioux Nation (1977); Leslie Marmon Silkos critically acclaimed novel Ceremony (1977); and Jack Forbess Columbus and Other Cannibals (1978). Like many of these texts, The Fourth World tells the story of North Americas genocidal invasion from the vantage point and lived experience of the colonized, as well as the resistance that Native peoples mounted to it. Unlike many observers of the day, Manuel refused to characterize this period of intellectual production as a new Indian resistance (69). For Manuel, such a characterization made the erroneous assumption that Indigenous peoples had accepted, until only recently, the theft of their lands and the usurpation of their sovereignty. The fact of the matter is, writes Manuel unequivocally, that there was never a time since the beginning of colonial conquest when Indian people were not resisting (69).