Glen Coulthard is a member of Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He co-founded the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories). Coulthard is the author of Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), which won the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book. His research broadly examines Indigenous politics and activism, political theory, and settler colonialism.
In his lecture, Coulthard examined the history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. While Red Power activists of the 1960s and 1970s tended to distrust Marxism because of its reluctance to identify Indigenous dispossession as the basis of capital accumulation in settler colonial contexts, in Vancouver, the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) drew from Third World Marxism in their activism. NARP understood their political organizing and theory-building as an adaptation of other movements, including the Black Panther Party in the United States, which provided an appealing international language of political contestation. NARP offered the Third World Marxist model to challenge the white Western class struggle model of Marxism among the Canadian left. Within this framework, they understood their anti-colonial actions as simultaneously anti-capitalist: land defense, for example, was a revolutionary and necessary opposition to capital accumulation. Like many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism into their own critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home. Coulthard discussed NARP’s study of postcolonial writings, their partnerships with US-based Black Panther Party chapters, and their tour of China in 1975. He saw NARP within a history of solidarity of thought and practice and a path to understand how Indigenous land sovereignty struggles intersect with other liberation efforts.
Coulthard’s lecture was held on March 5, 2020.