Truth and Reconciliation Day is presented to the workers of Canada, indigenous and otherwise, as a step on the path towards making amends for the historic injustices of the colonial period. It is no secret that while some greet this occasion earnestly in the intended spirit, reason for skepticism persists, and rightly so. Centuries of broken promises and exhausted faith do not engender trust from the aggrieved party, and so it is here that we encounter the “radical” arm of indigenous activism, defiantly positioned in resistance against what they regard as the source of all their woes; white Eurocentric settler colonialism. The legacy of all European society cannot ultimately be reconciled with their traditions, so it is said, and while the concomitant implications of this ultimatum are never made clear, in the meantime an assemblage of interim demands emerge. Fund the reserves. Forswear land exploitation. Defund the police. Vacate sacred lands. Honor the treaties. These demands appear reasonable at first blush, but do they go far enough? And if not, what accounts for the timidity of the supposed bleeding edge of indigenous radicalism?

Viewed historically, there can be no missing the conjunction of this indigenous radical tradition with liberal academia, which would account for much of the performative, underwhelming action that characterizes said radicalism. This is no condemnation of the rich history of indigenous philosophy; indeed, it further emphasizes the extent of the brutal dispossession this culture has experienced, that it would be so prone to incorporation. What is often forgotten in the rush to commend the durability of a tradition that has survived such dispossession is precisely how the brush with annihilation compromises it, and even the most undamaged philosophical traditions seldom remain unchanged. Nevertheless, we observe a tragic irony here, where the routine exceptions granted to European thought that have become in effect the rule meet their limits; a hostility to the Marxist tradition exceeding any other. Again, do we detect the limiting hand of the bourgeois liberal here, amplifying the most disunifying voices, insisting that the organization of the working class menaces indigenous traditions with the very marginalization they have already inflicted upon it?

From the moment there has been a communism to aspire to, the workers who have aspired towards it have been no monolith, and the grand history of indigenous workers who have toiled, agitated and risked their lives alongside their other coworkers forms part of that tapestry. The abolition of wage labor, capital and class society presents the only substantial way to achieve any of the ultimate aims of the stated demands of the indigenous radical, not the false promises of a concordat with a state, settler or otherwise, that has no higher duty than to capital. It is not the poisoned bait of a distinct nationhood for indigenous people, with borders to garrison and markets to protect, that will realize the efforts of cultural restorationists, nor the gravy train of well-compensated academics of indigenous extraction that will win the dignity they seek; it is in their condition as workers with nothing to sell but their labor, indigenous or not, that the most vivid and pressing tradition of our present moment is shaped, and it is on these grounds alone that the liberation of all those same workers, together, can be won.