Thanks for being Cherokee! - Sherman Alexie

Here is a quote from Australian political theorist Paul Patton's book Deleuze and the Political (2000). This book recently got a rave review from feloow Deleuzian, Dan Smith. It's a pretty unique venture bringing Deleuze into contact with orthodox liberal political theory on the one hand and Indigenous rights and title on the other.

In jurisprudential terms, the concept of aboriginal or native title expresses a novel kind of right which opens up a smooth space inbetween indigenous and colonial law. The interpretation of native title as a recognition concept belonging to the space between the law of the coloniser and the law of the colonised affirms that we are dealing with two bodies of law in relation to the land, both of which claim to be final and absolute in their own terms. It implies that there would no longer be just one body of law which holds sway over the same territory but two or more 'law ways.' In terms of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming, the recognition of native title involves a becoming-indigenous of the common law to the extent that it now protects a property right derived from indigenous law; and a becoming-common law of indigenous law to the extent that it now acquires the authority along with jurisprudential limits of the common law doctrine of native title. In terms of their concept of capture, the recognition of native title is a partial deterritorialization of the legal apparatus of capture by means of a refusal of its primary stage: the establishment of a uniform space of comparison and appropriation. It amounts to the assertion of an irreducible difference where before there had only been a uniform legal soace of alienated or unalienated Crown land. In this manner, aboriginal or native title gives effect to the absolute deterritorialisation of the juridicial apparatus of colonial capture. In effect, the legal recognition of indigenous law and custom returns to the fundamental jurisprudential problem of colonisation and rewrites the terms of that event. It opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration of the constitutional form of the colonial polity and the emergence of a different solution to the problem of the colonial nation-state. pp. 129-130.

This passage strikes me as being remarkably confident in the individual decisions of what are ultimately State-run courts, overly positive in its evaluation of indigenous self-determination under current conditions of deterritorialization (what more of a god send could there be for deterritorializing states wishing to cut on welfare spending than indigenous D.I.Y.?) , and overzealous in its enthusiasm for indigenous title as a "solution" for colonial violence. Given the current state of the working group on Indigenous peoples, wide-spread culturalist and neoliberal reform to indigenous policy taking place throughout the 1990s in Australia, Japan and elsewhere, and the simple fact that discourse of indigenous rights always seems to reduce itself to simply setting standards for servicing the huge variety of people who, for one reason or another, get lumped and lump themselves under the sign of "indigenous peoples," surely this is not the sight of any real politics anymore? Patton's argument seems to place recognition as a prerequisite. There is no goal in itself, no disruption or suspension of the status quo - no becoming. Just the repetitive exercise of technocratic, communicative consensus building and pandering to the "possible." A very Deleuzian world indeed.