Against Lament: Developmentalism and Fourth-World Perspectives

Jody Mason

In her incisive discussion of Elon Musk’s recent gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Jill Campbell-Miller correctly assesses the move as motivated by MAGA-movement isolationism. She further notes that Musk’s actions are complicated by the fact that, for many decades, the aid paradigm has also been subject to substantive critique from those who, unlike Musk, care about global poverty. Ultimately, Campbell-Miller concludes: “since the Second World War, it has never been the case that a US administration has so fully refused to state a commitment to the global order it helped create, or refused to participate in a dialogue about compassion and care for the world’s poorest.”

Weighing her own response to the attack on USAID, Campbell-Miller finds herself “in the strange position of missing” the “hypocrisy” of American foreign policy. I sympathize with this. But, for historians of development, is lament the most useful response? An activist mobilization is necessary on many fronts in the current moment. As part of this work, we historians of development would do well to return to the critical Indigenous thought on the development paradigm to inform our efforts.

As historians of Canada, we’re familiar with the rhetorical mode of the lament from the Red Tory philosopher George Grant, whose 1965 book Lament for a Nation denounced the postwar sell-off of Canada and the subsequent creation of what he termed a “branch-plant economy.” This lament found somewhat unlikely allies among the New Left nationalists of the later 1960s and 70s who, inspired by Grant’s call for the need to create an “indigenous society” in Canada, focused on the internal, psychological effects of the “colonial” condition experienced by settler Canadians.

Len Findlay argues in a 2004 essay that George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965) “deserves to be reread carefully as well as referred to evocatively.” Yet Findlay returns to Grant not on his own terms but rather through the lens provided by Chief Dan George (Tsleil-Waututh) and his 1967 Lament for Confederation. George’s performance at Vancouver’s Empire Stadium was staged for Vancouver’s celebration of Canada’s Centennial. George’s text is complex, but one of its primary moves is to insist that Indigenous knowledges (and languages) are a fundamental element of any Canadian future. In this sense, George’s performance responds to Grant’s infamous diagnosis of Canada as lacking a “thrust of intention into the future.” Findlay claims that reading Grant via George shifts Grant’s lament to a new “intent for a nation” that “can best be effected with substantial Indigenous intellectual and political leadership and the Indigenizing it continues so very patiently to nourish.”[1]

Indigenous activists have had a lot to say about the twentieth-century development paradigm that undergirds USAID (and developmentalist ideology and action in Canada). With development’s second wave in the late 1960s—a turn shaped by decolonial activism in the Global South and the emergence of dependency theory, among other forces–– and with the establishment of Indigenous political organizations on the national stage, such as the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) in 1970, the question of the relevance of developmentalism to Indigenous Peoples in Canada came to assume greater visibility. By 1970, many Canadian NGOs were either involved in some form of development work with Indigenous communities in Canada, or they were learning to create rationales for limiting their efforts to overseas contexts. At the same time, activists such as Marie Smallface Marule (Kainai) and George Manuel (Secwépemc), drawing on their own experiences with the development paradigm as it was unfolding in decolonizing African nations, responded to, reframed, and sometimes rejected outright developmentalist ideology.

Smallface Marule was one of the first Indigenous Peoples to go to Africa as a volunteer with the NGO Canadian University Students Overseas in the late 1960s, where she came into contact with the critiques of developmentalism that were emerging from newly independent nations like Tanzania. Her thinking influenced Manuel, whom she worked with at the NIB upon her return to Canada in 1970.

Manuel’s 1974 book, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, develops a phrase (“fourth world”) he heard from a Tanzanian diplomat to refer to the Indigenous Peoples of the world who were formally excluded from recognition as colonized peoples by the postwar international institutions, particularly the United Nations. The coinage speaks to Manuel’s mission to adapt, as Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has pointed out, the language of Third World decolonization, but it’s also an attempt to challenge the ideology of developmentalism.[2]

In The Fourth World, Manuel makes it clear that his problem with developmentalism is the ideology’s skirting of the central demand of bodies such as the NIB––that the “custodian-child” relationship must be terminated and that Indigenous Peoples must “take our place at the table with all the rest of the adults” as equal partners in Confederation. As neither “an ethnic group” nor a “province of Canada,” Indigenous Peoples in Canada require, Manuel insists, the “conditions for the different groups to become equal partners,” and the “right to design our own model” for “home rule.” There can be no “development,” Manuel posits, without the political participation of Indigenous leaders.[3]

Manuel’s adaptation of African socialist principles to his settler-colonial context is crucial here: in place of the economic self-sufficiency of the socialist state that was so important to documents like Tanzania’s 1967 Arusha Declaration, Manuel privileged political representation and self-governance within the settler state. At the same time, Manuel’s thinking, like the thinking of the era’s African socialism, links economic development—and thus “home rule”––to the land.[4]

As Manuel observed at an economic development conference in 1972, the usurpation of the basis of traditional Indigenous economies—land––was an obstacle to contemporary economic development. African nations were in the early 1970s attempting to “recover their land base” to “discover how it can be used to lift up the common standard of the community”; Indigenous communities in Canada would need to do the same. In The Fourth World, Manuel spells out clearly the fact that he understood this land-dependent economic development to be at the core of any possible political sovereignty: “Self-government, even on its grandest level, without an economic base simply creates the economic colonialism we are witnessing throughout much of Asia and Africa today.”[5]

Manuel’s thinking about developmentalism was also shaped his experiences as community development worker for the Department of Indian Affairs in the early 1960s––a program created by Indian Affairs that attempted to apply “second wave” (or ostensibly community-based) developmentalism to Indigenous communities in Canada. One of many programs developed by the Indian Affairs branch to deal with a growing public critique of its perceived paternalism (prior to the attempts to revise the Indian Act beginning in 1967), the Community Development program was the first state endeavour of its kind at the federal level in Canada. Community development was taken up in many second-wave contexts as a means of empowering grassroots collectives to call for radical change, but Indian Affairs could not tolerate much of this kind of activity.[6]

The lesson Manuel gleaned from this experience––that “economic development without full local control is only another form of imperial conquest”––clearly shaped his later response to questions of development in contexts such as Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. His 1974 presentation to that Inquiry emphasizes that some kinds of “development”––those that do not assure Indigenous Peoples “economic, political, and cultural self-reliance”––have no futurity. The James Bay Agreement, in his view, offered this short-sighted kind of development because it included clauses that surrendered title to the land, leading to “inevitable” destruction, recovery from which “becomes the burden of the Indian people.”[7]

My point in rehearsing this history is to observe how the lament can function to harness feelings of loss that are often antithetical to the critical historical work of transnationally situated histories of Canada. We don’t need more USAID; we need new conversations––scholarly, activist, everyday––about the world order to which USAID played palliative, and about the world order that must replace it, and I don’t mean Elon Musk’s techno-fascism.

Jody Mason is a Professor of English at Carleton University (on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation). She is the author of several books, including Books for Development: Canada in the Late Twentieth-Century World (forthcoming in the Rethinking Canada in the World series with MQUP in 2025).

[1] Len Findlay, “Intent for a Nation,” English Studies In Canada, 30, no. 2 (2004): 43–45.

[2] Glen Sean Coulthard, “Introduction: A Fourth World Resurgent,” in Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), x.

[3] George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 219, 220, 217, 236–38.

[4] On Manuel’s reading of the work of Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere, see Jonathan Crossen, “Another Wave of Anti-Colonialism,” Canadian Journal of History 52, no. 3 (2017): 541.

[5] Manuel qtd. in Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, Brotherhood to Nationhood and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement, Second Edition (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020), 153; Manuel and Posluns, The Fourth World, 204, 246.

[6] On the Community Development program at Indian Affairs, see Helen Buckley, From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare: Why Indian Policy Failed in the Prairie Provinces (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 102–3; Rob Cunningham, “Community Development at the Department of Indian Affairs in the 1960s: Much Ado About Nothing.” M.A. Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1997; and Hugh Shewell, “‘Bitterness Behind Every Smiling Face’: Community Development and Canada’s First Nations,” The Canadian Historical Review 83, no. 1 (2002): 58–84; as well as Manuel’s own account in The Fourth World.

[7] George Manuel. “Presentation to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,” This Magazine, 10, no. 3 (June-July 1976): 15–16.