Contested Identities of ‘Indians’ and ‘Whitemen’ at James Bay, or the Power of Reason, Hybridity and Agency

Abstract

In "We Have Never Been Modern" Bruno Latour notes the connections, separations and the "hybridity" of colonial uses of discourses and practices of modernity (Latour 1993). In this paper I examine discourses about identities and practical relationships that develop between institutions of a modern national state society and an Indigenous people. I suggest that the modern state/developer and James Bay Cree claims about each other's identities, their efforts to differentiate identities, and their relational practices, implicate them in both explicit and implicit recognition of complex differences, similarities, hybridity and agency. Yet there are numerous ways that this happens. The distinctions and similarities often are closely linked to the way that moralities locate and legitimate an active subject.