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This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy
How can indigenous people best assert their legal and political distinctiveness? In This is Not a Peace Pipe , Dale Turner explores indigenous intellectual culture and its relationship to, and within, the dominant Euro-American culture. He contends that indigenous intellectuals need to engage the legal and political discourses of the state, respecting both indigenous philosophies and Western European intellectual traditions. According to Turner, the intellectual conversation about the meaning of indigenous rights, sovereignty, and nationhood must begin by recognizing, firstly, that the discourses of the state have evolved with very little if any participation from indigenous peoples and, secondly, that there are unique ways of understanding the world embedded in indigenous communities. Further, amongst indigenous peoples, a division of intellectual labour must be invoked between philosophers, who possess and practice indigenous forms of knowledge, and those who have been educated in the universities and colleges of the Euro-American world. This latter group, Turner argues, must assert, protect, and defend the integrity of indigenous rights, sovereignty, and nationhood, as they are the ones able to 'speak the language' of the dominant culture while being guided by their indigenous philosophies. This is Not a Peace Pipe is a work that will be controversial amongst indigenous scholars by upsetting the assumptions many have about how best to fight for recognition of their legal and political distinctiveness. It will be debated for years to come.
200 pages, Paperback
First published February 6, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 3, 2026
Caveat: I read this book alongside Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Theory of Water , Arturo Escobar's Designs for the Pluriverse, Vanessa Machado de Oliviera's Hospicing Modernity and Renata Leitao's "Pluriversal Worlding" - and love the intersections these works create with one another when thinking about Social Justice education, behviours, and accountabilities we all might practice. Theory to practice in 5 moves.
I was delighted, in a nerdy way, that Dale Turner’s This Is Not a Peace Pipe announces its argument before the first page: like René Magritte’s famous canvas—Ceci n’est pas une pipe—the title refuses a comforting equivalence between representation and the thing itself. A “peace pipe” is one of the dominant culture’s most overdetermined signs of Indigeneity: a portable emblem through which settler publics imagine reconciliation, spirituality, and benign difference, often without confronting land, jurisdiction, or the everyday machinery of colonial power. Turner’s title interrupts that semiotic ease. It warns academic readers that what follows is not a symbolic offering of harmony, nor a decorative confirmation of multicultural goodwill, but an inquiry into how Indigenous political distinctiveness is argued, constrained, and contested within the state’s legal and intellectual languages.
The allusion to Magritte also wittily cues a methodological caution: the state’s vocabularies of “rights,” “sovereignty,” and “nationhood” are not neutral mirrors of Indigenous political life. They are representational regimes with histories, exclusions, and coercive effects. Turner’s project, then, is not to present Indigenous philosophies as a consumable image of peace, but to theorize a strategic intellectual practice—anchored in Indigenous communities yet fluent in the discourses of courts and universities—capable of defending Indigenous claims without mistaking translation for the thing itself, or recognition for justice.
Read alongside Indigenous resurgence thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Turner’s intervention can be understood not as a declaration of the future Indigenous politics should desire, but as a set of tactical instructions for survival within a present still organized by colonial law, capital, and force. Simpson asks us to imagine a more radical horizon: a world organized through lateral, cooperative relations that bring forth more life, where categories such as “human,” “gender,” and “rights” as constituted by the state no longer govern value or belonging. A pluriversal world as Escobar and Leitao understand it. Turner, by contrast, is writing from inside the ongoing conflict, where land, bodies, and futures continue to be administered through courts, universities, and policy regimes. In these spaces behviours can shape letting go of modernity in way Machado de Oliviera suggests.
Read together as a design for a course, these works suggest a necessary asymmetry: the horizon must not be set by the state’s categories, even as tactical engagements with those categories remain unavoidable. In this sense, Turner offers a survival kit for a road we have not yet been allowed to leave, while Simpson names the direction in which we must keep walking. The risk, as both implicitly acknowledge, is that tactics can harden into destiny. The ethical task, then, is not merely to win recognition within existing structures, but to ensure that state-facing work remains explicitly subordinated to the everyday practices—relational, land-based, and more-than-human—that reproduce pluriveral potential: Indigenous worlds otherwise.
I was delighted, in a nerdy way, that Dale Turner’s This Is Not a Peace Pipe announces its argument before the first page: like René Magritte’s famous canvas—Ceci n’est pas une pipe—the title refuses a comforting equivalence between representation and the thing itself. A “peace pipe” is one of the dominant culture’s most overdetermined signs of Indigeneity: a portable emblem through which settler publics imagine reconciliation, spirituality, and benign difference, often without confronting land, jurisdiction, or the everyday machinery of colonial power. Turner’s title interrupts that semiotic ease. It warns academic readers that what follows is not a symbolic offering of harmony, nor a decorative confirmation of multicultural goodwill, but an inquiry into how Indigenous political distinctiveness is argued, constrained, and contested within the state’s legal and intellectual languages.
The allusion to Magritte also wittily cues a methodological caution: the state’s vocabularies of “rights,” “sovereignty,” and “nationhood” are not neutral mirrors of Indigenous political life. They are representational regimes with histories, exclusions, and coercive effects. Turner’s project, then, is not to present Indigenous philosophies as a consumable image of peace, but to theorize a strategic intellectual practice—anchored in Indigenous communities yet fluent in the discourses of courts and universities—capable of defending Indigenous claims without mistaking translation for the thing itself, or recognition for justice.
Read alongside Indigenous resurgence thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Turner’s intervention can be understood not as a declaration of the future Indigenous politics should desire, but as a set of tactical instructions for survival within a present still organized by colonial law, capital, and force. Simpson asks us to imagine a more radical horizon: a world organized through lateral, cooperative relations that bring forth more life, where categories such as “human,” “gender,” and “rights” as constituted by the state no longer govern value or belonging. A pluriversal world as Escobar and Leitao understand it. Turner, by contrast, is writing from inside the ongoing conflict, where land, bodies, and futures continue to be administered through courts, universities, and policy regimes. In these spaces behviours can shape letting go of modernity in way Machado de Oliviera suggests.
Read together as a design for a course, these works suggest a necessary asymmetry: the horizon must not be set by the state’s categories, even as tactical engagements with those categories remain unavoidable. In this sense, Turner offers a survival kit for a road we have not yet been allowed to leave, while Simpson names the direction in which we must keep walking. The risk, as both implicitly acknowledge, is that tactics can harden into destiny. The ethical task, then, is not merely to win recognition within existing structures, but to ensure that state-facing work remains explicitly subordinated to the everyday practices—relational, land-based, and more-than-human—that reproduce pluriveral potential: Indigenous worlds otherwise.
March 15, 2023
{3.5, ebook} read this for my Indigenous politics class and really really enjoyed it & learned a ton - if you're interested at all in things like the White Paper and reformational policies i highly recommend it
August 19, 2018
Weak and equivocating analysis.
April 26, 2020
The best book I have read in a long time.
August 17, 2023
Must Read
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews