When parents deny a child food, clothing, and shelter it’s considered abuse.
Yet when governments do it, it’s called fiscal responsibility.
—Newfoundland and Labrador Strategic Social Plan (1996), vol. 1, What the People Said
From Expendable to Disposable
Starting in the 1950s, and intensifying greatly in the 1960s, there was a pro-vincial government program to centralize coastal populations all across the island of Newfoundland. The Newfoundland fishery, the mainstay of that economy, was shifting from a small- boat, near- shore enterprise organized by kin and neighbors from small villages strung all around the long Newfound-land coastline to a larger- boat, middle- distance fishery and then to an open- ocean, deep- sea trawler fishery prosecuted from major island ports. The coastal villages of the inshore fishery began to cost far more to service than they produced in revenue for the state or for capital. Newfoundland, in its im-posed centralization program, forced the population out of these villages and into a jobless life in what the government called “regional growth centers.”
Not publicly, but explicitly in private, the government knew it was throwing away the social lives and working careers of the middle- aged population. The planners did seem to firmly believe that the better educational possibilities, along with good road access that the small villages did not usually have, would give the younger generation access to better- paying production- line
jobs in fish plants and various other primary processing facilities. Centrali-zation would be the moderniCentrali-zation of “traditional” Newfoundland, as the political elite, in its historically narrow view, defined modernity.1
What is called “traditional,” in Newfoundland and Labrador, was of course always fully modern, fully current with its times. “Tradition,” to be more precise, was always produced by imposed demands for an ultra- low- cost supply of goods and labor, so that what became called traditional would be more accurately named “impoverished.” Moreover, the production of traditional communities and societies, partly through imposed poverty and partly through peoples’ creativity and resourcefulness, made communities and societies with supposedly “backward” or old- fashioned ways and social relations that could be pointed toward to justify further exploitation and con-trol by “the civilized” and “the modern.”2
When they were no longer wanted, no longer usable, their social and cultural differences from the dominant society took on a new dynamic, of-ten becoming the justification for these communities to be hung out to wilt and dry. The same process of divergent development—here tradition, there modernity—that led to their political and economic marginalization and social death enabled their resurrection as romanticized objects of “culture.”
Primitive people of course don’t own the mines on their lands; corpo-rations do, and the Natives should be grateful for the royalties and the few jobs they get, unfortunately along with the pollution that comes with prog-ress. In the Arctic construction camp where I worked in the 1960s, building an airfield on Inuit lands taken without either permission or compensation,
“Eskimos” were hired to clean the toilets, while at the same time “Inuit Art”
was becoming a very high priced commodity in galleries in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
A little- known but intense example, drawn from African history, makes this point about the production of “primitives” in a forceful way and helps to illuminate it as a quite general process, with Labrador one of many instances.
In 1590, a half century before the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa in-tensified explosively, Timbuktu was a major world city, about as large and as dynamic as Amsterdam—which was then the major city in western Europe.
Timbuktu was located on the interior end of the great bend in the Niger River, the major transport river of West Africa. Above Timbuktu were rapids that were impassible for freight boats. Timbuktu was the point of transship-ment between the very large camel caravans bringing trade goods back and forth across the Sahara—with up to three thousand camels in a caravan—
and the river transport into the downriver forest kingdoms. The currency of exchange was imported silver. The first major “western” university was not in Cambridge but in Timbuktu.
When the first European “explorers” got to Timbuktu in the mid- nineteenth century, after the slave trade’s rack and ruin of West Africa, and especially the regional wars in good part provoked by the slave trade, they did not find the fabled city but a small town of mostly mud houses. The currency of exchange by then was primarily cowrie shells, introduced by the Europeans as part of their control over the slave trade (Sider 1996), and it was this new “primitiveness” of these African communities that made them available to, and useful for, colonialism and anthropology, along with be-coming part of the retrospective justification for slavery and for missionaries’
cultural assault.
That is the crucial lesson of “modernity.” The centuries- long history of modernity manufactures, in pursuing its own ends, “primitives.” It always has and still does, despite its claims to the precise contrary. Modernity, de-velopment, progress, colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism—whatever name you call it, it is rooted in constructing more “primitive,” “less devel-oped,” “historically backward,” and, just underneath all these labels, usually more dependent and impoverished social forms. What domination in its various names has created is then used as a justification for displacement, destruction, and appropriation—in sum, taking. And this taking substan-tially finances domination becoming modern (or, in the current elitist self- amusement, postmodern) and developed.
The social construction of Eskimos and Indians from Inuit and Innu is a deeply analogous instance of this general process. The issue here, in this simultaneous social construction of fully contemporary yesterday and to-day, is much more than just the production of Indians and Eskimos within a colonial political and cultural economy. An almost equally destructive de-velopment is the internal divisions within Native communities that emerge with this process of unequal development.
These internal divisions in Native communities include the imposed dis-tinction between “Naskapi” and “Montagnais,” which named little more than different styles of domination and survival, and the more recently imposed distinction between Québec and Labrador Innu, with destructive laws about which Innu can hunt what and where, and also the destructive distinction in Inuit communities, reinforced by housing built in neighborhood ghettos, between relocatees and longer- term residents—in all cases with life- shaping,
life- diminishing consequences. The centralization of supposedly “primitive”
peoples who no longer could continue in a “modern” world created even fur-ther divisive and destructive situations within Innu and Inuit communities.
While the Newfoundland government was centralizing and, in its terms, modernizing the Euro- Canadian fishing populations of Newfoundland, it started to centralize and “modernize” the Indian and Inuit populations of Labrador. Newfoundland started to encourage its own village population to voluntarily centralize in the mid- 1950s, but it did not start increasingly squeezing Newfoundland villagers, by withdrawing crucial services such as mail delivery, until the mid- 1960s. In Labrador the force came earlier. The Inuit community of Nutak was closed in 1952; the Hebron Inuit were forced out of their community in 1959; the Innu, whose pressure to centralize started before, were given few if any other options than centralization by the 1960s, into what the youth explicitly called “concentration villages.” The similarity of time period of the Newfoundland and Labrador centralization programs masks a fundamental difference—a very substantial and subtle difference between an expendable generation in Newfoundland and disposable Na-tive populations in Labrador. The distinction between expendable and dis-posable is only subtle if you are not one of the victims. An expendable popu-lation is a popupopu-lation that is being used to serve the purposes of a dominant sector of the society. It did not matter to the British how many million Irish died in the potato famine, so long as the British could keep exporting Irish potatoes to England—and this export scarcely diminished, even at the height of the famine. When hbc used Native peoples to procure furs, it did not matter to them how many starved and died in the process, as long as enough fur trappers remained to produce the furs.
Similarly, it did not matter to the Newfoundland government that they were destroying the working lives, dignity, and social relations of a genera-tion of adult fisher- folk, so long as their children were available at low wages to staff a new industrial labor force as part of the planned transformation of Newfoundland.3 Expendable populations remain useful populations in one capacity or another, and the issue for the dominant sectors of the society is not what price these folks pay for being useful, so long as some remain useful, or replacements can be made available. Indeed, from the perspective of those who use them, often the worse expendables are treated the more compliant to the demands of use the survivors may be. Those who have little choice learn to keep going, until they can make a different kind of choice.4
The benefits of making a people expendable is one of the major lessons of
the production of “illegal aliens” in the United States and their participation in the most dangerous, oppressive, and low- paid sectors of the labor force. In Southeast Alaska, for example, one of the most dangerous, injury- prone jobs is climbing up very tall trees, with a chain saw dangling from a harness around your shoulder, to top the trees before they are cut for timber, so good wood does not split in the fall of the tree. Lumber companies recently shifted from using Native people to using “illegal Mexicans” for this task. Despite all the talk about how Native people were “naturally” good in the woods, undocu-mented workers turned out to be much less costly when injured or killed.5
Disposable people, different from expendable people, are people who are no longer wanted for any use, or whose usefulness depends on their disap-pearance, or on the kinds of compliance that can be gotten from those who have been taught that they probably will never have anything in the way of a viable future, that almost all of them are of no future use at all. The cen-tralization of the Inuit and Innu peoples of Labrador was built around their increasing transition from an expendable to a disposable population, along with promises that they would once again be useful.
The brutality of becoming disposable is hidden, particularly for those responsible, behind a simultaneous glorification of the victims’ “lost tradi-tions” or “traditional culture.” The anthropologist Julian Pitt Rivers (1963, personal communication) pointed out that no one in the French urbanized elite was wearing peasant blouses or singing peasant songs when the peasants were beating down the city gates; it was only after the peasantry had been destroyed as a viable political force that what passed for their culture became available for appropriation and celebration.
The world is now increasingly full of disposable peoples. Indeed, that is one of the most significant transitions over the past several decades—far more significant than the often vacuous talk about contemporary forms of
“globalization.” There are vast regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as large sectors of the African American population in the United States, along with many other folks, where nobody with the power to shape social and economic situations seems to care what happens to such people. As far as those who hold the power to shape large portions of what happens are con-cerned, it does not matter whether these disposable people live, die, or kill each other, so long as they don’t die of contagious causes that might spread, or causes that might provoke expanding rebellions and the “terrorism” of poor peoples’ engagement with the “technology” (not, as the elite of imperial societies put it, the “terrorism”) of our tanks, bombs, and drone airplanes.
Even worse than not mattering to the dominant, the well- being of the elite and the middling sections of the dominant societies would be enhanced if these disposable folks simply disappeared, or quietly killed each other—in noncontagious, nondisruptive ways, of course. And the disposable people now include not just Native peoples, undocumented “aliens,” and darker- skin “minorities.” The category is expanding to include large sections of the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish working classes, along with the bottom half of the so- called middle classes and the increasing vast numbers of long- term unemployed and homeless U.S. citizens, who turn out to be not as “citizen” as a large bank or a major corporation.
But—and this is crucial—disposable people do not simply disappear, even though they may suffer and die in large numbers and increasing per-centages. They struggle, necessarily and inescapably, not just to survive but to continue. Otherwise, their suffering and their death rate would increase exponentially. But oppressed peoples sometimes struggle in ways that seem, or are, individually and collectively self- destructive. The problem before us, from an engaged and partisan perspective, is the same problem as that faced by the people themselves: what are the possibilities and the limits of struggle for people who have become disposable? What, in the eyes of the disposable, are the pathways, if any, to tomorrow?
To understand this even a bit, we need to look more closely at what we are calling disposable. It is more complex than it may at first seem, and when we look at the actual situations of the Native peoples of Labrador in the last third of the twentieth century, and now as well, we will see that these complexities matter to how people struggle to live today and reach toward tomorrow.
To begin, we need to put aside what I call a light- switch view of social and personal worlds—where people, and specific kinds of persons, like lightbulbs at the end of an electric wire, are either on or off, either alive and working or dead. Being disposable, to the contrary, is rooted in a continuing situation. In the context of Labrador—and other places as well—I define being disposable as being put in a situation where what you can earn or pro-duce through your labors, combined with what you are given by the state, community, your kin, and others, is less than what you need to make it to tomorrow. This is not at all a matter of insufficient income, but of the whole material and social apparatus of a viable life—clean water, livable housing, minimal violence. The whole point is that the specifics of what you don’t have, what is not given, are irrelevant. The whole point is that what you have and can get is never quite enough.
Expendable people are also severely scanted—we saw that with the “tra-ditional” Indians and Eskimos. However, they had good years and bad years:
the crisis episodes were terrible, and routinely recurrent, but they were still, at least in the nineteenth century, episodes. As Native people increasingly were transformed from expendable to disposable, from the late nineteenth century on into the twenty- first, the scanting became less episodic, more routine. A house without running water or adequate insulation does not have good years and bad years.
When the promises by the state to fix it, change it, make it better, are de-nied year after year, decade after decade, for two generations of Innu, more than forty years, people learn. They learn where they stand in the larger world and who will not care when they are laid down.
When people do not have what they need to reach, or reach toward, to-morrow, they don’t just all die. Life expectancy declines, infant and maternal mortality rates rise, and of special significance for what then happens, they often take their lives in their own hands. Local forms of inequality intensify among the victimized population, as the people suffering the costs of this inadequacy seek or need to make sure that it is not shared equally. A starving family in the woods—a family sent out with inadequate supplies—needs to make sure the children die first, because if the parents go, they all do. Sic transit gloria mundi.6
Amartya Sen, in his stunning and Nobel Prize–winning studies of famine and famine mortality, puts this situation in stark clarity, but without at all exploring its internal dynamics. In a wide range of famines that he studied the death rate was approximately double the decline in available foods. An 8 percent decline in food stocks in situations that get called “famine” ordi-narily leads to about a 16 percent increase in deaths (Sen 1981). This propor-tion remains the same both in the violently unequal societies we call colonial and in societies whose elites were pleased to describe themselves as social-ist or communsocial-ist: dearth of the kind that leads to death rarely gets shared equally, sometimes from bare necessity. This is just an introduction to the logic of what I call terminal inequalities—life- ending inequalities. But there is much more to the logic of inadequacy and the resulting inequalities than the fact that serious scarcity is only rarely shared.
One relevant point that helps us grasp this situation more completely, get both our minds and our hands on it, is the fact that systematic inade-quacy, a continuing lack in what it takes to make it to tomorrow (or more, to make tomorrow), often transfers control over the people in this situation to
outsiders—usually the same outsiders that massively contributed to making the people they now increasingly control disposable.7 Tomorrow does not just arrive; it has to be made, and some of those who are trying to participate in making tomorrow do not have the vulnerable peoples’ best interests in either their hearts or their plans.
This situation, as it has developed and is developing in Labrador for both the Innu and Inuit peoples, has some very special and revealing features. Once the fur and sealskin trades ended, Native people, as individuals, became dispos-able. No one had any use for most of them in any sector of the productive econ-omy, not until quite recently. A few jobs here and there as guides or in other slots in the tourist industry, a bit of work at the bottom end of mining, timber, or construction, and some craft production, all more for Inuit than Innu, and
This situation, as it has developed and is developing in Labrador for both the Innu and Inuit peoples, has some very special and revealing features. Once the fur and sealskin trades ended, Native people, as individuals, became dispos-able. No one had any use for most of them in any sector of the productive econ-omy, not until quite recently. A few jobs here and there as guides or in other slots in the tourist industry, a bit of work at the bottom end of mining, timber, or construction, and some craft production, all more for Inuit than Innu, and