https://quillette.com/2021/11/22/confes ... l-justice/
“Indigenous peoples have been stewards of this planet since time immemorial,” tweeted Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault from the Glasgow Climate Change Conference earlier this month. “The fight against climate change is not possible without their knowledge and leadership.”
It was an odd thing to post. In recent years, many Canadian Indigenous groups have become full commercial partners in oil and gas development projects, and so have no particular incentive to apply their “knowledge and leadership” toward assisting white environmentalists such as Guilbeault in limiting carbon emissions. But even if First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples fully answered his call, it’s not clear why they would have any special insights to offer in regard to how densely urbanized nations such as Canada can best shift their industrial base, power generation, and transportation networks to low-carbon fuel sources.
But for Canadian progressives, Guilbeault’s intended audience, his message would have made sense, as it channelled the officially endorsed conceit that Indigenous peoples comprise a sort of oracular caste, whose folk wisdom shall inform the project of planetary salvation (or as one magazine headline writer rapturously put it, “we need Indigenous wisdom to survive the apocalypse”). Canadian progressives, a constituency once defined by fastidious secularism, are now experiencing a sort of Indigenous mystical awakening—a northern variant of the phenomenon described aptly by John McWhorter in his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
Berkeley Gender and Women’s Studies professor Mel Y. Chen provides the author with a case study in the psychology of the fantasies and obsessions of Woke ideology.