Primitive Subversions: Totalization and Resistance in Native Canadian Politics

Abstract

et us, for moment, obey Sahlins's injunction to consider the 'hidden meaning' of this inscription. As Sahlins points out in Islands of History the original inhabitants of Hawaii had developed social system organized around a political economy of love (19). Sex and beauty were coinage in the exchanges that constituted wealth and power.1 The language and poetry of the islanders reflected (and reflected on) this: sexual puns were favored exchange. Among their origin myths the islanders positioned male heaven and female earth whose progeny were the gods. As