Harold Cardinal - Intellectual Legacy

Intellectual Legacy

In 1969, along with Indigenous communities, Elders, and other leaders, Cardinal radically questioned the hegemony of the nation state through his efforts to stop The White Paper, which culminated in his book The Unjust Society. The book was instrumental in bringing Indigenous people’s voices and issues to a center stage in Canadian life; it also critically engaged the theoretical foundation and practice of Canadian liberalism as found in then Prime Minister Trudeau’s conceptualizations of a “just society” where all citizens would be considered “equal” in the context of the current nation state. Cardinal argued the state’s premise of equality and justice was a false one because it failed to take into account the historical conditions under which the nation state was created: conditions that denied Indigenous people’s rights as entrenched in the treaties and conditions that, subsequently, oppressed and subjugated them.

Cardinal was not only an architect of change on the political level, he was also instrumental in engaging and redefining the manner in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people related to one another. One of the foundations of his life work was the insistence of the need for mutual recognition, understanding, and respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. While he acknowledged difference, he still fundamentally believed in the power of relationship: “Two more disparate people, speaking in different tongues, speaking from different worlds, would be hard to find anywhere, and yet their dreams, their visions, their hopes, and their aspirations could not find any greater fusion”(Cardinal,1977,p.-). Cardinal is also one of the first Indigenous scholars who actively sought “…a convergence between the knowledge systems of the Cree people and other First Nations and the knowledge systems found in Western educational institutions” (Cardinal,2007, p. 65). Upon recognition of the power of colonization over both societies, Cardinal foresaw a bridge of understanding between them.

As embedded in Cardinal’s philosophical praxis, his most profound legacy was felt within Indigenous communities. He was one of the first contemporary Indigenous scholars to articulate the notion that Indigenous people could still hold onto traditions while fully engaging in modernity. Cardinal also opened the mindset of the Canadian public to the idea that Indigenous Elders were effectively “public intellectuals,” tacitly, raising the profile of Indigenous knowledge. He made further intellectual road maps between Indigenous scholarship and traditional knowledge by articulating the Elders’ desires to see Indigenous scholars become familiar with conceptual and theoretical frameworks of Indigenous thought through Indigenous languages in order to maintain cultural strength.