THE INDIGENOUS REDEMPTION OF LIBERAL UNIVERSALISM

Abstract

Accounts of liberalism as an ideology of European imperialism have argued that when liberals discovered that colonized people were, in various ways, intractable, they questioned and then abandoned the postulated universal human capacity for improvement; the racial and cultural determinants of native “backwardness” seemed stronger than any universal susceptibility to the civilizing projects of liberal imperialism. While the intellectual trajectory of some canonical liberals illustrates this decline in liberal universalism, some colonized intellectuals—while acknowledging distinctions of race and people-hood—adhered to the universalist optimism of liberalism. In pursuit of a global history of liberalism, this essay examines writings by Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper to illustrate a robust indigenous universalism. Drawing on the intellectual heritage of Christianity and universal (or “stadial”) philosophy of history, these intellectuals affirmed emphatically that their people were demonstrating the capacities to be subjects of liberal civilization.